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Interview With Don McGregor
Interviewed by Jenna Glatzer

Don is the Writer/Creator of DETECTIVES INC., SABRE, RAGAMUFFINS, ALEXANDER RISK & LADY RAWHIDE.  He also writes the daily newspaper comic strip ZORRO.

How did you get your start writing comic books and strips?

That’s a long, complicated story, filled with a lot of time-consuming, albeit often interesting, and sometimes absurdist anecdotes. I think for your purposes, however, it’s probably more pertinent to discuss how to get noticed in comics, and what types of writing you need to do for a full script.

If you submit a plot proposal to one of the major companies, the odds are it is going to be put into a huge, ever growing Slush Pile.  It is tucked somewhere in a corner of the editor’s office, covered with Xerox copies of artwork, and merchandising actions figures, and stacks of old comics.  If the stack grows too enormous, it is an intimidating reminder to the editor that the stack awaits. Stuff that they don’t need, but still needs to be dealt with. Not necessarily read. Just dealt with, so all those sheets of paper disappear! The writer does have a need, not to get lost in that submission pile. You need to find a way for your proposal or script not to be invisible!

It used to be true, and probably sometimes still is, that if you wrote a lot of letters to comic book titles, your name would get known. Submissions might not be high on anybody’s list to read. Editors normally have to get out one more title than they comfortably can handle. The unsolicited scripts are a factor they don’t have time to really look at. But, I promise you this, what does get read? The letters to the books! By the editors. Often the writers and artists. You are writing about their work. They’re going to want to know what you thought. Plus, they have a letters page to fill. And you don’t have kiss ass, either. Just be able express what you thought made it a good or bad comic. After a while, someone just might get to start noticing your name. Hey, this person writes to every single damn issue we do! Who is this?

That’s not going to get you a gig writing, but at least you’re getting read, and you’re not in that big pile that doesn’t get read.

So, what to do? In my case, I realized this was a visual medium, and it is a lot easier for an artist to get a reaction to his/her work than a writer. Why? Because the editor can look at the art and immediately know whether or not they like it. And they can tell you what they thought of it. You get immediate feed-back.

But what to do if you’re a writer? I got together with a good buddy, Alex Simmons, who could draw, and I suggested we do our own comic, DETECTIVES INC. This is the 1969 version, not the one people are commonly aware of. It took us a year to put it together, and then we took it to the big New York Comic Con. The big Convention these days is in San Diego. How New York lost being the site where the biggest conclave of comics is held, I’m still perplexed. The biggest companies are in New York, after all. But hey! My daughter, Lauren, lives in San Diego, so for me, it’s great. And the weather in summertime in San Diego sure beats New York humidity.

Anyhow, if you have a book you can hand out to people, they have something of yours they can see, immediately!

I would wait until editors and other pros were going on to a panel to discuss some facet or other of the industry and hand the book out. It had a brighter than Pepto Bismol pink cover, so you could see it from wherever you sat in the audience.

Now, the thing about thing about this is, if there are a lot of people sitting up on the dais, they often aren’t listening to what the person who is holding court is saying, so they look at whatever is in front of them. In this case, it was our book. I always knew, because you could see the bright pink cover.

Jim Warren, who was the publisher of CREEPY, EERIE and VAMPIRELLA magazines, was giving a stirring speech about how his comics were better than anyone else’s, especially since he was planning, at the time, to have his books all be sold through mail-order, and thus wouldn’t be subject to the restrictions the mom and pop grocery stores that carried comics might have. I don’t recommend this as a way to break into the business, and this goes to show there really was no big game plan on my part, and I don’t think I meant to even say this seconds before I spoke the words, but I raised my hand, and asked, "Well, if that’s true, why are publishing some of the crap you’re publishing!" Jim went ballistic. Totally nuts! Afterwards, he came off the stage and stalked over to me and asked, "Who in the hell do you think you are, hotshot, asking me a question like that? Name one story that I did that was crap?"

I named a story. Meekly, I suppose. I don’t believe I’d been ready for the nuclear reaction. Jim then told me to follow him. In those days, comic conventions ran movies almost 24 hours a day, and he took me into the darkened room, lit by screen reflected and projector light. He was looking for someone. When he found who he wanted, he motioned the person out, and as the movie voices went on, he introduced me to the artist of the story I’d said was "crap." Which it was. I still honestly believe that to this day. Moronic. But there was nothing wrong with the art. This was a dumb story with good art by Billy Graham. Anyhow, Warren said, "Billy, this is Don McGregor. Don McGregor, this is Billy Graham. Don, tell Billy his work is crap." I took up for myself, and stated more or less what I wrote above. A debate ensued which I’m sure made us beloved by the movie audience, and then Warren just stared at me, and everything got quiet there on the side of the theater. And then he said, "Okay, hotshot. Play your cards right, I’ll take you to dinner tonight."

You never know how it’s going to turn out.

But, you are not off the hook. You still have to write, even if you have a comic drawn. That means you have to know what a comic writer has to do.

You are doing two essentially different kinds of writing. There is the communication with the editor and artist who will draw your story, whom you’ll often never even have met, at least in the beginning stages of your career. And you must show the editor that you know what everyone’s job is in comics. In other words, a letterer doesn’t care about all your rapturous descriptions for the artist and what is going to be drawn.  They just want to know what they have to letter. That’s their job! It’s your job to know they don’t want to have to hunt all over the damn place looking for what they have to letter.

Now, the other writing you have to do in comics are the words the audience is ACTUALLY GOING TO READ, the captions and dialogue, and you have to be able to keep those two clear in your head at all times. You’d better remember that you may have used your characters’ names dozens of times in writing down all the fabulous things you want them to do, when you’re describing the visuals to the artist, but that maybe you never actually used their names in what the readers are going to read, so they won’t have a clue who it is they’re following. That’s one thing you have to keep track of.

Of what are you most proud?

I know you mean as a writer, but certainly it would have to be my son and daughter, Rob and Lauren. Any time my daughter calls from San Diego, it’s just a better day. Anytime I share with them, anywhere, I’m just glad they still like to be with Dad.

Now, I know you’re talking stories here, and it’s a question writers often get asked. There are some stories I have a deep fondness for just because of one scene that I think worked, that communicated something, sometimes just a small whisper that touched something human beings share. If I was absolutely forced to pick only one, it would probably be RAGAMUFFINS, which was a mainstream series, which I always subtitled "A Book About Kids For Adults." Unlike many kid oriented strips, these kids were not cartoonish, nor did they have the vocabulary of adults. They were small people, capable of cruelties, often with less subtlety than adults, as well as moments of great grace and at others incredible imagination, not to mention when fear or envy prompted them to do things less attractive. It was also a series about what adults believe they are teaching kids and what kids really learn, and I guess why I end up choosing this series is that I know it should not exist, not in this medium. Dean Mullaney, who was the publisher of Eclipse comics, says this is his favorite book of all the books he published. Most editors would have handed me my hat, as I write in the introduction to the series, and told me I’d finally gone over the edge, to even suggest a comic where the first three stories would be about a kindergarten kid going to school, having recess, and then coming back home. Dean didn’t. He believed in RAGAMUFFINS and he backed it up with not just words, but actions. And then it was the first comic to print Gene Colan’s pencils, and I’d waited years to do this strip, because I was waiting for Gene, because I knew he could capture these kids, and the time period in which many of the stories took place, the 1950s. It was also the first comic book to print color and pencils. Steve Oliff found the way to blend the two.

We should be reprinting in a graphic album format, the RAGAMUFFINS series in the year 2000. We just have to find a way to do it that won’t have the book getting lost in the flood-tide of books on the market. It isn’t enough to write the stories, although that is you’re only concern when you are facing that blank sheet of paper, but then, if it’s something you own, you have to figure out how to give that story and those characters a chance to survive.

When you are first writing your stories, you aren’t thinking any of these things, including the fact that years later, many people are going to be asking you questions about what prompted you to do this story or that, or what is your favorite.

I have a great deal of love for both DETECTIVES INC. books. I love the characters. Why wouldn’t I? I’ve lived with them, in one form or another, as stated above, since 1969.

There are moments with Denning and Rainier that I am very fond of. There’s a moment in the first mass published 1981 book of DETECTIVES INC.: A REMEMBRANCE OF THREATENING GREEN that always makes me glad that book exists. There is a sequence that runs across three pages, that takes place out in Sunken Meadow Park on Long Island. All the places in DETECTIVES INC. are pretty accurate in visuals and in background. It is a real New York book. At any rate, in this one sequence, Rainier is with a young woman who is a lesbian, and they are at the scene of where her lover was murdered, and being there prompts her to tell him more than she ever intended, as they walk up the beach, up the sandy hillside to the parking lot where the death actually occurred. So, they move against one visual backdrop, and on the third page climb right up to where we have visually scanned from beach to the parking lot. But then, running right along underneath it, is a visualization of what Rainier is fantasizing. He can’t get it out of his head that she’s a lesbian, and it follows his fantasies so that they include his ex-wife. So, here’s this woman pouring her soul out to him and he hardly hears her, and on the third page as the fantasies end, and they have climbed up into the one background that has spread across three pages of comics she asks him what he thinks about it what she has said, and he’s caught, embarrassed, because he hasn’t really been listening, and it’s such a small human moment, but I love that we caught that in a comic. Or there is a sequence in the second DETECTIVES INC. graphic novel: A TERROR OF DYING DREAMS where Rainier and Deirdre Sevens, a social worker, talk about the things that men and women can do to each other, that people can do to each other, that is so full of painful memories and recounting, and yet so healing when there are those who do listen, that I’m just glad that exists. There was a time when I was writing it that I knew this was a key scene in the film script version I’d written that might not make it into comics because of the page count, and I begged for more pages, and I was willing to pay the artist myself to draw them, because I so dearly wanted that scene in there, it was too important to lose, and it almost didn’t make it. Most of the time the mechanics of comics are set in cement. You can’t change the page count. I couldn’t afford to pay to have this done. And yet to have lost it, would mean I’d always look at that book and know what was lost. It would haunt the story-teller in me all my days. So, it was rescued. And now it is in TERROR, and it will always be there. I did a reading with other comic writers to help raise money for kids with AIDS, and my wife, Marsha and I read that Coney Island Boardwalk scene of revelations, and afterward a woman came up to us, and said she didn’t know material like that could be in a comic, and that it spoke to her about what she had lived through, and it was worth the fight to get it in there.

But I would be remiss not to mention the second NATHANIEL DUSK series: APPLE PEDDLERS DIE AT NOON, where I had all the room I needed for the story, and to do the research I wanted for the 1934 New York. Everything is accurate, down to the weather on the recounted days. If a horse lies dead in the middle of Times Square, and Dusk is leaping over it, you can be sure that horse was lying in the middle of the street right at that point in time. And to have such exquisite Gene Colan art on that book, capturing the film noir flavor that I wanted, rendering everything from the Flat Iron Building to a neon-washed tenement fire escape, God, I love to look at that book.

Or to have worked with Craig Russell on the KILLRAVEN GRAPHIC ALBUM, LAST DREAMS BROKEN. If they all looked that exquisite, you would never hear Don McGregor bitch!

Or the birth sequence in SABRE: AN EXPLOITATION OF EVERYTHING DEAR, along with one of the first kisses between homosexual male characters, as war rages all about everybody, and drawn with zestful fantasy heroics by Billy Graham, well, I’d have to mention that, wouldn’t I? SABRE, MELISSA SIREN, DEUCES WILD, SUMMER ICE, DEARIE DECADENCE, JOYFUL SLAUGHTER, HEIRONYMOUS SKULL, THE LOUNGE LIZARD, CRIMSON DAWN, MIDNIGHT STORM, hell, the whole gang wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t!

And then again, there’s working with Tom Yeates’ on ZORRO VS. DRACULA. You can write your heart out in comics, you can bleed on the page, but if you don’t have a Tom Yeates, a Billy Graham, a Craig Russell, a Dwayne Turner, a Mike Mayhew, God thank heaven, a Gene Colan, to bring those stories to life with their talent and ability, you are dead. The story will just sit there.

And when readers finally get to see what Mike Mayhew has done with ZORRO: MATANZAS! I think that’s a series that will score high on the ones I look at fondly, glad they are there, glad we did them.

Now, I just wish we could get ALEXANDER RISK: THE HOUNDS OF HELL THEORY to that level. For the first time I have a series that I could actually describe in those high-concept terms Hollywood so apparently loves: Think Sherlock Holmes meets the Thin Man. However, it is much more than just that. It mixes mythological horrors with everyday horrors that mankind is capable of inflicting on each other. I know there are scenes in there as strong as anything I have ever done. And the initial ideas for them go back as far as 1981. There’s one scene that I know some people will think was influenced by the HBO movie, IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK, about abortion, except I did the scene way back then, and it still hasn’t had a chance to reach an audience. We go further than that HBO movie, but a lot of the reaction to what you do is influenced by when you get to tell the story, and also when the audience gets a chance to experience it.

Click here to read the next page.  

Copyright © 1999, 2000 by Don McGregor

 

 

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