Posted in: Comics | Tagged: buzz lightyear, Comics, dc, scott snyder, swamp thing

When Scott Snyder Was Buzz Lightyear

Ray Brown writes for Bleeding Cool from WonderCon. When he can get there.

Having attended the San Diego Comic Con every year for almost 30 years, yesterday the difference between the two was apparent. Wonder Con seemed to be basically what the San Diego Comic Con was 20 years ago – intimate, not too crowded, with few lines and none that were unmanageable. Crowds were quite a bit denser on Friday, but also apparent was the one area where Wonder Con needs to dramatically improve – parking and transportation. Traffic in and around the convention center is a nightmare, and the free shuttle service offered by the convention pales in comparison to San Diego's system. As a result, unfortunately I missed the first half of the Spotlight on Scott Snyder, which is presumably where he address his plans for Batman and American Vampire…

Snyder got the job writing Swamp Thing after Geoff Johns called him at home one night and asked if he'd be interested. Swamp Thing is Snyder's second favorite character and he immediately launched into a discussion of where he'd like to take the character.

Snyder's original pitch regarding the character was to address who is Alec Holland. Snyder noted that the character had only ever appeared in a few pages of comics and readers had no sense of who the character was before the accident that created Swamp Thing.

Now that Snyder's work on the title has been well received, he wants to continue to explore other material and characters popularized during the Alan Moore run. One of the next questions Snyder plans to address is Who is Anton Arcane? Snyder wants to give readers a feel for how the character got to be the character who appeared in earlier Swamp Thing runs and what other family he may have out there.

The "Deadworld" crossover with Animal Man will be starting in issue 11. Snyder promises it will be "the biggest, weirdest thing you can imagine."

Snyder also addressed his how he got his start in entertainment. One of Snyder's first jobs was an internship at the Weekly World News. Unfortunately for them he was let go after two days. He then got a job as a janitor at Disney World, where he eventually worked his way up to "rollerblading janitor." Snyder explained that eventually he was able to audition to become a character at the park, which involved dancing in front of a one-way mirror. He started out as Eeyore and eventually got the much better part of Buzz Lightyear. According to Snyder, working at Disney World was a bizarre blend of fantasy and nightmare (he mentioned once turning a corner to find one of Disney's princesses in full costume sitting on a bench reading Guns and Ammo), which helped cement what he wanted to write about in his fiction…

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