George Perez Couldn’t Stand Working On New 52 ‘SUPERMAN’
It should be pretty obvious that I enjoy any and all of these nightmare stories vomiting up out of the anus of DC. Here’s George Perez detailing what a slug to the hog it was to pen Superman in the New 52.
Robot 6:
Renowned creator George Perez, who stepped down as writer and breakdown artist of DC Comics’ relaunched Superman after just six issues, revealed he couldn’t wait to leave the high-profile title because of frustrations over repeated rewrites and a lack of creative freedom. “It was not the experience I wanted it to be,” he said.
“Unfortunately when you are writing major characters, you sometimes have to make a lot of compromises, and I was made certain promises,” Perez said in a recently released Q&A video from this year’s Superman Celebration, “and unfortunately not through any fault of Dan DiDio — he was no longer the last word, I mean a lot of people were now making decisions [..] they were constantly going against each other, contradicting, again in mid-story. The people who love my Superman arc, the first six issues, I thank you. What you read, I don’t know. Because the fact that, after I wrote it I was having such frustration that I told them, ‘Here, this is my script. If you change it, that’s your prerogative, don’t tell me. Don’t ask me to edit it, don’t ask me to correct it, because I don’t want to change something that you’re going to change again in case you disagree.” No no, Superman is a big character. I was flattered by the responsibility, but I thought this was getting a little tough.”
“I didn’t mind the changes in Superman, I just wish it was the same decision Issue 1 or Issue 2,” he continued. “And I had to kept rewriting things because another person changed their mind, and that was a lot tougher. It wasn’t the same as doing Wonder Woman. I was basically given a full year to get Wonder Woman established before she actually had to be enfolded into the DC Universe properly. And I had a wonderful editor Karen Berger who ran shotgun for me. They wanted me to recreate what I did from Wonder Woman, but it’s not the same age, not the same atmosphere, I couldn’t do it any more. And the writer who replaced me, Keith Giffen, was very, very nice. I’ve known Keith since we both started in the industry, he called me up when they asked him to do Superman to make sure I wasn’t being fired off Superman. And regrettably I did have to tell him no, I can’t wait to get off Superman. It was not the experience I wanted it to be.”
Perez also divulged that he hadn’t been told that Grant Morrison would be relaunching Action Comics as part of the New 52, or that the title would be set five years before the events of Superman.
“I had no idea Grant Morrison was going to be working on another Superman title,” he said. “I had no idea I was doing it five years ahead, which means … my story, I couldn’t do certain things without knowing what he did, and Grant wasn’t telling everybody. So I was kind of stuck. ‘Oh, my gosh, are the Kents alive? What’s his relationship with all of these characters? Who exists?’ And DC couldn’t give me answers. I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, you’re deciding all these things and you mean even you don’t know what’s going on in your own books?’ So I became very frustrated …”
Sounds like a shit show. No worries though, true believers! They’re new! New stories! Featuring the same old tropes!