Hot Shot of the Week Companion Feature
Ten Questions About Tangent: Superman's Reign with Ron Marz
Russell Burlingame reporting for Comic Related
Ron Marz is the co-writer (with Dan Jurgens) of the Tangent: Superman's Reign miniseries that started on Wednesday from DC Comics. As a "prisoner of his past credits," Marz is best known for creating Kyle Rayner, the Green Lantern who replaced Silver Age stalwart Hal Jordan for more than ten years starting in 1993, and possibly the most controversial "legacy hero" of all time. He has a long and distinguished writing and editing career with credits from Marvel, Top Cow, DC, Dark Horse and Crossgen.
Spinning out of the Tangent Universe fifth-week events of the 1990s and the events of Marz's Ion: Guardian of the Universe maxiseries, the series tells the story of the Tangent Universe—a place that bears very little resemblance to the DC Universe proper, but which features characters called Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and others. At the conclusion of Infinite Crisis, the literal green lantern possessed by the Tangent Universe's Green Lantern washed up on the shores of a beach in the DC Universe, allowing a brief and confusing crossover to occur during the Ion: Guardian of the Universe miniseries, but that took place exclusively in the DC Universe, and the Tangent characters used reflected only the basics of their personalities, with no real hint of what may have happened in their universe during their publishing hiatus.
Picking up roughly a decade after the last Tangent fifth-week event left off, Tangent: Superman's Reign marks the first time that the characters of the Jurgens-created Tangent Universe have interacted at length with characters from the DC Universe, as Tangent Universe characters seek out their DCU counterparts to help combat the greatest threat facing their reality—a former Brooklyn cop calling himself Superman.
Comic Related: So you're writing backups. DC has gotten much bigger on those lately, and ironically most of the notable ones up to now have been by this series' main writer, Dan Jurgens. What's the nature of the backups you're doing?
Ron Marz: Yeah, I guess Dan was sort of the go-to guy for a lot of the DC Universe history stories, and this is kind of the same thing in that the backups I'm doing are telling the basic history of the Tangent Universe—or at least the important parts of how we got to where the story is now, and basic character sketches on the main players. So the backups essentially serve as a primer for everybody who either read the Tangent stuff years ago and doesn't remember it, or has never read it.
CR: You were one of many great '90s writers who worked on the original Tangent fifth-week events*. What's it like to revisit this universe?
RM: I hadn't looked at this stuff since we did it, so it was fun to dig out the issues and put myself into that mindset. I think Tangent was the only fifth-week event that got a second act. Actually, I think the coolest aspect is that we were able to move the overall story forward with each issue because it was a self-contained universe, so we weren't worrying about, "Well, you know, if we kill off Character A, or do something horrible to Character B..." It wasn't like we were going to affect characters who had been around for thirty years and were going to be around for thirty more years. Because of that, a lot of the usual rules were off.
CR: Is the next major story Dan Jurgens writes featuring the super-family of characters going to have to do with the reins on Streaky the Super-Horse? You know, R-E-I-N's?
RM: [Laughs] I guess. Or maybe Superman's Rain, when they have bad weather. Obviously, there's some cache in Dan's name followed by "Superman." We're all a prisoner of our past credits to a certain extent. As pros, we end up having to remind ourselves that people are constantly getting into this hobby. I saw someone online the other day mention that they had been reading comics for a few years, but never read Watchmen, and they were wondering if they should bother. And I'm saying to myself, "What? Never read Watchmen? You're kidding, right?" But I have to remind myself that it was published almost 25 years ago now, and while it might be second nature to you or me, some people are just discovering it. I realize there are people out there for whom Kyle Rayner is THE Green Lantern, the one that they grew up with, and this Hal Jordan guy is an interloper. A generation before, it was just the opposite. I think your perceptions are very much colored by when you got on the ride.
CR: When it comes to History backups, I always have to wonder—how much are you just re-stating from the last time around and how much are you actually creating new content?
RM: I set up the backups so that there was an "A" story and a "B" story within each five-page backup. It's been a juggling act to to fit everything into five-page segments. I didn't want to do dry, encyclopedia-type stories where it's just kind of a download of information. That's what Wikipedia is for—if you just want the nuts and bolts, you can get that from another source.
There's a framing sequence in each backup that set in the present timeframe of the Tangent Universe, which is ten years after the most recent Tangent books. The framing sequence introduces an information broker who is collecting all the info that's being recounted in the backup stories. There's a mystery about who actually hired this guy, and what their motives actually are. Who do they serve? That's the engine that drives the backup stories forward. So each backup has this framing story wrapped around the story of one of the main Tangent characters. Issue #1 is a basic Tangent history lesson, #2 is the story of the Metal Men, #3 is Nightwing, #4 is Superman. I just turned in #5 this morning, and that's the Joker. We'll get to all the major characters. This is hopefully a way to give all the necessary background information, but do it in a way that's got some story value itself. It's actually turned out to be a lot harder to do it this way than just the straight information download. But no sense in doing things the easy way ... he says, and bangs his head on the desk repeatedly.
CR: Who are the main players in the Tangent: Superman's Reign story?
RM: For the lead stories, there's ... uh, Superman. He's basically taken over the Tangent world, and thinks he's done so for its own good. You know, this is obviously Dan's baby. It's kind of funny, because Dan is doing the lead stories and I'm doing the backups, and we're trading scripts back and forth, but they're not -- at this point, at least -- intimately linked. We want this to be a stand-alone thing, because so many comics right now require you to bring a decade of comics knowledge with you, and be pretty familiar with how everything ties together. The Tangent stuff is going to be fairly stand-alone, so that if somebody hadn't looked at the Tangent stuff ever, or hasn't looked at it in a decade, they should be able to strap right in for the ride.
CR: What do you think the sales prospect are for something like the Tangent story?
RM: I don't know, I tend not to get too wrapped up in sales just because there are so many factors that are out of your control. The biggest one is that this is an industry of inertia, you know? The things that sell tend to keep on selling. When you do something new or different, you're kind of casting your bread onto the waters and hoping it doesn't come back too soggy.
I know that when Luke Ross and I can do something like Samurai: Heaven and Earth, which we own and pour our hearts and souls into, we'll sell 10,000 an issue, or 15,000 for a number one issue if we're lucky. When Luke and I did Green Lantern—same creative team, same effort involved—we sold four times that many copies. The market is what it is, and it embraces the comfort food, the stuff that's there every month, and has been there every month for 30 or 40 years. So something like Tangent ... who knows? It's certainly got familiar characters from the DCU, so that should help. Ultimately, I think it's pretty good stuff. It definitely looks great. Fernando Pasarin is drawing my backups, and Jamal Igle is following Matthew Clark on the lead feature. So even if Dan and I screw up horribly on the writing, you're going to get your money's worth on the artwork!
CR: What can you tell me about Ion: Guardian of the Universe, and the way that the Tangent characters came to be involved in that series?
RM: More than anything, because Dan Jurgens and I had breakfast one morning in Chicago. We were supposed to be talking about the fantasy football league that we have with Phil Hester and Ande Parks and some other pros, but work eventually came up. I knew we had 12 issues of Ion to do. The first 6 issues or so were nailed down pretty specifically, and then for the last 6, there was only a general idea because there were going to be so many other factors contributing to where the story needed to go—stuff with Countdown, stuff with The Sinestro Corps War. The Tangent thing came about pretty organically, because Dan said he was going to be doing Tangent again, so I thought that if we could start dealing with other universes in the DCU, maybe I could bring some Tangent aspects into Ion. Then it became a back and forth with me and Dan and the editor trying to work it out the parameters, along with all the other plot threads that ended up Ion.
CR: How much confusion or flak on Monarch's and Tangent's role in Ion: Guardian of the Universe have you encountered online, at cons and the like?
RM: It's more questions than flak. People just want to know how it all fits together and frankly, I'm not even sure how it all fits together, or at least how everything comes together in the end, because that's not a part of the story that I'm telling. A lot of the time when you're dealing with big crossover-type stories, you get your piece of the puzzle and you have to take it from point A to point B. Then somebody else picks it up and takes it to the next point. Unless you're the guy who's supervising the whole story and seeing it all the way through, you just handle your own part.
CR: What were the titles you worked on during the original Tangent runs, as opposed to the issues by Jurgens, Robinson or Peyer?
RM: I did Metal Men the first go-round with Mike McKone, which I totally jumped at because it was a chance to basically do an army book. It wasn't superheroes in any way, shape or form, it was just guys with guns. The second time I did Powergirl with Dusty Abell, which ended up bringing in a lot of the Metal Men characters decades later.
CR: I liked how they were integrated later, and the interconnectivity for a bunch of books coming out the same week was pretty surprising—in a good way. How was everything managed?
RM: Well, Dan had come up with the plan, the overall framework. So everybody knew that certain Metal Men characters from 1968, for instance, would reappear years later as the President, and as the guy in charge of the shadowy Nightwing agency. We had enough room to play so we could bring some creativity to our stories. We had a framework, but it wasn't a straitjacket. And it also helped that we were doing a limited number of books, with everything run through one editorial office. That's a whole lot different than coordinating 30 or 40 titles in the DCU every month, all of them coming from different offices. Something inevitably slips through the cracks. If you keep it contained, you have a better chance of dotting all the I's and crossing all the T's.
*A "fifth-week event" is an event that is created by publishers to fill the "gap" week during five-week months, as most comics publish on a four-week monthly cycle. These are increasingly rare, in no small part because people are a lot more laissez-faire about deadlines and there's almost always something coming out on the fifth weeks, but were extremely common during the event-driven speculator comics market of the 1990s. Most of these "events" were non-starters, but the Tangent Universe sold well enough to merit a second event the following year.
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Ten Question About Tangent: Superman's Reign With Dan Jurgens
Page last updated on March 22, 2008