Recent: Interviews

 

DALE GLASER: A leader of men, a lover of women, and a surprisingly good dancer for a big man. Although actually these days I have a day job where I oversee exactly no one (which I'm pretty content with), I'm extremely happily married, and I'm much better at Guitar Hero than I am at dancing (and I'm only ok at Guitar Hero. On Easy level.)

 

H: What's Your Background?

 

DG: Big family. I'm the oldest of three kids from my parents' first marriage, and I got a step-brother and -sister out of mom's remarriage and a step-sister and half-sister out of dad's. As a kid I was an avid reader of both books and comics and devourer of all other forms of pop culture. I played a lot of D&D and the like in middle school and never really stopped. My writing started ramping up in high school. I majored in English in college.

 

H: Where Do You Live?

 

DG: Although I grew up in New York and New Jersey, I went to college in Virginia and liked it so much I relocated there permanently, in the town of Sterling, which is an interesting little place. It's a suburb of Washington, D.C. which is just far enough outside the public transportation system to be annoying, but which has also seen enough explosive growth in the past ten years to be annoying in a completely different way. It's also too far south to be The North but too far north to be Dixie.

 

H: Why Fan Fiction?

 

DG: I love to write, but I'm not the kind of person who could scribble endlessly in a journal that stayed locked in a drawer and be fine with that. I have an ego and need to know that I'm writing for an audience beyond myself. So a big reason why fanfic appeals is the built-in audience and the occasional feedback.

 

You might as well also ask "why comic book fan fiction" since that's all I've done. No X-Files or Star Wars or Other Licensed Properties fanfic in my portfolio, just comics. Yes, technically, X-Files and Star Wars have had comicbook series. Superhero comics, then. I liked X-Files and love Star Wars, but of all the geeky, cult-ish pop culture things out there superhero comics are up at the top of the list in terms of deep, abiding devotion.

 

So ultimately comicbook fanfic lets me play with a genre that I love, post what I've written with a minimum of fuss, and know that it's being read by like-minded folks who hopefully will be half as amused by my ideas as I am. Which is a pretty sweet way for me to deal with excess mental energy, I guess.

 

 

DG: I do. All kinds. Sometimes I think that I might put too much energy into fanfic and not enough into other pursuits. Maybe that's another answer to "why fanfic?": because it's comfortable and easy and safe. If I have an idea for a Captain America story I can plow ahead with it knowing that it has a certain innate appeal, and by extension, worth. Whereas if I come up with an idea about a Robin Hood-esque drug dealer who lives in a dystopian future where a fundamentalist government has basically outlawed pharmacology and all other sciences, it's hard to convince myself that it's an idea anyone else would want to read about. So I spend my time on the Cap story rather than the original story.

 

But not always. I write short stories every once in a while and have ambitions about getting them published in the paying market. I've made some submissions, but have yet to get any interest, so I continue to plug away every now and then. I'd also love to write a novel and sell it to a major publishing house. I get very torn about that, too, between the part of me that dwells in Geek-land and wants to write heavy sci-fi or fantasy novels, and the part of me that wants to write something more mainstream in hopes of appealing to a wider audience. I have the beginnings of both kinds of novels on various hard drives and flash sticks. I play the lottery in hopes of being able to quit my day job and devote time to finishing them.

 

Oh, and while I'm tooting my own horn, I'll add that I recently was contacted by Palladium Books, which is a roleplaying game company, about a game supplement piece I wrote for their quarterly sourcebook periodical. Apparently they liked it and will be sending me a contract, which is kind of cool. The money's not much, but it's still kind of gratifying, and gives me further ambitions about writing more roleplaying stuff in the future.

 

 

DG: I've loved What If...? since I first stumbled across back issues of it when I was in middle school. There are so many things I love about it as a concept, and it's hard to go through them without turning this into a twenty page thesis, but I'll try. One thing I love is that What If...? stories tend to have a bigger scope, which appeals to me. A single Spider-Man story (and just to be clear, when I say "story" or "issue" I mean either comicbook or fanfic) will cover a relatively brief period of time, maybe one evening swinging around the city looking for photo ops. A Spider-Man What If...? story, on the other hand, might cover months, years, or Spidey's entire career on an alternate Earth. That leads into another thing I love, the idea of really examining cause and effect. Sometimes (not always! I hasten to add) Spider-Man is depicted making a decision that might have consequences down the road, but by the time that point in the road is reached the title has changed writers or the writer has decided no one remembers that old decision or no one cares, and the consequences aren't explored. Whereas What If...? is all about the consequences. The question in the title is abbreviated; it really should be "What would happen if ...?" The best What If...? stories are like little narrative Rube Goldberg machines, where one moment has consequences that affect the next and the next until things end up very different than they did originally. And of course that's Big Draw Number Three: the utter freedom of What If...? stories, where main characters can (and usually do) die, the bad guys can win, and the whole world can basically be reinvented. And then you can start over again in the next issue. I love continuity as much as the next guy, but it is nice to have completely free rein to go wherever the story takes you in a self-contained What If...? universe.

 

H: Your SQUADRON SUPREME (also at AVENGERS2000) is a consistently well-written and engaging series. What makes The Squadron Supreme different from other Marvel superteams?

 

DG: Good question! Firstly, thanks for the compliment. I really enjoy writing the series. I think one of the biggest differentiators between the Squadron Supreme and other Marvel teams is that the Squadron, to some extent, lacks purpose. The purpose of the Fantastic Four is to explore and invent stuff and save humanity from problems that require super-science solutions. The purpose of the X-Men is to achieve Charles Xavier's dream of peaceful co-existence. Alpha Flight defends Canada, the Defenders deal with the weird fringe stuff, Heroes for Hire face off with more street-level threats (and get paid to do it). And then there's Marvel's premier superteam, the Avengers (and all affiliated coastal branches and so on). The Avengers protect the whole world from the threats no single hero can stand against alone. That *was* the purpose of the Squadron Supreme, on their Earth, but at Avengers2000, the Squadron Supreme are on the Avengers' Earth, and can't go back again. They've gone from being not just the premier team on the planet but the ONLY team, to being faces in the crowd on a world with literally hundreds of heroes and dozens of teams. And that's one of the themes I try to address in the series, the notion of making that transition and dealing with it.

 

The other interesting and different thing about the Squadron, to me, is the sheer power level. The Avengers are the heavy hitters, and here's their Avengers2000 roster: Quicksilver, Crystal, Sandman, She-Hulk, Vision and Hawkeye. Which is an AWESOME, solid lineup. However ... I'll see your Hawkeye with my Black Archer, your Quicksilver with my Cyclone, your She-Hulk with my Power Princess, your Crystal with my Doctor Spectrum (that's a stretch, I know, but work with me here), your Vision with my Hyperion and your Sandman with my Skrullian Skymaster. Oh and I'll throw in Falcon and Tom Thumb, to boot. On paper, the Squadron is just about off the charts. I told a friend of mine I was writing Squadron Supreme fanfic and he just wanted to know "How do you make anything a challenge for them when they have Hyperion on the team?" Which is a valid question, and one I like to think I answer in interesting, unexpected ways ... but I'll let the readers be the ultimate judge of that, I suppose.

 

 

DG: Ah, Molten Man. That series really was the victim of incredibly bad timing. When I propped it, I was really excited about it, and the first issue was a blast to write. And then, you know, life happened. I'll spare everyone the gory details of the personal rough spot that I hit shortly after Molten Man #1 hit the web, but suffice to say, it was pretty rough. I found myself pulling back a lot on fanfic at that time, and all of my series suffered for it. I tried to keep banging away at some of the stuff I really felt obligated to continue on: Green Lantern at FauxDC, What If...? at Avengers2000. But my heart wasn't in it. Eventually it got to the point where I wasn't writing any fanfic (or anything else) at all, and in the mean time the Webspinners site that Molten Man was part of stopped producing any content at all, which dimmed my enthusiasm a bit. I'm grateful that Webspinners found an archive home under the CBF Treasury, because I'd hate for Molten Man #1 to disappear into the ether forever. But, the Treasury doesn't really support updates, and so even as I have eased back into fanfic after the Bad Times of 2003, and into the full head of steam of 2008, I still haven't tried to get back into the Molten Man mindset. Can you hope that someday it will continue? I suppose there's always hope! No definite plans at the moment, but ... maybe somewhere down the road.

 

 

DG: For a long time after I started Bad Blood I really wanted to talk about where it came from, and now that I finally have a platform which isn't totally self-indulgent, I find myself getting the tiniest bit of stage fright. However, let me take a deep breath and I will, at risk of ruining the title's reputation forever, take you BEHIND THE BLOOD ... So, you know all those references in the answers above to D&D and Palladium RPGs and stuff like that? When I was in college I was in a roleplaying group that played the Mayfair Games DC Heroes system. We played a long-running campaign for years. I'll give you three guesses what the name and general make-up of our team was. Those were good times! Everyone came to the table with good characters and played them well, the game master came up with (mostly) intriguing plots, and all in all I have a lot of fond memories from those dorked-out days.

 

 So a few years later I was surfing the web while bored and going through the message forums at the website for Wizard magazine. Someone had posted a message recruiting writers for a new fanfic site, and when I read that it was the first time I had ever heard of fanfic. This was 1999. So then I started searching out fanfic and I ran across some sites like Marvel Volume 1 and FauxDC. Suddenly I really wanted to be a part of this fanfic scene, but I found the whole "Dibs" aspect a little difficult to work around. Yes, I was "that guy", bitching about how "all the good characters were taken" - although to my credit I was bitching under my breath, not flaming people on the mailing lists or anything.

 

But luckily things clicked in my brain when I realized that the Bad Blood campaign had been set in a pretty-close mainstream DC Universe, and I could write Bad Blood fanfic for a DC fanfic site. Also luckily, at the time I had no idea that a lot of gamers think that their own roleplaying campaigns would make the best fanfic, when in fact it's pretty hit or miss. What I did know was that the Dragonlance novels I had read and loved in high school were supposedly loosely based on a roleplaying campaign, so that gave me hope. In what was probably a wise move, I didn't mention anything about how cool and fun and rad my college roleplaying group was and this one time where I totally rolled double-10's for a critical hit on Brainiac! ... when I submitted a proposal to FauxDC. I just said, "Here's an idea which involves original characters, let me know what you think."

 

Of course, funny enough, it almost didn't see the light of day at FauxDC, because of entirely valid concerns about original content outweighing DC content and diluting the site. Clay Arceneaux asked me if I'd be interested in getting any of the Big 7 titles back on track to balance things out, and I said I could probably do something with Green Lantern, since that's one of my all-time faves. So here we are, just shy of nine years later, and I've co-written 22 issues of Green Lantern at FauxDC and written 29 issues of Bad Blood. Good times.

 

 

DG: I suppose the cat's out of the bag on this now. At the risk of further ruination, I will elaborate. I played the Bad Blood campaign for about two years, the 94-95 and 95-96 school years. We played a lot in that span, sporadically in 96-97, and then retired the characters. There were quasi-sequel campaigns, where we might reference previous events, after that. But basically by the time I wrote Bad Blood #1 in April of 1999, I had had a notion of the characters in my brain for about five years.

 

And the key thing is, I had VIVID notions because I was lucky to have played with such a good group. I don't think the idea of writing Bad Blood would have been as appealing if the gaming had only been so-so. I know some gamers have reputations as number-crunching hack-n-slash munchkins, and others as stunted adolescents who think the vampire Lestat is as emotionally complex as a character gets, but my friends were very cool and very smart and very creative and the chemistry in the game was great. The chemistry is probably the reason why those adventures stuck in my head for the intervening years.

 

The way everyone inhabited their characters is also a reason why I find Bad Blood fairly easy to write. I can picture the way that More or Pierce or Valence would react to a situation because I remember so well the way those characters were handled in games. And that makes it a pleasure to write because it gives me an excuse to think about those goofy college game sessions. I'm still friends with and in pretty regular contact with all the guys from that gaming group, and every once in a while I email them to let them know there are new Bad Blood issues available online, and they're always happy to hear it, so that's especially gratifying.

 

It's also nice that no one gets offended by the liberties I've taken with the series. In the game we all got along well and tended to focus on the positive. In fanfic, I can exaggerate some of the negative qualities of the characters a bit more for dramatic purposes.

 

At this point you may be wondering which of the characters I played in the game. I think it's fairly obvious, but maybe not. Let the speculation begin!

 

 

DG: Technically I have the series outlined and plotted through issue #40 at the moment. I look at the series in terms of big arcs. The first thirteen issues were one big arc with a big finale. Then issues 14 through 25 were another big arc, where hints dropped in the earlier issues saw payoffs at the end. So I'm just a few issues into the third arc, which will culminate around issue #40. I also have some loose ideas that don't fit into the current arc at all, and therefore will have to wait until future issues beyond that. How many issues will there be beyond that? Who knows? I'd like to get up to 50. Hell, I'd like to get up to 100! If I go by the same average pace I have been going, though, by the time I hit issue #60 I'll be 42 years old. (I'm 33.) And I suspect my life may have changed by then and fanfic may not be such a priority. We'll see. I can say definitively that as of right now I have no plans for "the LAST Bad Blood story".

 

Incidentally, while I've taken some liberties with the characterizations in Bad Blood, I've taken even more liberties with the plots. It's not a recap of the old college campaign. There are some places where it's very close to what happened in the game. (See issue #1, which in retrospect is not one of my favorites. Doesn't it just *feel* like the obligatory intro adventure?) There are other places where I changed things somewhat so that it would make more sense or flow better, and there are other places where the plot is 100% from my own imagination. So there's no limit of how long the series can keep going, and it's not as if I'm going to run out of material. The series is already a weird hybrid of memories and new ideas, and as such it's pretty open-ended.

 

 

DG: Not as much as you might think. Of course it would be nice to get more attention - again, half of the "why fanfic?" answer is "my ego demands attention!" But at this point I know that I shouldn't expect showers of accolades for anything I write, whether it's solid-but-nothing-special based on Big Two characters, or not-much-else-like-it-out-there based on my own (and my friends') characters. And that's ok. I still enjoy writing the series, and when I get desperate for attention I can always email Ron or Glenn or Scott or Chris or Andrew from the old roleplaying group and say "New Bad Blood - check it out!" and I know there's at least five sets of eyeballs on it besides my own.

 

The funny thing is, every once in a while someone from the fanfic community will make an offhand comment to me about Bad Blood in an email or something, like, "oh, yeah, I love it, when's the next one coming out?" Which kind of surprises me, because I'm like "if you love it so much how come you've never posted a review of it or anything?" And then I think about all the fanfic series that I love and look forward to new issues of, which I've never posted reviews for, and it's much less surprising. Barry Reese had some nice things to say about Bad Blood when it first debuted, and good old "Doc" Skorupa posted a cool review when the first arc ended in #13, and you, Derrick, had some very kind words for it in your Notebook back in the day. So I've almost gotten to the pont where I can convince myself that everyone knows about Bad Blood by now, they just don't talk about it much in public forums. And I can't get too bent out of shape about that. Maybe they feel like there's nothing else to say?

 

I can truthfully say that the attention that Bad Blood does get, in and of itself, is really cool and makes me happy. But I don't want that to be construed as me saying I *don't* want people to lavish attention on it! What I'm getting is good, but more is more! If anyone out there wants to shout from the cyber-rooftops about how much they dig Bad Blood, don't let me stop you!

 

 

DG: I read on a blog recently (the Absorbascon, in fact) that the difference between DC and Marvel is the kind of stories they grew out of - DC from the classic pulps, and stories about detectives and criminals; Marvel from sci-fi monster stories and teen romance. I think that really hits the nail on the head, when you think about the Big Two in broad strokes.

 

But I try not to write in broad strokes. I approach each title I write differently and I try not to let Marvel "flava" versus DC "flavour" have too much undue influence. For example, I wrote JLA for a while at FauxDC, and I'm writing Squadron Supreme at Avengers2000 now. (On the off chance that anyone isn't aware, the Squadron are a bunch of analogues of the JLA.) When I wrote JLA, I wasn't thinking of it as a "DC book". But I was heavily influenced by Grant Morrison's then-recent run on the book, and I was trying to emulate that style - crazy antagonist concepts pushing the superhero tropes to the limit, peppered with quippy dialogue. Honestly, I don't think I was riotously successful in that, but that's where I was coming from. In Squadron Supreme, I'm coming at it from a very psychological angle (I'll be eternally grateful to Jason MacAskill, who launched the title, for leaving behind the psychiatrist character of Dr. Napoleon Gentry for me) with some classic Marvel villains as foils. It's not that I think Marvel is a more psychologically rich universe. I think as time has gone by the two universes have become more similar than dissimilar. I'm especially fond of the corner of the DC Universe that's sometimes been called the "Ostranderverse" and which was home in the 90's to more psychologically-driven titles such as Manhunter, Suicide Squad, Checkmate, Hawk & Dove, etc. Bad Blood definitely takes place in the Ostranderverse, literally in the sense that it's set in Louisiana near Belle Reve, home of the Suicide Squad, but tone-wise as well.

 

Honestly the hardest part of switching back and forth is keeping two separate continuities straight. I just started writing Ghost Rider at Marvel2000, and if I decide to use Darkoth the Death Demon, I have to pause a second to recall if he really was a Fantastic Four villain or if he's actually from Jack Kirby's Fourth World ...

 

 

DG: I think I have a pretty good ear for dialogue. I can write real people that sound like real people, and I can also do dialogue for everyone from Asgardians to Zamarons. I try to think outside the box and bring as many creative ideas to the table as possible, whether it's original characters (and I can claim some! they're not *all* based on other people's roleplaying characters!) or new scenarios or plot twists or what have you.  I think I'm long-winded to a fault, and I love big 25-cent words. I could really use a good editor most days.

 

 

DG: Besides the abundantly obvious roleplaying games? I love movies and music, and still enjoy going to the cinema and live concerts despite my advancing age, rising ticket prices, and these damn kids everywhere. I do seem to be developing a greater interest in history than I ever had before, though, so maybe that curmudgeonly tendency balances things out a bit. I love to travel - Las Vegas is one of my favorite destinations (gambling, drinking and people-watching being high on my interests list as well).

 

 

DG: Weekday: I wake up around 6:20 and get ready for work. I have about an hour and a half commute each way encompassing bus and train, so I read a lot, about a book a week. (Right now it's Catch-22, which is so good I'm mad at myself for never having read it sooner.) Get to work about 8:45 - I'm a government contractor working on web design for Defense Department agencies. I spend part of the day working on whatever I'm assigned, but the government moves at a rather slow pace so my assignments only trickle in. The rest of the day I spend playing on the web and writing fanfic - your tax dollars at work, folks! I head home at 5, walk the dog (my wife walks him in the morning) and either start making dinner while I wait for my wife to get home or sit down to the dinner Mrs. Glaser has already made if she beat me home. (She's a veterinarian and works odd hours, early one day, late another.) Then we watch TV, often of the "on DVD" kind. (Right now, "Firefly".) One more walk for the dog at 10 and then in bed by 11.

 

Weekend: Sleep in a bit more, run errands, read comics, play video games, go out to dinner with friends. Alternatively, road trip to visit family.

 

I know. Thrillsville. No wonder I feel the need to write endlessly about alien invasions, demonic overlords, and the like.

 

 

DG: There are tons of people on the fanfic scene whose work I love and respect, but I have to give props to Paul Daimler at FauxDC. Because I know people will be all like "Paul Who?" Paul only writes at FauxDC (as far as I know) and doesn't really hang out on the Heroes list or anything. But he consistently produces an issue each of Power Girl and Supergirl every month, and they are really good. I know DC will always be neglected in favor of Marvel sites, and as a result Paul may never get the attention he deserves, but I'm doing my best to get people to take notice.

 

 

DG: By boxers do you mean professional pugilists? Or the large breed of dogs? And by briefs do you mean legal filings? Or ... oh, I'm on to you, you cheeky monkey. The answer is boxers, and I'm glad you left out "bikinis" as an option so I don't have to go into an embarrassing period in my life where the girl I was dating had certain preferences which ... you know what, I've said too much.

 

 

DG: "Should" is such a strong word. But as a parting fun fact: I have a pirate-themed bar in the basement of my house. If there's anything else you think you "should" know about me, feel free to drop me an e-mail via badblood51 @ hotmail.com. I (almost) always write back!

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