Teen Titans Writer Scott Lobdell Talks Page Count at DC Blog

While many creator-owned and indie writers and artists are loathe to work in the 'floppy' magazine [...]

While many creator-owned and indie writers and artists are loathe to work in the "floppy" magazine format for their comic books and graphic novels, it's rare to hear a DC or Marvel Comics veteran bemoan the restrictions of the format. And Scott Lobdell didn't really go that far in today's blog post at DC, where he talked about writing vast swaths of a Teen Titans/Superboy/Legion Lost crossover, but he did get as giddy as a schoolgirl when faced with the prospect of having a hundred pages to tell his story in. To quote (a lot, but not all of) what he had to say in the story:

"Imagine you are a comic book writer who is bound by 20 pages a month in which to tell a story. Then you get a call... and you're told that suddenly you get to work on a 60 page story (that is, your book is going to cross over with SUPERBOY and LEGION LOST)! Suddenly more story possibilities open up as your telling a larger story with more characters and conflicts involved. Suddenly you have the opportunity to deal with Kid Flash learning the first hints of his origin by talking with Superboy, a 16 year old without any past at all. "Then you have Timber Wolf confronting Kid Flash for an explanation as to why Bart Allen is in the here-and-now instead of his place of origin in the 31st Century... and you wonder why at least one of the Legion Losters seems to be covering for Kid Flash? "Okay, so here you are, working on a larger canvas than you get to work on from month to month, and you're working with other writers and Editorial now and you're starting to wonder how even 60 pages is going to be enough... when the clouds part and Editorial delivers another edict: You get an additional 32 pages in the form of a Teen Titans annual! "That's a 92-page story you get to tell! Yowza! Just think of the possibilities! It'd be like taking an episode of your favorite television show and suddenly being given a 100 million dollar feature film budget where you can do all the things you want when you are no longer bound by episodic restraints!"

Lobdell, of course, has written his fair share of crossover stories in the past--but many of them were with co-writers, as his tenure on the X-Men titles was largely time shared with other creators on the half-dozen or so books that could be telling X-Men family stories at any given time. It's interesting to see that, this many years into his professional career, he's still finding new pleasures and challenges that are different from what he usually does.

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