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DE: Here’s a good geek question: you wrote the
episode "Monkey Fun" for the Superman
cartoon, which was based on an original story from a
eighties Superman comic. Did you read the
comic?
ED: No, I never read DC comics as a kid.
DE: Do you know why the original writer wasn’t
credited?
ED: Because they don’t have to and they never
will. That’s one reasons that everyone in the
industry that makes good money off these characters
should just send some to the widows of the guys who
created the stuff. If you’ve made millions of
dollars off the backs of guys from the fifties and
sixties then you should at least buy someone dinner
once in a while.
If I was a guy who worked at Warner Bros. on Superman,
Batman and Batman Beyond then my whole
career is based on the backs of Gardner Fox. But the
Titano stuff I knew nothing about it, I just knew he
was a giant monkey. In fact I did a joke story years
ago with Dan Vado and I screwed up: I had Titano
talking. I’m always happy that I did something wrong
because it makes me feel a little better that I’m
not completely insane because I know so much dumb
stuff about comics instead of the world. I know very
little about geography or politics.
Some people don’t seem to get that there are
aspects of Hectic Planet, Dork and even Milk
& Cheese that I’m very worshipful of this
material. Even World’s Funnest is nothing if
not a kind of love note to all the jokes who did the
stupid fifties book.
DE: I didn’t read World’s Funnest, but I
did read the Bizarro hardcover.
ED: Thank you very much for not supporting my
work. I appreciate that.
DE: [laughs] I can’t get everything.
ED: I’m sure you can find it for a quarter
somewhere now. Aren’t you one of those guys who has
to get every Alex Ross thing out there?
DE: If I did that I would have wallpaper on every
inch of my apartment with them. I did like that poster
he did of Superman and Krypto looking at the fire and
police poster on the wall.
ED: Made me cry. I personally just don’t like
painted comics. I think he makes some very nice
images. But I just don’t like painted superhero
comics. The storytelling is never really solid. Its
always done in captions and narrated because its
always just a bunch of unrelated images.
DE: The layouts are never tight enough.
ED: I remember when someone was doing a painted
Machine Man book. It was one of the X universe
things, I was like “who narrates it?” Because ever
since Marvels there is always a narrator; they
can’t tell the story linearly. Because there’s
always seventy heroes and villains in the air and some
guy looking up narrating it saying something like “And
then there were giants on the earth!” Pretentious
horseshit.
DE: I remember a friend of mine telling the
original Flash looked cool, the one with the bowl on
his head and I always liked him but….
ED: I liked that the bowl never came off his
head even if he ran like a million miles a second.
DE: He said it looked good when Alex Ross drew him.
Well, of course.
ED: The problem is when you paint something
like that you’re trying for this close to
photo-realism, the guys really look stupid. Like the
movies, Michael Keaton looked like an absolute moron
in the costume. He doesn’t look like a giant bat, he
looks like an asshole in a batsuit. They should shoot
him in the face because he’s a nut. I just can’t
take the stuff too seriously. If I need to see larger
than life horseshit I watch Hong Kong action movies
because they’re done in this sort of gee-whiz pulp
sensibility that doesn’t have the pretensions of
America superhero comics.
I’ve always argued about this once you get the
verisimilitude of comics, there should be gravity,
reactions to deaths, people should react to each other
the way people do but if you take it to far and start
getting “realistic” about it begs the question
that why are all these morons in costumes. Why does
everyone rob a bank in New York, why did Batman’s
parents take him down Crime Alley at midnight when
they were rich and should have gotten a cab, why doesn’t
Superman destroy terrorism, all that crap. They beg
that question when they make 9/11 part of their
continuity and address it in comics or once Spider-Man started getting laid why did he still go
out and beat people up. They wonder why less people
read comics, you can’t understand them without
scorecards and they make you pay for the scorecards.
DE: Did you ever do stand-up comedy?
ED: No.
DE: It just seemed like a lot of stories from the
Bizarro hardcover were jokes. Like what if Aquaman
wasn’t talking with the denizens of the deep after a
fight?
ED: When you do pop culture jokes, it is like
stand-up. That was just me and friend in a bar busting
chops on [Aquaman editor] Joey [Cavalieri].
Originally the strip was him not letting us do the
strip with me pitching him the idea drunk in a bar and
we tell the story as we pitch it. But the way Bizarro
worked out you couldn’t really do that. If they do
another Bizarro I’ve got some other crap I
could throw in there.
DE: You spoke at Heart of Film Screenwriters
Conference in Austin.
ED: How’d you know that?
DE: I know everything.
ED: No, you don’t. What’s my middle name?
DE: I don’t know.
ED: See.
DE: Were you at Austin because of the cartoons?
ED: That wasn’t like anyone knows who we are,
a couple of guys on that committee were working at the
Austin Film Festival liked our work. So they brought
us in. It was a weird situation to be sitting there
with John Landis. I kept wanting to turn around and
tell him he killed Vic Morrow [during the making of Twilight
Zone: The Movie]. I felt like turning around and
telling him that Jennifer Jason Leigh [Morrow’s
daughter] is in the back with a gun, man. If I killed
Vic Morrow I would be in jail, let’s put it that
way.
So, all of a sudden we were doing panels on comedy
writing and I’m like holy shit. I’m reading books
at home to figure out what the hell it is I’m doing.
Space Ghost is unstructured, Superman
isn’t comedy, and you people haven’t read my
comics. I didn’t know what to tell them. I don’t
know how I got this job and I probably wont have this
work for much longer.
DE: Did comics come up?
ED: A couple of people knew our work. In
general that’s few and far between in the “real”
world.
DE: Do you feel validated when you do so called
legitimate things like that?
ED: No, I just feel lucky that I got a free
trip. Maybe there is a feeling like validation but its
not. I feel validation when I get a fan letter. I feel
it when somebody comes up to me with a comic to sign
at a convention or something. I never feel like I’ve
made it yet. I still have complete doubts about my
place in the industry and my future.
Now I’m trying to figure out how to fit drawing
classes into my life because I really hate my drawing
right now. I’m pretty much self-taught and I’m
feeling limited. Btu at the same time I’m trying to
do more writing, so what do you do, do you do more
writing or try to learn how to draw. I will never draw
beautifully and I will never paint. But I would like
to get some of the fundamentals into my system.
But then I end doing these goofy gag strips, right
now I’m doing this Red Skull and Baron Zemo gag for
a Captain America book which is like Milk
& Cheese. Its really ridiculous looking. A
friend of mine said that what I draw I draw well. I
knew what he meant. I know that I have a limited
repertoire. If somebody asked me to draw a horse, it
would take me several weeks.
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