MattBrady
11-28-2002, 09:10 AM
Unfortunately, it probably cruises under the radar of a lot of comic readers, maybe bubbling up to the surface as they remember that Mark Waid isn't writing Flash anymore. In fact, he hasn’t written it for over a year – that duty has fallen to Geoff Johns, who, together with artist Scott Kollins is quietly turning Flash into one of DC’s buzz-books again.
Granted, the Waid shadow on Flash is a difficult one to get out of, and some readers opted to leave the series when the longtime writer left. Those that have stayed, and those that have begun reading the book in the past year have found a gem – a smart, stylish comic series that respects the past, the character, the readers themselves, and has woven a new tapestry for the Flash that stands tall among the series best creative runs.
Newsarama caught up with Johns recently for a little speed talking about the Flash and his world…
NRMA: Let’s start a year ago, back to when you came on the book with issue #164 – you started on a six-part, “Through the Looking Glass”-style alternate worlds story, rather than setting the stage for your version of the Flash and Keystone in the DCU. Why opt for the story you did, which effectively took Flash out of the DCU for six months?
GJ: Originally, I got hired to do six issues, so I couldn’t change anything. I love the Rogues, so I thought I would spotlight them, and play around with some Flash history. I had six issues to tell a story, and they wanted one storyline for it, so that’s what I did. AS the story was unfolding, I was hired to be the full-time writer on the series starting with issue #170 with Scott as the artist, and that’s when I figure it was time to rip apart the foundation and do something different.
NRMA: With your initial six-part story – you teamed Flash with Captain Cold. What was it about Cold that made him a good partner for Wally?
GJ: The Rogues have been around a long time and have great potential, along with a lot of fans that view them with a lot of affection. They’re so colorful and varied and fun, but we never really saw what the Rogues thought of Wally in detail. I think it was the Challenge of the Super-Heroes cartoon that made me feel that Cold was Flash’s perfect opposite, so I thought he would be the best “partner” for Wally – that was how it started in my mind, at least. I wanted to see how they played off of one another in detail. Starting with the second part of that storyline, we really got to see the two of them talk back and forth and argue, and for me, that was the most fun of that story.
NRMA: Right, the conversations between Wally and Cold really allowed you to show their attitude toward each other as it moved from annoyance to hatred to begrudging friends at times…
GJ: Yeah, it was a very odd relationship. I like how the Rogues have watched Wally grow up as the Flash, and they know not to underestimate him. He’s as capable as Barry was, and they sort of have this semi-balance of hate, respect, and disrespect for him.
NRMA: Even though he said he’d fought Wally as Kid Flash, the ultimate villain of the storyline, Grim, was brand new for the story, right?
GJ: Yeah, Grim was created just for that story and retconned in. We were originally going to use Psycho Pirate, but we ended up using a new guy instead.
NRMA: Is Psycho Pirate still a little messy when it comes to using him in the DCU, since no one’s really clarified if and how he “remembers” the pre-Crisis DCU as Grant Morrison showed in Animal Man?
GJ: Yeah, there were continuity issues. It was too much to unravel in that story.
NRMA: You’d have had to do a Hawkman-style revision just for a bit player…
GJ: Exactly. Four issues of a “Who is Psycho-Pirate?” story arc. Who wants to read that?
NRMA: After your first six issues, and getting the book for the long run, you got paired with Scott. You’d worked with him before on Stars and STRIPE, so you had a working relationship already. Was it just old home week on the series from there?
GJ: Oh yeah. I loved working with him before this – he’s a dynamite artist and a dynamite guy – very smart and a workhorse. He does a page a day, and he’s never late. He wanted to try something different stylistically with Flash, which he did, and I was all for it. After I saw the first issue he drew, I knew he was the perfect artist for the book. I’ve been ecstatic ever since. If you saw the Grodd issue [#178], you can see that he improved dramatically, and he’s only getting better with each passing issue. I’ve already seen his work through issue #184, and the stuff coming up is just amazing. He’s very consistent and a great storyteller - so underrated and so much better than a lot of other guys out there. He’s substance, he’s all about substance, and I would hope he really starts to get the attention he deserves for his work.
NRMA: Once you got the series assignment, and beginning with #170 where you re-introduced Francis Kane as Magenta and started refreshing the Rogues Gallery, what was your overarching idea for the book? More than any Flash writer of late, you’re really giving Keystone City a personality of its own, but it seems you’re also re-aligning the entire Flash universe somewhat…
GJ: Mark Waid did such a great job on defining Wally as a true hero, so we want to continue that and make him very competent, but at the same time we looked at other things we could improve upon, and Keystone City, the Rogues, and the human supporting cast were the three elements that we thought had been on the sidelines for a while. So we started off with Keystone, and tried to tie it into the Flash – the city that the Flash would live in is a city that also makes things that move fast. They make cars and planes and trains.
NRMA: So, it’s a city of working class folks, which explains why you’ve got Keith Kenyon, the former Goldface, running around trying to unionize…
GJ: Right. It’s a very blue-collar city, and when I think of Wally West, I think of a very blue-collar, publicly educated kind of guy – community college. He’s not into new age philosophy or anything like that. With Wally, what you see is what you get, even though he’s traveled through time, space and different dimensions. He’s very much down to earth, and Keystone reflects that blue-collar feel.
NRMA: And your revamp of the Rogues?
GJ: With the Rogues, as I said before, Flash has so many cool villains that can come back. For example, we even have plans for the Top that I think will make him cool. I think we’re achieving that goal with Mirror Master and Cold already. We’ve got Trickster coming up, and Magenta is a lot more competent and threatening as a villain now. That’s the key word we’re working towards – characters with competence. That’s what works for us.
Speaking of them, we do have a big arc coming where we’re going to recreate a lot of the Rogues, flesh out their history, look at why they’ve been in Keystone all these years, explain why they won’t leave, and keep adding new ones to the mix while we keep revamping the older ones. We have plans for nearly every Rogue that’s still alive. For example, the one-issue Grodd story was just the beginning – we have a big Grodd arc coming up in about a year.
NRMA: You made an interesting choice for Wally’s supporting cast. Rather than putting him back with scientists, you created a supporting cast from the Keystone Police Department. Why?
GJ: For me, the police have always been an element of Flash, going back to Barry Allen. Connecting the police back to Wally West – it just feels right on a certain level to see Flash hanging out in a police precinct.
NRMA: Looking at your run on the series, it's a little hard to put a finger on your style with the book - it's not the nilhistic, Authority style which has been really hot until late, and it’s not the shiny, neo-Silver Age that some writers had been using – it seems to fit right in the middle. You do have some pretty dark elements in the book, but at the same time, Wally is an unflappable hero. How do you approach the series in terms of tone and style?
GJ: It’s slightly different, but almost the same as the way I approach JSA. You have to respect what’s happened before, but you can’t drown in it. Otherwise, you’ll be sitting there spinning your wheels story after story. One of my takes on Flash is just brining it back down to reality a bit. By reality, I don’t mean just adding violence to an otherwise normal superhero book. Even though we have violence – I think it’s a lot more violent and darker than it was, we’re taking it seriously and while not scrapping everything that’s gone before, we’re not letting the past lock us into something.
I don’t want to do stories about the Flash’s costume coming alive and attacking him, like they did in the Silver Age. I don’t want to repeat stories that have been done, and I don’t want to do stories that have been done and add a “modern sense.” That’s all been done before. I love that stuff, but something like our story that starred the Weather Wizard, we’re using the characters and updating them a bit and fleshing them out a little more, which allows us to tell new stories and add nee characters to the mix. It’s difficult to do, but it’s worth it.
So I guess I’m really saying I don’t know how to classify my style on the book. Some say it’s dark and grim and gritty, but I don’t see it that way. I think of it more as one foot in a boot and one foot on the ground, if that makes sense.
NRMA: It does – looking at the “Blood Will Run” storyline [#170-#173], while on one hand you used it to flesh out a new villain, Cicada, and explore some issues with Wally, you also took a rather Silver Age gimmick of someone going after all the people the Flash has helped, but added the modern twist of having the villain murdering the people he’d helped over the years. In a manner, it seems that you’re taking Silver Age tricks and giving them a modern feel, rather than simply re-telling them.
GJ: Yeah, I guess that’s a good way to look at it. At the same time, we’re not making Flash a dark character – he’s not brooding, he’s not breaking bones as he captures people. He’s still a hero – he’s still Wally West. We’re just making him face some threats that are a little bit more intimidating on a psychological level. A psychological villain is much more interesting than a powerful villain. I think we’re sort of proving that with Murmur, a villain we introduced in Iron Heights. His only power is that he’s immune to disease, but you’ll see that he’s quite a threat to the Flash. If they were going to go one to one, he’d get his ass kicked, but the way he goes about doing his damage is a lot different.
NRMA: Going back a bit and speaking of the supporting cast – so far you’re not drawing on that many members of the Flash Family, and giving it the “Superman Family” feel that Mark Waid did during his run. Are you working to make the series more about Wally and less about the speedsters in the DCU?
Yeah. I don’t want to write Flash Family. Even the name itself, the “Flash Family” doesn’t sound appealing to me. It sounds old school, like the old Superman Family book. There are so many speedsters, and if people like them, fine, but I want to write about one. I’ll write about Flash and his villains and his supporting cast, but I really don’t have any interest in writing about six guys with super-speed running around. It’s just not appealing to me. It’s a conscious decision to leave them out.
But that doesn’t mean that they’ll never appear – Jesse Quick showed up, Jay Garrick is in a couple of issues coming up, and we do see Impulse briefly; but on the whole, they’re really not appealing to us.
NRMA: At the same time, speaking of family, you’re doing a lot to show readers that the Wally-Linda relationship is a solid marriage, and a very important part of Wally’s life. You’ve also begun hinting that Linda has begun thinking of having a baby. Is that “family” aspect of Flash going to become a larger issue as time goes on?
GJ: Yup. Definitely. I think it is possible to write a good marriage in comic books, and not make is sappy or boring, and that’s just what we’re trying to do. The problem with having a super-hero get married from my point of view though, is that suddenly, if Wally and Linda argue, Wally looks like the asshole. For me, it doesn’t matter what it’s about or what’s going on, it makes our hero look like a jerk. He can take on guys that can rip apart the moon, but he can’t avoid an argument with his wife? It doesn’t make sense to me. If we have Wally and Linda not argue, people will say that there’s no conflict, but I think you can have a different kind of conflict and a different kind of relationship that can be fun and loving. When Mark set up their relationship, he had Wally and Linda work really hard to stay together, and you can’t just throw that away. So yeah, their relationship is something that we have long-term plans for, and it will continue to evolve in a very positive way.
NRMA: And of course, Scott draws probably one of the most attractive versions of Linda that we’ve seen in a long while, and makes sure her Korean features remain consistent from issue to issue…
GJ: Yeah, he does a great job with her. Linda’s ethnicity is an issue we’re going to be dealing with, although we won’t be slamming anyone over the head with it. I think it’s fantastic that they are an inter-racial couple, and we’re both aware of that. We don’t try to overplay it, but we won’t underplay it either.
NRMA: With those bases covered, it’s probably time to see what’s coming up in the series, although you’ve hinted pretty broadly between the monthly series, Iron Heights and the most recent Secret Files issue…
GJ: After the Grodd issue, we have out Last Laugh tie-in, which really isn’t a tie-in. When all is said and done, when these crossovers hit, sometimes it’s a pain, but with this one, on both JSA and Flash, the crossover issues really turned out to be two of the best issues of the run, in a strange way. The issues barely tie into it, but the way it does, works right into the story that we’ve been planning on an entirely separate level. It also gives us an excuse to bring back another old Rogue.
With #180, we have a new villain called Peekaboo, and we’ll see Cyborg in there as well, since he just moved to Keystone. Scott’s giving him a revamped look, so he’s a character we’ll be dealing with a lot in the coming year. Peekaboo however is a very different kind of villain as far as backstory goes.
Issue #181 features Fallout from Iron Heights, and #182, which is probably my favorite issue to date is all Captain Cold. I think Flash appears once or twice in flashbacks, and maybe is in two to three panels in the entire issue, but otherwise it’s all Captain Cold – his origin, and what he’s been done lately, and what he has planned. It’s very character-based and Brian Bolland did just a fantastic cover for it.
Then with issue #183, it’s the prologue to our first big story arc since Blood Will Run, called Crossfire. It’s what we’ve been building up to for the past year with the Rogues, and that should run about five issues. That will take us all the way through next August. Scott’s already working on part two of that story arc.
NRMA: Scott is a workhorse…
GJ: Yeah, he’s so far ahead. He’s working on April’s issue right now. He’s amazing.
NRMA: Your editor, Joey Cavaleri must just love you guys…
GJ: Yeah, he likes us a lot. What’s funny is that at the beginning, when we’d want to try some different things, he’d be on the fence somewhat, and we’d usually have convince him to let us try it. When the issue would come out, he’d tell us how happy he was that we convinced him to go with what we had planned. He didn’t really want to do Grodd at first, because he thought Grodd was silly, but I told him to trust me, and this version wouldn’t be silly at all.
NRMA: Speaking of the Grodd issue, the aftermath of Grodd’s rampage – a section of the city destroyed, and a building collapsing, caught the attention of more than a few people due to its release shortly after the September 11th attacks. Given what the country and world saw in the attacks, has your approach to writing comics that would contain scenes such as we saw in #178 changed?
GJ: Obviously, this affects everybody. Even if I say no it won’t change the way I write, it’s obviously going to change the way I write, subconsciously, if nothing else. Consciously, I know that there are two elements that I’ll probably think about more. One is, that the heroes will continue to be more heroic. Saving lives is what they do. Flash evacuated that entire building before it came down in issue #178, for example. The other thing is that we’re going to be careful and sensitive about certain topics. We had, for example, an issue of JSA that was written well before September, and dealt with terrorism, but we had to go back and rewrite it. Right now, I can understand why, and we’ll just do what we do – continue to tell good stories as best we can. There are a few hindrances, but I think that most of them are rightly suggested. All in all, I hope it makes out books more inspiring, JSA especially.
NRMA: Back to Grodd one last time, in issue #178, Wally’s description of Grodd probably made a lot of readers realize just how scary Grodd can be, and probably moved him from the realm of the silly giant ape into a scary, savage, thinking villain. IN your eyes, was the Gross treatment a good revamp of a villain?
GJ: Yeah – on two levels. One, Wally said how he saw Grodd murder a man, and how he was frightened of him, and then we saw Grodd cut loose with some destruction. He’s a great villain, and everyone has to remember that Grodd was drugged to the gills in that issue – he wasn’t even thinking straight. That was Grodd without the logistical side, so when he does get his sense back together, it’s going to be a much bigger fight than can be contained in one issue. We have plans up through #200 right now, and all the seeds for every story through #200 have been laid in Iron Heights, Secret Files and the regular issues. It’s very tightly planned.
NRMA: But at the same time, not impenetrable to new readers?
GJ: Not at all. The next few issues are all stand-alones as we move toward the next big arc, and are all perfect places for people to check the series out. I’d hope that people do, and stick around for a while. Scott and I are just getting started.
Granted, the Waid shadow on Flash is a difficult one to get out of, and some readers opted to leave the series when the longtime writer left. Those that have stayed, and those that have begun reading the book in the past year have found a gem – a smart, stylish comic series that respects the past, the character, the readers themselves, and has woven a new tapestry for the Flash that stands tall among the series best creative runs.
Newsarama caught up with Johns recently for a little speed talking about the Flash and his world…
NRMA: Let’s start a year ago, back to when you came on the book with issue #164 – you started on a six-part, “Through the Looking Glass”-style alternate worlds story, rather than setting the stage for your version of the Flash and Keystone in the DCU. Why opt for the story you did, which effectively took Flash out of the DCU for six months?
GJ: Originally, I got hired to do six issues, so I couldn’t change anything. I love the Rogues, so I thought I would spotlight them, and play around with some Flash history. I had six issues to tell a story, and they wanted one storyline for it, so that’s what I did. AS the story was unfolding, I was hired to be the full-time writer on the series starting with issue #170 with Scott as the artist, and that’s when I figure it was time to rip apart the foundation and do something different.
NRMA: With your initial six-part story – you teamed Flash with Captain Cold. What was it about Cold that made him a good partner for Wally?
GJ: The Rogues have been around a long time and have great potential, along with a lot of fans that view them with a lot of affection. They’re so colorful and varied and fun, but we never really saw what the Rogues thought of Wally in detail. I think it was the Challenge of the Super-Heroes cartoon that made me feel that Cold was Flash’s perfect opposite, so I thought he would be the best “partner” for Wally – that was how it started in my mind, at least. I wanted to see how they played off of one another in detail. Starting with the second part of that storyline, we really got to see the two of them talk back and forth and argue, and for me, that was the most fun of that story.
NRMA: Right, the conversations between Wally and Cold really allowed you to show their attitude toward each other as it moved from annoyance to hatred to begrudging friends at times…
GJ: Yeah, it was a very odd relationship. I like how the Rogues have watched Wally grow up as the Flash, and they know not to underestimate him. He’s as capable as Barry was, and they sort of have this semi-balance of hate, respect, and disrespect for him.
NRMA: Even though he said he’d fought Wally as Kid Flash, the ultimate villain of the storyline, Grim, was brand new for the story, right?
GJ: Yeah, Grim was created just for that story and retconned in. We were originally going to use Psycho Pirate, but we ended up using a new guy instead.
NRMA: Is Psycho Pirate still a little messy when it comes to using him in the DCU, since no one’s really clarified if and how he “remembers” the pre-Crisis DCU as Grant Morrison showed in Animal Man?
GJ: Yeah, there were continuity issues. It was too much to unravel in that story.
NRMA: You’d have had to do a Hawkman-style revision just for a bit player…
GJ: Exactly. Four issues of a “Who is Psycho-Pirate?” story arc. Who wants to read that?
NRMA: After your first six issues, and getting the book for the long run, you got paired with Scott. You’d worked with him before on Stars and STRIPE, so you had a working relationship already. Was it just old home week on the series from there?
GJ: Oh yeah. I loved working with him before this – he’s a dynamite artist and a dynamite guy – very smart and a workhorse. He does a page a day, and he’s never late. He wanted to try something different stylistically with Flash, which he did, and I was all for it. After I saw the first issue he drew, I knew he was the perfect artist for the book. I’ve been ecstatic ever since. If you saw the Grodd issue [#178], you can see that he improved dramatically, and he’s only getting better with each passing issue. I’ve already seen his work through issue #184, and the stuff coming up is just amazing. He’s very consistent and a great storyteller - so underrated and so much better than a lot of other guys out there. He’s substance, he’s all about substance, and I would hope he really starts to get the attention he deserves for his work.
NRMA: Once you got the series assignment, and beginning with #170 where you re-introduced Francis Kane as Magenta and started refreshing the Rogues Gallery, what was your overarching idea for the book? More than any Flash writer of late, you’re really giving Keystone City a personality of its own, but it seems you’re also re-aligning the entire Flash universe somewhat…
GJ: Mark Waid did such a great job on defining Wally as a true hero, so we want to continue that and make him very competent, but at the same time we looked at other things we could improve upon, and Keystone City, the Rogues, and the human supporting cast were the three elements that we thought had been on the sidelines for a while. So we started off with Keystone, and tried to tie it into the Flash – the city that the Flash would live in is a city that also makes things that move fast. They make cars and planes and trains.
NRMA: So, it’s a city of working class folks, which explains why you’ve got Keith Kenyon, the former Goldface, running around trying to unionize…
GJ: Right. It’s a very blue-collar city, and when I think of Wally West, I think of a very blue-collar, publicly educated kind of guy – community college. He’s not into new age philosophy or anything like that. With Wally, what you see is what you get, even though he’s traveled through time, space and different dimensions. He’s very much down to earth, and Keystone reflects that blue-collar feel.
NRMA: And your revamp of the Rogues?
GJ: With the Rogues, as I said before, Flash has so many cool villains that can come back. For example, we even have plans for the Top that I think will make him cool. I think we’re achieving that goal with Mirror Master and Cold already. We’ve got Trickster coming up, and Magenta is a lot more competent and threatening as a villain now. That’s the key word we’re working towards – characters with competence. That’s what works for us.
Speaking of them, we do have a big arc coming where we’re going to recreate a lot of the Rogues, flesh out their history, look at why they’ve been in Keystone all these years, explain why they won’t leave, and keep adding new ones to the mix while we keep revamping the older ones. We have plans for nearly every Rogue that’s still alive. For example, the one-issue Grodd story was just the beginning – we have a big Grodd arc coming up in about a year.
NRMA: You made an interesting choice for Wally’s supporting cast. Rather than putting him back with scientists, you created a supporting cast from the Keystone Police Department. Why?
GJ: For me, the police have always been an element of Flash, going back to Barry Allen. Connecting the police back to Wally West – it just feels right on a certain level to see Flash hanging out in a police precinct.
NRMA: Looking at your run on the series, it's a little hard to put a finger on your style with the book - it's not the nilhistic, Authority style which has been really hot until late, and it’s not the shiny, neo-Silver Age that some writers had been using – it seems to fit right in the middle. You do have some pretty dark elements in the book, but at the same time, Wally is an unflappable hero. How do you approach the series in terms of tone and style?
GJ: It’s slightly different, but almost the same as the way I approach JSA. You have to respect what’s happened before, but you can’t drown in it. Otherwise, you’ll be sitting there spinning your wheels story after story. One of my takes on Flash is just brining it back down to reality a bit. By reality, I don’t mean just adding violence to an otherwise normal superhero book. Even though we have violence – I think it’s a lot more violent and darker than it was, we’re taking it seriously and while not scrapping everything that’s gone before, we’re not letting the past lock us into something.
I don’t want to do stories about the Flash’s costume coming alive and attacking him, like they did in the Silver Age. I don’t want to repeat stories that have been done, and I don’t want to do stories that have been done and add a “modern sense.” That’s all been done before. I love that stuff, but something like our story that starred the Weather Wizard, we’re using the characters and updating them a bit and fleshing them out a little more, which allows us to tell new stories and add nee characters to the mix. It’s difficult to do, but it’s worth it.
So I guess I’m really saying I don’t know how to classify my style on the book. Some say it’s dark and grim and gritty, but I don’t see it that way. I think of it more as one foot in a boot and one foot on the ground, if that makes sense.
NRMA: It does – looking at the “Blood Will Run” storyline [#170-#173], while on one hand you used it to flesh out a new villain, Cicada, and explore some issues with Wally, you also took a rather Silver Age gimmick of someone going after all the people the Flash has helped, but added the modern twist of having the villain murdering the people he’d helped over the years. In a manner, it seems that you’re taking Silver Age tricks and giving them a modern feel, rather than simply re-telling them.
GJ: Yeah, I guess that’s a good way to look at it. At the same time, we’re not making Flash a dark character – he’s not brooding, he’s not breaking bones as he captures people. He’s still a hero – he’s still Wally West. We’re just making him face some threats that are a little bit more intimidating on a psychological level. A psychological villain is much more interesting than a powerful villain. I think we’re sort of proving that with Murmur, a villain we introduced in Iron Heights. His only power is that he’s immune to disease, but you’ll see that he’s quite a threat to the Flash. If they were going to go one to one, he’d get his ass kicked, but the way he goes about doing his damage is a lot different.
NRMA: Going back a bit and speaking of the supporting cast – so far you’re not drawing on that many members of the Flash Family, and giving it the “Superman Family” feel that Mark Waid did during his run. Are you working to make the series more about Wally and less about the speedsters in the DCU?
Yeah. I don’t want to write Flash Family. Even the name itself, the “Flash Family” doesn’t sound appealing to me. It sounds old school, like the old Superman Family book. There are so many speedsters, and if people like them, fine, but I want to write about one. I’ll write about Flash and his villains and his supporting cast, but I really don’t have any interest in writing about six guys with super-speed running around. It’s just not appealing to me. It’s a conscious decision to leave them out.
But that doesn’t mean that they’ll never appear – Jesse Quick showed up, Jay Garrick is in a couple of issues coming up, and we do see Impulse briefly; but on the whole, they’re really not appealing to us.
NRMA: At the same time, speaking of family, you’re doing a lot to show readers that the Wally-Linda relationship is a solid marriage, and a very important part of Wally’s life. You’ve also begun hinting that Linda has begun thinking of having a baby. Is that “family” aspect of Flash going to become a larger issue as time goes on?
GJ: Yup. Definitely. I think it is possible to write a good marriage in comic books, and not make is sappy or boring, and that’s just what we’re trying to do. The problem with having a super-hero get married from my point of view though, is that suddenly, if Wally and Linda argue, Wally looks like the asshole. For me, it doesn’t matter what it’s about or what’s going on, it makes our hero look like a jerk. He can take on guys that can rip apart the moon, but he can’t avoid an argument with his wife? It doesn’t make sense to me. If we have Wally and Linda not argue, people will say that there’s no conflict, but I think you can have a different kind of conflict and a different kind of relationship that can be fun and loving. When Mark set up their relationship, he had Wally and Linda work really hard to stay together, and you can’t just throw that away. So yeah, their relationship is something that we have long-term plans for, and it will continue to evolve in a very positive way.
NRMA: And of course, Scott draws probably one of the most attractive versions of Linda that we’ve seen in a long while, and makes sure her Korean features remain consistent from issue to issue…
GJ: Yeah, he does a great job with her. Linda’s ethnicity is an issue we’re going to be dealing with, although we won’t be slamming anyone over the head with it. I think it’s fantastic that they are an inter-racial couple, and we’re both aware of that. We don’t try to overplay it, but we won’t underplay it either.
NRMA: With those bases covered, it’s probably time to see what’s coming up in the series, although you’ve hinted pretty broadly between the monthly series, Iron Heights and the most recent Secret Files issue…
GJ: After the Grodd issue, we have out Last Laugh tie-in, which really isn’t a tie-in. When all is said and done, when these crossovers hit, sometimes it’s a pain, but with this one, on both JSA and Flash, the crossover issues really turned out to be two of the best issues of the run, in a strange way. The issues barely tie into it, but the way it does, works right into the story that we’ve been planning on an entirely separate level. It also gives us an excuse to bring back another old Rogue.
With #180, we have a new villain called Peekaboo, and we’ll see Cyborg in there as well, since he just moved to Keystone. Scott’s giving him a revamped look, so he’s a character we’ll be dealing with a lot in the coming year. Peekaboo however is a very different kind of villain as far as backstory goes.
Issue #181 features Fallout from Iron Heights, and #182, which is probably my favorite issue to date is all Captain Cold. I think Flash appears once or twice in flashbacks, and maybe is in two to three panels in the entire issue, but otherwise it’s all Captain Cold – his origin, and what he’s been done lately, and what he has planned. It’s very character-based and Brian Bolland did just a fantastic cover for it.
Then with issue #183, it’s the prologue to our first big story arc since Blood Will Run, called Crossfire. It’s what we’ve been building up to for the past year with the Rogues, and that should run about five issues. That will take us all the way through next August. Scott’s already working on part two of that story arc.
NRMA: Scott is a workhorse…
GJ: Yeah, he’s so far ahead. He’s working on April’s issue right now. He’s amazing.
NRMA: Your editor, Joey Cavaleri must just love you guys…
GJ: Yeah, he likes us a lot. What’s funny is that at the beginning, when we’d want to try some different things, he’d be on the fence somewhat, and we’d usually have convince him to let us try it. When the issue would come out, he’d tell us how happy he was that we convinced him to go with what we had planned. He didn’t really want to do Grodd at first, because he thought Grodd was silly, but I told him to trust me, and this version wouldn’t be silly at all.
NRMA: Speaking of the Grodd issue, the aftermath of Grodd’s rampage – a section of the city destroyed, and a building collapsing, caught the attention of more than a few people due to its release shortly after the September 11th attacks. Given what the country and world saw in the attacks, has your approach to writing comics that would contain scenes such as we saw in #178 changed?
GJ: Obviously, this affects everybody. Even if I say no it won’t change the way I write, it’s obviously going to change the way I write, subconsciously, if nothing else. Consciously, I know that there are two elements that I’ll probably think about more. One is, that the heroes will continue to be more heroic. Saving lives is what they do. Flash evacuated that entire building before it came down in issue #178, for example. The other thing is that we’re going to be careful and sensitive about certain topics. We had, for example, an issue of JSA that was written well before September, and dealt with terrorism, but we had to go back and rewrite it. Right now, I can understand why, and we’ll just do what we do – continue to tell good stories as best we can. There are a few hindrances, but I think that most of them are rightly suggested. All in all, I hope it makes out books more inspiring, JSA especially.
NRMA: Back to Grodd one last time, in issue #178, Wally’s description of Grodd probably made a lot of readers realize just how scary Grodd can be, and probably moved him from the realm of the silly giant ape into a scary, savage, thinking villain. IN your eyes, was the Gross treatment a good revamp of a villain?
GJ: Yeah – on two levels. One, Wally said how he saw Grodd murder a man, and how he was frightened of him, and then we saw Grodd cut loose with some destruction. He’s a great villain, and everyone has to remember that Grodd was drugged to the gills in that issue – he wasn’t even thinking straight. That was Grodd without the logistical side, so when he does get his sense back together, it’s going to be a much bigger fight than can be contained in one issue. We have plans up through #200 right now, and all the seeds for every story through #200 have been laid in Iron Heights, Secret Files and the regular issues. It’s very tightly planned.
NRMA: But at the same time, not impenetrable to new readers?
GJ: Not at all. The next few issues are all stand-alones as we move toward the next big arc, and are all perfect places for people to check the series out. I’d hope that people do, and stick around for a while. Scott and I are just getting started.