Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  We’d made it to year five and beaten the Star Trek curse. There were shadows to be sure; we lost Claudia Christian at the last minute when she left the show over a contract dispute, and there were indications that Jeff Conaway was returning to his addictions, but the rest of the cast was thrilled that we would be able to finish our story. Best of all, now that I’d proven that a five-year arc could be done successfully for television, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and other shows picked up the ball and ran with it, until by 2019 multi-season arcs were the rule rather than the exception.

  But we did it first with Babylon 5.

  As we began working on our fifth season,* our search for a replacement for Claudia took us to veteran actress Tracy Scoggins, who slid into the role effortlessly and very much at the last minute. Though we were now back on track, the knowledge that this was our last year made every day a bittersweet experience, and I lingered on-set as much as possible to savor those moments. When the last episode went before the cameras, the crew presented me with a Typist of the Millennium Award in recognition for writing 92 out of 110 hour-long episodes and five TV movies, a record still unmatched by any other member of the Writers Guild of America.

  By this time I had been separated from Kathryn for almost three years, though we still met frequently for dinners and social events. While we were shooting B5 I’d been boxed in, but now that I was on the other side of that crunch, I thought we should give things another chance, and Kathryn agreed. She knew that the separation had been necessary for both my sanity and the survival of B5, and we were together again at the end of the show.

  Babylon 5 had done well enough for Warner Bros. to sense a possible franchise and they asked me to come up with a sequel. Most science fiction series put humans at the top of the pecking order, with traveling to other worlds as mundane as going to the corner store, so I decided to create a show set in a universe where humans were at the bottom of the totem pole. Our characters would explore ancient, dangerous worlds populated or abandoned by races billions of years ahead of us, a show that felt alien in the truest sense of that word.

  Crusade would tell the story of the crew of the starship Excalibur as they searched for a cure to an alien disease that would wipe out humanity within five years. It starred Gary Cole as Captain Matthew Gideon; Daniel Dae Kim as second-in-command John Matheson; Peter Woodward as Galen, a technomage who uses advanced alien technology to simulate the effects of magic; David Allen Brooks as archaeologist Max Eilerson; Marjean Holden as Dr. Sarah Chambers; and Carrie Dobro as Dureena Nafeel, the last surviving member of her race.

  During Babylon 5 our production team had honed their craft to a fine art, so as we began filming on Crusade I didn’t foresee any problems. Then suddenly, right in the middle of shooting episode three, TNT told us to stop production so they could reevaluate the look of the show. It seemed strange that they waited this long, but we accepted it at face value.

  What none of us knew was that TNT had just received the results of a study commissioned to determine how Babylon 5 was doing on their network. It showed that the typical TNT viewer didn’t like science fiction, and that B5 fans didn’t like what TNT offered the rest of the time (mainly wrestling and westerns). When our show came on, the TNT audience tuned out, and the B5 audience came in; at the end of the show, the B5 audience left and the TNT audience returned. TNT had hoped we would lure new viewers who would stay for their other programs, but the strategy was going the other way, annoying viewers on both sides.

  So the network executives apparently decided to use the production delay to buy time while they figured out how to get out of the deal for Crusade. The only way to extricate themselves without being liable for production costs on twenty-two episodes was to demonstrate that the show they were getting wasn’t the show they’d ordered, that we were a rogue production flouting their instructions. So after we were cleared to restart filming, they began giving us notes that were unbelievably toxic. Based on years of receiving network and studio notes, it seemed to me that their suggestions weren’t being made in an attempt to improve the show, they were notes so awful that no producer in his right mind would agree to implement them. Every time we said no provided another piece of evidence they could use to demonstrate that we were refusing to deliver the show they’d ordered.

  They told us to make Dureena “a sexual explorer” who would have intercourse with each new alien species she met in order to better understand them. They demanded fistfights on the bridge at every opportunity, regardless of whether or not they made sense for the story, and insisted on big action scenes we couldn’t afford within the budget they provided. If we didn’t stage those sequences, we were chastised for going against their notes; if we did as instructed, they complained that we were going over budget; if we were somehow able to do those big scenes and stay on budget, the network insisted the scenes be removed during editing, allegedly to focus on character, but then they did the same thing with the character scenes, demanding pages of additional dialogue to explain things that didn’t need explaining, then yelling at us because the extra dialogue they had asked for made the show “talky.” We were being whipsawed back and forth on a daily, sometimes hourly basis.

  One of their more egregious notes concerned an episode entitled “The Well of Forever.” They demanded that Gideon arrange for one of his crew members to be raped by the antagonist so they could “catch him with his pants around his ankles” and blackmail him into compliance.

  Repeated for emphasis: the network wanted the captain of our ship and the star of our show to deliberately arrange for an unwilling crew member to be raped to solve a plot point.

  I refused. “If I go along with this, I’ll go to hell,” I said to anyone within earshot. “Granted, I’m going anyway, but why accelerate the journey?”

  This led to a showdown at the TNT offices. On one side of a long conference table were the network executives and lawyers; on the other were myself, Doug, John, and a Warner Bros. executive who wanted to be anywhere else that day and spent most of his time avoiding direct eye contact by watching a moth that wasn’t actually there. Between us lay twenty pages of demands, most of which were on par with the rape note, while others were even more offensive. As we waited for the meeting to begin, those on our side of the table encouraged me to find middle ground, giving to get. But there was no middle ground. Though I didn’t know the reason for their posture, it was obvious that TNT would keep grinding us down regardless of whether or not I agreed to implement their notes. As the meeting began I decided that if I was going to go down, I may as well do so taking a stand against demands that I considered reprehensible.

  The TNT executive in charge opened the document. “Let’s start with page one.”

  “No,” I said. Very quietly, very softly, very firmly.

  “No to what?”

  “No to page one, no to page twenty, and to all the parts in between. I’m not doing them. I’m not doing any of them.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Doug wince and look away. The Warners rep paled visibly.

  “So what do you want to talk about?”

  I shrugged. “The weather?”

  The meeting was over. And so was the show. TNT pulled the plug on Crusade, citing creative and contractual differences. They got what they wanted. They got out.

  The death of Crusade was slow, agonizing, and unceremonious. The thirteen episodes produced before the cancellation would still be aired, so postproduction continued even as we tore down the sets and let go of personnel. These were bitter, angry days for the crew, my partners, and Warner Bros., all of whom blamed me for letting the show go down. I accepted that blame because without access to TNT’s master plan I thought I was to blame.

  I didn’t know the real story until two years later, when a TNT executive asked me to lunch after leaving the network and told me why they had worked so hard to make our lives miserable. “Once the ratings survey came in, they wanted the show gone so they could use the rest of that season’s budget
to buy reruns of shows more in line with what TNT viewers wanted. They were determined to get out of the deal and there was nothing you could have done to change it.”

  I’d spent my childhood fascinated by science fiction TV series, by Lost in Space and Star Trek, and dreamed of one day having my own show, my own universe to play with. I never imagined I would one day get not just one but two such series on the air. And while I would later return to the Babylon 5 universe for two small projects—a pilot that didn’t make it to series and a two-hour DVD movie that I would write, produce, and direct—for all intents and purposes, my time in that world was over.

  It was as if the universe said, You were staying in your comfort zone too long, so we had to blow up your life again. Nothing personal.

  It’s not pain, it just feels like pain.

  Chapter 29

  Swingin’ with Spider-Man

  For a TV writer/producer there is no higher title than showrunner. The series budget, studios, and networks may vary in size, but as far as the actual functioning of a series is concerned, that’s as far as one can go. Since only a small percentage of WGA members become showrunners, and the skills involved are considered fairly valuable, I assumed I wouldn’t be out of work for long. But once you’ve run your own series, everybody assumes you won’t work under someone else, and the only openings at the time were as seconds-in-command, so my phone remained silent.

  It didn’t help that the TNT fracas reinforced the perception that I was difficult. The truth is that I’ve always been willing to compromise if someone can show me, logically and objectively, a better way or where I’m simply wrong. The audience doesn’t know who contributed what, so if the final script contains something infinitely smarter than what I’d originally written, I can bask in the reflected glory of that idea as though it were my own. I enjoy the back-and-forth of the notes process when it’s smart and incisive. What I won’t do is lie down to bullies or lobotomize the part of my brain that requires story logic.

  But for some executives, that’s a distinction without a difference.

  Despite the anguish over Crusade, I felt quite positive about the prospect of a break in my TV career. Though it may seem counterintuitive, I believe that being out of work can often be a good thing because it forces you to reassess your priorities. Doing the same job for years on end doesn’t leave much time to ask, “Is this really what I want to do with my life, and if not, what is?” Quitting journalism led me to animation and firebombing my career in animation led to live-action. I’d worked in television for fifteen years because until Crusade augered into the ground it had been fun. As a kid, every new move was an opportunity to reinvent myself to fit into my new surroundings. If endings were beginnings, then a break in my TV work was another chance to decide what I wanted to do.

  Working in syndicated television paid only a fraction of what was standard for network series, and the onerous contract I’d signed for Babylon 5 ensured that I’d never see even a penny in profit from the series (and never have), but it still allowed me to sock away enough money to carry us for a few months while I figured out what to do next.

  I started by taking a shot at writing the Christine Collins story as a script, only to toss it in the trash, salvaging the one piece I liked as an insert to a new edition of my writing book, painfully aware that I still lacked the skills to tell it properly. I had no desire to return to journalism, and there was no way I could go back to animation, so what was left? Having been given the amazing opportunity of unemployment, what would I enjoy?

  The answer was obvious and immediate: comic books.

  The day my father tore up all of my comics, he said, “You’re never going to make a living with this crap.”

  Fine, I thought. Let’s prove him wrong. Again.

  My comics writing to this point was limited to just a few stand-alone issues that were breathtakingly amateurish because I was new to the form and still figuring out the rules. In a TV script you can write “He comes down the hall, kicks in the door, and enters the room.” But in comics the panels don’t move, so you can show the character coming down the hall, or kicking in the door, or entering the room, but not all three (unless you’re going for a superfast blur à la the Flash). I also lacked a real grasp of the techniques that would let me incorporate the artwork with the story more efficiently to create something that was visually arresting.

  All right, then let’s dig in and figure it out, I thought. The sensible approach would be to write more single issues for Marvel or DC, maybe some two-parters, and ease my way up the ladder until I was in a position to launch my own books and characters. The idea of going from television to writing comics full-time and creating my own books, with almost zero experience, was like an ice skater walking into the Bolshoi convinced she can be a ballerina starting right now. But I’ve never been terribly sensible; as with writing nearly all of Babylon 5 I was so excited by the idea that I didn’t stop to consider that it might be impossible.

  Most of the bestselling independent comics at the time were single-character books that starred a costumed superhero marred by tragic flaws, such as Spawn, Wolverine, Fathom, Witchblade, and The Darkness. There were plenty of successful ensemble books, but nearly all of them were based on long-established franchises such as The X-Men, Justice League, and The Avengers. Creating a single-character book was the safe, commercial choice, so naturally I went the other way. I decided to create an ensemble book about super-powered characters no one had ever heard of, most of whom looked like average folks rather than being the massively muscular heroes that were pro forma in comics. Established ensemble books generally averaged half a dozen major characters, so mine would be about 113 characters, of which 20 to 25 would be center stage. To further violate the usual tropes, there would be no super-powered characters outside this group, no supervillains, and in particular, no secret identities.

  I decided to go against the usual norms because in the late ’90s mainstream comics had entered a creative slump. Sales at Marvel and DC had fallen to record-low numbers and most of the independent comics were artist—rather than writer—driven. From a commercial standpoint the market wasn’t suited to the kind of story I wanted to tell, and my relative inexperience meant that the possibility for failure was immense.

  Which of course was the biggest part of the attraction.

  I decided to draw upon my experiences as an outsider in tight-knit Matawan and write about what would happen if a bunch of kids from a small town were born with unusual abilities after a mysterious cosmic event. Segregated into a camp for their own safety and the protection of others, they grow up as a dysfunctional extended family with all the attendant rivalries and jealousies. The story would focus on how the world changes them and how they change the world without the protection of secret identities because the event that birthed them was witnessed around the globe. Everyone knows who these characters are, but nobody knows what they feel, so exploring that dynamic would be the thrust of the storytelling.

  In comics, whenever someone gets superpowers they invariably put on a costume and become a Hero or a Bad Guy. For this story, most of our characters would never put on a uniform or seek out careers as superheroes or villains, attempting instead to create normal lives for themselves. Characters in most comics never grow old—Peter Parker is always in his twenties, Superman somewhere in his thirties—so we would follow these characters over the course of sixty-plus years, from birth to death, as they live through shifts in friendships and rivalries, and slowly come to grips with their abilities and responsibilities.

  I made every counterintuitive decision possible in the belief that if I kept going wrong, I’d eventually circle back around and end up right.

  I’d survived my childhood (and much of my adulthood) by isolating myself so I couldn’t be hurt no matter how hard I got pounded; the price was a veil between me and my emotions. So the first character I created was Peter Dawson, whose body is surrounded by an energy field that protects him from ha
rm, but also prevents him from physically experiencing the world around him, unable to feel the touch of a woman’s hand or the wind on his face. I’d dreamed of growing up to be a superhero, so Randy Fisk would be a comics fan with the same ambition, one of the few to don a costume and create an alter ego, which was pointless since everyone in the world knows who these characters are, but for Randy it’s all about the style. I was a shy, withdrawn writer, so John Simon, a poet—and secretly the strongest of the bunch—would be similarly inclined. I grew up in different cities, adapting to my surroundings without letting anyone see who I really was, so Elizabeth Chandra would look different to everyone who saw her.

  The characters were damaged, idealistic, cynical, lost, angry, hopeful, and doomed: the Rising Stars of the book’s title, a twenty-four-issue series with a clearly defined conclusion rather than an open-ended, ongoing monthly series. Once I finished roughing out the story, I began cold-calling comics publishers to find someone interested in the book.

  The first company to call back was Top Cow Comics, a division of Image Comics known for Witchblade, and we arranged to meet at their offices in Century City.

  I knew what I wanted—a title of my own, rather than writing any of their in-house books—and was prepared to bluff as hard as necessary by piggybacking on the success of Babylon 5. The average top-selling comic might move 60,000 to 100,000 copies, but B5 had millions of fans around the world; if even a fraction of them showed up, Rising Stars would do very well. I wanted creative freedom, no editorial interference, control of the film rights, a proprietary credit on the cover as J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars, and for the book to be published under my own imprint, Joe’s Comics, with the logo right next to the Top Cow logo. I chose that name because the night my father tore up my comics he left an empty box on which I’d stenciled the words JOE’S COMICS. Now I would begin to refill that box with my own comics.