The Watchtower 3.3.03: The Heart Of Fanzing: Talking With Michael Hutchison

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About a year ago, I discovered what I still today consider to be one of the greatest testaments to comic book fandom on the web: Fanzing. Reading through the vast archive of the online publication, I learned just about everything there was to know about the DC Universe, from the JSA to the Legion of Super-Heroes, not to mention being treated to unparalleled fan fiction and art by the people who, if there is any justice in the world, will be the comic book creative superstars of tomorrow. Sadly, Fanzing shut down its regular publication with this past week’s Issue 52. I was fortunate enough to get a hold of the driving force behind Fanzing, Michael Hutchison, to talk about Fanzing, what’s next for him and his crew, his favorite character of all time, and some other neat stuff. Mike was great, really enthusiastic and forthcoming, with a great sense of humor. I hope you all enjoy reading the first part of this interview as much as I enjoyed conducting it.

Ben: Why don’t we start off with you telling the 411 readers a little about Fanzing, how you guys got started and how you got to where you are today.

Michael Hutchinson: Otherwise known as “Let Michael do a lot of typing so I can sit back and relax!” Heh heh heh. Sure, no problem. Fanzing was started back in 1997 by Marc Campbell as a magazine run on his own AOL webspace. He used a graphic format…in other words, he composed the entire thing as one big giant GIF with a clickable image map. It took a while to load (back in those days), but the result was visually quite impressive. As an HTML designer, though, I believed HTML would be much better. The viewer could control the font size, blind people could use image readers, etc. When Marc left to work for DC Comics as their webmaster, I offered to take over the magazine. It was then that he told me that the contributors were mainly me, a few other writers, and some artists…and Marc using four different pseudonyms. So I had to talent-hunt a lot the first few months. Since the design was different, I restarted the magazine at issue #1. This was an all-text HTML format with images only for artwork. One big plus was that it was a lot smaller to host the thing. After a year, I moved it to a domain, Fanzing.com. The staff was really big by that time, and I brought on board some assistant editors in the following year. One of them, David R. Black, learned HTML from scratch using my tutorial and began doing most of the formatting. He even did a few issues entirely by himself. Over the last few years, more and more of the work fell to him until he was composing all of the issues except for a few pages that I would do…and then I’d slow down the posting of the new issue because I barely had time for those few pages! See, in 1998 I met this wonderful woman who became my wife in 1999, and needless to say a happily married comic geek has a lot less free time than a single introverted comic geek. And over the last year, with a new house and all, there just isn’t the time to stay up until 3:00 AM putting Fanzing together anymore. So we decided to bring Fanzing, the magazine, to a close. David R. Black (who, as I said, has really been The Man In Almost-Charge for the last two years) is devoting more time to his studies and couldn’t take it over. And I’d rather have Fanzing go out with a bang than dwindle on like X-Files without Duchovny.

Ben: How incredibly selfish of you…so what’s next?

MH: That’s the other reason for letting Fanzing Magazine go: I want to devote more time to things that might actually make money and take me somewhere. I realized that the time I was putting into Fanzing, a product that legally CAN’T make a profit because we’re using DC’s character for a fan mag, could be devoted towards actually getting me a job at DC…or at least, start me along that path. Fanzing has definitely helped me to improve my talents…but in the time I’ve been running it, I haven’t submitted anything to DC! Even with all of the people encouraging me, telling me that the stuff I write shows I could be breaking in now… I just haven’t had the time. So what we decided to do… was take many of the most talented people at Fanzing and put out a comic book ourselves. It’s an 80-Page one-shot (for now) anthology entitled “Job Wanted”. Instead of focusing on a genre, this is centered around a theme but is not genre specific. (In the same way that “Twilight Zone” might be about space travelers or time travel or cowboys, but had a unifying theme of “strange and bizarre.)

Ben: So is this featuring existing DC characters, or are you guys creating new ones?

MH: Oh no, these are all new characters. Although it’s not so much a “character” book. It’s not intended to launch characters into their own comic, although it may. Phil Meadows and I created some characters for our sci-fi story that we liked so much in the end that we’d like to use them again…but that wasn’t the intention. We just wanted to tell a good story. See, I think that’s the problem with some independent one-shots: they often try to promote their characters to the point that they don’t tell a good *story* with the comic you’re holding in your hands. With “Job Wanted”, we want people to enjoy it even if nothing else ever comes of it (or of the creators…although we knock wood that that isn’t the case!) I’d be satisfied enough if everyone who picks it up enjoys every page in it and is happy with their purchase. And how often does that happen with an 80-pager? So many of the ones I can think of have one or two good stories and then a lot of filler. Not “Job Wanted”. It’s 50 pages of great work and only 30 pages of my tax forms added on the back to pad it out. But as for the characters…I can tell you what we’ve got inside it. Every story in Job Wanted is about jobs. There’s a great story about an ex-slave cowhand in Texas. A spooky story about a bus driver taking on a new route through the creepy, supernatural part of town. A comic tale about a slacker who gets a job collecting the slime off of a monster. A bizarre story about a young priest who must exorcize a young boy who has been possessed by a video game. A funny advertisement for supervillain products. An introduction featuring the Fanzing Fuzzball as he tries to break into the comics industry. And a sci-fi horror story (that’d be mine) about a space junk collector who is cleaning up after a space accident and gets a life form reading from his haul. Oh! And I forgot the most recent addition: an 8-page story by Scott McCullar (who has already worked for DC) about his pulp character Yellow Jacket, an ex-millionaire (thanks to the stock market crash) looking for work in the Depression-era. I told the contributors to the story that I didn’t mind their using ongoing characters, so long as it was in an entertaining, self-contained tale. And I should mention that each story is going to have a title page. This is a sort -of miniature cover for each story that sets the mood, and they’re all done by Rosalyn Terrill, who is also the cover artist.

Ben: So what is about DC as a creative universe that you find attractive? Why a DC fanzine as opposed to one about Marvel or another company?

MH: That’s really two different questions. Let me take the latter first: I didn’t do a Marvel Fanzing because I know diddlysquat about Marvel. The Marvel comics in my collection are all stuff I inherited from other collections I bought, and they lie there unread. I just have Zero interest. Which brings me to the first question: Why? As a kid, I didn’t have any exposure to it. I knew the Superfriends. The only Marvel character I knew was Spider-Man on Electric Company…which is why I didn’t know Spider-Man could talk. I thought he just squeaked and pointed at his word balloons. So I’d be watching TV and there’s Spider-Man hanging around with Fargo North, Decoder and Morgan Freeman, and I just didn’t find him interesting. I never knew he had a comic book. But seriously…by the time I could buy comics at age 11, I was a DC-devotee just because of the DC comics I’d inherited from my uncle. That was the EARLY 80s, when the economy hadn’t yet taken off, my dad was in seminary and my mom was working as a cashier. Money was tighter-than-tight, and I could only buy a comic once in a blue moon. And it was DC all the way. My first purchases were: JLA #200 (what a great way to kick off buying JLA!) and Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew #3. By 1985, I was buying random issues of Superman, and then Crisis really swallowed me up whole into the DCU. So by then I was buying a half-dozen titles easily. And even though people kept telling me how great Marvel was…I kept thinking, “I don’t even have the money to buy all the DC titles I like. I’m not buying a whole other universe of books!” And I’m glad I made that decision. I’d be bankrupt if I was trying to buy both DC and Marvel. So I guess the answer is financially induced segregation. I never allowed myself to read Marvel.

Ben: Who’s your favorite character (anybody who has ever read Fanzing knows the answer to this one, but some of our readers might not) and why is that?

MH: What that would be the RED BEE! JUST KIDDING! My favorite is Elongated Man, for two main reasons. Back in the 1970s I saw Elongated Man in JLA #100 (I’ve identified since then which comic it was that I saw him in, but at the time I just knew it was a JLA comic my friend had) and in the first panel he appears in, there’s an editor’s note: “Elongated Man (Ralph Dibny) is the only active superhero who has revealed his identity to the world.” And I can’t explain it…but I loved that. Here was a guy who didn’t worry about hiding his real name. Instantly, I knew it was because he’s just Elongated Man and no one is going to want to kill HIM. Later, I started reading his various adventures in his mysteries and in JLA, and I found out that he had a wife. They were wealthy and traveled the world having fun and solving mysteries. It was exciting and yet laid-back. The world wouldn’t end if Elongated Man failed; most of the time he was solving a simple robbery or tracking down something bizarre. And given what the comics of the last 15+ years have been like, where every writer is trying to introduce the biggest most horrifying doom to hit the planet yet… I find that I’d rather read a more down-to-Earth challenge. In other words, I like reading the stories about the Elongated Man because they’re realistic, even if he is stretching his body into knots. He’s married. He drives to his destinations. He has to fuss about hotel reservations and getting his car repaired. He can’t just fly up to the moon or leap back in time. In the same way that Peter Parker speaks to the high-school dweebs who get picked on and wish they have a secret life, I think Ralph spoke to me. All I wanted in life was a funny wife and enough money to be happy. (Ralph is wealthy in that he doesn’t have to work, but he doesn’t have a money bin.) I’m sure some armchair psychologist will have fun with all this, but so be it.

Ben: So now you’ve got the wife, you’re working on the cash, will you be growing your nose and solving crimes soon?

MH: Well, there’s a purple pony out in the back yard and I’ve been meaning to get to the bottom of that for ages…but with Fanzing, I just haven’t had the time. You see what I mean?

Ben: Totally, 411 is definitely putting restrictions on my crusade to rid urban Connecticut of jay-walkers

MH: LOL

Ben: Dream scenario: DC makes you editor of a new Elongated Man ongoing or limited series and gives you carte blanche to do what you will with the character. Who would be the creative team (you can’t include yourself;-)) and where would you want them to take the character?

MH: Well, if I’m the editor and can’t WRITE it, that’s hardly a DREAM scenario…but as you wish. Here’s who I’d pick: Writer: Mark Waid. Artist: Ron Randall (the artist on JLE who designed Elongated Man’s new costume…my favorite costume and the one I wish he’d kept, but everyone keeps putting him in the old ones). I’d have the series focus on single-issue mysteries and world traveling, occasionally teaming up with other DC heroes. And I’d have them start solving some mysteries of the DCU, like what really happened to the Metal Men (as a way of undoing the stupid “humans trapped in machines” origin from the mini a decade ago). In other words, using him as a way to explore other characters that don’t get enough attention…kind of the way Chase did before being so rudely interrupted. And I’d do a multi-parter Year One story about how Ralph and Sue met. And yes, if I was writing it…it would be the same way. I actually have that story about their first meeting as a four-issue mini-series called “Mystery Date”. I mean, mapped out in my head. As something I could pitch to DC. But I probably shouldn’t say anything more.

Ben: Getting back to Fanzing…you guys put out 54 issues, a heck of a lot of content. Are there a few issues or articles that you guys produced that stand out in your mind as the work you’re most proud of?

MH: Obviously, the article that gets the most attention is How To Save The Comics Industry, which I wrote (hard to believe), four years ago as a special report. I interviewed many comic pros, getting their input before writing it. It boils down to “Get comics back in stores at a price kids can afford”. But there’s more to it than that. And I still stand by 95% of what I wrote, although I’ve recanted my law against publishing trade paperbacks of everything. Yet I still think there is a problem comics haven’t solved, which I was trying to offer a solution to: Everything good that gets published is packaged later much cheaper. But if EVERYONE waits for the TPB, then the initial books are judged a failure and aren’t reprinted. And it doesn’t seem like the companies have a way to solve that yet. Anyway, as for other reflections…one of the best fiction epics that we did was called Villainy on Vacation where all of Batman’s enemies leave Gotham looking for greener pastures. We did a ton of good fiction stories from that, and it then spun into another story arc called The Vile Vial where a virus turns most of the superheroes evil and most of the villains good. Both were ideas that sparked the imaginations of our contributing writers. If any of your readers want to read up on those epics, they’re in our archives I’ve enjoyed the art contests that we did as well, particularly the swimsuit contests (they got the most response). We’ve got archives for those as well.

Ben: Yeah, we’re trying to make a determination now as to whether we want fan fiction as a part of 411 (that’s your cue to vote in the poll to the right, faithful reader, provided it’s not still the Daredevil Movie one…)

MH: During the Villainy On Vacation, I wrote a multi-part story about Elongated Man tackling The Riddler. (check out part one here –Ben) If you want an idea of how I’d write Elongated Man, that would be it. Unfortunately, this late at night my memory is going and I can barely recall most of the last five years! I know that tomorrow I’ll smack my head with the dozens of good articles and features I should have mentioned. To sum up: It’s all good. Well, almost all. For a year we were hosting fan-made movies. That was great. It gave us something to demo at conventions, and they were a lot of fun. Then it turned out there was some controversy that the guy making them was using Poser models made by other people without credit. So we had to take down the movies. And I really miss them. Although they were killing our bandwidth, so that’s probably a blessing in disguise. We also had a contributor who turned out later to be an anti-Semite who was using our articles to get in his “Truth about the Jews” unquote. So those got ditched. Boy, you never can tell with these online people you meet, eh?

Ben: Yeah, I’ve got this kid Matt Morrison who works for us who I’m pretty sure is actually a serial killer

MH: Oh, Morrison from Texas? I’ve heard about him. Ate his family, I believe.

Ben: Yep, that’s the one…I think he’s trying to track down the director of Daredevil and tie him up in a room forcing him to read the complete Frank Miller run at the moments

MH: Haven’t seen Daredevil yet, myself. Of course, I’ll love it because I have no preconceptions. (Ha! Take that Morrison! Score another one for ME! –Ben) Aside from the thieves and Nazis, though, it’s been great! This is probably enough material for your readers to start going through our archives. I’ll try to remember some more. Boy, only 32, but I have the memory of an 80-year-old.

Ben: Anything left to say re: Fanzing before we conclude this part of the interview?

MH: Well, yes, one thing. Perhaps by part two I’ll have some details for you, but for now: don’t go away. From Fanzing.com, I mean. No sooner do I end the magazine than I come up with a whole new time-intensive idea for the site. Right now I’m procuring domains and software that I’ll need, but I’ve got some plans. And they’ll surely be of interest to your readers. I’ll just leave that kettle boiling for now. I know everyone wants me to spill some more details, but I honestly can’t until I have secured what I need to do it.

Ben: That sounds like a good note to leave the readers wondering on…and we’ll have you back later this week or next for some more thoughts about all things DC

MH: Sounds great! I have to go. Some e-mail just came in with an offer of cheap Viagra!

Ben: Whoa! Get on that, dude

MH: Wow! I must be a pretty special person to be getting this offer!

Ben: As a virile 20 year old I’m still getting the porn ads…I’ve got a few more years before the Viagra offers start pouring in, grandpa.

MH: Oh, I get the porn too. And hey! Penis growth hormones! Wow! I’ll send that on to Matt.

Ben: Check the name, he may have forwarded it to you…he usually gets first offer on that stuff…anyhow, thanks so much, Mike. I enjoyed this interview and can’t wait for part two!

MH: Thanks, Ben.