@’s by Joe Kelly
Writer of ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN Animated Series!
MATT ADLER (MA): How did Man of Action get involved with the show?JOE KELLY (JK): Jeph Loeb had contacted us…
JOHNNY DESTRUCTO (JD): Let me preempt… what’s Man of Action?
JK: Man of Action is my company; it’s myself, Joe Casey, Steve Seagle, and Duncan Rouleau. We started in the year 2000, we created Ben 10, Generator Rex-- a couple of little cartoons people might have heard of. So Jeph Loeb came to us when Ultimate Spidey was starting up, and said, “We’d like to have you guys on board, to support the writing staff and basically be story editors and producers.”
MA: Just to follow up on JD’s question, is it true you all met while working on the X-Men books?
JK: Oh yeah. Steve and I were doing the main X-Men titles together, Joe was doing CABLE, and Duncan was drawing [ALPHA FLIGHT, with writer Steve Seagle]. So that’s how we all got to know each other. They all live in LA and I live in New York, so they were already part of a comic book community and kind of got to know one another. But yeah, that’s how we met; we met on X-MEN, and then we all went to SUPERMAN together, so we’ve been together—we’ve known each other for a long time, we’ve worked together sort of unofficially for pretty much 15 years, but we made the marriage official in 2000.
MA: You’ve been working on this series for a while now, and I remember when the announcement first came out in April 2010, they said the series would premiere in Fall 2011. Were there changes between then and now that made them push it back?
JK: No, nothing specific. I think what happens is people get very optimistic about an animation schedule, and it just takes longer sometimes than people think. It really does take about a year to make an episode if you’re taking your time. You could get it down to 9 months, or 10 months, or something like that, but I think if you guys see the quality level that everybody’s shooting for, we really want to make sure that this looks like a Marvel comic come to life. So it was just a schedule shift, just because people realized, ok, it needs a little more time, but not because of any changes.
MA: Yeah, I was just amazed, watching the cartoon, with the attention to detail, the way Spider-Man’s mask moves, and everything. You can see that you guys put a lot of care and detail into this.
JK: Yeah, the guys are fantastic, the directing is awesome, and Eric Radomski and Alex Soto… those are the key guys working on the show, and all the storyboard artists, they really, really work very hard. We give them some pretty dense scripts, with all the comedy and cutaways and all that stuff, so they do an awesome job with it.
MA: So it’s called ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, but how much influence are you actually taking from the ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN comic?
JK: It’s really more of an inspiration from that universe. When Brian Bendis started all that stuff, it was sort of anything goes, all gloves are off, all bets are off, take what you love and redo it for today’s audience. So we kind of took that spirit. There might be a couple of elements that are recognizable, but there are definitely elements that are recognizable from films, and from the comics, and all that kind of stuff. It’s just, what do we like best? And you’ll see some of the characters are redefined, certainly some villains, when we start getting to some classic Spider-Man villains (and not quite as classic), because it’s an opportunity to bring it to a new audience and maybe update somebody that… you know, if we were sitting around talking about, “Well, why would so-and-so do such-and-such?” and we kind of poke at it… well, now we have an opportunity to redo those guys.
MA: So do you think we’ll ever see Miles Morales in this series?
JK: Ah… I cannot say whether or not we are going to see Miles Morales, but this is definitely the Peter Parker Spidey, no question.
MA: You guys are known for your work on BEN 10 and GENERATOR REX; how has working on those series helped you in developing this series?
JK: Really, those shows gave us our producing chops, ultimately. It’s a different set of skills to some degree, developing a project from scratch, and playing with toys that already exist. And they’re both great. There’s pros and cons to both of them. What we do now, we run the scripts, we hire the writers, we develop all the stories with the guys at Marvel, we’re in on the voice records, we review the animatics; we’re with the script all the way through to the end, really. And we had gotten all of those skills over the course of working at Cartoon Network.
JD: Going from the script to the finished product, was there anything in the script that may have gotten cut?
JK: Oh yeah, there’s always stuff that gets cut.
JD: Anything that broke your heart to get cut?
JK: (laughs) There’s always jokes that we have to kill. In this particular episode, I don’t think so; Paul [Dini, the writer of this episode] had done such a great job, and he worked a long time on this pilot, because there was so much information to get in, just in case somebody on the planet maybe did not know who Spider-Man was, and to establish our universe and what we were going to do. But it happens all the time; we found sort of a comfortable page limit that works great, that gives it enough air for all the comedy to really come through. So sometimes you leave stuff on the floor. But what’s nice is that you just kind of tuck it in the side file, and then when they say “Wait, we’re a little bit short,” you can bring that stuff back. “I have a brand new joke that I wrote… five months ago!”
(laughter)
MA: There are a ton of creative people involved with this production… you’ve got everyone from Joe Quesada, to Jeph Loeb, to you guys at Man of Action, to Brian Bendis, to Paul Dini… how do you guys all work together? How do you all find your roles without stepping on anyone’s toes?JD: That’s an awful lot of cooks in the kitchen.
JK: Cage match. Chairs are allowed, tables, it’s great. (laughter)
JD: Noogies?
JK: Yeah. It’s been a really great experience. When Man of Action came in, some of the stuff had already been set. Jeph had already been working with Brian and Paul, and the initial cast had already been set. So we came in, and it’s just been fantastic. Joe Quesada really sets an awesome tone; he wanted to do a fun show that is a Marvel comic come to life, but really appeals to kids. He’s doing such a great job of straddling that line between our older fans and our younger fans, and getting new fans. So that’s part of his job. And Bendis has got all the experience and all the pratfalls with what he went through in reinventing characters… “Well, we did this and this worked, and we did this and this didn’t work” which is great. Paul, like I was saying before, is just a master of animation; he’s like an animation god. So he’s got so much experience and so many great ideas. So when we’re all together it’s like literally we’re all in this big room, we pitch out stories and we see what sticks, and try to not hold onto things too dearly. If the rest of the room says “That’s really a crappy idea,” you’re just like “Oh ok, maybe I’ll save that one for another show.”
(laughter)
MA: And Brian had brought some prior experience because he worked on the MTV Spider-Man cartoon, right?
JK: Oh sure, absolutely, even though this, again, it’s such a different project. It’s so different from all the other iterations of Spider-Man. And Loeb of course too, Loeb has worked in all sorts of TV. So Jeph really wanted to run this cartoon like a writer’s room, which is actually not common in animation. So much animation is done with a story editor, who works with their producers, and then they sort of send out outlines. We write all the outlines, we co-write the scripts with the writers; it’s like a very tight relationship that we have with the stories as they move along.
MA: Being that they had all these people onboard before they called you in, what were the particular strengths of Man of Action that made them want you to bring you in on this project?
JK: I think because what we deliver with Ben 10 especially is high adventure that appeals not just to kids, but—and I’m very happy to say this-- I have a lot of dads that come up to me, and moms, who say, “We can actually watch your show!” They know that we can sort of straddle the line, and have a fun adventure show. And we love animation, so we’re doing stuff that we would want to watch. We don’t write down to kids, we always make sure that we treat audience with respect. And I think that Loeb knew that he was essentially getting a writer’s room in a box. You get Man of Action, it’s four of us, and we have four different ways of approaching a project. Joe Casey’s version, and the Duncan version, and the Steve version, and mine—they’re all so different. So you’ve got guys who will bounce ideas off each other and we have such a good working relationship because it’s like working with your brothers, we’ve been together for so long. It’s really easy for us to rip through stories. And we disagree like everybody, which is fine, but you end up getting, instead of that lowest common denominator, where sometimes it’s like “Ok, we have to reduce everything to make everybody happy” we tend to fight our way up to something cooler.
MA: So Nick Fury, now having recruited Spider-Man, is going to make him part of a team of young heroes, including White Tiger, Power Man, Iron Fist, and Nova. It’s sort of an eclectic bunch of characters; how did you decide on them?JK: Actually, that is one of the things we sort of inherited when we came on to the show. That cast had already been decided. And at first, we were actually sort of surprised. We didn’t know what the show was going to be like. And I’m sure many fans, especially older fans, were like “Oh, Spidey And His Amazing Friends 2.0, is that what we’re looking at?” But when you see them in action and you see the way they work as a group, they really are his superhero contemporaries. They are basically his super classmates, and SHIELD is super-school, and it works so well. Nova, to me, is actually a breakout character. He’s unbelievable, he’s so funny. All the voice acting on everybody is great. And we really came to love those characters, Iron Fist, and Power Man, and White Tiger; they all sort of pull at Spidey’s personality in a different way. Nova appeals to his sort of wild side, and White Tiger appeals to his more studious Peter Parker side. Everybody’s got an element that they bounce off of him really well.
MA: We’ve seen in the comics in the past that he has sometimes joined teams or flirted with joining teams, and then at some point decides it’s not for him; he just goes off and does his own thing. Is the team aspect a permanent part of the series, or is there a chance that he could go solo again?
JK: What’s great about what we were allowed to do with the show is that you’ll see Spidey solo episodes, you’ll see Spidey with just one of the guys, you’ll see Spidey team-ups with other Marvel characters, and you get a little bit of a hint from the pilot where Iron Man shows up, Thor shows up, and sometimes it’s the whole team, which is cool. So one of the nice things about this-- and you’ll see it in the second part of the pilot tomorrow—it’s not a given that just because they hang out together they’re all friends. And it’s been really nice that we can actually put an arc into this first season of Spidey getting to know these guys, and learning to be a leader. He’s used to be being a solo act, so now all of a sudden you’ve got four new people you’ve got to deal with, AND Nick Fury, AND Agent Coulson, all these extra guys, and Spidey goes through an arc which is pretty great.
MA: Did you play a role in the decision to start the series with Spider-Man as an established hero, as opposed to starting with an origin?
JK: No, they said “We want a Spidey who’s been at it for about a year” and that was our entry point to the story, but we all agreed when we talked about how to play the origin story, we didn’t want to ever get too heavy, we didn’t want it to get too dark, but we didn’t want to brush it under the rug either. It’s so critical to his DNA. You have to know why he feels that power and responsibility stuff on such a gut level. It’s really critical.
MA: So with him being involved with these other heroes and SHIELD, is there any chance of a crossover with the AVENGERS: EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES series?
JK: I would hope so! And if there is, I’m sure it would be some very special thing, somewhere down the road. But what’s really cool for us about using Spidey with SHIELD is that it really does open who you can use. So there’s so many kind of villains you would not expect in Spider-Man, even in the first 12 episodes, it gave us an opportunity to see what Spidey could do against some bigger types of bad guys, not just get stuck with the same rogue’s gallery you would expect.JD: Yeah, I saw in the preview there’s Doctor Doom.
JK: Yeah, that’s just really cool, the Doctor Doom episode is definitely a favorite. There’s some really, really funny stuff in that one.
JD: Is Maria Hill going to be making an appearance?
JK: Ah…not yet.
JD: Because I know she’s even going to be in the Avengers movie, which I was surprised about.
JK: Right, right, but no, she… I’m trying to just go through my head if we see her… but I don’t think so.
MA: Regarding a personal favorite of mine in the Marvel Universe…
JD: Typeface!
MA: Uh…no.
(laughter)
MA: DAMAGE CONTROL! Created by Dwayne McDuffie, who was taken from us too soon, and I know you worked with him on BEN 10; have you had any thoughts about bringing them in?
JK: There HAVE been thoughts about Damage Control! I can’t really say, but… it would be very cool if they show up! And yeah, obviously, I can’t say enough about Dwayne and what a loss that is. But yeah, that’s a little bit of the legacy that he’s left behind, and if we could work it in, it would be very cool.
JD: With the animation, it seems like they’re pushing the boundaries, as far as forced perspective, and the way he swings, and certain appendages will fly towards the camera and everything. Is that something that the animators just kind of make up as they go, like “Oh, it’d be cool if we had him swing this way,” or is that written specifically, someone sees that in their head, and they say “Make this happen”?
JK: On the comedy and the fantasy cutaways, we’re very specific about what we’re looking for. With the action stuff it tends to be a little bit more open for the storyboard guys and for the directors to play with that. And from the beginning, there was a test reel—they always do a test for these things. Radomski was looking for that kind of forced perspective, and again, to make a Marvel comic come to life.
JD: It has a very anime feel to it.JK: Yeah, some anime influences, but I think in a way, at least for me because I’m a huge fan of that stuff, I feel like they took the best and still kept it an American cartoon, and still kept it a Marvel comic, which is great. And it’s a hard line to walk. But luckily, because of what Spidey avails us with the comedy, with his always speaking to the audience, which was built into the comics since you can go into his head, it allows for these other animation styles. So I’m always struck by how we’ll have these sick action sequences, and you’re like “Wow, that looks almost like adult level anime,” and then we have these really funny cutaways bits that take on a totally different style. I love that kinetic nature of the show.
JD: The very comedic bits, like with the toaster, remind me of TEEN TITANS GO! Was that ever a discussion, “They did this well, let’s see if we can do something to that effect”?
JK: Well, Alex Soto did a lot of work on TEEN TITANS, but again, I think it’s one of things where as fans of animation, we sort of go “What kind of stuff do we like, what can we get away with,” and it’s really interesting to see what evolves over the course of development of this series. So we may not go to a specific well per se, like we don’t necessarily go, “Oh, look at TEEN TITANS”…
MA: They’re sort of tools in a toolbox.
JK: Exactly. It’s having all these tools, and then deciding what tools go up the flagpole, and everybody gets it. You’ll see there’s a device that pops up, you’ve seen it in some of the previews, where there’s an angel and a devil Spidey that pop up. The things that would pop up on his shoulder in the beginning were a wider variety, but then we realized we really liked those little angel and devil Spideys, they were really funny, so they sort of evolved in as ongoing characters. And like I said, we’re fans of a wide variety of animation, so Alex will show us something or be like “Did you see this show?” And these are older shows, but FLCL is a huge influence on me personally. The stuff that they got away with and were willing to experiment with… that show is so ahead of its time and nobody even knows it-- well, fans like us know it, but the broader public doesn’t know it. And you just see what they were able to pull off, and they’re letting us do that kind of stuff! So it’s a really great working relationship.
MA: So now you’ve gotten a chance to see the audience’s reaction here at the premiere; what did you think?
JK: Oh, it’s great. It’s funny to be listening to them laughing right now [as the episode is replayed] which is really cool. This is only the third time I’ve ever actually watched something with an audience, and it’s a wonderful experience, because… not that you’re in a bubble; our crew is so big, that we’re a small army working on the show.
JD: It’s a giant bubble!
JK: Yeah, exactly! But you’re also just kind of doing your own thing. So when you actually get to see people watch it, they’re laughing at the right places, they’re like “Oh, that looks cool” at the right places, it’s very exciting.
MA: Yeah, I loved the whole thing, but I think the thing that got the biggest laugh, at least from me, was the Iron Man bit, where they show him first testing the armor, and basically being slammed all around the hangar. That was great.JK: Yeah, the Iron Man bit was funny, Flash Thompson in the locker was really funny… “I’m ready!”
(laughter)
JK: And that’s another thing I love about it, is that there’s humor on so many levels, so you’ve got crazy visual stuff, but also subtle dialogue… there’s something for everybody, I think, and it just keeps coming, which is very important to us, that rapid-fire.
JD: Yeah, I was a little bit nervous watching the trailer for this… I was like, “None of that makes me laugh!” Except for the car alarm! I was like, “Oh, that’s cute.”
MA: Well, they don’t want to give away the best bits, right?
(laughter)
JD: Yeah! And I totally laughed out loud at this episode… I was like, “Oh, thank God!” ‘Cause I’m such a big Spidey guy, that I was like “This better be funny!” And it was.
JK: No, I felt the same way… and when we came on to it, and they said, “Yeah, we really want it to be funny”, we were like, “Well, do you really mean funny, or do you mean just one-liners?” And they’re like, “No, we’re going for it, we want it to be appealing on a lot of different levels. We know we can do action, but we want to prove…”--and I’m saying “we” sort of speaking for Marvel— “…that we get the comedy, we get the characters, it’s not just, ‘Hey, we have guys that punch each other.’” Marvel puts out the coolest action, no question—these are areas that maybe they’re not necessarily known for by the broader audience, so it’s great to be part of shepherding that in.
MA: Given the tone of the show, does that mean you’re probably going to stay away from certain Spider-Man storylines? I mean, I can’t see this show doing KRAVEN'S LAST HUNT.
JK: You know, it’s actually funny… of course, I can’t say whether or not Kraven is showing up, but if he WAS showing up, it would be a little darker than you would expect. And what’s kind of cool is that we can go back and forth, so long as it’s always balanced out. You even see in the pilot, when we talk about Uncle Ben, we talk about it, it’s addressed, but it’s not dwelled upon. So all the characters have different backstories; some of them are a little darker. But they’re always balanced out by Spidey’s point of view, and Spidey is, you know, the eternal optimist, so even when he’s a little down in the dumps, we’re able to sort of get back to the humor. So yeah, I think you’ll see, there are some characters that are critical, that you knew you were going to get to, and it’s always like “Ok, can we get to them in a different way?” I think there’s going to be one or two pretty significant surprises I think when we get to some of the Spidey villains that everybody is sort of expecting, and that I’m really pumped for. Sometimes with a little darker element, but just sort of a dash of it, just a little pepper goes a long way.
JD: I had a question about the look of the characters; I heard a couple of names thrown around-- Ed McGuinness-- the look of the characters, where does that come from the most? They’re vastly different from SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN, where everyone had very rounded eyes, and very big Scott Pilgrim pupils as opposed to this look which is a little more… realistic?JK: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things we talked about a lot in early development was that—and this is Joe Quesada, especially—we all love Batman Animated, we all love Justice League, and we love those Spider-man shows. That kind of hyper-stylized look has become almost the norm for superhero shows for so long, that the question was, is there a way to take and really make it feel like Marvel, like it’s a living Marvel book. And it’s interesting, the guys that they went to… you take some Ed McGuinness, you take some Stuart Immonen, and you take some Humberto Ramos, and you mix that up, and you get this look that… you know, the feet aren’t super-big, but they’re a little bigger. But the bodies look real, and it works really well to balance out the comedy, because if everybody was all goofy, all the time, then you lose…
JD: The punch of the comedy.
JK Exactly. And sort of the waves and the flow of the show.
MA: The designs for the Frightful Four, they’re great, because they’re fresh and they’re new, but right away when they come on screen, you say “There’s the Frightful Four.”
JK: And I think that in general… I’m just trying to see in my head if there’s any really crazy new designs, but I think they all sort of fall into that realm of “Ok, it’s pretty recognizable, but we’ve added something new to it.” Again, sometimes it’s in the origin story, sometimes it’s just the character visually. We want to keep them fresh and cool, that’s the whole point. ‘Cause I think we’ve all been around enough to know, we don’t want to see “X” AGAIN. And admittedly for kids, sometimes it is brand new, but the balance there is, what’s cool for a kid that’s new, but that the writers don’t go, “OK, here I go again.” It’s a challenge. We always have to light a fire under our own butts to make sure, are we pushing ourselves, are we trying something new, etc, etc. And so far, I feel like we’ve done a pretty good job.
Thanks Joe! Be sure to also check out the video of our interview with Joe, and stay tuned for our interviews with Joe Quesada and Chris Eliopoulous.
For those of you not interested in all this readin’, here’s a video of a good portion of the above interview!
JD can be found hosting the PopTards Podcast, drawing a weekly webcomic, discussing movies, comics and other flimflam over at www.poptardsgo.com, graphically designing/illustrating for a living, and Booking his Face off over here. Follow his twitter @poptardsgo. His talkback name is PopTard_JD. He is also now co-hosting another Comic Book discussion show on Party934.com alongside Bohdi Zen. They discuss comics and play music, check it out live every Saturday from 4-5pm.
Matt Adler is a writer/journalist, currently writing for AICN among other outlets. He’s been reading comics for 20 years, writing about them for 7, and spends way, way, too much time thinking about them, which means he really has no choice but to figure out how to make a living out of them. He welcomes all feedback.
Proofs, co-edits & common sense provided by Sleazy G
