Buffy The Vampire Slayer

As mentioned the other day, I was looking to get some features for the site and Dark Horse editor Scott Allie was recently kind enough to do an interview for the site about Buffy Season Eight and other Buffy goings on at Dark Horse.

Jackal: With Joss [Whedon] running Season Eight as if he were a showrunner and the comic was a TV show, as the comic’s editor, what has your working relationship been like with him? Are you the network president to his executive producer?

Scott Allie: There’s nothing like me in all of TV and movies, bub. This is actually pretty similar to my role on Hellboy, a lot of the times. We talk over every decision together, but Joss makes the decisions. I weigh in, I suggest artists-I’ve suggested one writer, and Joss said yeah to him. I’ve made some pretty weighty suggestions that I’ve been surprised that he’s adopted, but that’s one of the real relaxing things about working with Joss. He’s confident enough in what he’s doing that he’s not going to overrule other people’s ideas just because they’re not his own. So that’s rewarding. Of course, his confidence also gives him permission to threaten to kill me, but that’s only happened twice that I can think of. And you do sort of remember that kind of thing. I do all the scheduling, and I do all the businessy stuff with the other talent. DH pays the bills, so Joss can’t be negotiating the money stuff, and it’s better and cleaner and easier for him to stay out of that all together. Joss has the vision, and I think it’s my job to have an understanding of that vision second only to his, so that I can manage all the stuff on the ground as we go. I don’t want Joss sweating every marketing idea, ad design, all that sort of thing. I knew how important Georges [Jeanty] was to Joss’s vision-that word again-so I went whole hog after getting Georges away from another book he was gonna do for another publisher, and didn’t bother Joss with the details until telling him that we’d got Georges for the long haul. There’s a lot I can do without bugging Joss, as long as I know that I’m guided by a fair understanding of what he’d want. And again, that’s my role on Hellboy. And it was my goal on the old Buffy comics-to understand Joss’s vision best as I could, and execute it. Obviously the results are better, closer to that goal, when we’re talking and emailing about things as much as we are.

J: How much communication do you have with other writers on this series? Does it involve business-y and creative stuff or does Joss exclusively deal with the creative issues with other writers?

SA: So far Brian is the only other writer we’ve dealt with on Season Eight. I’ve only met Brian [K. Vaughan] once, and haven’t worked with him before, so Joss has the far better relationship with him. But there’s a lot of open dialogue. We all talk over cover ideas, and I give Brian some feedback on scripts. So there’s a lot of interaction. I suspect there may be less with the writers from the show, only because those guys are real close knit, and Joss definitely has his relationships and ways of working with them worked out. So that remains to be seen. These writers are real good, though, and Brian certainly has comics writing figured out. So a lot of the "editing" is front loaded, in conversations and emails up front. Joss and I aren’t having to give notes to Brian about character motivation or about making a scene more compelling. Joss and Brian sort of break the story, figure out the scope and shape of it up front, and I’m out of the loop on that stuff, and will probably continue to be, on the other writers, all of whom are closer to Joss than to me. You don’t need too many cooks in that.

J: How is the narrative continuity and tonal continuity maintained in the transition between Joss and Brian’s arc? Do they work out continuity themselves? Does the fact Brian’s arc is Faith-centric make tonal continuity a moot-point?

SA: The continuity is tight, flawless, closely watched. All Joss, with a little help from me and Katie and of course Georges doing his considerable part. In terms of continuity, this IS an ongoing comic. Keeping the same artist for most of the book is going to give a strong sense of continuity. The characters will be written very consistently. Brian is getting the characters’ voices perfect, and of course Drew [Goddard] will, after his stint writing for the TV show. It’s a lot like doing the show. On the show, every episode had a different writer and director, but you didn’t notice because the cast remained the same and Joss oversaw the whole thing. Well, we have one artist, and we have Joss running the whole thing, so it should be about as continuous as the TV show. That said, Brian will be doing his thing in terms of storytelling, so rhythms and setups will be very BKV. But when you hear Faith talk, you’d think Joss-or Drew, or Jane [Espenson], or Stephen [DeKnight]-were writing her. In Issue #6, there are lines so perfect that Joss was compelled to comment on what a great Faith line this or that was. So what was the question ... oh yeah. There’ll be variation in tone, but with the voices right, the characters true to themselves, and the same penciler, inker, colorist, and letterer, I don’t think the change is gonna be disruptive.

J: And was there discussion on how much of the show’s tone the book would adopt? Joss has mentioned that because it’s a comic, Season Eight will play itself out on a more epic scale, which we’ve seen so far with Giant Dawn and helicopters. Has anything been considered too epic yet in so much that it would jar with the reality and tone set up in the show?

SA: There was actually little or no talk about that. I like to think we were just on the same page about that. With Joss’s involvement, we’re gonna maintain as much of the tone as is, just as a result of Joss’s work. But it’s gonna be different, transposed to comics. Maybe there was some talk about that-getting the tone to be different because it’s a comic. But given that, I think we knew that the tone would be largely the same otherwise. The humor, the action, the optimism amidst the emotional ups and downs. We never talked about what we’d retain from the show, because I think that was understood. But we knew we wanted to amp certain things up for comics. The volume, the action. Also, as much discussion as we had over choice of an artist, that determined a lot about tone. Georges was just what we were looking for when we started talking, and he has this mix of levity, dynamics, traditional comics, but more honest emotional content. Had we gone for someone more like [John] Cassaday, that would have made for a much different tone. That would have determined tone for the book as much as or more than the writer could have. For instance, when Joss and I figure out who’s going to draw a fill-in issue, one thing we consider is tone.

J: IDW have published Angel script books and Dark Horse released a “making of” feature for Buffy #3. Is there any chance you’d publish script books for the comic? Or include them in the trades?

SA: No plans. There’d be an interest in Joss’s comics scripts, Brian Vaughan’s scripts, but this isn’t anything we’re talking about now. We’ve put some script pages on line, and there was a strong response to that.

J: Are there any plans for more online “behind the scenes” content?

SA: That’s a major focus for our website, something the web guys love to do. While we don’t have more in the pipeline at the moment, I’m sure they’ll be coming to ask for more soon.

J: At any point would you consider spinning other characters off into their own title? Or would an arc devoted to a specific character under the Season Eight banner be as close as we’d get to that?

SA: Why, we just talked about that yesterday. We haven’t got any plans for a miniseries, a side project, but there are some stories that are so complicated, so much outside of what Season Eight is all about, that the only logical way to do them would be to break them out as a miniseries. Funny you mention it, because we’ve literally never broached the topic until yesterday.

J: That’d be something to look forward to. Are you at liberty to say what characters may get these miniseries?

SA: Nope!

J: Along those lines, can we expect anymore Fray, Tales of the Vampires or Tales of the Slayers stuff?

SA: There’s no immediate plans for any of that, but we really want to do another Fray miniseries. Someday. It’s something we’ve always talked about, since wrapping up the first one, but other stuff always seems to get in the way. As for more Tales-type books, I dunno. Season Eight is just sort of a bigger, far better version of that-letting Joss and the TV writers play with the world in the comics format. I think that when you see #5, you’ll see that anything we could do in the Tales books, we’ve decided we can just do in Season Eight.

J: Considering Joss’s heavy involvement in this series, how much input have 20th Century Fox had?

SA: Fox has been great. Fox was always great on Buffy. My contact there, Debbie Olshan, genuinely became a good friend, and not in an L.A. kind of way. At the very beginning, the licensors sort of bossed me around more than I wanted, but once I started forging a relationship with Joss, Debbie was my only contact, and she realized she could trust me. That was on the non-Joss stuff-it’s even better on a Joss-written thing, whether it’s Tales of the Slayers or Season Eight. Debbie makes everything pretty easy for us, helps us deal with the approvals from the actors and actresses from the show, and just asks for lots of comps.

J: There has been some debate on the Internet about canon in the Buffy comics. Do you, Dark Horse and Joss basically consider anything Joss has worked on to be canon?

SA: Oh, yeah, of course. The scythe showed up in Fray, and then wham, there it was in the TV series. Yes, I cannot say it enough, Season Eight IS canon. That’s why it’s Season Eight.

J: Will Xander’s stint as Dracula’s slave from Tales of the Vampires be followed up on in Season Eight?

SA: Hotcha.

J: Thanks for doing the interview. Is there any thing else you want to tell the readers of Season Eight?

SA: There’s a new social disease spreading around that you get from not reading Season Eight. I don’t want to get too graphic, but stuff turns black and, sadly, doesn’t fall off. But it does learn to talk.