[00:00] INTRO: Welcome to The Corner Box, where we talk about comics as an industry and an art form. You never know where the discussion will go or who will show up to join host David Hedgecock and John Barber. Between them, they've spent decades writing, drawing, lettering, coloring, editing, editor-in-chiefing, and publishing comics. If you want to know the behind-the-scenes secrets, the highs and lows, the ins and outs of the best artistic medium in the world, then listen in and join us on The Corner Box.
[00:32] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody, welcome back to The Corner Box. My name's David Hedgecock, and I have with me, as always, my good friend.
[00:39] John Barber: John Barber. That's me. I don't know. Sorry, were you going to say my name?
[00:42] David: No, I wasn't going to say it. I mean, the queue was good friend.
[00:49] John: I paused for a moment because I thought somebody else was coming by. But wait, somebody did. Who else is here with us?
[00:55] David: Who is here with us?
[00:56] Megan Brown: Hi, everyone. I'm Megan. I'm back.
[00:59] David: Yay, Megan's back.
[01:01] Megan: Thank you for having me.
[01:02] David: Thanks for joining us. Yeah, we're super glad that Megan was able to join us because we've gotten a topic that we think, or at least I think, John's nodding his head it's good for audio, also a thumbs up, and now he's rolling his eyes and we're glad to have Megan back, because we're going to be talking about scriptwriting for comic books. Megan has quite an extensive experience/knowledge on the subject. So, we're happy she's able to join us for this one.
[01:29 Megan: I wouldn't say that. But that's nice of you.
[01:31] David: As I was saying before we started, I feel like I'm super qualified now to be able to talk on this subject because I myself have written a comic book script.
[01:44] Megan: That's, I mean, that's something. That's amazing.
[01:48] David: After 20-plus years working in comic books, I finally wrote 20 pages of a story.
[01:53] John: I don't think I've ever read fully realized you hadn't done that before. Because you've done a lot of other stuff. I mean, you've drawn comics.
[01:59] David: I've actually written stuff before. I'm just kidding. But the stuff I wrote was when I was making minicomics, and at the very beginning of getting into professional work, I did some stuff when I owned Ape Entertainment. So, no one could tell me that I couldn't write something and publish it, but this recent one was the first time I've written something where I like, I think that's actually professional, I guess I should say. I don't know if it's good. That's for other people to determine, but it feels like a professional work. I'm actually three scripts in, too. I totally derailed this before we even got started.
So, we're talking about scriptwriting. Megan has written for My Little Pony, Napoleon Dynamite, and that's one of my favorite things. Anything else, Megan?
[03:00] Megan: No, that's it so far.
[03:01] David: Edited hundreds of scripts, obviously. John, obviously, well, John's written hundreds of comic books, just for Transformers alone. When you add his stuff outside of comic books, I think you've written two or 3 million comic books.
[03:19] John: And some change, when you add any other stuff. Yeah, it's been weird. I actually haven't that much, more recently. So, I guess it's been a year, year and a half long process of getting back into it. But I've been doing more stuff again.
[03:34] David: We were talking about approaching this as a professional writer, because the two of you at least are, and then talking about it from the editor side, I thought maybe I could actually contribute something, and then speak as somebody who's drawn scripts before, maybe I could throw my two cents in on that side. John, what is your process when you're sitting down to do something for yourself? Not commercial. Something for yourself.
[04:01] John: Yeah, I don't know that I totally separate that stuff out, in terms of any process or anything. Most of what I've done has been for other people or for commercial things. I mean, obviously, when I started out, I was doing my own comics, I was writing and drawing stuff, and posting them online, and just to show my age, some of the stuff was way back in my webcomics days, I was using a flash interface to do comic storytelling, and program that stuff too, but what I try to do is eliminate the amount of time where I'm looking at a blank sheet of paper the most. So, I take notes down sometimes or type something in my phone. Nowadays, I do a lot of the stuff. I probably shouldn't because of all the AI data scraping, but I use Google Docs for my scripts, and part of that is because I can just pull it up on my phone and have easy access to it, and it works in a way that a lot of the other, I guess every program does that now, but Google Docs at least works. I’ve had experiences of other programs, years old now, of stuff just vanishing into the ether I thought I'd save things.
[05:09] David: You've actually like lost work?
[05:11] Megan: A lot of work?
[05:13] John: Oh, yeah, there was one day, I lost several hours of a Transformer script, during the days when I was working as an editor, so id be writing at night or on weekends, so, it was one of those things where I'm not seeing my kid today, I'm going to be sitting in this coffee shop, and then I had to move somewhere else, and I was using my iPad to write at that point and yeah, lost several hours with a script.
[05:37] Megan: My biggest fear.
[05:39] David: Yeah, that sounds awful. I'm sorry for your loss, John.
[05:48] John: This one time, I was editing a comic called New Universal, that Warren Ellis was writing, and he had a hard drive meltdown and lost the Next script, or lost all of his scripts. He lost everything that he was working on. So, we had a fill-in issue. We decided to do some one shots, and we hired some new writers, and one of those writers was Karen Gillan, and it was his first script at Marvel, was a comic called New Universal 1959, that Warren and I named 1959 because it was named after a Sisters of Mercy song. So, we knew that Karen would say yes, but Warren Ellis never wrote the Next script to Universal. So, all of Karen Gillan’s career has taken place between those two issues. So, if Warren Ellis ever does write the next.
[06:33] David: Then that's, that's potentially the end of Karen's career.
[06:37] John: I assume that's how it works. Yeah, I live in fear of that kind of stuff. But anyway, I'll take my notes, and I’ll turn those into some kind of outline, or just just writing down what the story is, and then try to go through and break it down into pages. Sometimes, that'll be in there if I'm already thinking of like, “this is a splash, or here's a sequence”, or something and I just pick away at that. I don't know. It's very sculptural for me. It's absurd to talk about it now because we're so far into, obviously, you're writing on a computer. I've only ever written a comic book script on a computer. I mean, some people might write stuff down longhand, or whatever, and then type it in, but I feel like as much as people talk about how digital technology changed the way people draw comics, they don't talk that much about how it changed how people write things, and it's that idea of typing something and having to be correct or spelled right. I don't know how to do that. Wow, that's so weird. I think I remember somebody telling me that Garth Ennis, would basically just write his scripts start to finish, he had to have all of his notes, but he’d just write them out full-on. I think he was using computer way later. Later than most people. Later than I would have anticipated, I guess, and I don't know how to do that. You know what I mean? That doesn't make sense to me.
[07:57] David: I don't know. Yeah, Megan, how do you?
[07:59] Megan: Well, I use this thing called Scrivener, which I like to tell people about a lot because it's the cheaper alternative to Microsoft Word, and it has a comic template that you can use that I find works fairly well, but when I'm writing comics, I'll have an outline. Also, I find that that's very important when I write comics, because the page base is premium real estate, and essentially, what I'll do is, I'll go through and, John, similar to what you do, I will just be like, “Okay, this happens on page one, this happens on page two, this happens on page three,” and then I'll go back in and I'll write the worst thing you've ever read, just to have something on that page, and then it's mental, because then when you go back, and it's like, “Oh, something is here,” and then you fill it in with what you actually want the characters to say. It's a lot different when I write prose. I don't outline at all. I don't do anything. I just write. But yeah, comic writing is interesting. Yeah, it's so much more. Like I said, you're really hindered by the page space sometimes, and I know that when artists draw my comics, they get really tired of me being like, “and this page has eight panels, and this page has nine panels,” and there are 30-word balloons, and people are like, “you should know better.” But I don't, so.
[09:21] David: You know better as the editor, though. When you see somebody else do it you're like, “oh, geez, amateur hour, here we go.”
[09:28] Megan: I get that now, I'm like, “this is really wordy. We can cut it down in lettering, or you can cut it down now.“
[09:35] John: That's an interesting thing, too, because I do feel like we've all edited and written stuff, and the editor part is weirdly different, and so much of that knowledge goes out the window when you're writing something, and some of its good. I mean, there's definitely parts of it where it's like, “I don't want to be sitting there trying to make everything reasonable when I'm writing the script. I want it to be wild and interesting as it can be and then maybe pick stuff that doesn't work.” So, there's part of it where I intentionally don't want to edit the stuff. There's also part of it, where it's just like, “I know better than that. Why did I do that? Why did I do that?”
[10:15] David: What is it like John, you said you lost hours of work, and you were writing on the weekend kind of thing, because your main job was not writing comic books at the time, which is funny to say, because your main job was editing comics. What's it like when it's like, “oh, no, I have to get this done. There's a deadline on this, and I'm not feeling it, but I still have to do this.” What is that like for you?
[10:48] John: I feel like when you are doing it a lot, you work that out, and it doesn't really hit that often. Because I definitely feel that way right now. I mean, there are times where I'm trying to work on the plot that Andrew Griffith and I are working on for our comic, and literally stopped working on the run writing issue to do this podcast. I'm right in the middle of it.
[11:14] David: Nice. Can you say the name of it yet?
[11:16] John: Cigna.
[11:20] David: Who's coloring?
[11:21] John: DC Alonso? Yeah, he was doing some work for us. He got a tremendous range. He really blew Mason, the editor, and I away recently. You don't have time, sometimes, to look if you feel like doing it or not. I always live in fear leaving the artists without pages to draw, because that impacts their life, that impacts their livelihood, and just try to get things done. I can remember, one time, where there was a Transformers script that Carlos Guzman, who was the editor at that point, pointed out, wasn't very good, and it was basically just, we had a page one rewrite. It was one of those other ones, it was just like “He’s right, this absolutely didn't work, I need to start over and just start with a clean sheet of paper,” and sometimes you do need that blank sheet just to start over with. I mean, there was no paper involved, but you know what I mean. So, that would happen. I guess, sometimes, it is harder when you don't need to have 20 pages written every week, because that's where it was at for a while. You can tell looking at me, I wouldn't know, but it's probably like exercising. If you exercise a lot, it's not as hard, but when you don't. Not only do I not like going out and running. I don't want to go out and do that. That's horrible.
[12:45] David: When you're writing at that clip, an issue a week, when you're writing at that speed, did you ever run out of ideas? Did you ever, or was there always just more than you could possibly get out? Especially, at that pace.
[12:58] John: Well, I don't know. I guess that's for the readers to decide.Out of ideas that issue 13 John? Like there definitely is that like possibility or even probability that I was just writing some of the same stuff over and over again, and just minut variations and not knowing it? You know, the Jonathan Hickman approach? Whoa, ah, yikes, dude. You as the other writer
[13:30] David: I like Hickman’s work, but his Avengers run was incredibly repetitive. At times, it's like, “wow, I've read this three times now. This is the exact same comic book.” Thanks for coming, everybody.
[13:46] John: You know what my favorite quote about what you're talking about, though, in relation to that Avengers run, where somebody, in an interview, asked him what he wanted to do next year, and he was like, “write a second draft.” Yeah, it's the same thing. He had to have been writing those things at such a crazy clip to be able to keep up with the artist. The artist was drawing the next arc, the artist that was drawing the other series, all that other stuff. When I was writing Transformers, there was a point where I was wondering, “well, where do we go? Maybe I'm out of ideas,” and then I had this idea for what turned into the rest of my Transformers run, and it's not like it came up fully formed, but it was like, “Okay, here's where I know that Optimus Prime is part of Cybertron, and here's where it all goes to, and it all leads up to the end of the story with Shockwave, and then I'm done,” and then, that's the end of my run, and things mutate as it goes on, but it more or less happened that way. So, once I had that, you know where everything goes.
So, if you're doing something that's a long run on something, which was a weird thing to do. When I started Transformers, I was pitching a 12-issue arc, and I made it 13 issues, partially to give myself more room, and then, partially, to just give myself another issue. I'll go, “I can make another paycheck out of it. I get one more issue out of it if I make this 13 instead of 12, and they say yes.” James Roberts, he started at the same time as I, we both felt like we'll be lucky if we can get to issue 12. Because no comics do that, and then we both wound up doing it for years, and it was really lucky to have that, but once we didn't have that thing, you need this Northstar to guide you where you're going, but that makes a lot of the other stuff fall into place, I think. So, it's not like I was coming up with a whole new story every week. It was like, “here's this six-issue story.
[15:42] David: “Here's the first chapter of that.” Gotcha. Mega, your stuff, professionally at least, has been more short-form, right?
[15:49] Megan: Yeah, my longest was four issues, and that was a wake-up call for me. I found that to be very much more difficult than I thought it would be, and that was where my outline really came in handy, because without that, I was like, “this would have been the worst thing I've ever written,” but yeah, all of my stuff has been a single issue, so I've been very fortunate that my deadlines have been very nice. So, the only time I ever had to write an issue in a day, it was Napoleon Dynamite. I did that to myself, because I procrastinated so long. I was scared. It was my first comic, I was nervous. So, I was like, “No, I'll just wait.” Don't ever do that. That always sucks. When you get up and you're like, “No, it'll be great. I'll have a day full of writing.” There's nothing worse than a day where you're just at your computer trying to write. It is so draining. I would not recommend. Now, I only write between the hours of 8pm and 10pm, every night.
[16:49] David: Do you dedicate that time to writing?
[16:53] Megan: No, often I'm not writing during it, but it's the only time when I feel like I can write anymore.
[17:01] John: The first Transformer stuff I wrote, I wrote three movie tie-in comics that reach for a few limited series, then I convinced Danny Schmitt that I should write all three of them, and we can tie them all together. One of them was an adaptation of one of the movies, but I had to write five pages of issue one of one series, five pages of issue one of another series, five pages of the third, to get all the artists going, then write the rest of issue one, the rest of issue one, the rest of issue one. So, by the time I got to issue four, I learned a valuable lesson about pacing, that it didn't matter that I learned it, because I was still going to repeat the same thing two more times, with the same traps, and that was horrible. I remember that.
[17:49] David:
That was early on, you said? That was one of the first things? Yeah, that's interesting. So, when you're writing, Megan, with the stuff that you've done, do you know who your artist is every time?
[17:59] Megan: I'm trying to remember. I did for a Little Fillies. I didn't know my artists for Bridal Woodstock, which is my latest one. It's hit or miss. I'm not a writer that will write to an artist. I don't know if that makes me a bad comic book writer, but I don't care if the artist changes stuff. I want them to be able to do that, so I'm like, “here's what I'm thinking,” but if the page comes back, and it's completely different, I'm never going to be angry about it. I'm going to be like, “cool, you were engaged.”
[18:28] David: Do you leave a lot of instruction for the artist?
[18:32] Megan: Not particularly. I have a screenwriting minor. So, I feel like I write like I'm writing for TV. So, I just will be like, “reverse on, cut to.” I try to set up locations as well as I can. Because I know that that can be difficult, especially with something like My Little Pony, where you're trying to integrate it into the show. But other than that, I'm just wordy. That's my biggest mistake. Too wordy, but I hope I'm not too confining for the artist.
[19:04] David: I have just jumped back into to writing after forever. I had the opportunity to work with an artist friend of mine, his name's Rolando Mallada, from Paraguay. He's just this incredible artist, and he just happened to be available on a Monday, and I've known him probably for, Oh God, at least 10 years, and on a Monday, he emailed me and said he was looking for work, and I've known him for 10 years and he's never said those words to me, ever. In fact, he's turned me down, I don't even know how many times while I was at IDW trying to bring him in on one project or another, because I just think he's one of the most incredible artists around. So, he said he was looking for work and I was like, “Okay, well, I've got a script for you. It'll be ready on Wednesday.” I had no idea what I was going to give him.
[19:50] Megan: Why would you do this to yourself?
[19:53] David: I know, I did it to myself, but I couldn't let that opportunity pass by, so I scrambled and found something else. So, not having really done it, or watched other people. Obviously, I'm constantly seeing the finished product and I'm constantly talking to writers, but having done it myself, it's interesting that I have come to the same sort of work process, John, that it sounds like you guys are at, where it's some highlights, some bullet points, I know where the endpoint is, and where I want to get to, and then you barf a bunch of words onto a page and then start chipping away at it and figuring out like, “Okay, here's what happens in this issue, here's roughly what happens on each page,” and then sprinkling it in with little dialogue bits, or if I've got an image in my head, that happens a lot more for me, an image in my head, I mark that image down, like, “okay, that's what I want to do,” and then for me, a lot of it is thinking about, and this might be because in this particular instance, I know exactly who I'm working with, for me, it's just about thinking about ways to give Rolo to just draw the coolest thing ever. Like, “I'm going to have three double-page splashes in this first issue.” That's the goal. I don't get there, but I'll be damned if I don't at least have one to make it sing for him, and then my scripts, I think, are mostly just cheerleading and trying to be inspiring to the artist, talking about “Hey, did you ever see the Frazier/Ali boxing match? That's what's happening in this panel. Go.”
[21:44] Megan: I did that recently, where I was like, “This is the scene at the end of Mulan, where 98 degrees is playing with Stevie wonder.” That's a very specific reference for all you Disney fans out there. But yeah, I think that's a good point, when you think about the spreads and stuff from a structural editorial standpoint, you don't want a comic book that is 20 pages of just two people talking, and even if the plot itself is boring, you have to find ways, too. That was always the struggle with Little Fillies, is that it's ultimately just a book about people talking to each other, and how do you let the artist go wild on some of these pages and bring in some action so that it's not just the March Sisters walking to school again, for the fifth issue in a row?
[22:29] David: The thing that's been sticking with me, in terms of writing, is the comic book writing 101 of every panel should make you read the next panel. The end of every page should make you turn the page, or make you go to the next page, and that's really served me well. Just whatever that hook is to keep the reader moving forward, compelling them, like, “I am going to grab your attention and I'm going to make you turn the page by the end of this page,” and just doing that over and over and over again, every single page, that's the muscle I've been exercising a lot in this new writing that I've been doing, and it's really hard, but really, really pays off it, especially as the art’s been coming in. It's like, “oh, this is great. This compels me to turn the page.
[23:27] Megan: I think that the page turns are especially a skill. I've noticed, as I grow as an editor, too, it's something that you can really pick out. If you get to the bottom of a page, a lot of times what I'll find is that either the first panel of the next page should be moved to the previous page, or vice versa, but I think it is something when you're first starting out that you don't really consider as a comic book writer. It's something that, like you said, David, it's a muscle you have to practice.
[23:57] David: Yeah, as an editor, I always assume that people are looking for a reason to put this book down. As an editor, I always know I've got one to four pages to grab somebody's attention and convince them to spend four bucks on something. So, when I'm looking at scripts and looking at writing, especially for a periodical, original graphic novel’s a little bit different, I think, but not really, not that much to me, but those first four pages are so critical, because if you've got a great cover, it's probably not by the same guy that's doing the interiors, so the cover is going to grab somebody's attention, and they're going to open it up, and then you've got three pages, four pages at most, while somebody’s sitting there in the comic book shop or sitting online and thumbing through, or tapping through pages to really grab their attention, and hopefully get them to commit. So, I always keep that in mind. I think that page turners are critical and that big surprise or big reveal, either, on page four, sometimes in just that cool page two/three spread. It's just always so important to me, and the books that don't do it, I always feel a little let down. They're always a little flat to me.
[25:15] John: Yeah, my background is in graphic design. That's actually what I went to school for. My master's thesis was about comic book page layout. That's always been a thing I've thought about. The two-page spreads. Thinking about it as a unit of two pages was so built into what interested me about comics, and that idea of turning the page and not knowing what you're going to hit. I mean, I remember having this realization, or just being blown away by reading 300, the Frank Miller comic, and not knowing what was going to happen when you turned the page, because in the comic book version of that, when it was published, it was just spreads, everything was just spreads, and it wouldn't necessarily be just one image, but everything was laid out in two page units. The book of it is just wide, and I've never liked that. I remember having conversations Brian Hitch about it, years ago, talking about this stuff, that I don't like the paperback or the collective version of it because it’s just wide pages. Weird fascism stuff.
[26:25] David: Who's throwing punches now?
[26:27] John: Well, that idea of filling up the whole field of vision, it falls apart in digital formats, and it works differently, or that idea falls apart. It works differently in digital formats. When I was doing stuff digitally, when I was doing webcomics, that was something I was really conscious of, was trying to have that effect to try to make the thing that I thought was interesting about that effect come out on on a digital screen, computer screen, at that point.
[26:54] Megan: I hate web comics now where they're just that infinite scroll. Obviously, you lose the page turns and stuff, but also, it's so limiting. It's such a Quibi thing to do.
[27:08] David: Yeah. This is old man David talking. I am angry at the Marvel infinity comics. I refuse to open them in my app, because I don't want Marvel to think that I am in any way, shape, or form, interested in comic books. That's very much my old man opinion. I'm glad to hear that I'm not alone. Talking about those spreads, John, the thing that that brought up for me is the digital landscape. I'm reading all my comic books, all my Marvel and DC comic books, I'm now reading through the app. I don't really buy physical copies anymore because, Dear God, who's got room in the garage left for comic books anymore? But it's interesting to me how the big wow factor, the big pop in a print comic book, which is the double page spread, is actually minimized when you're reading it digitally. So, I've got an iPad that's big enough that it's basically almost one to one in terms of the reading experience between a print comic book and my digital version. So, a single page splash works great, but then when you get to the double page spreads, suddenly, the impact is reversed. Rather than the way it's supposed to be presented, and I don't know how to solve that. I'm just not smart enough. But I want somebody to figure that out. I don't know what that looks like.
[28:41] Megan: I think the answer is just not being digital. I say as someone who collects print media from VHS tapes on, so.
[28:52] David: Nice. I am going to get Spiderboy number one. I'm going to get the print copy of Spiderboy number one. That's actually going to get me back into the comic book shop. I think the design on that character looks really cool. I want to see that in print. We're totally not talking about scripts now.
[29:11] Megan: It's all related.
[29:14] David: It’s all comic books. John, what's your approach when you know that you're writing with specific artists?
[29:23] John: I mean, it depends on the artist because there's a handful of artists that I feel like I've got this particular rapport with. Brendon Cahill's one. He's somebody that I've known since we were both in college, and we both knew him but didn't know each other.
[29:38] David: That's why I think you and I didn't like each other in college, because we had a mutual friend. We had to have crossed paths and you must have just looked at me and been an asshole.
[29:48] John: I don't know. Andrew Griffith, who I'm doing a series with now. Kei Zama on Optimus Prime, Livio Ramondelli. There's a handful of people that I've just worked with a bunch. There's other people that I’ve had great experiences, like Todd Nauk and I did a Spider Man thing, and it was it was great. Those people, especially, I feel like I can not know what they're going to do, but they're going to do something exciting, and I know how it's going to go. When I was writing the three Transformers comics simultaneously, Andrew was drawing one of them, and it was pretty close to both of our first comics, or first full comics, and I drew this one scene where Megatron says something like, “they called it freedom,” and he's saying freedom like it's disgusting like it's the worst thing he's ever heard. But it's movie Megatron, and that's not going to come through. So, I write it, and I know I'm going to have to add a line to it, like “freedom, which I dislike,” something to click clear, but somehow, Andrew drew movie Megatron looking disgusted as he said it, and I'm like, “Wow, that's amazing.” So, from then on, I knew, with Andrew, I could write a script that was “panel six, RC is lying,” and that's all I needed to say. I didn't need to describe the scene. One of the other artists I was working with was much more physical in all this stuff. So, I'd have to really lay out, “this person looks down, or they're sad.” If it was that same RC is lying scene, it would be “RC looks away,” and it would get that same thing across, but I'd have to say how the physical action is, instead of, with Andrew, he would just draw her lying and he would figure out what that meant. She’ll be looking away or whatever.
The third artist was, I think, a real newbie. I think he was pretty new to things, that I had to literally write in the script, at certain points, “and they are facing the camera as they say it.” Sometimes, people just have their backs to us when there was what the panel was about. I’d edited a bunch of comics by then, so I knew I knew the differences, and I was reasonably good at figuring out this artist would be good for this script, or these two people would work together well, or whatever. Again, all that stuff goes out the window when you're writing it, and then that was my learning, “okay, here's how you have to approach things. Here's what that means.” In a practical nuts and bolts way, is that certain artists are going to respond to certain things the right way, and to me, that's what that means, is trying to figure out the right way to do it. So, when I'm working with Andrew, especially on this new Cigna, we're co-plotting it. He's really involved in all of it to a super irritating degree. No, I'm just kidding. That's a joke. We're doing it like we did a lot of the Transformer stuff, which is I'm starting the plot, I’m writing the plot, and then we're doing the dialogue after it's all drawn. They tried that with Kei one time, and Kei was just like, “No. Write a script,” like that was unacceptable. Alright, okay, sorry. Sorry. Let me fix it for you. There's little things like that, too.
[32:59] David: Did you work Marvel style with Fico on something?
[33:02] John: Yes, absolutely. More than that. Colin Bunn and I co-wrote Revolution together. Fico sent us an email on issue one. He was like, “at the end of this page, are the GI Joe people in the tank?” And we realized that we were half assing it so much that you couldn't tell if the GI Joe guys were supposed to be inside or outside of the tank, and we're like, “well, we’ve really got to work a little harder on this. We’ve got to give people a little more detail. But yeah, Fico is somebody who's really good at that stuff, too.
[33:36] David: I think he wanted to work that way. I think we were trying to work with him on that. I seem to recall vaguely, with Revolution, the big challenge was tiny humans next to giant robots, and giving Fico a little more room to navigate that. Yeah, I think it was where we landed. That's why we worked at Marvel style.
[34:00] John: That makes sense. Yeah, that's definitely a problem. I mean, this is way off topic of reading scripts, but one of the things Andrew and I still talk about was one panel, Thundercracker had a dog that was based on my dog, and the panel was Thundercracker feeding Buster baby carrots, and Andrew’s like, “You know this is a 35-foot tall robot and eight-inch tall dog? Oh, well. They can be full-sized carrots.”
[34:33] David: Megan, in your role as an editor, what's one or two things that you just totally cherish about somebody who you really enjoy working with? What are the things that make them enjoyable to work with?
[34:47] Megan: I think the number one thing for me is an ability to take notes in a graceful way. But I think beyond that, I always want it to be a conversation. I want to point out all the things in the script where I'm like, “hey, maybe this could play out a different way. Maybe that will help the character arc or the pacing or whatever,” and when I have a writer who comes back and is like, “yeah, let's chat,” and sometimes we get on a call, and we're chatting for an hour about how to change the script and evolve it in a certain way, I really value that, because I think it's such a collaboration in a way that's really nice, and can be really difficult when you get somebody who's like, “No, my first draft, best draft, I'm actually not going to touch this at all,” and obviously, you don't have the ability to really dig into things on some projects. If it's an IP, you’ve got to get stuff out on a monthly schedule, so you do what you can. But I would say that a collaborative spirit, I really appreciate, and I also really appreciate writers because I work a lot with IP, who can capture the voices of the characters. That's a skill that not everyone has, and I know, I work with some writers, like Casey Gilley, who I adore, and she will watch one five-second clip of a background pony and immediately be like, “oh, yeah, so they talk like this on the page,” and just bring this character to life, so that's a real talent that I admire.
[36:19] David: John, what about you?
[36:20] John: The thing I look for the most is somebody that brings something of themselves to the project, while still playing within the realm of what the thing is, and that can be different from project to project. There's certain things. Like Transformers for us, or even a lot of the big Marvel and DC characters. As much as those are pre-existing things, and they live on any chunk of issues. Any one of those characters is usually pretty reflective of the person writing and drawing it. You know what I mean? Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo Batman is different from the Grant Morrison Batman, is different from Frank Miller Batman, all that stuff. Some stuff is a lot more locked on, like Batman The Animated Series, the comic has to be like Batman The Animated Series. But still, there's different ways to bring something of yourself into it, so you bring something unique, some unique perspective or way of approaching the stories. I think some of the other stuff can get worked on. You can learn a lot of the other skills, but that's not something you can go in and edit that into a script. That's a real floofy answer that isn't really concrete. To me, the platonic ideal of what a comic book script looks like, is what a Brian Vaughn script looks like, where it's super pared down, but has all the details somebody needs. Not too much dialogue. I also write way too much dialogue.
[37:48] Megan: It's hard not to.
[37:51] John: Yeah, one of the biggest things is what you said, that sense of collaboration, Megan, but especially, the collaboration with the artist, where the author of a comic book is the writer and the artist, not the writer. It's not illustration. That's a hill I'll die on. No offense to illustrators. I don't mean that. That's a tremendous skill and that's wonderful, but that is not what comic books are, and I think that that's the fundamental difference between illustrated prose and comic books, is that the way the art works, just functions differently, and I think somebody being, like what you were saying about yourself, Megan, where the artist comes in and does something a little different, or has an idea, there are times where the artists could come in and have the wrong idea. There are times where objectively that was the wrong thing, especially in My Little Pony. There are ways to objectively draw something incorrectly. But I mean, that idea like somebody coming in and having a different sense of storytelling or something, but still something really valid and really works, that's great. I love that, and that's what makes it cool, and that's what makes the comics Andrew and I do different from ones Kei and I did, or whatever. That's awesome. So, that's another important thing. How about you, David? I mean, you've been playing host on this episode, but what what do you look for people?
[39:15] David: I say this every episode. Art is king for me, in comics. So, it's hard to find, but I do like writers who think visually first. I don't know that there's a ton of them that think like that, at least the way that I do. One that comes to mind is Ron Marz. Ron Marz thinks visually. He writes his scripts visually. I don't know how else to explain other than as an artist, when I get a Ron Marz script, the visuals, I've got a lot of toys in the sandbox to play with when Ron Marz gives me a script, visually, and I don't always see that with everybody. Jim Zub is another example of a writer who thinks visually, and I think he's an artist. So, it makes more sense with Jim. I don't think Ron's got any sort of formal art training at all, but Jim Zub’s an artist, and you can tell because the way he comes to the table, he gives the artists so many different ways to play. So, that's one of the things that I like to do that I enjoy seeing. Not that it's a mandatory thing, but it's something that I like, and then the other thing is, when you're working in the grind, and you're working on a licensed IP and stuff, having a writer, in particular, who knows at least as much, hopefully more than you do about any given project, is so nice to have, because I'm typically juggling 12 projects at any given moment, and a writer is probably juggling three or four. So, Jim Zub is a perfect example. Jim knows everything about Dungeons and Dragons. So, when I'm reading Jim’s script, I'm just reading the story pieces, because I know for a fact that the Dungeons and Dragons elements, the things that have to be correct, that kobold is the right color, because Jim knows what color a kobold is, and he's baked it into the script for everybody. That is such a huge weight lifted off of my workload, and I appreciate it so much. There are things that are more important, but that is something that every time it happens, it's like, “I am so happy to be working with this person, because 30% of my workload just got eliminated.”
[41:51] Megan: Well, I think that that's an important skill for, like you said, anyone who's who's tackling an IP. They should be able to go in and have at least the baseline knowledge of a thing in order to write about it. I know I live on the My Little Pony wiki. Yeah, I think that if you want to make it in IP comics, you’ve got to be able to do your homework before you start a project. I couldn't write it. I don't know anything about D&D.
[42:25] David: You edited it.
[42:26] Megan: And I edited it. I'm just kidding. I played it. I just don't know what color kobolds should be.
[42:33] John: I remember, on one of Jim’s D&D comics, we made a correction in the trade paperback in something that Jim caught that he'd done wrong. Watse didn't catch it. He was like, “Oh, magic missiles are off” or something like that. There's something where we had to go back and fix something for the trade. So, that's really funny, but I think that can be a trap. Because I mean, just realizing all three of us have edited D&D. There are definitely people that I've worked with who knew D&D really well, and the comics didn't come out great. You know what I mean? It's easy to fall into that trap of “well, I know everything about this character.” You can become really fundamentalist about it, where “these are the things this character does. These are the right things,” and it can be the cliche annoying fan stuff, and it's when you have that stuff that's really that passion for the material. It's really married to somebody that is a visual storyteller. Jim is a great example of having all that stuff put together and done D&D, and there's other people that are really good like that, too. But, yeah, I mean, when I started writing Transformers, I knew what Transformers were, but I went, and I read every issue of the IDW Transformers comics. I started listening to podcasts about Transformers because I just wanted to find out. I was very clinical about it in a certain way, and then, hopefully, you'll really enjoy it or whatever. Working Back to the Future, I don't know if I should say this out loud, when I got hired to write Back To The Future, I had actually never seen the third Back to the Future movie.
[44:06] Megan: I've still never seen it.
[44:07] John: It's pretty good.
[44:10] David: There’s a flying train. How did you miss it?
[44:13] Megan: I know. Everyone I've talked to is like, “No, man, that third one's a lot of fun.” And I like old west. I like those movies. I don't know why.
[44:23] John: I mean, you're a huge ZZ Top fan. I mean, they can't see all the ZZ Top posters you have in the background.
[44:28] Megan: Just right behind me. Yeah.
[44:29] John: And the fake beard you always wear. But by the end of it, I had gone through frame by frame, practically, Back to the Future one. I mean, I think I probably know just some of the weird filmmaking details about that more than anybody that isn't Bob Gale or Bob Zemeckis, or that wasn't editing that movie, and also knowing where all the scenes they cut are and what Marty throws away and the end of Back to the Future one, because that used to be a scene in the movie, or it was a whole plot point that ran through the movie, what he was throwing away, or doesn't throw away, or whatever. You do learn some of it on the way as you're doing it, but as soon as I got that assignment, I went and bought the blu rays of it so I could have all the audio commentary. So, I could go in and listen and find out everything about the movies, not just the movies themselves.
[45:20] David: Nice. Yeah. See? I wouldn't mind working with you, John. As an editor, I want to be that level of expert, but I don't have the time. I don't have enough. I mean, overtime, I do. If I'm working on the same project for a year or two, then sure, of course.
[45:43] Megan: I think, for me, it involves some of the same prep, where if I take over a new project, I'm consuming what material we have published to a point. I remember when I started helping Bobby Kern on TMNT, starting it by that point, we were at issue 78, and starting at issue one was a lot.
[46:09] David: They’re not paying me enough to read all that.
[46:12] Megan: Read these comics on company time? No thank you.
[44:16] David: I’m literally talking to Tom waltz today.
[46:19] Megan: Tell Tom, I say hi.
[46:23] David: Megan said hi. Also, she didn't read your book.
[46:29] Megan: I read it. I'm just saying that you that you need to do your research, within reason. If I was editing Spider Man, I would not read 600 issues of Spider Man. I would know the issues I needed to.
[46:46] John: You can still be a valuable sounding board to somebody when they do know more about it too, because you're the one that's coming in with the “does this make sense if I'm not an expert in it?” And that's actually pretty useful, but you lose that as you go further through it. You can't help but learn more about it. But that's a funny thing. There's definitely at least one license where I knew more about the license than the licensor did.Just one of the things that had wound up at a company via an acquisition, and was really enthusiastic like, “oh, yeah, well, it's really about this,” like, “Oh, is it? Oh, yeah.”
[47:25] David: You're talking about Action Man, aren't you? You didn't respond to that Action Man double page spread advertisement that I sent you the other day. I was disappointed.
[47:38] John: Well, as usual, I wind up reading things from the same time period as you do, at the same time you're doing it.
[47:45] David: So, you’d already run into it.
[47:48] Megan: Wow, this is incredible.
[47:50] David: Our podcast listeners, all three of them, are going “what's going on?” So, John wrote an Action Man comic book a few years back, and because we had an interview with Paul Pelletier, he drew Superboy and the Ravers back in the mid 90s, so I immediately went out and picked up the entire Superboy and the Ravers run and read it, and while I was reading it, I saw this, from ‘96 they were trying to sell Action Man figures in 1996.
[48:21] John: Oh, there was a cartoon around then.
[48:22] David: Was there? See, this is you knowing literally everything.
[48:27] John: I think we obliquely referred to it in Revolutionaries or Action Man. I can't remember, but Revolutionaries I obliquely refer to everything Hasbro had.
[48:39] David: In the best way. I love that book. You trying to wrap it up, John? Are you saying we’ve done?
[48:45] John: We’ve probably rambled on for a while. I don't know if we should at some point, go back and revisit this and get into some of the actual things people want to hear about scriptwriting.
[48:53] Megan: This is part one.
[48:56] John: I thought it was going to be like, “how many words do you put in a panel? How many actions happen in each panel?
[49:01] Megan: You put as many words in the panel as you want. You make as many panels on the page as you want. Do whatever you want. Comics is fake.
[49:15] David: 20 words on a panel. No more than six panels per page. There. Done.
[49:21] Megan: I don't agree with this, but whatever. You can keep it in.
[49:28] David: I guess we did a good business. Good start. I'm super glad that Megan joined us this time. Thanks again, Megan, for showing up.
[49:34] Megan: Thanks for having me.
[49:36] David: Any Is there anything you would like to plug, Megan? We haven't really started plugging anything yet, but we should let you.
[49:44] Megan: Thank you. I guess if you're in comic shops, pick up My Little Pony Bridal Woodstock. I'm very proud of it, and if you're a podcast listener, maybe by the time this is out, my new podcast will be out. It's called Cruise Control. We're going through every Tom Cruise movie, from the worst to the best and back again.
[50:06] David: That sounds so infinitely more interesting than what we're doing here.
[50:09] Megan: We started with Cocktail, and it was the worst movie.
[50:11] David: Cocktail’s the worst?
[50:13] Megan: Yes.
[50:14] John: If your thing is called Cruise Control, Speed 2: Cruise Control is the worst movie I've ever seen.
[50:21] David: Tom Cruise is not in that.
[50:34] Megan: Yeah, so it doesn't count.
[50:24] John: Okay, it's not a real movie.
[50:28] Megan: Then I guess if anyone's on Twitter, I don't know, I'm there @Megan_MB. Thanks.
[50:38] David: Yeah, this Twitter thing.
[50:40] Megan: Yeah, I don't know where to go, and I refuse to call it X.
[50:48] David: X is stupid, for what it's worth. I was used to Twitter. Little white bird on the blue background. That was fine with me. It sat on my phone fine, and now I've got this ugly white X on a black background. John's rolling his eyes.
[51:03] John: No, I got away from from all that, and then I was like, “Okay, I’ve got to come back. We'll start talking about this on here and start talking about the comic, and all that stuff I need to do. I need to be out there. There was a day it changed over to X and like, how did I go away for a year and it got worse?
[51:23] Megan: I log on once a week and then I log back off. But thank you both for having me.
[51:33] David: Thanks for stopping by, Megan. John?
[51:36] John: Join us next week for more, what are we, Cruise Control?
[51:41] David: Cruise Control 2, and it's not number two, it's T-O-O.
[51:47] John: See you next week.
[51:48] David: Thanks, everybody.
[51:49] Megan: Bye.
Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, tell your friends about us, leave a review and comments. Check out www.cornerbox.club for updates, and come back and join us next week for another episode of The Corner Box with John and David.
[00:32] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody, welcome back to The Corner Box. My name's David Hedgecock, and I have with me, as always, my good friend.
[00:39] John Barber: John Barber. That's me. I don't know. Sorry, were you going to say my name?
[00:42] David: No, I wasn't going to say it. I mean, the queue was good friend.
[00:49] John: I paused for a moment because I thought somebody else was coming by. But wait, somebody did. Who else is here with us?
[00:55] David: Who is here with us?
[00:56] Megan Brown: Hi, everyone. I'm Megan. I'm back.
[00:59] David: Yay, Megan's back.
[01:01] Megan: Thank you for having me.
[01:02] David: Thanks for joining us. Yeah, we're super glad that Megan was able to join us because we've gotten a topic that we think, or at least I think, John's nodding his head it's good for audio, also a thumbs up, and now he's rolling his eyes and we're glad to have Megan back, because we're going to be talking about scriptwriting for comic books. Megan has quite an extensive experience/knowledge on the subject. So, we're happy she's able to join us for this one.
[01:29 Megan: I wouldn't say that. But that's nice of you.
[01:31] David: As I was saying before we started, I feel like I'm super qualified now to be able to talk on this subject because I myself have written a comic book script.
[01:44] Megan: That's, I mean, that's something. That's amazing.
[01:48] David: After 20-plus years working in comic books, I finally wrote 20 pages of a story.
[01:53] John: I don't think I've ever read fully realized you hadn't done that before. Because you've done a lot of other stuff. I mean, you've drawn comics.
[01:59] David: I've actually written stuff before. I'm just kidding. But the stuff I wrote was when I was making minicomics, and at the very beginning of getting into professional work, I did some stuff when I owned Ape Entertainment. So, no one could tell me that I couldn't write something and publish it, but this recent one was the first time I've written something where I like, I think that's actually professional, I guess I should say. I don't know if it's good. That's for other people to determine, but it feels like a professional work. I'm actually three scripts in, too. I totally derailed this before we even got started.
So, we're talking about scriptwriting. Megan has written for My Little Pony, Napoleon Dynamite, and that's one of my favorite things. Anything else, Megan?
[03:00] Megan: No, that's it so far.
[03:01] David: Edited hundreds of scripts, obviously. John, obviously, well, John's written hundreds of comic books, just for Transformers alone. When you add his stuff outside of comic books, I think you've written two or 3 million comic books.
[03:19] John: And some change, when you add any other stuff. Yeah, it's been weird. I actually haven't that much, more recently. So, I guess it's been a year, year and a half long process of getting back into it. But I've been doing more stuff again.
[03:34] David: We were talking about approaching this as a professional writer, because the two of you at least are, and then talking about it from the editor side, I thought maybe I could actually contribute something, and then speak as somebody who's drawn scripts before, maybe I could throw my two cents in on that side. John, what is your process when you're sitting down to do something for yourself? Not commercial. Something for yourself.
[04:01] John: Yeah, I don't know that I totally separate that stuff out, in terms of any process or anything. Most of what I've done has been for other people or for commercial things. I mean, obviously, when I started out, I was doing my own comics, I was writing and drawing stuff, and posting them online, and just to show my age, some of the stuff was way back in my webcomics days, I was using a flash interface to do comic storytelling, and program that stuff too, but what I try to do is eliminate the amount of time where I'm looking at a blank sheet of paper the most. So, I take notes down sometimes or type something in my phone. Nowadays, I do a lot of the stuff. I probably shouldn't because of all the AI data scraping, but I use Google Docs for my scripts, and part of that is because I can just pull it up on my phone and have easy access to it, and it works in a way that a lot of the other, I guess every program does that now, but Google Docs at least works. I’ve had experiences of other programs, years old now, of stuff just vanishing into the ether I thought I'd save things.
[05:09] David: You've actually like lost work?
[05:11] Megan: A lot of work?
[05:13] John: Oh, yeah, there was one day, I lost several hours of a Transformer script, during the days when I was working as an editor, so id be writing at night or on weekends, so, it was one of those things where I'm not seeing my kid today, I'm going to be sitting in this coffee shop, and then I had to move somewhere else, and I was using my iPad to write at that point and yeah, lost several hours with a script.
[05:37] Megan: My biggest fear.
[05:39] David: Yeah, that sounds awful. I'm sorry for your loss, John.
[05:48] John: This one time, I was editing a comic called New Universal, that Warren Ellis was writing, and he had a hard drive meltdown and lost the Next script, or lost all of his scripts. He lost everything that he was working on. So, we had a fill-in issue. We decided to do some one shots, and we hired some new writers, and one of those writers was Karen Gillan, and it was his first script at Marvel, was a comic called New Universal 1959, that Warren and I named 1959 because it was named after a Sisters of Mercy song. So, we knew that Karen would say yes, but Warren Ellis never wrote the Next script to Universal. So, all of Karen Gillan’s career has taken place between those two issues. So, if Warren Ellis ever does write the next.
[06:33] David: Then that's, that's potentially the end of Karen's career.
[06:37] John: I assume that's how it works. Yeah, I live in fear of that kind of stuff. But anyway, I'll take my notes, and I’ll turn those into some kind of outline, or just just writing down what the story is, and then try to go through and break it down into pages. Sometimes, that'll be in there if I'm already thinking of like, “this is a splash, or here's a sequence”, or something and I just pick away at that. I don't know. It's very sculptural for me. It's absurd to talk about it now because we're so far into, obviously, you're writing on a computer. I've only ever written a comic book script on a computer. I mean, some people might write stuff down longhand, or whatever, and then type it in, but I feel like as much as people talk about how digital technology changed the way people draw comics, they don't talk that much about how it changed how people write things, and it's that idea of typing something and having to be correct or spelled right. I don't know how to do that. Wow, that's so weird. I think I remember somebody telling me that Garth Ennis, would basically just write his scripts start to finish, he had to have all of his notes, but he’d just write them out full-on. I think he was using computer way later. Later than most people. Later than I would have anticipated, I guess, and I don't know how to do that. You know what I mean? That doesn't make sense to me.
[07:57] David: I don't know. Yeah, Megan, how do you?
[07:59] Megan: Well, I use this thing called Scrivener, which I like to tell people about a lot because it's the cheaper alternative to Microsoft Word, and it has a comic template that you can use that I find works fairly well, but when I'm writing comics, I'll have an outline. Also, I find that that's very important when I write comics, because the page base is premium real estate, and essentially, what I'll do is, I'll go through and, John, similar to what you do, I will just be like, “Okay, this happens on page one, this happens on page two, this happens on page three,” and then I'll go back in and I'll write the worst thing you've ever read, just to have something on that page, and then it's mental, because then when you go back, and it's like, “Oh, something is here,” and then you fill it in with what you actually want the characters to say. It's a lot different when I write prose. I don't outline at all. I don't do anything. I just write. But yeah, comic writing is interesting. Yeah, it's so much more. Like I said, you're really hindered by the page space sometimes, and I know that when artists draw my comics, they get really tired of me being like, “and this page has eight panels, and this page has nine panels,” and there are 30-word balloons, and people are like, “you should know better.” But I don't, so.
[09:21] David: You know better as the editor, though. When you see somebody else do it you're like, “oh, geez, amateur hour, here we go.”
[09:28] Megan: I get that now, I'm like, “this is really wordy. We can cut it down in lettering, or you can cut it down now.“
[09:35] John: That's an interesting thing, too, because I do feel like we've all edited and written stuff, and the editor part is weirdly different, and so much of that knowledge goes out the window when you're writing something, and some of its good. I mean, there's definitely parts of it where it's like, “I don't want to be sitting there trying to make everything reasonable when I'm writing the script. I want it to be wild and interesting as it can be and then maybe pick stuff that doesn't work.” So, there's part of it where I intentionally don't want to edit the stuff. There's also part of it, where it's just like, “I know better than that. Why did I do that? Why did I do that?”
[10:15] David: What is it like John, you said you lost hours of work, and you were writing on the weekend kind of thing, because your main job was not writing comic books at the time, which is funny to say, because your main job was editing comics. What's it like when it's like, “oh, no, I have to get this done. There's a deadline on this, and I'm not feeling it, but I still have to do this.” What is that like for you?
[10:48] John: I feel like when you are doing it a lot, you work that out, and it doesn't really hit that often. Because I definitely feel that way right now. I mean, there are times where I'm trying to work on the plot that Andrew Griffith and I are working on for our comic, and literally stopped working on the run writing issue to do this podcast. I'm right in the middle of it.
[11:14] David: Nice. Can you say the name of it yet?
[11:16] John: Cigna.
[11:20] David: Who's coloring?
[11:21] John: DC Alonso? Yeah, he was doing some work for us. He got a tremendous range. He really blew Mason, the editor, and I away recently. You don't have time, sometimes, to look if you feel like doing it or not. I always live in fear leaving the artists without pages to draw, because that impacts their life, that impacts their livelihood, and just try to get things done. I can remember, one time, where there was a Transformers script that Carlos Guzman, who was the editor at that point, pointed out, wasn't very good, and it was basically just, we had a page one rewrite. It was one of those other ones, it was just like “He’s right, this absolutely didn't work, I need to start over and just start with a clean sheet of paper,” and sometimes you do need that blank sheet just to start over with. I mean, there was no paper involved, but you know what I mean. So, that would happen. I guess, sometimes, it is harder when you don't need to have 20 pages written every week, because that's where it was at for a while. You can tell looking at me, I wouldn't know, but it's probably like exercising. If you exercise a lot, it's not as hard, but when you don't. Not only do I not like going out and running. I don't want to go out and do that. That's horrible.
[12:45] David: When you're writing at that clip, an issue a week, when you're writing at that speed, did you ever run out of ideas? Did you ever, or was there always just more than you could possibly get out? Especially, at that pace.
[12:58] John: Well, I don't know. I guess that's for the readers to decide.Out of ideas that issue 13 John? Like there definitely is that like possibility or even probability that I was just writing some of the same stuff over and over again, and just minut variations and not knowing it? You know, the Jonathan Hickman approach? Whoa, ah, yikes, dude. You as the other writer
[13:30] David: I like Hickman’s work, but his Avengers run was incredibly repetitive. At times, it's like, “wow, I've read this three times now. This is the exact same comic book.” Thanks for coming, everybody.
[13:46] John: You know what my favorite quote about what you're talking about, though, in relation to that Avengers run, where somebody, in an interview, asked him what he wanted to do next year, and he was like, “write a second draft.” Yeah, it's the same thing. He had to have been writing those things at such a crazy clip to be able to keep up with the artist. The artist was drawing the next arc, the artist that was drawing the other series, all that other stuff. When I was writing Transformers, there was a point where I was wondering, “well, where do we go? Maybe I'm out of ideas,” and then I had this idea for what turned into the rest of my Transformers run, and it's not like it came up fully formed, but it was like, “Okay, here's where I know that Optimus Prime is part of Cybertron, and here's where it all goes to, and it all leads up to the end of the story with Shockwave, and then I'm done,” and then, that's the end of my run, and things mutate as it goes on, but it more or less happened that way. So, once I had that, you know where everything goes.
So, if you're doing something that's a long run on something, which was a weird thing to do. When I started Transformers, I was pitching a 12-issue arc, and I made it 13 issues, partially to give myself more room, and then, partially, to just give myself another issue. I'll go, “I can make another paycheck out of it. I get one more issue out of it if I make this 13 instead of 12, and they say yes.” James Roberts, he started at the same time as I, we both felt like we'll be lucky if we can get to issue 12. Because no comics do that, and then we both wound up doing it for years, and it was really lucky to have that, but once we didn't have that thing, you need this Northstar to guide you where you're going, but that makes a lot of the other stuff fall into place, I think. So, it's not like I was coming up with a whole new story every week. It was like, “here's this six-issue story.
[15:42] David: “Here's the first chapter of that.” Gotcha. Mega, your stuff, professionally at least, has been more short-form, right?
[15:49] Megan: Yeah, my longest was four issues, and that was a wake-up call for me. I found that to be very much more difficult than I thought it would be, and that was where my outline really came in handy, because without that, I was like, “this would have been the worst thing I've ever written,” but yeah, all of my stuff has been a single issue, so I've been very fortunate that my deadlines have been very nice. So, the only time I ever had to write an issue in a day, it was Napoleon Dynamite. I did that to myself, because I procrastinated so long. I was scared. It was my first comic, I was nervous. So, I was like, “No, I'll just wait.” Don't ever do that. That always sucks. When you get up and you're like, “No, it'll be great. I'll have a day full of writing.” There's nothing worse than a day where you're just at your computer trying to write. It is so draining. I would not recommend. Now, I only write between the hours of 8pm and 10pm, every night.
[16:49] David: Do you dedicate that time to writing?
[16:53] Megan: No, often I'm not writing during it, but it's the only time when I feel like I can write anymore.
[17:01] John: The first Transformer stuff I wrote, I wrote three movie tie-in comics that reach for a few limited series, then I convinced Danny Schmitt that I should write all three of them, and we can tie them all together. One of them was an adaptation of one of the movies, but I had to write five pages of issue one of one series, five pages of issue one of another series, five pages of the third, to get all the artists going, then write the rest of issue one, the rest of issue one, the rest of issue one. So, by the time I got to issue four, I learned a valuable lesson about pacing, that it didn't matter that I learned it, because I was still going to repeat the same thing two more times, with the same traps, and that was horrible. I remember that.
[17:49] David:
That was early on, you said? That was one of the first things? Yeah, that's interesting. So, when you're writing, Megan, with the stuff that you've done, do you know who your artist is every time?
[17:59] Megan: I'm trying to remember. I did for a Little Fillies. I didn't know my artists for Bridal Woodstock, which is my latest one. It's hit or miss. I'm not a writer that will write to an artist. I don't know if that makes me a bad comic book writer, but I don't care if the artist changes stuff. I want them to be able to do that, so I'm like, “here's what I'm thinking,” but if the page comes back, and it's completely different, I'm never going to be angry about it. I'm going to be like, “cool, you were engaged.”
[18:28] David: Do you leave a lot of instruction for the artist?
[18:32] Megan: Not particularly. I have a screenwriting minor. So, I feel like I write like I'm writing for TV. So, I just will be like, “reverse on, cut to.” I try to set up locations as well as I can. Because I know that that can be difficult, especially with something like My Little Pony, where you're trying to integrate it into the show. But other than that, I'm just wordy. That's my biggest mistake. Too wordy, but I hope I'm not too confining for the artist.
[19:04] David: I have just jumped back into to writing after forever. I had the opportunity to work with an artist friend of mine, his name's Rolando Mallada, from Paraguay. He's just this incredible artist, and he just happened to be available on a Monday, and I've known him probably for, Oh God, at least 10 years, and on a Monday, he emailed me and said he was looking for work, and I've known him for 10 years and he's never said those words to me, ever. In fact, he's turned me down, I don't even know how many times while I was at IDW trying to bring him in on one project or another, because I just think he's one of the most incredible artists around. So, he said he was looking for work and I was like, “Okay, well, I've got a script for you. It'll be ready on Wednesday.” I had no idea what I was going to give him.
[19:50] Megan: Why would you do this to yourself?
[19:53] David: I know, I did it to myself, but I couldn't let that opportunity pass by, so I scrambled and found something else. So, not having really done it, or watched other people. Obviously, I'm constantly seeing the finished product and I'm constantly talking to writers, but having done it myself, it's interesting that I have come to the same sort of work process, John, that it sounds like you guys are at, where it's some highlights, some bullet points, I know where the endpoint is, and where I want to get to, and then you barf a bunch of words onto a page and then start chipping away at it and figuring out like, “Okay, here's what happens in this issue, here's roughly what happens on each page,” and then sprinkling it in with little dialogue bits, or if I've got an image in my head, that happens a lot more for me, an image in my head, I mark that image down, like, “okay, that's what I want to do,” and then for me, a lot of it is thinking about, and this might be because in this particular instance, I know exactly who I'm working with, for me, it's just about thinking about ways to give Rolo to just draw the coolest thing ever. Like, “I'm going to have three double-page splashes in this first issue.” That's the goal. I don't get there, but I'll be damned if I don't at least have one to make it sing for him, and then my scripts, I think, are mostly just cheerleading and trying to be inspiring to the artist, talking about “Hey, did you ever see the Frazier/Ali boxing match? That's what's happening in this panel. Go.”
[21:44] Megan: I did that recently, where I was like, “This is the scene at the end of Mulan, where 98 degrees is playing with Stevie wonder.” That's a very specific reference for all you Disney fans out there. But yeah, I think that's a good point, when you think about the spreads and stuff from a structural editorial standpoint, you don't want a comic book that is 20 pages of just two people talking, and even if the plot itself is boring, you have to find ways, too. That was always the struggle with Little Fillies, is that it's ultimately just a book about people talking to each other, and how do you let the artist go wild on some of these pages and bring in some action so that it's not just the March Sisters walking to school again, for the fifth issue in a row?
[22:29] David: The thing that's been sticking with me, in terms of writing, is the comic book writing 101 of every panel should make you read the next panel. The end of every page should make you turn the page, or make you go to the next page, and that's really served me well. Just whatever that hook is to keep the reader moving forward, compelling them, like, “I am going to grab your attention and I'm going to make you turn the page by the end of this page,” and just doing that over and over and over again, every single page, that's the muscle I've been exercising a lot in this new writing that I've been doing, and it's really hard, but really, really pays off it, especially as the art’s been coming in. It's like, “oh, this is great. This compels me to turn the page.
[23:27] Megan: I think that the page turns are especially a skill. I've noticed, as I grow as an editor, too, it's something that you can really pick out. If you get to the bottom of a page, a lot of times what I'll find is that either the first panel of the next page should be moved to the previous page, or vice versa, but I think it is something when you're first starting out that you don't really consider as a comic book writer. It's something that, like you said, David, it's a muscle you have to practice.
[23:57] David: Yeah, as an editor, I always assume that people are looking for a reason to put this book down. As an editor, I always know I've got one to four pages to grab somebody's attention and convince them to spend four bucks on something. So, when I'm looking at scripts and looking at writing, especially for a periodical, original graphic novel’s a little bit different, I think, but not really, not that much to me, but those first four pages are so critical, because if you've got a great cover, it's probably not by the same guy that's doing the interiors, so the cover is going to grab somebody's attention, and they're going to open it up, and then you've got three pages, four pages at most, while somebody’s sitting there in the comic book shop or sitting online and thumbing through, or tapping through pages to really grab their attention, and hopefully get them to commit. So, I always keep that in mind. I think that page turners are critical and that big surprise or big reveal, either, on page four, sometimes in just that cool page two/three spread. It's just always so important to me, and the books that don't do it, I always feel a little let down. They're always a little flat to me.
[25:15] John: Yeah, my background is in graphic design. That's actually what I went to school for. My master's thesis was about comic book page layout. That's always been a thing I've thought about. The two-page spreads. Thinking about it as a unit of two pages was so built into what interested me about comics, and that idea of turning the page and not knowing what you're going to hit. I mean, I remember having this realization, or just being blown away by reading 300, the Frank Miller comic, and not knowing what was going to happen when you turned the page, because in the comic book version of that, when it was published, it was just spreads, everything was just spreads, and it wouldn't necessarily be just one image, but everything was laid out in two page units. The book of it is just wide, and I've never liked that. I remember having conversations Brian Hitch about it, years ago, talking about this stuff, that I don't like the paperback or the collective version of it because it’s just wide pages. Weird fascism stuff.
[26:25] David: Who's throwing punches now?
[26:27] John: Well, that idea of filling up the whole field of vision, it falls apart in digital formats, and it works differently, or that idea falls apart. It works differently in digital formats. When I was doing stuff digitally, when I was doing webcomics, that was something I was really conscious of, was trying to have that effect to try to make the thing that I thought was interesting about that effect come out on on a digital screen, computer screen, at that point.
[26:54] Megan: I hate web comics now where they're just that infinite scroll. Obviously, you lose the page turns and stuff, but also, it's so limiting. It's such a Quibi thing to do.
[27:08] David: Yeah. This is old man David talking. I am angry at the Marvel infinity comics. I refuse to open them in my app, because I don't want Marvel to think that I am in any way, shape, or form, interested in comic books. That's very much my old man opinion. I'm glad to hear that I'm not alone. Talking about those spreads, John, the thing that that brought up for me is the digital landscape. I'm reading all my comic books, all my Marvel and DC comic books, I'm now reading through the app. I don't really buy physical copies anymore because, Dear God, who's got room in the garage left for comic books anymore? But it's interesting to me how the big wow factor, the big pop in a print comic book, which is the double page spread, is actually minimized when you're reading it digitally. So, I've got an iPad that's big enough that it's basically almost one to one in terms of the reading experience between a print comic book and my digital version. So, a single page splash works great, but then when you get to the double page spreads, suddenly, the impact is reversed. Rather than the way it's supposed to be presented, and I don't know how to solve that. I'm just not smart enough. But I want somebody to figure that out. I don't know what that looks like.
[28:41] Megan: I think the answer is just not being digital. I say as someone who collects print media from VHS tapes on, so.
[28:52] David: Nice. I am going to get Spiderboy number one. I'm going to get the print copy of Spiderboy number one. That's actually going to get me back into the comic book shop. I think the design on that character looks really cool. I want to see that in print. We're totally not talking about scripts now.
[29:11] Megan: It's all related.
[29:14] David: It’s all comic books. John, what's your approach when you know that you're writing with specific artists?
[29:23] John: I mean, it depends on the artist because there's a handful of artists that I feel like I've got this particular rapport with. Brendon Cahill's one. He's somebody that I've known since we were both in college, and we both knew him but didn't know each other.
[29:38] David: That's why I think you and I didn't like each other in college, because we had a mutual friend. We had to have crossed paths and you must have just looked at me and been an asshole.
[29:48] John: I don't know. Andrew Griffith, who I'm doing a series with now. Kei Zama on Optimus Prime, Livio Ramondelli. There's a handful of people that I've just worked with a bunch. There's other people that I’ve had great experiences, like Todd Nauk and I did a Spider Man thing, and it was it was great. Those people, especially, I feel like I can not know what they're going to do, but they're going to do something exciting, and I know how it's going to go. When I was writing the three Transformers comics simultaneously, Andrew was drawing one of them, and it was pretty close to both of our first comics, or first full comics, and I drew this one scene where Megatron says something like, “they called it freedom,” and he's saying freedom like it's disgusting like it's the worst thing he's ever heard. But it's movie Megatron, and that's not going to come through. So, I write it, and I know I'm going to have to add a line to it, like “freedom, which I dislike,” something to click clear, but somehow, Andrew drew movie Megatron looking disgusted as he said it, and I'm like, “Wow, that's amazing.” So, from then on, I knew, with Andrew, I could write a script that was “panel six, RC is lying,” and that's all I needed to say. I didn't need to describe the scene. One of the other artists I was working with was much more physical in all this stuff. So, I'd have to really lay out, “this person looks down, or they're sad.” If it was that same RC is lying scene, it would be “RC looks away,” and it would get that same thing across, but I'd have to say how the physical action is, instead of, with Andrew, he would just draw her lying and he would figure out what that meant. She’ll be looking away or whatever.
The third artist was, I think, a real newbie. I think he was pretty new to things, that I had to literally write in the script, at certain points, “and they are facing the camera as they say it.” Sometimes, people just have their backs to us when there was what the panel was about. I’d edited a bunch of comics by then, so I knew I knew the differences, and I was reasonably good at figuring out this artist would be good for this script, or these two people would work together well, or whatever. Again, all that stuff goes out the window when you're writing it, and then that was my learning, “okay, here's how you have to approach things. Here's what that means.” In a practical nuts and bolts way, is that certain artists are going to respond to certain things the right way, and to me, that's what that means, is trying to figure out the right way to do it. So, when I'm working with Andrew, especially on this new Cigna, we're co-plotting it. He's really involved in all of it to a super irritating degree. No, I'm just kidding. That's a joke. We're doing it like we did a lot of the Transformer stuff, which is I'm starting the plot, I’m writing the plot, and then we're doing the dialogue after it's all drawn. They tried that with Kei one time, and Kei was just like, “No. Write a script,” like that was unacceptable. Alright, okay, sorry. Sorry. Let me fix it for you. There's little things like that, too.
[32:59] David: Did you work Marvel style with Fico on something?
[33:02] John: Yes, absolutely. More than that. Colin Bunn and I co-wrote Revolution together. Fico sent us an email on issue one. He was like, “at the end of this page, are the GI Joe people in the tank?” And we realized that we were half assing it so much that you couldn't tell if the GI Joe guys were supposed to be inside or outside of the tank, and we're like, “well, we’ve really got to work a little harder on this. We’ve got to give people a little more detail. But yeah, Fico is somebody who's really good at that stuff, too.
[33:36] David: I think he wanted to work that way. I think we were trying to work with him on that. I seem to recall vaguely, with Revolution, the big challenge was tiny humans next to giant robots, and giving Fico a little more room to navigate that. Yeah, I think it was where we landed. That's why we worked at Marvel style.
[34:00] John: That makes sense. Yeah, that's definitely a problem. I mean, this is way off topic of reading scripts, but one of the things Andrew and I still talk about was one panel, Thundercracker had a dog that was based on my dog, and the panel was Thundercracker feeding Buster baby carrots, and Andrew’s like, “You know this is a 35-foot tall robot and eight-inch tall dog? Oh, well. They can be full-sized carrots.”
[34:33] David: Megan, in your role as an editor, what's one or two things that you just totally cherish about somebody who you really enjoy working with? What are the things that make them enjoyable to work with?
[34:47] Megan: I think the number one thing for me is an ability to take notes in a graceful way. But I think beyond that, I always want it to be a conversation. I want to point out all the things in the script where I'm like, “hey, maybe this could play out a different way. Maybe that will help the character arc or the pacing or whatever,” and when I have a writer who comes back and is like, “yeah, let's chat,” and sometimes we get on a call, and we're chatting for an hour about how to change the script and evolve it in a certain way, I really value that, because I think it's such a collaboration in a way that's really nice, and can be really difficult when you get somebody who's like, “No, my first draft, best draft, I'm actually not going to touch this at all,” and obviously, you don't have the ability to really dig into things on some projects. If it's an IP, you’ve got to get stuff out on a monthly schedule, so you do what you can. But I would say that a collaborative spirit, I really appreciate, and I also really appreciate writers because I work a lot with IP, who can capture the voices of the characters. That's a skill that not everyone has, and I know, I work with some writers, like Casey Gilley, who I adore, and she will watch one five-second clip of a background pony and immediately be like, “oh, yeah, so they talk like this on the page,” and just bring this character to life, so that's a real talent that I admire.
[36:19] David: John, what about you?
[36:20] John: The thing I look for the most is somebody that brings something of themselves to the project, while still playing within the realm of what the thing is, and that can be different from project to project. There's certain things. Like Transformers for us, or even a lot of the big Marvel and DC characters. As much as those are pre-existing things, and they live on any chunk of issues. Any one of those characters is usually pretty reflective of the person writing and drawing it. You know what I mean? Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo Batman is different from the Grant Morrison Batman, is different from Frank Miller Batman, all that stuff. Some stuff is a lot more locked on, like Batman The Animated Series, the comic has to be like Batman The Animated Series. But still, there's different ways to bring something of yourself into it, so you bring something unique, some unique perspective or way of approaching the stories. I think some of the other stuff can get worked on. You can learn a lot of the other skills, but that's not something you can go in and edit that into a script. That's a real floofy answer that isn't really concrete. To me, the platonic ideal of what a comic book script looks like, is what a Brian Vaughn script looks like, where it's super pared down, but has all the details somebody needs. Not too much dialogue. I also write way too much dialogue.
[37:48] Megan: It's hard not to.
[37:51] John: Yeah, one of the biggest things is what you said, that sense of collaboration, Megan, but especially, the collaboration with the artist, where the author of a comic book is the writer and the artist, not the writer. It's not illustration. That's a hill I'll die on. No offense to illustrators. I don't mean that. That's a tremendous skill and that's wonderful, but that is not what comic books are, and I think that that's the fundamental difference between illustrated prose and comic books, is that the way the art works, just functions differently, and I think somebody being, like what you were saying about yourself, Megan, where the artist comes in and does something a little different, or has an idea, there are times where the artists could come in and have the wrong idea. There are times where objectively that was the wrong thing, especially in My Little Pony. There are ways to objectively draw something incorrectly. But I mean, that idea like somebody coming in and having a different sense of storytelling or something, but still something really valid and really works, that's great. I love that, and that's what makes it cool, and that's what makes the comics Andrew and I do different from ones Kei and I did, or whatever. That's awesome. So, that's another important thing. How about you, David? I mean, you've been playing host on this episode, but what what do you look for people?
[39:15] David: I say this every episode. Art is king for me, in comics. So, it's hard to find, but I do like writers who think visually first. I don't know that there's a ton of them that think like that, at least the way that I do. One that comes to mind is Ron Marz. Ron Marz thinks visually. He writes his scripts visually. I don't know how else to explain other than as an artist, when I get a Ron Marz script, the visuals, I've got a lot of toys in the sandbox to play with when Ron Marz gives me a script, visually, and I don't always see that with everybody. Jim Zub is another example of a writer who thinks visually, and I think he's an artist. So, it makes more sense with Jim. I don't think Ron's got any sort of formal art training at all, but Jim Zub’s an artist, and you can tell because the way he comes to the table, he gives the artists so many different ways to play. So, that's one of the things that I like to do that I enjoy seeing. Not that it's a mandatory thing, but it's something that I like, and then the other thing is, when you're working in the grind, and you're working on a licensed IP and stuff, having a writer, in particular, who knows at least as much, hopefully more than you do about any given project, is so nice to have, because I'm typically juggling 12 projects at any given moment, and a writer is probably juggling three or four. So, Jim Zub is a perfect example. Jim knows everything about Dungeons and Dragons. So, when I'm reading Jim’s script, I'm just reading the story pieces, because I know for a fact that the Dungeons and Dragons elements, the things that have to be correct, that kobold is the right color, because Jim knows what color a kobold is, and he's baked it into the script for everybody. That is such a huge weight lifted off of my workload, and I appreciate it so much. There are things that are more important, but that is something that every time it happens, it's like, “I am so happy to be working with this person, because 30% of my workload just got eliminated.”
[41:51] Megan: Well, I think that that's an important skill for, like you said, anyone who's who's tackling an IP. They should be able to go in and have at least the baseline knowledge of a thing in order to write about it. I know I live on the My Little Pony wiki. Yeah, I think that if you want to make it in IP comics, you’ve got to be able to do your homework before you start a project. I couldn't write it. I don't know anything about D&D.
[42:25] David: You edited it.
[42:26] Megan: And I edited it. I'm just kidding. I played it. I just don't know what color kobolds should be.
[42:33] John: I remember, on one of Jim’s D&D comics, we made a correction in the trade paperback in something that Jim caught that he'd done wrong. Watse didn't catch it. He was like, “Oh, magic missiles are off” or something like that. There's something where we had to go back and fix something for the trade. So, that's really funny, but I think that can be a trap. Because I mean, just realizing all three of us have edited D&D. There are definitely people that I've worked with who knew D&D really well, and the comics didn't come out great. You know what I mean? It's easy to fall into that trap of “well, I know everything about this character.” You can become really fundamentalist about it, where “these are the things this character does. These are the right things,” and it can be the cliche annoying fan stuff, and it's when you have that stuff that's really that passion for the material. It's really married to somebody that is a visual storyteller. Jim is a great example of having all that stuff put together and done D&D, and there's other people that are really good like that, too. But, yeah, I mean, when I started writing Transformers, I knew what Transformers were, but I went, and I read every issue of the IDW Transformers comics. I started listening to podcasts about Transformers because I just wanted to find out. I was very clinical about it in a certain way, and then, hopefully, you'll really enjoy it or whatever. Working Back to the Future, I don't know if I should say this out loud, when I got hired to write Back To The Future, I had actually never seen the third Back to the Future movie.
[44:06] Megan: I've still never seen it.
[44:07] John: It's pretty good.
[44:10] David: There’s a flying train. How did you miss it?
[44:13] Megan: I know. Everyone I've talked to is like, “No, man, that third one's a lot of fun.” And I like old west. I like those movies. I don't know why.
[44:23] John: I mean, you're a huge ZZ Top fan. I mean, they can't see all the ZZ Top posters you have in the background.
[44:28] Megan: Just right behind me. Yeah.
[44:29] John: And the fake beard you always wear. But by the end of it, I had gone through frame by frame, practically, Back to the Future one. I mean, I think I probably know just some of the weird filmmaking details about that more than anybody that isn't Bob Gale or Bob Zemeckis, or that wasn't editing that movie, and also knowing where all the scenes they cut are and what Marty throws away and the end of Back to the Future one, because that used to be a scene in the movie, or it was a whole plot point that ran through the movie, what he was throwing away, or doesn't throw away, or whatever. You do learn some of it on the way as you're doing it, but as soon as I got that assignment, I went and bought the blu rays of it so I could have all the audio commentary. So, I could go in and listen and find out everything about the movies, not just the movies themselves.
[45:20] David: Nice. Yeah. See? I wouldn't mind working with you, John. As an editor, I want to be that level of expert, but I don't have the time. I don't have enough. I mean, overtime, I do. If I'm working on the same project for a year or two, then sure, of course.
[45:43] Megan: I think, for me, it involves some of the same prep, where if I take over a new project, I'm consuming what material we have published to a point. I remember when I started helping Bobby Kern on TMNT, starting it by that point, we were at issue 78, and starting at issue one was a lot.
[46:09] David: They’re not paying me enough to read all that.
[46:12] Megan: Read these comics on company time? No thank you.
[44:16] David: I’m literally talking to Tom waltz today.
[46:19] Megan: Tell Tom, I say hi.
[46:23] David: Megan said hi. Also, she didn't read your book.
[46:29] Megan: I read it. I'm just saying that you that you need to do your research, within reason. If I was editing Spider Man, I would not read 600 issues of Spider Man. I would know the issues I needed to.
[46:46] John: You can still be a valuable sounding board to somebody when they do know more about it too, because you're the one that's coming in with the “does this make sense if I'm not an expert in it?” And that's actually pretty useful, but you lose that as you go further through it. You can't help but learn more about it. But that's a funny thing. There's definitely at least one license where I knew more about the license than the licensor did.Just one of the things that had wound up at a company via an acquisition, and was really enthusiastic like, “oh, yeah, well, it's really about this,” like, “Oh, is it? Oh, yeah.”
[47:25] David: You're talking about Action Man, aren't you? You didn't respond to that Action Man double page spread advertisement that I sent you the other day. I was disappointed.
[47:38] John: Well, as usual, I wind up reading things from the same time period as you do, at the same time you're doing it.
[47:45] David: So, you’d already run into it.
[47:48] Megan: Wow, this is incredible.
[47:50] David: Our podcast listeners, all three of them, are going “what's going on?” So, John wrote an Action Man comic book a few years back, and because we had an interview with Paul Pelletier, he drew Superboy and the Ravers back in the mid 90s, so I immediately went out and picked up the entire Superboy and the Ravers run and read it, and while I was reading it, I saw this, from ‘96 they were trying to sell Action Man figures in 1996.
[48:21] John: Oh, there was a cartoon around then.
[48:22] David: Was there? See, this is you knowing literally everything.
[48:27] John: I think we obliquely referred to it in Revolutionaries or Action Man. I can't remember, but Revolutionaries I obliquely refer to everything Hasbro had.
[48:39] David: In the best way. I love that book. You trying to wrap it up, John? Are you saying we’ve done?
[48:45] John: We’ve probably rambled on for a while. I don't know if we should at some point, go back and revisit this and get into some of the actual things people want to hear about scriptwriting.
[48:53] Megan: This is part one.
[48:56] John: I thought it was going to be like, “how many words do you put in a panel? How many actions happen in each panel?
[49:01] Megan: You put as many words in the panel as you want. You make as many panels on the page as you want. Do whatever you want. Comics is fake.
[49:15] David: 20 words on a panel. No more than six panels per page. There. Done.
[49:21] Megan: I don't agree with this, but whatever. You can keep it in.
[49:28] David: I guess we did a good business. Good start. I'm super glad that Megan joined us this time. Thanks again, Megan, for showing up.
[49:34] Megan: Thanks for having me.
[49:36] David: Any Is there anything you would like to plug, Megan? We haven't really started plugging anything yet, but we should let you.
[49:44] Megan: Thank you. I guess if you're in comic shops, pick up My Little Pony Bridal Woodstock. I'm very proud of it, and if you're a podcast listener, maybe by the time this is out, my new podcast will be out. It's called Cruise Control. We're going through every Tom Cruise movie, from the worst to the best and back again.
[50:06] David: That sounds so infinitely more interesting than what we're doing here.
[50:09] Megan: We started with Cocktail, and it was the worst movie.
[50:11] David: Cocktail’s the worst?
[50:13] Megan: Yes.
[50:14] John: If your thing is called Cruise Control, Speed 2: Cruise Control is the worst movie I've ever seen.
[50:21] David: Tom Cruise is not in that.
[50:34] Megan: Yeah, so it doesn't count.
[50:24] John: Okay, it's not a real movie.
[50:28] Megan: Then I guess if anyone's on Twitter, I don't know, I'm there @Megan_MB. Thanks.
[50:38] David: Yeah, this Twitter thing.
[50:40] Megan: Yeah, I don't know where to go, and I refuse to call it X.
[50:48] David: X is stupid, for what it's worth. I was used to Twitter. Little white bird on the blue background. That was fine with me. It sat on my phone fine, and now I've got this ugly white X on a black background. John's rolling his eyes.
[51:03] John: No, I got away from from all that, and then I was like, “Okay, I’ve got to come back. We'll start talking about this on here and start talking about the comic, and all that stuff I need to do. I need to be out there. There was a day it changed over to X and like, how did I go away for a year and it got worse?
[51:23] Megan: I log on once a week and then I log back off. But thank you both for having me.
[51:33] David: Thanks for stopping by, Megan. John?
[51:36] John: Join us next week for more, what are we, Cruise Control?
[51:41] David: Cruise Control 2, and it's not number two, it's T-O-O.
[51:47] John: See you next week.
[51:48] David: Thanks, everybody.
[51:49] Megan: Bye.
Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, tell your friends about us, leave a review and comments. Check out www.cornerbox.club for updates, and come back and join us next week for another episode of The Corner Box with John and David.
