The big secret – and long guessed fan theory – was that Wally West was returning in ‘Rebirth’ and, for once, the fans were correct. While he popped up in “The Flash: Rebirth” #1, Wally West is going to be spending most of his time over in “Titans,” from the team of Dan Abnett and Brett Booth.
Abnett has been writing the bulk of these characters for the better part of a year in “Titans Hunt,” and Booth recently wrapped up his run on “The Flash” with Van Jensen and Robert Venditti. I got to chat with the two creators recently to discuss what exactly we can expect from the book in terms of pre-“Flashpoint” memories, the team’s make up, and whether or not a certain naked blue dude would be showing up.
Special thanks to Zach Wilkerson and Vince Ostrowski for helping formulate the interview questions
This book seems to be really involved with the machinations of ‘Rebirth’ overall, and has these big, far reaching consequences. How closely are you guys working with other writers, and artists, and other creative teams to set the tone for ‘Rebirth’ in this book?
Dan Abnett: Very, is the answer to that. Particularly with Geoff Johns, he’s the mastermind behind this. Whenever there is an event where you are required to coordinate with people, that coordination happens, but I have to say that Geoff has stepped it up a level for this, in terms of his accessibility, and his eagerness to talk, not just about specific plot points to make sure everything matches, but to talk philosophy of character, and how books might be constructed. He’s got a vision in mind and it’s, A, happily tallied with what I wanted to do, but, B, was very useful, in terms of guidance for me to put the book together.
The “Titans Hunt” series I did before this, in some respects, paved the way for ‘Rebirth’ and was experimental for that. I realized they didn’t tell me much about ‘Rebirth’ whilst I was doing it, but as time went on I realized there were things I was doing they were paying very close attention to and they were saying, “Can you do this and can you do that?”, and I was working that into the story and going, “This is going somewhere beyond what I’m doing in this one miniseries.” Eventually, Geoff and I had many long conversations on the phone, and I actually went out, and sat with him, and chatted with him about it in Los Angeles. We are coordinating, sending scripts back and forth, in fact, although I didn’t get to see the ending, I think I was one of the first people to see the first ten or twenty pages of the script on the “DC Universe: Rebirth” one shot and that kind of stuff. There is a wonderful collective cooperation happening, and I think the books will benefit from that very, very much indeed.
Brett, is there any pressure to have the characters seemingly fit in visually with the rest of the DCU, because the book is such a cornerstone piece of this new ‘Rebirth’ initiative?
Brett Booth: Not really. They gave me the Nightwing design. I believe the artist on “Nightwing” did. Then they basically said, “We need new designs for the rest of the cast,” and so Dan sent me a bunch of notes, so maybe he had more information than I did.
Wally was of a different…I did a couple different designs for him that we didn’t use. They had some notes and some changes on it. Shortly before the writing of the ‘Rebirth’ book, it went out that they wanted to revisit the colors on it. One of the designs on it was two-tone red, which I had actually just done on “The Flash,” but I knew that there would be an issue because the gold that was on Wally, because his costume was originally supposed to be a dark gray and a red, the gold wasn’t enough to break up the two reds enough. That was one of the things that I realized that the gold needed to be thicker, a thicker band, so I was worried that the gold wouldn’t quite work. Knowing my DC history, I remember the Dark Flash arc, and so silver and red were some of his colors, so I decided to try. I emailed Jim [Lee] and asked him about that, and he said, “Send me that over.”, so he could look at it. It was between the gold and the red…The gold and the silver, for a day or two, and then they went with the silver. Really it is almost designing in a vacuum, but because I’ve done so much design work over the last five or six years, I know the DC characters.
DA: This is obviously Brett’s great responsibility, but we had to design the characters so they worked in the context of their own book as a team, side by side.
BB: That was actually a really big help to do. I hadn’t actually ever done that that way before, I usually just design them one at a time, and I designed the whole group on a page, pretty much, and so I could see the goal, like this matches this a little bit and that matches that. Okay, that’s too similar, I don’t want them to have matching, matching costumes. Being able to have them all on one piece and see the different designs next to each other was actually very helpful to get them to work as a group. I even drew a little Nightwing and threw him on the end on the piece of paper, so I had his costume there at the time too.
Dan, Wally is the only character that seems to have any sort of memory of both the pre-“Flashpoint” and the lost years of the New 52 timeline. Will we ever be seeing him reference things that happened quite some time ago, pre-“Flashpoint,” or is that going to be tabled for the time being?
DA:I think that general awareness is there. I think our focus is particularly on the continuity that you’re talking about, but one of the things that we want to do, and Dan [DiDio] has said he really wants to see happen, is that we are, not just us personally, but the DCU books are reflecting the entirety of continuity rather than ignoring certain parts of it. Obviously, from ‘Rebirth’ we can see that time has been messed up severely, and the particular impact has been in the most recent times. I like the fact that it’s been crafted in a way that doesn’t deny the New 52. Doesn’t say that’s wrong, didn’t happen, or anything like that, it’s just saying that something has happened and that’s what disrupted all of this, no matter how incompatible and contradictory, has happened, and we’ve got to figure out the truth of that. I do think that opens all sorts of doors creatively, not just for the times, but for other books in the DCU, generally speaking. It’s great fun, we test them. I’ll put something in and I’ll run it past the editorial and it’ll go up to the powers that be, and can we say this or can we get away with that, and that kind of stuff. It’s nice. We’re monitoring it and doing it gently and carefully to make sure that it makes sense.
Right, right. I would think that one of the difficulties of a book like this is because there is a large portion of the fan base that is so focused on the past, and this book is one of the few places people can get a look at what DC was fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago, so how do you balance that looking backward approach while still telling stories that are fresh and new?
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DA: I think to have the strength of that continuity as represented, for instance, by friendship between the main characters and the fact that the idea is to be close friends like that, they’ve got to have known each other for a long time. You can therefore echo all sorts of different things. I have already started in “Titans Hunt” and we’re doing it now, is to revisit things and to either produce new versions of things that echo the past, or literally bring older things back. I think the book is the primary DC legacy title, in as much as these characters are, so many of them are the legacy characters, who have inherited their role from one of the DC giants. Therefore, that sense of history is just one of the flavors of the book.
With legacy characters, the important thing is not so much where they come from, it’s where they’re going, and how exciting and dynamic their stories can become. I think that’s the thing that Brett and I focus on particularly. If we can tell stories that are, in any way, exciting and dramatic, and even begin to match the classic stories, then we’re doing our job properly because it is the quality of the adventures, and the start of the adventures, and the stories that matter the most. If we spend every issue sitting there contemplating the past, it will be a mistake. I think people who’ve read the books before have got perhaps a long reading history with them, should be delighted. There should be that spark of recognition, and there should be all sorts of Easter eggs, so they go, “Oh gosh, that’s touching on that,” but generally speaking, and this applies to the new readers as well, it should be a really exciting book about a team of friends, and move forward with that energy.
Brett, you’ve put in a lot of team books in your tenure at DC; you mentioned “Justice League of America” before, and you also had a nice run on “Teen Titans.” How do you approach drawing a team book versus drawing a book that focuses on one character, like the Flash you were just on? I know it wasn’t just a solo person on each panel, but does your approach change at all when you have more than just a couple of focal characters?
BB: Yeah. Yeah, it’s definitely more difficult to do a team book. You have everybody complaining on Twitter about it. You have to pay more attention to, especially when the script, who’s talking first and you have to make sure that that character appears first in the panel. Then you have to basically set up…There’s tricks to it, but at the same time, it becomes second nature if you work on it enough. Just where you place the characters, who’s doing the most important action, that should be what’s focused on, and then there’s certain things you can do in the background to help story telling for the next panels that come up, if something’s going to happen.
I was lucky enough that when I was getting into comics, my favorite artists were working on the team books. Drawing the team stuff is second nature for me. It was actually really helpful when I started working at WildStorm because Jim was my mentor there, and he’d work on the X-Men, he worked on Alpha Flight. He told me most of his little secrets for drawing the team books. I have what I’ve picked up over the years through George Perez, John Byrne, Walter Simonson, and then while I was at WildStorm I was able to actually get Jim to tell me some of the little secrets, and luckily Whilce Portacio and Marc Silvestri were also working at the studio at the time, so I had all these team people tell me their little secrets. The team books’ art, actually they’re more difficult to draw because of all the characters, but since I know all of these little tricks it’s really second nature at this point.
Continued belowDan, we saw a bunch of characters, like Gnarrk, Hawk and Dove, Bumblebee and Herold, all introduced in Titans Hunt. Will those characters be popping up in Titans, along the way, or are those characters going to be taking a back seat for a little bit?
DA:To a certain extent, they’re taking a back seat because we wanted to refine the team into a manageable size and focus on the characters we felt were the strongest and the ones that bonded most interestingly, in terms of a team dynamic, but they’re not forgotten. I’m sure that we will see people popping up in the stories as we continue them. Perhaps, sooner rather than later, in fact.
This book is built around the central mystery of ‘Rebirth,’ which involves Dr. Manhattan and his role in the multi-verse, so are we going to be seeing … I don’t know if you guys can even answer this. Are we going to be seeing characters from “Watchmen” pop up in Titans eventually?
DA:We can’t possibly answer that question…
I had to ask it.
DA:Without spoiling everything, but the very fact that Wally, in particular, is pivotal to ‘Rebirth,’ he’s pivotal to the event, he’s bringing the warning to the DCU, and he is the center of attention in our book. I think you can possibly imagine, at least the fall out from what Rebirth is all about, is going to be reflected in the pages of Titans as it progresses.
You guys are tasked with telling the story of Wally West, maybe the single most beloved character that we have seen return in quite some time. What sort of feelings do you guys get from being so involved with bringing Wally back to the DCU?
DA: I’ll let Brett answer that because the way he feels about it is exactly how I feel about it.
BB: Yeah, and I’ve said it before, Wally is my favorite character in comics, period, and finally getting able to draw the character that got me into reading DC stuff is my dream job. On top of that, I get to work with Dick Grayson and Donna Troy. I’m super excited. I’ve been pitching this stuff to Dan DiDio for six years to get Wally back, and I finally get to work on it. I’m super stoked. They wrote something in the first issue, and when I read that, I just completely geeked out and I was smiling for the rest of the night. That’s something so small, but just that one little thing that he wrote made my day.
DA: I think Wally is beloved and it really, really, really helps that we both love the character. I think, on a purely professional basis, we’ve come into this book, and take it very seriously, and understand what a favorite he is, but the fact that he’s one of our absolute favorites too is incredibly helpful because I think we experience the same emotional response to his reappearance that we hope the readers do too.
