The Superman 2000 Pitch: The Writing Process

I've commented a bit on the Morrison/Waid/Millar/Peyer concept for Superman 2000, the famously rejected pitch that might have revitalized the Superman franchise for a new millenium, and Chad Nevett has looked at what the pitch had to say about Superman's dietary habits and morality, and today I'll take a look at what the guys had to say about how exactly they would all team up to write Superman. How would that have worked, anyway?

According to the final section of the pitch, titled "The Writing Process":

Project: Superman 2000 includes a new and different approach to the very way the comics are created.

The four of us would like to pool our talents in a unique way. We’re less interested in seeing each Super-book assigned to one writer as we are in putting everyone’s individual talents to their best use every week. Morrison and Millar are headmen, full of new and refreshing ideas; Peyer and Waid write from the heart with an emphasis on dialogue and characterization. No more round-robin scripting where some guy’s always stuck writing Chapter Three; instead, scenes and scripts fly back and forth across the Great Pond, and instead of duplicating past dynamics where good writers are introduced into the Superman Collective and then sometimes forced to subsume their individual styles and visions, the adventures of Superman are chronicled by a group of like-minded scribes who were friends before they were partners, who know they share a common vision, who are willing and eager to work as a unit for the good of their own hero.

It's a whole new way of writing comics, but it's not without precedent. In broad strokes, it’s similar to the way in which soap operas are crafted. Different writers are responsible for certain characters, plots and subplots, all according to their particular passions and specialties. We're still ironing out the details of the actual process, and we're all aware that any editor's heart would freeze solid at the sound of the names Morrison, Millar and Peyer in connection with anything that requires, oh, a weekly deadline...but since Waid meets his deadlines with an almost Catholic-guilt ferocity, he’s volunteering to be the Rob Petrie of this little Alan Brady Show--the writer who'll filter all the work and make dead certain it's on the editor’s desk when it's supposed to be. As much as he values his professional reputation, he’s willing to stake it on this thrilling and potentially revolutionary process. In the end, we know we can come through with stories the readers will be as excited to see as we will.

Hmmm...what a strange and revolutionary notion--a team of comic top-notch comic writers working in unison (sharing each issue by crafting subplots and character beats, and taking advantage of what they each do best) to create what would have been, in essence, a weekly comic. Not surprisingly, when this same writing process was actually tried, half a decade later, with DC's 52, both Morrison and Waid were involved. (Millar was at Marvel by then, and Peyer was pretty much out of comics at that point.) And I think it worked quite well on 52. Far, far better than whatever writing model was used for Countdown (supposedly Paul Dini as head writer an a rotating cast of writers on sequential issues, but I'm not exactly sure that's how it really happened--there seemed to be a lot of editorial influence on the nature of the series--far more than we saw in 52).

It will be interesting to see if Busiek and company can pull of a successful weekly series with Trinity, a comic which is scheduled to hit shelves today. One would think that a weekly series would be incredibly difficult to pull off, but not because of the writing. The drawing is the slow part. The writing should, in theory, take less time. But it doesn't work that way, does it? Everything is always harder than you think it will be, and when Morrison and company proposed collaboration on a weekly Superman series, they had no idea what they were in for. Ask Morrison or Waid if they'd ever do what they did on 52 again, and see what they say (note: it's not happy thoughts about ever doing anything of the sort, ever again).

The Superman 2000 Pitch: The Concept

In 1998, Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Mark Millar, and Tom Peyer pitched something called "Superman 2000: A plan to revitalize the Superman franchise for the newmillenium." The pitch was rejected, for mysterious reasons, although Mark Waid discussed why he was forbidden from writing Superman in a 9/29/2000 interview with Warren Ellis:

WARREN ELLIS: I've been given to understand that when you and Morrison were turned down in your bid to take over SUPERMAN, you were informed that, in fact, you would NEVER be allowed to write the Superman books. What did that mean to you personally? What is the condition of your relationship with DC and Paul Levitz following it?

MARK WAID: What did that mean to me personally? You cannot IMAGINE the frustration. No, I mean it. You think you can, but you can't. The one job I'd been working towards my entire life--and I'd just been told point-blank that not only could I never have it, but I couldn't have it for any reasons that were just or made any logical sense--at least in part because someone at DC had point-blank asked me for a proposal and then failed to speak up when another someone decided I was simply crusading for a job that wasn't available, violating the freelance code, and acting in bad (and punishable) faith. Doesn't matter that that wasn't true; since when do truth and politics go hand in hand? Welcome to the real world.

Presumably the zeal with which Waid and the others pursued the job of revamping Superman caused such friction that the proposal was summarily rejected, even though it was filled with great ideas (some of which Morrison has since used or altered for his current All-Star Superman series). But as Waid points out in the interview, this was a pitch that was requested by DC editorial, and not just an example of freelance gunslinging.

According to the pitch, the proposed revamp was intended to, "honor each of Superman’s various interpretations and to use internal story logic as our launching pad for a re-imagined, streamlined 21st century Man of Steel. The 'cosmic reset' notion has been replaced by a policy of 'include and transcend' with regard to past continuity." "Include and transcend" has been a hallmark of Morrison's approach to superhero work--just look at his current Batman run where all of Batman's past adventures are considered part of the character's psychic background--and it's almost exactly what he's doing in All-Star Superman right now. If accepted, the "Superman 2000" idea would have been an all-inclusive continuity embrace, instead of a traditional "white-event" reboot (as we've seen repeatedly in The Legion of Super-Heroes--although perhaps Geoff Johns's "Legion of Three Worlds" is an example of the "include and transcend" philosophy, or at least the "include" part. Whatever the reason, the Morrison/Waid/Millar/Peyer Superman was never meant to be, and it's too bad, because it could have possibly made the mainstream Superman titles more interesting and important than they had been in years.

Here's a small example of the type of approach the "Superman 2000" team would have used, taken from the section of the pitch labeled "The Concept":

The key to the initial concept lies in a radical but organic reversal of the currently accepted logic of the Superman/Clark dynamic.

In our interpretation, Clark Kent isn’t what Superman really IS, Clark is what Superman WAS--until he reached his teenage years and began to realize what all those years of soaking up the Kansas sun had done to his alien cells. Superman’s story here is seen as the tale of a Midwest farmer’s son who BECAME AN ALIEN shortly after puberty. Suddenly young Clark doesn’t just know his Ma and Pa through sight, touch, sound--he knows the exact timbre of their pulse rates, he can look at their DNA and recognize their distinctive electrical fields and hear the neural crackle and release of chemicals which tell him they’ve changed their minds about something.

And he can do all this, he can scan the entire environment in an INSTANT, with levels of perception we can only imagine.

That’s gonna turn anyone’s head around a little.

This is someone who by any stretch of the imagination is no longer just human--except for the part of him, the ethical, humanitarian base nurtured by the Kents, which forms the unshakable foundation for everything Superman is BUT WHO IS WHAT SUPERMAN CAN NO LONGER BE. Or, in other words not our own, "...who, DISGUISED as Clark Kent, fights a never-ending battle..."

As originally conceived by Siegel and Shuster, Clark becomes a cherished, poignant masquerade: mild-mannered, thoughtful, humane Clark. When Superman is being human, Clark is his template but this is a being no longer confined by gravity or pain or mortality and his experiences as Superman are experiences on a level of existence we can only hope to imagine.

So, in order to accomplish the transition to this new take on Superman more easily, our rationale is this: it’s been established that Superman’s powers are a result of solar energy saturating his cellular batteries. It’s even been suggested that his powers will increase through time as he absorbs more of our sun’s radiation.

And that’s just what happens.

As part of his alien maturation process, Superman crosses a second, critical threshold of solar radiation absorption and suddenly wakes up three times more powerful and three times smarter.

This changes everything.

Not a radical change of the status quo, but an interesting enough approach, isn't it? It wasn't just about making Superman more powerful, it was about making Superman more aware. Transcendent.

UPDATE: Chad Nevett just posted a different bit from the "Superman 2000" pitch over on his blog. Read what he has to say about a Vegetarian Superman HERE.