Oftentimes, the biggest names in comics break in through the most low key gigs. Kurt Busiek’s first job was a Green Lantern back-up piece. Devin Grayson’s first gig was a short Batman origin retelling. The list of artists who have gotten their big starts with a simple fill-in issue is seemingly endless. Tom O’Connor’s first comic writing gig is coming up shortly with an 8-page story in the Brendan McCarthy issue of SOLO. He happily agreed to talk to KFR about it.

OK, Tom - can you give us a little background about yourself?

I’ll keep it short —- I’m a Massachusetts-grown guy. I grew up in Western Mass, moved to Boston after college (a crazy ‘experimental’ sort of place called Hampshire College). I’ve worked in Television production pretty much since 1988, starting in Boston, doing everything from sweeping up to editing to writing/producing for sports networks, documentaries etc, while I played bad guitar in a string of truly awful and completely forgettable punk rock bands. I moved to Southern California ten years ago and just like everyone else, I’ve been hammering away at writing, or at least trying to improve my writing, doing comedy and scrambling for freelance gigs of any and all sorts. Some years I’ve been able to put “writer” in the occupation line of my tax forms, other years I haven’t. …but that’s the way it goes. Right?

Brendan McCarthy has been a comic book artist of some renown for a number of years. How did you hook up with him for your first comic book writing assignment?

I was originally introduced to Brendan by a mutual friend — gads — five? Six years ago? Because we worked together she was pretty familiar with my written work (a lot of which is “un-credited” re-write & punch-up sort of stuff, so not many people have really read “me”) and because we were friends she had also seen me perform my own material etc. She had known Brendan for a number of years also and so she thought we should meet and that maybe we had some of the same artistic sensibilities etc. Brendan and I met, and hit it off, he read some of my work – mostly screenplay and TV-type scripts, and I, of course, got to see a lot of his work, which is pretty dang amazing.

So a few times in the past couple years Brendan has been nice enough to hire me on to a few of his various projects. We all have ‘projects’ of all sorts, don’t we? And then, I didn’t hear from him for quite a while (he had moved back overseas, I believe)… until a few months ago when he called me up, said he was living in Southern California again, told me about his SOLO deal with DC and asked if I would maybe like to contribute a story. Does anyone say ‘no’ to an offer like that? I sure don’t.

How did writing a story for a comic book compare to the writing you normally do? Was it harder, easier…just different?

I would say it was just different, especially in the final stages. The process starts the same – you get an idea for the story, and then you start writing it out in simple terms… just a ‘logline’ then you expand on it with a short outline, the outlines then get longer and longer until you’re ready to start carving stuff away. I think that’s where Brendan’s expertise came in especially handy… I think the first real draft that I turned in was waaaaay too much story to cram into the allotted eight pages…so we had to decide what PART of that story we were going to put in the book. After that it was just getting the hang of the technical aspects of writing the actual script… It probably takes too long to describe, but, say you’re writing a feature or TV script… you write in very ‘active’ and present tense terms especially when you’re describing action, such as: “He grabs the guy by the shoulder, spins him around and punches him in the eye” … but in a comic book script you have to describe what has just happened, to lead up to the still frame that is shown: “Having spun the guy around, we see him as he’s landing a punch to the guy’s eye” … that sort of thing. Does that make sense? I know it seems like a minor difference, but it does take some getting used to.

Were you a comic book fan before the SOLO project?

Isn’t everyone? I certainly couldn’t win any trivia contests, but I’ve read comics since I was a little kid and have gone through periods where I’ve read more and periods where I’ve read less. Good stories are good stories, regardless of the medium.

The story you’re writing is for a book that’s meant to focus on Brendan, so what level of input does that give you into the collaboration?

Johnny Sorrow is a relatively new character that’s spent the last year or two being built up in the DCU. Whose idea was it to write a short story about him?

(This sort of answers both of the above questions)

Brendan gave me the lowdown on the SOLO project, that being that he had a pretty free hand with the DC Universe and told me that if I had any specific story ideas or pitches that would be DC-related, that he would like to hear them.

So we got together, and I had some idea I was all excited about and I told him about it… He didn’t dig it, and as a testament to what a great idea it must have been; I have NO recollection of what it was either, so his instincts were probably 100% right.

Then he told me about a story idea he had started working on and asked if I would be interested in pursuing that…and whatever it was (again I don’t recall) it just didn’t ring any of my bells either. So we were both a little bummed out… Then he just started laying out some rough pencil-pen sketches… Brendan works very intuitively, sometimes almost mystically, and what he had done was download just a long list of NAMES of DC comics characters, famous and obscure, and then, with no information or images about any of them, started doing some sketches. They were all pretty cool, but then he just spilled out this line drawing of a guy with sunglasses and a shag haircut with the name ‘Johnny Sorrow’ scrawled across the top. That’s all. I just looked at it and said: “Let me write something for THAT” Sometimes you just get a feeling about something.

I took the sketch home, taped it on my wall and, although I usually hate sounding too goofy about things, I then just conjured up the story that had to be told. I didn’t do any research either. I had no idea who Johnny Sorrow was ‘supposed to be’… Which is, I guess a luxury of the SOLO series.

So I wrote up the story as more of a short script treatment, and sent it to Brendan. He responded with a lot of notes, both general and specific and then in the course of oh, about two or three back-and-forths I got it down and into the more official ‘comic book script’ format.

Brendan was very generous in letting me tell ‘my’ story, but he was also an expert about what needed to be cut and when to add a special visual detail or line. Let’s face it; he’s a guy who knows how it’s done. So that was all cool.

Although I did describe scenes, characters and settings in words in my script I, of course, had zero input when it came to his drawings, which only makes sense. He’s the visual artist, and I can’t even draw stick figures…. and when he showed me the finished pieces it was pretty cool. Almost exactly what I saw in my head anyway.

Is your Johnny Sorrow story going to be adopted as DCU cannon?

That would be awesome, but I have absolutely no idea. Like I said, the luxury of the ‘SOLO’ series is that the artists and writers don’t have to stick to DCU cannon, but that can mean that they remain sort of ‘stand alone’ pieces that won’t be continued. Since I finished the project, I have done some research on Johnny Sorrow. You said he’s been ‘built up’ in recent years, but I wasn’t surprised to find out he was originally an older, fairly obscure character – because before all this, I’ll confess, I had never heard of him.

Although my story doesn’t jibe exactly with “the official version”, I can see some surprisingly close parallels, which was pretty cool. In both cases he’s a character that exists in a verrrry grey moral area. I can certainly imagine continuing the JS story I started… It’s only 8-pages long and probably raises more questions about him than it answers.

Do you have any other writing gigs in the pipeline with DC or any other comic book publishers?

Currently I don’t have anything planned with DC, but of course I would jump at the chance to do some more work for them. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but the whole process of dealing with the folks at DC was remarkably painless and 100% hassle free. Mark Chairello, the editor, even took the time to send me an email saying how much he had liked my script (which he had to approve) I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve gotten an email like that from any sort of editor. I would work with them again in a heartbeat, but heck, who wouldn’t?

Are there any other characters in particular that you’d like to tackle in the future?

At this point, I’m just a freelance sort of guy who was lucky enough to land a good story in a cool book; I can’t really afford to be choosy. I would be happy to write for any character. That said, of course, like most of the writers I’ve ever met, I’m a bit more attracted to the darker, morally conflicted characters… or even outright bad guys. Everyone knows they’re more fun to write… in any medium…They’re often very memorable, and they give you some license to be a bit more outrageous.

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