[man] All right. Here we go.
Issue 1.
2020 is almost here.
Like, twelve weeks until our first issue comes out.
Arno Stark is Iron Man, and the robots are rebelling.
[sighs] Where do I start? I mean, I don't even have to make this stuff up.
We're living in science fiction. We are in the future. Future. Future.
Hmm, okay. Focus. Focus.
The minute the ball drops, it's 2020. Arno Stark is officially Iron Man!
The future is now.
And... [stammering] what next? What-- What else?
Um... [clicks tongue] Ah, come on, Dan.
You've written comics for almost 30 years. You can do this.
-[Twitter alert whistles] -Ooh! Tweet!
[man] When Stan Lee would talk about Marvel,
he would call it the world outside your window.
Fantastic Four and Peter Parker and The Avengers,
they didn't live in some city with a made-up name that you can't find on a map!
They lived in New York City!
I have written Silver Surfer, She-Hulk and a lot of Avengers.
But most people know me for my ten years on Spider-Man.
I aimed for this.
I wanted this more than anything.
Doing everything you've ever wanted is awesome!
[no audible dialogue]
-Hey. Oh, man. -[cashier] Hey, Dan.
-[Slott] New books out yet? -Yeah.
[Slott] Ah, cool.
Nowadays, my new assignment is
Iron Man 2020, the adventures of Arno Stark.
I get to be the guy who's writing about Iron Man 2020 in the year 2020,
and they picked 2020 because it was a strange future year
we would never ever reach.
But here we are now, and that is a little crazy to me.
[elevator bell dings]
Hey.
[mutters]
Hey!
Wouldn't it be funny if it broke?
-It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. -I love the new digs!
So, ultimately this is a big, crazy action-adventure story
with a new Iron Man and a crazy big threat.
You know, all that goodness.
-The Mighty Marvel Manner. -Yes.
I started reading comics when I was six,
and now as an executive editor, I've got my hands in half to a third
of everything that we're putting out to some degree.
You-- We've been planning this for ages.
We've been seeding this for a very long time.
So I know you've got a lot of ideas and very little actually put together.
[laughs]
-And you need more time to get it done. -I would-- I-- You--
Because it's not good enough and you need more time.
I think I could make it better.
[Brevoort] We use the term "work" loosely when it comes to Dan.
Dan's terrible with his deadlines.
But no--
You'll be the famous writer of Iron Man 2022.
-God! -[laughs]
No pressure at all or anything!
-No problem! -Oh, oh!
[both laugh]
[Brevoort] I've worked with Dan for a quarter of a century.
And fortunately, he's good enough at this that those strengths help
to counterbalance the fact that he is his own worst enemy
when it comes to being able to produce things
on the schedule that they need to be done.
[laughs]
[Brevoort] Absolutely, I want [indistinct] Yeah.
[Slott] You sound like my parents.
[both laugh]
In the 1980s, there was a famous comic book story called Machine Man,
which featured the Iron Man of the future.
With iconic shoulder gears, he was Iron Man 2020.
Both Dan and I were aware that 2020 was coming up.
We thought about, "What if from that story 40 years ago,
we'll introduce a modern-day version of that character?
A modern-day version of Iron Man 2020."
-[typing] -[Slott] Issue 1: "The Future is Now."
Starts like this:
Arno Stark, Tony's smarter and sociopathic brother,
does not see himself as a...
does not see himself as a futurist.
For most of his life, he has seen himself as the future,
and that future is here.
And that future was 2020, and it's here.
Hmm.
He is the one who will unite man and machine
against this extinction event / threat.
The one who will unite--
The one who will u--
[grunts]
The one who will unite...
The Marvel style of writing has changed and evolved over all the decades.
Everyone gets to add to the tapestry,
but very much at the foundation, right at the start,
you're looking at some of the greatest comic book creators of all time.
Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and Jack "The King" Kirby.
[man 2] At that time, in the '50s and '60s,
the big schism in the industry was between the DC Method and the Marvel Method.
Most comics were done full script.
There was a panel description and then the dialogue was written out.
All the artist did was fill in the blanks.
And that led to storytelling that was codified
into this, sort of, plot-heavy structure.
And Marvel just completely revamped that.
[Slott] For a long time, Stan was one of the only writers working in Marvel.
Everyone talks about how Stan created the whole Marvel universe.
The X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Hulk.
One thing after another.
But the only reason he could do that is because he had such talented artists
who could really do the heavy lifting.
He would write up very brief descriptions of what he wanted in the comic.
And then the artist would lay out the whole page
and come up with the way the whole story unfolds.
And then Stan would get the art back and add all the dialogue.
And that all became the Marvel Style of writing. The Marvel Method.
Nowadays, Marvel Method isn't really used at all.
Everyone goes full scripts.
[typing]
I'm one of the dinosaurs. I'm one of the people,
one of the last people, doing Marvel Style.
I want the creators to have fun.
I want the creators to jump in and give you these gifts on the page.
You're gonna have an idea for a story,
but it's always gonna play out a little differently as your co-creator,
your artist, starts to play with the idea.
Normally in a comic book, you have multiple people working on the art.
You have a penciller, who lays out the whole book.
And then you have an inker, who comes in and embellishes it.
And then the colorist comes in and adds all the color.
But our artist for Iron Man 2020 is Pete Woods.
And what makes Pete Woods different is Pete Woods does everything!
Pete Woods is the penciller and the inker and the colorist, all in one!
In his van driving around the country. [laughs]
[Brevoort] These days, our writers and artists live all across the globe.
People in every time zone and every place around the world
are working on Marvel comics and Marvel stories.
All the time, I hope.
That's what they tell me they're doing. I choose to believe them.
In the days of Stan in the '60s, even if you weren't working
in the mythical Marvel Bullpen of the office,
you had to be local to Manhattan in order to bring your work in,
but the Bullpen these days is the world.
Moving into Iron Man 2020, we had to bring a new artist in.
So, we tapped Pete Woods.
[Woods] If there's a character out there in the comic book universe,
I've probably drawn him at least once.
With the technology we have available, I can draw wherever I need to draw.
The opportunity presented itself,
so I decided to just buy an RV and move around the country.
I communicate in pencil and ink and colors.
It's my favorite part of the process.
It's great finally seeing a fully realized page
that has the emotion and the impact that I've imagined it would.
Some artists prefer not to have the weight of telling the story.
But I like to have some stake in the storytelling.
For the first cover, I wanted to do something that pops.
Tom had an idea that he wanted to do a more character-focused cover.
So, I'll noodle around with some character ideas
while I wait for a panel-by-panel breakdown from Dan.
[Slott] One of the things I have to do is I have to make sure
that when all these comics stitch together,
it tells one big epic story. Bah, bah, bah.
[typing]
Every individual chapter needs to be great.
It needs to be edge of your seat. "What's gonna happen next? Whoo!"
But when you get to the whole big picture,
what's the bigger story we're telling?
And I've got some crazy ideas.
I need to know all these different characters
and what they're doing in their worlds.
Riri Williams, Iron Heart, is gonna get her own adventure.
Machine Man, who is a key character, he's crucial to the main story.
Ooh. Dr. Shapiro is too.
Where does it all start? Where do we start?
So, Arno's been around for a while.
What's he been doing? Why does he wanna be Iron Man?
But the real brains behind the outfit is Mark.
Wouldn't say Machine Man is running this whole operation.
There's also Machinesmith.
If it blows up and now, "Oh, no. I can't help Iron Man."
Not that that's going to happen. But it could.
I think we could pull this off.
[typing]
But every idea that I've put in the plot is going to be painstaking labor
from Pete Woods as he has to make it all reality.
Page 1, panel 1:
We open on Arno Stark's recurring dream.
He's a small naked figure floating in space above the Earth,
the only thing standing in the way
between our planet and an unstoppable colossal creature,
something larger than the Earth itself...
[Woods] There's this huge terrifying creature
that's half organic and half machine.
This creature is huge. It's gigantic and it's imposing.
So I wanna have it break the borders of the page
and really give an impression of size.
I like the Marvel Method because it's liberating. It's exciting.
As the writer and the artist, we work together more in tandem...
and that gives me a chance to choreograph things
and have a little more input into a story...
and maybe give my own little twist on it.
People have expectations for character creation.
And I wanted to meet those expectations,
but I also didn't wanna make it look like something we'd seen before.
But sometimes, when I'm behind schedule,
a nice tight script lets me get things done quickly.
The Marvel Method definitely can be more work for the artist
as they're helping write the story.
[Brevoort] All right.
The reason Stan started doing the Marvel Method, quite frankly,
is he didn't really have time to write those full scripts.
This is what I was looking for.
And so, he was leaning very heavily on his artists
to do a lot of the heavy lifting of figuring out all of the incident.
They were as much the writer as Stan was.
There's a classic story in the 1960s.
Stan and Jack Kirby met to talk about their next Fantastic Four story.
And when Jack sends the first issue in,
Stan goes through it, and suddenly there's this page
where there's this guy on a surfboard flying through space.
He calls Kirby up and says, "What's the deal with this guy, Jack?"
And Kirby tells him, "Well, a demigod like Galactus
would have a herald to go before him to scout out planets for him to consume.
I put him on a surfboard.
Kids are into surfing these days. It's a contemporary thing."
And the character took off from there and became the Silver Surfer.
It was not something that was in the original conversation,
but it was something that grew out of Kirby's imagination
and the Marvel Method process.
But this is, kind of, where the larger historical question
of who's responsible for what comes in, and those lines are all very blurred.
These are Pete's initial sketches for the first five pages of Iron Man 2020.
This was my first time seeing Pete's take
on what the extinction event creature was gonna look like.
And, oh, my God, it's gorgeous. Pete Woods nailed it.
That's what's gonna destroy us all, and I totally buy it.
Half of the fun in comics is, you're the writer, write.
Let the artist draw.
Let their imagination go to crazy places.
But then, I saw his initial sketches for the suit designs of Iron Man 2020.
He said, "Here's my first thought about Arno and his suit.
I hate the gears."
[laughs]
Every visual of Iron Man 2020 in any comic book,
it's his most defining thing.
But Pete's like, "I don't like the gears." [laughs] Well, it's--
So, I wrote back to him,
"There's no sidestepping the gears. There's no downplaying the gears.
They're his one signature look.
Doing Iron Man 2020 without the gears
would be like doing a Thor book without the hammer!"
Or just a tiny hammer.
"We only get one chance at doing Iron Man 2020 in 2020.
We've already hinted at the foundation..."
[Woods] I was talking to Dan about it, and he said,
"You gotta have the gears. The gears are iconic."
Originally, I wanted to do something a little different, but I said,
"You know what? I'm just gonna go for it."
I made them even bigger.
I have these big, massive gears on his shoulders.
It's him. It's Iron Man 2020.
He's big, he's bad, and he's got these massive gears,
and you better not laugh at him. [laughs]
[Brevoort] Every once in a while, my e-mail box will ping,
and some new piece of art or some new script will show up.
There's a constant push and a constant pressure
to produce material and get it out the door.
And so, I'm not necessarily editing all of our books.
So I'm overseeing the work of other junior editors
on all of the various titles that they work on.
As an editor, I help with the productions of the books
from their inception to when we get them out the door to the printer.
When we get a script turned in,
that's never the first time we're hearing about this story.
It often starts as a conversation.
Someone out there goes, "Hey, what if we did a story about this?"
And then everyone just starts spitballing, and the snowball gets bigger and bigger.
I love being an editor because I love taking a story and saying,
"How can we take it to the next level?"
This is an outline for Iron Man 2020.
It's really crucial to give notes in the layout stage
because once we move past that and the pages get a little more finalized,
it's harder to go back and make tweaks.
And so the story is just this dramatic thing that evolves in each process.
[Slott] Page 5, panel 1: In the foreground...
[chuckling] This will never get finished.
[softly] I don't know what I'm doing. Help me.
When you have writer's block,
a lot of times it's more about your inner critic going,
"Ooh. I don't think this is good enough."
One of the things that we have now today, which kinda hurts, is social media.
Back in December of 2012...
I killed Peter Parker.
I was the guy who killed Spider-Man.
When that story came out...
fans lost their minds.
It got scary fast.
Social media went insane.
That's what social media is now.
It's an instantaneous way for you to be mad about anything.
More often than not, you're telling the story
that will create some kind of visceral reaction
because someone is that invested.
And you wanna blow their minds. You wanna freak them out.
It's easy to say that in theory, but we're talking about Iron Man here.
Fans could say,
"This is terrible. Oh, my God. What are you doing?"
I want everything to come out and be perfect
as it leaves my fingers onto the page.
[Brevoort] Dan is behind where I need him to be on his various assignments.
I can't really start on issue 2 until issue 1 is solid enough.
I'd needed another writer to do the dialoguing on the book.
So we made the choice to bring Christos Gage in.
Chris Gage is half of my brain. [laughs]
I love plotting stories, but Chris likes scripting.
[Gage] Hello, sir.
-Hey, Chris. How are you, man? -[Gage] I'm doing all right.
[Slott] If deadlines are crunching, Chris is gonna get me across.
[Gage] Tom Brevoort approached me and asked if I could come onboard
and co-write with Dan.
We complement each other well.
The only reason to have co-writers
is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
But, really, you know, I'm Dan's deadline helper.
[laughs]
[Slott] Chris, great you're onboard.
Let me send you the overview for Iron Man 2020.
[typing]
Starts like this. Issue 1: "The Future is Now."
Arno Stark, Tony's smarter and sociopathic brother,
does not see himself as a "futurist."
[Gage] "For most of his life he has seen himself as the future.
And that future was 2020. And it's here."
My job is to come up with dialogue
based on the art that I have here from Pete Woods.
Pete's great with facial expressions, body language.
He's a great storyteller.
[printer whirring]
The approach to dialogue really varies.
I always like to immerse myself into
what the characters sound like, what they've done before.
But with new characters, like Dr. Shapiro, the genius talking cat,
we agree that he should sound like a genius talking cat,
but what exactly does that mean?
Is he talking in complete sentences?
Well, he's a genius, so yeah, probably he is.
But would he be into cat things?
But sometimes I've gone a little too catlike.
[Slott] Chris loves cats. Chris and his wife have tons of cats,
and he lives for cats, and he was writing all these funny cat puns,
and that's not the way I've been writing Dr. Shapiro.
I had to explain to Chris how talking cats work in my mind.
They're not making silly puns or jokes about their fur.
It's selfish. It's self-centered. It thinks the way a cat thinks.
It's one of the times that I end up rewriting Chris,
and then Chris looks at what I rewrote and maybe he'll rewrite it again.
And I'll go, "Okay, now we're on the right path."
Now we're both thinking like a cat, instead of thinking about cat things.
[Gage] You're basically creating the voice for this character,
and you're making it up as you go along.
It's a tightrope to walk, but it's also the fun part of the challenge.
[Woods] It's great to have Chris on the creative team.
Chris is sharp. He communicates a lot with a few words,
and it's always gotta nice little wry twist to it, that I really enjoy.
So after the inking stage, we're ready to move on to color.
The coloring process has evolved over the years.
I like to think of this as a more final step.
When I'm coloring, I like things to look realistic.
I want there to be a familiarity.
And with modern tools,
we can create depth and create effects that we could never have created before.
So we're trying to up our game whenever we can
and make things look as realistic or as fun as possible.
As time's gone by, comics have become less by the seat of your pants.
There's a lot more editorial direction to stories and character creation.
There's a plan that covers the whole Marvel Universe.
[Hama] I started out drawing...
and because of the Marvel methodology, I could barely do a page a day.
It's really difficult to format the storytelling,
draw out the action, and make it work.
And I said, "What's wrong with this picture?" [chuckles]
I think the days of Jack Kirby creating Silver Surfer
out of whole cloth are probably over.
It was done out of necessity,
and that did, to some degree, create some resentment from the artists.
Today, an editor wouldn't accept that loose a plot.
They'd say, "This isn't fair to the artist.
You're asking them to come up with half the story or more."
Dan is one of the few who still does
what we think of today as traditional Marvel Method...
because he learned to write comics here in the early '90s
when that was still the prevailing process.
As Marvel has become a multifaceted media company,
everybody in every other area works full script.
There's a common language that is now spoken throughout all of these divisions.
But as long as there's still strengths
that are associated with the Marvel Method,
people will still be interested in what it can bring
to the creative medium of making comics.
[Gage] Working with Dan in the Marvel Method has made me a better writer
'cause I'm more apt to say, "You know what?
Here's an interesting approach that the artist has taken with this
that maybe I can riff off of and do something differently."
On the very first page, where this cosmic being is coming
and Arno Stark is waking up from this nightmare of it,
for dialogue, Dan didn't specify what to do.
So I was thinking, "How should I approach this?"
Initially, I was gonna be a little bit classic Stan Lee cosmic story line,
with narrative captions.
Dan was like, "That's kinda cool,
but I also want to give a voice to the monster 'cause it's so cool looking."
And he had a great suggestion, which was,
"What if the monster is speaking, and its dialogue,
instead of being in a balloon, is just giant letters across the page."
He didn't tell me what to write, so I wrote my own thing.
"I come. It is time. You cannot kill the ultimate life.
Your destiny means nothing.
You and your world are forfeit, Arno Stark.
Accept your fate."
You think of it as this booming voice that you feel as much as you hear.
It's supposed to convey the overwhelming power and omnipotence of this being
and this overwhelming obstacle that Arno Stark has to face.
With the Marvel Method, it becomes more of a collaboration.
[Slott] The great unsung hero of comics is the letterer.
The last person who's gonna have to make the last changes to the very last second
before the book has to leave house, is Joe Caramagna.
It rhymes with lasagna.
[chuckles]
You're like, "Oh, no."
The way they lay out the lettering balloons
forces the eye to flow through the page the right way.
It should feel very intuitive whenever you pick up a comic,
if they know what they're doing, and Joe knows what he's doing.
Joe is fantastic.
[Caramagna] Because Dan works in the Marvel Method,
I'm usually waiting longer than I am from everyone else.
If I have no script, I'm just looking at art and there's nothing I can do.
Oh, yeah. Joe is the person I feel most guilty about.
By the time I get the script from Dan,
it's usually about two days before the book has to go to press.
I'm always sending a text or e-mailing, begging and pleading,
"Someone please send me some script." [chuckles]
[Slott] Pages 18 and 19, panel 1:
Big panel stretching across the entire top half of both pages.
This is an establishing shot, a big reveal in our introduction to the 13th floor.
It's a futuristic landscape, meeting place,
hangout, and safe harbor for all robots.
[Woods] Humans exist in an organic world.
What if these non-organic beings built in a way that was more nature-like?
[Gage narrating]
[Slott] Panel 4: Mark One turns around,
and we can see that it's our newest version of the Mark One Iron Man suit.
He says that he goes by the name Mark One now.
Mark One's voice sounds like Tony Stark.
Wait. [babbles] Okay, wait.
The problem-- The problem is, this isn't meant to be read aloud.
It's like IKEA instructions.
It tells you how to build your Fjordenbach.
Close up on Mark One. We see Stark...
[Gage] Humans might have created us, but they can't restrain us.
[Woods] It's a source of drama to me and excitement.
Anything like that just makes the page more fun to do.
-[lights buzzing] -[machine rattling]
[man 3] There aren't many print shops in the United States
that can handle the quantity of work
and the quality of work that Marvel requires.
Cyan, magenta, black and yellow.
They're all printed on top of each other to get this imagery.
It's not until Marvel prepares the files and then sends them to my team,
that we're ready to print the Marvel work.
[Ballesteros] We're in the final stage of the process.
We go through and we check it against the script,
making sure that the story makes sense,
and if there's anything that's lacking clarity, adding it in.
So it's really important in the lettering stage
to catch these kind of mistakes for clarity.
Well, I just got the notes back.
So, let's see what needs to be done next.
If my deadline is 6:30 p.m. to deliver a book to the printer,
I could still be getting notes at 6:15. Like, that's how close we cut it.
After that's all done, I export a PDF and send them to the printer.
[Slott] Hey!
-[Slott] Hey, hey, hey, hey. -[fans cheering]
-How's it going? -[fan 1] Hello.
[Slott] Hello.
Come on in. Right down that aisle.
That works too.
[fans chattering]
[chuckles]
-[Slott] Thank you very much. -Thank you so much.
-Thank you. -[Slott] Thanks. Bye.
-Hi. -[fan 2] Nice to see you again, Mr. Slott.
The big event today is a signing of Iron Man 2020 with Dan Slott,
a comic writer that I have long admired
and never had a chance to actually meet in person until today.
-[fan 1] Can I get a picture with you? -Yeah, sure.
Yeah, ready? Whoa!
[fan 1] I started reading comics with Dan Slott.
-[Slott] You got it? All right. -[fan 1] Awesome.
I'm just gonna be honest. The comic book community
is one of the most welcoming communities I've ever been in.
[Slott] ...with other characters and see if any of them...
[fan 1] These superheroes are so inspiring to me.
They show us that we can be the very--
Like, the human race can be the very best we can be.
Mr. Slott, that's all I needed to hear. Thank you so much.
-Have a wonderful day, my man. -You too.
-[fan 3] Hi, Mr. Slott. -Hi, how's it going?
I promised my son to meet him because he's the author of the Spider-Man,
when he was growing up, that made him fall in love with Spider-Man.
I just wanted him to have that experience.
[laughs, chattering]
-[fan 3] Thank you for coming, man. -Aw, thanks.
I hope you like Iron Man 2020.
Part of the fun of working in comics, is we're all telling our own stories,
and we're all getting to play with these great toys.
This is like the greatest medium in the world.
It's pictures and words together to tell a story.
You get to imagine. You get to dream for a living every day.
We escaped into this world and these characters were our friends.
[Ballesteros] When I was introduced to the world of it,
I just fell in love so quickly.
And it's been amazing seeing people engaging with what we put out there
'cause that's what it's all about.
[Woods] We just, kind of, gelled. We, kind of, came together on it.
We ended up with something, hopefully unique, that readers will like.
[Brevoort] We had the best of what everybody's doing,
all at once, onto the page, and into this comic.
A lot of that is an outgrowth of the way in which this book was done.
[Slott] What came out of it was an energy.
Very few comics are done using the tried and true Marvel Method.
[Lee] I love working with these talented artists.
It was a collaboration that was so exciting,
to discuss a story and, a few days later, to see it all drawn on boards,
then a month later to see it in a book
and to know that kids are reading these and enjoying them.
[Hama] Marvel always felt like a small town and a family...
[cameraman] This is Jim Boyle on the phone.
-He's off the phone. -Hi.
[cameraman] As you can see, this is all the artwork.
[Hama] ...that overlaid on basic story elements
within the Marvel Universe and made it all click, you know.
You can't manufacture that,
and it shows in the work.
[Slott] So the first issue's done.
So now we just need to do it five more times.
[chuckles]
And all of our lead time is done, is gone.
-But that's part of the magic of comics. -It is.
That, you know, it takes pressure to make diamonds.
[chuckles]
Come with me.
This is cool. You're gonna like this.
It's a new comic day. [gasps]
Ooh. Peter David Hulk. Want that. [chuckles]
[gasps] Tini Howard is doing amazing stuff on Excalibur.
[groans] What else we got?
Aw, look at the cute little Fantastic Four book. I want that.
Ah! There's something here for everybody, as long as it's Marvel. [chuckles]