Ask Kurt Busiek

[Bored at 3:00AM]

I have another question for you if you have the time.

With DCU currently at another crossroads in regards to its ever-changing continuity, what would you recommend they do? Should they try an "everything happened" approach and explain away any inconsistencies as time shenanigans or should they keep doing periodic reboots to clear away the barnacles of old stories to keep the characters modern and fresh?

Clearly, both have advantages and disadvantages, but I am curious to see which one you think think DC should try right now.

Thanks again for your time.

[Rincewind]

Kurt,

Is there any chance of seeing your creator owned work collected in omnibus format? I’d love to get a 2-3 volume set of Astro City collecting the entire run.

[Kurt Busiek]

With DCU currently at another crossroads in regards to its ever-changing continuity, what would you recommend they do? Should they try an "everything happened" approach and explain away any inconsistencies as time shenanigans or should they keep doing periodic reboots to clear away the barnacles of old stories to keep the characters modern and fresh?

I'm tempted to say, "They should hire me to fix it all," but probably a better answer is that you don't need a reboot event to rework a series' past. You can just do it, without the event.

The reason to do the event is to call attention to it, as a way to boost sales. That's what CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS did, enormously successfully, and what DC keeps trying to recapture, to apparently diminishing returns.

I think the events are worth doing only to the extent that they boost sales and keep the sales up. If they don't boost sales, there's no point in doing the event, and if they boost sales but not for very long, they're not worth the trouble (and the alienation of fans from current continuity by 'erasing' whatever continuity drew them in in the first place).

So if you get good sales juice out of it, well, that's one thing.

Otherwise, it's like doing your laundry in public. Just fix the books, make them be about what they're supposed to be about, at their core, ignore the stuff that detracts from that and move on. Tell stories that will excite readers and win over fans. A growing percentage of the market gets these stories in book form, alongside other books from earlier continuities, so don't worry too much about it all fitting together. They have access to multiple approaches to Batman any way, and they're not looking for "the consistent one" so much as "a good one."

When I recently did a Prankster story for the NEW YEAR'S EVIL special, the editors and I talked briefly about the question of "what continuity is this in?" since the worlds had been reordered since I last wrote my version of the Prankster, and someone had introduced a new, unrelated version, but even that version might not be in continuity any more.

What we decided was, screw it, I'm doing the Prankster I like.

And if that Prankster showed up in the modern Superman books, so what? If people like him and like the stories, that's fine.

And if someone wants to bring back that other Prankster and have the two of them fight, well, that's fine too. Or if you ignore that other one forever, that too. We're here to tell stories more than we're here to make catalogues.

So I don't think the events are needed, unless you have a reasonable expectation that you'll get some long-term benefit out of it.

But if you have that expectation, go for it.

[Still, you're better off making the books good first, rather than "fixing" the continuity and then screwing all the books up again anyway.]

kdb

[Kurt Busiek]

Kurt,

Is there any chance of seeing your creator owned work collected in omnibus format? I’d love to get a 2-3 volume set of Astro City collecting the entire run.

Anything's possible.

We hope to be making some interesting ASTRO CITY announcements in the near future, as it happens.

kdb

[comradepitrovsky]

Some fun, not weighty questions:

What is Superman’s favorite dinosaur, you think? What is Kurt Busiek’s favorite dinosaur?

What Legion couple would be the most fun to write? What pair of Legionnaires who haven’t been together would be fun to write as a couple?

Would you rather get a power ring, or the mystic power word of Shazam (and why)?

What does the bottle city of Kandor mean to you?

[Drexelhand]

I got another one for you Kurt and this one is in regards to Superman. By the end of the post-crisis era, a lot of people felt that the Last Son of Krypton title for Superman had been diminished with the New Krypton storyline, Supergirl's return, Superboy being part Kryptonian now as opposed to the solutions of the 90s where they would use things like pocket dimensions and other creative solutions to add other new Kryptonians but also keep Superman as the sole Kryptonian. My question is, do you see all these other Kryptonians as diminishing Superman's role as the sole survivor? Because fifteen years (I think it all stopped with Jeph Loeb's Supergirl), that is what he was and while some creators might have been pushed to look for creative solutions, others were clearly harangued at not having access to Kryptonians with a direct link to Superman.

And I guess since we're here, the current Superman has a half-human son. Since we know that Superman's going to live for a long time, it's clear that he's going to outlive his own son by decades, maybe even centuries. How do you see Superman coming to terms with that?

[Kurt Busiek]

Some fun, not weighty questions:

What is Superman’s favorite dinosaur, you think?

I don't know -- he has a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the Fortress, or used to, much like Batman did in the Batcave, but I bet his favorite dinosaur is Kryptonian. Something from Krypton's prehuman ages, that someone, someday, could recover (along with other Kryptonian dinosaur DNA), clone and lose control of, unleashing a wave of super-dinosaurs on Earth...

What is Kurt Busiek’s favorite dinosaur?

I know it's a betrayal of my heritage, but I don't have one. I always kinda liked Triceratops, though.

What Legion couple would be the most fun to write?

Ultra Boy and Phantom Girl. He's a roughneck with a bad-boy past, she's adorable with a controlling, aristocratic mom -- it practically writes itself.

What pair of Legionnaires who haven’t been together would be fun to write as a couple?

I've missed so much, I don't know who's been together over all that time. Maybe Superboy and Infectious Lass, because he'd be more-or-less immune to her powers...

Would you rather get a power ring, or the mystic power word of Shazam (and why)?

The power ring. It's more versatile, and it's mentally controlled. It'd be easy to clean the house with a power ring!

What does the bottle city of Kandor mean to you?

I like it as a remnant of what Superman lost -- a place he can go to (temporarily) to experience what his home was like. I also like that Supergirl's parents wound up living there, meaning that she never really lost her family (and only thought she did for a few years), which gives her a different perspective from Superman. I like the idea that there's a piece of Krypton left, that it's confined, like a museum exhibit, and that Superman didn't know about it until he was an adult.

It's a nice piece of texture for the legend as a whole.

kdb

[Kurt Busiek]

I got another one for you Kurt and this one is in regards to Superman. By the end of the post-crisis era, a lot of people felt that the Last Son of Krypton title for Superman had been diminished with the New Krypton storyline, Supergirl's return, Superboy being part Kryptonian now as opposed to the solutions of the 90s where they would use things like pocket dimensions and other creative solutions to add other new Kryptonians but also keep Superman as the sole Kryptonian. My question is, do you see all these other Kryptonians as diminishing Superman's role as the sole survivor? Because fifteen years (I think it all stopped with Jeph Loeb's Supergirl), that is what he was and while some creators might have been pushed to look for creative solutions, others were clearly harangued at not having access to Kryptonians with a direct link to Superman.

Keep in mind that by the time the phrase "Last Son of Krypton" saw print, in 1978, Superman was hardly the sole survivor of Krypton. Not only did Supergirl exist, but so did Krypto, Kandor, the Phantom Zone and more.

So it wasn't coined to mean "sole survivor." It was coined to mean "last son" -- the final child (male child, at least) born on Krypton before it exploded, and living to this day.

Everyone else of Krypton who survived is either older than he is, or was born elsewhere. So he's the Last Son. If you were born in Kandor after it was stolen by Brainiac, you weren't born on Krypton. If you were imprisoned in the Phantom Zone, you aren't the Last.

So no, I don't think of them as diminishing him -- I think the idea to translate "last son" into "sole survivor" post-Crisis was a mistake, one that robbed us of a ton of interesting texture in the grand legend of Superman that Weisinger built up over the years, and resulted in a mess of compromise characters from pocket universes, or that had the appearance of classic Superman characters without the heritage, and so on. And yet readers (and creators) wanted a Supergirl, wanted a Krypto, wanted a Kandor and a Phantom Zone, because they're cool, and they crept back in.

I say embrace them. Use them. Have fun with them. Just keep Kal as the "last son," meaning what it meant when Elliot Maggin first used it.

If he has to be the only one to be special, then he's not that cool. But he is that cool, so he doesn't need to be the only one.

And I guess since we're here, the current Superman has a half-human son. Since we know that Superman's going to live for a long time, it's clear that he's going to outlive his own son by decades, maybe even centuries. How do you see Superman coming to terms with that?

I don't think we know how long Superman will live, or how long his son will. There have been many stories written where Superman lived out a normal human lifespan, and many written where he lives to be wicked old. And not a few where he doesn't die of old age, but gets killed at some point.

Any son of Superman might inherit his longevity (if he actually does have that trait) or not. But you gotta tell the stories to find out; genetic inheritance isn't math, after all, there's a lot of chance to it.

And I haven't written those stories, so I don't know how he'd come to terms with it, or even if he'd need to.

kdb

[Vordan]

I'm tempted to say, "They should hire me to fix it all," but probably a better answer is that you don't need a reboot event to rework a series' past. You can just do it, without the event.

kdb

Hah if you don’t mind me asking Mr. Busiek, if DC approached you to reboot a character, how would you approach it? Wipe the slate clean and start over completely from scratch, or try to bring over the “essential” events from the previous continuity? What screwed DC with the New 52 (aside from a complete lack of prep) was they wanted to start over from scratch, but they also didn’t want to mess with Batman and GL since both of those franchises were doing great, so we got a reboot that was already a mess history-wise. I’m curious how you would approach it.

What do you think of the idea from Grant Morrison’s Batman run that each of the “ages” (Golden, Silver, etc) are all one Batman at different stages of his career? I always thought that was an inspired take, and as someone who is also known for working with a lot of the Pre-Crisis concepts in regards to Superman, is it possible in this modern age with its obsession over a “realistic” Batman to use that Pre-Crisis stuff for him?

I know you’ve said you don’t typically read books after you’ve written on them but did you ever read anything with the New 52 t-shirt and jeans Superman in it? Be fascinating to get your perspective on that Superman since he was very much in the vein of Golden Age Superman.

Oh and editorially, what was the Trinity book under? Justice League? Batman? Superman? Always wondered that.

[manwhohaseverything]

Hello sir. my question is,In a world where everyone flies. isn't leaping tall buildings in a single bound more exciting? Why is it that flight feels largely underwhelming compared to something like web slinging or running on electric wires?Also, goofiest and most fun thing about superman in your opinion.

[Bored at 3:00AM]

I'm tempted to say, "They should hire me to fix it all," but probably a better answer is that you don't need a reboot event to rework a series' past. You can just do it, without the event.

The reason to do the event is to call attention to it, as a way to boost sales. That's what CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS did, enormously successfully, and what DC keeps trying to recapture, to apparently diminishing returns.

I think the events are worth doing only to the extent that they boost sales and keep the sales up. If they don't boost sales, there's no point in doing the event, and if they boost sales but not for very long, they're not worth the trouble (and the alienation of fans from current continuity by 'erasing' whatever continuity drew them in in the first place).

So if you get good sales juice out of it, well, that's one thing.

Otherwise, it's like doing your laundry in public. Just fix the books, make them be about what they're supposed to be about, at their core, ignore the stuff that detracts from that and move on. Tell stories that will excite readers and win over fans. A growing percentage of the market gets these stories in book form, alongside other books from earlier continuities, so don't worry too much about it all fitting together. They have access to multiple approaches to Batman any way, and they're not looking for "the consistent one" so much as "a good one."

When I recently did a Prankster story for the NEW YEAR'S EVIL special, the editors and I talked briefly about the question of "what continuity is this in?" since the worlds had been reordered since I last wrote my version of the Prankster, and someone had introduced a new, unrelated version, but even that version might not be in continuity any more.

What we decided was, screw it, I'm doing the Prankster I like.

And if that Prankster showed up in the modern Superman books, so what? If people like him and like the stories, that's fine.

And if someone wants to bring back that other Prankster and have the two of them fight, well, that's fine too. Or if you ignore that other one forever, that too. We're here to tell stories more than we're here to make catalogues.

So I don't think the events are needed, unless you have a reasonable expectation that you'll get some long-term benefit out of it.

But if you have that expectation, go for it.

[Still, you're better off making the books good first, rather than "fixing" the continuity and then screwing all the books up again anyway.]

kdb

Agreed. Good stories outweigh everything else. The success of Spider-verse made wildly divergent versions of the same character mainstream. Plus, the extremely popular, but ridiculously silly, Teen Titans Go alongside the presumably successful, but overtly grim n' gritty, Titans TV show would be a pretty good indication that audiences don't have any problems with it. I don't see why comics should be any different.

Thanks for your reply.

[Kurt Busiek]

Hah if you don’t mind me asking Mr. Busiek, if DC approached you to reboot a character, how would you approach it? Wipe the slate clean and start over completely from scratch, or try to bring over the “essential” events from the previous continuity?

Depends on the situation and the character -- there's no one answer.

If DC wanted me to reboot, say, the Human Cannonball or Microwave Man, to pick a couple of short******d post-Crisis characters with interesting concepts, I'd start completely over, you bet. Very few readers remember those guys, so it would be better to start them off as if they're brand new characters.

If they wanted me to reboot, say, the Flash -- well, the Flash's history is an important part of why he's appealing. So it would be a mistake, I think, to throw all that out and start over. It'd make more sense to start off with a Flash in mid-career, who's had a familiar history, and do flashback stories along the way to show you updated versions of how the Rogues came about or how he met Iris, and so on. But maybe you don't pretend that stories written in the late 1950s happened ten years ago with nothing but cosmetic changes, maybe you hang onto the spirit of the characters and the series, but rework it and update it as if you invented it today, for a modern audience, not for the current audience's grandparents.

What screwed DC with the New 52 (aside from a complete lack of prep) was they wanted to start over from scratch, but they also didn’t want to mess with Batman and GL since both of those franchises were doing great, so we got a reboot that was already a mess history-wise.

They did that post-Crisis, too, where Batman, Flash and Green Lantern all had their history preserved, but Wonder Woman and Superman didn't.

What do you think of the idea from Grant Morrison’s Batman run that each of the “ages” (Golden, Silver, etc) are all one Batman at different stages of his career? I always thought that was an inspired take, and as someone who is also known for working with a lot of the Pre-Crisis concepts in regards to Superman, is it possible in this modern age with its obsession over a “realistic” Batman to use that Pre-Crisis stuff for him?

I haven't read much of Grant's Batman run, though I want to catch up to it at some point. But it wasn't all that long ago, so if it was possible in 2010, I guess it's possible now.

I don't think it's an approach I'd take -- I'd probably take more of a BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES approach, where I pulled stuff from throughout the entire sweep of Batman history and built a career for him that probably ignored a lot of the space travel and such. But I wouldn't say "that stuff never happened," because what if other writers want to draw on it and have good ideas for how to use it?

I know you’ve said you don’t typically read books after you’ve written on them but did you ever read anything with the New 52 t-shirt and jeans Superman in it? Be fascinating to get your perspective on that Superman since he was very much in the vein of Golden Age Superman.

Again, haven't read much of it, but I'd like to catch up on it at some point.

Oh and editorially, what was the Trinity book under? Justice League? Batman? Superman? Always wondered that.

I think it was under "this year's weekly book." It was edited by Mike Carlin, but I don't think he reported to any particular "group."

kdb

[Kurt Busiek]

Hello sir. my question is,In a world where everyone flies. isn't leaping tall buildings in a single bound more exciting? Why is it that flight feels largely underwhelming compared to something like web slinging or running on electric wires?

It depends on how you portray it.

If you show flight as mundane, just how Superman gets from place to place, then it'll feel mundane. If the writer and artist think about how to present it so that it makes the reader react the way they would if they could experience flight (or see someone flying down the street unaided) it'll be more exciting.

Same for leaping around like the Hulk or swinging from building to building. Are you gonna present it in an exciting way, or a boring way? That'll make the difference.

Also, goofiest and most fun thing about superman in your opinion.

I just don't make lists like that. I've never thought to rank "goofy things about Superman," so I have no idea what I'd consider the goofiest.

But I did like this a lot:

superbird6.jpg

kdb

[DrNewGod]

...I just don't make lists like that. I've never thought to rank "goofy things about Superman," so I have no idea what I'd consider the goofiest.

But I did like this a lot:

superbird6.jpg

kdb

I had never seen that. That's the most delightful Superman Sitcom moment I think I've ever seen.

[Kubert]

- Aspects of the DC Universe you'd like to explore. For instance like the Planet of the Apes, was there a globe for Gleeks?

- On that fun note on Super Friends, what were your memories of the toon? Just like Scott Snyder brought back the Hall of Justice; what aspects or characters of that fun toon, you'd like to write?