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, about the conventions, if we can't grow this, then the business becomes more short-term, which I don't think is anything any of us want.  So, I do ask the fans, not necessarily asking a single fan, "Go buy a thousand issues, with your own money!  Stop eating for a month!" *laugh*  I'm not asking that.  What I'm asking all the fans to do is to really make an effort to help us spread the word.  I'm doing my best to do that. I'm making convention appearances.  I went to nearly eight or nine conventions in 2006, it nearly killed me.  In a couple weeks, I'm going to my second convention of 2007.

 

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 Tennessee, the Gathering of the Gargoyles, and ComicCon in San Diego.  But if I get invited, I'll go to more than that because I want to help spread the word as well.  But I can't be everywhere, so I do interviews like this and I ask all the fans to tell people about the show.

 

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 DVDsto not only get it up to the level where they'd say "Yeah, it's worth us spending money to put out the third set," which would contain the second half of season two.  But, we have to get their attention all over again, and it took me ten years to get their attention, well nine, to get their attention the first time.  So we need the numbers to spike enough, or something else has to happen, maybe with the comic, maybe with the live-action movie, you know, something.

 

FFN: Like maybe we have to organize somewhere where everybody buys another copy of the DVD on June 15^th 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.