Firefox News was founded first and foremost as a fan site for, about and run by fans. In fact, many of the staff originally met via a shared interest in the 1990's animated Gargoyles series. As such, we were tremendously pleased to be able to chat with Greg Weisman, the man behind the clan, who created the show we knew and loved. Greg is now the supervising producer for the upcoming Spider-Man animated series for Kids!WB and Sony, and although he's got a full plate getting the show set up and running, he spent a little time telling us about that project and about the new Gargoyles
FFN: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.
GW: I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.
FFN: Then everyone's happy. Hooray! How are you this afternoon?
GW: Good. I'm listening to over a thousand auditions for various parts for Spider-Man.
FFN: Is there anything you can tell us about where you're leaning in the casting?
GW: No, we're just getting all these auditions coming in, and it's a cattle call at this stage. We'll start narrowing it down soon. I've probably listened to about five hundred or so, maybe six hundred left. So it's a lot. We'll narrow it down and start doing callbacks and stuff, but we're not even close.
FFN: I hear the Stargate folks are looking for work.
GW: *laughs* We'll take 'em. Of course, they're all in Canada.
FFN: Why don't you tell us a little about yourself? Where are you from?
GW: I'm from Los Angeles. I grew up here, second generation, which is somewhat rare. My kids are third generation, which is very rare. I went to high school in LA. I went to college up north at Stanford University for undergraduate, got my bachelor's there in English with a fiction writing emphasis. While I was still in college, I went to work for DC Comics, freelance, and then eventually when I graduated, I took a staff job at DC in their editorial department, working my way up to Associate Editor.
FFN: Was that when you landed the CAPTAIN ATOM job?
GW: It was during that period, yeah. I was working on a number of projects with Cary Bates, who was my writing partner at the time, and Cary got the CAPTAIN ATOM job, and he brought me onto that. I wrote about fifty issues of CAPTAIN ATOM, the last chunk freelance again. I applied to graduate school and got into USC's professional writing program, and moved back to LA. I've more or less been here ever since. When I graduated with my Masters in professional writing, with an emphasis in playwriting, I wound up taking a job at Walt Disney TV Animation as a development executive, and worked my way up there to Director of Series Development at WDTA. I developed and worked on a number of shows, and with my team, we created a show called Gargoyles.
FFN: Which we've heard of once or twice.
GW: *laugh* Passingly familiar with it, you are?
FFN: *laugh* Passingly.
GW: So, Gargoyles was sort of my baby. Well, not really "sort of" my baby. Gargoyles was my baby. Normally, as a development executive, I would develop a show and then, even if we developed it in-house, I'd find a producer and sort of pass it on and shove it out the door and sort of say "Good luck." But I just fell in love with the whole concept and didn't want to let it go, so I wound up switching sides of the desk and becoming the producer, later the supervising producer of Gargoyles with Frank Paur. We did two years of that, and they did the third year after I left.
FFN: We don't speak of the third year.
GW: Yeah. Silent on that subject. *laugh* I went to Dreamworks for a few years, and then I went freelance. I've been freelance ever since. I've worked pretty exclusively in animation with a little work in comic books thrown in here and there, and various unsuccessful attempts to break into live-action and publishing, beyond comics. I've produced a bunch of shows. Last year, I finished producing a show called W.I.T.C.H. for Toon Disney, and now, I am currently the supervising producer of Spider-Man for Sony and Kids!WB and Marvel.
FFN: Are you technically freelancing for Spider-Man, or is that a permanent position?
GW: I have an office here at Sony. In every way that matters, I'm on staff. If you're asking technically, in theory I'm still freelancing. It's a contractual distinction. In a practical matter, I'm here day in and day out, at least until March, but we’re hoping that sooner than later, we'll get a pick-up for a second season of Spider-Man, and I'm hoping to spend a lot of time here. I'd like to do a lot of years of Spider-Man.
FFN: I've heard that at least the first season of the show, and presumably the subsequent seasons, will be a kind of "Year One."
GW: Yeah. We're not really calling it "Spider-Man: Year One," we're calling it "Spider-Man: Month Four." The idea is that Peter's sixteen years old, he got bitten by the spider at the end of his sophomore year of high school, and Uncle Ben died. That's a big wound to his psyche, and to his life, but that was four months ago so it's still very painful but it's not an open, bleeding wound anymore. He's spent the summer fighting crime. But I mean that like, stopping muggers. There was one bank robbery he was very proud of foiling. There was the liquor store holdup, and that jewelry store, yeah, that was great. Basically, nothing challenging, not to him. He's just out of the league of most typical criminals, and he's thinking that's all there is. He's been away from his school friends because they were all away for the summer, so he's been on his own for the entire summer vacation, having kind of a blast in a lot of ways being Spider-Man. It's a huge release for him.
GW: We open our series literally the night before the first day of his junior year of high school, and get just a sense of what his summer's been like. But then morning comes and school's in session in every possible way. I mean, a) he's back in school, back among his peers. He's got a newfound confidence because he's Spider-Man, but none of them know that, so … *laugh* From their point of view, he's still the same nerd he was four months ago, and that's an adjustment for him, because he's been thinking "My life is gonna change." Life is going to change, but not everyone is going to recognize it.
GW: Meanwhile on the Spider-Man front, we introduce in the first episode his very first honest-to-Aunt-May supervillain, and he's going to be fighting supervillains for the first time, and they're going to be teaching him lessons too. So, when I say "School's in session," I mean "School's in session," and that's really the theme for our series generally is the education of Peter Parker. We've got a guy who is still unformed, in the rough. Our plan is to put him through his paces. We're skipping the first few months, because frankly to me, it's not as interesting. I mean, we're all pretty familiar with his origin, and we will tell that story eventually, when we've earned it later in the season.
FFN: You've got a good track record with flashbacks.
GW: I think that for now, we don't need to see him firing the web for the first time, or swing for the first time. Even our youngest audience has a passing familiarity with Spider-Man. We want to see him really start to lean life lessons and learn what happens when Spider-Man's up against something tough, not up against a guy in a ski mask.
FFN: Speaking of the villains, are we going to be seeing his whole rogues gallery? Are there any particular villains that are off-limits, or just that we're not going to see?
GW: We have a thirteen episode order, and we're going to be introducing a number of villains from his rogues gallery in season one, with clear plans, assuming there is a season two, introducing more members of his rogues gallery as we go forward. There's only been one villain that's been declared off-limits to us for various contractual reasons. There's a clear legal reason why we can't use this one villain, but other than that we are free to use everyone from Spider-Man's rogues gallery. We'll be introducing a good chunk of them in the first season, but obviously his rogues gallery is huge, so we're not going to introduce literally everyone in season one. We have big plans for a lot of the most exciting Spider-Man villains. We want season one to sell, so to speak, and with that in mind, we're not pulling our punches. We've got big plans, and we're going to do some exciting stuff.
FFN: Do you think you'll be drawing, intentionally or not, on the villains we've been seeing in the movies, just because the audience might have more familiarity with those?
GW: I think the movies chose the villains they chose because they were, and are, and continue to be some of the best Spider-Man villains. So if you're asking, are we using Green Goblin, are we using Doc Ock, are we using Sandman, the answer is yes to all three. I don't think that's too shocking a revelation. *laugh* I'm not going to go into any detail about it yet, it's way too early, but I don't think it's going to come as a surprise that I'm using three of the most important Spider-Man villains across our season. Our feeling is that our bibles for the series so to speak are the original Lee/Ditko and Lee/Romita comics of the early to mid-sixties. Now having said that, if there's a great idea in one of the movies, I'm not going to be shy about pick-pocketing. *laugh* If there's a great idea in ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, I'm not going to be shy about making use of whatever legit Spidey sources are out there. But we are starting from scratch. So it's 1962, sort of recast for the year 2008. So everything's new, everything's fresh. It's not a Marvel universe jam-packed with heroes and villains that you can't move five feet without tripping over some guy in a cape and tights. This is all new. So we're just going to have a great time with exploring these things for the very first time, and yeah, that means exploring all of the great Spider-Man cast. The villains, of course, but also Spider-Man has one of the greatest supporting casts in comics, and we're having a great time exploring those characters as well.
FFN: I've heard that you're planning on condensing some of the storyline. For example, Gwen Stacy was Peter's college girlfriend, but we'll probably be seeing her in high school.
GW: We are compressing a bit to get the cast into the early days, but I think we're doing it as much as possible to respect the characters and be true to them. So you're right. We're going to be seeing Gwen and Harry Osborne and Mary Jane Watson, all of whom Peter didn't meet until he was in college. But you're also going to be seeing Liz Allen, Flash Thompson, and characters from high school days. We're compressing, but we're also not in a hurry. Our entire first season, thirteen episodes, takes place during the fall semester of his junior year. Not religiously, but more or less across thirteen weeks, starting in September and ending in December. So if we have a season two, we're thinking it's winter. We're not going to race through this, we're not going to try to race to get him into college, race to make him an adult, but we want to explore this period of his life. So while we are compressing his timeline a bit, in order to get some of his great cast in sooner than later, we're also not going to skip over things.
FFN: You've mentioned you've got an order for thirteen episodes. Are you planning on making that one continuous story arc, or will you focus on standalone episodes?
GW: Everything that we're doing has to work on three levels. Or four, depending on how you look at it. The show's airing on Kids!WB, and it has to be thirteen episodes that can each stand on their own two feet and tell a single great story. We're incredibly excited about each of those individual stories. Having said that, these episodes will also be released as four DVDs of three or four episodes apiece, and we are making a conscious, intentional effort so that these three and four episode blocks work as a movie. Now, that's not the same as sitting down to write an eighty minute movie, but as much as possible, there's connective tissue between these episodes. The show is episodic but it is absolutely sequential. If a viewer is watching Kids!WB and they happen to tune in for the first time on episode six, they'll see a great story in six that they wouldn't have had to see one through five to see, but the hope is that they like six so much they want to go out and get one through five on DVD so that they can see how it plays out. So there's a certain benefit to seeing them all and seeing them in order,. The shows work both as individual episodes and the longer pieces, and then having said that, we have arcs that run through the entire thirteen episode season. It's just the way my mind works. Things that run from episode one though episode thirteen that we'll weave in and out. Again, though we can't count on it in these very early stages, we're very hopeful that this lasts for many seasons, and I have long-term plans that go beyond this first season. If they don't happen, I'll be a very sad boy, but if they do, we'll at least be ready for it and have plenty of opportunity to lay pipe, not just for the short term of this one season but for the long term as well.
FFN: Sounds fun! So who is "we" on the team? Who's in the writers' room with you?
GW: Well, it's very early days, but right now, the writing team has been assembled. It's myself, and Kevin Hopps, Matt Wayne, Andrew Robinson, our writer's apprentice is Randy Jandt. We have Vic Cook as the supervising director and producer on the show, and he's been participating in those discussions as well. We've got a bunch of very committed executives at three different companies in many different divisions very interested in what we're doing, participating and being helpful at Marvel and Kids!WB and at Sony.
FFN: So everyone's behind the project?
GW: Oh yeah. Everyone really wants the show to succeed, and frankly, it can't not. *laugh* I mean, it's Spider-Man. I'd almost intentionally have to try to sabotage it to make this show not succeed. But, having said that, that's not satisfactory for us. I think that, for us, our goal is either truly, truly arrogant or truly naïve, or probably both, and it is no less than our desire to make this the classic, definitive Spider-Man show of all time, the one that people look back on twenty years later and go, "Wow, that was a great Spider-Man show." We're setting the goal that high, ridiculously high on purpose. I don't know whether we'll success, but we figure the only way, the only chance we have at succeeding is to go for it, to really set the bar for us that high and really try and make it that great. And again, everyone involved in the process at three different companies is all on board with that idea. They want to do something here that is both very contemporary and very iconic, and just winds up being a classic Spider-Man show.
FFN: It sounds like this generation's Batman: The Animated Series.
GW: Well, I won't deny we've had discussions about that. Not that we're going to specifically emulate what Bruce Timm and Alan Burnett did on Batman, either stylistically or otherwise. I mean, these are two very different characters. But, that's how we all feel about Batman: The Animated Series, looking back on it ten years later. It's still where the bar is set. Our hope is that we can have that kind of success creatively on this show as well.
FFN: Have you had a chance to see the new movie yet?
GW: I haven't.
FFN: *laugh* How do you know what you might be accidentally copying?
GW: Well, we do have executives looking over our shoulders and all that. I have to say, they've been terrific, and one of the things they've been terrific about is understanding that we are not in continuity with the movies. The last show Sony did, the MTV Spider-Man show, was in continuity with the movies, and that I know because I worked on it briefly. It was a very difficult situation, trying to second-guess what Features was going to do in the second movie, long before the second movie was out. What Features gets now is that we're not in continuity with the movies, so what they're doing and what we're doing, again, I'm not saying there isn't overlap, because hey, it's still Spider-Man, of course there's overlap, but we're not in continuity with them, and so that's not a huge issue.
FFN: One last question. Are there any tidbits or in-jokes coming up in the series that you can share? On the Atlantis series that sadly didn't get off the ground, you were going to have Demona show up in Paris.
GW: Well, that wasn't really an in-joke, that was a crossover. We're just so not at that point yet. And also, for me, even when I do write an in-joke, it tends to be more spur of the moment, more of a glancing blow, because frankly, you want stuff to work for the audience you're presenting it to. If you can find a way to sort of slide in something for an audience that you've had in the past – *ahem* Gargoyles – then, great. But you know …
FFN: It's not a high priority.
GW: It's definitely not a high priority. Now, when we can, we might slip in here and there, but also, even if I had fifty in-jokes planned, which I guarantee you I do not, *laugh* I wouldn't tell you. *laugh* That would spoil the joke.
(continued)
FFN: *laugh* So, Gargoyles. It's back. Yay! And can I say, on behalf of all of us who ever painted ourselves blue and strapped on a pair of wings, thank you for putting in the time and effort to bring it back.
GW: Well, you know, it really is, without sounding too ridiculously sappy, has been a labor of love, with the fans and myself, and the other professionals here and there who have been participating along the way. We're talking about a show that premiered in 1994. We did two seasons, 94-95 and 95-96. They did the third season without me, or at least largely without me, and I went to my first Gargoyles convention in 1997 having no idea what to expect, and just have made such great friends there. It's my annual ego boost, which allows me to survive the dangerous waters of the entertainment business for a year until I can get that ego boost again. It's really quite frightening. *laughs*
GW: But, you know, the fans of the show in general are so loyal and smart and talented, and have been so wonderful to me, that they have really helped keep my interest in the property high. I always loved it, but in essence, given the fact that I stopped working on Gargoyles in any professional sense in 1996, I have spent the last ten years, without exaggeration, non-stop, continuing to work on this property. I've got notebooks and journals, timelines and encyclopedias just full of stuff. I literally have more stories than I could possibly live long enough to tell, and a timeline that runs from prehistory, and to at least 2199, if not beyond. All I've been looking for, for a decade, is the opportunity to have a forum to tell these stories again with the caveat that it did have to be a professional forum, because I don't own it. I don't get royalties off the episodes, I don't get royalties off the DVDs. I have to, as a pro, a least earn a little something to justify doing it, and that's exactly what these comic books represent, a very little something *laugh* to at least justify the time. But I have to say, it's been a true labor of love. I am having such a blast writing this comic book. The truth is, if it paid enough to keep my family going, I'd do nothing but write Gargoyles comic books for the rest of my life. I just love it. I love these characters. I love this universe, and I'm have a great, great time. As long as we can find a publisher who wants to do it, and SLG has been just great, and I hope they make a little money off of it.
FFN: Are they picking up the license to the comic?
GW: I can't answer that in an absolute sense, but I know that's Dan [Vado]'s intent. Whether or not, he's actually done that and pulled the trigger, that's really a question for him, but he's expressed to me his desire to do that. In fact, in addition to doing the bimonthly Gargoyles comic book, they've committed to do the bimonthly spin-off comic book Gargoyles: Bad Guys, and we're talking about doing a trade paperback that collects the first six issues of Gargoyles, which is the first half of the "Clan-Building" story arc. I think those three things indicate that he likes the property and is serious about keeping it going. It's a business, so things change. I can't know what's gonna happen down the road. I'm sure Dan only knows a little bit more than I do, but at this time, we're continuing to work on the book, both books, well, all three books now. *laugh* I have written through issue eight of Gargoyles, I wrote issue one of Bad Guys, and I'm in the middle of writing issue two of Bad Guys. The plan is for me just to alternate back and forth between Gargoyles and the spin-offs. Again, from my standpoint, ad infinitum, until I collapse in front of the keyboard.
FFN: Is Bad Guys taking place at the same time as the main book?
GW: Yeah. They're both taking place, well, if you're a true Gargoyles geek, both in 1996. I am making some effort not to, in the book itself, call a lot of attention to the date. One of the things we've prided ourselves on in Gargoyles the series was our sense of the time, and that is and continues to be important to be, and since we left off in 1996, that's where we picked up. I didn’t want to pretend that it was suddenly 2006 and yet nothing had changed in ten years, and yet I didn't want to skip ahead ten years to 2006 and have this big gap of stories that I wanted to tell that I wouldn't have the chance to tell, or be forced to do them all in flashback over time. So we picked up right where we left off in 1996, and we are still in '96. Issue three came out and it's October 31, 1996. I think, starting in issue ten, we finally get to 1997. Bad Guys actually opens in 1997 as well. So we're finally getting out of 1996 across the next year or so. From my point of view, I'm taking my time. Time is passing. From the standpoint of a reader who's not a huge Gargoyles fan, this is set in the present. If they get more involved and want to get a better grasp of "When exactly is this?" there are a lot of websites, like "Ask Greg" that allows them to ask questions like, "Is this the present? Is this 1997? I don't understand." It can explain the whole thing to them. There's archives and archives of information about this. The hardcore fans know that we're about ten years back.
FFN: Believe me when I say, the hardcore fans really appreciate that you're going back and telling the stories as you intended to tell them.
GW: Well, I went through all sorts of thinking about it. Believe me, I did think long and hard about how should I do this, what should I do? All sorts of wild ideas, some of which I'm sure would just appall people, went through my mind on how to handle this. Everything from as radical a thing as saying "Let's just start over, let's pretend this property is existing for the first time," and I just couldn’t do it. Didn’t want to do it, couldn't do it. Like I said, I get paid a little bit for this, enough to justify it, but as even Dan would admit, I'm not making money on this. And if it's going to be a labor of love, I gotta do it the way I'm passionate about doing it, and that meant, "Hunter's Moon" ended the TV series, what happened next? That's one of the reasons we picked up with the two-issue story that adapts "The Journey" from Gargoyles: The Goliath Chronicles, which is the one episode of The Goliath Chronicles that I wrote. It's why the first spin-off will be Bad Guys. There were at least six potential spin-offs that we could've done. There are actually more than that at this point because I've been working on the property for ten years, but there were at least six to start with. The question was, "Which one do we start with?" and the answer was "Which one happened next?" That meant Bad Guys.
FFN: Are you finding as, now that you finally have a chance to write down the stories, that you're learning new things about the stories, or are things going more or less as you planned?
GW: I am. Even across this ten year gap, I did take a lot of notes and had basic ideas but I intentionally didn't write them. I didn't say "Let me write them all out in prose so I can know exactly what's happening," because I want to be able to discover things. It's important both for the fans, who've had ten years of spoilers that I've been dishing out slowly and surely across those ten years. Of course, now I'm regretting like hell that a lot of my biggest surprises are gone. *laugh* And I made the decision about that, should I intentionally not do some of the things I planned to do because I gave them away, and the decision that I sort of made there was, all right, the only thing that's canon is the stuff that appeared in those first sixty-five episodes of the TV series, and the stuff that appears in this comic series. Anything else that I revealed one way or another in-between we're calling "canon in-training." I'm not gonna lock myself in. If I come up with a better idea, I'll go with that better idea. But if I don't come up with a better idea, I'm not going to change it just so I can give the audience a shock. The good news is, as I'm writing these new stories, as familiar as I am, I'm finding things that surprise me along the way, which I hope will also surprise the audience. There are still, here and there, a few revelations that I never revealed, so, we'll be having fun with those as well.
FFN: That's very good to hear. About new characters: you've already started introducing the residents of the Labyrinth. Are we going to be meeting a lot of new faces in the main book, or are we going to be focusing more on the cast we know and love?
GW: All of the above. We've got the biggest cast in the world *laugh* in this book. In "Clan-Building," which is the first twelve issues of the book, we're going to be re-introducing a surprising quantity of them, I think, all of whom have essential roles to play, some of them large roles, some of them smaller. But we were never shy about introducing new characters, and I'm not going to be shy about that now. A new character's purpose might not be obvious right away, even necessarily to myself, but I have plans. We introduced a number of new characters in issue three, all of whom I have very clear plans for. We're introducing more new characters in issue four, and, I'm trying to think if there are any new characters in issue five. I'm not sure there are. Eight is as far as I've written. There is literally new stuff, one way or another, in every issue, not just re-introductions of old characters. I think this is good both for the hardcore fans, because they get new people to be curious about, whom they don't know a ton about, as opposed to the characters they've known for ten years, and I think it's good for the casual fans too, because if this character is new, then they know just as much about that character as a hardcore fan does. "Casual" might not even be the right word, because the idea is that the book should work not just for the hardcore who’ve been there forever, but also that we bring in a whole new generation of fans who’ve never seen Gargoyles before, but just start reading this book and think that it's fun stuff.
FFN: I was going to ask how accessible you think this will be to new fans.
GW: I hope it's accessible. It's always a little tough for a guy in my position to tell, but I'm making an effort to make sure that all the information that they need is present. As you need to learn more, I'll reveal that in flashback or find a way to have someone mention it in dialogue. We're got a scene in issue three where Al, the homeless guy from the Labyrinth, who's a character from the episode "Kingdom," meets a new character and relates the backstory of the Mutates and the clones in the Labyrinth to this new character. I think it plays and doesn't' come off as artificial. It gives us a chance to get a new reader up to speed so that they know where all this stuff came from. How successful I am at doing this, at executing this, I should say, is really not for me to say.
FFN: You've got a lot of fans working on the official book. I remember Stephanie Lostimolo when she was sixteen years old.
GW: I do too. *laugh*
FFN: So did you meet everyone at the cons? How did you get the team together?
GW: The initial team, such as it was, was me and Greg Guler and Marty Lund, who formed a small company called CreatureComics.com, and tried to get the license from Disney to do the book. Disney wasn't too thrilled about giving three guys with no, although we were all pros in different fields, we had literally zero track record, but Disney was great because they hooked us up with SLG, and Dan and his team over at SLG brought us together. Then came the reality of it, which is that, you know, we've got to make this book. Greg Guler, who is one of the original character designers of the series, and an inspirational character designer for characters like Goliath, Demona, Elisa, Angela, and many others, our original hope was that he would be able to pencil the book. Greg is a terrific comic book artist. It just came down that he didn't have the time. So Greg has become our cover artist, and Dan at SLG put together our interior team, which is David Hedgecock, and the first two issues were colored by Will Terrell, but since then our regular colorist has been Dustin Evans. The covers would be colored by Stephanie Lostimolo. Over the years, Stephanie and I became really good friends, and I've seen her coloring, her work, and think she's fantastic. We're very excited to have her aboard. One of our fill-in artists was Nir Paniri, who was found by Greg Guler, and one was Gordon Purcell, who was found by Dan at SLG, and one was Karine Charlebois, who, again, I've known since the first Gathering in 1997, and whose work I've admired for quite some time and watched as she developed as a pro in the animation industry. She hasn't done a lot of comics work but she did some comic book work on spec so we could show it to Dan, and Dan said "That looks good." So she did the fill-in for issue five, and we all liked it, so when it came time to say, "David doesn't have time to do both Gargoyles and Bad Guys," so we went to Karine. She said yes. That's a black and white book. Tones are going to be done by Steph, and the covers will still be color, and those will be Greg Guler, and they'll be colored by Steph, so we now have our two teams assembled.
GW: I've just made great friends from the fandom, and I've also made great friends from the Gargoyles pros that I got closer to via the fandom. I mean, Thom Adcox and I worked together during Gargoyles for three years but we didn't know each other really well, and then we both started going to these conventions, and now Thom is literally one of my best friends. It's not like we didn't like each other before, but you know, we didn't hang. Now we hang. So, it's good.
FFN: Okay, you've said that if Bad Guys sells well, we'll be seeing Pendragon and Timedancer. Will they be in that order?
GW: In that order. If Bad Guys sells well, then the next story I have to tell is a six-issue Pendragon story, and if that sells well, then the next story I have to tell is a six-issue Timedancer story, and if that sells well, there'll be something that follows. I'll admit, I haven't decided beyond that. There's a point where I'm intentionally not trying to think too far ahead now. I wanna, again, leave myself open to a little more serendipity a little more surprise, but I know that much.
FFN: So you're not going to promise us right now that we're going to be seeing Gargoyles 2198?
GW: Not right away. But if you're asking will we eventually, again, given enough issues, as long as SLG or someone else keeps me going, then eventually, I'll just keep on going. Eventually we'll do Gargoyles 2198, we'll do Dark Ages, we'll do New Olympians, we'll do the Banshee spin-off. I'll get to all of it eventually, given enough issues, and so, to some extent, there's a certain onus on the fans. In order to keep the book going, but beyond that, we need to grow the property. There's a point at which, I'm not saying it should be the fans' responsibility, but ultimately, if they don't take responsibility for helping us to spread the word about the comic books, about the DVDs
FFN: That's here in Chicago.
GW: That's right, at Anime Central. And then I've got at least two more planned for 2007. Obviously, the Gargoyles convention in
FFN: Speaking of how we go evangelizing to new people, any word on the second half of season two on DVD?
GW: No, I wish there was. At the moment, I don't even have a good contact at Disney Home Entertainment. They've had some turnover there. The person I started with left. The person who took over left. The person who took over has moved on to different projects, and I haven’t as yet been able to find out who the new person is. That's, I'll admit, disappointing, but I won't even say it's shocking. So, the truth is, and it's a hard thing to have to say, but our first DVD set sold just fine. I'm not saying it broke records, but it sold just fine. Our second DVD set, which was ten dollars more but had twice as many episodes on it, did not sell very well. Now, one could discuss ad infinitum why that was true, but the whys don't matter as much to me as the fact of it. The fact of it is that since it didn’t sell well, Disney sort of moved on. Now, in order to get their attention again, we have to raise the sales on the DVDs
FFN: Like maybe we have to organize somewhere where everybody buys another copy of the DVD on June 15th or something?
GW: Yeah, and that's tough because I know that 95% of the hardcore fans have already bought a copy, or more, and I'm not sitting here saying "It's not enough! Buy a second copy! Buy a third copy!" *laugh* I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is, we need word of mouth. It works like this. You tell one hundred people about the DVDs or the comic books or the convention. How many of those people are actually going to go out and spend money, and the answer is probably one out of a hundred. It's that bad. What that means is that in order to get significant numbers, you've got to tell a thousand people, so that ten people that you tell, at least percentage-wise, are spending money. That's what gets Disney's attention. Now, a thousand people being told generating ten point of purchase sales still doesn't mean anything. So it means I need all the fans to tell a thousand people each. I say this, and people are like, "Yeah, yeah, a thousand people," but you know, it's the age of the Internet. Find a way to tell a thousand people who don't already know. I can tell you, I go to tons of conventions, and they're like, "Whoa, it's out on DVD?" They have no idea. Again, I'd love it if Disney was spending more money on marketing, I won't deny that, but at the end of the day, we can grouse about that, or we can try and do something about it. And when I saw "we," I mean "we." I don't just mean the fans. I'm not putting it on them. It's myself and it's those of us working on the project, but if the fans don't step up, then the answer is, it's not going to happen. I'm not saying that's the way it should be, I'm just saying that that's the way it is.
FFN: Speaking of the fans, we've got some questions sent in by fans, perhaps in the style of "Ask Greg."
GW: I'm happy to do that, not making any promises. Go for it.
FFN: DoeEyedBunny asks: Greg, you write such strong female characters. What and who were your influences and inspirations for that?
GW: Well, I meet a lot of strong women. Starting with, I suppose obviously, my mom, and my sister, and moving on these days to my wife and my daughter. There were always strong women in my life, aunts and grandmothers and cousins and girlfriends and teachers, great teachers. But also from a literary standpoint, you know, the things that appeal to me as a reader or as a viewer, William Shakespeare wrote amazing female characters. I'm not pretending I'm on his level.
FFN: We know you're a fan. *laugh*
GW: I'm just saying that appeals to me, and so I'm not interested in writing shows that are merely guy-centric. I'm fascinated, even in a teenaged boy sense, with women, and have been from a precocious, early age. *laugh* I continue to be now, and in kind of all aspects of them, from the emotional, physical, sexual, whatever. It interests me. I like writing female characters. I'll even admit the fact that, because in the grand scope of things, less has been written about female characters, and with female characters. As odd as it sounds, it's almost more virgin territory to write about them. And also again, you're trying to write about the human experience, and that's approximately fifty percent of the population, so leaving them out doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense to me.
FFN: Speaking as a female fan of the show, and having grown up on things like He-Man and G.I. Joe, where you had "the girls" and they were occasionally allowed to do something cool, and then we got to see Elisa, and Demona, and Fox, and Titania and all of these strong woman at the same time. Just, wow.
GW: You know, it was funny when we were working on the show, we were writing Maggie the Cat, and we actually made the conscious decision to let her be afraid. *laugh* To let her be a little more of the "damsel in distress" because it crossed my mind that it was the one category of female character we hadn't done at all *laugh* We had plenty of guys who got afraid of stuff, but we were always so determined to create these strong women that there was no balance. I think the irony is that now Maggie is getting stronger, and may turn out to be one of our stronger female characters because she started in a different place. One of my goals has always been to allow the characters to grow and change and mature. Devolve. *laugh* Whatever seems to be right for them. One of the reasons we always knew, even back in the day, that Gargoyles was really working was that the characters began to tell us what happened to them next. It just became this process of tapping into the Gargoyles universe as opposed to writing it. When that's going, when it's flowing like that, you know it's working.
FFN: Our next question touches on what we were taking about before. Matt asks: is there anything fans can do to see new Gargoyles cartoons or DTVs? I'm going to guess the answer is going to be, buy the old ones, buy the comics.
GW: Yeah, if someone came to me and said, "Hey, we want to do more TV episodes, or we want to do direct-to-video," I'd be thrilled. I'd do it in a second. But in the short term, if we're being realistic, that's not going to happen. We do have a great outlet, great medium, for telling these stories. I mean, Gargoyles in comic form works, and so I'm thrilled to be doing that, and like you said, the short answer is, if you really are serious about wanting to see it on television again, the absolute best way to do that is to support things with your wallet that will get Disney's attention. At the moment, there are three ways to do that. There's the comic books, there's the DVDs, and there's the conventions. Just to be clear, I know I've said this before elsewhere, but the way we got Disney's attention to release the DVDs in the first place was through these conventions. They do take notice of it, they do pay attention. They put the 2004, I think …
FFN: The Montreal one.
GW: I think the Montreal convention was 2004, on the DVD. Supporting these things. Letting Disney know that there's a community out there who wants to spend money on their property. That is the best way to get Disney to want to do more things with the property, including TV, including movies, including everything.
FFN: Is there anything we can do as fans to convince Toon Disney to be rerunning the Gargoyles episodes at a time where anybody new might actually see them?
GW: I don't know. I'm not privy to what their overall plan is for their network and what it would take to convince them, how it works into their strategy. I am glad, very glad, 3a.m. or not, that it's aired nonstop, literally. We say it hasn't been on for ten years, and that's true in any real sense, because there haven't been any new episodes in ten years, but the fact is, it's never not been on the air, ever. The show has run in reruns nonstop since 1996.
FFN: So it's M*A*S*H.
GW: Yeah. Believe me, I wish I had a penny for every time a Gargoyles episode has aired somewhere. Boy, do I wish I had a penny for every time a Gargoyles episode is aired. That'd be great. Would I prefer it at 10p.m. instead of 3a.m.? Yeah. I'd prefer it at 4p.m. over 10. I'd prefer it having an all- Gargoyles nonstop channel, I guess. I'm that goofy. We take what we can get. The good news is that we've never been off the air. When the show went off the air, it went to USA, and when USA let it go, it went to Toon Disney, and it's been at Toon Disney ever since, which I think is something like eight years.
FFN: That's pretty awesome.
GW: It is.
Once again, we'd like to thank Greg for his time, his energy, and the sheer amount of effort he's put into these projects.