You have been very fortunate to have worked on comics with some of the actual stars of the show. How did that come about?
When I was out on the set doing interviews for the Watcher’s Guide, I met and interviewed James Masters. I’d never met him before, but we got on rather well and I learned from him that not only was he a big fan boy - which he probably wouldn’t want people to know - but that he also wanted to write screenplays.
He’d done at least one screenplay at that time, and I think I said to him, "We should do a Spike and Dru comic, or something like that. I mentioned it to Scott Allie at Dark Horse Comics and things just happened from there. James didn’t work on the subsequent Spike and Dru comics, but I know that he had a good time.
With Amber, Little Willow (who is the girl who does my web site and also does a site for Amber) said "you guys have to get together." So, we went and had a great lunch. Then, I was out there again perhaps four to six weeks later and we went out of dinner. I think it was actually Amber’s mum who brought up the fact that Amber had written several one act plays as well as a screenplay, which she’s since produced as a movie.
I said, "I’d like to read some of this stuff, can I read it?" And so she gave me her plays to read. They’re really good, and Amber is so smart, so literate - everything that you could think of that’s opposite to what you imagine a Hollywood actress to be.
I said to her, "do you know, maybe one of these days we should do a comic together." I was just throwing it out there, only because she writes. Same thing with James. I’ve met a number of the other cast members and I’m not chasing them all down and saying "Let’s do this."
Amber said, "that would be great, we should definitely do that," and immediately we started kind of bouncing off these sort of germs of ideas about what we would do. From there we developed the idea of the Tara and Willow Comic.
What happened in both cases is that we would talk at length about the plot and I would write down maybe three or four paragraphs about what the plot of that issue was going to be. I would then send it off to them and they would change it. In Amber’s case, once we were happy with it, I would do a scene-by-scene plot and decide how many pages we’re going to dedicate to each scene.
Amber would change it, do whatever she wanted to it, and send it back to me. Once we got to that point, Amber and I split the comic up. "You take this scene, I’ll take this scene." I felt free to write, to rewrite lines of dialogue of hers and she felt free to rewrite lines of dialogue of mine. We edited each other. We went back and forth until we were both happy with the finished product.
That’s the process that happened with James as well. And both of them were extremely enthusiastic. I’m always sort of extra-defensive because I know that a lot of people assume that they didn’t actually do the work, that any time you see an actor’s name of a book or a comic book that they didn’t actually write it. But in both of these cases both of them did and did an amazing job and I’d work with either one of them again in a second.
