 NEWS |  | Home > NEWS > THE WIZARD CONVERSATION: JUDD WINICK & DENNY O'NEIL
|
THE WIZARD CONVERSATION: JUDD WINICK & DENNY O'NEIL | | A nervous Winick speaks with DC icon O’Neil for the first time, as they debate Winick’s ‘sleazy stunt’ of reviving Jason Todd, not to mention marrying Green Arrow and Black Canary | | | By Danny Spiegel | | Posted 02/13/08 | |  | | When we were putting together our Green Arrow retrospective a few months ago, Wizard discovered something interesting. During our interview with current Green Arrow/Black Canary writer Judd Winick, we asked him if he had ever had the chance to speak with legendary GA scribe Denny O’Neil. He said he hadn’t but added that “it’s something I long to do [but] it terrifies me at the same time.” Huh? Well, it turns out that while Winick is a big fan of O’Neil’s, he thought the feeling may not be mutual since Winick had been the one to resurrect Jason Todd whose demise had occurred under O’Neil’s supervision in 1987. To prove his theory, Winick grabbed his trade of the modern classic and read a back cover blurb from O’Neil that said simply, “It would be a really sleazy stunt to bring him back.”
And so, since Wizard is all about bringing people together, we put Winick and O’Neil on the phone together to hash out what the fuss is all about. | |  When we were putting together our Green Arrow retrospective a few months ago, Wizard discovered something interesting. During our interview with current Green Arrow/Black Canary writer Judd Winick, we asked him if he had ever had the chance to speak with legendary GA scribe Denny O’Neil. He said he hadn’t but added that “it’s something I long to do [but] it terrifies me at the same time.” Huh? Well, it turns out that while Winick is a big fan of O’Neil’s, he thought the feeling may not be mutual since Winick had been the one to resurrect Jason Todd whose demise had occurred under O’Neil’s supervision in 1987. To prove his theory, Winick grabbed his trade of the modern classic and read a back cover blurb from O’Neil that said simply, “It would be a really sleazy stunt to bring him back.”
And so, since Wizard is all about bringing people together, we put Winick and O’Neil on the phone together to hash out what the fuss is all about.
WIZARD: Hey, we’d like to introduce you guys.
JUDD WINICK: Mr. O’Neil, how are you?
DENNY O’NEIL: I am fine! [Mock indignant] And, uh, Winick, you, you…you swine! You putz! Bringing back Jason Todd? How dare you?! Okay, now that we have that out of the way…
WINICK: [Laughs] Good! We get right to the meat of the sandwich. I had always been concerned what you thought of our bringing back Jason Todd.
O’NEIL: Oh, my quote about [bringing him back]? Well, that referred only to my ever bringing him back. The truth is I kind of thought that it was at least a strong possibility that some other editor down the line would do it. That kind of thing is natural and really doesn’t bother me very much. And if I were holding grudges, that would be pretty far down on the list. [Winick laughs] But I’m sorry, gossip-mongers; no rancor. And, you know, I have some questions about it. Marifran—my wife—has become an ardent [comic] fan and her question is you had [Batman] revisit all of the DC characters—the recent ones, anyway—who have come back to life. Was that a kind of nod to the readers to say, “We’re continuing a long-standing comic book tradition”? | | 
WINICK: A little bit. Batman lives in a world where people very close to him have literally died, been put in a coffin and buried. So storywise, it makes sense that if Batman is having this horrible feeling in his gut that his worst mistake has come back in a horrible way, he would seek that out.
O’NEIL: So whose idea was it to bring him back?
WINICK: Uh, it was actually mine. Denny, honestly, it comes off of everything that you guys built with Jason as a character. What had come before is that he found himself breaking away from Batman, [and] the line that Batman refused to cross was one that, as Jason was getting older, just got grayer and grayer.
O’NEIL: Yeah, he’s an interesting example of a character taking on a life of his own, because when Gerry Conway created him, I think Gerry’s mission was to just provide another Robin. Nobody ever planned for him to be a little snot but that is what he became. When we thought of that telephone stunt [in which readers were asked to call in and vote for Robin to live or die], it was at a point where I thought, “We either have to figure out a reason to give him a massive personality change or figure out a way to write him out of the series.” | | 
WINICK: Were you surprised that they voted for him to die?
O’NEIL: Oh my god, yeah!
WINICK: Really?
O’NEIL: It changed my mind about what I was doing for a living at the time. I’d been thinking of myself as, you know, a writer and editor who was working in this odd little literary backwater and suddenly I realized, “No, these characters have been around so long and in so many media that they are our kind of post-industrial folklore.”
NEXT PAGE >> | | | | | | |
Share this article
![[Slashdot]](http://slashdot.org/favicon.ico)
![[Digg]](http://digg.com/favicon.ico)
![[Reddit]](http://reddit.com/favicon.ico)
![[del.icio.us]](http://del.icio.us/favicon.ico)
![[Facebook]](http://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico)
![[Technorati]](http://technorati.com/favicon.ico)
![[Google]](http://www.google.com/favicon.ico)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.stumbleupon.com/favicon.ico)
|  |
 | |
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
|  |
| |
|
