Taking the Seaport World Trade Center by storm, Boston Comic Con returned triumphantly this weekend to bring thousands of fans together to meet their geeky heroes. The Quad had the fortunate opportunity to talk with some of the very talented creators in attendance at BCC, asking questions about future projects, diversity, and preferred onomatopoeias. Part 2 features interviews with Phil Jimenez, Amy Reeder, Brandon Montclare, and Yale Stewart.
Phil Jimenez is an established comic book artist and writer, best known for his work on Wonder Woman, New X-Men, Fairest, and many other projects from both DC and Marvel.
The Quad: Recently, Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment announced their most recent slate of movies at San Diego Comic Con, and, unfortunately, Wonder Woman was not among them. If/when a Wonder Woman movie comes out, what would you like to see from it?
Phil Jimenez: Oh god. It’s a long answer. I don’t even know how to answer that.
The trick I plug whenever I’m talking about any possible Wonder Woman movie is determining and defining what you think Wonder Woman is. Wonder Woman, for me, means a certain thing; the character embodies certain qualities of various creators, mostly [William] Marston and [George] Pérez. Ideally, a Wonder Woman movie would feature a character with those qualities.
It would not be a thematically fear-based movie like Man of Steel or Dark Knight. It would be a celebratory movie of a character who is fun and spirited and good. That would be a nice Wonder Woman movie. The tone of the movie is ultimately more important to me than if she fights hydras or not. I don’t really care about that. Wonder Woman means certain things, and it’d be nice if that movie found an actor and a script that could embody those.
Who are your favorite characters, aside from Wonder Woman, to draw?
PJ: Donna Troy. Legion women. Storm.
Do you have any upcoming projects you can talk about?
PJ: I’m doing a bunch of stuff for Marvel that I can’t talk about, a few DC projects, a lot of stuff for Hasbro and IDW, Archie, and TV development. But the fun Marvel stuff will be announced really soon, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to talk about that in another week or two.
Lastly, who would you cast as Wonder Woman?
PJ: I would generally cast an unknown, someone who doesn’t carry a lot of baggage with them. Someone who can embody the spirit of the character. I’m less worried about things like height or ethnicity. A lot of people get really upset because they want her to be tall or Greek-looking. That matters less to me than the spirit of the actor does.
Over the past few years, fans have voted, with dollars on Kickstarter, for multiple creator-owned projects (Halloween Eve, Rocket Girl) from the team of Amy Reeder and Brandon Montclare. In addition to the Kickstarter projects, Reeder has been artist on multiple DC Comics titles, including Supergirl, Batwoman, and Madame Xanadu. Montclare has been editor on numerous titles at DC and writer on Marvel’s Fear Itself and other books.
The Quad: How have your lives changed since going from mainstream work to creator-owned work?
Amy Reeder: I’ve been a lot happier! [laughs] The other stuff was definitely happy, but this is like what I really want to be doing, so it’s very exciting and I can’t stop working. Yeah, we’re just in more control of what we’re doing. What do you think, Brandon?
Brandon Montclare: I think almost all creators like their own stuff better. And as a writer, we were just talking about this, we do a podcast. As a writer, you can do both a monthly book with a superhero for Marvel or DC, but you also wanna do your own thing if you can. It’s so much nicer to be able to work with your own stuff, just because it’s yours. Which is obvious. But maybe the less obvious reason is you get to do really what you want with it, not just in story direction, but, for example, Amy colors her own stuff. Even the production and how you want to market it is completely your choice.
With most time travel stories characters tend to go to the distant past. But with Rocket Girl, she’s going into the recent past. What is it like drawing and writing for a time period a lot of people can still remember?
AR: It’s actually really hard because I know that people will remember it. It’s also a specific location, like New York in the ’80s, and there are so many movies in the ’80s set in New York too, and people really do remember that. I feel great responsibility to make it legit.
BM: Yeah, I think it’s just as hard. You wanna throw a couple of clever lines in there and references, but the writing is not that different. For Amy, it’s just as hard doing this, I think, as doing something that’s 200 years ago. Right? With the level of detail and you wanna get it right.
AR: I mean, it kinda depends. Like, there are certain things that are harder than others. But the nice thing is that since I lived the ’80s, even though I was young, I know when I’ve got it right. I know when it looks right. So that’s kinda the one nice part about it. But it’s a lot of work.
Referring back to the more mainstream work, what characters haven’t you worked on that you’d like to one day?
AR: I think my “go-to” girl is usually Wonder Woman. Still haven’t done Wonder Woman, which would be really cool. Besides that, I really want to play with the obscure characters. I have sort of a fascination with it. Not that I’m super researched in it, but I’d love to do Big Barda or Dolphin or something kind of silly. For the most part, though, probably Wonder Woman.
BM: I’ve always liked Doctor Strange, I’ve thought he was a good character. They tried to relaunch him a couple times over the past few years, but it’s never taken off. To me, it’s a great character. You don’t have to re-invent him or do anything different, just kind of keep him to his core. It’s fantastic. I like the design and it’s not quite superhero, so you can do some different stuff. So I would pick him, if I could.
Yale Stewart is the creator of the widely popular JL8 webcomic that features kid-sized versions of DC Comics characters. Another piece of recent creator-owned work, Gifted, can be found here.
The Quad: What inspired the creation of JL8?
Yale Stewart: Boredom. It was over a summer. I was just bored at work. The idea literally just popped in there, and it seemed like a good one. So I was like, “I’ll hit that up when I go home.” I did the first strip, showed it to some friends and they liked it. So the rest is history.
After the Boston Marathon bombings, you created a Flash-themed desktop wallpaper where people could donate any amount of money to Boston Children’s Hospital and Red Cross in exchange for the wallpaper. What inspired you to do that?
YS: It just seemed like the right thing to do.
Did you have any specific connection to Boston? Or did you not need any?
YS: No, it just seemed like a crappy thing that happened and, you know, I’ve got fans in lots of places and I imagine Boston is one of those places, so “do unto others” and all that, I guess.
What did the amount end up coming to?
YS: I wanna say, like, low 4,000’s? I honestly can’t really remember entirely, but yeah, it was fairly significant. I honestly wasn’t expecting it to net that much.
I would literally kill to see Amy Reeder work on Big Barda.