This interview is in four parts, because there was so much to talk about! You can navigate through each section at the bottom of each page.
RG: When you’re developing something and partnered with a toy company, how much collaboration happens?
CM: In the case of Hasbro, there was no collaboration whatsoever really. They gave me the sketchiest outline of what it was about and what dolls they had. I had to fight and fight and fight just to eventually get them to send me some Polaroids of the prototypes of the dolls, so that I could see what things looked like and get a sense of visually what we were working with. So I had tremendous creative freedom on that show in terms of coming up with what the animation series would cover, who the characters were, all that sort of thing. I mainly just had to worry about what the product names were and which instruments they wanted which doll to come with, that sort of thing. Or, you know, they had this Rockin’ Roadster™, which I had to get into the series. That sort of thing.
But it varies. I also did an adaptation of Bucky O’Hare, you know, Neal Adams created Bucky O’Hare. So I had a little more collaboration with him, which was nice.
RG: Do you prefer to collaborate, or do you prefer that creative freedom?
CM: It just depends!It just depends on who you’re working with. Neal was terrific!He was great to work with, and one of the other major series I developed was Conan. Obviously, I couldn’t collaborate with the creator, but Hasbro flew me to Rhode Island, and I had a lot of meetings seeing that toy line there, so there was a fair bit more collaboration on that one.
RG: Can you talk a bit more about working on G. I. Joe? You worked on that with Steve Gerber. He was the showrunner, right?
CM: Yes, Steve was one of them. That was the beginning of a wonderful friendship with Steve, one of the most delightful people in the world. He was the one who forced me to start writing on a computer. This was pretty early on, but he wanted everyone who wrote for the show to write on computers and be able to use a BBS (Bulletin Board System) and a modem to send the scripts in, which was brand-new and so far ahead of the curve, it was amazing.
RG: I don’t even know if our younger readers even know what a BBS was (laughs).
CM: Probably not!It was somewhere halfway between email and an internet forum, but it was private, almost like a private internet list in a way. And of course, when I talk about a modem, I’m talking about a separate piece of equipment that plugged into your computer and went at a blazing speed of like 300 baud and 1200 baud and 2400 baud, etc.
RG: And it would make that delightful dial-up noise.
CM: (laughs) Yeah, that famous dial-up noise!So, thanks to Steve, I was forced to go out, buy a computer, learn to use a computer, learn to write on a computer, learn how to send scripts electronically—he gave me a very good leg up on learning about computers. The very first computer I ever worked with was even before MS-DOS. It had an operating system called CPM, something that later became DOS. So I was definitely there at the forefront, which was thanks to Steve.
RG: Being involved with emerging technology seems to have been part of your entire professional career.
CM: It did kind of turn out that way. The fact that I was working with computers and using computers was extremely helpful to me that when I had the opportunity to start designing computer games in 1988, I already had a good familiarity with computers.
RG: During animation, while you’re writing Jem, this is when The Sisterhood of Steel was coming out?
CM: Yeah, that’s interesting that both of these major, major projects for me happened right around the mid-1980s. Jem was a lot of work because I was writing most of the episodes. I wrote something like 23 out of 65 episodes, plus did all of the development work, and then also did some story editing work towards the end of it. And at the same time, I was also writing Sisterhood of Steel, which was being illustrated at that time by Mike Vosburg.
What happened back then—I don’t know if you knew Mike Friedrich—Mike Friedrich was the first person to try to do what he called “above-ground comics,” instead of underground comics. He published Star*Reach, which was a line of completely independent comics outside of the major two and not worrying about the Comics Code, so they were very ahead of their time. When Mike stopped publishing—he was also one of the people, I believe, who was instrumental in setting up the Direct Sales market, rather than having comics appear only on newsstands, setting up comic book stores and Direct Sales, he was instrumental in that as I remember.
RG: And the advantage of Direct Sales is that they didn’t necessarily have to deal with the Code.
CM: Plus, you don’t have to deal with returns, which is quite a difficult thing to cope with. So Mike at one point became an agent and represented comics writers and artists as an agent. He became my comics agent in that time period and set up the deal with Epic Comics, that creator-owned line of comics that Marvel decided to do, a mature line of comics. Either he or Marvel—I don’t remember exactly who—connected me with Mike Vosburg. Mike’s a dear, wonderful person, a fantastic artist, and so we had a tremendous collaboration on The Sisterhood, which ran for eight issues, and I was on the verge of making a deal to continue as a graphic novel when there was a censorship flap. There were some distributors who objected to certain words in certain comics in the Epic line—words like “penis” and “masturbation,” which were too much for them to cope with. Mature-level comics were not very well understood at the time. It was a new thing. Consequently, there was a wave of censorship that went through the whole line of books, and I had to remove some words like “jugs” and “tits.” Oddly enough, other words like “shit” were left alone!
So I was pretty pissed off. And there was one panel we had to change, and it was nothing particularly terrible either. It was just—there was this one nasty guy character who was wearing a spiked codpiece. He was wearing it hidden because he was going to try to trick this woman of the Sisterhood into kneeing him in the groin, thereby destroying her knee. But they made us change that panel, the panel just showing it, that’s all, just showing that he had it.
RG: That’s a really great visual nonetheless, just you describing it.
CM: (laughs) So anyway, I had a newletter that was subscription-only for the diehard Sisterhood fans, people who subscribed to it, and I did this anti-censorship rant, because I have very little tolerance for censorship. The editor-in-chief of that line was Archie Goodwin. I didn’t want Archie to find out about that [rant] second-hand. I thought that would be underhanded, so I rather stupidly sent him a copy of the issue, and he killed our deal. So that was the end of The Sisterhood at Marvel.
