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 and not gone through its final round of edits. 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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