Anyone who's been to a major comic convention has seen Jim McCann
moderating Marvel's panels. As the publisher's Marketing Manager, he
knows what's going on in just about every corner of the Marvel Universe.
Now McCann is crossing over into the realm of comic book writing as he teams up with Brian Reed for one of Marvel's latest batch of What If? Stories coming out in December. Titled What If? House of M, the McCann/Reed issue will explore the question: "What if Scarlet Witch had said 'No More Powers?'"
Penciled by Paolo Pantalena with a cover by Jim Cheung, this issue
marks the first time McCann has written a full comic book issue,
although he told Newsarama that he's got another project coming up
after Secret Invasion. But before he works solo on that future project, McCann said he's learning a lot from Reed during this co-writing gig on What If? House of M.
As fans may remember, Reed also started out learning from an
established Marvel scribe as he co-wrote his first few issues with
Brian Michael Bendis. After starting his writing career in the video
game industry, Reed is now a busy solo comics writer working on Ms. Marvel, Red Sonja, Secret Invasion: Front Line and Secret Invasion: Spider-Man.
We got both McCann and Reed on the phone to talk about how they worked
together on the issue, what readers can expect from their
collaboration, and what the future might hold for McCann's writing
career.
Newsarama: How did you two get together to do this?
Jim McCann: I had an idea for a What If? last year, but because
it ran too closely to something that we were actually going to be doing
later on down the road, it got kiboshed.
Brian Reed: And the same thing happened to me. I had been asked
if I wanted to do another What If? related to the whole Messiah
Complex. So I pitched something. And it turned out they said, "That's a
good idea. It also happens to be the next two years of stories."
JM: We both had the exact same thing happen to us within a year
apart. We pitched things that weren't really a "What If?" but were
instead a "When?" because they were both planned to happen.
And I had verbally pitched that I'd love to eventually do a What If?
where Wanda had said "no more powers." Then later, they told me, "Brian
Reed's X-Men What If? is no more because we're already doing it, just
like yours. Would you mind writing with Brian on this? Brian likes the
story idea." And I was like, "If Brian likes the story idea, I will
definitely write with Brian. I will just do the punctuation if Brian
wants me to. Sure, I'll do anything to learn with Brian!"
I knew Brian had learned from Bendis, so it was something that was
really, really exciting for me to be paired with somebody like Brian
for my first outing on a full-length comic.
NRAMA: Brian, does the way you're helping out Jim remind you of
what Brian Bendis did for you when you first started co-writing comics
with him after your video game experience?
BR: I'm sure Bendis had it much rougher. [laughs] Jim already knew how to structure a sentence after all.
No, seriously, with Jim, it was just a matter of telling him he was on
the right track and was 90 percent there. When you do this month in,
month out, you learn the tricks to telling a story this way. And Jim
was making exactly the same mistakes I was making when I started out.
I'm sure it's exactly the same mistakes everyone else has made when
they've started out. And that was most of my work with Jim, honestly.
We had the story in place and we kind of hashed it out together. I had
him do the first draft of the script. I told him, you're going to learn
to swim by being thrown into the deep end of the pool.
JM: We worked together on the outline, so it was a little
overwhelming to do the whole script by myself. After I sent the rough
draft to him, I think that was the most nerve-wracking 36 hours of my
life. And the title of the email back to me was: "I'm going to tell you
what Bendis told me my first time." I almost didn't open that email. It
came at 8 p.m., and I thought, "OK, if I open this email and it's
awful, I'm not sleeping." So I just stared at this subject line for
about 30 minutes -- I'm not kidding. And then I thought, hey, it's
Reed... he'll at least give me a kiss before he punches me in the face.
BR: Jim really just came out swinging and the script was really,
really good. Like I said, most of what I did was just adjusting pacing
and things. It's tricks that you learn as you tell stories in comic
book form. You learn that the thing you took four panels to do last
time, you can really do that in one panel. And this thing I did in one
panel works better if I make it three panels. You just pick this up
over time. Honestly, that was most of the work with Jim. He really did
a great job.
JM: I'm blushing over the phone. Emoticon blush please.
NRAMA: What was the most difficult thing about writing the story?
BR: We were ending the Marvel Universe and telling the story
about that in 27 pages. So it was difficult at first because the
opening was one of those things where you completely overthink a
situation. We were both doing it at first, when we came up with the
outline. And as soon as he'd written it in this completely over-thought
way, I looked at it and went, well... we've just done too much.
JM: I had done this hugely intricate scene. Brian and I were trying to touch upon almost every character.
BR: His first six pages would have been this beautiful artistic
story. It was like, we're going to tell the Spider-Man story by
structuring the panels as a web over this two-page spread. He has this
incredible, intricate thing set up, and the first thing I did was
delete the first six pages. [laughs]
JM: It's true! But he told me to never throw anything away. And I still have it so I can use it someday!
BR: I just took it and changed it, and now there's still a lot
of excitement and there are a lot of things going on, but it's not
doing that overthinking of the scene where you completely kill the
reader with information overload. It's got a much better pace.
JM: I've learned a lot. I have something coming up soon that I
can't talk about yet. But I was in the process of reworking my outline
for this other project, and as soon as I saw what Brian had done with
this script, combined with some notes I'd gotten, it helped me throw
out everything that I had been structuring on this outline. And I was
able to completely restructure it. Now I understand what it means to
just do too much and give too much information. So I don't hate him too
much for hitting delete on the first six pages. [laughs]
NRAMA: Let's talk about the story. What's it about?
BR: It's What If? House of M. And it asks "What if Wanda
had said 'No More Powers' instead of 'No More Mutants?'" And it takes
out the entire superpowered world.
NRAMA: What characters will we see?
BR: Just about everybody! It opens the morning after House of M.
And this time, instead of just the mutants going away, everyone powered
has gone down. If you kind of stop and do your Marvel math for a
moment, you realize that most of the bad guys don't have powers. Most
of them have technological-based powers. The heroes have superpowers.
So that really leaves Iron Man against the world. And this is the story
of what happens to the world in that situation, and what happens when
evil really had nobody standing in its way.
JM: It's the story of Iron Man, and it's also the story of Peter
Parker, whose whole life has been about "with great power comes great
responsibility." So with no power, does that mean no responsibility? So
he's our other set of eyes through this. There are choices that have to
be made. It's very much about power and responsibility and who bears
the burden of it. Peter gets away from the superhero life, while Tony
becomes more the Iron Man than Tony Stark.
We talked about how you can look at the Marvel Universe, and two people
can have the same powers, but one's a hero and one's a villain. So it's
obviously not the power, it's what's inside of you. As a result, we
looked at who the people were of the Marvel Universe, as opposed to what the superheroes and power sets were of the Marvel U, if that makes sense.
BR: And we had a lot of fun killing off much-beloved characters.
[laughs] It's not every day you can slaughter the Fantastic Four, so
you can enjoy it when the opportunity comes along.
JM: And when you can do it really ruthlessly too. Sorry FF fans.
Plus I had this one thing in mind to do to one character, and Brian got
completely disgusted by it. So it totally made it in. That's the good
thing about What Ifs. Anything is possible. Although we both really
took a look at what went on right before M-Day and what was going on in
the Marvel Universe. So it doesn't completely diverge.
NRAMA: People assume you can ignore continuity in these things. But you have to look at that stuff, don't you?
BR: That's the thing that has fascinated me most about doing a What If? I'm doing Spider-Man: Secret Invasion, Secret Invasion: Front Line,
tie-ins to this huge summer event, and for those comics, I deal with
one editor. And I've done two drafts of each of those scripts, tops, to
match continuity to other things. This What If? story went through how
many editors? Three?
JM: Three or four.
BR: All of our "What If" continuity had to bring in account all
the current continuity too, so we knew we were referencing everything
properly, where we were in history was matching characters properly.
I'm not kidding you -- Illuminati, with all the continuity that came
with it, was easier than a What If?
JM: When I wrote the draft and when Brian and I were going through everything, we both had the House of M trade, the Cap Omnibus, all the Road to Civil War
stuff. We even had to keep in mind who was a Skrull at that point and
who wasn't. I was just thankful I had the trades department to go to. I
just grabbed every trade I could think of so I could answer things
like: Who is in the X-Men at this particular moment? What is happening
with the Avengers at this time?
We even lost a main villain. We wanted to use Doom, and it was like,
"Doom is in Hell at this point." And we were like, &*$^! [laughs]
NRAMA: Brian, you've worked on comics by both collaborating and working alone. What's the difference?
BR: When you've got someone else and something's not working,
you can just throw it at them and say, "I can't figure this out." And
that sounds completely selfish and silly, but I can lose days to that
by myself. You can have this thing that you think is a gorgeous idea,
and as soon as you put it on paper, you go, "Oh my God! This is
horrible!" And if you have someone else, you can go, "OK, look, here's
this horrible idea I have. What does it make you think of?" And that's
the great thing about having a co-writer. Whether it's somebody just
starting out like Jim or it's someone like Bendis, that's the great
thing, because man, when you're on your own, you're on your own.
NRAMA: Jim, you probably know these characters' voices pretty well because you eat, breathe and sleep Marvel, don't you?
JM: It's true. But it was still really, really fun to write
them. And it was nice to see a good deal of the dialogue come back
unchanged. I actually came from the world of scriptwriting for soaps,
and that's basically where you plug in dialogue for characters that
have been around for 60 years. So it's very similar to that. I'd like
to think that I can do OK dialogue. That's the one thing I know how to
do, but I was still nervous about being able to do it in comics. It was
great to get through this first time and feel so good about it.
BR: Writing the Spider-Man video games, designers will send me
dialogue they've written for their level. And I read this stuff, and
it's so bad that I'm thinking, "Didn't you see the Spider-Man
movie? Have you ever read the comic book? You're aware who Spider-Man
is, right?" But this made me think right away, OK, Jim knows who these
characters are! Yay!
NRAMA: Jim, you mentioned you have something coming up for Marvel that you can't talk about yet. Can we get any clue on what it is?
JM: Well, it's a mini.
BR: And it spins out of Secret Invasion.
JM: And now every single in-box I have will be filled. Everybody
will be asking, "What is it?" I now understand what every other writer
goes through because I'm fighting with myself because I want to talk
about it!
NRAMA: We'll have to talk soon. Anything else you want to tell people about the What If?
JM: I couldn't have asked for a better introduction to comic
writing than working with Brian, and I'm so excited about this project.
And I hope other people are excited too. Brian Reed is a freaking
phenomenal writer and people should buy everything that he writes. And
I can't wait for them to read this.
