On December 5th at a comic book store newar you, the Mystery Inc. gang investigates the Hyena Man in "No Laughing Matter" written by me, with art by Randy Elliot (who also did the cover), colorist, Silvana Brys (who also colored the cover), lttered by Saida Temofonte, and edited by Courtney Jordan. This issue also reprints "The Boy Who Cried Werewolf" by myself, Robert Pope on pencils, Scott McRae on inks, Heroic Age coloring, Randy Gentile, lettering, and Jeanine Scheaffer editing. This story was originally published back in May, 2008 in Scooby-Doo #132.
Nice work, just read it. Though I do have a few questions:
ReplyDelete1) Why didn’t you include Velma losing her glasses and falling down a trap door, Danger Prone Daphne, etc.? Those cliches/gags are used so infrequently these days its frustrating.
2) Why is there only 1 Scooby comic once every other month? With the lack of new Scooby content we’d appreciate more Scooby comics more often like one a month.
ReplyDeleteYour questions in reverse order.
2) I couldn't tell you. That's a question for DC directly. Half of each comic is also a decades old reprint story for which the creative team does not receive additional pay. My guess is it's a cost cutting measure. They only have to pay for six new ten page stories per year this way.
1) Story length. For each story we have only 10 pages to work with. This includes the introduction of a monster, a cast of suspects, clues, and enough material for a cast of five regular characters to each have something to do. All of this in 50 panels, or less. That might sound like a lot, but it isn't. This means these stories are really stripped to the bone out of necessity. We don't really have room for Velma to crawl around finding her glasses, which can use up a full page if you want to have that gag lead somewhere. If you go back and look at issues of Scooby-Doo from the early 2000s when stories were longer, you'll find a lot more of those things.
In Scooby-Doo #121 (http://johnrozum.blogspot.com/2023/04/scooby-doo-where-are-you-121.html) I did have Fred lay one of his monster traps and also have danger prone Daphne in action. I also had Shaggy and Scooby playing hide and seek with one of the monsters --at the expense of a page setting up a supporting character as a red herring.
2) How can I ask DC directly about that??
ReplyDelete1) I mean you could still include the Velma gag quicker…your examples are clearly missing hers?
ReplyDelete2 - Check their website for contact information. I'm not sure what their policies for that are these days.
1 - I've written well over a hundred Scooby-Doo comic book stories and have used these kinds of gags numerous times. If there's a way to fit them into these 10 page stories I will, but I'm not going to get many of them into a single story for the reasons stated above. Besides, we've all seen those gags lots of times.
We may have seen those gags lots of times but there’s been a real absence of them these days…they’re what make the characters iconic to this day.
ReplyDeleteAny luck on finding how to contact DC about this? Checked their site and found nothing.