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NITZ SPEAKS ENGLISH ABOUT 'BLUE BEETLE' IN SPANISH | | With the bilingual issue of the hit teen hero series on stands, its writer discusses trepidation for translation and why he had to write the book anyway | | | By Kiel Phegley | | Posted 5/08/2008 | |  | | Many comic fans may not be familiar with the name Jai Nitz, but after this week, more folks may be talking about his work, no matter what language they speak.
A writer whose most widely spread work has been issues of DC's all-ages The Batman Strikes!, Nitz wrote last week's Blue Beetle #26, an issue with most of its dialogue written in Spanish as spoken by protagonist Jaime Reyes' extended family. While the issue has created a buzz on the internet over the past few days, Wizard Universe tapped Nitz to tell the tale of how he was picked for the prime gig, why he was nervous about both the assignment and the series and which other Latino DC hero may help him break out in a big way later this year.
| |  WIZARD: Tell me about yourself, Jai. You've got this Blue Beetle issue out now, but you've also done other work, right?
NITZ: Yeah. I've been doing The Batman Strikes! for a while now at DC. There's a rotation of writers on that title, and I'm just one of the rotation working on that. The other stuff I've done have been Image books that have sold so poorly, I don't think there's a chance you've seen them. I did a book called Heaven's Devils and one called Season of the Witch at Image, and Heaven's Devils won the Stoker award for best horror writing in comic books when it came out. But that's an award that nobody in comics really knows about, so it probably easily passed you by. I also self published a book called Paper Museum for a few years, and I'm still doing it while I can.
I do know that book. Mike Allred did the cover to #1, right?
NITZ: Yup. That's me, and I won the Xeric grant for doing that, and I've done three issues of it. But again, it's one of the things where you're in the self-published ghetto. You're so far down in Previews that no one orders the books anyway so you're only doing it because you REALLY love it. That's what I'm doing with that, but it's really how I broke into comic writing to begin with. I have a bunch of friends in the industry who were very kind in helping me out, but they also almost to a man said the same thing, which is "You gotta get published even if you end up doing it yourself because that shows everybody that you're serious about it." I started out self publishing for that very reason just to show editors, "Hey, I'm here for the long haul. I'm serious about losing money self publishing so I can get better at what I'm doing." And every time I self publish a book, I end up getting something out of it. My first self-published book led to my first pro work at Wildstorm, and after that I'd do another self-published book and get a job at Marvel of DC or whatever. It's always led to something every time I've done something that way. I then eventually amassed a bunch of small credits at Marvel and DC over the years.
Well, how did you make the jump onto this issue of Blue Beetle, and what was the theory behind doing it with DC?
Just recently – actually this was last year – I was in New York, and I went to DC and was talking to some of the editors there, and Jann Jones, who's a friend of mine said, "Hey, what would you like to do?" And I told her about a book I wanted to do. I wanted to revamp the character El Diablo. She said, "That sounds really great. You ought to pitch it to me." And I reached into my bag and said, "Here's the pitch." So she said, "I'll take a look at it. I'll give it to Dan [Didio] and we'll go from there." I said, "Sounds cool" and went down the hall to talk to Mike Marts who's a buddy of mine as well. I actually worked for Mike doing stuff at Marvel. We're talking about Nets basketball or something because he's a Jersey boy, and then we're in there hanging out, and Jann pops her head in to say, "Are you going to be here for a while at DC?" I said, "I'll be here this afternoon. I fly home tonight." And she says, "You got a meeting with Dan Didio in 15 minutes. So cool." And Mike looks at me – and I swear to God, he was dead serious – and says "Don't blow it." [Laughs] I go, "Thanks for the pep talk, Mike! That's the best pep talk I've ever had. Wow." And he said, "No seriously. This is a big deal. Don't blow it."
So I waited and talked to Dan about El Diablo, and we hashed it out a little bit. He said, "I want you to pitch this. I want you to rework it and pitch it to me again. Takes these notes into account" and so on. We really hit the ground running, Dan and I, to the point where Dan was the editor on El Diablo, and it wasn't that I was going through someone at DC. I was under the #1 guy, which is very, very, very scary because you have to make sure you're doing it right because if you fail in front of that guy, then you don't get a second shot to fail in front of another editor. It's "I remember this guy. He stunk last time." It was very much a high wire act to work with Dan, but he was very happy with what we did, and DC wanted to do this Blue Beetle issue in Spanish. Since I was already working with Dan on El Diablo, I got a phone call of "Hey, Jai! You're Hispanic, right?" which was really why I wanted to do El Diablo in the first place, and I said, "Yeah." They're like, "How well do you speak Spanish?" And I can get by but I couldn't write a thesis paper in Spanish or give a speech at the U.N. in Spanish, but I can speak if I'm in Mexico or around my family. They said, "Oh. Well, we want to do this issue of Blue Beetle in Spanish. Do you want to write it?" And I said, "Yeeeeeah…is it really that easy? I just have the job?" | |  But then we started talking about it, and it wasn't as easy as it sounded. There were lots of little things about it. Obviously the point of it was to reach out to Spanish language readers. It made sense to do it in Blue Beetle because of how Blue Beetle speaks Spanish at home, and it's set in El Paso. But they've never done anything like this. So when they said, "Do you want to give it a whirl?" I said, "Absolutely. Works fine for me." And there are other little things like, "How do you want to approach this or that?" In my family, it's all Spanglish. It's not pure textbook Spanish or anything like that. They said, "Well, we can't have that. That's not what were shooting for here. We have to put the whole thing in Spanish so that everybody can understand it from Columbia to Spain to Chile." It's got to be a little more text booky than my Spanglish with my family, so it all kind of fell into place.
Then it became, "How to we want to approach villains? Why does everybody speak Spanish? Where are we going to set it? Are we going to set it in Mexico?" And all that stuff worked itself out and eventually became the issue that we have. It was just like writing any story that the editor would ask you to do. Like if they said, "Hey! Come write an issue of Checkmate. Here are the things going on in Checkmate and here's where we want you to go." It's fine. You can still make all that stuff work out. It's just the extra wrinkle of "Oh by the way, none of it's in English." So hopefully my heritage and four years in high school and five years in college don't go completely to waste of learning how to speak Spanish.
I had two years in college, and I could get about every third balloon on the page.
NITZ: [Laughs]
But that's another thing. You're a more conversational Spanish speaker as opposed to someone who has a college degree or is even a native speaker. Do you think there's an audience crossover where it's not just people who are native speakers but it's also for people who speak English first and know some Spanish?
NITZ: I think it's definitely the latter. First of all, I will always go and check out what people are saying about my books. I read reviews, and I know you're not supposed to, because the old saw is, "For everyone that calls you a genius that you believe, you have to also believe it when they call you an idiot." I understand that, but I wanted to see how the Spanish translation was going over with people, and for everybody that's been commenting on it – some of them are morons and some are really bight about what we're doing. It's kind of what you said. I don't want this to be something that is completely insular to the way people in South Texas talk or how it's said. The way people speak Spanish in South Texas is completely different than the way people speak Spanish in Mexico, and we're talking about a separation of five miles. It's something where it's very important to make it as widely accessible as possible. That means using more text booky terms and stuff I normally wouldn't use if I was speaking Spanish with my family. But also it means writing it in a certain way that I'm going to catch flak for. "Oh, this is obviously somebody who's not native!" Yeah, I know, but it had to work out a certain way so most people would get it – even people like you said a second ago who don't speak Spanish! If they see the word "Collegio" they might not know that that'd basically mean high school, and they might think it means college, where if you say "Universidad" that obviously means college to you and me. It's little stuff like that that they don't understand.
I was trying to make it as accessible as possible, and so was DC, by the way. They understood that there's going to be some loud guy on a message board that's pissed off about it, which...guess what? There's a lot of loud guys on message boards pissed off at everything. So you can't worry about that. And that's something that's new to me because my Batman Strikes! stuff has really flown under the radar. I'm not saying, "Hey! In this issue of Batman, he dies!" like Grant Morrison is doing, so I don't have to worry about that. But with this, I knew I was going to ruffle feathers. I knew it would be something that's going to be front and center for message board fodder. I took that into account when trying to translate, but I didn't care about that at all when I was trying to write it. I still told the story I wanted to tell, but it was like, "Okay. How do you say 'supervillain'? I have no idea how to say 'supervillain' in Spanish." Well, Sergio Aragones does, and he has the word for it. Excellent. [Laughs] I could have asked my mom, "Hey, mom! How do you say 'supervillain'?" Come on! My mom doesn't now how to say "supervillain" in Spanish. I don't think anybody's mom knows how to say "supervillain" in Spanish. It's a very comic booky thing.
I bet Sergio Aragones' mom knows how to say it.
NITZ: She might! [Laughs] And that would be it. She'd be the only mom who knows how to do that.
| |  So it sounds as though you went through writing the script in English and then went back to translate. How did that work out? Was it easy for you to shift back and forth with the languages?
NITZ: It's not as easy as I would've like it to have been, and that's one of the things I didn't realize when I said, "Yeah, I'll take that job!" I didn't realize how hard it was going to be because I first of all, I wrote the script in English. I wrote the entire script just like I would any comic script, and then I sat down with it and said, "Okay, this line is very much an American idiom." Like, you can't say, "Well, the bases are loaded" because when you say something like that…oh boy! The phrase in Spanish is going to be different than the phrase in English, so you can't get married to that. You have to look for a different way to say that, and I would. I'd go through and try to find a way that is even more universal to say something rather than just say something that is specific to an American phrase.
Then, after I took that into account, I had to go in and change stuff around. A great thing I heard from one of my buddies that speaks Spanish was "Jai, I've read this over, and I have no idea what this means." I said, "What the phrase [means] is 'he's missing something,' or 'he has no class' is what the phrase specifically means." But it directly translates into "He does not have the ivory keys of the piano." So someone who would read that would do "I have no idea what 'he doesn't have ivory keys on his piano' means." Well, what it means is he has no class. "Okay, I can see that." It's something that's familiar to certain Spanish speakers. My mom was like, "Oh yeah. That's something that in South Texas you'd say. He doesn't have any class because class means wealth, and pianos are associated with wealth. It has multiple meaning."
Another phrase that's like that in the same way is that it's a little bit like saying "Daddy-O." If Mark Millar wrote that in Kick-Ass, people would go, "Who talks like that? Nobody!" But it's something where I wasn't afraid about that when I wrote it, but I'm terribly afraid of it now. Like if someone said, "That's hip, Daddy-O!" I'd be going "Oh no! It'd be like a really bad '60s comic. I didn't worry about it when I wrote it, but now I'm terribly afraid. That loud guy on the message board haunts me in my dreams.
Aside from the language issues inherent in creating this story, what did you find you liked most about writing Jaime as a character and getting into the book? Did anything surprise you in that sense?
NITZ: Oh yeah. I've told this story before, but I didn't read Blue Beetle. I was of the belief – which is the absolutely wrong thing to do, and you should never write anything off before you check it out – but I was like, "Keith Giffen? Old Jewish guy from the Bronx is going to write a teenage kid from South Texas? My ass!" And I love Keith Giffen by the way, but I was like, "No way am I going to read that comic. It's going to be bad." So I didn't read it. And when I started seeing so much positive response to the book in general, I started going, "Ehhhh…I'll take a look at it." And I saw Rafael Albuquerque's art and was like, Damn! This dude's good." So I started checking it out a little but still hadn't read it from issue 1 on up, and when I got the job, they asked if I knew the book, and I said, "I gathered. It's the scarab. It's the guy." But they sent me the trades, and I read them, and holy sh-- is it good! This comic is really, really good. I called the editor up and said, "Rachel, this comic is really good!" And she was like, "I know. I edit the book." I said, "You don't understand. I read brand new comics every week, and this comic's better than all of them!" And she said, "Well, thanks. Why didn't you read it from the beginning?" And I was like, "Because I was offended by the idea of an old Jewish guy writing a Mexican character. Never mind that!"
| |  So then I got really excited. I was really excited to write Jaime because he had the elements of Ditko Spider-Man in this kid that doesn't know what he's doing and these powers that are affecting his family. It's very, very modern and really rang true with what's going on today in America. But also, they nailed a lot of the stuff in terms of living in El Paso versus living in Kansas City or versus living in Atlanta or whatever. It was very good. So as I read the book I got really excited to do it, and when I got into it I was very excited to be in Jaime's world for a while. One of the things that I did was...in the first draft of the script, it had no fighting. I thought Jaime would attack the problem totally differently because he does in every issue of the comic. He's not The Punisher, and he sees everything so differently that i had a whole issue that was Blue Beetle and Parasite talking about fighting and not really fighting. And they were like, "We kind of need them to punch each other a little bit." I was like, "I see that! Okay!" I didn't realize how boring it was until I reread the script. It was like, "Oh. Two guys dressed up in super clothes not punching each other is pretty boring." But then I worked it out to externalizing the conflict through action. Now it's the same conflict that they were having but with them punching each other while they say it.
So beyond this issue, what else have you got on the pipeline, Jai?
NITZ: El Diablo will be out I think in September. We just decided as far as the scheduling is concerned. That's something I've had done for a while now, but that's when it will actually ship. The art will be finished and everything, and it's all very cool. But at the same time, it's something where I'm trying to line up what happens between now and then.
Who's drawing that?
NITZ: Phil Hester is. Phil is one of my best friends and is my mentor, and it just worked out. He's one of the best guys I know, and it worked out that we get to work on this together because the editor Dan handed this over to, Nachie Castro, was Phil Hester and Ande Parks' associated editor on Green Arrow. So when I pitched the idea of what I wanted to do, we went through a list of artists, and the guy that was on my shortlist was Phil Hester because I love his work and we're friends. Nachie's looking over the list and saying, "A lot of these guys are good, but I really think Hester is born to draw this book. He's just the right guy for it." It worked out he had a hole in his schedule, and he's doing a lot of writing right now, which I know takes a lot of time from experience, but it's also one of those things where he can draw if not a monthly comic, he can do six to ten issues each year. It was something where I was very fortunate to get him, and I have nothing but high expectations for the book right now.
Then I've got a Marvel Comics Presents story coming out in August, and there's more stuff in the works from Marvel hopefully. I was just to New York in March meeting with the guys at Marvel and DC. I had very productive meetings. It's just that thing about, "Let's see how you do on the big stage. Let's see how El Diablo does because it's your thing. Geoff Johns is not sitting around going, 'Man, I got such a great idea for El Diablo!'"
Blue Beetle #26 is still on stands right now!
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