[00:00] Intro: Welcome to The Corner Box, where we talk about comics as an industry and an art form. You never know where the discussion will go or who will show up to join host David Hedgecock and John Barber. Between them, they've spent decades writing, drawing, lettering, coloring, editing, editor-in-chiefing, and publishing comics. If you want to know the behind-the-scenes secrets, the highs and lows, the ins and outs of the best artistic medium in the world, then listen in and join us on The Corner Box.

[00:30] David Hedgecock: Welcome back to the corner box. I'm one of your hosts, David Hedgecock, and with me as always, is my good friend,

[00:37] John Barber: The other host, John Barber. Good to have you back.

[00:40] David: Yeah, yeah. I was on vacation for a couple of weeks. We took of couple weeks off, but don't worry, we've got so many of these in the can now that there will be no missing on our listeners, and, John, we've got a special guest with us today.

[00:55] John: That's exciting news.

[00:56] David: I'd like to introduce our special guest, I guess it's going to be in the show notes, so it's not even an exciting thing. Anyway, here's Ron Marz. Ron, how's it going?

[01:08] Ron Marz: Hi, boys. Thanks for inviting me into your little clubhouse.

[01:13] David: Yeah, it's nice to have you man. I had ChatGPT write an intro, so I'm going to read it. Before I start, though. I think, Ron, that when our robot overlords come to take us away, you're going to be in good shape. I think you're going to be one of the last ones that they call, based on what ChatGPT wrote about you. So, with us today is a luminary in the comic book world, a writer whose compelling narratives and unforgettable characters captivated readers for decades. The one and only Ron Marz. Ron's journey in the comic industry is one marked by an unyielding passion for storytelling, having penned some of the most iconic enduring series in the world of comics. He is best known for his influential work on titles like Green Lantern for DC Comics, where he introduced the character, Kyle Rayner, and Silver Surfer for Marvel Comics. His extensive and diverse portfolio includes working with a myriad of publishers and imprints, and he's contributed to shaping the narratives of characters spanning from the superhero genre to science fiction, and beyond, bringing depth, emotion, and a unique voice to each one. In addition to his contributions to the superhero genre, Ron has also captivated readers with his work on various independent and creator-owned projects, showcasing his versatility and commitment to pushing the boundaries of comic book stories. Ron's impact on the comic industry is undeniable and his dedication to his craft continues to inspire aspiring creators and delight fans around the world. Whether you are a longtime follower of his work, or a newcomer eager to explore the vast realms of comic books, you're in for a treat as we delve into his creative journey experiences and insights on the ever-evolving world of comics. Ron, thanks so much for being here today.

[02:53] Ron:

Well, one, I guess I have a new author's bio, and two, ChatGPT is kind of an ass-kisser.

[03:06] David: Yeah, that was not what I would have written. But I'm glad I had ChatGPT put something together.

[03:13] John: How do we keep going over our half hour time limit on this show?

[03:18] David: John’s constantly shaking his head and looking down. Every single episode. Quick highlights, Ron, not that you don't know, but just for the people out there, those three people listening to us, you had a stint at CrossGen, Mystic, The Path, Scion, Sojourn, were you writing all of those or were you just editor-in-chiefing a lot of that? Were you the editor in chief at CrossGen?

[03:38] Ron: We didn't have any editors. No Gods, no monsters, no editors. Actually, that's not true. We had a few monsters, but yeah, I wrote all those. I stopped writing Mystic around issue 20-something.

[03:51] David: Yeah, you had longer runs on Scion and Sojourn, from what I saw, which, not to blow smoke, but those actually were two of my favorite books. There was another one that Paul drew that I really liked. Yeah, the Sci Fi one. 

[04:08] Ron: We did a bunch of good books down there. We did a few stinkers too, but the batting average is pretty good.

[04:13] David: Dark Horse. I know you did some various Star Wars stuff, among other things. I’m just hitting the highlights. DC, Green Lantern, obviously, and then a storied run on that. You did some of DC versus Marvel stuff and some Tangent stuff, which I would love to talk about a little bit if we get a chance. Over at Image, I think your big run was Witchblade, but you had a short run on Cyberforce and Magdalena as well, and then of course at Marvel, well known for your Silver Surfer work, which is where you got your start. I'll stop talking pretty quick here. One of the things that John and I did when we did our first episode was we did our origin story, which was basically “what was a comic book, obscure or not so obscure, that got you interest, got you hooked, the one that got you into the game or made you a fanatic?” I'm curious to find out what that is for you. 

[05:05] Ron: As a kid, it was just whatever I plucked off the spinner rack. That was the gateway drug. Going into the pharmacy or the deli or the supermarket, it was potluck. There's an attraction to that whole thing, where you didn't know that you were going to get the next issue of whatever you were reading. For me, it was Avengers and X Men, but you had no idea whether that issue was going to be there or was sold out, or maybe it didn't show up, or somebody left it on the dock out in the back. So, you just don't want to read it yet. So, initially, it was just a bunch of different stuff, and when I got to be too old for comics, 12 or whatever I was, I kept reading Savage Sword, because that had violence and nudity in it, and then the, the one that sucked me back in, so the gateway drug was X Men Teen Titans, which I stumbled across in our local mall a mile or two from my house, and there was an antique show set up in the middle of the mall, and there was a comic dealer there, and I hadn't looked at comics in four or five years, or something like that, and X Men Teen Titans was laying out on the table, and I was like, “well, that's impossible, because that one’s DC and that one's Marvel, and that can't actually happen, and what the hell?” So, I think I spent the princely sum of $5 or whatever it was to get that issue, and that just sucked me right back in. Glorious Simonson/Austin art was the shit. From there, ended up being drawn back into comics in the mid 80s. Simonson’s Thor, Miller's Daredevil being the two prime motivators for getting me back in, and then starting to read indie stuff, and then 1986 happened with Dark Knight and Watchmen, and I was a goner by that point.

[07:01] David: It sounds like you have a similar path to us, but you look so much older than us.

[07:11] Ron: As I pointed out on numerous occasions, David, I still have my hair. There's one of us with a baseball cap.

[07:24] John: On the podcast.

[07:27] David: I always wear a hat, to be fair, even when I had hair.

[07:30] Ron: It's like those mid-40s dudes you see with a knit cap on in August. Oh, really? A little chilly today, are we?

[07:43] David: My head gets a cold. Ron, you said it was Simonson and Austin on the X Men Teen Titan? That wasn't Wolfman/Perez doing the crossover?

[07:54] Ron: No, X Men Teen Titans was Simonson drawing it, Austin inking it, and Claremont writing it, and I believe there was talk of a sequel that Marvin and George were going to do but it never never came off. I know the Avengers X Men thing the George started drawing and it never came out except for the pages eventually landed in the back of that hardcover omnibus or something like that, but that was the one, and fell in love with Walt's work, and I still remember very specific panels from that thing, opening that book and getting not just the Dark Side Dark Phoenix splash, but there's a smallish panel of Wally West taking apart a car engine as he runs past the car to stop dudes from getting away. For whatever reason, that specific panel stuck in my head and will be there forever.

[08:53] David: That's awesome.

[08:55] John: For years, yeah, that's good stuff. I'm totally out of it this morning. So, I apologize. I'm letting you guys ramble.

[09:03] David: Okay, that's why I paused because I feel like I was hogging the conversation.

[09:08] John: Oh, no, I'm definitely more alert.

[09:12] David: It's early, man. It's early. I'm chugging this mocha as fast as I can.

[09:15] John: I've been up for three hours. I've got kids running around. Wow.

[09:20] David: That sounds awful. No wonder you're exhausted. Ron, you famously, or maybe not famously, but famously to me, you cut your teeth with Jim Starlin. Can you talk a little bit about how that relationship happened and how it turned into what it did for you? And then the follow up question is, do you and Jim still hang out or talk? Are you still friends?

[09:43] Ron: Oh, yeah, we had an expensive crab cake dinner in Baltimore a couple of weeks ago, just like we always do. Crab cakes are 60 bucks a pop now, so apparently when you break the planet and there aren’t any crabs in the ocean, the price goes up. But that was okay. So I initially met Bernie Wrightson, from interviewing him, as first a high school student and then a college student, and Bernie lived in the Hudson Valley in New York State, he lived in Woodstock and I lived in Kingston. That's where I grew up. Bernie was the nicest guy on the planet, and he invited this 19 year old kid, she had might even been 18 at the time, the second time I saw him, to his Halloween party, which was coming up in a few weeks, saying “you should come to the Halloween party,” and I was petrified. Bernie Wrightson invites you to his Halloween party, even though you don't belong there, or you're going to be a human sacrifice at some point, and I almost didn't go. I was like, “I won't know anybody. I'll be one awkward son of a bitch in the midst of this party with a bunch of industry people and everything” and I realized that everybody would be wearing a costume, so nobody would really know who anybody was. So, I screwed up my courage and went to the party, and that's where I met Starlin and a bunch of other people who were in the Hudson Valley comics community. Terry Austin, Fred Hembeck, and I think at that initial party that would, Jeffrey Kathryn Jones was there, and Mike Kaluta, and just a bunch of people.

So, I just fell into that social group and got to be friends with Wrightson and Starlin, in particular, the late Dan Green, who just died a month ago or so, all of those guys were in that group, and I got closest probably with Bernie and Jim, and then later on, Terry Austin, and I just became buddies. Eventually, after a year or so, Jim asked me to edit his manuscript for his first prose novel, which I did, because I was still in college, but I was working with a local newspaper as a journalist every day, so Jim asked me to copy edit his his manuscript, which I did. Apparently, I did a really good job, put the commas where they needed to go, and then not that long after, Jim said to me, “Hey, did you ever think about writing comics?” And the answer was, “duh. Obviously. That's a dream, but it doesn't seem like a thing that you actually get to do,” but when Jim Starlin says, “Did you ever think about writing comics,” what he really means is, “would you like to write comics? I'll show you how, and then I'll take you into Marvel and introduce you to everybody, and then eventually I'll turn Silver Surfer over to you,” because that's how it all went down. Obviously, I'm very fortunate. I was handed a career by Jim Starlin at the right time, which was the early 90s, where they would publish anything, because everything was selling, like Gangbusters. Silver Sable sold a million copies. It's not an exaggeration.

[13:07] David: That silver foil cover, though.

[13:11] Ron: So, I got in at a time when publishers, specifically Marvel, which is where I did my first gig, and I had never written a comic script at all, never tried out for anything, I never did indie work, I just got to go to the major leagues immediately. So, I co-wrote some Surfer stuff with Jim, which means I wrote it and then he fixed it, and after a year or so, Jim went off to do Infinity Gauntlet and they turned Surfer as a monthly over to me. Literally, been doing it ever since.

[13:47] David: That's fantastic. It's funny, we were talking to Paul, John, and Paul never submitted samples to DC Comics. Never. So, he also got a job, basically, without ever actually trying to get the job, and for me, cream always rises to the top, and it's amazing how it happens.

[14:08] Ron: Well, everybody's got a different story of getting through the door, getting your foot in the door, and getting a chance, but then you have to be able to do the job and be professional and all that stuff once you get in the door, because comics is strewn with a bunch of people that get a chance, get in the door, get to hang around for a couple of years, and then eventually, they're not around anymore for various and sundry reasons. Some of them their own fault, and some of them, that's how the industry works. To stick around this long, as you know, is a rarity, and I'm forever thankful that I've been able to do it.

[14:42] John: When you started on Surfer, was Ron Lim drawing it at that point?

[14:47] Ron: Yeah, Ron Lim drew the first script ever on my life. The first couple of them, at least. That was also a big factor in me learning how to do this, is that I had a really good artist, who was very much professional, very much a storyteller, who could make up for any deficiencies in the script by doing his job well, and then I would learn, “this is the page of script I turned in and that's the page that came out of it.” So, there was a learning curve, although I got how comics worked, I think probably from taking film classes in college, and just being a fan of film and storytelling, and stories, in general. I think one of the biggest learning curves that writers have to go through in comics is, “that's a single image, those people don't move in that box,” and even when I teach comics writing now, some people get it, and some people don't, and I can tell you from seeing scripts from a range of professionals, people that are doing this professionally, some of them get it, some of them don't. It ultimately falls on the artist to fix all that stuff. If the script says, “Batman jumps off the building, lands in the alley, runs to the Batmobile, and drives away,” all in panel one, Well, the artist who has to fix that, is cursing the writer. But ultimately, the finished product that goes on the stands, nobody knows that the writer didn't understand how to make that work. The artist had to come in and be the guy to triage the whole thing and kept the patient alive on the table.

[16:32] John: Were you writing full scripts at that point? When Starlin was showing you this stuff, was it Marvel-style plot-first stuff?

[16:40] Ron: No, it's full scripts. I was the rebel, because a lot of stuff at Marvel, back then, there were plots written on two cocktail napkins, and I'm not making that up. I mean, I saw that one time, where a creative team went out to lunch with an editor, and literally, it was written down two cocktail napkins from the restaurant, and that was handed to the artist, “go home and draw this.”

[17:06] David: Wow, that guy’s still getting royalties for whatever that is.

[17:09] Ron: Yeah, probably. I know what it is too, but I'm not going to say. I wanted to have a little more control, a little more input over the process than just to say, “pages six through 17, they fight,” which was pretty common in those days. They were churning out material and a lot of editors were writing stuff in the evenings and on weekends and just trying to squeeze work in, so fast was the watchword. Keep the train moving all the time. But learning the process from Jim and learning the format from Jim, I was not maybe one of the few but one of not that many who were writing full scripts just because that seemed to yield a better product at the end, a more cohesive product at the end.

[18:02] David: Were you working on more than one project? You were just Silver Surfer for quite some time. You weren't picking up other projects at Marvel?

[18:15] Ron: I did What if for a while, because What If was the proving ground for the newbies. Because it was in the Surfer editor's office. He was the guy that drew that short straw.

[18:28] David: That is a lot of extra work.

[18:32] Ron: Because it's like doing an anthology book.

[18:35] David: It was different writers and artists all the time.

[18:37] Ron: Different creative team. You couldn't just pick a team and say “go and I'll talk to you.” It was a constant cultivation. So, anytime I would go into the office, the editor was Craig Anderson, would be like, “got What If ideas? Got any?” And in fact, I was never that big a fan of What If, conceptually, because I was just like, “well, it's an imaginary story based on a different imaginary. It's all made up shit.”

[19:03] David: 616 counts, Ron.

[19:06] Ron: Yeah, well, that's real. It taught me the skill of coming up with stuff, how to work a story in sometimes 11 pages, because they would split the book in half. I got to work with a bunch of different artists on different takes, and look, I was just thrilled to be writing comics.

[19:30] David: It sounds like you went through a pretty darn good training program, for lack of a better term.

[19:38] Ron: Yeah, it was bootcamp. It was because my first batch, when I took over Surfer, as a monthly, my first eight issues were tie-ins to Infinity Gauntlet, so I had to quickly learn how to work within a shared universe and move my stories in and around other stories, and make sure they were satisfying in and of themselves, but we're attached to the main Infinity Gauntlet storyline, but didn't depend on it. It was a lot of stuff that I look back at now and go “Well, those were fairly nuanced lessons for me to learn,” but I didn't know that at the time, that that was a big deal or something, that was one step beyond the ordinary of just learning how to do the job, but obviously, all that stuff served me very well in being able to jump on whatever project was put in front of me and figure out a way to make it work.

[20:37] David: That's fascinating. That's good stuff. Can we jump all the way to the end? I want to know about Diablo 4. So we've got this backstory on you and where you started, but where you are right now is seemingly infinitely far away from where you started. What's it like for you to have spent so much time in the comic book industry and now diving into the video game space?

[21:06] Ron: It's entirely different, but it's not. It's ultimately all storytelling. It's all making the audience care about what happens to the characters.

[21:17] David: Well, what is your involvement in Diablo 4? I know that you are writing for it, but what does that mean? What is it? What are you doing?

[21:26] Ron: I am a Narrative Designer on the Diablo franchise, which sounds really good. That's a good thing to have on your business card.

[21:36] David: I'll add it to the ChatGPT.

[21:38] Ron: I don't even have Blizzard business cards. So, I am involved in helping to make the story for the Diablo franchise, and that means I worked on Diablo 4, which came out in June and made like a billion dollars.

[21:52] David: You got 10% of that, right?

[21:54] Ron: I hope so. I mean, I have no complaints whatsoever, Blizzard treats me incredibly well, and I'm enjoying the work, and it's all great. No complaints at all. So, at its core, it's the same thing. It's making a story, trying to get an emotional reaction out of the audience, trying to gauge the audience so that they want to come back and see what happens to these characters. So, at its core, it's the same thing, but the way you do it is fairly different, because comics is me and four or five other people and we make a thing, and then it comes out two months later, or a month later. I just sent in the dialogue polish on the next Silver Surfer issue that'll be out, and that'll be in people's hands in five weeks. Video game is you, and in the case of Diablo, 600 of your closest friends, all pulling on the oars in the same direction, all doing their thing, and the number of disciplines that are involved in that is just vast, and I'm still a little fuzzy on the process. We all do our thing, and then somehow, years later, we wind up with this massive video game. Comics is like alchemy. I can write the same script and give it to a different artist and the story comes out completely differently. So, there's alchemy to that. Video games are just sorcery. How does this whole thing come together with all of these people working on it, and everybody's doing their little bit, and then at the end there's a game that takes you 70 or 80 hours to play through, and hopefully, you come away from that feeling like you've been engaged by the story, and that you've had some sort of emotional journey with the story, not just running through dungeons and hacking and slashing demons, and that's obviously a part of it. The playing the game aspect is in the forefront, obviously, but part of the narrative job is to make sure that you feel something when you're doing all that stuff.

[24:18] David: It seems to me, knowing a lot about comics, not knowing much about video games, it seems to me like the difficult piece, transitioning from comics to a video game, is that in comic books, you can control the timing. You can control the readers timing with various tools and techniques, whereas, in a video game, you have a lot less control over how long somebody spends on a specific piece of the narrative. How do you solve that? How do you resolve that? Or is that just not something that comes up?

[24:55] Ron: In a video game, you have the waypoints in the journey, and in the case of a lot of video games, an actual map, like “go here and do this thing, and then you go here and do this thing.” So, the player navigates that in whatever fashion they want. It can be out of order or whatever, but there's enough of a narrative direction that they're getting the pieces of the story as they go, and sometimes we have to build in “well, maybe they're going to get this piece before this piece,” and there's a lot of planning, and there's a lot of sorting how the pieces of that puzzle fit together. It was a new skill to learn for me, but it wasn't a foreign skill to learn, like, “okay, we can do this thing,” and it's still visual storytelling, because you're watching this thing, and you're participating in this thing, and a lot of it is characterization through dialogue, because those are the tools that you have. So, in that respect, it's the same thing as comics, and you want to be able to communicate to the audience, the characterization stuff and the emotional content without being so on the nose that you're just belaboring the point. I mean, my standpoint, in both, is less is more. Don’t have somebody come out and speak in a soliloquy that would take up six or eight balloons if you can do that in one balloon and a really good expression on their face. Or in a video game, if you can do that with a dialogue exchange between two characters, that the real meat of the conversation is left unsaid, but it's understood.

[26:40] John: To the timing though, in comics, you're making a guess, “here's how long somebody's spending on this panel or here's how they're reading this,” but with a game like Diablo, they have to have the analytics on exactly how long everybody's spent on exactly what moments right? Does that come back to you at all? Do you get to see it?

[26:55] Ron: It filters down. Obviously, there's a lot more play-testing and feedback, and all that goes into a video game, because it is a very interactive process. What worked? What didn't work? What what did the players gravitate to? What they gravitate away from? So, comic is mine. I'm the God of the comics world. Whatever I say, happens. Whatever we, the creative team, decide, happens, and how we tell that is what you get, and you either liked it, and you're going to come back for more, or see ya. There's no feedback loop, other than we sold a bunch of this issue or that thing didn't sell it, or also, nobody wanted it. In video games, because it is interactive, and because there's a constant flow of content, constant flow of gameplay, there's seasons, which is little bite-sized chunks, and then there are expansions, and these games, these games don't just come out and people play it for two weeks, and then they go away. I mean, these games, because they're multimillion dollar investments, have long tails. They're going to last quite a few years, and we're going to keep producing content for it to expand the world and give you new adventures and all that stuff, and because we are doing that, we're constantly putting more into the pipeline, we can take into account the the feedback that players give, and man, if you thought comic fans were engaged and involved, you have no idea the level of engagement on the hardcore video game fans.

[28:44] David: Spend 60 bucks on something, I'm going to say something.

[28:54] David: This scale of economy, it's just crazy. Here's a 20-page comic and it costs you five bucks, and you're done with it in 20 minutes, labor over the the art, and all that stuff. But it's a 20-minute ride. That's what it's designed to be. Video game is 60 or 70 bucks, and it's infinitely replayable. Just to play at once, you're talking 60/70/80 hours of your time to get through the whole thing. The value of it, to me, is just crazy, and the value of it and how much investment goes into making the thing. I mean, Diablo 4was in development for four or five years. I mean, comics are very instant gratification.

[29:44] David: On all sides. On the creators’ end and on the consumers’ end.

[29:50] Ron: It's made to be, “ram the thing out and get it out there,” and you work in a vacuum in video games for years, and that was a learning curve for me. I got it, intellectually, but then to really understand that this is the thing you engage with every day and there's no audience, other than the people you are working on the game with. There's, at a certain point, beta testing and stuff like that, where you let some of it out into the world.

[30:25] David: Ron, switching back to comic books, but staying in the modern day, who's getting you excited these days? Who are you looking at and going, “Wow, I like this guy's work or this girl’s work?

[30:37] Ron: One of the dirty little secrets of comics is, once you start doing them, you don't have enough time to actually engage with all the cool stuff that's out on the stands. But the stuff that I will go out of my way to go to the store and get one, I know what's coming, I like the new Conan stuff, that Heroic Signatures, and Titan are doing great, he's Canadian, so he’s a polite little fella. There's a lot of sword-swinging violence coming out of that polite Canadian.

[31:16] John: He and I both started at the same website back in the early 2000s. So, we've known each other for 20-whatever years, and it's super exciting to see him.

[31:27] Ron: I probably know Jim for almost as long and he gets it, he understands how this works, and what the job is, and all that stuff. So, I love the Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips stuff. Whenever they put something out new, I’ve got to go get it. Whenever there's new Hellboy stuff, I’ve got to go get it. I like what my buddy Phil Johnson is doing on Hulk and on Action. A lot of times I’ll just walk into a store, and “list this looks interesting, I'll pick this up.”

[31:53] David: And you still do that every once in a while?

[31:55] Ron: Yeah, I was in a buddy’s store just the other night prior to going to play a softball game. So, I had 20 minutes to sort of hang out and just scan the racks and pick up whatever looked interesting, but also just be confronted by the vast number of things that are out there, and the sense of what the hell do I read? Need a scorecard to keep up.

[32:27] David: It's a lot.

[32:31] Ron: Which is probably not great for the industry, not great for luring in people that are casual. I think those people are probably buying at Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.

[32:43] David: Yeah, they're probably picking up graphic novels. They're probably picking up the more collected edition type stuff, at least, as the current gateway. I don't know, just pure conjecture on my part. I was listening to something the other day, and they were saying that if we had a crash today, the way we had it back in the 90s, that probably would look different, because we have so many more outlets for sales opportunities. The local comic shop is not confined to just that community. If I'm sitting on 100 copies of X Men number one, or Death of Superman, I don't have to just rely on my community to sell those. I can get on eBay, I can do live streams, I can do a bunch of other things, and I can also take those variant covers, mark them up crazy, and turn a profit, basically, and if we had had all those avenues, maybe in the mid-late 90s, maybe it would have looked a little different.

[33:49] Ron: I think we, as an industry, just cycle through the mistakes every 20 years. We cycle through them differently, we evolve, but we do the same short-sighted stuff, overall. The market continues to evolve, and the one thing that I think is undeniable is that there are more good books out there on the stands than at any time in the history of the business. There's a bunch of really good books, because we have a bunch more publishers, and there's a much wider range of genres and all of that stuff. As to whether that's a good thing or not, I guess it probably is, ultimately, but it also has the effect of striding the market.

When I was a kid, X Men ruled the roost every month. Colossus, that strode the universe, the one constant, the one Northstar, was X Men, was the book that everybody read, and everybody could sell, and I don't think we have that anymore. It's a much bigger pool, which is a good thing, because we have a much wider audience, we have a much more diverse audience, and we have a much more diverse creator pool, but I think, I don't want to be the “stay off my lawn, you kids” guy, but there was a time when there were three networks and everybody watched what was on those three networks. So, when you went into school the next day, you talked about what you watched on TV last night. There were much fewer choices. So, there was a greater sense of community to it, because everybody was experiencing the same thing, and now, everybody's experiencing a much wider range of stuff, which is good, but we have lost more of a sense of community, because everything is fractionalized more than it's ever been in the past.

[35:48] John: With comics, especially by the time you got to the 90s, if you were reading comics, you were going into a comic book store, because that's where you could buy comics, and there were five or six, that would be B Dalton or Walden books or something, but you will go into a comic book store. I don't think that's the case now. At least, what I see with my kids, they'll read comics, but they don't see it any different than reading a prose book. My daughter doesn't really see a difference between reading a Babysitter's Club graphic novel, my son, right now, he's super into Babysitters Club right now, he's four, massively obsessed, but comics are a part of people's media diet in a way that it wasn't before, but it doesn't translate into them becoming comics fans the way I grew up. I would pick up Image comic and I would pick up the new thing that Seth did, and I’d pick up all this stuff, because I just liked comics.

[36:35] Ron: I think I had this discussion, maybe on another podcast. Not that I don't love yours best. Part of the discussion was, everybody goes and sees superhero movies, and that sort of material is just everywhere. Star Wars is everywhere, but we're not selling a greater number of those products. When the only media stuff we had was, Lou Ferrigno painted green. My thought is that, well, not that many people read, period. Alright, it's not like there's a vast readership out there for anything. So, you can't expect the, the numbers on this stuff to go up crazily, because people aren't reading, period.

[37:20] David: I always bring it up, I'm holding up my iPhone. I always bring it up that it's really hard to compete with this tool. This is such an incredibly powerful tool and it is a tool for all kinds of things, including entertainment, and my son can get on his phone, and be entertained for hours, if I let him, nonstop, and he's just inundated with content, and it's all free. It just exists, and so it's to your point, Ron, I think it's really hard in this day and age to say, “hey, spend money for your content and read it in a print format, or even in a digital format.” 

[38:11] Ron: It's a hard sell, because it's a sell, and because comics in particular demand you to be a participant in it. You can't just be passive. You have to spend the energy of reading the comic, but you also have to expend the energy of filling in the gaps. It's a participatory entertainment, and I don't think a lot of people are used to that. I think a lot of people are just used to getting beamed straight into your brain, whether it's from your phone, or from your widescreen TV at home or whatever, and just consuming rather than being rather than being a participant in the entertainment. The video game thing demands you to be a participant. That's what that offers is, you are part of this story. Comics are somewhere in the middle of that whole equation, where it demands you to be a participant, but you're not really part of the story like you are in an interactive game.

[39:10] David: Right. That's interesting. I hadn’t thought about it like that.

[39:13] Ron: Look, I'm still doing comics, because I love doing comics. I think it's the best way to tell a story, very often, and we have been telling stories with pictures since we were drawing on cave walls. So, I think, for me, I don't want to stop this, because I love working with artists. I love having Paul Pelletier or Bart Sears or Ron Lim take what I'm doing, if it's in my head, and then make it into a real thing, make it into a real page of art, and I think comics, to a certain extent, have lost some art literacy in the last 20 years. Art used to really drive the market. “Back in my day,” he says, I remember when not only was there a wizard magazine, but there was a wizard magazine that just had a top 10 artists list, because really, who gives a shit who writes that stuff? It was just a top 10 artists list, and eventually, they added the top 10 writers.

[40:20] David: You only mentioned that because you were probably number one at some point.

[40:23] Ron: I might have gotten the number two at one point. So, when I when I got to number two, then it would be the top two writers list, because I wouldn't consider anybody else that was behind me. Although, frankly, to bring it back to where we started, David, it was, the top 10 writers list, back in those days, was me and nine bald guys.

[40:57] David: You mentioned Bart Sears, who I know you've you're friends with and who you've done a lot of stuff with, but I seem to recall you saying at some point that The Path was one of your favorite things. Is that true, A, and B, what were those CrossGen like for you? What was that like, being in that environment, living in the compound, doing all that?

[41:18] Ron: Well, one of the weird things, people actually believe there was a compound, which was, I guess, one of my first indications that conspiracy theories and stuff were just much more fun than the actual reality of you have a fucking office like everybody else, and we just show up and make comics, rather than Stalag 17, or something like that with everybody living in bunk beds, but people actually believe that stuff. So, yeah, The Past was one of my favorite gigs, because I love samurai stuff. Anyway, just the visuals, and it's basically, you're doing a Western. So I love that whole milieu, and working with Bart was great, particularly on that, because Bart got to draw in the style that he wanted to, which was a lot more spotted blacks in the artwork, and not the big muscled figures that he became so known for, and that was sort of the trademark, but he really wanted to draw stuff a lot more, sort of a lot more Alex Toth-y, and we just had a ball on that series. Overall, CrossGen, creatively, was pretty great. I got to do series that I was really invested in, and work with people whose work I really liked, and who were friends, and who I saw virtually every day, go out for lunch together or go out for beers after work during the day. So, from the creative standpoint, it was pretty great. I mean, it was a grind, particularly for the artists, because it was 12 issues a year, and the on-staff artists were expected to do 10 of them a year.

[43:06] David: What was your commitment for that? Were you getting a salary? Is that how that was working? Or were you being paid? That explains your longevity.

[43:22] Ron: Free snacks in the in the kitchen? No, they paid me a salary. They paid me a really pretty good salary.

[43:30] David: And was there a requirement for the number of like pages or books you were producing in a year, the way the artist had it?

[43:37] Ron: My salary was for two monthly books, and then, whatever else came up. Unfortunately, fairly soon thereafter, I ended up doing three monthly books because we had Sojourn, but I didn't get a raise. So, wait a minute, I'm doing three books instead of two? It was like “oh, we'll take care of you down the road,” which never came, and we ran out of money, which ultimately, is not a terrible complaint. Look, three books is a decent workload. Four books is a walk on the edge as a writer, because you do a book a week in the month, and hopefully you don't get sick, or you don't go on vacation, or something like that, because then the schedule starts falling apart because you don't have that. So, the math for three books a month, as a writer, works better than the math for four books a month, at least for me, but I enjoyed everything I was working on.

[44:39] David: You have great talent that you're working with, too. Scion and Sojourn, in particular. Those guys were no joke and still working today.

[44:49] Ron: Yeah, in fact, I just had dinner with Jim Cheung the other night. We hadn't seen each other in a number of years and Scion’s one of my favorite books ever from the entirety of my career, and largely due to the fact that Jim is just so good. I mean, that's ultimately what this job is. Work with the best artists you can find and then they make you look like a genius.

[45:12] David: Yeah, I was saying the other day, in the last episode that we did, we were talking about just writing in general, and I was saying that when I get a Ron Marz script, you think visually. I don’t know how else to explain it, I can't quite explain it correctly, but when I read your scripts as an artist, because I come from the art side, I never wrote, there's so many toys in the sandbox to play with, when I get a Ron Marz script, I have a lot of options, a lot of different directions I can go on every page, and I really love that about the way you write, I think that really shows up in the finished product. It's not necessarily that you give the artist a bunch of freedom. You're directing, for sure. You're not being lazy. I wish I could explain it better, but for that piece of your process, you think visually, how did that come about? Because you're not trained in art, right?

[46:10] Ron: No, I can't draw to save my life. I mean, I've always been really interested in art, and I love going to art museums, and there are more art books on the shelf behind me than book books.

[46:25] David: When I was working at IDW, every couple of months, I get an email from Ron Marz, and Ron would be like, “Hey, David, that new artists edition, can can hook me up?”

[46:39] Ron: Poor UPS man would come staggering up the driveway. I couldn't actually look him in the eye. But yeah, I've always been a huge fan of the art, and that was, to me, the allure of comics, was much more art oriented, that story oriented. I mean, obviously, the stories are hugely important, and you need to have it. It's got to work for what you're doing. But I'll go pick up a terrible story if it's drawn by a good artist, because I want to drink that in. I want to experience that. So, and I think the fact that Starlin taught me how to do this, and I was, and still am, friends with a lot more artists than I am writers, I think I tend to gravitate towards that end of it, because writers tend to be assholes. So, I was just always more comfortable hanging out with the artists than a lot of other writers because I am fascinated by what they do, and how they conjure stuff out of the air, and, to a certain extent writers do, too. But we write the recipe, and then the artists are the ones who actually go into kitchen to make the meal, and people show up for the meal. They don't show up for the recipe.

I think, the other factor in it is that I just could always do it. I could see the pictures in my head. It took me a while to realize that not everybody can. Yeah, I can always do that. So, it's very natural for me. When Jim taught me, every panel was a frozen moment in time, and your job is to pick out what the best frozen moment to tell the story is. I got that already. I was able to do that, and it took me a while to realize that not everybody could. I don’t mean to compare myself at all, but it's like Ted Williams teaching people how to hit. Ted Williams was the finest hitter in baseball history. Just do it. So, it didn't occur to him that other people couldn't. He had that skill in the hand-eye coordination and all of that stuff that was just natural to him, obviously, with a huge amount of practice involved as well, but he could just do it. When you have that thing, whatever it is, hitting the baseball or writing a script or drawing a picture, or whatever it is, I think when you have that thing, it's hard for you to grasp that other people don't, because you've always had it.

[49:08] David: Yeah, couldn't agree more. I'm constantly shocked at, I will show, for example, somebody like two different artists, and to me, it's painfully obvious, it's Jim Cheung and Daniel Warren Johnson. It's painfully obvious that these are two completely different styles. Wildly different, and the person looking at it has zero recognition that either one is different, “they're just comic books,” or whatever the comment is. They don't see that there's a difference between the two and I'm still always shocked by that. Always.

[49:43] Ron: A big part of the job is to is to come up with this suggestion, again, the recipe for the best page that the artists can produce, and try to lead them in that direction, and if they do something different or come up with a better way, that's all good, because we get the credit for it anyway. But, part of the job is to make sure that this is a cool-looking page, and the artist is engaged and having fun drawing it, like that thing that I'm doing with Pelletier now, I can't actually say what it is, but we're sort of taking them along on the back burner. A big part of my job is to just, “hey, what kind of cool shit would you like to draw?” I'll figure out a way to put that into the story, because that's the gig, because his job is a lot harder than mine. I can describe “the vast barbarian army charges over the hill to lay siege to a fantastic castle with a dragon on it,” and I'm done, and it's that poor bastard’s job, over the next three days of his life, to make that real, so I do understand that division of labor and how much time and energy it takes for them to do that. So, I can try to make sure that I'm not doing that on every page. If you read the really fine print off your comics contracts, if you do that shit on every page, the artists are allowed to hunt you down and murder you.

[51:15] David: And they. We've already lost so many writers that way.

[51:21] Ron: So, when I can come up with a way to draw a little tiny figure in the desert, or “hey, we want a tiny figure in the desert, there's a horizon line, and then there's nothing. It's all negative space.”A, it's effective, but B, the artist can go to the movie.

[51:44] David: Silver Surfer on his surfboard, flying through space, empty space, double page splash.

[51:51] Ron: Black with stars in the background. You're good.

[51:57] John: Hey, this is John. Our interview with Ron went long, even by our standards. So, at the behest of our editor, Ed, we're breaking this into two episodes. So, come back next week for the exciting conclusion to the Corner Box versus Ron Marz. Same corner time, same corner channel. Also, like and subscribe, and rate us, and tell your friends. See ya.

Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, tell your friends about us, leave a review and comments. Check out www.cornerbox.club for updates, and come back and join us next week for another episode of The Corner Box with John and David.