Comics Interview — Issue #077

Motter and Askwith discuss how DC's authorized four-issue Prisoner comic sequel came together, tracing the project from a chance lunch meeting between Motter and DC art director Richard Bruning through the creative and legal challenges of licensing the likenesses of Patrick McGoohan and Leo McKern. They explore their collaborative writing method, the deliberate decision to leave the series' core mysteries unanswered, and their conscious use of visual and verbal echoes from the TV show. The interview also covers Motter's upcoming design work for Piranha Press and Askwith's plans for a realistic spy series with artist Rick Taylor.

Van Horn, a California-born cartoonist living in British Columbia, recounts his career path from animation (co-owning Aesop Films) to creating the ten-issue Nervous Rex series for Blackthorne, and finally to writing and drawing Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories for Gladstone. He discusses his influences — Carl Barks, Chester Gould, George Herriman, and old radio comedy — and explains why he handles his own pencilling, inking, lettering, and coloring to maintain maximum creative control over the final printed product.

In a Paris interview, Mezieres traces the evolution of French and Belgian comics from their pre-war origins through the cultural watershed of 1968 and the transition from magazine serialization to the album market. He discusses his 30-year Valerian collaboration with writer Pierre Christin, the challenges of the declining European comics market, his brief forays into European film design, and the frustrations of seeing his work plagiarized. He expresses skepticism that Valerian would ever find a large American audience given its stylistic and tonal distance from American superhero comics.

Craig, TV's original Batgirl (1967–68), reflects on her years on the Batman series, recalling her surprise at the show's enduring global popularity, her love of performing her own stunts (ballet training and motorcycle riding), her favorite villain (Vincent Price), and the frustrations of working with a scene-stealing trained parrot. She discusses her post-*Batman* career in episodic TV and real estate, and shares her view that the 1989 film rightly returned the character to its darker roots.

Uslan recounts being driven since childhood by a goal of bringing a serious, dark-knight Batman to the screen, teaching the first accredited college comics course at Indiana University in 1971, and training at DC Comics alongside Paul Levitz and Bob Rozakis before moving into entertainment law at United Artists. He and Melnicker describe the decade-long path from optioning the Batman rights in 1979 through repeated studio rejections to Tim Burton's involvement and the film's production beginning in October 1988. Both discuss their extensive slate of future projects including Batman II, Monopoly: The Movie, Swamp Thing TV series, and Fantastic Voyage II. A follow-up phone interview covers the state of Batman II planning, casting questions, and the marketing phenomenon of the first film.

A libertarian-leaning essay arguing that money represents labor and that taxation is equivalent to forced unpaid work, framed as a provocation for readers to reconsider what they accept from government.

The Mindgame Corporation details its failed attempt to license an *Arkham Asylum*-branded T-shirt from DC/LCA, arguing that bureaucratic confusion and LCA's apparent ignorance of DC's own properties led to an unjust denial and forced retraction of their solicitation.