IGN

IGN For Men Interview: Kevin Smith

We catch up with the director of Dogma, a certified comic book junkie

July 23, 1999


As writer/director of the award winning Clerks, the dubiously acclaimed Mallrats, and the critically honored Chasing Amy, Kevin Smith is known to the world at large as the preeminent king of the '90s indie film scene. But Smith has been leading a secret double life which few, aside from his rabid circle of fandom, know about. While Smith makes rent off of writing and directing movies, he's simultaneously been making a little extra beer money writing comic books on the sly.

Comic books? Yeah, I said comic books, which shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Smith's cinematic wares. Take a gander at Mallrats again. The opening credits featured artwork drawn by some of the top names in comics - Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti (who Kev would team up with on Daredevil), Mike Allred (who not only supplied the Bluntman & Chronic artwork used in Chasing Amy, but recently illustrated the Bluntman & Chronic story in Oni Double Feature number 12), Jim Lee, and Adam Hughes.

Not only that, but the flick also featured a cameo from Stan "The Man" Lee, the lord god of the Marvel Comics' bullpen, the very man responsible for creating Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, Daredevil (which Smith would come to write), and numerous other icons of the comic book realm. As for Chasing Amy, hell, the film's main characters were all comic book creators. To say that Smith is obsessed with comic books is no lie (the man is so into comics that he even purchased the local comic shop in his hometown of Red Bank, New Jersey and re-christened it Jay & Silent Bob's Secret Stash).

But I digress. For the past year and a half, Smith has been penning the tales of Daredevil for Marvel Comics (his run on the series ended this summer with issue number 8). He also crafted the scenarios for two Clerks comic books, a Jay & Silent Bob adventure which appeared in Oni Double Feature number 1, a four-issue Jay & Silent Bob mini-series, and a Bluntman & Chronic (the comic creations of Banky and Holden in Chasing Amy) adventure, all for Oni Press Comics. But wait, there's more. This past April, at the annual WonderCon in Oakland, California, Smith snagged one of the comic book industry's ultimate honors by winning the 1999 Harvey Award (sort of the comic book industry's answer to the Oscars and Golden Globes rolled into one) for Best New Talent. Top that off with the fact that Smith's Silent Bob character was turned into an action figure toward the end of 1998 and you've got one dude who's seriously livin' out the fanboy's wet dream.

Smith is currently taking a hiatus from the rigors of comic book writing (although he has hinted at a comic book adaptation of his as-yet-to-be-released film, Dogma). Kevin was cool enough to hang out with IGN For Men's Spence Abbott, who grilled him on his descent into the four-color pages of comicdom.

IGN For Men: Are you bummed that your tenure on Daredevil is over?
Kevin Smith: No, I'm relieved because at least I got to tell a story from beginning to end and I made it to the end. I don't feel like I left anything out. I felt all the T's were crossed and the I's were dotted and the arc finished. And quite frankly, I don't have another story in mind, so it was nice to finish that arc and be able to walk away. Besides, that gives me more time to think up another arc. Like, I couldn't imagine being the lone writer on the book for years at a time because I think my stories would begin to suck. I know there's some people out there that think my stories already suck, but it would suck worse if I had to come up with **** all the time. It was nice to do this one because I got to think about it way in advance. So, long story short, yeah, I'm happy that it's actually come to a close.

IGN For Men: Do you think you hit your stride in the eight issues?
Kevin Smith: I think so. I think basically by issue four I was off and running. Like I look at issue one now and I cringe because it's verbose beyond verbose where it didn't have to be. I think I got better at dialoguing as I went along and didn't have to say everything, letting the visuals take care of that sometimes. So I think by number four I felt the books were really, really strong. My writing, at least. I think visually the books were strong from the get-go.

IGN For Men: What are the primary differences between writing a screenplay for one of your films and scripting a comic book character like Daredevil or even turning one your own characters into comic form like the Jay & Silent Bob series for Oni Press?
Kevin Smith: The screenplays for the flicks are very spartan. There's no description whatsoever, 'cuz I figure I'm gonna direct it so I don't need to describe it for anybody 'cuz I'll be there on the day we shoot. The scripts for the Oni stuff are very detailed because those [characters] are my "kids," so to speak, and I like to keep it as close to me as possible and to what I would want to do. I tried as much as possible to "direct" those books. So I'm pretty detailed with [Matt] Wagner (illustrator of the Jay & Silent Bob short story which appeared in Oni Double Feature number one), and with Jim Mahfood (illustrator of Clerks: The Comic Book and Clerks Holiday Special), and with Duncan Fegredo (illustrator of the Jay & Silent Bob four-issue mini-series) and just try and give them as much description as possible to fit into the panels so that I feel like every inch of that book is covered. The Daredevil stuff I left very wide open. It's just a lot of dialogue and then I basically described what was gonna happen within the scene, but that's about it. Joe [Quesada, the artist on Daredevil] then took the script and worked backwards and blocked the entire book out, figured out how many panels per page. Sometimes I'd break it down into panels and whatnot, but my version of panels are way off 'cuz I'm not drawing it and I don't know how it should be laid out. Sometimes I'd wind up with like page nine, 26 panels, and Joe's like "Well, that's not really feasible." Then we'd have to try and break it down. So it's different in as much that I pay a lot more attention to the visual aspects, but not nearly as much as I think a real visual talent would.

IGN For Men: What did writing comics give you that writing films doesn't?
Kevin Smith: In the case of Daredevil, I got to play around with somebody else's character that has a history that's been established over a long period of time. You don't have to go back and tell a lot of back story because it's been done for you years before. That was kind of nice. Stepping into a story already in progress and not having to develop character because it's already been developed.

IGN For Men: Did you consult at all with Stan Lee, seeing as how he created Daredevil, not to mention that you had him appear onscreen in Mallrats?
Kevin Smith: No, never got to talk to him about it. I understand he liked the books, but I haven't spoken to him about it.

IGN For Men: What about the difference between writing an action hero title like Daredevil as opposed to the Jay & Silent Bob and Clerks titles which are definitely more humor oriented?
Kevin Smith: I mean it's a lot different. It's kind of writing from two separate sides of the brain, maybe. I don't know. One is kind of like all you're worried about is the punchline and the joke and making somebody chuckle. And the other is about plot and pacing and making a scene develop. You don't really think about the scene so much when you're writing a Jay & Bob book because you're just thinking about how many jokes, like, "this is funny, this is funny, this is funny." There's a sketchy plot, that as long as you're done telling it within 30 pages you're okay. But when I was working on Daredevil it was more about pacing and plot and laying in seeds of stuff that wasn't gonna pay off for issues down the road, so I was a lot more careful on the storytelling with that title.

IGN For Men: How did you juggle between working on your latest film Dogma and writing the comics? I know that especially with Daredevil, it overlapped with the end of Dogma's filming schedule and then of course you had post production duties to attend to.
Kevin Smith: I didn't juggle it very well and sometimes things were late because of that. It's one of those things that's kind of like, I hope the retailers kind of understand. I know as a retailer I get pissed sometimes when books are late. But at the same time, the books that I do tend to bring a different audience into the comic book market and kind of the trade-off to that is sometimes they're gonna be late by virtue of the fact that this isn't my day job. It's just kind of what I do on the side and I've got to answer to the other job first.

IGN For Men: So you look at the comic book thing as moonlighting then?
Kevin Smith: Oh definitely. Unfortunately writing comic books wouldn't pay the rent, y'know. Unless I was doing it full-time. That's the thing about writing comics. I now know why there are writers who write more than one book ‹ sometimes way more than one book. It's like just not enough to sustain yourself on, I don't think. I get a pretty decent wage over at Marvel, but of course it's not about how much I get paid, it's just the idea of doin' it. But if I had to live off it? I mean, I'd have to write a few others books, too, just to kind of make ends meet, I think.

IGN For Men: Dogma is essentially the first film you've written and directed which doesn't have any comic book references in it. Yet given the subject matter ‹ renegade angels, foul-mouthed apostles, machine gun toting Jay & Bob ‹ it certainly appears to lend itself well to the comic book milieu. Can we expect a comic adaptation of the film or an ongoing series?
Kevin Smith: I think we're gonna do a one-shot that Scott Morse [writer/artist of such titles as Soulwind, Revolver, as well as art director for Hanna Barbera's Cow and Chicken cartoon series] is gonna be painting. It's gonna be a Bartleby and Loki [the characters that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon portray in the film] kind of 50-to-60 page one-shot which tells their story before the movie, from the dawn of creation all the way up to the flick. I never want to do an adaptation of the movie, cuz what's the point? Everyone has seen it. I remember reading the Star Wars adaptations as a kid and it was just, "what is the point, really?" Let's just go watch the movie or at least tell a brand new story. That's the mindset I'm in. The closest I'll come to adapting, though, is there's a book I'm putting together with the Oni Press guys which is a sequence that was cut out of Clerks. We didn't shoot it because we didn't have the money and it was too involved. So now we're gonna do it in comic book form. We're callin' it like Clerks: The Lost Scene. (Editor's note: Clerks: The Lost Scene comic is slated to hit stores this August.)

IGN For Men: You've kind of become the indie king of all media. You've conquered the cinema, the comic book realm, you've had an action figure modeled after your Silent Bob character and you're in negotiations for a Clerks animated series. What's next?
Kevin Smith: Time to take a ******* break, just to relax and drop out of view for a little while. I think I'm gonna finish up the stuff I've already committed to and then take a little break, 'cuz I just don't want people to get tired of me. Thankfully, what brings people in, I think, in terms of my comic stuff is the novelty of it and what keeps them in is that they like it. It's like actually kind of good and if you like the movies you really dig the books. But I don't want that to go away. I don't want to become the guy that is putting out the books for the sake of putting out books and not about the story anymore and not about the quality of what's inside the books. So I'm gonna take some down time and think about what's next and then go back into it.