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Ty Templeton has been writing and drawing comics for major publishers for most of his 20+ year career. He recently played the role of Editor for a Planet of the Apes series from Mr. Comics. He has also begun teaching courses on making comics at Max the Mutt Animation School. We ask Ty about his editing of Planet of the Apes, his teaching job, touch on his recent work on Civil War: Choosing Sides, and The Simpsons Comic.
Jamie:
So the Planet of the Apes mini series is done. How did the franchise people react to it?
Ty Templeton:
I'm not sure how the people at Fox reacted to it directly. I never talked to them directly. I was editor, not publisher, and never handled those emails or phone calls. I hope they liked it, we did our best to honour their characters.
I do know how the Planet of the Apes fan base reacted to it, which was 99% positive. We got responses that went from glowing to grudgingly enjoying it, complaining about an artist here or there, but almost no one disliked the series as a whole. And various fan and online critics seemed to take us well. Scripps-Howard news service, for instance, voted our comic one of the ten best published in 2006 (I wish I had the link handy, but it's not hard to Google), and was the ONLY comic on the list published by an Indy. That was gratifying. And we were nominated for a Shuster Award for best written comic last year. So at some level, we clearly didn't suck.
Jamie:
You and Joe O'Brien were co-writers of the series. How did that work, did one of you plot and the other script or what?
Templeton:
As editor, I decided that Caesar was our central character, as I thought he could best put the PotA into "our" era, where we could use the internet, and nuclear war, and American politics as players in the drama...as a way of making it relevant to a younger crowd who might not have seen the original movies. Or at least, weren't aware that the original movies were themselves, political films commenting on the world in the Seventies.
Anyway, once that was established, I asked Joe O'Brien to be in on scripting it, for two reasons. 1) I thought I wasn't going to have the time to devote to the project full time (how quickly that had to change!) and 2) Joe is a very talented genre writer who has a track record of working on licensed properties and doing them well. (Joe has co-scripted a number of Robocop TV movies and other projects).
So Joe and I came up with ideas of what to do with Caesar on our own, as did a few other people working on the project, and we had a big round table discussion about what we all wanted to see in the story. Originally, and I suspect this came from me, I wanted to include Thade in the story somehow, linking the two versions of the franchises together, and a bunch of us made notes on that idea, which developed into an interesting story that eventually FOX asked us not to do. They weren't enjoying the mail they had gotten over the recent Burton Apes film, and wanted to downplay those new characters and focus on the original ones.
Which I was quite happy to do, I'm a HUGE fan of the original characters.
From there, Joe and I (with helpful notes from some of our artists) set about creating the plot together. I think I was stressing the emotional connections between the characters, and Joe had terrific ideas about the events and situations. The idea that Caesar was slightly unglued from time because of his gestation while still in the time stream was purely Joe's and I LOVED the idea. The estranged lovers (scientist and secretary of news media) working for the government who get wrapped up in the story was mostly mine. The idea for the monkey plague came from our original artist Richard Pace, and I think the basic structure of the war itself came from our story with Thade. I'm probably past remembering who "wrote" the original Thade Caesar war, but I suspect it was mostly my outline.
Beyond that it's silly to dissect further. Once we had a plot in place, Joe and I passed it back and forth to set it into six chapters. We plotted the first issue together, from which Joe wrote all the dialogue. From that point forward, Joe wrote the scripts on his own, submitting them to me as editor for notes, which were fairly light. I think I moved a scene here and there, or tweaked a line of dialogue, but nothing major. The scripts were 95% Joe.
The back up stories were my scripts, often my layouts as well* and so were the "Caesar's Journals". (*except for the back up in issue #4 which was scripted by Sam Agro from a plot that was mostly his. My contribution to that story was fairly small, beyond editing notes and a couple of plot ideas.)
The whole miniseries was a very collaborative effort, as you can see.
Jamie:
The series takes place right after the 4th movie, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. I suppose you know about the editing done to that movie to tone down both the violence and potential race riot inciting speech by Caesar at the end. Were you tempted to keep the content at the original intended level?
Templeton:
We sort of did go back to the original idea as a plot point in our story, rather than go back and re-re-writing the dialogue from that scene. I wasn't really tempted to play with what is now considered PotA cannon. To me, it's more important to tell a good story, than to talk directly to details that only dedicated fans would know about. If the producers released the movie with the dialogue "altered" to offer a more hopeful ending in POTA #4, then that's what our cannon says Caesar says at the end of that movie.
Jamie:
One moment in the story that stuck out for me is where Mr. MacDonald tells Caesar that torture was "inhuman" and he says "It couldn't be more human." I get the impression you guys had fun exploring humanity's flaws with the series.
Templeton:
Well, that's the BASIC idea behind Planet of the Apes. It's what makes that series, and that idea work...the compare and contrast aspect of humanity's bestial side against our more divine aspirations. It's what makes PotA unique from Star Trek, or Ghostbusters in the long run.
Jamie:
Is it going to be collected into a TPB any time soon?
Templeton:
I'll keep you posted. I wish I had a specific release date, but as of today, I don't have one. No one is as frustrated about this as I am, trust me.
Jamie:
Do you know if Mr. Comics is interested in republishing the Marvel PotA series in TPB format?
Templeton:
They've never expressed any interest to me about that. We were offered all the discs for Gary Chaloner's last four issue Apes story to reprint and the publisher decided not to do it, so I suppose he's not that interested.
Jamie:
Will there be any more Planet of the Apes comics from you & Mr. Comics?
Templeton:
See above. Here's hoping.
Jamie:
You were the editor for this comic, did you like that position?
Templeton:
Very much so. It was an opportunity for a couple of things I greatly enjoyed.
1) I got to "find" a couple of artists and publish their work to an audience that hadn't seen it before. That was especially gratifying. Sam Agro, Steve Molnar and Attila are all fairly new to the action adventure comics genre, and I think they all did fantastic work. PLUS it was an opportunity to show off the talent of Canadian artists and writers. EVERY single person working on the book was a hockey playing, French speaking, bacon eating, igloo dweller, like myself.
2) I got to see a project through every step of production. From the plot sessions right down to the lettering and production and colour guides, and got to participate in every aspect of making a comic. I sketched covers, I lettered some of the issues, and coloured a page or two for Mr. Comics when deadlines required it. I wrote stories and laid some of them out. The only part I didn't do was the penciling, since I was penciling Spider-Man/Human Torch for Marvel for some of the same time, and let's be honest, the pencillers we had were WAY better at that stuff than I was, so it seemed the best place to step back.
It wasn't so much that I was micro-managing, since everyone had lots of room to play and contribute, but that I was participating in every step of the way.
Jamie:
I know you've got a lot of passion for the Planet of the Apes. Was it at all hard letting other people do some of the creative work, but getting them to do it in a way you felt did justice to the franchise?
Templeton:
In the long run, not really. My system of editing was very democratic. I made sure every script, every page layout and every penciled and coloured page was emailed to everyone else who was working on the book. The cover artist would see penciled pages, or the colourist would comment on scripts, etc. We tried to make a comic that the whole team enjoyed, and made sure we did our parts in front of everybody else, that way if there was a discussion or a problem, it wasn't somebody forcing it on someone else in the system. The writers got to see layouts before they were penciled, so Joe or I could make notes, which everybody was free to disagree with or not. I think I got voted down on a decision or two over the space of six issues, and felt the team was happy enough to make me happy. More than anything I played traffic cop, and rarely needed to "put my foot down".
Jamie:
So now that you have proved your superior editing skills, whose job do you want; Dan Didio's or Joe Quesada's?
Templeton:
I'm pretty happy with my job as it is. I don't think I'd enjoy working on characters that have SO many interested parties involved in the creation of them, that it's impossible to make a product that doesn't involve compromise. The difference between an indy film and a studio film, I'd expect.
Jamie:
So you are teaching at Max The Mutt Animation school. Which courses are you teaching?
Templeton:
Writing Professionally for Comics, and layout classes.
Jamie:
Did you have to go through any teachers accreditation courses?
Templeton:
No, because I'm teaching what are technically called "workshops". It means I prepare lectures and we do exercises, and I look over everyone's work, but I don't mark projects or give tests.
Jamie:
Have you read Scott McCloud's Making Comics?
Templeton:
Of course. Everybody in the biz has read it by now. I thought it was a wonderful voice in the discussion and philosophy of comics and art in general. It's like having a lively evening of argument and thought about the subject with a very clever and well spoken person. It certainly makes me look at some things another way, and I ESPECIALLY loved that he framed the essay in terms of a comic book format. Brilliant.
Having said all that, Scott and I disagree on certain technical and philosophical aspects of making comics...but I greatly welcome his books and opinions as interesting and challenging.
Jamie:
Why is it important for writers and artists to learn about each others craft, even if they have no intention of doing that type of work?
Templeton:
The quick answer, it allows empathy and collaboration between the two major disciples of the format. Writers often don't know the limitations of the artist's world. The same can be said the other way around. Often an illustrator is unaware of the storytelling rhythm that the writer is attempting to do, and might focus on the wrong thing in the drawing.
Years ago I was given a script that asked for a panel in which we could see a character stuck in a car in busy traffic. The writer then described, IN THE SAME PANEL, what it said on the driver's t-shirt, and what it said on the driver's bumper sticker, and impossible task for a single illustration. It's up to the artist, at a moment like that, to decide to add a panel, or remove the gag, or to focus on what the gag is there for.
Knowing the other's craft, is almost essential to serving your collaborator's needs.
Jamie:
Do the classes make it difficult to meet publishers' deadlines?
Templeton:
So many factors contribute to that I'd be unfair to blame the classes. Actually I enjoy them tremendously, it's a chance to leave my studio and interact with young folks working in the medium for the first time. Very exciting. I wish I had time to teach more classes.
Jamie:
You recently did some writing for Marvel, doing a Howard the Duck story for Civil War: Choosing Sides. Given the history of the character and its creator Steve Gerber were you at all apprehensive about the assignment?
Templeton:
Only slightly. I certainly don't want to piss off Gerber, who is a bit of a hero of mine, but on the other hand, I plan to do the BEST Howard comics I can manage to do, and with luck, do the sorts of comics that Steve wouldn't mind reading. Too often, Howard has been written by writers who don't seem to "get" the character, or clearly don't seem to care. Howard, under my pen, is as close to Steve's version as I can manage to write.
Jamie:
When you write for other artists, how do you do it? Are you very loose or do you do a detailed script?
Templeton:
Depends on the artist and my history with them. Some artists (like Rick Burchett or Tom Fowler) I'm happy to just let go and create. I trust them completely and loosely script for those guys. Other artists, I script fairly tightly, and often provide thumbnails. It's all about how clearly I see a sequence in my head, or how much I trust the artist to improve upon it, without my breathing down his neck. I remember a Batman Adventures Comic I wrote for Rick Burchett some years ago which had a sequence that read: "For the next two pages, Batman and Batgirl sneak past the guards and get into the building in a cool way." and Rick drew pages better than I would have done 'em!
Jamie:
How is working for Bongo Comics is different than Marvel or DC?
Templeton:
DC won't let me write/draw a story by myself. I'm either a writer or an artist at DC, never both on the same project. The BONGO folks give me enough time and enough trust to let me do both, which is a WONDERFUL thrill.
Jamie:
Bongo does a lot of 'done in one' stories. Are there any creators/books in particular you recommend examining to figure out the best way to do them?
Templeton:
Art is totally subjective. You have to find the "done in one" writer/artists that appeal to you, and decide what it is that appeals to you about what they just did. Who appeals to ME, personally, is Harvey Kurtzman and all his work for EC comics. His approach gooses me the best. After him I'd have to give it to Alan Moore and all his self contained stories. The idea of a self contained story USED to be the main form in comics. This "expanded" storytelling is a fairly recent format, so in the long run, I grew up reading nothing but "done in one stories".
Jamie:
Which Simpsons character do you most relate to and why?
Templeton:
There's SO many. I tend to find the older characters the funniest, and I don't know why. Grandpa, Moleman and Burns are my favorite support characters other than Krusty, so I seem to enjoy both writing them into my scripts, and watching the older characters when they come on TV. Amongst the family, it's Homer all the way. Sadly, I AM Homer, far more than I'd like to admit.
Jamie:
What's upcoming with your name on it?
Templeton:
At the Simpsons, there's an upcoming issue where we "reprint" the licensed versions of the Simpsons from around the world. The issue includes a Mexican Simpsons, a Japanese Simpsons, and a Belgian Simpsons. I wrote and drew the Belgian Simpsons, and kibitzed a bit on the other stories, which were scripted by Chuck Dixon.
There's a Bartman issue coming up from me as well...a full 25 page Bartman extravaganza! Bartman vs. Doctor Colossus and the TENINATOR!!
I'm penciling/inking two issues of Vertigo's THE EXTERMINATORS. I can't tell you the issues, but I'm halfway through the first of two.
AND...I'm writing a couple of things for Marvel at the moment, but having JUST started, I'm probably not allowed to talk about it until it's approved by the publicity dept. We'll just say it's a couple of characters at Marvel I've already done some published work on, and leave it at that. (that narrows it down to Spidey, The FF, The Avengers, Howard the Duck, Ant Man, and a few more, so I'm hardly being helpful...)
Regards,
Jamie Coville
http://www.TheGraphicNovels.com
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