Posted in: Comics | Tagged: chip zdarsky, dawn of dc, dc comics, james gunn, Tom King

Chip Zdarsky & Tom King Owe Their Comics Careers To James Gunn

Chip Zdarsky and Tom King have talked about how they owed their careers at Marvel and DC Comics to James Gunn, the new DC Studios head.

Published Tue, 14 Mar 2023 20:17:11 -0500

by Rich Johnston

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Chip Zdarsky, Tom King and more have been talking to Gregg Katzman of CBR about the upcoming Dawn Of DC publishing initiative at DC Comics. But they also talked about how they owed their careers at Marvel and DC Comics to James Gunn, the new DC Studios head.

Chip Zdarsky, current Batman writer, said "I wouldn't be working at Marvel or DC if it wasn't for James Gunn. After he did Guardians of the Galaxy, the weekend after it opened, a Marvel editor contacted me and said, "Hey, did you watch Guardians of the Galaxy? James Gunn put Howard the Duck at the end! I think we have a shot at launching a Howard the Duck series now." That was my first gig at Marvel. The funny thing is, I got that job and I wrote Howard the Duck for a good amount of time. Then James was like one of the first higher up people on Twitter to actually like, go out of his way to publicly talk about Howard the Duck, and that he enjoyed it. I'm like, "Oh, well, that's really nice." So yeah, I actually owe my career to James."

At the time, Chip Zdarsky was best known as an artist on titles such as Sex Criminals, and writing Howard The Duck certainly put him on the map. Or, at least, a different map, that led to Spider-Man, Daredevil and at DC, Batman. Tom King, upcoming Wonder Woman writer added, "Dude, I have that same story. The day Guardians came out, I got called for Omega Men, which was my first solo book that I was a real comic book writer on! So I have it from the exact opposite side." Omega Men was the series that he wrote for DC Comics that, along with his Vision series for Marvel, saw him taken seriously as as superhero writer, which also led him to write Batman for four years, as well as Heroes In Crisis, Batman/Catwoman, Danger Street, Human Target and so much more for DC.

Other DC creators on the Zoom call had more to say about James Gunn. Josh Williamson of Infinite Frontier, Dark Crisis, current writer of Superman and upcoming Green Arrow, said, "I was glad to see DC having a voice. I mean, I think DC was lacking a voice for a while. Having somebody out there that not only has a voice for the company, but also like, look at these really cool books, and [promoting] the creators! Like you said, I don't think we've really seen that. It's really exciting to have somebody out there actually talking about DC, being that voice and redirecting it back to the source material. It's really powerful." Tom King, who is working withJames Gunn directly on upcoming movies, stated "That is not at all corporate synergy or any sort of marketing plan, that's just James Gunn speaking from his heart. He loves those comics. He read them, and he [talks] about them. I mean, that's what makes me so excited for where DC is going. The people who making the product love the product. We are as big of fans of these things and want them to be good. It feels like a family building something together. It's wonderful."

While Phillip Johnson, writer on Action Comics and upcoming Green Lantern, added "Yeah, agreed. I think it's clear that the multimedia stuff is being led and made by a superfan. I'm just very hopeful that we're going to see a time of unprecedented cohesion and sharing between source material and all the other media coming out of Warners."

Tom Taylor was brimming with joy, about how James Gunn has been throwing it back onto the comic books. "I know he was reading my Suicide Squad when Bruno Redondo and I were writing. I got to know James is a fan of what [I was] doing…. You want them to continue acknowledging that and seeing the comics pop up [at] the end of the trailer. Seeing this is what I think so many of us as creators have wanted when we go to the cinema. In the preview, we want to see [fans] go and buy comics. Find new books, this is what this material has come from. Let's celebrate the creators who created these stories that are informing everything you're watching on your screen at the moment, be it from the MCU, the DCU, whatever. The source material is the reason these stories are so good. They came from the single greatest storytelling medium in the planet.

Tini Howard, current writer on Catwoman and Harley Quinn continued. "Yeah, I mean, I think there are so many fans that are just so hungry for what's next with these movies that someone like James saying, Well, this is what I'm looking to send people scrambling. I'm sure there's an article that pops up that [talks about] what James Gunn might have taken from Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo's Suicide Squad. And that's wonderful. Like, that's so cool. It's cool, as writers, seeing how people respond and adapt to your stuff. It's exciting when someone doodles fan art of a run I'm on and [tags] me. It's also exciting when you know that someone who is up there on a screen in front of, you know, a billion people has your words in their head. As a writer, it's just exciting. We're, we notoriously feel unappreciated, like as a species writers do. When people with power go out of their way to appreciate us, it's really exciting. You know, we're just a notoriously underappreciated class, if you ask us.