I had the chance to interview the current amazing Spider-Man writer, Zeb Wells!
Q1. As a writer, how do you maintain your skills in this craft and field? What is it that you usually do when you begin writing a series or book?
ZW: Well it’s like anything in a way. It is like sculpting in a way, you start with it really broad like a big lump of clay and then you start thinking of a big broad plan and then you keep getting more and more specific until you’re in front of the keyboard actually writing a script.
Q2. I’m sure one of the biggest challenges when it comes to writing a script, is starting. Do you start with an outline? Or write a series of notes? Or do you write a bunch of stuff and see what you leave in and take out?
ZW: I have a whiteboard with 20 squares on it, to represent the 20 pages, so that I can write and erase. But I am mapping out exactly what the comic is so then when I go to write the actual pages, I’ll get a piece of paper and draw (I write 3 pages at a time), and then I can get a little more specific and actually figure out how many panels are on a page and make it make sense in my head, and then I go to script after that.
Q3. Now that you’ve discussed your writing process, what is it like working with an editor and how do you preserve some of the stuff that you’ve written in the raw elements that end up in the final stages of the book?
ZW: You send it to an editor and it always helps when you can trust your editor, and me and Nick Lowe have worked together for a long time. So I will send him, after I’ve done that Whiteboard, I’ll send him a document of what that is and if he has any concerns, or ideas, or fun stuff, we go back and forth. I think comics, with the artist, with the editor, work best when they’re collaborative, so you never want to push away someone’s idea just because it’s not your idea. If it’s good, if you disagree, maybe you’ve come to a different compromise than what you had, it’s a back and forth but that’s part of the fun of doing this stuff.
Q4: Given that you’re the current writer on Amazing Spider-Man.I imagine the difficulties that come with writing a character with such a grand history of creative teams, writers and illustrators. For this particular series, I noticed there are a lot of J. Micheal Strazynski inklings and elements that seemed to have seeped through I to the series. When writing this book, what were some of the back catalogue that you revisited and expanded on that others might not have considered expanding upon in their runs?
ZW: I did look back at the stuff that affected me as a kid and when I was reading stuff as a young adult. That’s why Tombstone showed up because those Sal Buscema issues and Gerry Conway issues were super creepy to me as a kid. I think when you deal with bullies growing up, and Tombstone was a bully, I felt that you could relate to that in not a fun way, and going back to recontextualizing that character. I think we all just take everything we read growing up and somehow it gets thrown into a blender and comes out as something else. I didn’t want to try to ape anything unnecessarily.
Q5. You’ve also recontextualized The Vulture into a more vicious antagonist for Spider-Man compared to previous iterations of him. What made you want to try and tackle the Vulture as a particular villain for Spider-Man to face off?
ZW: I just love all the Sinister Six characters, and Vulture from all those Ditko issues was just a great old guy. I think he’s a mean old man, so I wanted to make him feel mean and scary.
Q6. Since you’ve been working with John Romita Jr on this book, will we see you guys work together on a couple of other arcs down the road?
ZW: Yeah, he’s the main artist on the book, but given that the book comes out twice a month, he needs to take breaks to catch up on other arcs. So we’re getting many issues out of him as humanly possible. I love working with him and it’s a dream come true. Everyday I get pages is incredible.
Q7. Given his work on Spider-Man and his previous work in the 90’s and early 2000’s JMS run, was he always your first choice when it came to illustrating this book?
ZW: Absolutely! A chance to work with him, I’d never turn that down.he’s the best!
Thank you for your time, Zeb!
Brian Isaacs - Executive Editor / Publisher