MattBrady
11-15-2002, 11:03 AM
<a href="http://classic.newsarama.com/Vertigo/mmass_8.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://classic.newsarama.com/Vertigo/mmass_8_t.jpg" width="175" height="275" align="right" border="0" alt="Midnight, Mass. #8"></a>At first, it was an ongoing, then it was backed down to a miniseries. Now, with it’s final issue due in shops next week, Midnight, Mass. is enjoying a renewal in buzz. As DC announced at last weekend’s RRP, the series is in development as a live action television series.
Running the gamut from its troubled start to its conclusion and in-development sequel, Newsarama sat down with series creator John Rozum for a post-mortem of sorts of Midnight, Mass..
First, a quick bit of background - along with small handful of other Vertigo series over the past months, Midnight, Mass. was at one time being groomed as a possible replacement for the imprint’s Preacher. The series’ stars were Adam and Julia Kadmon, paranormal investigators. Before you roll your eyes, they’re not Ghostbusters – fitting in with a pop cultural landscape that includes a monster-filled Buffy, in the world of Midnight, Mass., demons, supernatural creatures, magic, and mystical artifacts are very real – and more often than not, very dangerous.
In that sense, Julia and Adam are troubleshooters, called in when local authorities find that the thing knocking over garbage cans isn’t a raccoon, but rather a hungry zombie. Together, the two are recognized the world over (by people who…recognize that kind of thing) as the preeminent experts in their field.
The storyline of the miniseries had the Kadmons taking on a new assistant, Jenny, a quiet, likable girl with her own connection to the supernatural. Oh, and along the way, there are goblins, murders, abandoned churches, the Daughters of Kali, husband and wife bickering, a kicky new haircut, three creepy gentlemen, and one timely decapitation.
Overall, many DC and Vertigo fans have singled out the series as one of the handful of new projects that’s helping to revitalize Vertigo. For Rozum, the series’ execution was a success, all things considered.
”I think the book came off extremely well considering the challenge we faced with turning quite a bit of finished work designed for an ongoing series, into an eight-issue mini-series,” Rozum said. “Jesus Saiz surpassed all my hopes for the art. What he can do with expressions is incredible. His action scenes also, are fantastic. It’s rare to find someone who des both so well. He really won me over with the flashback scenes in issues two and three. He was really able to draw a distinction between current day Adam and Julia from their incarnations just a few months earlier. It was much more than changing hair length too. He was really capable of distinguishing their prior confident attitudes with their softer contemporary personas. I don’t know how he did it, but it blew me away. His work just got better and better as we went too. I hope to work with him again. Jimmy, also did great work, which is why he seems to be doing everything these days. Noelle, I requested for colors after having such a great collaboration with her on Xombi. I was sorry to lose her half way through, but not for the reason. Ken and John did some great lettering, and I gave them a lot of things to deal with. Tomer Hanuka provided stunning covers. I’d love to do another project with him as well, hopefully involving interior artwork. There’s some technical stuff I can nitpick, but why bother? Hopefully, if there’s a trade paperback collection, that stuff can be fixed then.”
While his view of the miniseries’ execution was glowing, Rozum’s opinion of the market’s response to Midnight, Mass. was mixed. “I think it found an audience, but I don’t think it found all of its audience,” Rozum said. “From what I’ve seen, I’d say that at least 90% of the response was highly favorable. It seemed like the people who didn’t like weren’t getting what they expected from their preconceived notions of Midnight, Mass.. For some, it just wasn’t their cup of tea. Those reasons are all fine. Given all the retrofitting that had to be done to make this material complete for a mini-series, I expected it to be a bit more disastrous. There were some criticisms to bits that came about because of this retrofitting. It’s hard, because I can’t really say be patient, all your questions will be answered, because there’s no ‘beyond’ after issue #8, and there was nothing I could do about some of those things.
”That said, I do have to say that the fans really came through on this one. There was quite an effort of their part to impress upon the powers that be at DC that they felt Midnight, Mass. Needed to be an ongoing book. They also did quite a bit of word of mouth. I think DC kind of buried this thing once they decided to turn it into a mini series, after all - why bother pushing something only eight issues long? To them it had no future anyway. Not to sound bitter, because I think Fables is a fine book and deserves the attention, but I think if Midnight, Mass. had been given the push Fables was given, it would be another story altogether.”
Despite his grievances and annoyances at the series being pared down to an eight-issue miniseries from an ongoing, Rozum said that the change didn’t affect the story contained in the miniseries at all. The book was originally scheduled to begin in January of this year, but was pulled from the schedule last October. As a result, Rozum had four issues in the can already when the word came to retool.
“I had written through issue number ten, and was outlining five issue arc that would follow that, when Heidi called me with the news,” Rozum said. “Initially, they were going to kill it al together, but I think too much money was invested in it at that point. At first, it was supposed to be cut down to a six-issue mini-series, but Heidi and I argued for eight because we essentially had to wrestle the existing four issues into some semblance of a complete and satisfying story that didn’t end with a cliffhanger. This was further complicated because issue #4 was also the first part of a three issue arc. Essentially, everything had to be tied together and concluded with just issues seven and eight.
”The plan originally was to use the first nine issues of the ongoing Midnight, Mass. series as something of a sampler. I wanted to do a series of one to three issue stories in a variety of moods and types just to give everyone a sense of the range this series would move across. The Magellan story was pretty much action, the Four Sisters was a mix of dark and humor, there was another issue which was going to be real horror, and the story for issue #9 was pretty much comedy. I also wanted these to be more or less self-contained stories so that if this series generated any buzz, or word of mouth, people could jump in at pretty much any point here without being lost, or fretting over parts one through three of a five issue arc being sold out, then never coming back for the next arc.
”As is apparent, that structure pretty much remained the same. Mainly, this was because half of it was already finished. If I had known it was going to be a mini-series going in, I would have structured it as one longer arc. Even so, almost all of what was originally staged for the first seven issues remained unchanged except for Jenny’s secret. Originally, her secret was supposed to be something else which was interesting and relevant, but not such a big deal. It was more a slow build of little mysteries about why Jenny did certain things, or how she knew something. The pay-off was supposed to be more of a, ‘Of course, that all makes perfect sense. Cool.’ than the very special episode of Family Ties that it ended up being just to give this mini-series a dramatic build and thread tying everything together.”
That said, Rozum admitted that there were quite a few things that were left out of the miniseries that would have been included if Midnight, Mass. had remained an ongoing. “We lost a lot because of the retro-condensing of what was done into a mini-series,” Rozum said. “There was a whole sub-plot that leads into the next storyline that had to be taken out, and actually added more weight to the argument between Adam and Julia when she turned him into a donkey. There were fuller scenes pertaining to Jenny‘s and Julia’s training technique which we lost because of space and because it wasn’t pertinent to this story, at the same time, because we couldn’t go back and replace pages which were drawn, the scene with Adam and Julia training in issue #4 remained, when I would have removed it for the same reason of irrelevancy. Instead, I would have kept the extension of a scene with Harmon which was humorous and also humanized him a bit more.
<img src="http://classic.newsarama.com/Vertigo/midnightma.jpg" width="175" height="275" align="left" border="0" alt="Midnight, Mass. #7"> “Mainly, I felt we could have used more room to breathe. If it had been an ongoing series, I probably would have broken issue #6 into two issues, and ditto with issue #8. That one lost a few scenes which added a layer of emotional weight, and also truly involved the town of Midnight, into the story. I had to take out most of those scenes and truncate others. There just wasn’t enough room.”
Given what he said about Adam and Julia, Rozum explained that while the experience of writing the miniseries didn’t necessarily reveal any new facets of the characters to him, the same was not true about their assistant, Jenny.
“Since this first mini-series was pretty much an introduction to Adam and Julia and their work, at a low point in their careers, I didn’t really have to reach too far into that nebulous area where my knowledge of the characters and what they’d do is more intuitive than set in stone,” Rozum said. “During the on and off years of putting this thing together my focus shifted from Adam to Julia a bit, because she’s more like a real person than he is.
”Jenny was the real surprise. Mentally casting the characters, I always thought of Julia as Famke Janssen and Adam as a young Peter Weller. Jenny didn’t have any of that baggage, though I knew who she was. Then when I saw Jesus’ first sketch of her, she really came to life, and changed a bit from what I originally had in mind. I really thought of her as frumpy and a bit melancholy. After I saw the sketch, I lightened her up a bit and really came to love her. The way Jesus drew her, you can really tell she was his favorite character too. Also, as I mentioned earlier, because her secret ended up being the focus and climax of the book, I had to increase the stakes of it a bit, while being true to her, and still on track with what was originally planned, so that future stories planned for her can still come about.”
As fans of the series learned recently - after Rozum himself posted the news on the DC Comics message boards, next week’s issue of Midnight, Mass. won’t be the final word on the property – a new Midnight, Mass. miniseries is in the works for 2003. While not wishing to reveal too much about the miniseries’ storyline, as the project is still unscheduled, Rozum explained that it will essentially be what was going to come next had the series been ongoing from the start.
“What was originally written for issue #8, one of my favorite issues, is now in limbo though,” Rozum said. “Because of changes needed to make the first mini-series a more or less complete and self-standing storyline, plot threads that would lead into the second mini-series had to be edited out. The way it’s structured now, there’s not really any way to work them back in. Because it’s designed as a mini-series, I think all of the short comings that happened in the first mini-series will be avoided this time around while really amplifying everything that was good about the first mini-series.”
Of course, Rozum’s ideal plan for the property is that it is, one day, picked up as an ongoing – perhaps when the television series gets rolling, or even earlier, possibly if 2003’s miniseries performs well.
“Ongoing would be preferable by far,” Rozum explained. “I like to punctuate longer stories with a succession of short stand alone stories, and the occasional breather issue, like issue #7 of the first mini-series. Just writing mini series doesn’t really allow me the luxury of doing any of those. I also wanted to seed Midnight, Mass. With a number of subplots which would slowly build over the course of the series, and that’s pretty much impossible with the mini-series. Almost everything which gets introduced needs to be resolved, though I do like to end with more questions unanswered than answered. I can already see the effect on the storyline as a whole from just the first two mini-series. Jenny’s secret was supposed to be a slow build with a much more satisfying, though less climactic resolution than what happened in the first mini-series. Also, as stated before, there were scenes in the first eight issues that would have led smoothly, and front loaded a little more weight to the second storyline. I had to cut all those in the first mini-series fro space, and also because they weren’t relevant to the story at hand. I have a rough map of what I want to do with Midnight, Mass., and figure it will take about 100 issues to tell it all. I’d much rather do that in eight years than in 16-20.”
Although Rozum’s time may soon be split on the property, as Joel Silver has tapped it for a possible television series. Landing the television deal admittedly felt like a little bit of sweet justice after the comic series was truncated – Silver sought Rozum out based on what he felt was the strength of the property – Rozum wasn’t shopping Midnight, Mass. around.
Whatever his role with the potential Midnight television series, Rozum explained that the fact that one day, people may be able to tune in and watch Adam and Julia’s adventures hasn’t – and won’t – affect how he approaches the comic.
“I look at them as two separate entities,” Rozum said. “I plan to continue the comic book as originally planned. However close the tv series ends up adapting the comic book, it will never be the same thing. They are two different media, with different needs, emphasis, and restrictions, so the material needs to be addressed differently in each case. From my perspective as the originator of all this material, the comic book is the authoritative version of Midnight, Mass., and the tv version is the parallel universe version of the material. There will most likely be characters created specifically for the television series and I have no plans to incorporate them into the comic book, no matter how cool they are. My plan is to write the comic book as if the tv show doesn’t exist, and any episodes of the show that I write will be suited to the tv series as a whole and will be worked from the established television version of Midnight, Mass., though I may incorporate elements from the comic book series.
”Before I began, I weighed the various possible media for telling these stories, and comics, to me, seemed the best choice for doing so. Hopefully, I’ll get to finish what I’ve begun in comics - everything else is secondary at this point.”
Running the gamut from its troubled start to its conclusion and in-development sequel, Newsarama sat down with series creator John Rozum for a post-mortem of sorts of Midnight, Mass..
First, a quick bit of background - along with small handful of other Vertigo series over the past months, Midnight, Mass. was at one time being groomed as a possible replacement for the imprint’s Preacher. The series’ stars were Adam and Julia Kadmon, paranormal investigators. Before you roll your eyes, they’re not Ghostbusters – fitting in with a pop cultural landscape that includes a monster-filled Buffy, in the world of Midnight, Mass., demons, supernatural creatures, magic, and mystical artifacts are very real – and more often than not, very dangerous.
In that sense, Julia and Adam are troubleshooters, called in when local authorities find that the thing knocking over garbage cans isn’t a raccoon, but rather a hungry zombie. Together, the two are recognized the world over (by people who…recognize that kind of thing) as the preeminent experts in their field.
The storyline of the miniseries had the Kadmons taking on a new assistant, Jenny, a quiet, likable girl with her own connection to the supernatural. Oh, and along the way, there are goblins, murders, abandoned churches, the Daughters of Kali, husband and wife bickering, a kicky new haircut, three creepy gentlemen, and one timely decapitation.
Overall, many DC and Vertigo fans have singled out the series as one of the handful of new projects that’s helping to revitalize Vertigo. For Rozum, the series’ execution was a success, all things considered.
”I think the book came off extremely well considering the challenge we faced with turning quite a bit of finished work designed for an ongoing series, into an eight-issue mini-series,” Rozum said. “Jesus Saiz surpassed all my hopes for the art. What he can do with expressions is incredible. His action scenes also, are fantastic. It’s rare to find someone who des both so well. He really won me over with the flashback scenes in issues two and three. He was really able to draw a distinction between current day Adam and Julia from their incarnations just a few months earlier. It was much more than changing hair length too. He was really capable of distinguishing their prior confident attitudes with their softer contemporary personas. I don’t know how he did it, but it blew me away. His work just got better and better as we went too. I hope to work with him again. Jimmy, also did great work, which is why he seems to be doing everything these days. Noelle, I requested for colors after having such a great collaboration with her on Xombi. I was sorry to lose her half way through, but not for the reason. Ken and John did some great lettering, and I gave them a lot of things to deal with. Tomer Hanuka provided stunning covers. I’d love to do another project with him as well, hopefully involving interior artwork. There’s some technical stuff I can nitpick, but why bother? Hopefully, if there’s a trade paperback collection, that stuff can be fixed then.”
While his view of the miniseries’ execution was glowing, Rozum’s opinion of the market’s response to Midnight, Mass. was mixed. “I think it found an audience, but I don’t think it found all of its audience,” Rozum said. “From what I’ve seen, I’d say that at least 90% of the response was highly favorable. It seemed like the people who didn’t like weren’t getting what they expected from their preconceived notions of Midnight, Mass.. For some, it just wasn’t their cup of tea. Those reasons are all fine. Given all the retrofitting that had to be done to make this material complete for a mini-series, I expected it to be a bit more disastrous. There were some criticisms to bits that came about because of this retrofitting. It’s hard, because I can’t really say be patient, all your questions will be answered, because there’s no ‘beyond’ after issue #8, and there was nothing I could do about some of those things.
”That said, I do have to say that the fans really came through on this one. There was quite an effort of their part to impress upon the powers that be at DC that they felt Midnight, Mass. Needed to be an ongoing book. They also did quite a bit of word of mouth. I think DC kind of buried this thing once they decided to turn it into a mini series, after all - why bother pushing something only eight issues long? To them it had no future anyway. Not to sound bitter, because I think Fables is a fine book and deserves the attention, but I think if Midnight, Mass. had been given the push Fables was given, it would be another story altogether.”
Despite his grievances and annoyances at the series being pared down to an eight-issue miniseries from an ongoing, Rozum said that the change didn’t affect the story contained in the miniseries at all. The book was originally scheduled to begin in January of this year, but was pulled from the schedule last October. As a result, Rozum had four issues in the can already when the word came to retool.
“I had written through issue number ten, and was outlining five issue arc that would follow that, when Heidi called me with the news,” Rozum said. “Initially, they were going to kill it al together, but I think too much money was invested in it at that point. At first, it was supposed to be cut down to a six-issue mini-series, but Heidi and I argued for eight because we essentially had to wrestle the existing four issues into some semblance of a complete and satisfying story that didn’t end with a cliffhanger. This was further complicated because issue #4 was also the first part of a three issue arc. Essentially, everything had to be tied together and concluded with just issues seven and eight.
”The plan originally was to use the first nine issues of the ongoing Midnight, Mass. series as something of a sampler. I wanted to do a series of one to three issue stories in a variety of moods and types just to give everyone a sense of the range this series would move across. The Magellan story was pretty much action, the Four Sisters was a mix of dark and humor, there was another issue which was going to be real horror, and the story for issue #9 was pretty much comedy. I also wanted these to be more or less self-contained stories so that if this series generated any buzz, or word of mouth, people could jump in at pretty much any point here without being lost, or fretting over parts one through three of a five issue arc being sold out, then never coming back for the next arc.
”As is apparent, that structure pretty much remained the same. Mainly, this was because half of it was already finished. If I had known it was going to be a mini-series going in, I would have structured it as one longer arc. Even so, almost all of what was originally staged for the first seven issues remained unchanged except for Jenny’s secret. Originally, her secret was supposed to be something else which was interesting and relevant, but not such a big deal. It was more a slow build of little mysteries about why Jenny did certain things, or how she knew something. The pay-off was supposed to be more of a, ‘Of course, that all makes perfect sense. Cool.’ than the very special episode of Family Ties that it ended up being just to give this mini-series a dramatic build and thread tying everything together.”
That said, Rozum admitted that there were quite a few things that were left out of the miniseries that would have been included if Midnight, Mass. had remained an ongoing. “We lost a lot because of the retro-condensing of what was done into a mini-series,” Rozum said. “There was a whole sub-plot that leads into the next storyline that had to be taken out, and actually added more weight to the argument between Adam and Julia when she turned him into a donkey. There were fuller scenes pertaining to Jenny‘s and Julia’s training technique which we lost because of space and because it wasn’t pertinent to this story, at the same time, because we couldn’t go back and replace pages which were drawn, the scene with Adam and Julia training in issue #4 remained, when I would have removed it for the same reason of irrelevancy. Instead, I would have kept the extension of a scene with Harmon which was humorous and also humanized him a bit more.
<img src="http://classic.newsarama.com/Vertigo/midnightma.jpg" width="175" height="275" align="left" border="0" alt="Midnight, Mass. #7"> “Mainly, I felt we could have used more room to breathe. If it had been an ongoing series, I probably would have broken issue #6 into two issues, and ditto with issue #8. That one lost a few scenes which added a layer of emotional weight, and also truly involved the town of Midnight, into the story. I had to take out most of those scenes and truncate others. There just wasn’t enough room.”
Given what he said about Adam and Julia, Rozum explained that while the experience of writing the miniseries didn’t necessarily reveal any new facets of the characters to him, the same was not true about their assistant, Jenny.
“Since this first mini-series was pretty much an introduction to Adam and Julia and their work, at a low point in their careers, I didn’t really have to reach too far into that nebulous area where my knowledge of the characters and what they’d do is more intuitive than set in stone,” Rozum said. “During the on and off years of putting this thing together my focus shifted from Adam to Julia a bit, because she’s more like a real person than he is.
”Jenny was the real surprise. Mentally casting the characters, I always thought of Julia as Famke Janssen and Adam as a young Peter Weller. Jenny didn’t have any of that baggage, though I knew who she was. Then when I saw Jesus’ first sketch of her, she really came to life, and changed a bit from what I originally had in mind. I really thought of her as frumpy and a bit melancholy. After I saw the sketch, I lightened her up a bit and really came to love her. The way Jesus drew her, you can really tell she was his favorite character too. Also, as I mentioned earlier, because her secret ended up being the focus and climax of the book, I had to increase the stakes of it a bit, while being true to her, and still on track with what was originally planned, so that future stories planned for her can still come about.”
As fans of the series learned recently - after Rozum himself posted the news on the DC Comics message boards, next week’s issue of Midnight, Mass. won’t be the final word on the property – a new Midnight, Mass. miniseries is in the works for 2003. While not wishing to reveal too much about the miniseries’ storyline, as the project is still unscheduled, Rozum explained that it will essentially be what was going to come next had the series been ongoing from the start.
“What was originally written for issue #8, one of my favorite issues, is now in limbo though,” Rozum said. “Because of changes needed to make the first mini-series a more or less complete and self-standing storyline, plot threads that would lead into the second mini-series had to be edited out. The way it’s structured now, there’s not really any way to work them back in. Because it’s designed as a mini-series, I think all of the short comings that happened in the first mini-series will be avoided this time around while really amplifying everything that was good about the first mini-series.”
Of course, Rozum’s ideal plan for the property is that it is, one day, picked up as an ongoing – perhaps when the television series gets rolling, or even earlier, possibly if 2003’s miniseries performs well.
“Ongoing would be preferable by far,” Rozum explained. “I like to punctuate longer stories with a succession of short stand alone stories, and the occasional breather issue, like issue #7 of the first mini-series. Just writing mini series doesn’t really allow me the luxury of doing any of those. I also wanted to seed Midnight, Mass. With a number of subplots which would slowly build over the course of the series, and that’s pretty much impossible with the mini-series. Almost everything which gets introduced needs to be resolved, though I do like to end with more questions unanswered than answered. I can already see the effect on the storyline as a whole from just the first two mini-series. Jenny’s secret was supposed to be a slow build with a much more satisfying, though less climactic resolution than what happened in the first mini-series. Also, as stated before, there were scenes in the first eight issues that would have led smoothly, and front loaded a little more weight to the second storyline. I had to cut all those in the first mini-series fro space, and also because they weren’t relevant to the story at hand. I have a rough map of what I want to do with Midnight, Mass., and figure it will take about 100 issues to tell it all. I’d much rather do that in eight years than in 16-20.”
Although Rozum’s time may soon be split on the property, as Joel Silver has tapped it for a possible television series. Landing the television deal admittedly felt like a little bit of sweet justice after the comic series was truncated – Silver sought Rozum out based on what he felt was the strength of the property – Rozum wasn’t shopping Midnight, Mass. around.
Whatever his role with the potential Midnight television series, Rozum explained that the fact that one day, people may be able to tune in and watch Adam and Julia’s adventures hasn’t – and won’t – affect how he approaches the comic.
“I look at them as two separate entities,” Rozum said. “I plan to continue the comic book as originally planned. However close the tv series ends up adapting the comic book, it will never be the same thing. They are two different media, with different needs, emphasis, and restrictions, so the material needs to be addressed differently in each case. From my perspective as the originator of all this material, the comic book is the authoritative version of Midnight, Mass., and the tv version is the parallel universe version of the material. There will most likely be characters created specifically for the television series and I have no plans to incorporate them into the comic book, no matter how cool they are. My plan is to write the comic book as if the tv show doesn’t exist, and any episodes of the show that I write will be suited to the tv series as a whole and will be worked from the established television version of Midnight, Mass., though I may incorporate elements from the comic book series.
”Before I began, I weighed the various possible media for telling these stories, and comics, to me, seemed the best choice for doing so. Hopefully, I’ll get to finish what I’ve begun in comics - everything else is secondary at this point.”