As one of the co-executive producers of the red-hot Fox series The O.C., you’d think TV writer Allan Heinberg had already landed his dream job. But then Marvel Comics came calling, and suddenly he’s living a life-long fantasy as one of the most in-demand comic books scribes off the amazing success of his teen superhero title Young Avengers. After throwing a comic-themed Krug champagne tasting party for his TV and comics cohorts (complete with huge blown-up comic book covers from the 1950s) Heinberg tells Hollywood.com about his adventures with everyone from Seth Coen to Superman.
Hollywood.com: I understand that as a writer on The O.C. your own comic book fixation was the impetus for the preoccupation of Adam Brody’s character, Seth Coen.
Allan Heinberg: “It was. Josh Schwartz very generously let me share my comic obsession with Seth, yeah. Adam needed a little education on the subject, but he was very cool with it and got into it. I don’t know that he’d read a lot of comics. He’s a huge film buff, and so movies are his passion. But he was really supportive about the whole comic book thing and had a lot of fun with it.”
HW: Rachel Bilson’s always complaining to me about the crazy costumes she’s had to wear on the show. Was it your idea to put her in that sexy Wonder Woman outfit to fulfill Seth’s fantasies?
AH: “I have to credit that to Josh–putting Rachel in the Wonder Woman costume. That was entirely his brainchild.”
HW: But now you’ve left all the drama behind for new projects?
AH: “Yes, I’m no longer on The O.C. Last season was my last season and so I’m not a part of season three.”
HW: When you left did they try and find another knowledgeable comic guy to write this stuff?
AH: “I don’t know that they were able to do that. I think that this season they sort of wrote away from the comic book thing. It might have played itself out. Though I know that Urban Outfitters is releasing a line of t-shirts with the superhero versions on them, designed by my buddy Eric White, so that’ll be fun.”
HW: In the Hollywood arena, what sort of projects have you moved on to?
AH: “I’m working on an independent feature, and I’m developing an hour long romantic comedy for Touchstone and ABC. The ABC pilot is tentatively a superhero romantic comic drama, so that should be fun if we can make it work.”
HW: Are these original superhero characters in the TV series? Are they young characters or more adult-oriented?
AH: “Yes, they are original. It’s a little more adult, actually. It’s still so in development that I should probably keep most of it under wraps. And then I have a comic book that I’ve created at Marvel Comics that I’m currently writing as well.”
HW: And that would be Young Avengers–which features youthful contemporary characters with superhero guises inspired by the original Avengers line-up: Patroit, Iron Kid, Hulkling, Asgardian, Stature…That comic book has turned into a bigger hit than anyone expected. People were surprised at how creatively satisfying the book is.
AH: “Yeah, that seems to be the case. I think that readers were skeptical – if not openly hostile – toward the idea of a book called Young Avengers. And my collaborators and I put a lot of hard work into it, and really wanted to put a book on the stands that we would want to read. So I’ve been very, very moved by the sort of fan support that we’ve had over the past year with the book. It’s been incredible.”
HW: Did Marvel bring the concept of Young Avengers to you or was it something that you came up with?
AH: “They were revamping the actual Avengers using a number of Marvel “movie star” characters [such as Spider-Man and Wolverine], and they thought that because I had written for teens throughout my TV career that maybe I’d be interested in developing a teenage off-shoot group of Avengers. But that was all they sort of had in their head. They didn’t know who would be on the team. They didn’t know if it would be existing heroes, or heroes that I would make up, and they basically left it up to me to figure out everything about the book. They were very generous in that way.”
HW: Was it part of your plan to have Young Avengers be a Marvel Comics version of DC’s Teen Titans [a team comprised of famous superheroes’ youthful sidekicks like Robin], appearing to mimic the sidekick concept but really mining Marvel’s continuity to make it all fresh?
AH: “That’s exactly what I tried to do. People’s worst fear about the book was that it would be a Marvel rip off of the Teen Titans. I decided to play into that [laughs] and put what I considered to be a fairly outrageous idea of having these four sidekicks who have never appeared in continuity appear on the cover of the book hoping that fans would be at least curious enough to open it and get into the mystery of who these kids are. Then the plan was that by issue number six, all the kids would sort of have their own heroic identity apart from The Avengers and the readers who had been invested for those six issues hopefully cared enough about the characters that they would stick around.”
[PAGEBREAK]HW: Who’s been your favorite character out of that group? Who do you like to write the most?
AH: “My favorite is the character that I created sort of whole cloth, who doesn’t have any tie to the Avengers at all: Kate Bishop. She doesn’t even have a superhero codename yet. But she’s kind of been the big surprise to me. I really enjoy writing her a lot, but I love all of them. They’re each sort of getting their turn in the spotlight.”
HW: I’m sure Marvel is very happy with the success of the book. Have they or any other comic book companies been courting you to do more projects?
AH: “DC has been really, really wonderful to me. I co-wrote a five-issue arc of JLA with Geoff Johns this year for them, and I would love to continue working for both companies as long as my other writing commitments permit. There are a number of DC heroes that I’d love to be able to write.”
HW: Any one in particular that you’d die to get your hands on?
AH: “Wonder Woman in particular. She’s been a lifetime favorite of mine.”
HW: Joss Whedon has dibs on the first big screen Wonder Woman movie, but is she the one big name superhero that you’d like to take crack at translating to film?
AH: “Yeah. I think that she’d be the one.”
HW: How did you get into this career? Did you start in television first and move into comics?
AH: “Yeah. I was actually an actor for most of my life and a playwright in New York. I was writing plays and musicals, and I got a job as a staff writer on [the NBC sitcom] The Naked Truth in ’97 in L.A. and have been writing television since then. Then because of the work on Seth Coen and his comic book obsession, Marvel Comics sort of noticed and got in touch and asked if I wanted to write for them. So that’s how it happened: Seth Coen put me in touch with Marvel.”
HW: There’s a whole community of guys, and I’m sure women too, who have a foot in Hollywood and a foot in the comic book industry now. Are you guys a tight little fraternity? Do you all know each other? How did it all come about, this weird little clique?
AH: “I’ve actually met Joss Whedon [Serenity, Astonishing X-Men], but I don’t know him. I would like to know him. But I don’t know him. The Joss Whedons and the Reggie Hudlands [House Party, Marvel Knights Spider-Man], I’ve never really spent much time with and don’t really know those guys. I guess that Damon Lindelof [Lost] is doing Ultimate Hulk Vs. Wolverine now – I’ve never met Damon. So I don’t really know the Hollywood bunch. I’m very close and share a writing studio with Jeff Loeb [Batman: The Long Halloween, The Ultimates] who was a producer on Smallville and is now working on Lost. And with Jeff Johns [Infinite Crisis, JSA, The Flash] who is sort of crossing over from comics to TV and he and David Goyer [Batman Begins, Blade, JSA] are working on a TV series of Blade for the Spike network. Both of those guys were at the party I threw.”
HW: I saw the photos of your Krug champagne tasting dinner–It looked like quite an extravaganza.
AH: “It was pretty extraordinary. A friend of mine, sing/songwriter Jaron Lowenstein [of Evan & Jaron], invited me to a dinner that was thrown by the same company at L’Orangerie about two years ago, and I met the head of marketing for the company there and we became friends. I think that we wanted to sort of do a similar evening inviting as many sort of industry friends as possible to expose them to Krug in the hopes of getting Krug a little more exposure. So I invited–I think that there were eighteen of us total of my best friends who work in the industry, mostly writers and producers actually who came to this incredible dinner. It was actually thrown at my house, and because I’m a comic book writer and a comic book fan I think that Larry sort of embraced this sort of play philosophy, the nature of the way that my house is decorated and my interest in comics. So he did an entire superhero-themed extravaganza that evening. It was beyond belief. This was an entirely new experience. I throw one party a year, and that’s about it and nowhere on this scale.”
HW: What has been the same for writing television and comic books, and what has been radically different?
AH: “The serialized style of story writing is the same and the strictness of the deadlines are the same. The way that I write Young Avengers is very similar to the way that I would write a show like Sex In The City or The O.C., where I tend to primarily focus on the relationship between the characters, and let the sort of superhero action be driven by whatever is emotionally at stake in the scene. So it’s been fairly similar in terms of breaking the stories and breaking each book up into specific dramatic scenes. The difference is then that each scene has to be graphically depicted and directed on the page in a way that I’m not used to doing coming from television. A lot of my humor has had to be adapted to the page since you don’t have the benefit of an actor’s inflection. Whatever comedy there is in the script has to sort of read as comedy by itself, two-dimensionally, without the actor’s voice helping you. So those have been the big adjustments. I’m learning how to think more pictorially, learning to actually to direct on the page, and then how to use humor.”
HW: If you had any advice for aspiring writers in the television world and the comic book world, what would it be?
AH: “It helps to be successful in another field of writing before you get to Hollywood and or comics. If you are a comics writer it helps if you get your stuff out there and be a successful independent writer or artist and then the big companies will track you down and find you and beg you to work for them, and it’s the same with Hollywood. TV and film are so expensive that it’s very risky to take a chance on people who are untried, but if you have success as say a playwright or writing columns in a newspaper, if your plays are being produced, even if it’s independent film – just getting your work out there and having any kind of success outside of Hollywood will only attract Hollywood’s attention. So I think that the key is to focus on craft and getting your work seen by as many people as possible and then if the work is good I think that the job offers tend to follow.”
HW: Is it easier to come up with privileged Orange County teen melodrama or Skrulls invading the Earth and that kind of outlandish action?
AH: “I have really only spent 20 minutes in Orange County in my entire life. So it’s about the same. They’re both fantasy worlds of a sort. It’s about the same leap of imagination with The O.C. kids and the Skrulls and super-soldiers and stuff like that.”
