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February 24, 2008: WonderCon 2008 - Interview with Kurt Busiek

Superman Homepage staff writer Jeffrey Taylor caught up with writer Kurt Busiek at WonderCon 2008 and asked him about "Trinity", the new weekly DC Comics series...

How far into writing Trinity are you right now?

Kurt: The schedule is pretty good. Sure there will be problems because it's a year-long project and there are always problems, but nothing has cropped up yet. Everything's going very smoothly.

How do you expect Trinity to relate to the DCU? There's a big Superman story that Geoff Johns is planning. Will one affect the other?

Kurt: Trinity isn't going to cross over books. It's possible it might spin out a miniseries or something. But Trinity is going to be pretty self-contained. It's not bursting out of some other series or leading up to another series. And Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman will be having big stories going on in the year in their own books, but those stories aren't going to play into Trinity. Trinity is like the big blockbuster DC Universe adventure movie, and at the same time, the big blockbuster Superman movie is going to be going on. But they're two different movies, if that makes sense. They're each their own stories.

As Trinity unfolds over the year, should we expect one continuous story or several broken up?

Kurt: It's one big story, but it's an episodic story. Something happens in the first two issues and then at the end of that, something has been resolved and then something else is going on and that leads into the next three issues and that's resolved but they learned other things about what was going on in the first and second and so on.

So it's not all one continuous threat. You have episode, episode, episode but it all adds up to one big story.

I think that one of the problems that something like Countdown had early on is that it was going and going and going, but you didn't really have a sense of where it was going. And people are liking it a lot more now that they're getting to the part where its getting there. But Trinity may be 52 issues long, but it still reads like you're reading a comic book. Here's a fight, it ends. Here's a mystery, they discover something. Each chapter builds the over all story, but instead of nothing resolving until the end, it's a big adventure made up of small adventures.

We know that you can work fast. You're usually juggling multiple books and you even filled in for a few issues of Action Comics last year. Now you'll be doing about 12 pages each week. Is that the same amount of work?

Kurt: It's more. But that's one of the reasons why they took me off of Aquaman when they thought that this was going to be a smaller project. And now, a year later, now that we know how big it's going to be, they took me off of Superman as well. It's going to be a lot of work. I'm writing about 48 pages a month solo, which is a little bit more than two books a month. I'm also co-writing 40 pages of other stuff in the book that Fabian and the other artists are doing, which is also chapters of the story. It's not a separate thing. It's more episodes, more adventures and more stuff that builds to the conclusion. So it's 48 pages of solo writing and 40 pages of co-writing. So it's a lot of stuff.

You mentioned in an interview that you had a number of Superman stories you wanted to do on Superman. Will any of that become part of Trinity?

Kurt: Trinity's sort of built up its own story. I had a lot of stories that were planned to be part of Trinity when it was originally brought to me. And as the story we were telling developed, oh it turns out there's no room for that. One of the stories that was conceived for Trinity was Superman discovering that there was a third Kryptonian. So that story, when Trinity got put off for year, we decided that we can't put that story off for a year. We told people this character is out there and we've got other stuff happening so we've got to get this story done sooner. That story came out of Trinity and went into Superman. And that's why Batman was part of it. Batman was intrinsic to parts of it. Wonder Woman would have been. But we changed the story and we changed the plot, so I think that a lot of the stuff that I wanted to do with Superman in Superman would not turn up in Trinity, because Trinity is Trinity stories. But hopefully I'll get a chance to tell them afterwards.

Any idea what's going to happen with Chloe in the comics at this point?

Kurt: There is not going to be any Chloe. No Chloe. We spent two years getting all the right approvals, got all the right approvals and it got yanked at the very last minute. So no Chloe in the comics.

Any news about the Krypto story that never made print?

Kurt: They intend to print it when they feel they're able to. But that time has not arrived.

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February 24, 2008: WonderCon 2008 - Interview with Kurt Busiek

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