Hey, everybody, welcome back time again for Word Balloon, the Comic Book Conversation Show.

John cuntris here.

This is a great rerun that I've never reran.

This is an episode of me talking to my buddy Greg Rucca, and we're talking about Denny O'Neil, he had just passed.

But also we talked about how Rucca really owes his count book writing career to Denny, because Denny is the guy that found Greg through his mystery novels, decided he might be a good fit for Batman, brought him in during the No Man's Land era, and the rest is history.

We explore Greg's attitudes towards Batman and Wonder Woman and some of his great runs.

We also mirror that with some of Denny's runs, like his run on Wonder Woman, and of course his philosophy's on Batman as well.

This is really great, and it's actually a teaser for a new conversation with Greg that's coming up.

Greg has just started a Cheetah and Chesher Versus the Just League mini series, a great caper comic and I'm glad he's doing it.

I'm glad he's back writing, although you know, He's also still doing Lazarus with Image.

He's wrapping up the Lazarus story.

The Old Guard is still in their Black Magic his Wonderful series with Nicola Scott.

In fact, Nicola is the artist on the Cheshire and Cheetah Versus the Justice League mini series as well.

But yeah, I just kind of thought this would be a neat examination of both Greg's writing style and his love of Danny O'Neil, and really an examination of both of their writing philosophies.

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Hey everybody, Welcome back to Word Balloon, the Comic Book Conversation Show.

John Cutress here.

Look who's back one of my guys.

Man always a good It's uh.

It's time for a very special ruck at debrief.

Good to see you, buddy.

How you being good to see you?

John uh?

As as we have said before, you know, fine with an asterisk.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, and the asterisk keeps getting bigger and bigger.

I know, man, I know, and and you know, along with obviously the status quo of the world right now, we're losing good guys.

You know, a couple of months ago was Marty Pasco and uh yeah, and now we're saying goodbye to Danny O'Neill this weekend, and it's it's it's tough.

And I and I, I mean, obviously you knew the man much better than I did.

I did have the pleasure of doing a few conversations with him, and it means the world to me that I did get a chance to really talk to him and you know, hear what made him tick and also talk about the work.

I've Yeah, I I get the word has been bouncing around a lot, and I hadn't thought of it in these terms, but it's come up with regards to Black Lives Matter and and and social action and social media presence in light of that, and uh and the and the word is is performative, right, And I get really nervous if I I I tend to get worried, you know, when when I see words like tribute come along or here's tragedy, and immediately somebody rolls out a book and says we're gonna do a fundraiser, and I always get I just get awkward with that.

There's there's a piece of me.

It's like there's a difference between grieving and and and showing your grief.

You know, there's a difference between helping and trying to show other people that you have intent to help, you know.

And I suppose that's a roundabout way of saying that I am I am.

I am here doing this with you because it is you and you and I have known each other for a really, really long time.

I don't want to You're not.

I just I you know, I I this is Sunday night, and what the news came Friday, right, yes, Friday morning, Friday, and I hadn't been up that long when I found out.

And and I'm not the only person who did this.

It turns out I was talking to Charlie Kauchman, not yesterday of the Friday night he called me, and it turns out he did the same thing, and I suspect a number of us did, which was you know, you got the news, and almost the first response not the first response, but almost the first response was to sit down and write, which I suppose tells you a whole lot about Denny right there, you know.

And I I wrote this thing and I was like, I'm going to write it and I'm not going to edit it.

And I had that moment again, is this performative?

If I put this on Instagram?

Am I saying, Oh, look at my sorrow, which is not what I want.

This isn't about me.

So I put it out and uh, and I called Rick Burchett, and Rick and I are working on.

Uh, We've got a project that we're working on, and yeah, well it all goes well, yes, And I suppose I guess this is just getting right into it.

See, this is why we get along solo.

John, You never have to ask me anything.

I Denny introduced Rick, and Denny put us together.

Denny, it was San Diego and I think it had to be San Diego ninety nine or two thousand.

It was either.

I think it was ninety nine.

That's where I was going to go, great because yeah, I'll.

Go on and then I'll yeah yeah, because it was it had to have been during Noman's Land, right what I was thinking.

Yeah, And Denny says to me, him, let's go get some lunch.

And there's an artist who's going to join us, and I want you to meet him.

And my memory, in my memory, it's it blurs.

It might have been at dinner, and I can't remember if Mary Fran was there or not, but in my memory sometimes she is this is twenty years ago for me.

Yeah, you know, and I was at that point, you know, mid late twenties punk, you know, I mean I just was so you know, full of a juice and gasoline.

And you know too, I was too young to know better, you know, I just it wasn't I had all the arrogance of youth.

And and we sit down to eating and I'm introduced to Rick.

And Rick and I get on like a house I like immediately, like within thirty seconds.

And you know, Rick has years on me.

He is of a different generation, and yet all of our cultural touchstones and song were the same.

Like we bonded like that, cool left the meal together, like walked back to the convention together.

And I was like, well, we got to work together, you know, man, we gotta, we gotta And it went from there and we talked about Denny as a writer.

Was this motorcycle era?

Greg meaning, did I own one?

I think I did at that point.

I I bring this up because we everybody, everybody in comics understands Denny as a writer.

Right.

We can look at his body of work, and we can look at the influence of that body of work.

You know, he was the man.

If you love Batman, then you love Batman because of Dennie O'Neill.

You may think it's because of Frank Miller, but it's because of Dennie O'Neil.

Right, Denny was the man who made Gotham noir.

Right, Denny was the man who turned it hard boiled.

Right.

Denny was the guy who was planting a social action flag early and often and at a time when it was common sense.

But that it was also not done certainly at DC.

Right.

Right.

You know you'd been getting it over a marvel, you know, but there was Denny going, no, no, no, we're going to talk about this stuff.

You know, it's twenty twenty and you read books that are written in nineteen seventy one, and you, holy mackerel, these are dated, and they are stylistically, there of their time, Artistically, there of their time, but their merit and their heart doesn't change.

We know Denny as that writer.

We know Denny is the guy who gave us Rachel Goule.

Right, And even if you don't know it was Denny who gave us Rachal goul if you saw Bamm begins, guess what, that's a direct line, yep.

Right, And one's ability to say that racial Gould is not a very good to racial goal because he's not racal Gold.

The way Denny made him comes from Denny.

So we know that about Denny.

The thing that and the way I knew him in my experience of him was as the group editor of the Batman books, as this guy who I never heard raise his voice.

That's not to say he never did.

I wasn't in the office twenty four to seven had collected, in my opinion, around him.

The last of the great editorial groups like that stuff has gone.

Now it's gone, that apparatus of assistant editors.

They're they're trying to rebuild it, and DC has sort of clunked along saying there's a bat group, and there's this Superman group, and there's a Justice League group.

But you know, Denny was surrounded, you know, Jordan Garfinkel, Darrin m chnzo, Scott Peterson.

We go down the line, and these are all editors who had and you hear this complaint a lot these days.

He had editors, they had his complete trust in backing.

You know, he wasn't sitting there over their shoulders.

And if you follow that all the way up, Jeannette con wasn't looking over his shoulder, Paul Levitt's wasn't.

You know.

It wasn't being policed like that was.

It was a brunt.

It was an era.

You know.

He tended a garden that flourished.

And one of the unspoken skills of an editor is, certainly in comics, is the ability to put talent together.

And we don't have a lot of that anymore.

We don't but Denny and and that wasn't simply you know, in terms of writers and artists and so on.

It was literally, this is the right editor for this job, for this book.

And we don't see that anymore.

And that maybe because it was actively dismantled, Maybe because it was passively dismantled.

You know, a lot of the people who came in and followed Denny worked very hard to erase Denny.

And I, you know, I'm I normally wouldn't be this frank about it, but I am old enough now that I don't fucking care part in my language.

And you know, when he left, You see, there was a period when he did not leave.

He was not a cord of the grace he deserved.

And I get angry when I think about that.

He was he was, He was a remarkable man, and all of that stands next to him being a remarkable artist, you know, being this extraordinary guy who had gone through some extraordinarily difficult things yep, you know, and and was was not shy about, you know, his struggles with drugs and alcohol.

Yeah man, he so yeah.

I mean, I'm gonna miss him, and I will I happily tell you, you know, I'll tell you stories if you want stories or whatnot.

But like my testimony, and my testimonial ends with this, you know, which is we're not going to see his like again, and we won't see his like again because the world he was born from is gone, and we're not going to see his like again because the industry that he worked in is gone.

In the same way that Archie.

You know, and I never had the good fortune of working for our I arrived just before Archie passed.

Archie Goodwin is who you're doing about, obviously, Yeah, but yeah.

So yeah, No, I'll tell you Greg honestly, And I first of all, completely understand what you're saying about being concerned when you want to pay tribute, and that it does come off as performance.

Look at me working in sports radio.

I had to do a lot of memorials, and I always felt like I was walking over somebody's grave and I'm like, I shouldn't be doing this.

Yeah, the reason why I wanted to talk was to get those I won't deny that I would love to hear some stories because again, I think he was a great editor, and I do want to hear about the people that work with him in that capacity, because not only would he put great writers and artists together, It's well known there were creators who came from all political stripes and all managed to work to other on Batman or individually, but with Denny and not agree with his politics necessarily and still recognize talent.

Well.

I think that's great.

And and and he he had this wonderful uh ability.

It's interesting.

You know, you will meet some editors and I was talking to Alejandro or Bona about this last week.

There are certain editors you will meet, and what they are is they want what they're editors because they are frustrated writers.

So what they really want you to do is you're writing the story that they're not writing.

And a good editor.

One of the things a good and true editor will do will accept that the story you are trying to tell us the story that you want to tell, and regard artless of their personal opinion about it.

Their job is to uh facilitate the telling of it as as best as possible.

If that is the story you want to tell, then maybe you need to look at this right not, but they are not the person who tells you that is not the story you should tell.

And Denny was, you know, very gifted at that and understand.

I think that comics was a really broad tent that it could encompass many many things, you know, but there were certain things Denny.

You know, Denny was adamant that you never showed Batman sleeping with anybody.

We talked, Yeah, because if you did, guess what everybody would and guess what's happened?

Everybody has this is literally what happened?

Literally what happened?

Right?

Apparently Batman can't keep it in the tights, dude, I know.

And I was going back again and listening to these conversations, especially the last ones we had in eighteen.

Yeah, he wasn't crazy about Catwoman and Batman hooking up.

No.

Well, I mean because Denny had very you know, he had very fixed opinions about what what.

And it wasn't that he was dictatorial about it.

There were, but there were some red lines, and they were there for some very good reasons.

And I think as we've seen them a road, we've seen why they were there.

You know, there are certain things you break if you're not really careful with what the stories you're telling.

If you take Joker too far, for instance, then Batman becomes ridiculous, right, because if the Joker is successfully killing hundreds of people in issue, then Batman's inability to kill him, to stop him becomes really problematic.

Right, you take Joker far too far?

Another you know, another example, you weren't supposed to understand Joker, you know you are you are not?

And he would always talk about the Joker.

As you know the ropes.

The ropes have filled certain purposes.

The Joker's purpose was chaos.

He was he was the coyote god in it.

He was the trickster.

You didn't want an origin for him, You didn't need it.

You could if you if you took what what what Alan had done in killing joke.

And this is regardless of how one feels about the Killing Joke.

The key phrase in there is it maybe happened this way, I remember it differently each time.

Yep.

The Joker establishes himself as an unreliable narrator.

The Red Hood story is a story created that he's telling you to generate sympathy for himself.

Right, well, if he's capable of generating sympathy for himself, then he shouldn't be doing what he is doing.

Right.

If he understands empathy on that level, then he knows what he is doing is without justification.

Absolutely.

The second you start saying, oh, well no, it was this Red Hood thing, and so I guess what You've damaged the Joker, you actually have changed what he is.

And he was very careful about sort of the core things.

You know, he he cleaved to the core truths as he saw them of what Batman was, and I do think modern Batman has strayed a lot from those cores.

I saw somebody in the car saying, you know, Batman works the best when he is.

Yeah, he is a work Betteran's aloof with his female look cups.

Yeah.

You know.

One of the things we did actually after No Man's Land, and one of the things we wanted to talk about and it never took was that at a certain point you ran out of the argument that Batman and Joker are mirrors.

Okay, is fallacious because it opens up the door to Batman is crazy too, right.

Right, Yeah, Sean Goodon Murphy is I thank god that down that road obviously with his book.

But if you do that and you say, well Batman is insane, right because the Joker is crazy, so Batman's crazy, then Batman is incapable of being a hero.

So if you want to tell stories where he is not, if that's what you're about, If you don't want you Batman to be a superhero, if you don't want to tell these stories about heroism, then that's fine, that's a choice.

Go ahead.

But if you are saying no, at the end of the day, Batman is the good guy, then he cannot be doing what he is doing because he's crazy, right, He has to do it with full cognizance.

It has to be a decision, because that is the heroic act.

Everything else stems from it.

His willingness to jump in front of a bullet stems from it.

But the initial heroic act is to say, what happened to eight year old Bruce Wayne.

I will not permit to happen to anybody else.

Yeah, And therefore, every night of my life, I am going to go out and try to keep that from happening, knowing full well it's impossible, but the battle will be fought.

And then every now and then gets you know, the battle blows up large and we tell stories about Darkseide and so on, and that's fine, but in the context of Gotham, that's the core mission.

Yeah.

So I will tell you a story.

I think I've actually told it to you before, and it is the directly how Greg got into comics story.

But it is Danny O'Neill's story.

So I have written three novels for Bantam Books.

I've written Keeper and I've written Finder, and I think I think I had just delivered the manuscript for Smoker, and I am in New York, and I am fortunate that a high school buddy of mine by the name of Scott and Ibocken, who had worked for Fantagraphics and then ended up in New York working for DC, had put my first couple, my first novel, in front of his boss at that time, Patty Jaris.

And Patty quite liked the books, and Patty had asked me at a wonder Con that I had been at about the time liber and I had come out with White Out, would I have any interest in writing Batman, to which I said, are you out of your mind?

Of course I would.

What sort of question is that?

It's Batman, the ultimate private investigator?

Right?

So I no, I'm going to be out.

I'm living in Eugene, Oregon.

I know I'm gonna be in Manhattan because I'm meeting with the publisher.

And I tell Patty I'm gonna be in town.

This is great.

I'm gonna see if I can get you and Denny, you know, to go off for a lunch or something.

He said, well, wow, holy shit, Denny O'Neill, because for me.

And now we digress on this.

My dirty little secret in comics is that, unlike most people who write comics, I kind of came to superhero comics late.

Like I didn't really start reading superhero comics until I was in high school, and it was primarily Marvel.

Okay.

I didn't really know who Denny O'Neill.

Was until I was in college and I picked up this book mostly because it had this gorgeous Bilsonkeevitch cover that was sort of this film.

Noir poster, and I had this guy who didn't have a face and it was called The Question.

And I went back to my dorm and I read that issue.

And if you have not read issue one of the Denny O'Neill, you know Dennis Cohen Question series, I'm about to spoil how issue what ends, because the issue Issue one ends with Charlie dead, been shot through the head and dumped in the river yep.

And I was like, oh my god, this is brilliant.

And I you know, my whole time at college I was reading The Question because those books, uh, those books are amazing, and and there are there's those first twenty four issues in particular, that run is stunning, is just stunning.

And when you were at college and you were hanging out with your buddies who are USO reading comics, and one of them happens to be a site major and then turns to you and says, hey, you know who Thomas Zaz is?

And you say, you mean Charlie's adopted like the Charles Victor Zadz.

He says, yeah, you know who?

You know who who that is?

And I say no.

He says, this guy has written this book called The Myth of Mental Illness.

Like the thesis of the work is that there is no such thing as insanity.

There's only behavior that society deems as in approach is so inappropriate that they label it as insane rather than as illegal.

Okay, okay, So now you go back and you reread that whole run.

And amongst the many things Denny is examining, and he's examining a lot, he is interrogating the question of what is crazy.

Look at those first like eight to nine issues in particular, and his focus on the motivations of people, why they are doing what they do, why they end up doing what they do, how they get to the place where what for them the conclusion to do this thing is logical.

So Patty says, you know, let's see if Denny and you can have lunch.

I'm like, oh, you do.

The way Patty tells it is that she walked into Denny's office and she had the paperback of Keeper, right first novel, in one hand, paperback of Finder in her other.

She comes in, she says, hey, Denny, and she's holding the books and she says, so the guy, and Denny points and he says, where did you get that?

And he's pointing at Finder, and she says, you know, the the writer gave it to me, you know.

And he says, I read that first one and I loved it, and I didn't know the second one was out, at which point Patty says, well, interestingly enough, he's here in town.

And so I'm like, I walk in and I am and I don't.

I'm pretty good.

As my mom instructed me when I was very young, if you're feeling intimidated and incredibly nervous in a situation, just imagine the person and you're talking to sitting on the toilet.

Right.

That was her life advice to me, right that, and and for variations of that, I like, you know, there's something to it.

But but in the main, I don't actually tend to meet people and be like, oh, you know, I walked into that room.

I was literally shaking.

And Denny.

Denny was not expansive, you know, you look at the pictures of him, at least when I knew him.

He was not a He was not a big personality.

He did not walk into a room and command the room.

He was very Midwestern.

He was very Saint Louis.

He was Irish Catholic.

Right, you never got caught His Irish Catholicism was you never got caught being told, be telling anybody you were good at something, right.

He was very mild, and he's the sweet guy.

And he puts on his hat and he says, uh, well, let's let's go get lunch.

And I'm like, no, no, no, So we go and he takes me to he'd he'd had I think the heart attack.

I'm not sure how many he ended up happening, had a lot.

Yeah, so I think he'd had his first by then.

And at that point he was eating vegetarians.

So he had a vegetarian restaurant he wanted to go to.

So it was fine, great, we went, We're sitting there.

We're eating and we're chatting, and I make it about halfway through the meal and then I'm like, I just I have to ask you because I will die if I don't.

But the zazz thing and that question run and oh my god, and he did this thing where his eyes kind of went you know, and then he went, yeah, that was kind of there.

I was just like, oh my, So we have this lunch.

Yeah, and he says, uh, because he hadn't read white Out.

Okay, he had read He'd red Keeper, he hadn't read Finder yet, and so he didn't know if I could string words together in a comic.

Sure.

And he says to me, well, I tell you, why didn't you write me a story?

He just write me a little story.

I said, I have this idea for this story about Renee Montoya and two Face and he said, well, you know, we're doing this event coming up and it's gonna I can't go into the details so much, but we've had this great, big earthquake.

There's gonna be this huge earthquake in Gotham, and we're gonna do these things that are these aftershock stories.

And if you if you got an idea there that'd be great, and I'm like, okay.

So, like literally the next day, I'm flying home and I'm writing the d and he had loaded me up.

I had all these black and white you know, because in those days you didn't have In those days, you weren't emailing anything.

It was all going via I had.

They had a contract with d h L.

Yeah.

So I'm flying home and I've got like two hundred pages of photocopies of black and white inks that have been lettered like books that have not yet gone to press.

Wow.

And I'm sitting there on the plane reading them.

They're like, because it's the coolness of I have a thing people who are not inside the industry don't have, right, you know.

So I've got gold.

There's I remember, there's this a little kid sitting across the aisle from me, and he's like because he's you know, he's got six year old radar, he sees Batman, he knows what's going on.

And I'm like, so I'm finishing these things and I'm passing them to him.

Oh that's nuts.

And I get out his notebook and I draft the story that ultimately became two Down.

And I get home and I just I type it up, you know, and I send it so literally the time from write me a store here is the story I have written is maybe forty eight hours.

And wow, And the next thing I know, he and gorf.

Yeah, there must have been some sort of that.

I I'm not that much older than Matt Fraction.

It's really funny that, believe it or not, that kid was Matt Fraction.

That's funny though.

God, absolutely, that's very funny.

But I'm not sure.

There must have been some sort of conversation in the office about me at that point.

But the next thing I know, they're shooting worked my way and they're saying, we've got no man's Lam coming and we want you to come out here.

And that's how it ran out.

And then you want to throw up Diane's cannon question.

There I can ask, explain it and answer it.

Random encounters was the short story?

Right?

The short story was actually asked to be written after I had written too down.

I'd written too down.

It was being drawn, but they needed to fill pages in an issue of Batman Chronicles before and they said, if you did a pros piece that we can do with the stration for could you do that?

And I was like, sure, wow, can I keep playing with that thread?

And they're like, yeah, by all means.

So, I mean that was how I got in, and I got in.

It was a perfect for me for my career, and I said this on the Instagram my career.

I sit right now in this office, right now, talking to you right now, and over my shoulder there right the other one, and you can see on this side that's the design for whisper A Dare.

Let's see if I can zoom in on your Yeah, you exactly hot.

Here let me I'll move out of the way.

But like literally at the far side of my office, right on my left is whisper A Darren Abbott and that design piece.

And then on the right is Rick's unused Huntress Cry for Blood issue six cover okay right, which was meant to be a direct riff on the Godfather three posters that have been floating around that had correlate Michael sitting in the chair.

Oh sure, I remember that I have and you can't see this, and I'm not going to pivot.

You know, I've got a paid from Legends of the Dark Knight when twenty five that birch At drew on the wall there.

So literally, I am sitting in an office in a home with a career and a profession.

And that is directly attributable to the fact that Dennie O'Neil liked the silly Renee two face story I wrote him, and liked it enough to share it with the other editors in his group, and the other editors in his group said all right and started throwing work my way outstanding.

And if not for that, I do not write on No Man's Land.

If not for writing on No Man's Land, I would not have been asked to do the No Man's Land novelization.

Yep.

If not for the No Man's Land novelization, I would not have had the strength of friendship that I had with Denny.

I would not have gotten to know Charlie Couchman as a friend.

If not for No Man's Land, I do not be I am not given the honor of writing detective comics when we finish No Man's Land.

If not for writing detective comics, I don't get to write Cry for Blood.

You don't get Gotham Central.

Yeah, you don't get.

And from that, you do not get any of my other work at DC.

You just don't.

I.

I don't have a career at d C.

So if, for instance, you are a fan of my Wonder Woman, my ability to do that Wonder Woman is directly attributable to Dennie O'Neil.

And further, I would argue that if I have ever written a good comic, it is as much attributable to Dennie O'Neill as anybody.

You know.

So he and and and and and and that's not to put it all on Denny, right, it is too saying that Denny opens that door.

If Denny doesn't open that door for me.

Jordan Gorfinkel doesn't sit with me in an office one afternoon with us going over this brand new map of Gotham City that they've actually commissioned and going through color coding it, and him explaining to me what the CNYK values are and why it matters to know them.

Right.

He does not explain to me, for instance, that the way the way certain character relationships work, right, I do not.

Yeah, I just literally go down the line.

I don't work with there, Vincenzo, I don't you know, by bye, But it's all there.

It all comes from this moment and this meeting and this man and uh yeah, so look I I I there's there's nothing to add to that.

That says it all.

There's my there's a Denny story story for you.

That's a good story.

I like all.

Burchitt Burchette told me.

This is just a quick one, but this will give you a great example of who Denny was.

Well, you say, called Rick on on Friday and we were swapping stories back and forth, and he said, you know, last time he saw Denny was at a show in Saint Louis and he'd been sitting behind the table.

He had already gotten there and Denny came in and they were sitting next to each other, and Denny and Mary Fran I think had come in together.

Okay, so it's before Mary Fran had passed, and apparently he came up behind Rick and he leans over and he whispers in his ear are we rich and famous?

Yet?

You know?

And that's that's Denny, you know what I mean?

It was like, yeah, that ain't that?

Ain't this game man?

And what we do?

So wow?

He uh, you know, and man not to not to dwell on a lot of the sad stuff, but you know, you mentioned Mary Fran passing.

I mean, that's the thing.

Then he had a he had a really rough last two years.

I mean when I talked to him, they had they had the car accident too, yeah, and uh and then also yeah that and and also another hard episode he was telling me about too.

And then poor Mary Franties at the end of you know, twenty eighteen or seen, and.

I think that that was, Yeah, that was I was talking to Charlie Friday night, you know.

And and apparently Denny said to Charlie after Mary had passed that because like I always thought, you guys would be on the phone talking about you know, havn't had to put up with that cranky old bastard for so long.

I never thought I would be having this conversation.

Yeah, that he'd go first.

Yeah, yeah, you know.

But their story, and I don't know all the details of it.

I know that the quick version about Denny and Mary fran is that they were childhood sweethearts.

They each grew up and moved away and married other people, and then they rediscovered each other and to spend the remainder of their time together.

And I was talking to I was talking to Jen, you know, for people who do not know who I'm referring to.

I'm referring to my wife, Jennifer Van Meter, and we were talking on Friday, and she had been she she had done that thing you do when you get grief news, which is she had focused on all the tasks in front of her and then stopped moving long enough for it to catch her.

And she was remembering like the first time, and it was probably that San Diego, when you know, I met Rick, that we that that that Jen and I and Mary Fran and Denny you know, had a meal and went not together.

But she was saying they were the first couple like she was like, those are the couple.

That's the couple we want to be.

I want to be like them.

That's adorable, That's great.

Ye.

So yeah, man no, And again, I mean, you know, God, the guy had as we said, the guy had his demons, and I'm glad they found each other and we're able to have those those last years together.

And that's why, man, I really I was worried when Larry, his son emailed me and we had done because we'd done this amazing conversation in two thousand and six and I hadn't tried the few times I thought about having him on.

I would get word from mutual friends like Mike Gold and people like that.

It's like, oh, actually, Denny's not doing really well right now.

It's not a good time, and it's like okay.

And then, you know, as typically happens, months become years and it's like, oh shit, you know, I haven't tried it again, so let me try again.

So then Larry emails me and it's like, hey, you know, you did a great ship to talk with Dad.

He's just hanging out and I'm like, I would love to talk to him as he okay, and he told me, you know, well, you know, his wife passed away, and he's he's doing okay, and he's you know, coping, but you know, yeah, he's just you know, it kind of sucks.

He's you know, just bored.

And I'm like, I would love to talk to him, man.

So, and it was when the autobiography came out, the fictionalized autobiography I should always say, Yeah, Hour of Captain Mighty and the Redemption of Danny the Kid and uh So that was the first conversation and he really wanted to talk about growing up and everything in his life and I'm like, you know, let him go and let him do it absolutely man, And it's like, let's have a unique conversation.

That's great, and we had, you know, we covered a lot of stuff back in oh six that I you know, as far as the career and stuff.

And then and he's like, yeah, that was terrific.

And Larry said too, He's like, oh god, Dan still talking about it like that.

He had a good time.

I'm like, well, that means a lot.

Can I be so bold to ask for another conversation and we could talk a little more about you know, various Batman runs and certain stories and philosophies and stuff.

And he's like, oh yeah, and many came back for another two hour conversation.

It was amazing, and so yeah, I'm really I'm glad and I.

As you know, what I like to do with this show is really get behind the stories and where the inspirations and the philosophy is for character.

And I really I appreciate what you just said about Joker earlier.

And it was interesting to hear some of Denny's thoughts.

You know, it's interesting I see Henry's put up a question if you want to share it, it's worth the answering, because I think it actually does say something about Denny.

Denny.

Denny did Denny did a run on Wonder Woman that is much more mind where she ends up being a bad Diana Rig in the Avenger's knockoff.

Her powers are gone and she is a street level vigilante.

Yes, very yeah, very much in the multi Diana Rig and the Avengers.

And that was that was and that was exactly the goal.

That was the intent.

And talking to Denny about it, you know, you know, in two thousand, because we would talk about it.

Sure, this was This was another thing that I loved about the guy.

And it's interesting, you know, because we live in this era now where where God forbid you make a mistake in public and h and and then should you make the mistake in public, how are you going to negotiate and how you answer it and how you handle it.

It's important, you know.

And we have had a whole lot of and we've seen it, you know, we've seen a lot of non apology apologies, you know, but but Denny, Man, Denny cop to that, like the first time I mentioned it, he was like, oh, man, I shouldn't have done that.

If I had thought about it.

I would never have done it, he said.

I thought I was making this feminist statement and I wasn't.

An I undermined her horribly and it was a mistake.

And bring that up by way to say that, you know, here's the guy.

He died at eighty one, you know, which means that he was sixty sixty one when I started working with him.

This was a guy who was never so said in his ways, he couldn't learn from himself and never reached the point that he didn't want to learn, you know.

He wanted to improve, and he owned his missteps, and there were things he stood by that he believed, and there are things you know that he would back away from him be like, no, I was wrong about that.

And his ability to say I was wrong about that that was a mistake.

I can't think of a whole lot of editors or writers who do that.

Yeah, I mean, that's you know.

And I can think of some big mistakes that have been made in the last five years or so and comics where writers have doubled down and tripled down.

And if you disagree with them, they you know, God forbid you are on a forum posting a comment.

They will come after you there, you know, to defend, to defend their work, and it's like, dude's you know, so I just I I bring it up because I do think it's indicative of who the man was, you know.

He he looked back on that and he was like, I'm not proud of what I did there.

That was a mistake.

I should not have done it.

There are way too many writers who would look back at something they had done twenty years, you know, fifteen years before and be like, yeah, that's perfect.

What are you talking about?

No, you're right, and I won't.

You know, he did it on that documentary about comics history where he su admitted it was a mistake.

I met and why am I blinking now?

Shame?

I mean, Glorius Steinem was at because that's how big that story was.

It was bigger than DC Comics.

It was the cover of Miss magazine for people who may not remember or be aware of this story, that look what DC did.

They have depowered the greatest female hero ever.

And that was Steminan's point.

And she was doing a comic at the time, and I forget what the cause was, but she was literally set up next to Neil Adams and I didn't even know and wasn't paying attention to the banner or anything.

He's like, you know, Glorious Steinem was sitting next to me and nobody's talking to her.

And I'm like, I would be happy to talk to miss Steinem, that would be great.

And I brought up the miscover I had to and I said, you know, I don't know if you saw because the comic documentary had aired.

And I said, you know, mister O'Neill kind of gave, you know, not to justify it, but was like he thought he was empowering wonder Woman by making her more relatable and a street level person.

And she's like, while he was wrong, It's like yeah, and he's wrong.

Yeah, but it was really it was interesting and I'm glad I had that moment with miss I thought that was interesting.

And and and for instance, now we've got an origin that says no, no, no, she's no longer made from Clay, she's Zeus's kid, And the people responsible for that aren't ever going to turn around and be like, oh, you're right, that was sexist.

They're not They're not about to look at it and go like, you're right that was sexist.

No, guess what it was.

No, I hear you, man, it's just like I say, different era.

And and we will not you know, yeah, we will not.

We will not see his like again agreement.

But you know, my god, what a legacy.

I mean, what a legacy.

I gotta ask great, because I didn't know he was kind of drummed out unceremoniously from DC.

You know, he was kept on for he wrote Asrael, he wrote those hundred issues of Asrael.

Yeah, but I mean, you know, when he left Group editorship, he was supposed to have his own office, and they literally, you know, they literally ended up putting him in, you know, in a corner.

And the new group editorial uh on the Batman Books didn't want anything to do with him and made things very difficult for him.

And one editor in particular was actively hostile to him, you know.

And at the end of the day, it's like, well then why bother coming into the office?

You know?

Yeah, And like I say, it says more about the people who in particular what the one editor who in my opinion, is responsible for this, says much more about him than it does about Danny, you know.

Okay, And and and I don't want to.

You know, this is one of those things where I know I've already said too much about it.

Okay, I know that I was unaware.

I thought, you know, I I I I was, I was watching the sizzle.

I wasn't paying attention to the stake, okay.

And and by the time I realized that I'd been looking at the sizzle, it was too late.

And it wasn't just Denny.

You know, there were a lot of people who got caught up in this, and a lot of people got really really hurt by it.

And I don't mean just like emotionally hurt.

I mean careers were destroyed by what happened when when Denny was moved out.

Wow, and and and what followed that, well, there was a big editorial change, I mean yeah, and a lot of people that had been there and I mean got No Man's Land.

Is really one of the great events and and massive stories.

It amazes me to this day that it does not seem to have been replicated successfully, which again speaks to the strength of that editorial group, because that was something that you know, the only reason that worked is because editorial was working hand in glove.

You cannot undertake something like that if your editorial teams are not.

Just working flawlessly, So, how did you distill that into that novel?

That is the first thing of yours that I read.

I was going, yeah, I was going, I was going to Uh, the.

First thing of mine you read was this.

Yes.

I literally, I'm in O'Hara airport.

I am flying to New York to cover an Oscar de la Hoya HBO fight from my radio station.

And I always pop into the bookstore and let me read something on the plane, let me read something when I'm in the toy you know, when I'm on the toilet in the hotel and I'm like, oh, look at this, this is what is this?

I didn't know there was a bad Man novel and I read the inside cover and I'm like, this sounds like an amazing story.

Please let me read it.

And man, I was in throwed so and it.

Is such a because if they ever were to try to really adapt it, it's got to be a series.

It's got to be at least a limited series of ten parts or something like that.

And even that, compared to what you guys, I mean, how long did that event go?

A year?

Over a year.

It was a year long event.

It was meant to run, It was meant to take you all the way up to New Year's of the millennium.

Yeah, two thousand, yeah, yeah, yeah crazy yeah.

So yeah was it tough?

Kind of distilling and all into not really.

The hard part was that the manuscript had to be finished before the series was so okay.

One of the things that the novel could do that the that the comics couldn't because comics are broad right, comics comics are are are like your focus is broad right, you have x many issues and this was no man's Land ran across every bat book in the line for the course of the year.

One of the things that the novel needed was it had to have a through line, right.

You needed to have certain things that you were going to come back.

To and threads all the way through.

Sure, So understanding that structurally actually made the writing of the novel was not so difficult.

The finishing of the novel is a nightmare because it was all deadline writing.

And I was writing comics and also writing the novel, and I remember the last twenty two thousand words of the novel were written in a twenty four hour period.

And they were written in a twenty f for hour period because I had to Hey you say there was ninety nine right, Yeah, yeah.

I had to fly the manuscript out to Charlie.

I literally had to deliver it by hand.

It had a due date, so like I had the plane ticket and I had to have the flight and I had to have the damn thing done, you know.

So I remember flying out, I'm holding this manuscript like this because my forearms in cramp because you know, writing twenty two thousand words in twenty four hours, there's a lot of writing.

Yeah, man, absolutely good look.

And I was, man, I was just like this on the plate, and I remember just dumping it in front of Charlie and I being like, there's your book.

Wow.

It was.

It was a hell of experience.

That was so you know what I mean.

For instance, we had this huge this is spoiler.

We had this huge debate at the time about how we were gonna end No Man's Land and and this fairly ferocious argument about who who Joker was gonna end up having killed?

Okay, and I really wanted it to be Harvey Bullock.

I really really felt strongly and needed to be Bullock.

And it was was, and and it obviously did not win that argument.

But remember that the counter argument that one of the writers put up was like, well, you know, too many people like him, And I'm like, well they did.

Wait a minute, that you don't kill characters that people don't like that.

You know that there's no point in that, right if you if you're going to say he's done, if Joker has done this horrible thing, it's gonna have this lasting ramification, you know, then then let's do it.

I'm still not delighted that it was Sarah.

I was gonna say, yeah, it was Gordon's wife.

I'm like, I was in my brain and I'm like, oh yeah, Sarah, Jesus.

That's right.

I'm still not delighted about that for a number of reasons.

And I think at the time I had not been able to articulate that, you know, killing the woman in this situation was probably not the thing to do to Gordon.

But then the other thing that happened, right was that if we're going to do this, I remember us arguing about this really strongly, We're gonna do this.

It needs to it needs to have ramifications moving forward.

You know, next time you see Joker.

He's got a you know, he's got to have a brace.

He asked it.

He was shot, you know, Joker took you know, Gordon doesn't kill him, but Gordon takes his knee, you know.

And we ended No Man's Land, and I think like then next month, the Superman group had started at the Emperor Joker stuff like immediately hilarious, weird, and of course it didn't acknowledge anything we had done.

Yeah, jeez.

Which gives you an idea that certain problems that exist an editorial on a grand scale have always existed, because that was twenty years ago, and the Bat group may have been working like clockwork and the Superman group may have been wearing like clockwork, but clearly there was not an appropriate communication going on there.

Interesting.

Yeah, the clocks weren't SYNCD.

Yeah, no, I understand.

You know, it's funny he talked about nightfall and night Quest and Doomsday happening at the same time, and obviously neither office knew what the other was doing, and they were both thinking along the same lines of let's kill him or let's Yeah.

I mean, it was a huge thing to shake things up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's interesting.

But you know, I mean, if no man's land, no man's land gives you fifty two, you can't do fifty two if no man's learning to happen.

And as I am told, as it was told to me, it was Gorfinkel who came up with the idea.

This was before I joined, right, But what I was told was that gorf had gone away one weekend and came in on a Monday and sort of dumped this thing on Denny's desk and said, reading, let me know.

What you think.

And what Jordan had proposed was, so there's an earthquake and all of this stuff happens, and we do all this stuff, and then we have the aftershock, and then we have the rebuilding, except it won't happen, So then we have no man's land, and for a year there's this federal no man's land, and then at the end, you know, with the millennium, we come in and that way we can redesign Gotham.

There was a bible that went around, you know, when Martin Brough and I started on Detective, we had an actual document that was these are now and all this stuff has gone by the wayside, But it used to be you had an in house document that said, the bat cave looks like this, the batmobile looks like this, the you know, the the the bat wing looks like this, the belt looks like this.

This is the current iteration of the costume and what it can do.

Okay, And so everybody working on these things new, right, Okay, can I have night Wing doing this?

And you would be like, well, no, you can't.

That's not possible.

Night Wing cannot do the thing there that you were saying you should do because it isn't it's not in the Bible, it's not canonized, and it was not.

And this is the thing.

I think poor writers look at something like that as dictatorial and and it impairing, and I think it's the exact opposite.

I think it is incredibly empowering because when you are told no, this is the room you have to work in, right, it encourages you to use the tools and to build it and to make it work and to invest in it.

Right.

If you keep if you keep changing things over and over again, if you keep adding things over and over again, then there is no trick to the writing, because ultimately what it comes down to is, well, then there are no limits on the character.

There's nothing that will ever challenge them because you can always give them something else that'll do it.

It's the gag of the Adam Wes TV show, right, you have that shark repellent spread right, like that is the ultimate joke, right you instead of going how do I get away from sharks?

Well, you just use this thing on your belt, right, and and and it's a great gag.

I'm not I'm not throwing shit on the show, but I'm saying that you you you are dealing with something else in the process of creation and collaboration.

And when you do that, you are actually being additive to the universe in a different way.

It looks like you're being additive when you say no, no, he's got that shark repellent.

You're not.

You're actually being reductive, right, You're actually doing the opposite.

You're taking away.

You're taking away from the character and replacing it with a gadget or a gimmick or a gag.

Yeah, and if you do that, you end up then impairing the character ultimately.

Or the and the story.

Star Trek writers of New Star Trek take note of.

What you need.

You need to know where the walls are right and you can't, Yeah, you can't just you can't just violate it.

So no, I get it, man, I do.

And again it's that sense of realism and truth to the character and stuff that yeah, makes makes a great story.

And and truly that's again one of the things I talked about.

I put I put in the wild while Greg was talking there, I put in the uh in the Yeah.

The links to the links to the YouTube links to these conversations that I had with Denny and and yeah, I really hope people will will check them out.

They are also available on the podcast, the audio version of the podcast already I posted them on Sunday.

But yeah, I uh, this is exactly the kind of thing he talked about, and also that evolution in writing from where comics were prior to he and Steve Skates coming to d C uh and also the you know and and what they were able to do to elevate stories even in the seventies, and then the progression into you know, his later writing and his later editing as well.

And yeah, well, and it was very interesting to hear as far as him coming to d C.

He's like all they were doing at the time was they needed warm bodies because they were rejecting the notion from the creators that are from the publishers when the creators wanted health insurance, and they're like, hey, how about we hire different people, see you guys later, Thanks for thanks for twenty years, goodbye yee.

So well, and I got in there in a really weird way, you know.

I mean, like I said, I showed up at the right time, in the right place.

They had had a a a big turnover in the back group, and I think the only writer who remained was Chuck Dixon, and so all of a sudden, you know, all these people who had been there for a long time weren't right and you know, publishing up whorese a vacuum.

So it was fortunate for me that I was in the right place at the right time and apparently was able to deliver of a quality that everybody felt was was worthwhile.

And I just realized, oh, I need to write myself in up.

There was a question that fled aback.

I see the question, I'm on it, and I'm abou to pop it up.

And it's one that I meant to get to as well.

It's Denny dude, seven, did you work with Denny Long while you were on Detective with Sean Martinborough And I'm glad, yes I did.

All that's cool because yeah, I.

Was wondering when that editorial ended while you were because obviously, yeah, carried over into the Shrek.

Yeah, it was all Denny.

You know, Denny was my editor on Detective for I think that first.

You certainly through seven fifty, okay, seven fifty, I can't.

I think I started seven forty two.

I remember writing the seven to fifty issue being this you know, big, double sized, racial, all cool thing.

And that was another huge moment because I went to him, I said, I want to do this thing with rage.

They do this thing with rage, and he was like, yeah, go ahead, all right.

You know, to be able to write Charlie, you know, to do to to do Pride for Blood and have him edit it, to write Rachel Goole and have him edit it.

Oh my god, yeah, oh my god.

Came later, am I right?

Came later in your Yeah, Nissa Nisso came about as part of Death and the Maidens, and Death in the Maidens was edited by Matt Idelson and sort of, I honestly don't remember when we started working on that.

That was one of those projects that had a very very long gestation period.

And and it's okay, I mean I think, you know, Klaus is amazing.

Oh yeah, And and I like, I think the concepts and the ideas there were good.

I'm not happy with with the ending of the series.

Okay, Well, let's go back to you and Sean because I and really, uh, Sir Edward Gray made a very good point and said, love the minimal color you see.

Okay, So, sir Sir Edward Gray, that was Denny, really Denny.

Yes, Denny said this is what I want to do with the book let's and and and like I said, this was this was who he was.

He said, I want this to be different.

It should look different.

I you know, and man Martin Brough, Yeah, I don't know if Sean I should know this, but I genuinely don't know what Seawan had done in comics prior to that.

I just know that he introduced us and put us together.

And I was like, I don't know where you found him, but he is amazing.

Like this guy is unbelievably good.

Oh yeah, And if you look at Shawn's art and again you got to remember the period right in two thousand and there were people who went through they hated it.

I mean, we got the people hated I totally because Shawn's art was so radical.

Yeah, it was like, what the hell is going on with the coloring here?

If you didn't know these issues, they were effectively black and white with a spot color, and the spot color would change per issue.

So here are people going And literally we would get letters being like I'm buying a full color comic for a reason, you know, and it's like, okay, well then don't buy this one.

I don't know what to tell you.

You know, it hit me.

I got to tell you, as a read a lapsed reader, that literally came back when Kevin Smith was writing Daredevil, when you guys are writing No Man's Land and all that stuff, and then to get that detective with you and Martinborough, it.

Was like, this is exciting, this is man.

It was.

It was thrilling to read that stuff.

I was trying to get Shawn on for years.

Oh man, and just bad scheduling and stuff.

I'm sure eventually we will talk and you need to talk to him.

He is.

Oh, I'm such a fan, dude, he is.

He is not only is he just brilliantly talented, he is one of the like sharpest, just I mean it, guy's got a huge damn brain.

John cool, Like he's one of those people where you're like, oh, man, I gotta I gotta be careful.

I don't want to accidentally get clubbed by the big.

Intellect, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, he is really smart.

I will those conversations.

It would be it would be an honor.

And truly, it's just it's been a I mean and again, like I was saying before about suddenly months become years, and I'm like, I really haven't tried to get sewn in a long time.

I gotta make that happen.

Yeah, the calender, the calendar flies, Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, but it is.

That's a that's a fantastic run.

Who was the colorist, Diana?

That's a great question.

I honestly don't remember.

We should look it up.

We'll look it up.

Yeah, I mean, I was so head down as Nicholas Scott is fun to say of saying about work, you know, head down, ass up.

And and the thing is Nick can say it and make it absolutely not sexual.

It's just I am doing the work, and man, there was a lot of work at that time.

I just remember doing a lot of writing.

So and Who's Who's the Who's the bodyguard?

Again?

That you created.

Bordeaux absolutely, man, fantastic, Yeah.

Because I because I was still you know, hit deep in the Kodiak stuff and I love the idea and you can see this actually and again it's Denny who opens this up.

You get to Gotham Central the same way that you get to Sasha, Like Sasha is the first examination of the idea that's going to bring you to Gotham Central, which is what happened.

If you.

Take in the confines of the conceit of the universe, Okay, everything in it, honestly, if you really really take it to heart, if you say, okay, fine, Bruce Wayne is Batman.

Bruce Wayne is also a CEO at Wayne Tech.

And Bruce Wayne is a globe drotting womanizing flake.

What does that look like in the quote unquote real, right, and in the real have some board of directors going that guy over there has always going out late at night and being seen with supermodels and wrapping Lamborghinis around Lampo's is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to this company.

He needs to have personal security, right right.

Of course, now you're Bruce Wayne, You've got a real problem, right because you actually don't.

But you can't tell anybody that, right.

I mean, the only way you can convincingly get the board to back off on this is to say, well, guys, I'm actually Batman here.

I'll prove it to you, right right, you can't do it.

So he's trapped like the the the the investment in the in the truth of the story creates this great complication, and complication manifests as Sasha, who is this professional protection specialist who has literally begiven the worst possible clients she could have and is unfortunately just good enough at her job that he can't get rid of her easily.

And the second you do that, you open up other questions about Batman, right, because the Batman's solution to everything is stay away.

It's it's nobody gets close.

Yes, right, we have a bat family, but we don't like it, right, you know, And we can go into the pathology there or so on.

But it was Denny, you know, Denny was like, yeah, go do it.

But like I said that that examination is how you get to you know, the officer down storyline, for instance, and again the realism of that storyline and the realism of actually having Gordon retire for a while, bringing in Aikins.

And there were attempts actually made to move to move sort of Gotham forward in a way, not just in terms of you know, here's design, here's what the yeah, what knew what what the rebuilt Gotham is going to look like?

And so on.

There are some other things here we can talk about.

And one of these things is the pathology of Batman, because it was very important to me, and this was again it comes up in Death in the Maidens that and and Denny and I talked about this a lot too, which is at a certain point there had to be a story where Bruce recognized that he was not Batman out of grief anymore, that it had stopped hurting, you know, yes, that that after twenty two years or twenty five years, because canonically Batman's thirty three, right right, I'm with you if at thirty three, after a quarter of a century, he is actually there was a story to be told about the fact that twenty thirty three year old Bruce Wayne cannot remember what his mother sounded like, right, but the memories do what happens in time.

Yeah, that the pain doesn't hurt so much.

It's not it's not that it's not that he doesn't care, it's not that he's not missing them.

But to finally set.

Down this bullshit that was Bruce Wayne on his knees every night going dad, certain point he had to go, like, I am who I am, and I have the life I am and the life I am living now.

I live to honor their memory.

I can do that without having to rip my clothes and rub ash, you know, into my hair every goddamn night.

Agreed.

And I think it says something and I am not sure what that that nobody has been able to do.

That was an idea we had twenty years ago, and nobody's been able to do it.

You know.

It's funny.

Denny talked about that with the one thing he liked about the only thing he liked about the George Glenney Batman film was that it excuses like the burden of it being Bruce's fault that they went to the movies is absolved, And he said that same thing that, yeah, it would be interesting to get him past.

Said no, I understand, but this was you know, it's funny because again there are other things.

This is why, this is why, Joe Chill, it's so problematic.

Agreed, If you ever name the person who did it, then it becomes a soluble issue.

Yes, the the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne remains an unsolved crime, yep.

And it will never be solved because what happened was the poor mugger who in desperation and you know whatever his circumstance was that led him into that alley that night and ended up murdering these two people and then ran like hell and then woke up the next morning to find that he had murdered Thomas and Martha Wayne.

Is the guy who eats a gun and drops himself and does it on on the bridge over the Gotham River.

They don't find the body, you don't because that's the other part of it.

He can't have the mystery, he can't have the crime closure, right.

What he can have is the emotional acceptance, sure, and the idea of a matured to me that was a level of maturity for Batman that would have made him, frankly more interesting and that would have allowed us to start asking some of the harder questions then and answering those questions, right, which is, if you're smart enough to be able to Batman and you're a multi millionaire and you know an adjust for inflation, a multi billionaire, why the hell haven't you cured AIDS?

Why doesn't Gotham have the best public school system in the world?

Right?

What you now need to go down there, because there are certain truths we need to maintain.

One of those truths needs to be that the Gotham PDA is never going to not be corrupt.

Right.

The conceit of Batman requires that Gotham is constantly fighting against corruption, and that every time you stamp it out, three more shoots spring up somewhere else.

But at least at least giving Batman cogent arguments so that you could disarm those things.

You could say, no, this is what Bruce Wayne has done.

There are clinics right that Batman isn't.

Batman's solution to crime isn't to go out every night and kick criminals in the nuts.

Batman's solution to crime is to go out every night, kick criminals in the nuts and make sure they're after school programs and arts funding and social welfare and mental health.

And you know what I mean that.

Leslie Tompkins is not the only person doing it.

She's the most visible point of that spear.

Yes, right, yes, And and if you do that, if you answer those questions, all you do is make Batman look even better.

You know, all you do is buff that armor on him that much more and saying no, no, this is you know, I asked myself that many a time.

Know why anybody would want to live in Gotham for the audio audience, Yes, but the reason you live in Gotham is because maybe it's your home.

Maybe that's where your opportunity is.

Maybe it's you know, Denny, I believe the quote was Gotham is Manhattan below.

I forget what street on a cold November night, that's Gotham.

You know, God in New York in the seventies was not a great town.

No, but people still love being New Yorkers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, And you still wanted to be on Broadway and you still wanted to play for the Yankees.

What was that?

What was that HBO show about the porn industry and everything that was setting the sud.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to say the deuce absolutely.

Yeah.

I always love talking to Jakin about that because he's like, I know I'm not there, but I see myself in the background in every episode because we grew up there, so we understand.

I I remember doing research for my fourth novel for shooting at Midnight, and I think it was fourth, I might even fifth.

I did the research for shooting a midnight down on Times Square when it was still okay, you know, and now I when I get to go with uh, you know that if I get to go with my daughter and she loves Times Square, and I was like, yeah, this isn't what it was.

Maybe say the Saint what it looked like back in the day the peep shows, and yeah, absolutely, But look, I mean look we we are.

We're all over the map here, So I feel like I should say, is there.

Yeah, We're gonna can keep talking.

Are questions No, that's you know, honestly, we can go through and see if there there are other questions, that's fine.

Yeah, I'm happy to answer because yeah.

I And also, like I said, everybody, I put it in.

I put the links in the chat.

If you want to hear Denny in his own words, I put in actually listening to these because I have Oh thanks, buddy, you're good man.

Yeah, well, there are only a few people you talk to where I'm not gonna want to hear it.

Yeah, no, I hear it.

I agree with Kyle Faklive.

His final Uh Detective one thousand story was stunning for question.

And I mean, that's the kind of writer he is.

Yeah, And that's the extension of the writing he did.

You know, Look, I mean Denny gave us.

I don't.

Yeah, I'd go back to this question, run.

I look at the characters he created who were not so many other characters, So many other writers would have gone for the low hanging fruit, and he always reached higher up the tree, you know, he just always reached higher.

Lady Shiva is a great example of that, and the Shiva Charlie relationship in the question is a great example of that.

He had said that if he hadn't gotten into comics and was writing mystery novels, the question essentially was the world he would have been writing in and stuff.

And yeah, it's no man, like you said, those those first twenty or so issues.

Are just there's still they are stunning.

Yeah.

Here, let's see what was it?

It was something right here.

Oh you know someone asked about Eduardo Riso writing your your great tango Webb kingpinishy another class, Yeah, he wrote, and then I didn't.

Yeah, and we're it has consented to draw the story that I'm doing in the Detective Comics Tech one and twenty seven, which is the thousands issue of Detected since Batman debuted.

Yeah, and I was approached specifically, and I thought that it was David Wilgo's at DC reached out to me, and I thought they were being very smart about this.

He reached out and he said, look, we are.

We've been looking at the other anniversary issues we've been doing, and what we want to do with this one is sort of he said, if you look at some of these other ones, we've gotten a lot of similar stories because we've just sort of put teams together and said, hey, yeah, go ahead and do it.

So what we wanted is we actually wanted to sort of interrogate certain thematic things about Batman in this and we were thinking about Batman and the Cops, and your name came up, and would you be willing to do that?

And I was like, yeah, I would be willing to do that, and we're like we're thinking kind of got them centrally sort of thing, and I said, yeah, do you think Lark could draw it?

And I said, well, I'll ask Michael, but he's drawing Lazarus and he's really busy, and yeah, yeah, so I asked Michael and Michael said I'd love to, I can't, So I got you know, got back to d C and Dave said, well, we've reached out to Riso.

Would you be okay with working with him?

And I was like.

Yeah, because it's only been what twenty years since I've written something that he drew either, So I was like he's such a sweetheart too, and yeah, a gentle soul really and yet again, yeah, unbelievably talented.

Yeah, it's been a pleasure reading books that he's written, along with drawing the books and stuff.

And I've really like gone down the Riso rabbit hole a few times and it's yeah, and you're right, why should ask a relo get all the damn my Riso stories?

So there you go.

Well, I think it's actually because I think Brian's got like some sort of electronic tag on him or something.

They always do great collaborations.

Let's see, does Greg John or anyone know in the chant why Denny change the backstory of the question in the novel he wrote about him.

You know that's funny.

I just reordered because I can't find my copy of hel Town, the adaptation.

I don't remember the specifics of what he changed.

I do know that while you know he said he was most proudest of what he did on the question, that by the same token, he really did radically change Yeah, Titko's character.

And he and I once had a conversation h about the fact that he and this is this is an interesting byproduct of what comics do.

He actually felt he had reached the point where he he wasn't happy that he had done it.

He felt guilty about it.

He felt that he had taken this character and he had broken him and made him into something that he was never meant to be.

And I suppose one can make the argument that that is absolutely true.

He did change the question from the objectivist Randy and creature that Dicko had created into a character.

I would argue that what Didko gave us was a brilliant design.

What then he gave us was a brilliant character.

If you read those Dipko stories, there's no character.

The question in the Dickco stories exists solely to be a political propaganda mouthpiece.

I mean that's literally it.

That's all he does.

And have you ever talked to Zach Crusy who's writing, who wrote a Ditco thesis and everything, and he's going to publish it in book for him in the fall.

Really good dude from from Indiana and a massive DICO guy.

And I'll be talking to him in the months ahead and absolutely want to get his take.

On You mean, you may want to talk to UH Professor Eric Newsom at some point you get the opportunity, Eric or Doc Newsom as as I am found, oh calling him UH used to run like the Question website and has done a lot of scholarly work there as well.

And I think you might find him fascinating to talk to you about it, Okay?

And yeah, and then I know Eric's you know, collaborated with you.

And does he do the lancerous No?

No, no, you think you're thinking, you're thinking of Troutman.

This is I think Eric Trubman.

I am thinking of Eric Truvi on there, so I apologize, yes, yes, yes, oh, there we go, and Diana gives her it is genius, very nice.

That's cool.

And I know I follow Eric Newsom as well on Twitter.

Yeah, so that doesn't surprise me.

He's the teacher that moderated yours and and brew Baker's got them central ten years ago at Seattle.

You're thinking Ben Saunders Saunders.

It is Ben Sonders absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's doctor Sonders.

All these great seriously, and and you know Diana Shutts now a big academic, comic, genius and everything.

I'm glad I saw her.

And dude, I'm sure I've already said this to you before.

I'm so glad that we saw each other, however briefly.

Yeah, it might be a while before we get this see each other in person again, which.

Is why this is nice that we're talking and everything.

I see.

Yawning, buddy, I'm gonna let you go because it's you know, it.

Is, it's getting laid here and it's late where you are.

But I am I'm glad we got to do this, and you know, I am happy to talk, and well were we should we should plan on talking around around Old Guard time.

We're going to absolutely, buddy and truly the things I asked you online and everything, don't worry, we'll talk.

We'll talk regardless, and then absolutely that's not gonna kill the conversation.

And also, did you guys get the Green life for season two?

For Stufftown?

Yeah?

See, stunt down is underway.

The writer's room has been convened and is scribbling.

Jason Richmond has been joined by Monica Bream b R E E M.

For those of you who like to immediately go to IMDb and figure out who these people are.

And Monica is co showrunner and Kobe is excited and I am excited and I think there is a lot of great potential here.

So that's that, dude.

I swear I have friends who, in fact is people I saw this afternoon and I'm like, oh, I'm talking to this guy.

I go, you guys know Stumptown Kobe Small, Oh yeah, I love that show.

I'm like, yeah, he created that whole thing really And I'm like, yeah, I really like that show.

I'm like, oh, there you go, so, uh you want to throw this, Let's do this last one?

Throw Shu Ramon's question there at least sure.

Oh yeah, so yeah, wasn't my choice to turn Montoya into the question?

Was it an homage to Denny's question?

Absolutely, yes, it was an homage.

There was no way I could write any question that wasn't going to homage Denny's and Pipeline.

The pipeline story with Kully was absolutely that.

It was, you know, Tost's there for a reason.

I really wanted to, and I sort of, you know, like I played a little fast and loose with the end of the question continue and Denny's run, just so I could have the toys that I wanted.

Oh that's right, Tod passes away, doesn't he end?

Ye?

But my But you know, the decision, the decision for Renee to become quh was part of the fifty two story, so it you know, it was organic and and thematically appropriate at the time, and we wanted legacy, and we wanted appropriate legacy, so that that story in fifty two we knew where it was going to go, that that was in the cards pretty much from the start.

And I've loved her role in Lois Lane.

And you're wrapping up Lois Lane, and I'm sure we'll be talking about.

That so yeah, Lois.

Issue twelve is next month.

It's July.

There you go, So yeah, man, I mean again, we'll reconvene and we'll talk old guard and uh and going.

With you next line and all the other stuff.

Okay.

Indeed, there was a special ruck of debrief talking about Denny tonight, and I'm glad we did.

And thanks man, because like I said, I the last thing I wanted to do was make you feel uncomfortable doing.

It, so no, and when you reached out, like I said, man, there's I'm delighted to talk about him and remember him, and I'm very happy to do it with you.

So I appreciate you doing it.

And for everybody who is going to end up hearing this listening, thank you.

For everybody who actually on a Sunday night has stayed up and is typing questions and watching it live, thank you very much, and and thank you for your questions.

And sorry we didn't get all of them.

So great conversation on the chat and I appreciate it, guys, And if there's anything I can answer, I will.

And also I'll be turning this into an audio tomorrow.

But Greg, thanks for your time.

We went into the broadcast, and I will say as I always do, stays happy, stay safe.

Here you go.

Fun conversation with Greg Rucka about the great Danny O'Neill when he passed Wow that was recorded during COVID actually cut off Greg's sign off, which said wear a mask and I don't want you guys to go what the hell is he talking about?

Well five years ago COVID some show notes, this is gonna be a great week this first week in September on Word Balloon.

We're gonna have Matt Fraction on Wednesday talking about his new Batman number one.

We're going to also on Tuesday have Philip Kennedy Johnson back to talk about his excellent run on The Hulk and his brand new Superman comics.

So Tuesday, Philip Kennedy Johnson, Wednesday, Matt Fraction regarding the Word Balloon book Club and the Venus book Club.

We apologize the month got away from Brian.

Brian inadvertently, he found out himself on the road and it made it really tough for him to do what he needs to do and also make time for the book club.

But we are going to do it in September.

The book so all of you know is one hundred Bullets Volume one, Brian Azerrelo ad Wato Riso fantastic book and you might as a teaser before we get to it.

I don't know when they did it, but Brian did an episode of his version of the book club with his Discord and Kelly Sue Da Konik, and I think I'm going to play that closer to when we do the hundred Bullets thing.

I felt like if I released it now to all of you, my listeners, that you'd feel like, oh man, we missed on that, and that sucks.

It sucks enough that we weren't able to do it this month.

If we find ourselves in that kind of bind again, I will do, much like Brian did with Kelly Sue prior to us combining our book clubs, I'll do a solo book club with the Word Balloon League of.

Word Balloon listeners.

If Brian can't make it and stuff, maybe we'll invite Brian's Discord.

We'll see, I'll talk.

I'm gonna talk to Brian about all this before we get together for one hundred Bullets.

But he did.

He's like, Hey, if you want, you know, I'll give you the episode with me and Kelly Sue in our book club and I don't know, like I said, And folks please like email me at John atwarballoon dot com if you feel like, hey, you know, we would have been a cooler listen at that.

It's not a big deal.

I just kind of felt like, oh man, you know, all those guys got to do a book club and we didn't this month.

That kind of sucks, so I didn't want to like rub it in.

The Other thing too, is you'll forgive me, because really, between terrific on and a few other things, August really did get busy.

But I'm back on the stick on the Word Balloon magazine as well, and we've got new issues coming up the E magazine.

If you are a three dollar a month or more patron on Patreon dot com slash word Balloon, you have access to the e magazine and membership to the book club as well, and you will join us.

Oh why, I also forgot to mention right on Monday, Eric Policky, as I always like to say, is going to be joining us with his new Kickstarter And you know, Adrian's Adrian's brother, as I always call Adrian Policky, Eric's sister, But yeah, Eric's gonna join us on Monday Night, So Policky on Monday Night, Phil Kennedy, Johnson, Tuesday Night, Matt Fraction, Wednesday Night.

It's gonna be a great word Balloon Live week to start things off in September.

Join us.

I hope you will.

Until next time.

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