Francis McNamara writes…
First of all, Mark, thank you for being such a creative person in so many ways and also for your insights into the entertainment world on its many genre. As for my question, when you worked on DC's revival of Blackhawk, were there many restrictions or house rules you had to follow?? I enjoyed that whole run very much.
Thanks. Dan Spiegle and I enjoyed doing it a lot…in part because there were no real restrictions. This was in part because the folks then at DC were pretty good about trusting their creative people. (I am not in the previous sentence hinting that other regimes were or are not.) And the other part was that Blackhawk was such a standalone, ignored title that no one else at DC cared much what we did in it since it didn't infringe on their projects.
If we'd been doing Superman or Batman — or even if we'd wanted to guest-star those super-gents — we might have had problems. At any given time, a dozen people at DC have plans for Superman and/or Batman and everyone has ideas about how they should be handled. It was nice not to be enmeshed in any of that.
At the time I was writing/editing Blackhawk, I was writing network TV shows where if you wrote, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," you got notes about the word "good," the word "evening," the word "ladies," the word "gentlemen" and your choice of conjunctions, plus whether you were pandering to feminists to put the ladies before the gentlemen. As I think I've written elsewhere here, one of the great joys of writing comic books is that on most projects, between you and the audience are about five people as opposed to five hundred. There are times in my profession when I think I should offer to write the script for free if they'll pay me for the meetings.
