The opportunity to talk to Diane Schutz is just too good to pass up. We may talk about legends in the comic industry but here we have a very special chance indeed to discover some of the secrets behind a very creative era of the comic industry, the people behind it, and a lady that made a huge amount of it all possible.
Before diving headlong into talking about comic books it felt it only polite to ask a little bit about the person behind the name many fans may only recognise as a credit in many of the finest comic books in their collection but may not fully appreciate. Diana explained:
"I was born and raised in Montreal, Canada, and in 1967, when I was twelve, I was featured in a dorky TV commercial for a kid's toy called Footsee. Because I have no shame (I'm almost 70, for god's sakes) you can find the actual commercial on my FB page: https://www.facebook.com/DianaMarieSchutz/videos/10155610808277325
Paul: I find the best place to begin is at the beginning, so with that in mind, how did you find discover comics? Can you recall the first ones that caught your eye and impressed you? Or where they were from?
Diana: I wish I could remember, Paul. There are several different places. Really, though probably the strongest memory I have is of reading comics in the waiting room of my Father's dental office before driving home with him after a day at school. The orthodontist in his office always had comic books there for his kid's patients, and that's definitely where I discovered early 1960s DCs, including Supergirl drawn by Jim Mooney, my favorite!
Diana: The thing is, I learned to read when I was five, in 1960—and comics were everywhere in those years! At the grocery store, corner mom-and-pop shops, on spin racks at the lunch and soda counters, at the newsstand on the street. Comics were just so much a fact of daily living that it's hard to pinpoint exactly when I became aware of them.
Paul: How did you first come to work in the comic industry? Was it a role that was advertised in a newspaper or a suggestion from a family friend? Everyone has a story tell.
Diana: In 1978, I was two years into a PhD program in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, but I was feeling out of my element. I'd been in school for 18 years straight at that point, and I'd been getting more and more involved with comics, and collecting, for several years by then. The 1970s, of course, marked the growth of the direct market of comic book specialty shops in the US, and Canada was no exception. I'd discovered The Comicshop in Vancouver, not far from the UBC campus, and when I was offered a job there by the owners—Ken Witcher and the late Ron Norton—I took it. I dropped out of school and never looked back! It was at The Comicshop where I began getting my first lessons in comics, from Ron and Kenny, and it was there that I finally found my tribe. I worked comics retail for six years—at The Comicshop and at Comics & Comix in Berkeley, California—and began writing: reviews and interviews, all of which would eventually lead, in 1985, to a job offer at Marvel Comics as an assistant editor to Annie Nocenti. A job that lasted four days!
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Paul: Oh wow, I'm afraid I can't just skip over that. What transpired in those four days?
Diana: I think it was a case of… Be careful what you wish for? I had only ever worked for smaller companies before, and suddenly, at age of 29, I found myself taking the train in every morning, with all the other commuters, to a midtown Manhattan corporation—i.e., Marvel Comics. I was still a west coast hippie and a comics fangirl who was surrounded by very professional New Yorkers! I'd been recommended for the job by my friends, Christopher Claremont, Frank Miller, and Annie Nocenti's outgoing assistant, Marvel historian Peter Sanderson. Working as Annie's assistant on Uncanny X-Men in 1985 was kind of a dream job… but it just wasn't a good fit for me. At the time, Annie said I was overqualified for the job of an assistant editor, but in editorial, that's really how you have to start. It was also a very political time. Comics creators were lobbying for their rights, and I strongly supported their views on owning what they had created. At that point, there were just a handful of independent publishers giving creators copyright ownership, royalties, and return of their art. Marvel and DC were not creator-friendly companies, Archie Goodwin's Epic imprint should not be included in that list. That was another reason I didn't feel at home there.
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Diana; I learned a lot in four days, and Annie was a very sympatico boss. On Day 5 I was scheduled for what the editors called my "indoctrination lecture" with Marvel's then Editor In Chief, Jim Shooter. I was terrified of Shooter. I'd heard all the horror stories. He was not well liked during his time as Editor in Chief. I called Annie that morning and quit. A decision I don't regret one iota… except for leaving Annie hanging like that.
Diana: Having hired countless assistants in my time at Comico and especially at Dark Horse, I find hiring and the various personnel issues to be a painful part of the job, and the time spent on that is time away from the joy of making books. I've hired plenty of assistants who didn't work out, and finding the right person is difficult. So, I'm sorry that Annie had to look for a new assistant again after only four days, but working in a midtown Manhattan corporation job was never for me. I'm way too much of a free spirit. Sometimes much to my dismay! All that said, I took what I learned at Marvel. Especially valuable were the making of production schedules for comics. I learned these from Virginia Romita, John Romita Snr's wife, who was then Marvel's production manager and I brought that skill with me a few months later to Comico and then in 1990 to Dark Horse, where it was really needed!
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Paul: Thank you for such a wonderfully comprehensive answer. What was your first role for Dark Horse Comics?
Paul: This is a tricky question to ask, but I can only ask it bluntly. At that stage in your career did you ever experience any elements of blatant or subtle forms of sexism in your time working within comics? If that was the case I pray it has improved, or has it?
Diana: Well, yeah! Of course I did ! And yes, things have improved, but they ain't perfect yet. When I was at Comico. For example, after a couple years of having raised that company's profile pretty dramatically, Bob Schreck and I asked for raises. While they were willing to pay Bob his raise as their marketing guy, I was grilled as to why I should be paid the same raise. I was "only" editor in chief, for god's sake ! I was editing every book and making sure all the trains ran on time!
Paul: I do not wish this interview to exist purely because you are a significant woman within the comic industry, but by the same token you are and I cannot avoid that fact. Could I ask for your overall opinion of how women are treated in general in the comic industry. I ask this not because of your gender, but because of your experience within the industry. I am guessing you have some thoughts in this regard?
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Diana: I've been semi-retired since 2015, so I'm not actively involved in publishing anymore and can't really speak to the present other than what I read on various news sites. I think that the revelations about Dark Horse's former editor in chief, Scott Allie, were pretty indicative of the kind of thing that can go on, and has gone on behind closed doors for far too long.
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Paul: Can you describe the duties of an Editor in Chief for Dark Horse comics please? Could you give a picture of an average day in the role?
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Diana: We'd reached the threshold where people saw the company as something alien to themselves. I never felt that way, because I'd started when we were so small. Because we were growing, I was saddled with a number of personnel issues—all within the editorial department, which was the role of DH's editor in chief. I had no say over other departments, like marketing or production or accounting, for example. I was responsible only for the editors which meant hiring and firing. Those personnel issues that felt painful to me and not what I wanted to be doing. I was also responsible for scheduling, so I asked Bob Cooper, who'd previously been my assistant but who had also been a systems analyst at one time, to handle all the production schedules and the Master Production & Printing Schedule for the entire company. I think Bob hated that job, but he did it to help me out, god bless him. To tell you the truth, Paul, it was so long ago that I really don't remember what the day-to-day was like.
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Diana: What I do remember there were countless mind-numbing meetings, enough memos to wipe your ass forevermore, and not being able to work with creators and make books, which was something I was pretty good at and really loved. I did restructure the entire editorial department, because we were growing, so I created the editorial levels still in effect: assistant editor, associate editor, full editor, senior editor. Later, senior executive editor was added to that scale. This was just before email and several years before the internet came along to change our lives and all the methods of production. I really hated the job of editor in chief. Finally, I just stepped down in 1996, two years after having taken on the job, and took a big pay cut just to go back to working as an editor, to working one-on-one with creators and making books, which is what I truly loved. Though for a long time, I continued to be the person who trained all the junior editors coming in to Dark Horse. Does that answer your question?
Paul: So it clearly sound like you enjoyed producing comics more than the business side of things. I hope that is a fair comment. Can you specifically say if there was one comic, or comic series, you are especially proud to have helped complete and have helped put into readers' hands?
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Diana: I did want to clarify, because to say I "enjoyed producing comics more than the business side of things" really isn't correct, because producing comics means actively being involved in the business side of things! Not many people really understand what editing encompasses—and, in particular, how much of that job requires a head for business. Last year I taught the first-ever (anywhere! anytime!) university-accredited course in Comics Editing, at Portland State University, and I guess my students thought we were going to spend ten weeks talking about story and what makes a good one, when, in fact, before we even got to that, we first had to spend several weeks talking about things like work-made-for-hire vs. creator ownership and negotiating contracts; scheduling and deadlines; order solicitation, advertising, and marketing comics; production and design; and creating budgets for each project. My students were surprised just how much math they'd be expected to do as editors! Editing is often referred to as "the invisible art," but I think that just means people don't know what the hell we do, since so much of it is behind the scenes.
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Paul: I can only imagine.
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Paul: Oh yes, please do so.
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Diana: Well over twenty years ago, I came up with the idea to do Dark Horse's first art book, and that was The Art of Sin City. I was used to editing serialized comics, mostly, and I didn't honestly know what I was doing, but Frank Miller sent me tons of his original inked art, pencils, and production sketches, and designer Cary Grazzini and I went to work assembling that book, which launched an entire line of art books at Dark Horse that continues to this day. Making that first Art of Sin City book was so much fun that even though I was a novice at art books, I kept going and learning more along the way, eventually adding Usagi Yojimbo, Will Eisner, Grendel, and Denis Kitchen to the list. Jeff Smith let me edit The Art of Bone, which Dark Horse published in 2007 even though Bone was not a Dark Horse comic, but I'd been a fan of Jeff's work right from the start, and what a joy it was to fly to Columbus, Ohio, and spend a few days at the Cartoon Books studio, going through all of Jeff's original drawings for Bone, some dating way back to when he was just a kid.
Diana: Not many people remember this, but I was Harvey Pekar's editor on American Splendor from 1992 through 2003. Harvey had been self-publishing American Splendor since its first issue in 1976, but by the early ’90s, he'd been through his first cancer and it had left him kinda worn out, so he just didn't want to have to bother with the business end of publishing anymore. He and I had met several years earlier, and he knew I loved his work, so he called and asked if I had an interest in publishing it. Even back in those early days, Dark Horse had a budgeting process for each new project, and I knew that, given Harvey's then-sales, American Splendor probably wouldn't get past our accounting department. But here's the advantage of working for a privately owned company as opposed to a corporation: I went to my boss, Mike Richardson—Dark Horse publisher, founder, and owner—and told him that we'd been offered American Splendor and that we had to publish it, sales notwithstanding. Mike agreed! He said, and I will always remember this, "American Splendor is too important a book to say no to Harvey. He's expanding the boundaries of the medium with his work, and I don't care what the sales are or what Accounting has to say, Dark Horse will publish Harvey's book." I love autobio comics, and I loved working with Harvey, so eleven years of American Splendor is a bright spot in my career.
Diana: For similar reasons, I loved working with Eddie Campbell—I loved Eddie and still do—especially on his autobiographical The Dance of Lifey Death, another high point for me.
Diana: Working at Dark Horse made it possible for me to indulge my passion for Franco-Belgian bande dessinée. Having grown up in Montréal, I did my entire elementary education in French, even though my family was largely Anglophone. I was the child of first-generation German and Ukrainian immigrants to Canada, and it was clear to them that their three English-speaking daughters needed to learn French in what was quickly becoming a majority French-speaking city (Montréal) and province (Québec). Although I railed against my Mum and Dad back then, I am so grateful now that I did learn to speak French, fluently, as a child. In addition to instilling a receptivity in me for other languages—Spanish, German, Italian, even Latin, all of which I've studied—ultimately it opened up my own reading choices to a world of literature that allows me, now, to work as a professional translator of French and Spanish graphic novels, work that I enjoy immensely. But, man, I hated my parents at the time! 
So, in addition to the Jim Mooney-drawn Supergirl stories (at the back of Action Comics) that I couldn't get enough of, my other favorite comic as a kid was Tintin, which I read in its original French. That love of Franco-Belgian comics continued into my adult years. When my parents were still alive, I'd fly home to visit when I could and would always shop at Marché du Livre, a huge French bookstore with a tremendous selection of European graphic novels, and I'd always buy a stack to bring home with me to the U.S., discovering new creators (or new to me) each time. In any case, one of my very first gigs at Dark Horse, in 1990, the year I was first hired there, was to edit Moebius #0: The Horny Goof!
Diana: Marvel was publishing their series of Moebius graphic novels through Archie Goodwin's Epic imprint, but The Horny Goof was a collection of Giraud's more underground-style work—so it was really sexy and really out there, and Marvel refused to touch it! I mean, there was a big erect dick right on the cover! 
Anyway, editing that English-language translation of Moebius's more raw, bawdy humor was a blast! Who knew I'd be translating his work today! Jacques Tardi is another favorite of mine, and no one remembers this but in 1992 Dark Horse published The Secret of the Salamander, one of Tardi's Adèle Blanc-Sec books—a joy for me to edit! And somewhere along the way I'd discovered Marc-Antoine Mathieu, a brilliant French cartoonist best known for his mind-bending, groundbreaking Julius Corentin Acquefacques series of graphic novels, whose stories are filled with inventive formal tricks and intricate wordplay, making them almost impossible to translate—but I convinced Dark Horse to try just the same!
Diana: In 2003, I edited Mathieu's Dead Memory (Mémoire Morte), translated by Helge Dascher. Sadly, it was ahead of its time. European graphic novels were still struggling in those years, and sales just couldn't support continuing. But slowly, through the years, U.S. audiences have become more and more open to European work: witness the huge success of Blacksad, which I've been editing for Dark Horse since 2012. In fact, as of the most recent book, Blacksad: They All Fall Down—which I translated with my partner Brandon Kander—creators Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido even talked me back out of retirement and into editing the book for them again! Which tells you how much I love it!
Diana: When asked about books I'm most proud of, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about 300, the five-issue series, and subsequent landscape hardcover graphic novel, by Frank Miller and especially by Lynn Varley. I don't think I've ever worked harder on a project than that one. Lynn, who pretty much pioneered blueline color painting here in the U.S.—with Ronin and then Batman: The Dark Knight Returns—a color process she'd learned in France from Jean Giraud aka Moebius, wanted to try a new watercolor process with 300: the blackline process. This involved printing Frank's original black-and-white art at reproduction size onto watercolor paper, which Lynn would then paint. At that point, Frank had begun drawing at twice (!) the size of reproduction, which is quite a bit larger than most comics artists draw their pages, and because each issue of 300 was composed of a series of double-page spreads, his original art was just HUGE!
Diana: Finding a printer who could deal with that, first of all, was an issue. Then, I needed that printer to provide me with anywhere from five to ten copies—again, at reproduction size, at the size of the comic book—of each spread on watercolor paper. So, once I received Frank's art for each issue, I would read the work immediately, which Frank insisted on, then proof it, have any necessary corrections made, and then surrender those original art pages to the printer to create the five-to-ten watercolor-board reproductions for Lynn to paint. Once painted, Lynn's color art would be scanned, and the lettering would be dropped out of the four-color process eventually to be reinstated, on the black plate only to prevent any blurring. And we were, right at that point, transitioning from a film environment to a digital one—by which I mean that comics, just like old photos, used to be printed from film negatives. But towards the end of the twentieth century, digital took over, and comics started being printed from digital files. Miller & Varley's 300 series arrived right in the middle of that transition! And remember: each page was hand-painted by Lynn, using watercolor. The reason she wanted multiple copies of each black-and-white spread was to allow herself several attempts at the color before deciding on a final. She's a perfectionist!
Diana: We all are! I've said this many times, but I will continue to say it till I die: when Lynn sent her first issue of watercolor art… I wept. I cried real tears. I was so overwhelmed by the incredible beauty and sensitivity of her color paintings for each page that they brought me to tears. That is the power of real Art. Incidentally, in his movie adaptation of the 300 graphic novel, Zack Snyder ripped Lynn off, mimicking her color palette shot for shot, scene for scene. But having that gorgeous art in hand and getting it to reproduce faithfully in the comics were two different things! And I worked my ass off on that. In those days, flat-bed scanning wasn't yet technically advanced enough to do a high-quality job, and we were still using drum scanners: Lynn's flexible watercolor boards would get wrapped around big drums (like oil drums) for scanning, and each scan became a digital file, which I needed to approve—it was 1998 and that was my first time seeing scans on a screen.
Diana: Anyway, I found a local scanning outfit, recommended to me, to do the job, and then for each issue, I went there and approved each scan. Which is to say I mostly DISapproved each scan until they got (digitally) tweaked enough to reproduce Lynn's colour absolutely perfectly! I remember one scan in particular giving us so much grief that we were up to the seventeenth (!) correction for that one spread before I finally okayed it. But Lynn's color was so beautiful, how could I do anything less? Printing was yet another problem because… well, not to get too technical, but colour (especially painted colour) sort of migrates on the press, and when you have predominantly blue pages printing near to predominantly red pages, it's hard to keep the colours coherent, to keep them from invading each other. We sent our print liaison, Darlene Vogel—god bless her and her exceptional eye—on press for the graphic novel, and she would literally stand there, telling the China-based printers to up the blues here, pull back on the reds there, and so on.
Diana: She called me at home in the middle of the night, whatever time it was in China, to make some judgment call that I no longer remember. But y'know, that's what you do when you're invested in a project, and you want to make it work. And you want to make it work for the creators, because your job as an editor is to realize their vision, but you also want to make it work for the readers. You want the reader to see what you see—the talent, the artistry, the miracle. Frank and Lynn gifted me the attached (above) page—which, if you can believe it, is one of Lynn's "rejects"!
Diana: In the end, Paul, I mean… I worked with geniuses like Will Eisner (!), Neal Adams, Barry Windsor-Smith. I worked with brilliant writers like Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, Brian K. Vaughan, Pulitzer winner Michael Chabon. I worked with the heroes of my youth, Jim Mooney, Murphy Anderson, Carmine Infantino, and my adult heroes the Hernandez Brothers. I worked with my contemporaries, exceptionally talented cartoonists and independent spirits like Larry Marder, Shannon Wheeler, Stan Sakai, Paul Chadwick, and right from the start my amazing brother-in-law Matt Wagner. I discovered young, new talents like the late, much-missed Tim Sale way back in the mid-1980s and then a decade or more later, my lovely Brazilian twins Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá. I am as blessed an editor as ever could be. It’s impossible to tell you what I’m most proud of, because it’s all of it.
Paul: Can you share any memories of the various stories of the Give Me Liberty comics?
Diana:: The four-issue prestige-format Give Me Liberty, by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons, was published in 1989, the year before Dark Horse moved Bob Schreck and me to Portland, so I wouldn't actually end up editing the various Martha Washington series until Martha Goes to War, sometime in the mid-’90s. Of course, Frank and I had met way back in Berkeley, California, in 1981. We'd become friends through the letters page of his Daredevil series: you can actually find my letters to him printed in various issues published right around that time. I probably met Dave in the late ’80s, though I remember being very surprised when he asked me to be editor for the 1991 Batman vs. Predator series, which Dave was writing, with Andy and Adam Kubert on pencils and inks. The thing about Give Me Liberty… y'know, it was such a political time in comics, in the ’80s. The industry was so much smaller then.
Diana: For example, when I first started going to the San Diego Comic-Con, in 1982, there were only about 4,000 (!) of us there… compared to today's 130,000. So, it was easy to get to know people personally in the industry, much easier than it is today, despite the internet and social media. Also, there were very few women working in comics—at any level. I mean, you'd see the same handful of us, over and over again, at every Women in Comics panel at every convention! And in those years independent publishers were just beginning to establish themselves as an alternative to Marvel and DC. When Frank and I first became friends, in 1981, Dark Horse didn't even exist—and wouldn't for another five years! But up until the advent of independent publishing in the late ’70s, if you wanted to work in monthly commercial comics, you had to sign away all your rights. Period.
Diana: Typically, as an artist, you were paid a onetime crappy page rate—for penciling or inking, and as a penciler, say, you had no choice over who would ink your work. If the work was reprinted, you weren't paid anything extra. If you created a new character who became popular enough to warrant his own series or any kind of ancillary item—movies, lunchboxes, action figures, whatever—you didn't get paid anything extra for that either. Comics artists were being exploited by Marvel and DC and Archie in ways that were unconscionable, unethical, and the companies were getting rich off the backs of the creators. Artists didn't even get their own original artwork back until sometime in the later ’70s, and then only because Neal Adams began rallying artists to start asking for some of these rights. Comics fans of today either have forgotten all this or don't even know about it to begin with, but independent publishers arose as a reaction against Marvel and DC and their repressive policies.
Diana: Jack Kirby, in particular, had been really fucked over by Marvel, his original artwork stolen, or given away to cadge favors, or just utterly neglected and left to rot in some storage space where it was never recovered. Most original Kirby art from the 1960s that you see on the market was stolen by Marvel employees. And by the mid-to-late ’70s, other artists began getting vocal about art return, reprint rates and sales royalties, ownership and creators' rights overall, especially in support of Jack—people like Neal Adams and Frank Miller were out there leading the way, along with Gary Groth and The Comics Journal. And independent publishers, like Eclipse Comics and Fantagraphics in the late ’70s, and Pacific and Comico and then eventually Dark Horse in the ’80s, were founded on the principle of creators' rights. But most of the work they published back then was in black-and-white and by novice creators—Love & Rockets by the then-unknown Hernandez Brothers, for instance. And sales couldn't really begin to compare with those of the so-called Big Two, Marvel and DC.
Diana: Economies of scale notwithstanding, the independent movement, and it was a movement, was growing. And then, fresh off the enormous success of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and of Watchmen, when Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons teamed up for a new project, first of all, and decided to bring that new project—Give Me Liberty—to the tiny, ten-person, only four-year-old, black-and-white publishing "company" in Nowheresville, Oregon… man, that was huge! Both Frank and Dave had been talking the talk, as it were, but then they got up and walked the walk, too, putting their money, their livelihood directly on the line, standing up for what they believed in: creators' rights. Taking Give Me Liberty to a then-upstart independent young company like Dark Horse rocked the comics industry in a way that changed everything.
Paul: During your time in the comic industry there have been significant advances in computer technology that have altered the way comics are produced, printed and consumed? From an editor's perspective, what do you see as the most significant advantages and disadvantages of these changes?
Diana: I’m old enough that I was 35 before the personal computer became an essential part of my work as an editor. At Comico, we had just one of those old box-like Macs for the entire office, and I never used the damn thing—I was scared of it! But it was clearly the wave of the future, so in 1988 I took a night course in what was then an emerging (!) academic area: Computer Science. 
And in 1990, when Bob Schreck and I began working at Dark Horse, the company provided us with our own Macs, so I’m glad I’d learned to use one by then. I was almost 40 before I bought one for home use. I’ve always done a lot of work at home—as an editor, the work doesn’t end just because it’s 5 o’clock, and if you’re conscientious, you take the work home to get it done. In fact, I always got more work done at home because of the lack of interruptions.
Diana: Dark Horse didn’t get email, though, until 1996. So, in my years of editing The Telegraph Wire retailer zine for Comics & Comix, then in all my time at Comico, and for the first six years at Dark Horse, the phone was my primary editorial tool. Which means I talked to my freelance creators in person over the phone about once a week, at least. Nowadays people use their phones for everything… except speaking to someone! And from an editorial perspective, I believe that’s a huge disadvantage. First of all, it’s pretty hard to chase deadlines via email. Emails and even texts are a lot easier to ignore than your editor’s voice over the phone.
Diana: More importantly, email just doesn’t build the kind of personal editor-creator connection that you can develop over time by speaking to someone directly. And if you’re not interested in creating those trusted working relationships, then editing is perhaps not the job for you.
Diana: As for reading comics onscreen… well, I don’t do it. No doubt because of my age, but that just feels like work to me, not pleasure—and I still derive, and want to derive, pleasure from reading comics. I know so many editors whose passion for comics has burnt out as a result of the job. There’s a comics shop right across the street from the Dark Horse editorial offices, and when I was still on staff, I was one of very few editors, maybe the only one, who still checked out the new comics each week—and not out of a sense of duty, but because I love the form. At 68, I'm still checking out that LCS, and I still read comics… every day!!
Paul: As a part of your job within comics did you enjoy comic conventions?
Diana: The conventions, the panels, being able to see all my closest friends gathered together in one spot every year—that was great! But working the booth, not so much. And reviewing portfolios, not at all. Conventions can be grueling when you’re working a show: long hours, constant loud stimuli from all angles, after a while the smile stretches pretty thin on your face—cons are just not very conducive to the kind of focus you need to properly evaluate someone’s art or their story proposal especially. And y’know, people can be rude sometimes, interrupting you in the middle of a conversation with an old friend to insist on monopolizing your time.
Diana: I mean, I’ve been followed into the bathroom—the women’s bathroom, by men wanting a portfolio review! And of course, once Hollywood took over Comic-Con, they just sorta sucked the fun—and the comics—right out of the show. In fact, my last ten years on staff at Dark Horse, I paid my own shot to attend Comic-Con. That was the only way I could make sure I’d have time for my creators and my friends—who were often one and the same!
Paul: Given the fact conventions have changed over the years, do you have any fun or funny convention stories that you are allowed to share?
Diana: Sorry, Paul. I guess… I dunno… I just don't have too many funny convention memories. I mean, we really work our asses off at those shows. Sure, y’know, there was Art Spiegelman one year in San Diego smoking one cigarette after another directly below a No Smoking sign. There was the time that Bob Schreck and I were taking a dozen (!) different creators out to dinner, one of whom was the late, great Alex Toth—and while we were all waiting by the hotel pool for everyone to meet before setting out, someone walked up to Alex who had worked with in animation in the past and Alex just hauled off and punched the guy, who landed in the pool! Is that funny? Not for the guy who got knocked into the pool.
Paul: To be fair, the way you describe it makes it does sound kind of funny.
Diana: One Saturday evening, several people decided to go to Tijuana for dinner—it’s twenty minutes away from San Diego, across the Mexican border. Problem was, one of those people was Mike Lake—former co-owner of England’s Titan Books and the Forbidden Planet chain of comics retail stores—and Mike forgot his passport, which meant he was denied entry back into the U.S. later that night and was tossed into jail! The next day on the convention floor, we were all asking, “Hey, man, where’s Mike?” The answer: “Mike’s in jail in Mexico!” It was hilarious—but not to Mike… who eventually got out because one kind soul retrieved his passport and went back to Tijuana with it to spring him on the Sunday, which is more miraculous than funny, to tell you the truth.
Diana: One of my best convention memories is from the 2000 Small Press Expo. This isn’t particularly funny, but it’s enormously heartwarming. SPX is a small convention: two display areas and a cash bar that’s open all through the weekend—so it’s comfortable and friendly and no blaring Hollywood crap. It’s all about the comics. That year, Will Eisner was the guest of honor, and he and I had just begun working together maybe six months earlier, but we’d already become pretty close—Will was like a father to me. In fact, I was the age his daughter Alice would have been had she not been struck down by leukemia at age sixteen. Anyway, Will had been invited to SPX primarily to present that Saturday night’s Ignatz Awards—for smaller press, more alternative work. That afternoon, he had no obligations, so I brought him around the two display rooms, where new, young, more offbeat artists were selling minicomics or other very individualistic, very art-oriented, but smaller-press work: more personal, more exciting work than the standard monthly commercial comics fare. Creators in the room, for example, included James Sturm, Anders Nilsen, Seth, Paul Hornschemeier, James Kochalka, Brian Ralph, Dean Haspiel. And I brought Will from table to table, introducing him to any artist I happened to know—and, y’know, that was a big deal for so many of the young people there. Will had inspired so many of them, they were in awe of him and never expected that they would meet him, let alone that he would pay attention to their art, and he was so gracious. He took the time to look at everyone’s work that day, engaging them in conversation, and of course they gave him freebies of their books—and he was just delighted by all of it! He was leaving the next morning to return to his home in Florida, and that night, after the Ignatz Awards ceremony, he told me that he himself had been tremendously inspired that day! Meeting all those young turks and seeing their innovative work had both excited and challenged him, and he told me that, as a result, he just couldn’t wait to get back to the drawing board, because he was so fired up by having met that new generation of comics creators. Y’know, that’s real greatness.
Paul: To what extent did having the right to publish comics about Alien, Terminator, Predator and Star Wars help Dark Horse comics against publishing others titles that might have been a risk financially?
Diana: Dark Horse had (and I believe still has) a budgeting process for each series or title. Having survived a company, Comico, that I predicted was going bankrupt—which was the reason Bob Schreck and I left, after the owners refused to admit what the math had already proved to me—I really appreciated Dark Horse’s more judicious accounting of each project. I think I’ve already told you the story of American Splendor and how publisher Mike Richardson just approved that for reasons of quality, and the accounting be damned. But that was the exception.
Diana: Most books had to prove themselves financially viable before they would be approved for publication. That was a complex formula of print and creator costs versus an estimate of potential sales—a projection. Where the licensed titles really helped was in expanding the company: hiring new editors, growing other departments. Of course, as we grew, more projects came our way, more projects were pitched, and we developed more credibility, which also led to expansion of the line. Have I mentioned this yet? When I started, in 1990, there were ten of us. When I retired from staff in 2015 and went freelance, there were 130-some employees. So, the company really grew like a weed during those 25 years!
Paul: How much direct or hands on involvement did you have with Dark Horse's licensed titles?
Diana: Well, there’s no doubt that Lucasfilm was in tight control of their license, but there’s a sense in which I prefer that. No matter how egregious they might seem, it’s better to have the “rules” spelled out beforehand than to learn after the fact that the licensed comic you’ve been sweating over has been DISapproved for some obscure reason—which might amount to the licensing rep just having a bad day. If you’re given guidelines to follow from the start, then you just work around them. There’s not a lot of point to fighting the licensor. They own the IP. Star Wars is George Lucas’s baby, and that’s the bottom line. So, for example, when John’s “Who’s Your Daddy” strip first appeared—as an unlicensed (!) black-and-white bootleg—it was untitled, so I added the title, with John’s okay, and panel 3 on the first page originally had Darth Vader peeing in the sink. As funny as that was, I knew it would never fly at Lucasfilm, so I suggested to John that Darth should be brushing his grille instead. John replaced the panel, and his delightful two-pager was approved—though I cannot for the life of me remember who did the color. Maybe Paul Hornschemeier, creator of the Mother, Come Home graphic novel.
Diana: Oh, but it was fun! I’m not sure how familiar you are with Michael’s novel, but it presents a history of comics that is mostly accurate… except for the Escapist character and its publication history, all of which sounds true but is entirely made up! We kept up the faux history in the comic book, which allowed Dark Horse’s “resident historian,” Bubbles LaTour (me!), to write fanciful histories of the stories about their “original” publication or about the spurious company that had “published” them or about the genre they “pioneered”! It was a lot of work, writing that meta-history for the stories, but it was worth the effort!
Diana: We matched that effort in the artwork, too. For instance, I’d asked my longtime friend, Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, to draw the cover for the third issue of the anthology. I asking him to do a riff on Simon & Kirby’s first issue of Captain America, where Cap punches Hitler on the jaw, sending him flying across the cover. That cover was pretty controversial for its time—1941, just before the U.S. entered World War II. Anyway, I guess the point is that just because a book is a licensed property, that’s no reason to treat it like shit.
Diana: Readers may be used to thinking that way because, traditionally, that’s exactly how Marvel and DC tend to treat anything they don’t own. But I have spent my entire career working in independent comics, meaning the two publishers I’ve worked for never owned any IP at all—or if they did, it was a bad mistake! Witness: Dark Horse’s Comics Greatest World universe (1993) of terrible titles created by consensus.
Paul: There's a daft question I like to ask anyone that has worked on or enjoys superhero comics. If you could have one superpower, or the abilities of one character, what power or whose abilities would you chose?
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Paul: My final question is simple. What does Diana Schutz do these days? And what does the future hold for Diana Schutz? Are there any mountains left to climb?
But the truth is that age is sobering. I was born in 1955, so you can do the math.Paul: Given your final answer may I ask one extra question please? If you could give your younger self any valuable advise what might it be and why?
You know that Charles Schulz's nickname was Sparky—is that where your own nickname came from perchance?Note to the Reader: The name "Sparky" is part of one of my email addresses.
Photo by T. DeLeon for San Diego Comic-Con (2005): Michael Chabon & Diana Schutz.