It's Always Darkest Before The Dawn But Also During The Dawn If You're Batman
and mama mia that's a sexy penguin!!!!!
It’s the DAWN OF DC! I know what you’re thinking: hasn’t DC been around since 1934? How can NOW be its “dawn?” Well, let’s just say the “legacy numbering” on its time of day has it as more of a “MID-AFTERNOON OF DC”, but we’re going with “dawn” for this initiative. And yes, I tried to get them to call it “Afternoon Delight Of DC” but I was shot down yet again.
Anyway! CBR did a roundtable interview with a bunch of us DC writers where we talk about the bright and fun future for all their flagship characters except for Batman, who is dark and gritty, squinting at the dawn. It was fun, and I managed to give CBR fodder for a proper clickbait headline, unless they’re too cowardly to use it.
WOW BOLD MOVE
Thank you
Anyway! Go check it out and get our WHOLE VIBE, MAN
Speaking of DC, they just gave me an EXCLUSIVE SUBSTACK REVEAL! Apparently they’ll be collecting the Penguin/Catwoman backup stories that I did with the amazing Bélen Ortega into its OWN COMIC! More details to come, but it’s going to be called PENGUIN #0. Why is it called that and not, like, CATWOMAN V PENGUIN: DAWN OF JUSTICE? It’s even got DAWN in the name!! Nobody listens to me.
Anyway, Bélen did a new cover for it and it’s AWESOME and rightly features CATWOMAN instead of that uggo PENGUIN.
SO GOOD. It also features my favourite new creation, the killer robot lawyer, THE EXECUTOR. Do I deserve this job? No.
In non-DC news, I had a very lovely chat with my dear old (very old) friend, Kieron Gillen. You may know him from his infuriating puns on Twitter, or from his comics, I guess.
Anyway, we were supposed to talk about PUBLIC DOMAIN, and we kind of did? Really it’s just us talking about the process of making comics. So! If you’re a process junkie or an insecurity junkie have I got the podcast for you!!!
Okay! Now for a … READER QUESTION!
batman. daredevil. howard the duck.
now that you've done the big three, are there any major characters you haven't written that you want to? or any other creator's creator-owned character you haven't written that you want to? or any other question you want to answer?
-Myq Kaplan
The answer for the company characters part is both none of them and all of them. Like, I very much do not think about stories for characters I’m not actively writing. I don’t have a secret Green Arrow pitch in my back pocket, or an FF story I’ve been dying to tell. It’s not how my brain works. I’m too busy thinking about sex and food, I guess.
But! This week I sadly turned down my third dream job in a row from my favourite editor (and yours), Tom Brevoort. He joked that he needed to stop offering me dream jobs and start offering me jobs that were stupid and awful. I was about to reply with an example of a “stupid and awful” gig, but I couldn’t think of one. Like, when I tried to conjure a lame Marvel character, my brain kept going, “oh, but that could be cool.”
I would legitimately have as much fun, if not more, writing a D-Man series as I would Amazing Spider-Man. Of course, the “D” doesn’t stand for “dollars,” so I probably wouldn’t be able to pay my rent writing D-Man exclusively, but you get the idea.
So, yeah! None of the characters and all of the characters! What a cop-out answer!!
As for others’ “creator-owned” characters, I’ve got no real desire. Those are in the voices of their creators, their interior lives are their creators’, anything I did would be such a poor impression it would just be embarrassing for everyone involved. The closest I’d come to that idea is doing something with The Sandman characters, which has had enough other people writing them that it wouldn’t feel too weird.
But, also, never forget:
All right!! I gotta go finish writing Batman 137 before I start on Daredevil 13 before I draw another page of Public Domain 7!! Fuck!!!! Bye!!!!!!
Chip,
I've been rereading Sex Criminals, my introduction to your oeuvre. One question - what is sex? I asked my wife but they told me I'll find out when I'm older.
Your pal,
Joe
My mom calls me “D-Man” because my names starts with “D”, but I felt weird posting it so I decided to make it a “yer mom joke” on you instead. Turns out the joke is on me