2002 Comic Book News Archives

Smallville

February 23, 2002: Paul Levitz Talks "Smallville" Comic Book

Newsarama sat down with new DC Comics President, Paul Levitz and discussed many things about DC Comics and the business of publishing comic books. Amongst their discussions they talked about a "Smallville" comic book tie-in. Here's an excerpt from the lengthy interview...

Q: Let's talk about Smallville and DC. In the past, you've been very quick to launch tie-in comics to the animated series, but with Smallville, even when it was being hailed as a hit, you still haven't really touched it. Was there an uncertainty in how to approach it, since it wasn't about Superman or Superboy, or was it a wait and see until the series got its legs?

A: One of the differences between live television and animation is that in animation, you have model sheets and scripts usually a minimum of eight to twelve months before the show airs, so you have pretty much everything you need to do to create a comic book at the very beginning of the process.

With live television, you don't know how the characters look until after the episode has been filmed, and usually the system for the writing only to be a few weeks ahead of the filming. So, by comparison, we had Justice League premiering this past fall, we had the character sheets and scripts safely in hand the previous fall. We certainly had the outlines, which was all we needed to know what the guys were out to do.

On Smallville, they were still making changes to who was playing some of the characters and some of the scripts in the months leading up to the launch, so we didn't have material nearly as early to work with.

Q: Is a series on the books now?

A: We have a special coming first, which is a combination of a comic-format story, and some behind the scenes stuff - a 64-pager. Mark Verheiden, who is working on the show, and has been a wonderful comic book writer will do a 22-page lead story, and then there will be a couple of other stories written by some of the other writers form the television show, plus a bunch of strange back up stuff.

Read the complete interview at the Newsarama website.



2002 Comic News

Listed below are all the Comic News items archived for 2002.


Back to the News Archive Contents page.

Back to the Latest News page.