With the San Diego Comic-Con cancelled for 2020, they have put together a virtual convention. Replacing the usual DC panel, for Friday July 24 they live-streamed a panel in which all of the guests appeared via Zoom (or something similar).
Per the Comic-Con website, here's the panel description:
Whether its Batman's final showdown with The Joker, Wonder Woman taking on new adventures, or the Man of Steel taking facing threats from Metropolis and across the cosmos, DC is the place to be for the best storytellers lending their talents to the World's Greatest Super Heroes! Don't miss your chance to hear first-hand from these comic book legends in the making as they give you the inside scoop on what's in store for Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and other DC heroes and villains!DC talent to appear: Vita Ayala, Morgan Beem, Brian Michael Bendis, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Grace Ellis, Mitch Gerads, Clayton Henry, Mikel Janin, Tom King, Jim Lee, Ryan Sook, Maggie Stiefvater, Mariko Tamaki, Tom Taylor, Ram V, and Brittney Williams.
Editor
Jamie Rich was the moderator. In the second segment (Legion, Swamp Thing, Wonder Woman, and Superman) were Mariko Tamaki, Mikel Janin, Brian Michael Bendis, Ryan Sook, and Vita Ayala (as "Vita A"), starting around 14:45. You can watch
the entire panel on YouTube.
Below is a verbatim transcript and not edited, so it sounds more conversational than it would if it were in print.
Spoiler alert: there were no spoilers for the Legion, just talk among Bendis, Sook,and Janin about how there are lots of characters and it's a fun book to work on. There is an interesting bit about Gold Lantern near the end of the segment.
Bendis and Sook were up first in this segment, talking about the Legion.
Rich: Brian, I’ll start with you, you actually have some experience working with a giant cast, tell us what’s going on with Legion of Super-Heroes these days and how you balance all these characters.
Bendis: Well, there’s giant casts, and then there’s Legion of Super-Heroes, it’s a completely different ball park, I mean a big cast like we are in X-Men, it’s still around 6 lead X-Men and there’s a lot of people running around in the background, but with Legion of Super-Heroes there’s like 3 dozen lead characters and each one of them could lead the book, lead the team, has enough story to like anchor a whole book, so for us it’s almost like this giant ensemble, we have to put focus on every character as often as possible, and we keep adding new characters as well. Ryan is a perfect partner for this, anything we come up with he adds, it’s all additive, he always comes up with new stuff. It’s just a matter of for us, making sure every character gets its due. We have this awesome two-part 44-artist Legion jam coming up with issues 8 and 9, that is about focusing on each character going around the whole room, making sure everyone knows who everybody is and what they’re capable of. It’s the craziest thing.
Rich: Ryan, how do you keep them all straight when you’re having to go through the script and trying to figure out who goes where and who belongs in the background?
Sook: I don’t... I have to redraw so much, so much stuff. (Laughs) No, Brian’s a great writer, he writes exactly who needs to be there and I just try to do my best and sort of draw them, though I do have a sort of cheat sheet, it’s four pages long of every single character and their designs so that I can refer back to it. I would have thought that by issue 6 I would know them all, but I still refer back (laughs) and look at them again and again. Yeah, but like Brian said, to keep a huge cast and each character is their own lead, it’s, this legion of artists that’s coming up to draw the Legion of Heroes, it’s super exciting. The characters have come more to life more than they ever have before. I got the benefit of having Mikel [Janin, also in the video chat] draw some of them in issue 4 and they never looked better. And now Kevin Nowlan and Art Adams and Michael Oeming and, God, countless... Yannick Paquette, the characters have come to life like they never have before, and making them real to me. So it’s really fun.
Rich: Speaking of Mikel, you’ve done a lot of characters before, you’ve done Justice League Dark, you’ve done Batman, you’ve just taken over Wonder Woman, how do you adjust to all these characters and keeping them straight?
Janin: Well, every project is very different, so I think it starts really with the writer. Because now that Ryan and Brian are talking about Legion of Super-Heroes, when you start working in that project, you feel so... the passion that those two men are putting in the project, you can feel that they love every little bit of that story, so you feel like you just entered that story. It’s easier to get in the mood of that particular character…. [talks about other stuff]
[skipping everyone talking about their other stuff]
Rich: We have a few minutes left, I want to actually touch base with both Mikel and Ryan, similar questions, but how do you design characters? I want to ask Mikel how you went about designing Liar Liar and Ryan, we’ve got this new character called Gold Lantern coming up in Legion of Super-Heroes, I’d like to know what went into the designs behind that.
Janin: [discusses his work]
Rich: So Ryan, what can you tell us about Gold Lantern?
Sook: Gold Lantern is... he’s kinda become... he’s such a great character, he’s the epitome of all the Lanterns. I mean, when Geoff Johns was bringing out all the spectrum from years ago, the amazing sort of scope that the Lanterns bring, it’s broad, but Gold Lantern refines it all down to this one character, it’s not a Corps, it’s a guy, you know, it’s this one character, and he brings legitimacy to all these emotions being encapsulated in one thing. It’s part of the Legion universe in a way that I think is totally inseparable from it. But designing him was a lot like designing a lot of the other Legion characters, we can take elements… this is a thousand years in the future, there’s nothing withheld, right? So we have all those elements of the Lanterns and all the history that’s there, but to push it a thousand years into the future, make it recognizable, but really pull it as far as we can into the future and let him be a character that’s not bound by the history, but brings that history into an expression that’s totally new in the future. That was kind of the idea of designing him and making him gold – at least, from Brian’s point of perspective, it was just “Is that a Gold Lantern in there somewhere?” It starts like that, this germ of an idea, but all of a sudden it’s like “yeah, that is a Gold Lantern – wait, we’ve gotta know the Gold Lantern.” And when you have characters that evolve and grow as the story and the characters are growing, boy, it really is exciting to design a character like that, because you start with such a blank slate and then you can just refine it as we go forward in the story, it’s really fun.”
Bendis: And we’re really excited about that taking off, you know.
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