DIRTY TALK RETURNS

In a manner of speaking...

The original version of the following text ran in the infamous “Dirty Talk” letter column, located in the back of issue #15 of my last, long-running, ongoing series from Image Comics, called SEX. That would date this around July 2014 (over ten years ago?!?). I’ve edited and tweaked the piece for clarity and conciseness (fingers crossed). But as we’re still ramping up what this whole Substack thing is going to be, I felt like this might be a good thing to put out there. Considering what we’ll be talking about here for the foreseeable future, I figured this was especially relevant.

Enjoy…

Let’s talk about fellow comicbook writer, James Robinson. There's certainly plenty to talk about. On a historical level, he was part of the generation of writers that came directly before me. It was a generation that included fellow Man of Action, Steve Seagle, as well as guys like Neil Gaiman, Mark Waid, Kurt Busiek, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis and many more. In other words, writers that really started to make some noise in the mainstream industry in the early 1990's. They were essential figures in what soon became known as the "writer-driven"-era of comicbooks, a phenomenon that I plugged right into as I was breaking into the business as a professional.

At the time I first got to know him on a more personal level, around 1996, James was one of the more prolific writers around, writing Starman, Leave It To Chance, Cable, Generation X, Captain America (the Heroes Reborn version), various runs on Legends of the Dark Knight to name just a few. I was just a punk kid, slaving away doing my no-money, black and white comicbooks, looking for my way into the industry.

James helped me to break in at Marvel by persuading them to hand over the reins of the CABLE monthly series to me -- a novice writer who no one at Marvel Comics would’ve ever heard of -- which, in turn, allowed me to build a career as a professional comicbook writer. I've said it before... it was maybe one of the greatest gifts that I've ever received in my life. I've expressed my gratitude many times over the years, both in interviews and to James directly. To me, it's a debt I can never repay.

But what I'd like to focus on here is something he did that he wasn’t even aware of... something that even I wasn't completely conscious of at the time... but, in looking back, it's obvious how important it was to me as a writer and as a student of the medium.

In the ramp up to my taking over CABLE, James was generous enough to provide me with the plots for the issues he'd already written, the ones leading up to my first. Coincidentally, around that time I also got my hands on a couple of his Starman scripts. Up until that point, my only real exposure to seeing other writers' comicbook scripts were the odd Alan Moore script page that had found its way out into the world, a few examples from Mike Baron's thumbnail scripts and, I think, a Denny O'Neil script excerpt from an issue of Batman Family (reprinted in some random fanzine). All of these limited examples were incredibly helpful and instructive, each in their own way, but they were also very insular in their methodology, in their language, in the way they described the visuals for the artists to draw. Even Baron's thumbnail scripts spoke their own unique language.

But James' scripts were different. They were, for lack of a better term, blatantly referential at times. They used the language of comicbooks in a way I'd never seen before. It's a little tough to explain, so let me just give you a few examples, from James' actual plots (excerpted here, with his permission):

            * From CABLE #46, Pages 2/3:  "... we see these images as big fight images with many full-figures all writing and firing weaponry off across shot. (The most recent example I've seen of what I mean is a double page in the latest issue (#2) of DEATHBLOW/WOLVERINE, although the person who did this best, I guess was the divine Miller in ELEKTRA LIVES AGAIN."

            * From CABLE #47, Page 19, Panel 2:  "... we're side on to Cable's silhouette with the dusk behind him (glorious red hues) taking up the bulk of the panel. (We're being way Frank Miller here.)"

            * From CABLE #50, Page 10:  "Full Page. Pierce and Shaw enter a room that is high-tech and like something Kirby might have drawn as a workshop for Reed Richards within the Baxter Building."

So, as you can see, James never hesitated in referencing other comicbooks, other creators and other styles to get his point across to whichever artist he was writing for. He would name check Miller or Kirby or whoever it took to describe the vibe or the look or the particular storytelling moment he had in mind. I know it sounds funny now, but back then it was a mini-revelation to me. I'd heard filmmakers talk like this, but never comicbook writers. I'd written a few scripts before then, but they were all in the mold of the Moore/Baron/O'Neil scripts I'd seen. The idea that I could harness my own encyclopedic knowledge of comicbooks and utilize them in my own scripts just made the process so much more... fun. I mean, comicbooks were cool enough as it is, and actually writing them for a living was a dream come true... but this was icing on the cake. I'm not one of those writers that shies away from the actual process of writing. If anything, I'm such a process junkie that it even holds a special place in my heart when I'm the one that's knee-deep in the process. And here was something -- freely but unknowingly given to me by James through his work -- that enriched that process even more. Again, another gift from James that I can probably never repay.

Just for shits and giggles -- and to show that James used this technique in his more "serious" work -- here's a few more excerpts from a couple of Starman scripts (which, unlike CABLE, were written in full script format):

            * From STARMAN #11, Page 8, Panel 1:  "... we see Ted's observatory townhouse a little way back. Think Wrightson here, Matt... where the background and the grass and the shadows on the rocks gives as much drama as the figures within the image."

            * From STARMAN #11, Page 9:  "... these images will be from different angles, distances and P.O.V.s however, so there will be variety even within this page, although more of the kind that Toth used to attain so well, when working with the old 2 across by 3 down panel days of Four Color Dell comics."

           * From STARMAN #42, Page 7:  "... eight panels, two across by four down page. Like Mignola has been known to do in Hellboy and Gotham by Gaslight."

So, yeah... if you know your comicbooks, then these touchstones immediately evoke specific imagery. At least, in my mind, they do. If I was an artist and read these particular panel descriptions, I'd have a pretty good idea of what I should be drawing, or what kind of tone I was trying to achieve. These few significant bits of James' comicbook scriptwriting opened a pretty big door for me. It was a method that I still use in my scripts to this day.

Joe Casey

USA