Continued from Part 1Are there any plans for Black Canary or any of the other heroes that we saw on the show?
Yes.
Can you say any more?
We’ll get to a lot of people we’ve met before. Episode 3, for instance, has someone we haven’t seen in a few years returning, and what he’s been doing with his life.
There will be some League action, with the League assembled, towards the end of the season, but as we go, there will be little bits and pieces and cameos and stories, here and there.
You know that brings up the elephant in the room. What are the chances of Batman or Wonder Woman showing up?
That IS an elephant, and all I can say to that is that I haven’t had any requests for characters declined so far.
What is the deal with Hank Henshaw coming in for the first arc, and how does he factor in to the Smallville universe?
That’s another one of those things. It’s an odd thing, just with spoilers and solicits, especially, and the weekly nature of what we’re doing with the book. I know when we used to have episodes come out, people would flip out when the episode description, which was just a paragraph, gave away too much about an episode. So, it’s really hard with the weekly turnaraound, to say one thing now, because the print version of that comic doesn’t come out for weeks afterward. You kind of have to balance how much you say and how much you don’t.
Digital-wise, I want to say Hank enters the story in the second three weeks, and then he’s around for the rest of the premiere, but his print issue comes in like two months after that. So Hank’s definitely there. He’s got a reason for being there. Like the current real world climate, the space program is on its way out. He’s someone who used to have a purpose within that as an astronaut, and he has found new purpose thanks to one of our players, coming out of the events of the first ten pages of the book.
Speaking of those first ten pages, it’s obvious that at some point that we’re going to see Smallville’s Superman in a costume, flying. How did it feel for you to see that for the first time, when the artwork began coming in?
It was great. We tried to make as much of a moment as we could, of a head to toe reveal, of Clark in his slightly new Superman suit. It’s not specifically the Superman Returns style suit that we had seen frozen in the Fortress and on that wee little CG Clark in the finale.
There’s a very easy reason for why he’s changed his suit, which literally is a line between Lois and Clark at the top of Week 2. I think it makes total sense.
It’s great. We do it as much as we possibly can. Everyone’s been waiting for so long to see Clark in the suit, so now that we can do it, we’re going to stretch our legs with that.
Are there any stories in the Season 11 comic that are things that you wish you could have done on the series itself, or pitched for the series itself, but couldn’t because of budget or actor constraints?
Yes. Not a ton, because I do want to keep it as independent as possible. I certainly don’t want to implement stories that were put together by my fellow writers, and then not have them involved with it, because I think that’s wrong. But there are two that I had wanted to do for a long time, one of which will be Episode 3. The other will probably be somewhere further down the line. They were ones that literally for two reasons, for actor availability or for budget, we couldn’t do. So those will kind of pop back up.
We’re almost done! Fly on to Part 3 of 3!