Marv Wolfman Q & A- Superman Returns: The Videogame

Marv Wolfman got his start writing comic books and since has written for movies and TV shows, and has created many characters including The New Teen Titans and Blade. He recently teamed up with lead writer Flint Dille and EA Tiburon to work on Superman Returns: The Videogame . We had a chance to ask him some questions about writing comic books, Superman, and what it was like working on the new game.

You've created and worked with so many characters throughout your career, it's really quite impressive?
MW: If you live long enough, I guess you can get it done.

Oh come on, it's more than that.
MW: Well, I love this. I think that the real world is too much of a problem, so I'm making it correct in my version of it.

It's great that you have an outlet for that and that others get to enjoy your original characters and worlds?
MW: Thank you, it's really been such a pleasure since the Internet and email have become so widely available, because previously fans sent letters, and they tended to communicate more about the stories, and stuff like that. Now I get emails directly to me that are really warm, and heart-fulfilling, and they talk about the different books and how they hit them at the right age?how much it meant to them at an age when they were struggling?at 13, 14. It's been an absolute thrill. More now than in the earlier days because?you know what it is? It's work! You're sitting down there, and even if it's fun work, it's work. The struggle is making the story work. To me there's no difference if I'm doing an issue of Teen Titans or if I'm doing a novel, or a TV show, or a movie, or a videogame. It's all the same to me in that it's all a struggle to make the story work. The fun comes when you get the finished product.

You've been very character-focused in the stories you've worked on throughout your career. Is that challenging to do in the comic book world?
MW: The way I like to say it is: by the time someone has read their 5 th or 6 th comic book, they've seen every scenario and every fight scene. What makes a reader want to come back for more is you have to care about the characters. So in the action?or even in the plot, because there's not many original plots?you might add a wrinkle, but generally you're not finding a major plot concept. What you can do is work to make the characters interesting because there are as many personalities and characteristics to draw from as there are people. You have to try not to keep replicating the same thing, which gets hard after a while, obviously. You only know what you know. So the thing that brings a reader in is caring about the characters. And in terms of my work on Superman Returns: The Videogame, I've been a Superman fan since I was five years old. He was the first animated character I saw when I was a kid, and the first comic book I read was Superman.

What is it about Superman as a character that has resonated so well with such a wide audience over so many years?
MW: Well, Superman's been around since 1938, and I think there are different reasons depending on your age? Superman speaks to almost everybody because it's wish fulfillment. We all try to live our lives in certain ways, but he represents the good we want to be. We'd like (if we were that powerful) to want to do good. And to want to be selfless. We know those are the right things to do.

There's also something special about that as Clark Kent? he's sort of meek and mild and quiet, but you know that underneath all that he's got this power to help people. So it's this wish fulfillment, it's Aladdin and his lamp, it's all these stories that resonated first with children, then with adults. It's the belief that if we were capable of doing the right thing, we would. That's not always the way it is in real life, unfortunately, but that's what we'd all like to believe we could be if we had that ability.

So I think to kids, he represents that when you're weak, like Clark Kent , you can still be strong. To adults he represents the type of character that is going to do the right thing, even if nobody is looking. That to me is how we deal with the morality we should all be dealing with. Do you do the right thing when nobody is looking? And that's Superman. We know what the right thing is, but we don't always do it.

So you think Superman is such an enduring character not because he has so many powers, but because he chooses to use them responsibly?
MW: You can take that power, and you can do a lot of different things with it, as dictators have through history. They've taken their power?military usually, or physical?and they've used it for the wrong things. To subjugate people, to hurt people. Superman represents the people who want to help you. Remember, he was born in the depression. The character comes out of the depression, and he's the character that will lift people out of the poverty, out of violence, out of all of that into something special. Every so often we go into that sort of a world again, unfortunately, but that's where the innate goodness of the character comes through. What makes Superman survive over the years is that he's not perfect. He has all this power, but he still worries about things. He still has problems. He's a character who has personal situations to solve, as we all do. But he tries to do his best in all situations. Which is something I think we all would like to do. That to me is the reason why he's been so popular. Because he represents the us we would like to be. Not the us we always are. The powers make it more fun and fanciful, but why he does anything is to do right.

What was it like helping to bring this character to life in a videogame? It must have been challenging to stay true to such a complex character in a game format.
MW: One of the things that EA did that really made it work for me, more than I've seen anywhere else, including in the comic, is the concept of assigning a health meter to the city of Metropolis . In your standard game, you have a character, they have health points, and they die. With Superman it's not just about beating him up. You can, and some of the characters will. But, what Superman tries to do is save people. That's what he's about. He's there to help people and he's there to help the city, which is a character in its own way.

And what EA did, which is really interesting to me because I hadn't seen it done this way, is assign health points to the city. So yeah, Superman could go fight Metallo, who's this giant robot, and he can really smash through him without a lot of problems? But he'd cause a lot of collateral damage. The fact that they came up with this idea, that there were multiple ways to solve the problem, and that choosing the right path gives you more credit, more victory in a sense, (if Superman thinks his way through it and does it with the least collateral damage as possible) made it fascinating for me. That makes it so close to the original mythology of a character who is trying to help others, who's trying to do no wrong (or as little wrong as he can in the midst of fighting somebody else) that I really found it fascinating, and it's something we really hadn't dealt with much in the comic. I think it is something we should address.

If Superman existed in real life he'd be concerned with that as much as stopping the villain. I thought this was an amazing concept to have myself and Flint Dille, who was the lead writer on this project, write different types of scenarios and material because we are given a situation where brute force itself isn't good enough as it is in most games. Generally you just shoot the zombie, beat up the bad guys, whatever. But in this game you have to think a little bit?what's the best way of doing something? And that is so true to the character of Superman.

In a game, the primary thing is the gameplay. Of course the gameplay has to be fun. But one of the nice things we did with this was the story?you're not just playing through the movie, moving through the plot of the film, but adding all the villains from the comic still trying to see the story. The gameplay is vital, but there's still this story element that takes it beyond just Superman fighting all these bad guys. It's all connected really well.

The game comes out Monday November 20 th in stores nationwide. Check back with EA.com for more information.