Featuring...

Christopher Golden Author of Angel comics

Continued from previous page... "I mean, Leonardo DiCaprio is the last person that should play that role!" The latest comic action heroes to hit the big screen are in the X-MEN Movie but also in the talking stage is the Spider-man Movie, with rumors of Buffy’s own Nicholas Brendon possibly playing the lead role. What does Chris think of this, having written a Spidy comic himself, and even better, who doesn’t he like? Is that Peter Parker? Why no, it's Nicholas Brendon as our friendy neighborhood Spidy! “I actually think that Nicholas Brendon is a really good choice! I think he has all of the elements that the classic Peter Parker needs. Pretty much everybody else they’ve mentioned I just don’t think . . . I mean, Leonardo DiCaprio is the last person that should play that role.You’ve got to have somebody that is not really straight. You know what I mean, I don’t mean straight like, you know, but I mean really strait-laced. You have to have somebody who’s got character, you need somebody who has character.” And Nicholas certainly has that! What is interesting about writing for such characters is that while both the Buffy and Angel series have large writing staffs, some having a preferred voice such as Jane Espenson for Anya and Doug Petrie for Faith, Chris is left with the tremendous task of recreating all the characters himself. So which stories does he find harder? “Buffy is more work, but I think that’s because there are fewer members to the Angel cast and the Angel material is sort of closer to home for me.” Having written a similar character in his own novels, with that of Peter Octavian, “ It’s sort of a natural,” he continues, “because almost all the stories sort of roll out of Angel. Roll out of like who he is. We just finished up the script to Angel (11) and it’s the second half of a two part story. Which actually I’m waiting to see if they’re going to let (11) go as written, because it’s really funny. The two part story which is called Strange Bedfellows, very bluntly approaches the subject of, what must be an awful sexual frustration for Angel. (laugh) It’s that kind of thing.” After his laughter has died down he goes on to explain, “It’s really easy to write that once you know the characters. Where as Buffy, the one shot issues that I’ve done, Buffy #12 and Buffy #16 have been easier, but the current story line that I’m writing is so complicated and so dense that it has been really difficult. I’m actually going to be starting the last installment, the fifth part of the story, which is the anniversary issue of Buffy 25. It’s much more difficult to write the Buffy Comics.” Does that make it less fun for him? “No, no I don’t think that’s true. It makes it less fun in the sense of goofy fun, because when I’m working on Angel I’m working with Tom and it’s always more fun.” There's a whole lot of Spooky going on! Tom Sniegoski has been in more collaborations with Chris than another other writer except for Nancy Holder. Having just completed the Monster Book with Tom and is working on a number of other current projects with him, Chris lets us in on a little story about working with the talent beside the talent. “You know, what I say about working with Tom always is, my favorite band when I was a kid was Lynyrd Skynyrd. I read in this interview one time where they talked about the fact that they had three lead guitarist and wasn’t that overkill. And what they talked about was, in the studio one of the guitarists would do a riff that the other guys thought was amazing. And then the next guy had to do better, they had to keep sort of one upping each other. And that’s the beauty of working with Tom.” "... and it makes a lot of people cry and you know, hey, you can't beat that." He goes on to say, “We’ve done a lot of comics together and actually he’s been doing comics much longer than I have. But working with him is always like that. It’s, you know, if I’m trying to make him go ‘wow that was a cool line’ and he’s trying to make me laugh, then I think we’re gonna get really good scripts out of that. And there have been some things that we’ve done, that I got an e-mail from my editor today about Angel (11) basically saying ‘boy this and this in this script were really, really funny’ and I e-mailed him back and I said ‘you can thank the guy’ because those were definitely his. I think that also comes from the fact that from the very first time we spoke at length, Tom and I realized that we had an almost obscenely large number of things in common. Our frame of reference, even though he’s 4 or 5 years older than I am, our frame of reference is almost identical. It’s more of a joint effort, almost every creative spark comes jointly” Go to Next Page >> Buffy or Angel comics?