DC@Home Day One: Full Comic-Con Panel Is All About the Creative Process

Hey, today DC is putting the Comic back in Comic-Con with DC@Home Day One. This hour-long presentation is divided into two (or four, depends on how you count, I guess) parts. For the first 30 minutes, DC Superman Group Editor Jamie S. Rich hosts two groups of DC Superhero comic writers and artists. They delve pretty deep into their creative processes and the challenges of long arcs; how they use the core characteristics of the heroes to drive plot and conflict; and the process of creating new villains. This is really fascinating stuff for any comic fan, but especially for anyone interested in writing or working in comics. I love this kind of nitty-gritty process talk. The group for the first fifteen minutes was Tom Taylor, Ram V, Tom King, Mitch Gerads, Clayton Henry, and Kelly Sue DeConnick. The second group was Mariko Tamaki, Mikel Janín, Vita Ayala, Ryan Sook, and Brian Michael Bendis.

The second half of the panel was given over to Michelle Wells, the VP and Executive Editor of DC for Young Readers, which produces original, out of continuity stories about DC heroes for middle grade readers (ages 8-12). She used her time to get more in depth on specific titles, first speaking to Grace Ellis and Brittney Williams, the writer and artist on Lois Lane and the Friendship Challenge, and then to Maggie Steifvater and Morgan Beem, writer and artist on Swamp Thing: Twin Branches. I mostly decided to watch this panel because I really love Stiefvater’s other work (All of it slaps, but her current project is a trilogy about people who can take items out of dreams and the people trying to annihilate them), and I very much enjoyed listening to talk about her attraction to Swamp Thing as a person with a great kinship to plants and the research she has done into similarities between human and plant neurotransmitters.

Check out the full panel below: