Expert Writing Advice from Comic Book Insider, David Avallone

EPISODE DESCRIPTION – David Avallone is a writer and filmmaker. He writes on #batwheels for Warner Brothers Animation, and in 2024 he has a few new comic book series in stores, including horror comedy #ELVIRA MEETS HP LOVECRAFT, and his original comic series DRAWING BLOOD, co-created with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles creator Kevin Eastman from Image. He hosts a couple of podcasts, including the award-winning THE WRITERS BLOCK. His comics work includes many iconic characters, like #Zorro, #Vampirella, #RedSonja, #theshadow, #DocSavage and John Carter/Dejah Thoris. His writing career began with #starwars stories for the West End role playing game, and he's gone back to prose only recently, with short fiction on classic characters Kolchak and Nick Carter. He is the son of prolific novelist Michael Avallone and women’s rights activist Fran Avallone. He lives in Hollywood, California with his delightful wife Augusta and three mischievous cats

Find David Here:
http://www.davidavallonefreelance.com

Drawing Blood - http://www.davidavallonefreelance.com/Drawing_Blood.html

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Transcript

[00:00:00] David Avallone: this is the best writing advice. You always ask yourself in every scene. 

[00:00:05] Zena Dell Lowe: You do not want to miss what industry veteran David Avalone has to say to writers Check it out. 

[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to the Storytellers Mission with Zena Del Lowe, a podcast for artists and storytellers about changing the world for the better through story. David Avalone is a writer and filmmaker. 

[00:00:24] Yes. He writes on Batwheels for Warner Brothers Animation, and he has a few new comic book series that are in stores this year, in fact, including the horror comedy Elvira Meets H.

[00:00:37] P. Lovecraft, which I saw when I met you at WonderCon. Yes. And then he also has his original series, Drawing blood, which is what I bought at when I met him at a table Just a couple of months ago, maybe not even 

[00:00:55] David Avallone: a month and a half. Yeah, it's that 

[00:00:58] Zena Dell Lowe: at at wonder con And so he co created that with Kevin Eastman who did Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles big time comic book writer and also David has a couple of podcasts including the award winning The Writer's Block which I have since checked out and I've enjoyed that as well so that's been fun iconic characters that you've created.

[00:01:28] One of the things that I love that you told me at the table is so you have drawing blood. 

[00:01:34] Which 

[00:01:34] Zena Dell Lowe: is sort of a play on the cover of the oh gosh, I'm forgetting. El 

[00:01:42] David Avallone: Mariachi. Yes. That covers a tribute to El Mariachi. Correct. 

[00:01:45] Zena Dell Lowe: Right. But with a cat there. And then, what's fun is you have, you're doing the meta narrative thing.

[00:01:52] Yeah. Like, it's huge because now, here's the comic book that one of your characters writes, and Or the main character writes in Drawing Blood. Isn't that fun? It's like a comic book within a comic book. 

[00:02:06] David Avallone: So great. Well, and yeah, the significance of that poster image from El Mariachi that blew our minds is that because we were swapping out turtles, the ninja turtles for the cats, the ragdolls when we went back and looked at the El Mariachi poster, none of us had remembered that it had a turtle on it, and we swapped out Robert Rodriguez's turtle for a for a cat.

[00:02:30] And I will say, Robert did assist on the art the director, Robert Rodriguez, is also a comic book artist, and he's a, or an artist, I should say. And a friend of Kevin Eastman and we asked him to do a variant cover for him and he, Kevin and Ben Bishop all sort of collaborated on that cover. And then we did a sepia version of the cover for the current re release.

[00:02:52] I should say the current release. Of issue one of Drawing Blood. That object you had was the, is the trade paperback from the Kickstarter. And now Image Comics has picked it up and they will be publishing issues one through twelve of Drawing Blood. That was issues one through four. The second Kickstarter for issues five through eight, which were like, literally, Two, three pages away from being done with.

[00:03:19] And then I have written issue nine and I'm in the middle of writing issue 10 and Ben Bishop is, has started drawing issue nine. And yeah, we're, we're, we're excited by it. And Image has been very they've been a really, they've been gracious hosts. They've been very on the ball with promotion and with getting the book out.

[00:03:39] And It's it's been a very smooth experience working with them. 

[00:03:43] Zena Dell Lowe: That's great. So for those of you listening at home, just keep in mind, comic book writing is very, very different from any other kind of writing in terms of how you get your projects done. I mean, you don't do a Kickstarter for a novel.

[00:03:57] You don't do a kick. Well, you could do a Kickstarter for a film. People 

[00:04:01] David Avallone: do Kickstarters for pretty much anything under the sun. Yes, but typically 

[00:04:06] Zena Dell Lowe: speaking, that's not what you're going to do. But yeah, but a novelist, you 

[00:04:10] David Avallone: know, the thing about a novel is it's a thing you're doing alone. 

[00:04:13] 99. 999 percent of the time.

[00:04:16] So it's got a different feeling with a, and it's more common for a novelist to just put the time and sweat equity into their own novel and not expect to get paid for it. Whereas if you're doing a comic book project. A drawn, forget writing, a drawn comic book page should take a professional comic book artist about a day.

[00:04:40] So if you ask someone to work on your comic book for free, You're a 20 page comic is taking a month out of their life in which you're not paying them. So, you know, there are a lot of ways that people do this. But what we did on Drawing Blood is we raised the money primarily so we could pay the artists and make sure that they had the time to and the space to to work on to work on Drawing Blood.

[00:05:07] So that's the, 

[00:05:09] Zena Dell Lowe: and, and as the writer of the comic book, you're still writing for free. 

[00:05:15] David Avallone: Oh, no, no. I, when I did a Kickstarter, I absolutely paid myself a better rate than I have been paid by any comic book company because we, we could raise the money. 

[00:05:26] Zena Dell Lowe: Okay. So that's great. So when you did the Kickstarter, then you made sure that you got to pay yourself.

[00:05:29] Oh yeah. 

[00:05:30] David Avallone: Yeah. No, we, that was the, that was the thing about the Kickstarter is that, you know, we're supposed to. It was supposed to help us create this thing that was a dream project of Kevin's and at San Diego Comic Con, I think 2015, might have been 2015, he told me about it and we started working on it to get, he asked me if I would write it based on his story and we started working on it together and it actually began life as A TV pilot and we shopped it around a little bit.

[00:06:03] We sort of thought, okay, nobody's getting this. Honestly, someone set us up with an agent that was the wrong agent for it. So they did a, they did not put us in the right rooms, but when it was over, we went, you know, Yeah. And a lot of screenwriters do this thing where it's like, Oh, my, I couldn't sell my pilot or my spec, I'll make it a comic book.

[00:06:22] And they don't really love comic books. I don't care about comic books. It's just kind of a thing that they see as a way of getting an IP established. But for me and Kevin, we're comic book guys, you know, he's one of the seminal comic book creators of the eighties and, you know, created something that is legendary.

[00:06:41] And I was just starting out at the time and it was very kind of him to take a chance on me. Yeah. But we hit it off really well. And he asked me to do this thing with him and we, I translated the first, the, the pilot is basically the first two and a half issues of drawing blood. And you may even notice if you read it all the way through, you'll probably notice that after the first two and a half issues, it gets a, the dialogue gets a little less wordy.

[00:07:13] There's a little less dial, like they're very different beasts, comic books and movies, and like there's a scene in the pilot where our hero is threatened by Lithuanian gangsters, and in the screen, in the screenplay, it's a very funny five page scene with a lot of very good jokes in it. You can't do that in a comic book.

[00:07:32] It's too many pages. It's too, and it would translate 11 pages, you know, eight pages of comic book with a lot of word balloons and basically just two guys faces yapping at each other. And in a movie or a television show, I always used to say when I was making movies more often, the greatest special effect in the world is an excellent actor reading great dialogue in closeup.

[00:07:57] Like you can look at that for two hours if it's good, you know, you really can. If the writing is that good, You can just stare at it. You really, there are some comic book writers who get away with things like that. But it's a visual medium. And as much as movies are a visual medium, when you don't have the actor there, you're counting on the artist to convey that emotion.

[00:08:18] And Ben, our artist on drawing blood is very good at conveying emotion. It's the reason we hired him actually. But It's just, it's the, the rules of pacing are different. 

[00:08:29] Zena Dell Lowe: Well, and you just, you just have to 

[00:08:32] David Avallone: take a five page dialogue scene and. 

[00:08:35] Zena Dell Lowe: Cut it. Cut it 

[00:08:35] David Avallone: the hell down, you know. 

[00:08:37] Zena Dell Lowe: Well, plus, so I, I mean, I have very little experience writing comic books, of course.

[00:08:42] All I've done is I've written two Strawberry Short Book comics, and then I've also I was hired by a company to help sort of integrate All of their different projects. They had a project that they were doing. One was a comic book. One was an animated series. One was video games, and they wanted to make sure they all meshed.

[00:09:02] And I ended up really getting involved in the comic book part because that ended up being their sort of their centerpiece, if you will, and it's where all of the mythology was really being established and it was kind of convoluted when I came on board, so I had to kind of clean it up and what I found is.

[00:09:20] As a screenwriter

[00:09:21] what I find is that with comic books you have to freeze the frame which is different than You know, so you don't have the actual so you can only freeze it on one emotion Which means you can't have a lot of different dialogue.

[00:09:38] It has to be right for that particular emotion or you need a new box and yeah panel and the problem is is that you just you only get a limited number of panels per page Five to seven is my understanding. 

[00:09:54] David Avallone: Yeah, that's I mean, yeah, there there's You I mean, anyone can do any number of panels on a page, obviously.

[00:10:01] And I've noticed that there's an industry term that has a very different feeling outside of the industry, which is cartoonist. I think when you say cartoonist to someone who's not in the comic book industry, they think of Charles Schultz or someone who does a daily strip in a newspaper, but it literally means someone who writes and draws.

[00:10:18] Kevin Eastman is a cartoonist. I'm a writer. I do not cartoon. I do not draw. But I've noticed that cartoonists will be more willing to do a page with 20 panels on it. Or, you know, 25 panels, 15 panels. They're much less. But as a writer, you, unless you've really discussed with the artists what they want to do, what they're capable of doing, you can call them up and say, okay, this karate fight scene we're about to do.

[00:10:46] I want it to be. 15 panels on the page, but they're going to be these tiny little panels, all with little actions broken out. And then you can do that, but in general, you don't want to send someone a script with a bunch of pages on it that they're like, ah, this is a lot of drawing. 

[00:11:03] Zena Dell Lowe: Yeah. Right. So you can, you know, it's a artist.

[00:11:06] David Avallone: Yeah. It's a, it's a collaboration and you have to, you have to like have an idea, but it's all about, you know, Especially in a 20 page monthly comic book. It's a real estate question. You have 20 pages, as you said, like if you average five panels a page, that's a hundred panels. And what that means is if you take a movie, you're taking 100 frames.

[00:11:29] Of the finished movie and going this frame tells this much of the story. This is a great film editor named Walter Merckx, one of the great film editors of all time. And Walter, when he's editing a movie, he takes. A frame grab of like the frame from any given shot. Now, if it's a shot where an actor is having five emotions over a course of 30 seconds, he takes a couple of shots to register each emotion, but he prints them out and puts them on a whiteboard in the order of the movie so that he can sort of go, this is the visual language of the movie.

[00:12:06] This is the sweep of it. This is one more in a wide shot. This is one more in a close up. And it sort of gives a sense of. What the story is going to look like on the screen. But basically he's creating a comic book out of the panels of the movie. He's of the shots of the movie and comic book art is very much.

[00:12:26] If you take a shot in a movie and you go like, I have to boil this down a one image. You know, the screenwriters who come to comic book writing often will write, you know, panel one. Matt Murdock walks into his apartment, throws down his keys, picks up his remote control, and watches television. 

[00:12:43] Right, can't do that.

[00:12:45] David Avallone: And you go, okay, so either that's five panels Or you ask yourself, well, if I see him already in the room, I don't need to know that he walked into there. I don't need to see him walking into the room. If I see the keys on the coffee table, I know he threw his keys on the coffee table. So that could be one panel.

[00:13:05] If the panel is Matt Murdock is sitting on the couch with his shoes off and a remote control in his hand, and there's a TV and there's keys in the foreground and in the background, the doors open. That gets in all of that story information without the action. He did this. He did that. So it's, it's, you know, and I'll say as a, as a technique thing when I started out, I tried as hard as I could to learn the language of comics because I had never really read them with an eye towards that when I grew up wanting to be a filmmaker.

[00:13:37] I watched films with an eye towards what is acting doing, what is camera doing, what is editing doing, what is music doing, what is directing doing. But I read comic books completely uncritically. I never looked at them, I never looked, how many panels is that, why is that action that way? So when I got my first offer, when someone offered me an opportunity to write my first comic book script, I went to my shelves and pulled down all of my graphic novels and went, 

[00:14:01] Zena Dell Lowe: You had to analyze it.

[00:14:02] David Avallone: Watchmen is a nine panel grid every page except when something big happens. Watchmen Fascinating. Nine panels every page. New, Darwin Cook's New Frontier is three cinemascope widescreen panels every page. Because he's making something look like a movie, very intentionally. And then again, when something big happens, It's a single panel page.

[00:14:22] It's a splash page. So that kind of taught me, okay, this is, this is the language. This is the language you need to speak. This is what you need to know. 

[00:14:32] Zena Dell Lowe: And there are liberties that you can take depending on what you're trying to do, but it's collaborative and you have to make sure that the artists and the everybody else are on the same page.

[00:14:42] David Avallone: And you know, when, especially when you're new at comic writing, you can, you want to listen to the artists. And when I started. I wrote in a very cinematic style in the sense that I never used caption boxes. I used what you heard, quote unquote, was sound effects and dialogue. And every once in a while, there would be a caption box that would be an onscreen title card.

[00:15:09] Doc Savage ring of fire opens with the title card that says. The South Pacific 1939, but it's not a description. It's not, it's just, you're looking at an Island. You're looking like your eyes are telling you everything I need to know. You need to know, except that it's 1939. And this is an Island in the South Pacific and an artist that I was working with at the time, very much Dave Acosta, who I still work with a lot.

[00:15:33] He does all of the Elvira covers now. He said to me once, let comics be comics, write caption boxes. He said if you, if you don't write caption boxes, sometimes you are forcing yourself into panels that you don't need. If you say, You could have a character walking out of an airport and hailing a cab and saying, That morning I flew to Newark.

[00:16:00] If you don't have the caption box, you might need the shot of the plane in the sky. You might need, you know what I mean, like, Caption boxes allow you to use the language of comics and jump over things that you just don't need to see. 

[00:16:13] Zena Dell Lowe: Visually, 

[00:16:14] David Avallone: that you can just eliminate. I will admit that even so, when I use caption boxes, I have a tendency to make them the first person narration of the main character.

[00:16:25] In Drawing Blood, the caption boxes are just Shane Bookman telling you his story. And when I did the Betty Page comic, it's literally supposed to be her diary from, you know, that she wrote when she was an old woman explaining what happened to her in the 1950s. Which gives you also the distance. Did you work with and the one time told the story a lot, but the one time that I tried to write a comic with omniscient narration, I went for a kind of poetic flowery voice in the narration because it was a Zorro story and.

[00:17:01] Like the narration was like in this sleepy town with the poetic name you know, la el Pueblo de la Nuestra Dama, La Reina, Los Angeles. They are straddling the moment between the Mexican revolution, between the American revolution and the Mexican revolution, and it was just kind of like this, it was omniscient, but it had a flavor to it and I'm writing the comic.

[00:17:25] And in the fourth issue, Zorro confronts the Tongva, it's the local native tribe in Los Angeles. The, the Tongva goddess of debt, Tarmalok. I do my research. That's the name of the Tongva god. That's the real name of the real. Tongva goddess of death. She lives in an under land an underworld called Shishangna and so he's in Shishangna confronting Tarmalok.

[00:17:52] And when I started writing her character, I went, that's who's been narrating this whole story. It's the goddess of death telling you about the time she met Zorro. 

[00:18:02] Zena Dell Lowe: And she's, 

[00:18:03] David Avallone: She's a goddess. So she's omniscient. She, she can, she can talk about things like that. You know, it's She can be in people's heads.

[00:18:10] She can see things that she wasn't around for. And I told the letterer and the colorist, so this lettering treatment we've been doing in the caption boxes, it was kind of a, you know, a burnt sand color with flowery script. And I said, that should be in the dialogue balloons for Tarmaloc so people realize.

[00:18:34] Zena Dell Lowe: Oh, they make, 

[00:18:35] David Avallone: they make the visual connection of like the This is your narrator. This is the person. And as Zorro is walking away from her, it goes back to being boxes again, instead of coming out of her mouth directly. So so yeah, even when I tried to have an omniscient narrator, it still ended up being a character in the piece, but that, that was not planned.

[00:18:55] And that's sort of one of my favorite things about comic books is that when you set out to make a movie. You know, you might be shooting the last scene first, 

[00:19:05] Zena Dell Lowe: and 

[00:19:05] David Avallone: so you're not changing the last scene because of what happened to you along the way while you were telling you finished writing the script before you started shooting and on a comic book.

[00:19:17] A lot, you know, I have an outline a lot of times, but shit happens and you go, you know, I thought we were going somewhere else, but now it's a little bit more like a television series where you may say that by episode 12, these things are going to happen. And this is going to wrap up our season, but then around episode six, you go, you know what, that's not the best ending to this anymore.

[00:19:40] And for example, drawing blood. What happens in issue 9 through 12 is completely foreign to what I thought the ending of the series was actually going to be. 

[00:19:54] It goes in a direction that I had not planned, partly because of current events, partly because of things that happened in my life and in Kevin's life where I went, you know, that's not the better ending to this story is this ending and the reason for this conflict is now this instead of that.

[00:20:11] And that can be exhilarating and it can also be 

[00:20:14] Zena Dell Lowe: terrifying. 

[00:20:16] David Avallone: It's it's I mean, I have the good fortune that when I write for Dynamite, when I write something like Elvira meets H. P. Lovecraft, they're pretty what's the word? They, they they have a lot of faith in me, very, which is very nice. So when they ask me to pitch something, a lot of times I'm pitching a four issue series, five issue series, as a paragraph.

[00:20:38] Saying, Elvira meets H. P. Lovecraft, and this happens, and then this happens, and I make that work for five issues. And then they say yes, and then I suddenly go, Oh, I have no idea what's happening in issues three, four or five. Like, I just, like, I know what the setup is. But I don't necessarily know where this is going, and with Elvira meets H.

[00:20:58] P. Lovecraft, I had a couple of like, vague, this is how this is gonna work out ideas. 

[00:21:05] Zena Dell Lowe: So that's, I mean, that's totally different than what I'm encouraging most of my novelists and also screenwriters, of course. I say when you break a story, you need to know where you're going. Oh, yeah. And what you're saying here is that you don't, if you're writing a comic book, you don't necessarily know.

[00:21:23] David Avallone: Yeah, it's, I mean, and I will say, you know, at the risk of sounding how it sounds, I'm 58 years old. And even though I've only been writing comics for 10 years, I've been writing for 56, you know, 55 years, whenever I started writing. So You do have to have a certain amount of faith in your ability. And the other thing I'll say about comic books, which I did not expect is before I wrote comic books, when I was a script writer and a failure at a script writing, I will absolutely.

[00:21:57] And by failure, I don't, the scripts were great. Nobody bought them and the movies didn't get made. And by the way, that's 

[00:22:03] Zena Dell Lowe: a tradi that's, that's very common. Oh yeah, 

[00:22:06] David Avallone: no of course. And, and by the way, I got my first comic book job because someone read one of my unproduced screenplays and went, I can't help you get, I can't help you get this made but you're a really good writer and I, I can recommend you to comic book editors.

[00:22:21] Which they did. But but when you're I was much more of a, I don't know what I should write. What should I put all of my time? Like a screenplay or a novel is something that you're going to spend a lot of time on, and it's hard to go like, okay, I'm going to spend the next month, four months, five months, year of my life on this thing.

[00:22:42] What if it's the wrong one? What if it's the wrong decision? And also when you don't have any deadlines, when you roll up to a roadblock, when you roll up to an obstacle. You know, let's use the metaphor of a river. If you're going on a hike, and you come to a river, and you're not in any rush, and you have nowhere to go, you can camp by the river while you think about, do I build a boat?

[00:23:04] Do I walk up the river until I find a bridge? Do I look for a, do I try walking out and see how deep it is? Sometimes you don't even do any of that. You sit on the shore and you make yourself snacks and you pet the cat and you watch some TV when the pagers are due at five o'clock you come to river and you go, we're swimming.

[00:23:25] And you swim across it. And is swimming always going to be the best choice? Absolutely fucking not. But right now I need a decision. And the decision is I'm swimming. And when you don't have that pressure, you get to stand there and go. Or maybe I could build a canoe. I don't know. Let me, or a bridge, those branches look like they can make, so you don't have the time.

[00:23:47] In the 

[00:23:47] Zena Dell Lowe: meantime, let me plant a garden and make sure I have food. You 

[00:23:50] David Avallone: don't. And, and when you not having time, I have become. So much better and faster at story. That I kind of feel like if you, if any writer comes to me and says, I'm at this point in the story, this happened, this happened, this happened, I don't know what needs to happen next.

[00:24:12] I will never be at a loss. I will always say, well, what you should do is your character does this now. Cause that's an 

[00:24:18] Zena Dell Lowe: experience, longevity. I mean, all that stuff. That's that's why you can do that. Cause you've had enough experience to be able to kind of be able to see it and figure it out. That's kind of me too.

[00:24:30] I'll never get really stuck in a story. Cause I always have a solution. 

[00:24:33] David Avallone: Yeah. And, and again, it doesn't even mean you're always right. And sometimes you go back and fix them, but like in the last, The, one of the ironies, career ironies of writing comic books is that it fed back into the best film and TV work I've ever had, and I got a job on development of the new Red Sonja movie.

[00:24:56] I don't know if anything of mine survived that process, but I got that gig because they wanted, because Red Sonja is a comic book character more than she's anything else. And they wanted a comic book guy in the room to have ideas to tell them what comic books look like and sound like and all that.

[00:25:12] And 

[00:25:13] Zena Dell Lowe: Isn't that funny? They let that company You couldn't get something made as a filmmaker and then you go to comics, now they want you back as a comic book. 

[00:25:20] David Avallone: Well, and even funnier, that company They brought me in to be the comic book guy, the genre guy, the swords and sandals and guns and you know, whatever guy.

[00:25:29] And that same company kept reaching out to me for development. And I remember the third project they sent me was just this adaptation of this. Women's memoir. And I said, this doesn't have car chases or sword fights in it. Why, why are you asking me? And they're like, you're just, you're really good and really fast with story and we like your notes.

[00:25:53] So they, especially during some slow times, business wise, they have kept me alive doing development for them. And I don't mind it. It's, you know, it's, it's funny. Every time I sit down, I go like I am not dishonest enough. If I, if I didn't see anything worth commenting on, if I didn't see a major flaw, I'm not going to invent one to feel like I did my job, but I will admit I sit down and go, they're paying you a fair amount of money for this.

[00:26:24] I hope I can be helpful. I hope I can read this and find the broken thing and tell them what the fix of the broken thing is. And so far. Knock wood, I will admit I haven't yet to read a project and go, this is perfect. I have no notes. There's always like, no, here's the thing that you could tweak that would change it all and make it, make it work better.

[00:26:45] And but yeah, I don't, I didn't have that before I had that kind of deadline pressure, it really turns you into a machine for story. Cause you're like, I got to solve these problems every week. I don't, I don't have 

[00:26:59] Zena Dell Lowe: turned in. 

[00:27:00] David Avallone: I don't. And, and it's why, you know, the best writing advice is always right.

[00:27:05] Yep. 

[00:27:05] David Avallone: Because you, the faster your work, it makes you faster. It makes your mind work faster. And the more often you've solved the same problems over and over again, the more you've thought about them and the more solutions you have. At your fingertips where you go, well, there are a variety of ways you solve a problem like this, or a variety of ways a story like this goes.

[00:27:27] I mean, it's why I think good writers of particularly good writers of fantasy and horror and science fiction, it's hard to trick us with a twist in a movie. Because most of the times the surprise twist in a movie is the only thing that would make it an interesting story. You know what I mean? Like it's not.

[00:27:47] Most stories when you, when you enter them and there's a twist coming and you know there's a twist. It's worse when I know there's one coming 'cause then I'm looking for it. But when you know, there's a big twist, you just look at the plot and go, well, the only thing that would make this unique is if we tweaked this thing and made it that thing instead.

[00:28:08] And once you're aware that the trick is being played, you go, oh, well that's a trick. Mm-Hmm. , I made my brother-in-Law very mad at me because we saw, we were sitting in the trailer. For Unbreakable, the second M. Night Shyamalan, Shyamalan movie, Shyamalan, and the, it was only the scene after the train crash, well, where the doctor tells him you're the only survivor and there's not a scratch on you.

[00:28:30] And without, I just turned to my brother in law and said, this would be a really interesting opening scene in a Superman movie. And he looked at me and said, fuck you. And I said, what? What's what? He said, I'm sure you're right. I'm sure this is a movie in which Bruce Willis is playing a guy who doesn't know he's a superhero.

[00:28:48] But I'm like, but that's the only interesting answer to that scene. Like, especially since in the director's last movie, he was a ghost. 

[00:28:55] Zena Dell Lowe: So 

[00:28:56] David Avallone: he's, so that scratches off the Bruce Willis is a ghost. He's not going to do that twice in a row. It's not a sequel to the sixth sense. So guy who doesn't get. There are like, again, you think of like, he's an alien, he's a God, he's Superman.

[00:29:14] He's what I mean. And Superman's all three of those things, depending on how you look at him. So there are only another, there are, there are a set number of solutions to this problem. I sat through Jacob's ladder. About, I think, 15 minutes in, I went, if this is an occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge one more time, I don't know, occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a very legendary short story by Ambrose Bierce about a man who's about to be, confederate spy is about to be executed during the Civil War, and he's being hung over a bridge.

[00:29:48] And the rope snaps and he falls into the water and it's his whole thing where he escapes and he gets away and he gets home and he's about to embrace his wife and the net and the rope snaps and he's dead. Like it's, it was all a fantasy. 

[00:30:00] It's 

[00:30:00] David Avallone: his fantasy right before the rope snaps. And again, 15, 20 minutes into Jacob's letter is like, if he's a soldier dying on a battlefield somewhere, I'm going to be really, really fucking mad at this.

[00:30:12] And that's, and, and, and, and, and, and, All of that stuff about Jacob's Ladder and the military experiments, all red herrings, it's just a guy's dying fantasy. That's why it's this whole thing. And I mean it's a beautiful looking movie, but it's just like, that is literally the oldest trope in the book. 

[00:30:32] Zena Dell Lowe: And 

[00:30:33] David Avallone: I knew, when I watched the pilot for Lost, I told, I said to the people I was sitting with the first night watching that first trail, that first episode, I said, they do not, the people who make the show do not know what the island is.

[00:30:48] They do not know. They have taken every trope. I was like, you could take this episode and it's a setup for they're all dead, which it turned out to be, 

[00:30:57] Zena Dell Lowe: but they didn't know they were going to do that. They never paid off anything. Setups are easy. Payoffs are hard. Yeah. 

[00:31:03] David Avallone: And, and I said, You've got the possibility that this is a forbidden planet thing where there's a machine on the island that makes your dreams come true or like the Star Trek episode of shore leave, or they're in an alien zoo on it.

[00:31:14] Like there are, there is evidence here for about 10 sci fi tropes and they have scattered them out so that we'll all and, and I can respect that if you do it intentionally in Twin Peaks. The dead girl's name is Laura, right? Right. In Twin Peaks. Well, in the most famous film noir, Laura, Laura is not really dead.

[00:31:39] And then Laura's cousin played by the same actress comes to visit over the course of the series. Her name is Madeline. Again, this is. Deep nerd film, Easter egg stuff. But Madeline is the name of the character in Vertigo, which is also a story about a woman who appears to be dead Madeline, but is secretly actually.

[00:32:06] The woman our hero thought she was is an actress who was playing Madeline. So the names Laura and Madeline, 100 percent David Lynch and his writers put them in there so that guys like me would go, 

[00:32:19] Zena Dell Lowe: Maybe 

[00:32:19] David Avallone: Laura's really alive, but Laura wasn't really alive. Those were smart red herrings because those names In and of themselves don't demand that that's the resolution, the mystery, 

[00:32:32] Zena Dell Lowe: but by 

[00:32:33] David Avallone: putting them there, they're, they make people have seen the movie.

[00:32:36] Laura go, well, Laura's about a movie woman is not really dead. So, and here's Madeline who looks exactly the same as the dead girl. So maybe Madeline is really Laura, just like Madeline Elster was really, I can't remember the other name of the name of the other character in vertigo. It's like they're playing with expectations and playing with.

[00:32:56] people who know tropes and know in a story about a beautiful dead girl that everybody loves, the surprise ending is always that she's not really dead. Like that's been done since Laura. So all that to say it's, there are ways to be smart with the red herrings and still be telling what I'll call an honest story.

[00:33:14] Story and then there's one 

[00:33:16] do that 

[00:33:16] David Avallone: loss did not play fair with the audience at all. And you know I still enjoyed it. I still found it entertaining. 

[00:33:22] Zena Dell Lowe: I will never watch it again It made me mad same thing with game of thrones. I was so pissed by the end I'm, like you guys had the most amazing series and then you just ruined it and I hated it so bad well, and also 

[00:33:36] David Avallone: It's people conning themselves into thinking, you know, they're adapting george rr martin They run out of Material and then they think they're still gonna be as good as George R.

[00:33:51] R. Martin and look at all the stuff that Peter Jackson wrote for the three Hobbit movies. It's garbage. It's unwanted. I actually have never seen Game of Thrones because. It came out after the first Hobbit, the first of the three Hobbit movies. And I literally just, it was like, I don't want to see anything like this ever again.

[00:34:15] I think I don't, I am done with epic fantasy for a bit. I think I'm okay. I think I'm going to live. 

[00:34:22] Zena Dell Lowe: Yeah. Yeah. Well, let, let me ask you a question here. Kind of reeling us back in here. I want to know, what do you think sets comic book storytelling apart from the other forms of writing? And how would you know if you have a story?

[00:34:38] Cause I agree with you. I always tell writers, Hey, your story. It can't just be in any medium if you have a story that's a play it's for a play It doesn't mean it's going to make a good screenplay or a good tv series or a good comic book or a good novel So you have to conceive of an idea let it be in the medium that it's going to be Yeah So what says storytelling or a comic book writing apart from other storytelling and how would you know if you have a good story?

[00:35:06] Story for a comic book. 

[00:35:09] David Avallone: I will, I'll say that I, I'm more of a believer that you could take any premise. I don't know about any story, but you could take any premise for a story and make a comic book, a movie, but it greatly changes. What story you're telling and how you're telling it. So I mean, there's a there's a trope a smart one One of my first screenwriter Teachers screenwriting teachers said to me like a novel Isn't a great thing to make into a movie because there's too much There's too much and what made it good is gonna get lost a novella A long short story, even a regular short story can make a good feature film out of a short story, a novel, a 10 issue, a 10 episode streaming series to be out of a novel.

[00:36:00] But the, and also I will, I will make a distinction. 

[00:36:06] Zena Dell Lowe: It depends on the type of novel. 

[00:36:08] David Avallone: It depends. It also depends on the type of comic book, a monthly 20 to 24 page comic book. That's what most of them are these days. Has different demands. Then an original graphic novel, that's going to be 160 pages. That 160 page graphic novel doesn't have to break into discrete 20 page chapters that have a beginning, middle, and end like series television.

[00:36:36] In the serialized age that we're in used to be standalone. Everything was standalone and whatever happened to captain Kirk last week, he had completely forgotten happened to him by next week and it wasn't affecting his. 

[00:36:48] Zena Dell Lowe: There was no arc. There was no now, 

[00:36:50] David Avallone: even like strange new worlds tries to have the adventure of the week thing while still have.

[00:36:57] Captain Pike's still a little unsettled from what happened last week, actually. It's okay that things have a resonance, but all that to say, and by the way, I think 

[00:37:07] Zena Dell Lowe: we got that from Joss Whedon. I think he really changed serial television. No, it's 

[00:37:13] David Avallone: actually Michael Mann. It goes back before Michael Mann created Miami vice.

[00:37:21] And that did a thing that wasn't terribly serialized, but that did the first thing that made for modern day television, which is he insisted on feature film production values. 

[00:37:31] Well, now 

[00:37:32] David Avallone: everybody had to spend more money. His second show after that was called Crime Story. 1986, 1987, actually based on the same true crime story as the movie Casino, believe it or not.

[00:37:47] But about dedicated police officer chasing this one mafiosi for 52 episodes of television. And it was a first in that it was completely serialized. The first episode in the series is a one off where they go after a serial killer, and I think they did that just for the network. This is going to make people think, no, there's going to be a different criminal every week, but no, actually it's after the serial killer, it's Ray Luca every week for 52 weeks.

[00:38:21] And it's this, and it was based somewhat on the true story, but every episode was about our hero, Mike Torello and our villain, villain, Ray Luca. Fighting each other and that fight you know, and they had personal lives and they had friends and they had other cases that we were involved in. And Ray was doing crimes that Mike didn't know anything about and all that.

[00:38:45] But it was this Russian novel for television of like, so no one had serialized 26 episodes, 24 episodes of a TV series before but. Like comic books. And this is the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel and between a TV series and a movie every 48 minute episodes still needs a beginning, middle, and an end.

[00:39:09] And there still needs to be a resolution of some kind. And comic books is the same thing. You need a resolution of what was up this month, but you also need the tease of what's. Next. And in comic books, there's this phenomenon. This is the biggest difference. Biggest thing to learn writing comic books for me was the page turn.

[00:39:31] I always lecture about the page turn. When you're holding a comic book in your hands, you got your odd number page on the left and you get your even number page on the right. And the thing is, when you're looking at it, you can see what's on the even number page. Excuse me, even numbered, odd numbered. You can see what's on the odd numbered page out of the corner of your eye.

[00:39:53] Zena Dell Lowe: Okay. You can 

[00:39:54] David Avallone: see it. So nothing on that page can be a surprise. Nothing on that page can be a visual thing that the audience is going to be surprised by. Because they're going to go, oh no, he turns into a monster, right? I can see it right there. Even though I'm over here, over there, I see it happening. And now I'm, now I'm just going to, I'm going to not read all this.

[00:40:15] I'm going to go over here where the monster is. So, and that, that should pull you through the book. 

[00:40:23] Zena Dell Lowe: So it should be the first panel of the next page where he turns into 

[00:40:27] David Avallone: a monster. Yeah, so, lower, Right hand corner is set up, upper left hand corner is payoff. Everything that's visually surprising and you know, do you, can you pull that off every time?

[00:40:40] No. Sometimes you have to put something important in the middle of an odd number page 'cause you couldn't get around it. But a well-paced comic book, every page turn and it. It can be as small a thing as ask a question, answer a question. It can be a bigger thing as panel of Betty page going, what the hell is that?

[00:41:04] And then you turn the page and it's a giant scorpion. Like that's one of my actual things, but that keeps the reader reading. And also if you surprise them. On the page turn, for example, in drawing blood the main, it, it exists in three planes and reality. Basic reality is drawn by Ben Bishop and looks, you know, vaguely photorealistic.

[00:41:32] Okay. 

[00:41:32] David Avallone: And then there are flashbacks. Our hero here is in the first issue in this panel that here, he's thinking about his best friend who he's just heard, or his mentor who he's just heard is commit, committed suicide. When you turn the page. Suddenly, it's Kevin Eastman art, the way it looked in the Ninja Turtles in the 80s.

[00:41:54] And here he is, and here he is meeting the, the mentor as a new man. And I, as a young man, and I wanted the shock of going from Ben's art to Kevin's. You can't, if you see Kevin's out of the corner of your eye, it's, it's not, what's this? This is amazing. This is a completely different look. And then later in the book, one of his cartoons comes to life.

[00:42:20] And starts beating the hell out of him. 

[00:42:22] Zena Dell Lowe: And 

[00:42:24] David Avallone: again, the first punch 

[00:42:25] Zena Dell Lowe: again, too, 

[00:42:26] David Avallone: you know, that's another art style. Troy little did this art. But again, it's, it's about keeping the reader reading and keeping them moving through the book. The other thing I'll say as a general principle, which is sounds. Like, it's physics and mind blowing, is that when you're watching a movie, the, or a TV show, the watcher, the reader, is not in control of time.

[00:42:56] You're in control of time, and you are controlling time from them. A reader can take as much time or as little time reading a panel in a comic book as they like. And you're doing everything in your capability to guide that. So, the amount of words and the amount of detail and the size of the panel can make them spend a little longer looking at it.

[00:43:23] A small panel with less detail and one word in it is gonna be a shorter period of time. So it's the difference between, in a movie, you're gonna have a 30 second take in a comic book, a 30 second take is a half page panel, as opposed to trying to cram all that into the smaller panel. So the, the mind blowing physics part of it is I was talking to Howard Chaykin about it once, legendary, another legend, and I said to him, what, and he was trying, sort of trying to explain this to me and some others, and I said, so we In a comic book, space equals time.

[00:44:04] Interesting 

[00:44:04] Zena Dell Lowe: how much space you give it on the page, depends, is, determines how much time the reader is going to spend looking at it. 

[00:44:15] David Avallone: It is an element of time. And when you want them to stop and look at a thing and really take it in. I did a comic where Elvira went to hell, was in Dante's Inferno, essentially.

[00:44:27] It was called Elvira's Inferno. And every issue. The first page was a regular five panel page, and then you turn it, and pages two and three were always a two page spread of a landscape of hell. And the reason was, hell is vast, and I felt the need every issue to tell the audience, You know, this is a comedy.

[00:44:57] We're going to be in closeups and we're going to see actions and all this kind of thing, but take a minute and take it all in, man. Here's appreciate the 

[00:45:04] Zena Dell Lowe: vastness of here is a 

[00:45:06] David Avallone: Vista of fire and demons and suffering souls, whatever that Vista might be in the fourth issue. She goes to see Lucifer and it's the plane on the ninth circle of hell, which is a plane according to Dante is a plane of ice.

[00:45:20] And a giant Lucifer sitting on a throne chewing on Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, if I remember correctly. 

[00:45:27] But you know, so it's a different landscape. But like all four of those issues, I wanted that to be a big POW, take it all in, cinemascope moment. I also did a Betty Page series where she was essentially in, on another planet in every episode, in every issue.

[00:45:45] And once again, like, I Did big splash pages to go, take it all in, take in the new surroundings, learn that we're in a new place, believe it. And now we can get smaller and tell other parts of our story. But first I need you to, I need you to believe we're on another planet. I need you to see all of it. So that's how you use.

[00:46:09] That's the biggest difference in writing comic books is when you're writing a screenplay, you're giving. You're giving an artist, a single artist generally, maybe three if you have a color, an ink or colorist letter or whatever, but you're telling them how to make a thing, what it should look like, what you have in mind for its construction.

[00:46:31] A screenplay that's, you know, even on a small size movie, minimum a hundred people are reading it and interpreting it and having to understand it. The first step of a comic book, really, only the artist and the editor have to know what you're doing, and have to believe in it, and have to be able to see it.

[00:46:51] And so that's a big difference, is what you're communicating into who, and of course in a novel, you're trying to communicate to everybody. You're not using a shorthand that you can use with an artist. 

[00:47:04] Zena Dell Lowe: But you're really trying to communicate directly to one reader at a time. You know, like, make sure they get the story, which is different than what I, you're exactly right.

[00:47:14] What I tell people when they're writing a screenplay, Is you have to not only think about the the actors reading it and are they going to get it, but also like the first readers, are they going to get it? Are, you know, there's so many levels of the investors. Are they going to get it? Like there's so many people you have to be writing that screenplay for, and that's not even the end product.

[00:47:36] David Avallone: No, no. And it's, and, and things are going to change and that's, you know, that's the nature of the business and that's fine and you have to be able to sort of roll with that, but yeah, it's, it's a, it's just a, it's a more targeted audience and then all of, you know, you and your team and your friends and your collaborators together create something that, you know, hopefully has the, has the impact you want and has the, has the impact you want.

[00:48:05] What's the word I'm looking for? Has the, the, 

[00:48:08] the ability to engage readers on an emotional level. And 

[00:48:11] David Avallone: that your intent is there. You know, what you, what you wanted to get across. You 

[00:48:16] Zena Dell Lowe: know. So that leads me to a question though. So, One of the things that we've talked about with you is that you've created a bunch of iconic characters, really.

[00:48:25] I mean Not created, 

[00:48:26] David Avallone: I've written a bunch of iconic characters. Okay, you've written 

[00:48:28] Zena Dell Lowe: a bunch of them, you've maybe not created them. Okay, good, good differentiation. But, can you talk to me about your approach for character development? In either your comic book series or your, your movies that you've written, like, how do you, because I really believe that it's all about character.

[00:48:46] If we don't like your character, if we don't emotionally resonate with your character, we won't care how great the story is. How do you approach character? Well, yeah. And 

[00:48:55] David Avallone: in, and in comics, as opposed to in films material, you don't have, you can't rely on the actor's charisma to put it over sometimes I've read scripts and I was like, you need like, this, this had better be George Clooney or I'm not going to put up with this from this guy.

[00:49:08] Like, I'm not going to watch this. I tend to, I, you know, I know there are writers out there who sit down and write biographies for everyone and can tell you what their favorite character has for lunch and where they went to high school, but the truth of the matter is. You don't have all that information on every person that you meet in your life and you still kind of can understand who they are.

[00:49:28] So I, I think, and not to be judgy at all, I think people do that because it's easier than writing sitting down and writing character biographies for everyone. Sure. That'll get, that'll, I tend to have real world templates in mind for people and it's not even Every character in a script of mine is a one off, one for one, this is that person.

[00:49:55] But you can apply the, what would that person I know do in this situation? And what, you know, if you know what they're about and what they want, I mean, it's a very common acting note is just, what does your character want? And what does everybody else want? And why are those, what are, are there cross purposes and why are there cross purposes?

[00:50:17] I think the worst writing in the world is when people create. Conflict. Because they feel like a scene needs conflict, but it's out of character for everybody in the scene. 

[00:50:26] It feels like no, actually, 

[00:50:29] David Avallone: actually, those two guys would agree on that. You're just literally making the one guy say you're out of line McCluskey because you feel like the Police captain needs to yell at the police detective in every scene.

[00:50:42] Instead of him going, that's a great idea. Go ahead and go follow that lead down. That's really smart. Thanks McCluskey. 

[00:50:48] Zena Dell Lowe: I learned something about that. Just a little freebie or a little tidbit here since we're talking about it. One of my first short films I had had These flashback scenes with these sisters where they got along and they were Happy and all these things and somebody with a lot more experience than me came along and said xena You need conflict in every scene.

[00:51:08] This doesn't work and I was like, oh, oh, okay So then I made it so that there was conflict between the sisters And then we got on set and I'm like, no, it doesn't work. I needed the no conflict. What in the world? And so then what I realized is, and this was huge, you know, huge aha moment learning curve.

[00:51:25] This was 20 years ago. But what I realized is the conflict for that scene didn't happen between the characters. It happened because of what was going on out here in the real world. So there's still conflict. There's still pressure, but they can get along beautifully. 

[00:51:41] David Avallone: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly, that's the, it's, it's that, it's like when two characters fall in love in a TV series and you know the writer is just like every other episode, gonna come up with a dumb fight for them to have, that isn't really characteristic of those two people, they would, they would not have that particular fight, but they're having it because the writer needs them to have a fight, and it is the smarter take.

[00:52:06] To go like, no, if you have two people who are in love, you don't have to introduce conflict into their relationship. The world has plenty of sources of conflict for people that are happy. And not every couple is miserable. I'm sorry. That's, you know, your experience, TV writer living in Brentwood with a wife, who's out of his league.

[00:52:26] But you know, some of us are, are, are happily 

[00:52:30] Zena Dell Lowe: married. 

[00:52:31] David Avallone: Are happily married and are willing to write about good relationships. And I think it's the laziest kind of comedy. George Meyer, one of the great writers on the Simpsons. It's an amazing interview with him in the New Yorker, like 20 years ago, where he talked about watching sitcoms with his wife.

[00:52:50] And they were watching either Friends or Frasier, and she turned to him and said, If any of my friends spoke to me the way these people speak to each other, I would run crying from the room and never speak to them again. Like they're sniping at each other like comedy writers in a comedy room. They're not treating each other with the kindness that friends treat one another with.

[00:53:09] And I think it is, there is you know, Ted Lasso is a perfect example of like, you can write a sitcom about decent people behaving decently, and you can even have the most unpleasant characters become decent people, and it's still funny. You know what I mean? Like, you don't have to order, offer everyone a redemption arc because everyone doesn't get one.

[00:53:31] But, like, Ted Lasso is a great repudiation of the, like, comedy has to be about unpleasant people who don't like each other. Yeah. And who behave badly. It's like, no, life is interesting and to me it just shows, you know, you, it's decency is harder to write. And you have to understand decency at a certain level.

[00:53:52] And a lot of, some people don't understand decency. But it, to me, it's far more interesting than just the constant, like bickering is not conflict. And I, and I don't think, you know, in a perfect example Elvira meets HP Lovecraft three series ago, I did Elvira meets Vincent Price. They're very different series because Vincent Price is a lovely guy, and there's no conflict between them.

[00:54:22] The conflict is between them and the outside world. And when Vince, the ghost of Vincent Price comes to Elvira and says, I need your help on this mission, I actually do a joke about bad writing and she says, Oh, my God. Absolutely. That sounds like so much fun. And he says, thank God. I hate refusal of the call is just the most boring step in the writer's journey thing.

[00:54:45] And I'm glad that we're skipping over it. And she says, I blame George Lucas for making everybody read Joseph Campbell and thinking every story had to be exactly that archetype story. And yeah, I made a joke about TV writing in Elvira in Monsterland, and we come up to, in issue four, we come up to the big confrontation, giant, you know, Elvira is alone against an army of monsters in an evil dimension and all this, and when you pick up issue five and you open it, it's her as a little girl building models of monsters, and she says, you know, when I was a little girl, I used to build, and Elvira rips the page apart in the comic and says, We're not doing this.

[00:55:27] We're not doing the like hold off on the big, on resolving the big confrontation. And I say it to my wife every time we're watching a streaming series. And a big confrontation is the climate, the cliffhanger of issue nine of episode nine, I say, if episode 10 starts with a flashback to the villain's childhood, just so that we don't have to resolve that conflict yet, I'm going to be so fucking mad.

[00:55:51] And it happens almost every time. And so my character, she shows up in my office and says, we're not doing that thing. And I was like, no, but it's really popular. Everybody, everybody loves going, putting the, Flashback up front to hold off the big action scene and she's like, nope, we're not doing in my comic.

[00:56:10] And then 3 pages later, there's a legitimate flashback and she's like, God damn it. He got the flashback in anyway. It's fun. You know, the virus has been breaking the 4th wall since. She invented the character. So it's a very easy it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a very easy character to write meta stuff with, but yeah, I see the, you know, I see the tropes that everyone is into these days and, you know, and the thing about a trope, 

[00:56:36] Zena Dell Lowe: the problem with tropes is, I mean, there are some things that are just true in story.

[00:56:42] The key is to make it true to your character and to not try to use a trope. to rely on it like a, I don't know, some sort of formulaic solution to the story. You can have a flashback if the flashback is really necessary for the story. But I wouldn't have a flashback as a way to avoid resolving the conflict.

[00:57:04] It's all about, it's all about just justifying, justifying. Yeah. And it's about what's, 

[00:57:10] David Avallone: what is the next thing you want to tell the audience if you were telling them the story? I mean, it's. There are stories to poke a sacred cow for a second. How interesting would Pulp Fiction be if you told it in order?

[00:57:26] Zena Dell Lowe: Right. I mean, actually the scene he opened on, I've actually analyzed that with my students before, because the scene he opened on, for one, it was unconventional. The two people in the diner having this weird conversation. So the characters are super intriguing. It's also introducing us. to this dangerous element, but this witty banter and then how, you know, how it all ends up connecting in some way.

[00:57:55] It was just a brilliant scene to open that movie with. 

[00:57:58] David Avallone: Yeah. Yeah, but, but again, it's that thing of like, if you told the story in a linear fashion, 

[00:58:05] Zena Dell Lowe: then 

[00:58:05] David Avallone: you're ending with Butch killing John Travolta and kind of who cares, 

[00:58:10] Zena Dell Lowe: you 

[00:58:10] David Avallone: know what I mean? You know what I mean? Like, it's not quite, you know, Zed's dead baby.

[00:58:14] So it's an interesting, it's sort of way, the way he shuffled the cards kind of hides the weak scenes a little bit more from the audience and puts them where they're going to be. Put up with them the best and all that. It's an interesting, you know, and I'm not against people reshuffling narrative cards.

[00:58:33] I think that's a fine, but when I do that, I try to have a story bound reason to do it. Not just I, the author have chosen to show you the story out of. Right. You don't want to 

[00:58:47] Zena Dell Lowe: do anything like that. Arbitrarily because if I hide these things 

[00:58:51] David Avallone: from you, it will make this seem mysterious when, if you saw it in order, it wouldn't be mysterious at all.

[00:58:56] And I see that happen 

[00:58:57] Zena Dell Lowe: a lot with screenwriters. They're trying to use camera angles and stuff like this in the screenplay. And it's like, this is just you trying to be cool. It doesn't play into the narrative. If it plays into the narrative and you want to have a slow mo thing. Great. But if it doesn't, don't do it just to try to be cool.

[00:59:15] David Avallone: Yeah, no, and a lot, a lot of directors will do that also, just the, you know, dress up something and, you know, the thing is there, I can think of an example, one great example, the Limey, I don't know if you've ever seen it, Steven Soderbergh movie, it has an extremely conventional plot, and if you told it conventionally, it would be great because Karen stamp is all the actors in it are great.

[00:59:39] It's a compelling story. It's a father who's a criminal fresh out of prison criminal whose daughter has committed suicide in Los Angeles, and he flies to Los Angeles, this British criminal, and he goes around trying to find out if his daughter really committed suicide or if something happened to her, why she would have committed suicide, all that.

[00:59:59] And it ends up indicting him as a father a little bit. And it's a, it's a great story in and of itself, but Soderbergh shot it. Every scene is shot from multiple angles. And even like there's a scene where he goes on a date with Leslie Ann Warren and the same conversation, I think is shot in four different locations and he cuts back and forth between the, and it's all locations they want in a date.

[01:00:32] They're at dinner, they're sitting by the shore in Venice Beach, they're walking down the boardwalk, and they're in her apartment. But he jumbles them all, as if to create a conversation that never happened by connecting, or a conversation that took place over five hours, which it really is. And by editing the movie the way he edits it, It's not just about a father looking for his daughter.

[01:00:58] It's about memory. It's about the functions of memory. And even it has a framing device of him on the plane, which you really struggle to go, is he remembering his trip to Los Angeles as he's about to leave? Why back to London, or is he imagining what might happen on his trip to Los Angeles as the plane is arriving in Los Angeles, like these questions are all eventually resolved to a degree, but by editing it and shooting it in a really interesting way.

[01:01:33] He took a movie that's not all that much different from Get Carter or a million other noir crime movies and also made it about the functions of memory. And, and. And the thing is, the raw material is there in the script, because the villain, Peter Fonda, is a guy who's like, his glory days were in the 60s, and he talks about how when people talk about the 60s, they're really talking about three months in 1967, that was really the part everybody wishes they had been around for.

[01:02:03] He's like, the rest of it, right? Wasn't that great? Like, but you know, it wasn't different from the present day. So even within the movie, there's a lot of talk and the father is also remembering the little girl's childhood. And he's remembering being, he did something which has been done more often since, but he found a current stamp movie from the late sixties and used the same character name in his movie and use them as flashbacks.

[01:02:33] as young Terrence Stamp to show you what he was like as a young man before he became a criminal, before his life went off the rails. Like, so he's also showing you like the father that this little girl loved and worshipped before he became this broken down old violent hood. So it's anyway, all that to say you can take a trope y story and if you're very talented you can hit it with a hammer until it breaks into something really interesting.

[01:03:02] You know, but you don't 

[01:03:04] do it just to try to, you don't do it just to add to the story. You have to have 

[01:03:09] David Avallone: like those edits that I'm talking about. If it wasn't about memory, there's no point. It's just, you're not doing it for, you're not doing it for any reason. You're just doing something because it looks cool and it's an interesting way of using film, but it's got something behind it.

[01:03:27] And that gets to also, you know, one of the more important, I use the term slightly and precisely, but. You know, there's plot and there's story. Plot is, this happens, and this happens, and this happens. And for me, story is, why do we care? Why am I, why are you telling me this? And in some stories, particularly, like, the story itself doesn't turn out to be some giant, profound thing.

[01:03:54] But at least there's a reason why we're telling it. And in comics in particular, I will say a lot of times in issue one, I don't know what the story is. I don't know. I don't know what we're all going to learn when we get to the end of this road. I don't know what we, what the, and what's fun is, you know, yeah, discovering that there's this, you know, very pretentious thing writers say where the character takes over, but sometimes.

[01:04:22] The character, you put a character in a situation and they say the thing that that character would say in that situation and you go, Oh, there it is. There's our story. In Elvira meets H. P. Lovecraft, he, she's helping him find the last copy of the Necronomicon, which is the magic book that can open up the gates of this Prison dimension and let all these evil gods back in to destroy the world.

[01:04:46] And spoiler alert, that's not actually what HP Lovecraft is after. He wants the book for his own purposes, but he cons her into thinking she's saving the world. And she's aware that he's a bad person. So she didn't trust him entirely, but there's a scene where she has ended up with the book and they find themselves, I won't explain the convoluted plot mechanics.

[01:05:07] She, one of the evil gods. And H. P. Lovecraft are in the court of an even greater power that's going to decide who gets the Necronomicon, who gets to keep it. And she says to the messenger of the gods, to to the, the aide de camp to Nodin's Lord of the Abyss, she says, Look, I just want this thing because these two chuckleheads are going to use it to destroy the earth, and I, I, I, I don't want you to destroy the earth.

[01:05:40] And the messenger of the gods says, that seems like a you problem. That doesn't seem like anything I need to care about. And she says, well, then what good are the gods if you can't protect the little guy from evil? Like, what do you even exist for if you're gonna let these two run rampant, you know, she's like, me and seven billion of my closest friends would like the earth not to be destroyed.

[01:06:07] And in that moment, the next panel, all three of them are laughing at her. 

[01:06:11] Zena Dell Lowe: She's 

[01:06:11] David Avallone: like, you all suck. But when I got to that, like, what are what good are gods? I was like, Oh yeah, that's, that's what this comic has been about. What good are gods if they can't help the little guy? That's, that's what we're talking about in this con.

[01:06:28] I mean, there are other thematic things going on, which is like, can someone like Lovecraft be redeemed? Is there something in there worth saving? But you know, it's that's. You have to give the audience something to chew on of why did we spend all these time with these people? And it's the same thing.

[01:06:47] I, when I used to write low budget action movies, I used to say, heroes have to do something heroic. 

[01:06:53] Zena Dell Lowe: It 

[01:06:53] David Avallone: can't just be that they're cops and the other people are robbers or they're pretty and the other people aren't pretty. That's not enough. They have to do, they have to make a sacrifice for the greater good.

[01:07:04] They have to take a. Risk you and I wouldn't take my favorite moment in Raiders Lost Ark, which is a movie with a thousand great moments in it I don't think this is true for most people is him swimming to the submarine 

[01:07:16] because 

[01:07:16] David Avallone: it's crazy 

[01:07:18] It's crazy 

[01:07:19] David Avallone: because he's faced with well, I guess I could stay on this Steamer we've escaped like I didn't get captured by the Nazis Marion did and they have the the Ark I could you know Take the boat back to Morocco and get together a search party, but he's like no I'm standing here right now You I got no, I got no resources.

[01:07:38] I got no options. I got nothing on me that sinks a U boat. Now I guess I'm just going to swim over there and hang out on the conning tower and find out where this thing is going. It's a, it's, it's the most heroic thing he does in the movie. And I also like as a writing thing, it's confused. Would he do it if they took the arc, but didn't take Marion?

[01:07:58] Or would they do it if they took Marion, but didn't take the arc? I think he's swimming the Marion. I don't think he's swimming to save the arc. As much as it's in his mind, like he got her into this problem and now she's going to be, you know, tortured, killed, whatever. So he's got to save her. But to me, that's the moment because you, and as a writer, you always, especially if you're writing a hero, it's always put him in an impossible or her or them in an impossible situation and figure out how they get out of it.

[01:08:31] Going back to Odysseus. How, how are we going to trick Polyphemus? How are we going to trick Circe? How are we going to get away from, like, you know, it's all, what's, and that's, you know, Captain Kirk is sort of the modern Odysseus in that sense of like, you know, science fiction stories tend to be mysteries.

[01:08:52] My wife said to me once that she prefers science fiction to fantasy because science fiction is always built around a mystery. And fantasy is more often than not built around soap opera and melodrama. 

[01:09:05] Zena Dell Lowe: You know, 

[01:09:06] David Avallone: who's at war with who, what brother hates what other brother, you know, Elizabethan royalty plays are all like the foundations of that, of, of.

[01:09:17] Epic fantasy in some ways. It's all Henry the fifth. It's all Richard the third, but science fiction is always what's on this planet and why is it doing that? And who are these people? And why, what, how did they get control of the enterprise? And, you know, like that's. You're always, you're always solving for a mystery in science fiction.

[01:09:37] But anyway, that's a digression, but the, yeah, the, the, the element of finding out what your theme at, what theme you were going for And sometimes the elements sneak up on you and you're like, Oh yeah, I didn't intend that at all, but that's going to be perfect now. 

[01:09:57] Zena Dell Lowe: And by the way, that's exactly why I'm always telling my audience, my students, whatever, that you shouldn't come to a story with a theme in mind or else it's actually propaganda.

[01:10:08] You discover the theme as you go, you figure out, but you do need to know what your character's after, what their objective is. You need to know a little bit about your character. Who they are deep down and then you have to try to reveal that as you go, but they have an objective that they're pursuing.

[01:10:25] Then you figure out what the other layer of the story is. 

[01:10:29] David Avallone: No, like, you know, in drawing blood, Shane Bookman is transparently based on Kevin Eastman, but he's about 20 percent me. Like 80 percent of what he says and does are, are Kevin things. And another 20 percent or a little bit more me, but I'm very aware of what that percentage is every time I write him.

[01:10:51] And I know what he'll say or do in any given situation, because I know what this composite person made up of me and Kevin will do, and I know, and that's the, you know, and a lot of times that thing of when the, you know, the cliche about when the character takes over a lot of that is simply because. You know, the character so well, you know, they wouldn't do that thing that you wrote in the script that they would do.

[01:11:18] Right. 

[01:11:19] David Avallone: And they, you know, I wrote a, the first time that happened to me in comic books, I wrote a, a shadow comic, the 1930s pulp Avenger, the, the shadow. And it was a man, it was a weird project. It was a mashup with the twilight zone. And in the fourth issue he's been captured by American Nazis. And he has a, he basically has a confrontation with his.

[01:11:44] The guard that's assigned to him is a young kid, is a Hitler, American Hitler youth. And he engages with them to find out why, why are you with these people? Why do you think these people are going to help you? And he basically, he doesn't turn the kid completely, but the kid kind of doesn't stop him from escaping.

[01:12:05] And then when he's escaping and they've got a machine gun trained on the shadows car, the kid that he talked to shoots the guy with the machine gun and the shadow gets away. Now, how I wrote it is the other American Nazis then all turn and kill the kid. As the shadow is escaping. And I really wanted two pages for the client, for the, for the epilogue where the shadow is in a bar with his girlfriend talking about what he's just been through.

[01:12:35] I really wanted two pages for it, but I got to the bottom of the page where the kid gets killed and the shadows watching for the car and literally the shadow said, whispered in my ear, stop the car. And he got out and he picked up a machine gun and he killed everybody because that's what the shadow would do.

[01:12:52] The shadow would not leave a murder unavenged. Even outnumbered, even outgunned, stop the car. I'm getting out. And he gets out, picks up a Thompson submachine gun and Just kills him. Shoots himself, shoots himself a bunch of Nazis. And it's funny, the big reason that I want to do that, it was the whole, the story of that comic was the shadow learning mercy.

[01:13:17] But there are limits to mercy. And that was, that was the shadow hitting his limit on mercy. But but yeah, it, it's It comes from, and you know, I'm, I'm frequently complimented, which is very nice, on how well I write Elvira, and how well I capture her voice. And I always say, it's such a finely created, well defined character, that it is really easy to write, actually.

[01:13:48] It's not hard to know the reason it resonates with the audience. They, for they don't realize they're also complimenting themselves for recognizing what Elvira would sound like. 

[01:14:00] Zena Dell Lowe: So it's 

[01:14:00] David Avallone: easy to write her because the entire audience that loves her also has internalized. What she would say and do in any situation.

[01:14:09] So it's easy for me to not write something that's uncharacteristic for her because she has laid out such a perfect character that it's just easy. You know, when I used to write Betty Page, I'm not a 27 year old beauty queen from Nashville. I'm about as Betty Page is about as removed from my experience.

[01:14:31] As any character I've ever written, even Elvira, like I have some of a background in, you know, stand up and sketch comedy. So like Elvira is essentially a comic, like that's not, you know, a standup comic doing a character. That's not that that's not that she's a, she's also a creature of show business.

[01:14:50] That's not that divorced from my experience. But Betty Page, the photo model, like, I'm not her at all. But I watched a documentary called Betty Page Reveals All that the audio of it is about 80 percent of her giving an interview about her life. And I had just said yes to the job and I watched this documentary and listened and when, that's when I decided it should be a diary in the first person because I was like, I can write that voice.

[01:15:18] I, it's, I get, now I know who she is and how she spoke and what made her very different from me. But once you know those things, once you know that Betty Paige doesn't swear, she doesn't smoke, she doesn't drink, but she's a nude fetish model. 

[01:15:31] Right. Once 

[01:15:32] David Avallone: you know, once you know that she's decent in every way that matters but also doesn't have any shame in the best way.

[01:15:41] Not ashamed of having her, you know, like, you can't write Betty Paige being like, oh my god, I can't believe there are naked pictures of me. It's not her. It's not, not her. So when you have it, when you have a character that's just so well defined, it's just really easy to step in and go, Oh no, I know what, I know what she would say.

[01:16:02] I know, I, I, I know how her mind works, you know, 

[01:16:06] Zena Dell Lowe: And 

[01:16:06] David Avallone: that's the job. 

[01:16:07] Zena Dell Lowe: I've taken a lot of your time. So let's just end by, let me ask you one more question. Sure. No, people will love to know.

[01:16:14] And that is. What advice would you give writers, either people who want to write comic books or just aspiring writers in general, because you can speak to novelists, you can speak to screenwriters and you can speak to 

[01:16:27] David Avallone: writers. What should I know that I said it earlier that obviously, right. I write in a journal every day.

[01:16:35] I can actually tell, I can monitor my own depression by noting how long I go without writing in my journal. 

[01:16:44] Zena Dell Lowe: Wow. So I 

[01:16:45] David Avallone: try to write in it every day, even when I'm under the weather, even when I don't feel like it, because the writing actually makes me feel better. So that's sort of the, And I do it every night before bedtime.

[01:16:56] You can do it every day in the day. You can do it at whatever you want to do it. It's fine. But right. Is the number one thing and read is the number two thing or another number one thing parallel. You do, when you're starting out, everybody starts out by imitating things. Everybody starts out. First screenplay I ever wrote was a James Bond script when I was 14 years old.

[01:17:20] Zena Dell Lowe: That was the 

[01:17:20] David Avallone: first screenplay I ever wrote. And of course it was derivative of everything I loved in James Bond movies. And I wrote, first movie, one of the first movies I made was a Star Wars movie. Now, can I understand 40 year olds spending millions of dollars? To make Star Trek fan films. No, I, I can't, if I had a million dollars, I would be making my own films with my own properties.

[01:17:44] I there's, there's a thing about that that I've, I will never quite understand, but you start out by imitating and there's nothing wrong with that and imitate what you like, and then you find your own voice and you find your own way through. And the thing about the 21st century. Is you have more ways of expressing yourself than anyone than we've ever had.

[01:18:08] I used to be, I mean, it's funny. I'm, I am the perfect person for social media because I'm not a standup comic, but I, once a day, I think of a funny line and I used to be, I used to have to call someone up and say, I thought of this funny thing today. Now I go on Twitter, I write my one funny thing, I get back to my life.

[01:18:28] You know, like that's where the, the gag writing that doesn't fit anywhere else in my life, that goes to Twitter, goes to Blue Sky. I write longer essays on other websites. But story, writing non, writing fiction is a muscle that absolutely has to be exercised. And it has to be exercised as much as humanly possible.

[01:18:50] And the more you do it, you absolutely, the better you get at it. Now, there are people who tell you, well, what about all of the writers who their first novel was the best thing they ever wrote? Their first novel isn't the first thing they ever wrote. It's the first thing you saw. I think it was Elvis Costello that said about the sophomore slump in albums.

[01:19:10] He's like, But you wrote your, it took you 18 years to write your first album. And then they want the second album of in seven months. 

[01:19:17] Right. And 

[01:19:17] David Avallone: guess what? The one you poured, cause you never thought you were going to get a second album. So in that first album, you pour in every thought you've ever had, every big idea, every feeling, and then they go, okay, you have seven months to like have another lifetime worth of experiences.

[01:19:34] Zena Dell Lowe: And every song that you've ever written, you probably have 50 songs that you chose and you like cut 'em down until you just had the best ones. Yeah. And now they want seven new ones, or excuse me, nine or 10 new ones on the new one. And 

[01:19:46] David Avallone: the other, the other thing that I will always say is, yeah, read, watch movies, read comic books, all of that, but also have a life, have life experiences, do things.

[01:19:58] I am very glad. That as a 58 year old writer that when I was a teenager, I worked in a furniture factory I, as an adult, I mean, it's been been a long time since I've had a non film industry job, but even in the film industry, I've been a grip I have hung from scaffolding with a tool belt on I've seen film sets from every possible direction.

[01:20:24] You can see them. I produced and directed, but I've also been a PA I've. Been an art department guy like it's because if you don't do that and if you don't go out and meet people and talk to people you end up writing movies about movies and you end up writing books about books and you end up writing comic books about comic books you've read and ultimately that's an airless thing and you know if you look at someone like the Coen brothers as an example, Their work is suffused in other movies and literature and all that, but there's a unique voice that's not that that's when they make a movie that's like a Frank Capra, like, you know, the Hudsucker proxy very much touches upon the 1930s social comedies of Frank Capra.

[01:21:19] But it is not at all a Frank Capra movie, and it's got life experience in it and life to it that exists outside of just being the pastiche, just being the thing about the thing. And I think you can, you can kind of tell when a young filmmaker, young writer hasn't just hasn't had the life experience.

[01:21:43] To, you know, people say, write what you know, have 

[01:21:46] Zena Dell Lowe: something unique. 

[01:21:47] David Avallone: Yeah. And people say, write what you know, and they think that means only write, you know, autobiographical. No, no, no. If you want to make a, if you want to write a story about a construction worker and you've never been a construction worker, go talk to a construction worker.

[01:22:01] Right. Go read a book about construction work. Go hang around. Like it doesn't mean you can never do that. It means. Think about who that person is and, and that is the job. I, I made a low budget, very low budget, absurdly low budget movie once. And I was given the title. I was given a bad script, which I was told I was free to rewrite, which I did completely.

[01:22:29] But I was told by the executive producer do whatever you want, but it has to have, you know, a lot of martial arts in it. And I'd also like some gunplay and maybe a car chase, but the main character has to be a kickboxer and his girlfriend has to be a strip club and some part of it has to be set in a strip club.

[01:22:46] And my initial reaction being the smart, pretentious 30 year old I was at the time was Kickboxer and a stripper, really? Like, is that what I got to do? And it took me about a day before I went, a stripper is a human being and a kickboxer is a human being. And that means you can tell a story about them.

[01:23:05] Right. 

[01:23:06] David Avallone: And if, if your reaction to that is, Oh, I don't want to write a stripper and I don't want to write a kickboxer. Well then what you're thinking about writing is the characters you've seen in movies. Not the actual people. So learn what the actual people are like, learn what their lives are like. What story is there to tell about those people and then tell that story instead of, well, you know, there's this story we do all the time about hit men and there's this story we do all the time about prostitutes and there's this story about, so you want to like, even given, you know, the, the tropes are tools.

[01:23:47] And then you ask yourself. The question everyone, this is the best writing advice. You always ask yourself in every scene. How has this been done before? And what can I do to make it what has not been done before? What can I do to make this different? My favorite story ever, I think, on a director commentary.

[01:24:11] One of my favorite Bond movies is not very well loved. It's called Diamonds Are Forever. And there's a scene in it where James Bond, Sean Connery, is going to find a billionaire who's been kidnapped. And when he gets there in the movie, there are two 95 pound young women who are gymnasts and they kind of beat the shit out of him.

[01:24:34] They kind of beat the shit out of six foot three Sean Connery until he gets an advantage by his weight and overcomes them. And they tell him where to find the kidnapped billionaire. But on the director's commentary, the old British director Guy Hamilton is like, so in the script, you know, Connery's walking up the steps and he's like, so in the script.

[01:24:53] There's some big fellow guarding Willard White, and he and Sean have a fisticuffs, and you know, haven't we seen it, we've seen it, and we've seen it, and we've seen it. I was watching the Summer Olympics with my wife. And the gymnasts were on and I said, Oh my God, these women are terrified. The things they can do and the cartwheels and the jumps and the kicks and all of that.

[01:25:17] And he's like, wouldn't it be funny to see a big fellow like Sean and these two tiny little diminutive girls who like weigh nothing. Just beat the crap out of him. It's a funny scene and it's a little crazy and it's a little terrifying, but that's a director going, I'm handed a, the trope iest trope scene.

[01:25:38] James Bond fights with another big man. There's an earlier scene in that movie where he does fight with another big man and they're both on their way. He's interrupted. He's, he took the place of the other guy. Without that guy knowing and now that guy is going to blow his cover and they're heading up to the apartment of the woman who he doesn't want his cover blown in front of and he gets on an elevator with a guy who doesn't know he's James Bond.

[01:26:06] Okay. 

[01:26:07] David Avallone: And they have a fight in the elevator, but it's this tiny glass ornate European elevator. And the whole joke is they can't. Get far enough away from each other to land a real punch. So it turns into this comedy of errors thing, and it's very violent, but it's also funny and interesting. Basically Connery's behind the guy and about to clock him in the back of the head to knock him out.

[01:26:35] And when he pulls his arm back, his elbow goes through the glass pane behind him. And that alerts the guy in front of them and then they're wrestling. And it's the same thing on the same commentary. Guy Hamilton was like, when we were in pre production, we went to see Ken Adam at his apartment and me and the producers who are big men were stuffed in this two foot by two foot elevator.

[01:26:56] And I thought, wouldn't it be funny if he and Peter Frank's fight, try to fight each other in a room this small 

[01:27:04] and it's 

[01:27:04] David Avallone: hard, but again, it's that question of like, In our script, we have this dumb, boring scene. 

[01:27:11] Zena Dell Lowe: How do we make it interesting 

[01:27:12] David Avallone: of James Bond fights another big guy. What can you do to make the circumstance absurd 

[01:27:19] Zena Dell Lowe: or 

[01:27:19] David Avallone: interesting or different?

[01:27:20] Zena Dell Lowe: And going back to what you said, the three biggest things that people can do is write, read, and live. Yeah. That guy would never have had that inspiration had he not been living his life. And then in the living out of his life be like, oh, this would be funny. Yeah. 

[01:27:38] David Avallone: Yeah. And when you're, you know, when you're, when you have a writer's mind, when you have the mind of someone who makes this stuff for a living, when you get in a small elevator like that, you're like, Wow.

[01:27:47] This has been impossible place to shoot a fight scene. That's crazy. You know, you see a gymnast and you're like, that girl could beat me up. That's funny, you know? And so you file that stuff away and then you go, Oh yeah, I've never, I've never seen an 18 year old gymnast in a bikini beat up a six foot four muscular Scotsman.

[01:28:10] That's funny. Like that's a thing I've never seen before. So as a, as a writer, when you approach, you know, it's all crossroads and you reach the next crossroads and it's like, well, X has to fight Y X has to get past this roadblock X has to accomplish this task. What's the thing we've never seen before?

[01:28:30] What's the. And then making it 

[01:28:33] Zena Dell Lowe: believable, because that's the other thing, like I remember in Arrow, if you ever saw the TV series Arrow, which of course is based on a comic book too, but in Arrow, he was actually the guy that played it, Stephen, I forget his last name, Amel, I guess, Stephen Amel. 

[01:28:50] David Avallone: Amel or something, yeah.

[01:28:51] Zena Dell Lowe: Yeah, he was truly athletic. Like he had actually, he was an accomplished athlete. And so he could do all of these feats that were pretty impressive. But then as the series evolved, they took the girl that was his girlfriend and she started becoming like a superhero type. And she'd get in these fights where she'd be beating up these guys and she had arms that were twigs.

[01:29:15] And there's no way she could have accomplished those physical feats. And, but then there was another character who was her sister and that gal was very athletic. She clearly, I mean, she was stacked. I mean, she could do the same exercise, so it was believable for Sarah, but it wasn't believable for the other characters.

[01:29:36] You 

[01:29:36] David Avallone: know, and as an example, like in Elvira, it's a comic book and I have her going up against a bunch of dangerous things. I, she doesn't throw a lot of punches in the comic because she's not, she's a, she's a, that's not her, she's a, she's a show girl, you know, that's not her, there's a scene in the one that's on newsstands right now at least Elvira Meets Lovecraft number three, where They're going up, they're in this haunted mansion, going up to see this old dude, and he's, you know, Lovecraft is telling her, beware of, you know, the things we may encounter, and she says, what am I, what exactly should I do when I encounter these things, cause really, I got one move, and that's kick him in the nuts and run away screaming she's like, do the, and when she sees the first monster, it has a smooth And she's like, well, okay.

[01:30:25] The kick in the Menards part is out. That, that ain't going to help me here. So I'm just going to stick to the running and screaming. And it's the same thing when I did Betty Page, Betty was actually very athletic girl, but in the first adventure with her, before she gets recruited to be. Essentially a spy in the first adventure with her.

[01:30:44] I didn't have her do a lot of, I didn't have her throw punches. I didn't have her, you know, do a lot of gunplay because she's not, I mean, as a Tennessee girl, she actually was pretty comfortable around firearms, but I didn't want to give her skills that she wouldn't have. And then literally in issue five.

[01:31:03] Or six, I think she goes to bathe the guy who recruits her to be a spy sends her basic training. 

[01:31:08] Yeah, 

[01:31:09] David Avallone: and there's five pages of her running in the forest and firing handguns and doing judo and like, okay Now she can do judo, but in the very next adventure She has a fight with a soviet assassin who's another woman and they're having this fight And in the book, in the narration, she's saying, no, she's better than me.

[01:31:29] Like I can't, there is no fair way that I can do martial arts with this train. Like I took eight classes in basic training and I'm proficient, but this woman's going to wipe the floor with me. If I continue, like, if we just do this fair and luckily she's saved by the police at that point. But it's that thing of like, I didn't want her suddenly.

[01:31:51] Zena Dell Lowe: To be able to beat a Soviet assassin who's been trained like this her whole life. Yeah, 

[01:31:56] David Avallone: she, you know, and I think even the woman says, like, I've been doing this since, like, literally they had me doing this shit when I was six. You know, like, you're, you're, you're not gonna beat me up. And, you know, knowing, giving people those kinds of, like, 

[01:32:10] Zena Dell Lowe: Which is great then for the character, because now she's gotta figure out, How do I beat this person when I can't rely on that?

[01:32:18] What, what superpower do I have? What skill do I have that I can outsmart them out with them? Outplay them? 

[01:32:27] David Avallone: Yeah. And it's 

[01:32:28] Zena Dell Lowe: playing field. 

[01:32:29] David Avallone: And that becomes the whole key to the character is, you know, what, how can, how can they deal with it? And you, like I said, you just, you can't, they can't suddenly have skills.

[01:32:40] They never had before, just because it's, It helps you in the scene. 

[01:32:44] Zena Dell Lowe: Yeah. Unless you're writing Matrix and I know Kung Fu. 

[01:32:48] David Avallone: Okay. Yeah. And that's the, that's the cheat. That's how you get around it. It's like he's downloaded all of Kung Fu in his brain. Yeah. 

[01:32:54] Zena Dell Lowe: We loved it. We loved it. Okay. So how can people find you or follow you and what and what would you like to promote?

[01:33:02] David Avallone: Well, my, I have a website, and luckily, I have a very Google able name, I, there, you Google David Avalone, you will not find anyone else for about 11 or 12 pages, which is helpful. 

[01:33:13] Zena Dell Lowe: That's nice. 

[01:33:13] David Avallone: My website is DavidAvaloneFreelance. com, and right now, Drawing Blood is in number one, and Elvira Meets Vincent Price, Vincent Price Meets H.

[01:33:23] P. Lovecraft, number three, are in stores. If your comic book store is sold out of Drawing Blood number one, you can buy it from my website. While supplies last. No foreign sales. And want people to 

[01:33:35] Zena Dell Lowe: go to their local comic book store to buy it. Yes. 

[01:33:38] David Avallone: Yes. And it, like I said, the good news we got from image is that it has been selling out and they have actually gone to a second printing on the first issue, which is great for an indie comic book with no IP, no TV show, no anything.

[01:33:51] It's a pretty great circumstance for us. That's great. So so yeah, and I'm on all of the social now, not on threads yet. I should probably at some point do that, but I feel like Zuckerberg having me for 2 websites is more than enough. 

[01:34:04] Zena Dell Lowe: That's how I, 

[01:34:05] David Avallone: But I'm on blue sky, which is a great community over there and Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and the LinkedIn and always have it.

[01:34:12] And my next personal appearance on May 4th. I'll be in San Marcos, which is, sounds like a small Central American country, but it's actually a town just north of San Diego. At a store called Nowhere, with a K, for a free comic book day. And I'll be signing and selling some stuff there. And then I'll be at San Diego Comic Con, and I don't know what I'll be at between now and then.

[01:34:37] Zena Dell Lowe: Okay. That's wonderful. Thank you so much, David. This has been great, super informative. 

[01:34:45] David Avallone: It was my pleasure, Zena. 

[01:34:46] Zena Dell Lowe: I'm looking forward to having you back. And again, thanks for coming on today. I appreciate it. 

[01:34:52] David Avallone: My pleasure.

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