Vault Material: Supergirl #1 (New 52)

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I was hired on in 2009-2010 to take over the long-running Supergirl comic book at DC Comics. In 2011 when their “New 52” reset was conceived, they wanted me to stay on and adapt what I was working on to fit the “New 52” brief, which I did.

One day before the announcements of creative teams were to hit the internet, I got a call from Dan Didio at DC informing me I was not picked to be the writer on the title. I got pretty angry.

I was hired. I met with Dan and Jim Lee early in the process about it. I signed the paperwork. I filled out the work sheets you fill out when you deliver work. I had an editor and an assistant editor who were as taken by surprise as I was to find out I actually wasn’t the writer. We had all had conference calls hashing out story ideas. For months I was the writer, writing away. Jim Lee took me out to breakfast to talk about how I was the writer.

This is what some people call a “bake off,” where more than one writer is hired to submit work and then they choose one. Usually the writers have no idea they’re in a bake off. This is what they told me this was. But then in classic DC fashion they fucked up and put this out officially:

So this phone call, where I was getting upset. Where I was being gaslit. They offered me a job on one of the other books, their Frankenstein title. I was angry and turned that down. Remember this was two days prior to the announcements. Jeff Lemire was the writer of that title. If I had said yes, would they have bumped him off? Years later when I told Jeff this story, he was pretty disgusted.

When I didn’t renew my exclusive publishing arrangement with DC, this was one of the reasons. The others were new Vertigo contracts that changed the royalty structure to the extent that I wasn’t sure I would ever even receive royalties. And the fact I didn’t want Will Dennis as my editor any more.

“We’ll call you next week, Brian, and find something good for you to write,” Dan Didio said. That was mid-2011. Take a guess if he ever called me again.

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They paid me for this one script I now link to. I re-read it now and it’s not so great to me, having been written fifteen years ago. If you’ve read my Image Comics book Mara you will see how I recycled some of the ideas for that. But for all its faults, here it is:

This is the script, offered for free from my writing portfolio.

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