2015 Comic Book News Archives

March 10, 2015: New "Superman" Creative Team Discuss Their Plans

Superman #41 Acclaimed cartoonist Gene Luen Yang has been tasked with the job of taking over the writing duties on the "Superman" comic book title, joining artist John Romita Jr., with issue #41. The LA Times caught up with the pair via telephone for a chat to see what they have in store for the Man of Steel. Here's part of the interview...

    HC: The initial announcement specifically mentions that Gene will be bringing more focus to the immigrant experience. How are you incorporating that into the narrative?

    GLY: That's just an essential part of the character. And as I'm writing, what I'm expecting is that it will come out organically. Superman has been around for so long; he's been around for, what, eight decades now? And he goes through these different eras where different aspects of who he is get emphasized. I think at the core of him is the idea of the immigrant experience. His creators were two children of Jewish immigrants. And embedded in his origin story is this idea of negotiating between two cultures and trying to take two halves of himself and create something that's whole and unified. I'm hoping what will happen is as we build our narrative, that aspect will come out organically.

    HC: Has any of the art started? John, do you have a script yet or is that still in the process?

    JRJ: I do not have the script for No. 41. I actually am knee-deep into issue 40, which I am attempting to dialogue myself. I'm plotting it, and I'm going to pencil it, and I'm going to attempt to dialogue it, and hopefully I can make it through without adding any more gray hairs to myself. I'm having a lot of fun with it. I ended up plotting it and throwing in as much dialogue into it for descriptive purposes to make everyone happy, but it actually helped myself out. I'm going work on No. 40 for a little while longer, and I haven't gotten the script for No. 41 yet, but I'm looking forward to it. I've spoken to Gene several times, along with the other teams that work on the character, and there's this grand design for the character and the stories that is really very, very good. Not that I would tell you in an interview that it was awful, but I'm very happy with it. That an idea that could make you cringe ended up being such a brilliant idea, and I know because I was a part of the idea that could make somebody cringe. And now there's a whole Super-story, and [DC] is listening to all of these writers, Gene included, that have been working on - a year's worth, Gene?

    GLY: We're trying to figure out something that will take him through a big chunk of time. We've been talking about 10 months to a year's worth of story. Superman, because he's such an important character in the DC Universe, there are four titles where he's one of the main stars. There's "Superman," there's "Batman/Superman," "Superman/Wonder Woman" and "Action Comics." All of the writers of these books [Yang, Greg Pak and Peter J. Tomasi], we got together for a conference in New York a couple weeks ago to just talk through the character, talk through some sort of a premise that would be able to go through all those books. That was the tricky part, coming up with some kind of a premise that would both give us as writers the freedom to tell stories with our own voices, but also give all of these books a sense of unity.

Read the entire interview at the LA Times website.



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