RINGGENBERG: It's December 7th, 1995--
MOENCH: Pearl Harbor Day.
RINGGENBERG: Yeah, forty-six years ago, or fifty-four.
MOENCH: I didn't realize that until now.
RINGGENBERG: Yeah, that's weird. Okay, how long have you worked on Batman over the years, off and on.
MOENCH: I think the first time was '82 and from '82 until, I don't know, '87 or '88, something like that, and then I guess, '92 or '91 I came back.
RINGGENBERG: Was that working on the graphic novels?
MOENCH: No. The graphic novels were, excuse me but a big truck just pulled up. Okay, I'm going to let it go. I know what it is. It's gravel. The graphic novels, the first one was Red Rain, and that was before, it was started before I started back on the regular monthly book. But I think I was on the monthly book before Red Rain came out. I could be wrong that. Was Red Rain like '89?
RINGGENBERG: It was '89-'90. I think the publication date was '90.
MOENCH: Okay, so I guess by '90, naw--Could I have been back on the book for five years? That doesn't seem right. 481 was my first one back.
RINGGENBERG: I can look that up.
MOENCH: The last one I did the first time was that Giant-sized number four hundred, and then I came back on number 481. At 481 now I'm doing like five thirty-three or five thirty-two. How many does that work out to be?
RINGGENBERG: A lot.
MOENCH: Twenty and thirty-one, about fifty-one issues. How many, what's fifty-one divided by twelve?
RINGGENBERG: Fifty-one divided by twelve, that's about four years' worth. A little over four years.
MOENCH: Okay, so I've been back for four years.
RINGGENBERG: That makes sense. Doug, you've gotten to work with some really good artists during in your career, notably Paul Gulacy and Bill Sienkiewicz--
MOENCH: Weren't you friends with Paul Gulacy?
RINGGENBERG: No. I don't know Gulacy. I know Bill a little bit. But I'm a big admirer of his work, going back to the old Master of Kung Fu days.
MOENCH: Right.
RINGGENBERG: The reason I bring it up is I was just wondering, how is working with Kelley Jones different than working with those guys?
MOENCH: Well, actually I, in the new issue of Batman that's out, the one was done by Jim Williams as a fill-in issue, and Jim did a great job, but it's funny, the letters page contains my, you know, "Love letter to Kelley", in which I do compare Kelley to my favorite collaborators of the past and I included in there Mike Ploog, Mike Zeck, Gene Day, Bill Sienkiewicz, and maybe one or two others and then I said, `Plus, I'd put Kelley right alongside my continuing collaborator, Paul Gulacy.' And those two guys are probably my favorites of all time. And I think I said something like, `The magic created with each one is very different, and yet...' or, no, `the results created by each collaboration are very different, but I feel there's a true magic in each one. It's a different kind of magic.' Paul, of course, is more of a cinematic storyteller, and Kelley is more of a single-image, a single striking image that jumps off the page, you know what I mean. So, it is very different, and!
yet I really do feel that I mesh with both guys to create what I always call a synergy. That's where the finished thing is greater than the sum of its individual parts. It's a synthesis of words and pictures in both cases and, you know, when you break it apart and look at the pictures alone and then the words alone, and then you look at the finished product, which is the two of them synthesized and put together, that seems greater than the individual components, to me anyway.
RINGGENBERG: Well, you know, it's funny you should use the word synergy. When I was interviewing Kelley a few days back we talked about the synergy of two creators and I had thought that one of the things lacking in a lot of the comics now, where it's a one-man show, something like Spawn is that synergy, one guy writing and drawing everything.
MOENCH: Yeah, which is not bad. In fact, there was a time when I felt that was best and I was thinking back to the days of Carl Barks and Will Eisner, even Jim Steranko. Now, the only guy that I can think of that maybe comes close, other than if you go into things like, Robert Crumb, you know, the underground stuff, in mainstream comics, is Frank Miller.
RINGGENBERG: That's the only example I could think of, too.
MOENCH: And it's like, well, in recent years the best stuff has been done by teams, in recent years, I'm including the last 20 years, I guess. I don't know why that is. I guess that it's just very rare for one person to be extremely talented in both writing and drawing. I mean it's just a very rare combination. And therefore, you probably do get more good comics lately when you have a really good writer teamed up with a really good artist then. By good writer, the most important thing in comics is understanding when not to write, and let the pictures carry part of the storytelling. That's the most important thing. I've always felt like, if you read a page of my typed dialogue, or the typed dialogue from any comic and you could make complete sense of it, then there's something wrong with it. You should, if you just read that without looking at the pictures, you should be totally baffled. It's like the pictures have to be there for it to make sense, or else it's not really good !
writing.
RINGGENBERG: Well, Doug, aside from Miller, who are some people working in comics today whose work you like?
MOENCH: Charles Burns, um ,oh, let's see. I liked Jerome Charon's The Magician's Wife, however, I did not like, I'm sorry to say, his recent paradox thing. But Billy Budd was okay, Margo was okay, Margo in Badtown, I guess. But, Magician's Wife I thought was really well-written. Charles Burns is the one that really jumps out as, you know, stuff that I've really liked, and I always liked who's the guy that does Binky Brown? I always liked his writing. But he hasn't done that much lately, so I don't know if you could consider him that good. From Hell is really good, Alan Moore. And, you know, I don't know how recent you mean, but if you're going back to those Swamp Things, those were great by Alan Moore. Have not read Watchmen, so I can't say anything about that.
RINGGENBERG: That's a terrific project. You ought to look that up sometime.
MOENCH: Oh, I've got it. It's in my reading pile. It's just you know, there's nine million other things in the reading pile. Just haven't gotten around to it.
RINGGENBERG: Well, Doug, what do you have in the works in '96 for Batman?
MOENCH: I'm sure Kelley told you about the three-part Deadman.
RINGGENBERG: Yeah, he said you're going to take them down to South America.
MOENCH: Yeah, it's involved with looted Inca treasure and a lost city and a dormant volcano, in which the Inca are still living as if four hundred years had not passed.
RINGGENBERG: That sounds like real Edgar Rice Burroughs territory.
MOENCH: Yeah, yeah. Sort of, except that I tried to give it a more modern feel by having the stuff looted by Ollie North-type mercenaries left over from the Contra days, you know. They heard of this legend of a lost city, and after, you know they were done in Nicaragua and Honduras and so on, they decided to go to Peru and check this out, and low and behold they discovered this place, and they've been looting the Inca gold and silver and trying to sell it in Gotham, and that's how Batman gets wind of it. Now, Deadman gets involved because of missing time cases, people who wake up in a place they've never been before, `How do I get here? Oh my God, a day is missing out of my life.' And the solution of course is they've been possessed by a ghost and their bodies have been used like a car, you know. And then they leave the vehicle, and the person wakes up and has no idea why he has this missing time.
RINGGENBERG: That's sort of the way Deadman operates, isn't it?
MOENCH: That's absolutely the way Deadman operates. And that's why Deadman knows that it's got to be ghosts. And that's why he's trying to solve this. Who's doing this? Which ghosts? And of course the ghosts are from this lost Inca city. And then we get the Inca mummies in there. They're brought back to life when they're possessed by their own ghosts. And the mummies walk and, it should be cool.
RINGGENBERG: It does sound like you're throwing in a lot of interesting stuff in those three issues.
MOENCH: Well, it's not the usually Batman story, I'll tell you that. And I think it should stand out for that reason. It should be a refreshing change of pace. I love Gotham and Kelley loves Gotham. Part one takes place in Gotham, but I think it's nice, every once in a while to see Batman somewhere else, and a jungle! You know, you can't get more different from Gotham than that.
RINGGENBERG: Yeah, Kelley said you were both into Willis O'Brien and jungle movies and stuff like that.
MOENCH: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
RINGGENBERG: One thing I've noticed during your recent run with Kelley is that you've been doing a lot of two-part stories.
MOENCH: Yes. We did the one-part Mister Freeze, and then I've done two other one-parters without Kelley. But the three-parter is like our magnum opus, our longest thing since Bloodstorm and Red Rain and Dark Joker.
RINGGENBERG: Do you think you'll do any more longer storylines or continue on with the two or three-issue ones?
MOENCH: I would prefer going with one, two, and three parters, but I don't know all that's going to happen in '96, because we haven't had our Bat-meet yet, at which a lot of this is determined. I will be requesting, suggesting, a number of other two and three parters when have that meeting, but there may be other things involved that nobody knows of yet that we'll have to get involved in, such as this one-part thing for "Contagion", where...If there's another crossover between all of the Batman books, that will determine, to a certain extent, what we have to do, during part of next year. But other than that, I'll just be requesting more two-parters and three-parters and one-parters, as we have in the past year.
??
5S.C. RINGGENBERG
(520) 326-6603
DOUG MOENCH TRANSCRIPT (4/13/95)
RINGGENBERG: I am speaking to Doug Moench. It is April 13th, 1995. Doug, let me begin by asking, when did you first start writing Batman?
MOENCH: This is actually my second run on Batman. The first time was, I believe was in late '82 or '83, and I think I did it, I did Batman and Detective up until I think '87. My last issue on the initial run was Batman #400. We have chirps, is that okay?
RINGGENBERG: Yeah, it's just beeping to let you know that you're being taped.
MOENCH: Okay. So my last one on the first run was Batman #400. That was that anniversary double-size or triple-size jam session with all the different artists that had about ten, fifteen different artists on it. And then I came back, I think, on Batman #48-something. I can't remember which one. I guess I've been on it for about three years now for the second run.
RINGGENBERG: Let me ask you, why did you leave it initially?
MOENCH: They changed editors, they changed artists, they changed writers. It was their decision, not mine.
RINGGENBERG: Oh, okay, yeah. I was just wondering if perhaps you'd gotten burned out on Batman.
MOENCH: No, no, no.
RINGGENBERG: Earlier in the week I had interviewed Jim Aparo and he was saying that you were probably his favorite writer on the character.
MOENCH: Oh, that's nice of him to say. I'm writing something that will have him involved, it's a thing called Brotherhood of the Bat, a sixty-four page one shot, which will also be done jam-style, with Norm Breyfogle, Vince Gerano, Jim Ballant, Graham Nolan, oh man, who am I leaving out? Tom Grommet (sp?) and a few others, and Jim will be handling like the framing parts.
RINGGENBERG: Will Kelley do anything for it?
MOENCH: Ah, no. Kelley is so busy on the monthly that we couldn't spring him free even for one chapter, unfortunately.
RINGGENBERG: Too bad.
MOENCH: Yeah, but this is going to be a really nifty one-shot, I think. When we changed Batman's costume, we hired I don't know how many, about ten artists I think, to come up with designs for the new costume and then we picked the one that we thought would be the best, but not so extreme, you know, a change, but that all the designs turned out so well, even the ones we couldn't really use because they were just too drastic a change, that I decided that, Hey--why don't we do a story using all these designs? And that's what Brotherhood of the Bat is, so that, it's going to be kind of cool.
RINGGENBERG: Yeah, now what was the thinking behind redesigning Batman's costume, the same one he's had since the sixties?
MOENCH: I think because you know Bane broke his back and he went away and then we had Azrael Batman and so on and so forth, then we wanted this big deal where Bruce Wayne returns, and we wanted a visual way to signify, not just his return, but the fact that when he returns he has to be different, he has to have been changed by the experience he went through. That was the thinking behind it.
RINGGENBERG: Was it influenced at all by the black costume in the movies?
MOENCH: No, although the way the changed costume has evolved it certainly is closer. The one that we all voted on and picked was not all black originally. It's been tweaked since then so that the one we picked actually is not the one you're seeing. It's like an amalgamation of several of them, and it has turned that it is, it's not really like the movie one, but it's certainly being black like that, it's closer to it, yeah.
RINGGENBERG: What comic did the new costume first appear in?
MOENCH: Batman #515.
RINGGENBERG: And you said we voted on it? Who are the people who voted on it besides you?
MOENCH: Everyone who attended that particular Bat-conference. It was the, let's see, four, five editors: Archie Goodwin, Denny O'Neil, Scott Peterson and Jordan Gorfinkel. Four editors. Maybe Darren Vincenzo was there, I can't recall. And then the three writers, Alan Grant, Chuck Dixon and myself.
RINGGENBERG: None of the artists were asked?
MOENCH: It wouldn't be fair for them to vote on their own stuff, see? They were asked to leave the room while the rest of us voted.
RINGGENBERG: I see, okay.
MOENCH: Because not all the artists could attend. I think three or four of them were there, and it wouldn't be fair to let those guys vote and not the other guys who had designed costumed.
RINGGENBERG: Now I know that Denny is basically sort of the main Bat-editor. What's Archie doing. Does he work on special projects?
MOENCH: Well, Archie edits Legends of the Dark Knight, month in and month out, which is one of the main Bat-books. It's removed from the continuity, so even though it's a monthly Bat-title, there is no real problem with having a different editor handle that one. And then he does do, various one-shots and special projects involved with the Bat-universe or whatever you want to call it, like the Bat-Mite special that Alan and Kevin O'Neill just did, you know, things like that once in a while.
RINGGENBERG: Yeah. I can't believe they're bringing back Bat-Mite.
MOENCH: Yeah, well it's kind of cute. It's kind of cute. I think it's the kind of thing Alan Grant does really well and, you know, I mean it's not in continuity, it's sort of like a, I guess it is technically an Elseworlds story or it's being played as if it were. You know, it's not really happening, it's just a cute one-shot.
RINGGENBERG: You know, Doug, I just thought of where you might have seen my name before. I co-wrote that Robin 3000 miniseries.
MOENCH: Oh, okay, that's probably one of the places, yeah.
RINGGENBERG: Yeah, and originally it was supposed to be Tom Swift. I had done it for Byron Preiss. I did about three of those. We were going to package them for Simon and Shuster and then they pulled the plug on it back around '87.
MOENCH: Huh. That's too bad. But it worked out.
RINGGENBERG: Yeah, it did. It was a beautiful book.
MOENCH: Yep. Yep.
RINGGENBERG: But, yeah. Speaking of beautiful books, your stuff with Kelley lately, those last three issues, man, were just nice stuff.
MOENCH: Thank you. I just got the new one, the first one of, first of all, let us not omit the name John Beatty.
RINGGENBERG: John Beatty. Beatty, yeah, is doing a great job. His inks are so rich.
MOENCH: It's a three-man team here, you know, and not that we want to leave out the colorist and the letterer, but the core group is really, you know, me and John and Kelley working together. Kelley is really doing some strong stuff, and John's inks--Wow! You know, really, really, really enhancing it well, and, yeah, I got the latest one, which is I think our one, two, three, four, our fifth one. You've only seen three?
RINGGENBERG: Yeah. I don't have #515.
MOENCH: Oh, okay, well then this would be the fourth one for you. And it's the first one that's on the improved paper and the computer coloring, and you know, I mean it's like an Image quality in terms of production. It feels heavier in your hand, the paper's thicker, slicker. The coloring is not only better, it's a completely different process. It does all kinds of key line dropouts where it's just color without black lines holding it. It really looks nice. I'm, especially since it's like the first one, you know it's only going to get better from here. I was afraid the first one would be a disaster before everybody learned what they were doing with all these new process, but it actually turned out really well.
RINGGENBERG: Who's coloring it since Adrienne Roy left?
MOENCH: Greg Wright.
RINGGENBERG: What is the direction you're going to take Batman into in the future?
MOENCH: Well, upcoming we have a one-part Bullock story and that's one issue that's done by Eduardo Baretto. You could call it a fill-in, but it's not really a fill-in because Kelley was not late. This was forced by the change in the process. Now the stuff has to be in sooner because of all this more complicated coloring and so on. But Kelley comes right back after that one issue and we have a two-part Killer Croc story, the second part of which is the first crossover between the DC universe and Vertigo, which has Swamp Thing in it, and we're pretty excited about that. You know Kelley'll do a great Swamp Thing, of course.
RINGGENBERG: Oh, of course, dripping with moss.
MOENCH: Oh, yeah, and then after that we have a two-part scarecrow, which is loosely tied in to my Batman Annual for this year, which is Scarecrow Year One story. It's like the origin of Scarecrow. All of the annuals this year, at least in the Batman books, I think in every book in the company, are Year One books. You know, Year One Poison Ivy, Year One Riddler, Year One Man-Bat, and so on and so forth. Well, I did Scarecrow. It gives his origin, fleshes him out real well. And then Kelley and I are doing this two-parter, which of course is many years later. It's in the current continuity rather than Year One, but it does play off of some of the things that were established in the Year One annual, without the necessity to read, it's not like you have to read the annual to make sense of this. That's the one thing that Kelley and John and I are really, I think, happy with right now, especially me, after being tied with all the other books for so long, with the Knightfall, Knightq!
uest, Knightsend. Now it's like a nice change of pace to have these stories that are complete in themselves, one-parters and two-parters in the same book. And you can get a nice, satisfying thing without having to go from this book to the other and back and forth and so on and the changes in writers and artists and so on. It's all by the same team, all in the same title. Much more compact. And I think that is refreshing for the readers as well as us. We will have another cross-continuity thing, In, I guess about a year. But it won't be as long as the Knights thing. I think that was something like seventy-plus issues, when you added it all up. And it's not going to be anywhere near that. Anyway, after the two-part Scarecrow I think we have a one-part, we're going to revamp this guy Mr. Freeze and then we have a top-secret one-part issue that they won't even tell me all about yet, you know, and then what do we have? Well, Man-Bat will be coming up, and who else? Two-Face, and Po!
ison Ivy, and then, of course, all the Bat-Books are gearing up for the anniversary issue of Detective, number seven hundred, which is in about a year or so, I guess.
RINGGENBERG: Well, it sounds like you're using a lot of the classic villains. Do you have any that are particular favorites?
MOENCH: Yeah. Everybody's favorite is probably the Joker, and then I really like Man-Bat. I really like Two-Face. I like what I'm doing on Killer Croc here. That doesn't mean I like him all the time, but this particular two-parter which ties in to Swamp Thing, I think that's a good one. I'm doing something a little different with him, but with Killer Croc.
RINGGENBERG: Killer Croc seems like he's just made for an alligators in the sewer story.
MOENCH: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and in the swamp. He's made for a team-up with Swamp Thing, no doubt about it.
RINGGENBERG: Yeah, in Kelley's hands, I'm sure it's going to be really atmospheric.
MOENCH: Oh, it is. I mean I'm writing the pages now. It's amazing. We're hoping that this, you know, the second part of that, is going to be, by far, the best to that date, issue, by the three of us.
RINGGENBERG: Well, it seems from talking to Kelley, and from talking to you now, that you've got a really exciting synergy going.
MOENCH: Yeah, I think so. I think so. It's a special thing. I've had it before with Paul Gulacy and Mike Ploog, and Bill Sienkiwicz, but I haven't had it in quite a while, and it's finally hit with Kelley and John, and it's like old times, you know, with that feeling that it's something special again. Not that I'm putting down what I've done in the last five years or so, but this stuff really, you know, I don't know if you saw the hardcover graphic albums we did, graphic novels: Red Rain and Bloodstorm, and Dark Joker...but that's where we really realized that there was a synergy going on, and it has spilled over. We were afraid that we wouldn't be able to do it on a monthly basis, but I think we're maintaining it.
RINGGENBERG: Doug, looking back on all the Batman work that other people have done, is there anything that anyone else did that has ever particularly influenced your own approach?
MOENCH: Well, all of it, to one extent or another, except maybe the goofy fifties bizarre science fiction stuff. But the very early dark and nasty stuff, sure, that influenced me. The Bill Finger and Dick Sprang and Jerry Robinson stuff, that influenced me. The sixties stuff by O'Neil and Adams, the return to the dark stuff of the beginning, that influenced me. That's probably the last stuff that influenced me, but you know, I mean, you can't help but being influenced by all of the stuff that you read in one way or another.
RINGGENBERG: Yeah. Did you read the issues of Detective that Archie edited in the seventies?
MOENCH: Oh yeah. I thought that was great stuff.
RINGGENBERG: I thought so too. I thought that was a particular highlight of...
MOENCH: I just talked to Archie. Not this phone call, just about an hour ago, but the last phone call we had I told him, I said, `Hey, Arch, those Detectives you did in the seventies, those were really sleepers. People don't realize how'...And you know, of course Archie and his `Aw, gee, gorsh' kind of thing, always trying to be modest. `Well, that's the story of my life. Nothing but sleepers.' Those were really fine, fine stories. Really solid. Maybe not flashy and spectacular in a surface, but man, they were good reading.
RINGGENBERG: Yeah, like that one job he did with Toth. That's a classic.
MOENCH: Absolutely. I've always been a big Toth guy, yep. I hear he's a crusty old guy, but that's okay.
RINGGENBERG: Well, I think he's earned it.
MOENCH:I love his work, man.
RINGGENBERG: Yeah. Me, too. Me, too. You did a fair amount of Batman with Gulacy, too, didn't you?
MOENCH: We did a two-part story in Batman, back around, I don't know, '85, '86, something like that. Then we just finished the four-part Batman versus Predator. The second Batman versus Predator series. The last one of that just came out a month or two ago.
RINGGENBERG: Okay, so the whole run of that is out now?
MOENCH: Yeah. Yeah. I'm hearing that a lot: When's the fourth issue coming out? And, hey, guess what? I got news for you--it's out and sold out. A lot of people are saying: `Well when's that fourth one coming out?' It came and went.
RINGGENBERG: Do you think there's any plans to collect that one into a book?
MOENCH: I certainly hope so because that thing sold out real fast.
RINGGENBERG: Doug, what do you think is the reason why Batman
has been such a successful character for so long?
MOENCH: Well, first of all I think, well I think there's two reasons. His origin is very primal and pure. You know, it's the nightmare of a kid losing his parents, and the way he lost them, to violence, makes it all the more horrifying. And the second thing is, I think you can more easily identify with a Batman than you can with some gamma-ray super-powered guy because it's at least within the realms of possibility that you could study and learn and train your body and be a Batman. I mean, you know, maybe he's the world's greatest, he's better than the best athlete in the Olympics, but he's not that much past the bounds of the possible. He's more realistic even though yes, sure, it's comic book fantasy, but you can identify with him. He's more grounded in realism. He doesn't lift buildings or hover in mid-air or anything like that. And those are, I think, the two things, then you get into all kinds of other psychological archetypes and mythical resonances. He speaks to us in a!
deep way that we don't consciously realize. He's a hero, and yet he looks like a devil with those horns, you know, those bat-ears look like horns and he's a dark angel and there's a very complex, convoluted kind of thing going on there and you know I prefer not to get into that, to over-think it too much. I'd rather just, you know let that stuff simmer in the subconscious. If it comes out in my writing, fine. If it strikes a chord in the readers' deep subconscious, fine, but if you pick that apart too much and over-analyze the archetypes stuff you probably are going to lose it.
RINGGENBERG: Yeah, well, something Denny said the last time I talked with him made me think that Finger and Bob Kane had accidentally tapped into an archetype without meaning to.
MOENCH: Yeah, and I think that's the only way you can do it. If you try to do it, yeah, maybe you can do it, but it's going to see studied, it's going to seem labored, it's going to seem too obvious. The only way it's really going to work and strike a chord and resonate with you is if it is by accident. An archetype by its nature has to be, I think, subconscious. It has to be very deeply imbedded in the character.
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