An Interview with the Author of Marvel Comics for Dummies

Do you love the Marvel comic books, but can’t keep all of the plots, heroes, and villains straight? (There are a lot.) The solution to your Marvel mayhem is here in the form of Marvel Comics for Dummies, which hit shelves this month. Part of the new publishing deal between John Wiley & Sons’ “Dummies” brand and Marvel comics, Marvel Comics for Dummies explains the Marvel universe for fans new and old. Our very own Saturday Evening Post Executive Editor Troy Brownfield is the writer of Marvel Comics for Dummies, and this week, he spoke with contributing writer Connor Brownfield (yes relation) about his writing career, as well as the lifelong comics fandom that led him to, and through, the project.

Connor Brownfield: You have numerous writing credits across various fields, within journalism, the comics industry and fiction. Give me a brief overview of some of your favorite projects, or institutions that you’ve gotten to work for.

Troy Brownfield: Starting with comics, my frequent collaborator Matt Brady and I got to write a Batman story for a Batman special in 2011. I joke that that’s tombstone stuff. You know, like, “Husband, father, wrote Batman once.” But I got to do Batman, I got to do Buck Rogers for [comic book publisher] Dynamite, which was great. I also had the opportunity to write a Dracula novel, Prince Dracula, which was very cool. I tried to do that in a very Hammer Studios vibe because I grew up on those Hammer horror movies. They were a big influence as far as horror writing.

Really significant to what would eventually lead to Marvel Comics for Dummies is all the writing I did for comics websites, starting with Comicon.com for a couple years and then seven years at Newsarama, and a couple years at Newtype USA magazine. At Newsarama, I got to write literally thousands of articles and reviews on comics, which cemented me in the field. Doing that actually presented the opportunity to write comics because I’d gotten to know publishers and editors and so forth. It availed me to some of these people who would say, “Do you have an interest in doing this?” and it led to actual comic writing.

Probably the one comics project that’s the most “me” that I’m most proud of is the Sparkshooter webcomic that I created, which is based on the experiences of me and some of my friends in the Indianapolis music scene in the early 2000s. It’s very close to a passion project because, in a weird sort of way, I always came up thinking I would write superhero stuff, and I feel like my best stuff is semi-autobiographical, comedic, music, and horror. You never know where it’s going to go.

CB: How does the way in which you write comics influence the way you write about comics, and vice versa?

TB: I think that having written about comics for a while, and looking at why something works or why it doesn’t or how an artist and writer might relate to each other really informs what you do as a comic writer.

Comics is an incredibly interdependent discipline. The comic does not exist without the writer, but it also doesn’t exist without the artist, the letterer, the colorist, editorial, etc. You have all these different functions and, to quote Avengers, “Not one of them will succeed without the others.” It’s got to have a balance. Sometimes, the balance swings one way or another.

The Marvel method, of Stan Lee writing out the idea for a book’s plot and then the artist drawing everything and letting their imagination run wild and then Stan dialoguing everything later, spread through the company. That’s a very “artist first” kind of discipline that was one of the things that made Marvel break out, and made it so Jack Kirby could go crazy with his layouts and everything. You have to study the form and know what works for you and what works for your collaborators, and I think that years of writing set me up to be better at it. I wouldn’t say “great,” but it really helps you understand.

I have generally gotten along very well with my artist collaborators. There are people I’ve worked with repeatedly over the years because I treat what they do with a lot of respect and, in return, they have frequently asked me to do stuff with them. That’s a really high compliment, when an artist asks you to do something. It makes me feel like I’ve done it, at least for the most part, the right way.

CB: Who are some of those artists that you’ve collaborated with multiple times?

TB: Paolo Yonami is awesome. We’re friends. He’s a Brazilian artist. I first worked with him when he was doing covers for the Blood Queen series that I wrote at Dynamite, and I’ve written several stories for his Midnight Witch character that have appeared in Brazil and in American comics through [publisher] Tidal Wave. Every once in a while, we’ll kick an idea back and forth and we’ll put it down. A couple months ago, he told me he was drawing one that I’d written like seven years ago.

I’ve also worked with Enkaru from Spain. She’s an award-winning comic artist, and we did many parts of Sparkshooter together, chapters 3 through 13.

You meet a lot of cool people in the business and you keep in touch. Sometimes you kick ideas back and forth and they don’t go anywhere, because that’s the nature of it, and sometimes you put out an idea and it comes back years later. You want to keep ahold of those things, even if they’re just in the back of your mind, because you never know when that opportunity might pop up.

CB: You’ve been working for the past several months on Marvel Comics for Dummies, which hit shelves this month. How did you get the project?

TB: This goes back to the making and maintaining of contacts and relationships. I met Steve Hayes, who is the executive editor of the Dummies books at Wiley, in the very early 2000s. Steve was, and is, the bass player for a band called The Common and, in the music circle I was involved with, we became friends.  I knew Steve worked on the Dummies books and he knew I was a writer. I thought, maybe in the back of my head, that we would someday work on something together. It just seemed like it would make sense, that there would be a Dummies project that he would think, “Maybe Troy’s good for that” because I’ve been writing articles that would fit in the pop culture side for decades.

In June, Steve reached out to me. It was not announced yet, it was very much on the DL, and he said, “We’re looking for writers, are you interested in this? You would have to pitch, you would have to work with us on a sample outline.” I had to kind of audition with a sample chapter and everything. That had to be approved by the folks at Wiley and Marvel as well. By going through those steps, I was able to get into the project.

They asked for input on other possible writers and, when they told me what the other books were going to be, I mentioned Gene Selassie for Avengers and Justin Peniston as a possible writer as well. Gene got the Avengers book, Justin got the Fantastic Four. And the Captain America book that also came out this month, that’s by the great Stuart Moore, who has been in editorial at both Marvel and DC and written lots of things. What an excellent choice they made for that. It was also really funny when I found out it was Stuart writing the Captain America one because, this is not an original quote, this is a Henry Rollins quote, but it made me feel like Flavor Flav to his Chuck D. Here’s the guy with all the experience and the voice of authority and I’m the guy with the big clock.

CB: Obviously, the Dummies books have a unique and identifiable format to them. What was it like to incorporate the Dummies model with the knowledge that you brought to the table?

 TB: For a company like Wiley and a brand like Dummies, format is strength. They know exactly what they are, they know exactly what works, they know exactly what the process is. It helps a writer tremendously because there aren’t a lot of surprises. Dummies covers software for computers, it covers the history of Bollywood, it covers cooking, bartending. The sheer amount of stuff they’ve done is insane, but the format is king. They are able to make these extremely informative, great-looking books because they know it inside and out. They help you as the writer fit the format.

After I’d done the first couple of chapters, I really got the feel of how it was going to break down. Working with them on that outline and table of contents made it all make sense. And what a great team. They were incredibly supportive throughout the whole thing. If they had suggestions, I tried to take as many as possible. They care about you as a person, and they want to make sure that you have the best experience possible working with them.

CB: Marvel Comics for Dummies is an overview of the entire company — its history, its characters, its storylines, etc. Give me a brief overview of the topics that readers will find in this book.

TB: I actually put this in the introduction, that this is not a PhD class. You can’t do the deepest of deep dives on everything. This is 101. The introduction has got to hit a few things. It’s got to hit the company history, like kind of how it evolved. It’s got to hit the big teams, the big heroes and antiheroes, the big villains, the big storylines. I was very much on the same page with that initial Wiley vision.

There was stuff we had to condense because this book could’ve been way bigger, but part of the format is trying to keep it to a certain size. It wasn’t going to be the Encyclopedia Britannica. We’re trying to give the best snapshot, and you want people to be able to read one book if they just want to read one book. However, some of these things will be widely expanded in other books in the series.

Another cool thing about Dummies books is that they’re structured so you can open and start reading anywhere. There’s a lot of cross-referencing, so if we say, “Refer to the Dark Phoenix” or whatever, they’re very good about putting in, “You can read more about the Dark Phoenix in this chapter.” If you want to read front-to-back, great. If you want to start with just reading the villains chapter and then go back, great. That all works.

CB: This book incorporates a lot of the iconic Marvel art. You got to choose much of the art that appears. How did you go about choosing which art to include alongside the text?

TB: This is the moment where being a long-term fan really helps. When editors hire writers, they want them to have experience, and I’ve joked that I’ve been preparing for this my whole life. I started getting comics when I was about three years old, and I’ve been reading and watching and collecting things since. When they said I got to pick the art, I immediately knew iconic images I was going to use with certain things, especially when you’ve got a chapter on great storylines. For the Spider-Man villains, I leaned really heavily into the Steve Ditko art from their first appearances. Others I picked were favorites.

Some struck me as really obvious; like, for the X-Men team shot, I used the page from Giant-Size X-Men #1 where you see Colossus, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, Storm, Banshee, and Sunfire all together in their costumes for the first time. That was immediately in my head.

Similarly, with villains, there are some great villain shots that you remember. The reveal of Thanos in his floating throne when he returned, after an eleven-year absence, in Silver Surfer, is to me the perfect Thanos shot.

CB: Being a fan really contributed to your process, and you talk about many of the iconic Marvel characters in this book. Who are some of your favorites?

TB: Cyclops is my long-term favorite. I find Cyclops to be a really interesting character, and I think a lot of people miss the point of him over time. The evolution of that character to where he is now, as a pseudo revolutionary who is motivated by just not letting any more of his people die, is a really interesting take on his growth.

I also think it’s really hard for people to love Marvel and not love Spider-Man. He is the quintessential everyman superhero…it goes way beyond the superhero stuff in terms of how he affects people.

Also, I’m a major Rocket and Groot fan. Rocket is a delight, and so many people have gotten that voice right as writers.

As far as minor characters, I love Lockjaw from the Inhumans. What’s not to love about a giant, teleporting doggy?

I also have a soft spot for part-time Avenger and oceanographer Stingray, who does not get to appear enough. But Cyclops is my Number 1.

CB: Is there a story that stands out for you as your favorite?

TB: I know this is probably a popular answer, but probably the most formative comic arc in my childhood was the Dark Phoenix Saga from X-Men around 1980. I had started reading X-Men with #125, which was a great time because it led into the Proteus Saga, which is followed immediately by the Dark Phoenix Saga. These were incredible stories by Chris Claremont and John Byrne that had big consequences and characters making really hard choices.

1980 was the year of Empire Strikes Back, and the Dark Phoenix Saga, and John Lennon died. It was a really weird year for seeing the dark side of things, seeing hard choices and hard things happening. It was a very formative time.

Also, with Marvel in the ’80s, the X-Men titles just exploded because the franchise is building. They had these intercompany crossovers, Secret Wars and Mutant Massacre and stuff, and those titles just held my attention throughout the whole decade in a crazy way as I was going from 8 to 18. That was a really intense time. I don’t think anything is going to shape my love of comics the way that Dark Phoenix Saga did at that time.

CB: What was the best part about working on this book?

TB: I liked working with the people I worked with. I work with great people at the [Saturday Evening] Post, and that helps make that job easier, but anytime you do a project like this and you’re working with good people, it always makes it better. It is work, though…you have to treat it like it’s important. You can’t just say, “Oh, I’m writing about the Inhumans today,” but you can allow “I’m writing about the Inhumans today!” to drive it. It is fun. It’s hard work, but it is not ditch digging. It is not bomb disposal. I’m getting to commit time to writing, which is a thing I love, and to characters that I grew up with and still enjoy. It’s hard to say that that is anything but a good time.

 

Marvel Comics for Dummies is currently for sale online and at bookstores across the U.S.; Troy Brownfield’s other works are available at various retailers.