I loathe Comic Book Men, but this hasn't been bad so far. I don't dislike Kevin Smith, though.

I listened to his second, 2-hour interview with Neal Adams. There were a lot of interesting tidbits and anecdotes, but nothing I can recall off the top of my head about Batman really, other than Neal's opinions on some of the movies. Neal seems a little full of himself, and Kevin is happy to provide whatever positive reinforcement is necessary for that to continue, but overall it's interesting stuff. This was a follow-up to a 3-hour interview that I haven't listened to yet, though, and I expect that the original interview probably went over Neal's Batman work.

I'm only an hour into the 3-hour Denny O'Neil interview and they've just now gotten to the part where Denny was hired by DC, so we haven't gotten to his Green Arrow or Batman work yet (though he did touch on a couple things - more below). He has a lot of interesting stories about his early experiences in the industry and as a fan and such.

He did say that he had some regrets about putting out The Killing Joke. Not because of the content exactly, but because he misjudged who would be reading that content. He thought the format and price would restrict the audience to adults and older students, but didn't take into account the popularity and public profile of Batman. He said that as a result, a lot of parents or grandparents bought it and gave it to younger readers, assuming Batman was kid friendly material, which obviously Killing Joke is not. So he regretted it on that level, though he didn't really say what he might have done differently.

I expect the next two hours will be more about his Batman stuff, though, both as writer and editor. He did mention at one point that taking over as editing Batman was a major high point for him; he said it turned his job from a job into something he loved to do, the best job in the world. He said this was because he could really do interesting, adult stuff that touched on various social issues and the like. So... I guess he felt a little differently about his time as editor than you do.

Okay, I am almost done with the second hour. He's only kinda touched on Batman so far, jumping around a little between his writing days and editing days. He's apparently going to talk about the death of Robin in the third hour.

The number one thing of interest for you in this episode is something that is no doubt also really frustrating. When he started talking about being editor on Batman and the changes he made, he said he had to fire someone - and he makes it clear he's talking about Doug Moench, though for some reason he doesn't mention Doug by name. but he says that he had a ton of respect for Doug and Doug was doing good, timely work, but that he was "backed into a corner" and had to fire him because...

...well, he doesn't say. It's implied that there's a much longer story behind it that he doesn't want to get into, but, well, he doesn't get into it, so I have no idea what the story is. He said that he later was able to rectify things by bringing Doug back for Batman #500. The overall impression that he gives is that he didn't really want to fire Doug, but there was some kind of pressure or office politics or something or other that made it necessary; and while he regretted it on a personal level, he thought it was necessary, and probably helped the book.

But he's very oblique in discussing it.

More tidbits coming out. If you do decide to listen to any of these, episode 62 is probably of the most interest, as he gets into his time as editor. Oddly, he doesn't spend much time at all talking about his time as writer on the book, other than a couple brief anecdotes about Ra's al Ghul. Apparently the creation of Talia and Ra's was specifically intended from jump street to introduce a major new, long term villain for Batman, as they thought the rogue's gallery was getting a little stale. So it wasn't the case where they had a one-off villain that turned out to be popular; he was intended to be a big addition to the rogue's gallery. He said Julie Schwartz already had the name Ra's al Ghul and had been waiting for the proper time to use it.

As far as his editing, he expounds on his earlier comments about why being editor of Batman was a dream job. He said that once the unpleasantness of firing Doug Moench was past, it became about the best job in the world. Part of this was because of the social issue thing I mentioned earlier. He specifically cites two stories - one is an anti-gun story he got John Ostrander to write, which he says ended up influencing Virgina state legislation on gun control. The other was a story about land mines. In both cases, the directive to do these specific public service stories came from Jenette Kahn; with the land mine thing, it was brought to her by representatives from the U.N.

That ties into O'Neil's other reason for loving the job, namely that he got to travel all over the world as a Batman ambassador, all on the company dime. I can't blame him for loving that, I would have too.

One other note that I know will be of interest to you. While he hasn't yet said anything about branding story arcs (I still have about a half hour left to get through), he does address the creation of variant covers with Legends of the Dark Knight #1. He said that this was not his idea, but rather that a guy named Bruce in DC's marketing department came up with it. O'Neil said that he loved it at the time for the simple reason that it sold more and therefore he got much bigger royalty checks; but in hindsight he doesn't like the effect it has had on the industry, specifically citing the lenticular covers as a recent gimmick that he thought was stupid.

It's possible. He calls him Bruce at one point, but it might have been a Freudian slip.

Those would be Batman: Seduction of the Gun (1993) and Batman: Death of Innocents (1996).