Greg Pak On the End of His Action Comics Run, Superman's Return to Power and More

Today marks Superman's return to power in Action Comics #50 from writer Greg Pak with the art team of Aaron Kuder, David Messina, Javi Fernandez, Bruno Redondo, and Vicente Fuentes on pencils; Kuder, Gaetano Carlucci, Juan Albarran, Fernandez, and Fuentes on inks; and Tomeu Morey, Arif Prianto, and Wil Quintana on pencils.

Wow, that's a mouthful!

The double-sized fiftieth issue will run you a buck more than usual, and can be found at your local comic shop, or on ComiXology.

Pak joined us to talk about the issue, which will close out his run on Action Comics and his part of the "Savage Dawn" story.

As you're wrapping up your run, what's your long view of this? Is there anything you guys didn't get to do that you'd like to have done on Superman?

There are always things you wish you could have done. There is only so much time in the day and so many issues in a year. We had a heck of a run and had an incredible time and we're really grateful to everybody at DC for giving us so much room to play for so long.

Working with Aaron [Kuder] was just a dream, you know what I mean? Every once in a while you get paired with an artist and everything just clicks. I think there is something about working with Aaron on Superman in particular. I think we both just got Clark in the same way. We felt Clark is always going to try to do the right thing, you know what I mean?

Working with Clark in the New 52 who is younger and figuring things out. That felt fresh and dramatic and so much fun for us. From the very first issue when Aaron was drawing this young Superman who was kind of cocky and at the same time having these frontier moments where he goofs something up.

He is scrambling, thinking on the fly, trying to figure out what he has done and how the heck to do the right thing. He just got that character on every level. I think we just shared a feeling about the character and had a shared story sense. It was just a dream working with him.

We ended up co-writing the last ten issues of the book. We started off just working really closely together. We worked plot plot first, which meant that I would break down the story page by page and panel by panel but I wouldn't write in the dialogue yet. He would take that script and do layouts based on that. We'd get on the phone and talk it through for an hour, hour and a half. That kind of really intense back and forth collaborative storytelling was my favorite thing. I love Aaron and I love everything he did on the book, so I am really grateful for it.

You guys had a happy medium between being entirely autonomous and being interconnected. For a lot of "The Savage Dawn" story, it felt like each of the Superman books was doing its own thing. Then, as the story started to wrap up, we started to see more and more that there were bits being planted in one book and being picked up in another. What was that relationship like with the rest of the Super-teams?

I love working with all those guys. Those guys are all pros and really great. They're great writers, and they're good people. We bonded a lot working on this story, and it was a great team. That said, this kind of story is hard to pull off.

I appreciate what you say because that was our objective, is to tell stories where each book can stand on it's own, but you can put it all together and tell a larger story and build up to a larger climax. At the same time, it's a tricky thing: When you're coordinating this many pieces of a pretty complex story it can be a challenge.

How does the editorial process work with this kind of thing? Are you guys organizing through the editorial room or are you actually doing super summits like they used to do in the old days? What does that look like?

We did all of the above. We got together in person, we got on the phone, we e-mailed like crazy, we texted. There was a huge amount of back and forth -- constant discussion for months and months and months. It is an intense, demanding and exciting process to do this kind of story.

Obviously Vandal Savage is huge right now because of Legends of Tomorrow. Was that the kind of thing where you said "Oh this is a great opportunity to shine a light on this great character," or was that just a happy accident since you had a long running Vandal Savage story going, and "Oh look. Now they're going to start using him in TV?"

It was just coincidence. I had no idea that they were going to do anything with Vandal when we started talking about using him here. Those kinds of pleasant surprises and coincidences happen all the time.

I remember back in the day, when Matt Fraction was working on that Iron Man book and he talks about the fact that it felt like it was channeling the vibe of the first Iron Man movie, but he was just writing Iron Man the way it felt natural to him. The fact that it meshed so well with what Robert Downey Jr and those move makers ended up doing was, again, a happy coincidence.

One of the great things about Superman is that he is very flexible. There's a lot of ways to interpret Superman and I won't say that all of them are valid, but many of them are valid. When you go in, do you sit down and say "This is my take on Superman and this is the story we can do with it," or do you say "What elements of the past do I want to pluck to create my Superman?"

I have, like everybody else, strong feelings about Superman. I love Superman. I love the Christopher Reeve Superman, I love the Superman in the comics, I love that dark, tool of the government Superman from Dark Knight Returns. I've loved many different incarnations of Superman over the years, but I didn't go in with the aim of writing those Supermen.

I guess I started the job the way I start and work-for-hire job, which is I find out what the parameters are. What is going on with the character? What are the company and the editors looking to have happen? What kind of take do they have? What kind of interesting stories can I tell based on the status quo and where they want to move them.

In this case, it was a beautiful starting point because they had a New 52 Superman who was, as I said before, younger and greener. Still has that heart of a hero, but is figuring out what the heck it is he does and how to do it. As a writer, I loved coming in to tell stories of a Superman that age and with those kinds of challenges. It lets you tell stories that are totally true to the heart and soul of Clark, but that have some real drama and suspense because he is figuring things out.

That first story arc that Aaron and I did, with Superman meeting the Subterraneans and with Lana -- that remains one of my favorite things that I ever did with Superman. The whole thing has been a blast.

Do you feel like it's really helped ... You have not only a newer, younger Superman, but you have a Superman who is in a circumstance that he hasn't been in from a storytelling point of view for like thirty years.

I love it. It was a huge amount of fun. Any time you can start a story at the beginning, start a story when a character is becoming who that character is becoming, that's the sweet spot. That's a hugely fun place to tell stories. It was a pleasure and a privilege to have that opportunity.

I don't want to necessarily spend the whole time looking back at your run in a macro sense. With "Savage Dawn" in particular, you guys introduced a handful of new concepts, some of these new characters. How much of that was just in service of the bigger story and how much of that was "I have a really cool villain. Is there a way we can fit him in?"

It all starts in service of the story. I mean, for me. The story has a certain number of working parts; there is a big theme for the story. When you're creating characters, you're creating characters that make sense plot wise but that also, somehow, are able to evoke and bring out that bigger theme that you're working with. As we developed the story, once we established Vandal as our big bad, other things come together as a result. You're finding things -- you're just following the logic of the cast you have and building characters to support that.

I can't really speak for Aaron. I'm not sure exactly where that came from, but that was his. He had this inspiration for that particular kind of kid-turned-barbarian, which I thought was fantastic. It totally fit everything that we were doing, but you'd have to ask him where the inspiration for that came from.

Sometimes folks, every once in a while there is a story where somebody has this character or design that's been kicking around in the back of their head for a while and you just find the right sweet spot for that.

That's actually in The Totally Awesome Hulk books that I am working on right now, speaking about a different company, but Lady Hellbender character was a character that Frank Cho created. He'd come up with that design years before and as we were talking about the story, we realized that that would be the perfect fit with the story that I was thinking about, so some things things happen that way, too.

Touching base on the idea that Superman is this great iconic character and everybody has an idea of him, but in the New 52 you were able to reinvent the wheel a little bit. Was that similar to how you dealt with having Vandal's children? We know Vandal so well and then we know his daughter so well. Having the others play a big role in this story, it suddenly becomes a great opportunity to have a Savage, but be able to go a different direction a little bit.

Yeah, well there is a way in which, when you introduce these children of Vandal Savage -- when he claims to be doing all this for his kids -- it opens up a new way of looking at this character. That's something that we get in to big time in Action Comics #50.

Part of Superman's glory, and also maybe one of his weaknesses, is that he is always going to try to find the good side in whoever he is fighting. Whoever he has to go up against, he's going to try to reach them, not just pound them. Is there something redeemable about Vandal? Does the relationship with his kids point to that? That's something to find out. Keep on reading.