Superman Unchained: Scott Snyder Reflects on His Story, Working With Jim Lee
What scene made Jim Lee want to kill Scott Snyder?
With the finale of Superman Unchained hitting yesterday, we talked to writer Scott Snyder about his thoughts on the mini-series as a whole, if he'd ever want to write an ongoing Superman series, what it was like working with Jim Lee, and crafting a wordless finale.
Hear what he had to say, then let us know your thoughts in the comments.
IGN Comics: Now that Superman Unchained is done and it's out there for everyone to see, how do you feel about writing this big, nine-part Superman story?
Scott Snyder: I'm really happy with how it turned out. I'm really proud to have gotten to do it with Jim [Lee], Scott [Williams], Alex [Sinclair] and Dustin [Nguyen]. I feel good about it, man. It's a weird feeling, because I feel bad that it's over, because I thought maybe we'd keep going or we'd do a second volume. Then, as we got towards issue #6 and #7, schedule-wise, it was getting really hard. So we were talking and it was like, "This is going to be the last issue, #8 and #9." It feels really great to have it out there, and it's a big thrill -- I loved working on this book with them. I already miss it.
IGN: Would you ever consider doing an ongoing Superman series?
Snyder: Yeah, I definitely would. I think one of the things I learned writing Superman Unchained was that, for me -- and maybe this a more aerial-view question to answer; I'm going off-topic a little bit -- one of the things I realized was, I love both characters, Superman and Batman, and I'd love to write both of them, but one of the hard things about writing them at the same time is just that you flex some of the same muscles writing them, because their series have similar priorities.
They need to be really personal, first and foremost, so that the character doesn't just feel like you're doing a Batman or Superman story. It has to be something that's yours. But it also has to have a lot of bombast, and you want it to have action, you want it to be fun and have a fun supporting cast, that has the same big pace to it, a crescendo. So I loved working on both of them individually, but I think as a writer, it'd be hard for me to do a Superman ongoing or a Wonder Woman ongoing or really any superhero while I'm doing Batman -- unless it was a very different kind of superhero. I enjoy having a plate that varies and has different sorts of creative challenges.
Like, Wytches and American Vampire are very different from one another and very different from Batman. So I like that type of triangle better, I realized, than writing two superheroes at the same time, not because either series wasn't a blast -- they are -- but there are similar challenges on both.
IGN: What was it like working with Jim Lee?
Snyder: It was really scary at first, because Jim loomed very large in my imagination. I didn't know him all that well when we started. I still have all my X-Men #1s at my parents' house. On Thanksgiving, I took a picture of my issues, and I was teasing Jim about how I wanted to get them all signed -- all the copies, all the holographs, all of it.
But the great thing about working with him is, one thing I didn't realize is, Jim Lee can kind of phone it in and still have it be really good -- similar to working with Stephen King on American Vampire. But what you realize about both of them is that they're both incapable of doing that, where one of the reasons I think Lee ended up taking a little more time with it is that Jim is a pretty big perfectionist when it comes to the big moments of the story. He would redo certain pages over and over and over for himself, even though I would like the first one; it was fine. Then you'd see the final one and be like, "Oh, I see what he was thinking and why this is better." But that's the thing that's so fascinating about him and a guy like Stephen King too: they're rockstars, and they're capable of doing really good work without needing to bring their A game to it -- but they both bring their A game, you know, in a way that's really inspiring.
They act as though it's their first project a lot of the time, where they do these big moments in the story. It was a great thing to see -- and it was nice to get to know him. Now I consider him a friend, and it was nice to get to know him a bit more too.
IGN: Did you guys have any disagreements?
Snyder: No, we didn't have any disagreements. I think there was one moment when he wanted to kill me, and I didn't realize, like, how bad this would be. I've since come to realize how rough certain things are for artists. I always think of how cool a moment is and how great it would get to be to draw. I'm like, "Guess what? Look at this badass moment, Sean Murphy! There's a thousand mermaids coming, and they didn't even know that was going to happen!" And it's like, "Wow, what a fun story moment," but he's like, "A thousand mermaids..." You know what I mean? You realize like, "Oh, yeah, right. A thousand mermaids -- that's kind of a bitch."
But with Jim, it was when I did that piece where I was like, "Guess what, Jim? Batman throws every Batmobile in history at Wraith! How fun is that!?" He was like, "Every Batmobile in history..." [Laughs] I'm like, "Wait, what? What's the problem?" You know, you think about how fun that is as a story, and then you think, and you're like, "Oh my God. That would be a huge mountain," you know? To his credit, he didn't tell me until afterwards he was kind of mad about that. Like, he did it and did this great job, and he was like, "You know, I pretty much wanted to kill you when you said that." I was like, "What!?" So I'm much more aware of it now, I think. You know, I'm still pretty green. I'm still learning. So that was probably the tensest moment between us, and he never even let me know he was mad.
IGN: Well, I'll say that I'm glad you made him do it, because that was probably one of the best parts of the book.
Snyder: Oh, thank you.
IGN: Batman stole the big moment from Superman in his own series.
Snyder: Well, Batman doesn't have superpowers, so I feel like one of the closest things he has to superpowers is he always has the best one-liners, you know.
IGN: [Laughs] I want to talk to you about the end. Could you talk about Luthor's point of view on Superman, as he's expressing it at the end of the comic book?
Snyder: For me, I think what I was trying to say was that I wanted a moment where Luthor actually explains Superman better than anybody, because I felt like it would be a very nice twist on the way we normally see Lex. I just think that, given the role he's played in the series, as this kind of arch-villain, I wanted it to come from him, where he says, "You think I'm a villain? I know him better than all of you," and this idea that he maps Superman's history, but only these big moments. So he doesn't know he's Clark; he doesn't know these things, but he knows when he's active in big ways.
What I wanted was for him to say, "I've always hated him because I always thought that he was trying to say to us, 'This is how you be a better species. This is how you be better people.'" And I think a lot of people, including me, growing up, think Superman is that. He stands for these things, and he's a symbol. But then what I realized and what I wanted to write about as I was thinking about Superman was, when you look at his decisions, he doesn't know what he's doing at all. He's Clark Kent, even though everyone's going to age out in front of him, and he's going to know he's not like them. He doesn't align himself with any military or country, which is going to put everybody against him. He does enough to make some people happy but not enough enough to make others. He sits in the middle of this kind of matrix where he's going to end up doing this pretty quick. Superman can't really last very long, as he's constructed him. When Luthor realizes that, he sees he's just a man trying to do his best; he doesn't know the right thing to do, but once he decides what he thinks the right thing to do is, he will do it, even if it means his own end.
There's something inspiring I think in that, in a way that Luthor suddenly finds endearing. He says, "He's not trying to tell us how to be better; he's just trying to do his best, day to day, for himself. He's trying to figure it out on his own, to make himself sleep well at night and be a hero to himself." In that, I think Luthor sees he's not a threat. Luthor sees that he's not trying to lead the human race and show them the right way, "the way that I am." He's just a fool almost, at least to Lex Luthor. In that, I think Luthor finds a bit of section for him.
IGN: I liked how the world was ending and the heroes are out in the arctic, but he's just a hologram chilling out drinking wine.
Snyder: It's classy! [Laughs] Luthor has a touch of class. I always love that phrase: "touch of class." Just a touch, nothing more.
IGN: With a lot of finales, we get a dialogue-driven end with lots of talking and monologues and explanations, but when had Wraith sacrifice himself to save Earth, and it's all wordless. Obviously you can't talk in space, but if you wanted, you could have fudged it and made something up to let them talk, but you didn't. What was your decision to have this wordless final exchange between Wraith and Superman in the end?
Snyder: I just thought it would be more powerful, and I'm a pretty wary dude a lot of the time. My feeling was like, "Let this just be Jim's poetry, and let it be something where you understand just by watching and knowing the history," in terms of the parts Dustin drew, this incident from the past. You understand what's happening between them, even though they can't even talk. There's a silent exchange and bond. Because the whole time, they'd been arguing with each other, going back and forth and yelling and fighting. And this up in space in front of the sun, in the face of death, they look at each other and the salute, it just thought it would mean more. I'm really happy with it.
I think it's very easy at the end of a series to have a big duel of words. I just wanted to try something different here, and I feel like it suits the material. I was really happy with it. Don't think I didn't think about it though. I could have talked to Jim and been like, "They could have oxygen masks and earpieces, Jim." I really did consider it, to throw myself under the bus with it. It was tempting, because I fall back on that. I come from a prose background. I'm just trying to grow and be better about that stuff and take some risks, try and let the artist tell the story a little bit more.
IGN: What can you say about the parallels you created between the first and last issue?
Snyder: I just wanted to show that it was a series that really -- because with some of the delays and all that stuff, I think we just decided to try and allow ourselves to take as much time as we needed issue to issue while still really pressing as hard as we could to get done. Because Jim wanted to redo certain things and add pages; that's the way it works, and it was exciting to work that way with him because you'd see the stuff evolve and get better, and him taking all these cool risks with stuff.
Once I realized it was sort of off and he realized we were just going to be on schedule and let it go -- but it was the best comic we could make that way -- we sort of accepted it. What I wanted to show is, I know it's been a long time since issue #1 -- over a year -- but that said, it's a story that I'm really proud of because it sort of is exactly what it was going to be from the beginning. Little things in the middle have changed, as they do with every story for me. But this, you can see in the first issue the ideas and visual storytelling, it's echoed here.
Like, for instance, in the giant, humungo poster splash in issue #1, he's very small at the first one, and you turn the page, and he's very huge. It's Superman facing a challenge where it looks like he's in big trouble, but he's Superman; of course he's going to do well. In this issue, I wanted to show, after everything he's been through through the whole series and what we've said about him and the argument that we've leveled against him, that he doesn't make any sense and his decisions are poor and that he doesn't stand for anything. I wanted a page that was exactly the same kind of thing but in reverse -- so a giant splash of him busting through and looking heroic, and instead of going from small to big, we go big to small; you turn the page and you get him tiny. You see he's actually just a man trying to do the best he can in terrible circumstances.
So similarly, the leap off of the silo. That's in the first one, and here, that story hopefully explains itself -- why we did it, what it's about -- in this issue. Also, the boy looking up at Wraith with binoculars, who's looking for something inspiring in the sky in some ways, and instead finds nothing but death. Here, he looks up in the sky and is saved by Wraith -- he's looking up with binoculars and is inspired by that. So in that way, the parallels -- I'm proud of them just because I'm proud of and happy with the issue -- but I'm proud of them in a way that I hope people see. That is, as long as it's taken to get from #1 to #9, Jim and I are both really happy with how it turned out to be the thing we really set out to do a year ago.
Joshua is IGN’s Comics Editor. If Game of Thrones, Spider-Man, or Super Smash Bros. are frequently used words in your vocabulary, you’ll want to follow him on Twitter and IGN.
