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Recently, I applied through DC Comics for equity in a character, SCARY MARY, that I created (with the artist Derec Donovan) as a new villain for Robin back in 2007. By equity, I mean profit participation in a character; which is a way of insuring oneself that if that character is used in a movie/TV Show/video game/audiobook etc. the creator will see some small benefit from it.

In these days of everything becoming a comic book movie, you just never know so I was long overdue in applying. 

I was originally going to write about something different for my first newsletter but going through the equity process has brought Robin Annual #7 to the front of my mind for the first time in years. There was a lot going on behind the scenes of this book; maybe some of which you will even find it interesting... 

But first, here's the opening page of the annual by Derec Donovan, who even colored this story.

 

In 2006, I was hired by DC Comics to be the writer of the ongoing Robin series.

It was an exciting time in my career.  I had been an artist/inker for DC for well over a decade at that point, it had only been in the previous couple of years that I was finally being given a chance to do what I really wanted: write.

The Robin gig was an opportunity to flex. I wasn't just coming in for 2-3 issues to help out another team or write exhausting company-wide crossover projects which was how DC was utilizing me. The book was MINE. I had a story to tell and that story began with Scary Mary.

 

 

Scary Mary was a Halloween-themed serial killer (my first issue of Robin was slated to come out in October). She was slicing and dicing her way across Gotham City in, what Robin would eventually learn, was a competition with her family of serial killers.

I had also planned that Mary would be a love interest for Robin. I had plotted them to meet in his high school in their civilian personas, neither one aware of who the other really was. While Tim Drake (Robin) would have been dating and falling in love with Mary Quintas (FUN FACT: I often name characters after people I know. Mary was named after my real-life friends, the Quintas family), Robin would have been hunting down Scary Mary. Eventually, the two worlds would collide and more than hearts would be broken.

 

I wrote the first script, got paid for it, Freddie Williams III was going to be my artist and then...

God laughed at my plans.

The editor that hired me to write Robin (let's give him the clever pseudonym of Peter Tomasi) left DC to become a writer himself and the first thing Dan Didio, at that point micromanager of all things DC editorial, offered him to write? Robin. 

So yeah, that was awkward. 

But in a strange plot twist, that so-called Peter Tomasi turned the job down! He had no interest in writing Robin; he had his sights set on Nightwing instead so...maybe the gig would be coming back my way? I didn't know but I had several other projects to work on while DC figured it out.

A couple of months of silence later, I realized something important: DC didn't figure it out.

So I reached out to the editor that had inherited the book and asked, "hey, am I still writing this thing or what? I wrote the first issue before everything got flip-turned upside down."

Long story shorter, the new editor had no clue I was ever even in the mix to write Robin and had hired his own guy to write the book with Freddie drawning it. Ugh, it still makes me roll my eyes to this day. 

BUT...all was not completely lost.

The new editor (let's call him Mike Marts for shits and giggles) came up with a plan to use my first script as...an annual. Mike was and is a stand up guy and it was nice of him to find me an olive branch when he really was under no obligation to do so. The plan was that after the annual eventually came out, now with Derec Donovan on board as an artist, we'd find another way to continue the story somehow. Sounds great, right? Except spoiler alert: we didn't. 

 

 

The only problem storywise/logistically is that an annual typically has a higher page count than a single issue of a comic book and we'd need to come up with something to fill the remainder of those empty pages. At the time, Grant Morrison was gearing up to bring R'as Al Ghul back from the dead and back into Batman's life and Marts saw an opportunity to begin that story in this annual, with another (future) Robin, Damian Wayne: son of The Batman, grandson of R'as.

I came up with a quick little Damian story, also sort-of Halloween-themed with the only editorial caveat being that we needed to have R'as Al Ghul appear at the end without revealing his true identity. The great Jason Pearson was assigned to draw it and man, did I feel like I hit the lottery twice in terms of my artists for this annual! Guy Major also did a fantastic job of coloring this story, I really enjoyed looking through it again after all this time.

 

 

A few months later, Robin Annual #7 arrived in comic shops all over the place. Marts's instinct of including R'as Al Ghul in the book was right on the money because it sold out and we got a second printing. Geoff Johns sent me an email congratulating me and I still get a few dollars in royalties every quarter thanks to DC including the Damian Wayne story in a million reprint editions of the R'as storyline. All's well that ended well enough.

Still, I would have preferred to have written the monthly Robin comic. There were several writing projects over the years that DC gave me, then took away for one reason or another. Joker: Year One (with Doug Mahnke), Green Lantern: The Corpse (with Jamal Igle) and a six-issue run on Nightwing spring to mind and its hard not to wonder how my writing career would have been shaped by any of those projects coming to completion. 

But hey, maybe they'll each make good newsletter stories someday, if you guys like reading this kind of thing. Let me know!

Bonus: WHERE ARE THEY NOW? 

The so-called Peter Tomasi remains one of my best friends and we're writing a project together called The Death Whisperer...for Mike Marts at Aftershock Comics. Image is also publishing a new edition of our book, The Mighty, later this month! I'm not sure whatever happened to that Geoff Johns guy, did he ever do anything major in comics? Derec Donovan and Jason Pearson are both around, still fighting the good fight. And I see several members of the Quintas family occassionally and none have ever tried to serial murder me.

And Dan Didio? Don't ask my opinion of him.

See you next time!

Keith