Causing Trouble in Eight Pages
BATMAN #151 is out this week, and here's how I did it
Big day for me!
I have an eight page story, “Absolute Power Plant!” in the pages of today’s Batman #151.
Everyone in comics has their own weird little personal milestones, and being in Batman was one of them for me. Yes, I’ve gotten the chance to write Batman the character, and I’ve been a part of issues of Batman in the past (like the ones Chip wrote for Gotham War that featured our shared planning,) but this is the first time I’ve ever been able to say I wrote eight pages in what is, to me, the biggest book in comics, no-adjective BATMAN.
Yeah, the story’s not about him, it’s about Harley, that just makes it better!
And eight pages is just the right amount of space to do a few donuts in the parking lot and have a little fun.
BATMAN #151 - ABSOLUTE POWER: HARLEY QUINN - 8.7.24
(my first ever foray into the pages of the BIGGEST BOOK IN COMICS! Hope you check it out.)
CATWOMAN #68 - 9.18.24
HARLEY QUINN #43 - 9.25.24
DRAGONCON 2024, ATLANTA GA -8.29.24-9.2.24
HEY WRITERS, C’MERE
If you’re a new or aspiring comic writer, short stories like these are the kinds of assignments that might get you noticed by an editor, or the kind of stories you’ll likely receive as your first editorial assignments. Anywhere from one page (like my first ever X-Men story in Marvel’s Merry X-Men Holiday Special ) to eight or ten is usually the ask, and it’s often an opportunity to prove yourself to a new editor or team of editors you’ve maybe been looking for a chance to impress.
It is with that in mind I decided to share my process for this specific assignment - by no means a prescriptive guide, this is just the true peek behind the curtain, the steps I go through when I start to put together a short (say, below 12 pages) comic story.
0. THE ASSIGNMENT
I got an email from the editorial team, asking me if I had the bandwidth in my schedule to take on eight pages in Gotham during their huge summer event, Absolute Power. The story would be printed in Batman #151, and since Catwoman features heavily in the main story, perhaps I could write a Harley Quinn story. I was extremely eager, but I needed to come up with an idea.
So I sat down to brainstorm and immediately found myself up against the parameters of the Absolute Power event. I didn’t want to undermine the event with anything too big or important, but I absolutely wanted to respond to current state of things with my story.
With the Harley Quinn backup stories that appear in the pages of the monthly book I wrote, those were their own out-of-continuity adventures, so I didn’t want to give the writers and artists any guidance - I wanted to see what they would do. But this was an event backup - what I didn’t want to do was pull against the threads of what Mark was building.
Eight pages on a huge stage to show the world what we could put Harley and her city through in a meaningful way. We could address her past with the Suicide Squad, her hate for the Joker, her love of her girlfriend, her time at Arkham, her recent reality-damaging Personal Crisis…it all seemed pretty limitless. Maybe what I needed were some parameters to kick start my mind.
So I emailed the always-friendly Mark Waid, author of Absolute Power so I could outsource that task. Maybe Mark had something in mind he really wanted me to do or not do. When you’re brainstorming, any idea, even a bad one, can feel like a starting point. Besides, what if Mark really wanted one version of Harley and I delivered a different tone? Please, I prayed, please Mark, be brutal, be demanding, give me an idea.
And Mark replied.