January 28th, 2008

Paul Dini’s career is the kind that most fan boys only dream about.  The man writes comic books and cartoons for a living.  In fact, over the last three decades, Paul Dini has been putting his own unique stamp on the pop culture industry, and has shaped the cultural landscape more then possibly anybody else in his field.  Starting as a freelance writer for Filmation Studios in the early 1980’s, Paul Dini worked on some of the decades biggest and most cherished cartoon series including GI Joe, Fat Albert, Ewoks and Jem and the Holograms.  Then, in 1989, Paul joined the team at Warner Brothers Animation as a writer for Tiny Toon Adventures and became a part of the 90's cartoon revolution.  Soon afterwards Paul became editor, producer and writer of Batman: the Animated Series, where he and Bruce Timm introduced the world to Harley Quinn, pop cultures most significant creation of the last two decades.  More DC superhero animation projects followed, including Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, Krypto the Superdog and Justice League, amongst others.  By the time he left Warner Brothers Animation in 2004, to become story editor for the hit TV series Lost, Paul had received five Emmy Awards for his animation work.  Paul Dini’s comic book work has earned him Eisner and Harvey Awards, and, besides being busy on television projects, Paul currently is not only the current writer on Detective Comics, but is the headwaiter of DC’s current weekly mega event, Countdown.  Meanwhile, in 2007 Paul introduced comic fans to Madam Mirage, a brand new original character, published by Image Comics.  Furthermore, sporadic adventures of another original creation, Jingle Belle (Santa Clause’ teenage daughter) appear through Darkhorse Comics.  Finally, along with his wife, professional stage magician Misty Lee, Paul co-writes and hosts Monkey Talk, a series of internet mini-films with his sock monkey son Little Rashy (voiced by Misty) and he even finds the time to be a part of the cinematic revival of the anime classic, Gatchaman!  Wow!  Having that many fingers dipped in that many honey pots is enough to put the average fan boy into a diabetic coma!  Paul Dini is a powerhouse.  A true renaissance man of the sub-culture.  As I said, his career is what fan boys dreams are made of. 

However, despite all of these incredible success and current projects, it was at the 2006 San Diego comic book convention that Paul Dini made an announcement that was to make my personal fan boy dreams come true!   Paul announced that he was working on an original Black Canary and Zatanna hard covered graphic novel.  Now as many regular readers know, these two fish netted heroines are my two favorite comic book characters and I have been collecting their adventures pretty much my entire life.  In fact, I have both characters tattooed on my body!  That's just how devoted I am to these characters.  So to have the two of them together, in one book, being written by a talent like Paul Dini made this graphic novel the one comic event that I have been most anxiously waiting for.  So, when I had the opportunity to interview Paul and Misty about Monkey Talk in December 2007, there was no way that I was not going to work in a few questions about the Black Canary/Zatanna project.  What followed was a lengthy discussion between Paul and I that I could have never predicted about the two things that has made Paul Dini a pop culture legend – animation and comic books.

So come and hear what Paul has to say about the origins of Countdown, the reason he loves Zatanna, his thoughts on the controversial Disney classic The Song of the South, the problems with the current state of the animation business, and even advises me, with the help of Misty Lee, on how to find the woman of my dreams, as 

CONFESSIONS OF A POP CULTURE ADDICT PRESENTS 

COUNTDOWN AND CARTOONS: A CONVERSATION WITH PAUL DINI 

I reached Paul Dini at his home in California via telephone in December, 2007.

Sam:  Okay Paul.  Now I don’t want to talk too much about your comics, because I know that you’ve probably talked the subject to death with every other site on the internet, but I couldn’t have a conversation with you and not tell you how much I am enjoying Countdown! 

Paul:  Thank you. 

Sam:  Well what you’ve done is take a really interesting assortment of characters, and some of them happen to be personal favorites of mine.  Mainly Mary Marvel and Jimmy Olsen and Triplicate Girl.  Now out of all the characters in the spectrum that you could have used, how did you pick these characters? 

Paul Dini:  We were looking for characters that were not the key major DC players but had strong links to them.  So Jimmy Olsen has strong links to Superman, Karate Kid to the Legion, Donna Troy to Wonder Woman, and Jason Todd to Batman.  Certain other characters also fit into the Batman character, like Holly Robinson and Harley Quinn.  Mary Marvel, of course, to the Shazam Family.  And we thought by taking characters that were the supporting characters in their respected universes that we could take a really fascinating look at the different Countdown stories through their eyes.  These are characters who don’t have books elsewhere yet they are such a big part of the DCU that you wonder what is going on with them when they fall off the radar for too long.  And to put them as the major players in a cosmic drama, I found very appealing.  A year ago when I first met with Dan Didio and the creative team putting together Countdown; Keith Giffen and Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Grey and a few of the others, we kind of hammered out what the story was going to be.  In some cases Dan had very specific ideas about where we would take some of the characters and how they would link into the bigger picture.  I threw a bunch of suggestions on the table, and then Jimmy, Justin and Keith each made story and character contributions.  Everybody brought in something and gradually the story took place over that week in New York and then a few weeks afterwards we hammered out a few other details.  And then the other editors at the DC titles got onboard with what they were going to bring into Countdown.  Countdown has been a year long event with quite a lot of series flow in and flow out of it.  At first I thought it wasn’t going to be that extensive but as it went along Countdown became the spine for a lot of other events.  So we found ourselves having to juggle those events and make room for them in the big epic.

Sam:  Well what I’m finding compared to 52, is that I have a far more personal attachment to the characters that you have chosen this time around.  However, when it comes to personal attachment the one project of yours I’m most excited about is the Black Canary/Zatanna hard covered graphic novel.  I have every appearance, either as and original, a reprint or a Xerox of every appearance of these characters, as well of both characters tattooed on my body. Now I know you can’t probably tell us a lot, but because you comic book sorts are very secretive.  Does Dan Didio have a death clause in your contract for anybody who reveals plot secrets? 

Paul:  Yes. 

Sam:  I thought that might be the case.  It explains a lot.  Well what can you tell us about the Black Canary/Zatanna book, and when can we expect to see it? 

Paul:  I think you can expect to see it the last half of 2008.  I think that’s the target date at this point.  What you’re going to see is a big adventure that mixes elements of magic, crime drama and all out action, but it also focuses on many of the reasons that Black Canary and Zatanna have been friends all these years. 

Sam:  Well you know, the last time that Zatanna and Black Canary were paired up as a duo was in Justice League of America #227, which was all the way back in 1984!  About five issues before Gary Conway introduced the Detroit team! 

Paul:  Well the last time I saw them together was a little bit in Identity Crisis where they are sort of hanging out and that kind of fueled a little bit of my thinking about the team up.  It’s a  natural pairing.  In discussing Zatanna’s history with Alex Ross, he maintains that Zee, especially in the early days of the JLA, was kind of a “kid sister” to some of the other members.  I liked that, so I established that Zatanna’s a couple of years younger then Black Canary and that Dinah’s a bit of a mentor to her. 

Sam:  Well I’ve written to so many creators over the years suggesting this.  I’ve written to everybody from Kevin Smith to Gail Simone. Anybody who has touched either of the characters but you’re the first one who has seemed to bite but it was over a year ago that you announced it.  San Diego 2006, wasn’t it? 

Paul:  Yup. 

Sam:  So what can you tell us about this project? 

Paul:  Well, the story takes place both in the present and in certain flashbacks in their past and these are not necessarily incidents that have existed in comics before, but are plausible extensions in their relationship.  I’m going back and kind of filling in the gaps.  Kind of like the way I put a previous connection between Bruce Wayne and Zatanna. 

Sam:  Which was brilliant Paul.  You know, as I said, I have every Zatanna appearance ever, and I consider your Zatanna arch in Detective Comics [833-834] the best Zatanna story I’ve ever read. 

Paul:  Oh, thank you. 

Sam:  And I’m looking forward to Zatanna’s return in Detective again in a few months. 

Paul:  Yup.  She’ll be back in April. 

Sam:  Sorry.  We’ve gotten off track.  I interrupted.  We were talking about the Zatanna/Black Canary book. 

Paul:  Zatanna, in particular, has a lot of gaps in her history and the story is going to fill in those gaps and it’s going to answer some questions and raise some other ones.  It also brings in a unique villain that operates both in Zatanna’s and Black Canary’s world and presents a threat to both of them.  It’s a lot of fun! 

Sam:  Well I know you’re a big Zatanna fan.  It’s something you and I have in common.  What is it about the character that appeals to you, and where does your love for her stem from? 

Paul:  I can’t even remember the first time I saw the character.  It must have been, oh I dunno, in high school or college or somewhere.  I must have seen her in an old Justice League reprint or something and I kind of wondered why there was this girl who looked like a cocktail waitress or showgirl running around with the Justice League.  But then it turned out that, no, she was a real magician and I liked that there was a type of…I don’t want to say earthiness…but a different quality to her.  Usually magical characters look like Clea from Doctor Strange or the Scarlet Witch or something but this girl looked like she just stepped off the main stage showroom at the Sands hotel in 1965.  So I liked that, and I liked the fact that she was just sort of operating on her own and had all these links to the DC Universe but she was always a character you didn’t see all that much.  She was off having her own adventures or on the fringes of what the Justice League was doing each month.  I also like magic and I’ve been a member of Magic Castle for a long time.  My Dad took me to see an escape artist get out of a straight jacket hanging upside down off the side of a building once and ever since that time I always thought magic was very cool.  So having a character who sort of walked those worlds between that of the superhero and the supernatural and show business, I felt there were probably a lot of interesting stories to tell about her.  A mixture of Dr. Fate and Leonard Starr’s classic show business strip, Mary Perkins on Stage.

Sam:  I was going through the Internet Movie Database earlier today, and looking at your animation credits, and the shows that you have worked on are like the storyboard of my childhood.   

Paul:  Wow. 

Sam:  Mr. T, He-Man, GI Joe, Fat Albert… 

Paul:  I wrote a lot of crap back then.  It was either that or sell my body for medical experiments and there were no takers. 

Sam:  Actually, I think the fact that you wrote a Jem and the Holograms episode is pretty awesome.  Do you actually remember what the particular plot with your Jem episode was? 

Paul:  I think it was about the girls at a magic competition or something. 

Sam:  Really? 

Paul:  As luck would have it, that was the one they assigned me.    

Sam:  Well, before we get to the question I was going to ask, and because we’re talking about your obvious obsession with girl magicians, you are married to magician Misty Lee. How did you actually manage to not only meet and marry someone who not only looks like Zatanna, but is also ACTUALLY a magician? 

Paul:  Okay, this is the origin story.  It’s interesting because when I wrote Zatanna:  Everyday Magic a few years ago, I got an e-mail later that year from magician Misty Lee who read the book and liked it and wanted to write me an e-mail and tell me so because, as she later explained to me, whenever she reads or encounters something she likes, she goes out of her way to tell people about it.  Even if she gets good service at a drive through restaurant she’ll call the manager later, not to complain, but to say that person really made my day and gave me good service.  So I got an e-mail from Misty Lee, who said that she was a female illusionist and to check out her web-site and I did and I saw this picture of this gorgeous girl surrounded by her assistants and the other people in her company and I said “Wow.  She’s really cute.”  And we started e-mailing back and forth and that led to phone calls and that eventually led to meeting in person and then one thing led to another. 

Sam:  Okay.  Well you give hope to fan boys all over the world that, well, for me personally, that I’ll meet a gorgeous blonde with a sonic scream that looks great in a pair of fishnets. 

Misty Lee:  Is the sonic scream all that important to you, because I bet you can find everything else but. 

Sam:  Maybe.  Well…maybe not. 

Paul:  Well I could just imagine.  She’d want you to take out the trash and it would be like (yells) SAAAAMMMMMM!  TAAAKE OUUTTT THHHE TRASSSHHHH!” 

Misty:  Sam wouldn’t be able to take out the trash. 

Paul:  You know, I was actually at the comic book store last week and there is the little figurine of the Black Canary that came out with the busts of the DC women and she’s put her hand to her mouth and I was thinking if she actually could do that when she’s doing the sonic scream, wouldn’t she have broken her fingers?  Why would you put your hand to your mouth? 

Misty:  Well wouldn’t that depend on how the vibrations effected her personally?  Because wouldn’t it make more sense if she was immune to it because, technically, does she have to cover her own ears? 

Paul:  No 

Misty:  Well if it would break her fingers then it would also break her eardrums. 

Paul:  That’s true. 

Misty:  Did I just say that all out loud? 

Paul:  Yeah. 

Misty:  I’m getting that Innsmouth look. 

Sam:  Innsmouth look? 

Paul:  You ever read H.P. Lovecraft?  There’s an H.P Lovecraft story called The Shadow Over Innsmouth which involves this scholar who is trying to trace the origins of a piece of jewelry to this town and everybody has this weird almost fishlike look.  If you’re a town resident you start off looking fairly normal and then your head takes a sloping quality and your eyes get all bulgy and, basically, everybody in the town has some kind of fish blood in them and when you come to a certain age you go back to the ocean and live as an amphibious creature for all of eternity.  So when we hear someone whom you’d think would never have any knowledge at all of comics or cartoons spout out with facts about Jack Kirby or Chuck Jones, we say they have “the Innsmouth look.”  They have revealed themselves to be of our blood, a fellow geek and member of the Esoteric Order of Dagon.

Sam:  Okay, well getting back to the question I was going to ask about your opinions as an animator.  Obviously you’ve been working in the cartoon industry for a long time, and once I remember being a convention and hearing Ty Templeton refer to you as an animation legend.  That was the phrase he used to describe you.  Well I was thinking about this the other day.  I was at my mothers home and she runs a daycare and as I was visiting my mother had the television on for some of the older kids to watch and I was watching some kids cartoons and it’d been a long time since I’ve really actually “watched” any modern kids cartoons, and all these cartoons were gentle, and politically correct and quiet and there was no good guys or bad guys or explosions or anvils falling on top anything or fight between good and evil. 

Paul:  What were these wretched cartoons? 

Sam:  Exactly!  That’s what I was thinking!  

Paul:  Were these current things? 

Sam:  They were current things. 

Paul:  Like Dora the Explorer? 

Sam:  No.  They weren’t watching Dora.  They were watching something about bunnies. 

Paul:  Bunnies. 

Sam:  Yeah.   Something about bunnies. 

Paul:  The only animated bunny is Br'er Rabbit or Bugs Bunny. 

Sam:  Do you have a copy of Song of the South on DVD? 

Paul:  Oh yeah. 

Sam:  Where did you get yours? 

Paul:  A British pressing. 

Sam:  I got it off of a Disney collector.  It’s one of my very favorite Disney films. 

Paul:  That animation of those characters is so beautiful.  Just the way the animators captured the personalities of Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox.  It’s just amazing. 

Sam:  Do you think Disney will ever release it on DVD? 

Paul:  I think eventually, once they find a proper way for apologizing for it in a filmed bit before the picture.  Disney has to find the right way of saying: “this is a historical piece that was wrong then and it’s wrong now,” but, no, it really wasn’t wrong then. 

Sam:  No.  Not at all. 

Paul:  Their perceptions are wrong now. 

Sam:  I honestly think that the Song of the South was a very progressive film.  I mean, it was, what, made in the 1940s. 

Paul:  Yeah. 

Sam:  And it portrayed black and white kids, living in the South, of different race and culture, singing and playing together!  It portrayed a black man as not only the main character, but the wisest, most moral and smartest character in the film.  I mean, for the 1940s that was highly progressive. 

Paul:  Yes, but in retrospect Walt Disney may have made a mistake by not saying when the film was set.  Many of the original Joel Chandler Harris stories were set after the Civil War during the reconstruction.  Explaining that the freed slaves who now worked on the Plantation were sharecroppers who were free to come and go might have taken some of the onus off it.  There are a few stories about Uncle Remus going to Atlanta for a visit and coming back to the folks at the plantation about what he saw there, so it’s clear in the later books that he is a free man at that point.  I think Disney will probably put out Song of the South domestically; it’s out in just about every other country.  That’s why we have the Splash Mountain attractions in Florida and in California.  If you go overseas and check out the Disney merchandise, the characters are still well known in different countries.  

Sam:  I remember as a kid being brought into the gymnasium in elementary school and sat on the floor with the rest of the school and we watched a reel to reel print of The Song of the South when I was in the fifth grade.  It was a part of my childhood.  But anyway, back to my bunnies.  The ones I saw at my mother’s house.  What do you think is the problem with the state of animation today?  Why are we getting flooded with all these gentle, politically correct, unimaginative, soft, no anvil animation?  Is it just a trend?  I mean, when I was a kid cartoons were on one day a week.  Saturdays.  And then they ended at noon and you’d watch sports or wrestling.  Besides that, they were on for a few hours before school, an hour at lunch, and a few hours after school and there were only four channels that showed them.  Now you have six or seven all day cartoon networks.  How do you feel that animation has changed in the last number of years, and has it been for the better or for the worse? 

Paul:  I think that there are peaks and valleys in the creativity level of TV animation and I think right now we are in a valley time. It’s been discouraging to watch that happen, primarily, in the last four to five years.  That’s when I really started noticing it and there are a number of reasons for that.  If you go back to the 1980s cartoons were just as bad as they are now.  They were very soft and very homogenized.  The three major networks controlled all the content.  You saw shows that were very gentle, like Smurfs and whatever shows were based on pre-sold properties. 

Sam:  Like Care Bears, or the Get Along Gang, or Rubik’s Cube and Monchichi. 

Paul:  Yeah.  It was all pretty much garbage.  And then there was an effort to make the programming better, and it wasn’t just cartoons, but you saw shows like Pee Wee’s Playhouse come along and that was a fun children’s show but also a fond look back by the people creating it to the shows they liked.  It was also a skewered, hip reworking of shows like Pinky Lee and Soupy Sales.  There was a little bit of innuendo in it and some humor that deliberately played over the kids head. 

Sam:  It was kind of like watching Soupy Sales on acid. 

Paul:  Yeah, yet the kids watching it liked the show and all those characters but they wouldn’t pick up on the slightly adult innuendo. I think when that happened it showed that Saturday morning could be fun again and then you had people like Ralph Bakshi doing his Mighty Mouse show which raised a lot of eyebrows at the time because it was funny for kids and adults and featured finally, at long-last, some interesting and eye-catching animation.  Then you had Disney bringing out The Disney Afternoon with Ducktales and suddenly the classic Disney characters were back in newer cartoons and there was some effort to make them look good.  Then you had younger artists and filmmakers breathing new life into the animated Disney features again.  You had Roger Rabbit which revived a lot of people’s interests in Chuck Jones and Tex Avery Looney Toons type humor and then The Little Mermaid which brought back a great interest in the classic Disney features.   The bar on animation was being raised all over the place.  In features and on TV.  You had The Simpsons, which was funny and irreverent.  When we did Batman, FOX really wanted to make the show dark and appealing to an older audience so we were able to go and make each episode as if it was its own movie.  Nobody had done anything like that on kids television before.  Some episodes are better then others and some are hit or miss, but it really was different for it’s time.  I remember at that time everybody at Warner animation was very inspired by those shows because we thought this was the start of a trend and that animation was on the rebound again. Cartoon Network was taking a chance by green lighting new shorts that became shows like Dexter’s Lab and Powerpuff Girls and Nickelodeon was doing shows like Doug and Ren and Stimpy and Rugrats and each of those shows were taking new approaches to graphic design and storytelling and suddenly animation became a real fun place to be.  I stayed at Warner’s for well over fifteen years working on a bunch of their shows and had a really good time.  But once we got into 2000 or 2001 or so things began receding again and started on a down swing.  I think creatively we went into a dark time and it’s not really the fault of the creative people because a lot of them are still out there and still capable of great work.  But what happened was that for a brief time the networks and the censors and the so-called creative execs had a back seat to the people who were making [cartoons] and that was really the exception and not the rule.  Then the corporations began to monopolize. When Disney bought ABC, it eliminated that marketplace for other studios because ABC could take whatever was running on GEN X or ToonDisney just double or triple run it through the week.  That’s why you could have Kim Possible, Lilo and Stitch and The Proud Family on Saturday morning because those programs were running on different Disney venues on cable and they just thought that they might as well run it on Saturday morning, so ABC was not buying any new programming.  NBC stopped running Saturday morning cartoons in the late 90’s.  So did CBS, which became largely an outlet for old Nickelodeon kid stuff.  When these various corporations realized that they have a hundred episodes of Sponge Bob and a hundred episodes of Kim Possible, they really don’t need to buy anymore cartoons.  At Warner Brothers we were always encouraged, right up to the very end, to be as creative as possible and the shows got a tremendous fan following.  When Cartoon Network finally did Justice League Unlimited, and Bruce Timm and his crew brought in all the DC characters, CN had kind of reached their limit with the kind of episodes that they wanted to do.  Yes, the ratings were very good and the fan interest was through the roof and the toys were still selling but there’s not the same advertising dollars available on cable as there are on a network like NBC or FOX, so new episodes are just not profitable in the network’s eyes.  So even if the show has a tremendous following, the network would rather cancel it and come up with something new to entice potential advertisers.   

Sam:  I was totally heartbroken that I never got a Vibe episode. 

Paul:  Oh yeah.  Well the sad thing about traditional TV animation is that it’s a entertainment medium that only requires mediocrity, and when a show comes along that is superior, it’s almost looked on as a freak or a noble failure by most network execs.  They should look at it as something to strive for, but all too many execs still see US animation as something soft and cute for babies.  Now that Justice League is wrapped, you can never really assemble the same team and do it again.  You can do other versions of Batman and Superman but you can never do what you did originally. 

Sam:  Do you think that there will ever be an upswing?  Do you think this trend will ever change? 

Paul:  I think at some point it will but I think the balls gone back the way it was where there’s a lot of network control, there’s a lot of focus testing, there’s a lot of people who don’t know how to create entertainment who are responsible for putting it on the air. And if there is a renaissance I’m not sure if anyone knows where it’s going to come from.  It may come from people doing it on the internet.  People will always create funny cartoons.  The problem is the more people that are involved with it who are not the original creators, the less funny it’s going to be.  And I maintain that whatever a character becomes the sole property of a corporation, that character basically dies.  Bugs Bunny is the funniest character ever, but he’s dead. 

Sam:  Wow.  That’s depressing.  I didn’t know we’d end this discussion on the death of Bugs Bunny. 

Paul:  Well they tried reviving him about three or four years ago when they did Looney Toons Back in Action.  Warners created a unit to do new Bugs Bunny cartoons and they had some very gifted cartoonists working on them but the support from the studio wasn’t there and, ultimately, they abandoned the shorts program.  Now Disney is making a commitment in doing more shorts and doing experimental shorts and some of those will feature the classic characters.  There’s a new Goofy short coming out soon in front of the new National Treasure movie.  But as much fun as it is to go out to a movie theater and see a theatrical short, that’s an uphill battle too because you have to all but force them down the throats of the people who own the theaters because they hate running cartoons.  At least Coca-Cola pays them money to run those ads but if you want to show a cartoon, well it’s not like in the old days when you could book a program to run in your theatre that would feature a couple of cartoons.  Nowadays many theatre owners look at cartoons as an annoyance.  But could you recreate Looney Toons and redo them for cell phones or the internet or someplace else that people are talking about?  I guess you could, and I guess it’s just a matter of how to do it.  I know that everybody is looking in that direction because with no Saturday morning TV and with educational TV just being very homogenized pabulum, there’s no place to run funny cartoons anymore. 

Sam:  Well Paul. You’re about to recreate one of my all time favorite cartoon series, Battle of the Planets, aka G-Force, aka Gatchaman!  Now is that going to be animated or is that going to be live action? 

Paul:  That’s going to be CGI animated.  It is going to have a similar look and feel to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie had that came out earlier this year. 

Sam:  So how are you going about recreating that franchise? 

Paul:  I can’t really talk about it but I am working with some very very gifted people, and it’s going to be really good.  I think you’ll be pleased with it. 

Sam:  So Paul, what can we expect, that you’re allowed to tell us, for 2008 without DC’s death clause going into effect? 

Paul:  I got a bunch of things that are sort of on the horizon.  I want to work more with my own characters like Madame Mirage and Jingle Belle and Ida Red and some of the others I’ve created in comic books and I’m looking at venues where I’ll be able to do that.  Maybe not in publishing as a first option but in other ways to keep those characters alive and to do other things with them. 

So, despite the fact that Paul was one of the busiest writers in comics in 2007, it looks like we have even more great things to look forward by him in 2008!  I want to wish Paul Dini luck on another banner year this upcoming year, and thank him for the contribution he has made as a trail blazer on the pop culture journey.  

All content copyright Sam Tweedle 2006.