Jeph Loeb has made his name as a writer in feature films (Commando, Teen Wolf), television (Smallville, Heroes) and, of course, comic books (too many to list). More recently, though, he has found himself in the ultimate position: as Marvel Entertainment's creative guiding force on television, intimately involved in the development of live action and animated TV shows based on Marvel Comics properties. "It's really great," he enthuses with a laugh. "It's the peanut butter getting to play with the chocolate of my brain. They were always two separate worlds -- comics and TV writing -- and now they've collided."
In the following Q&A session, Loeb takes a look at The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, the series that recently concluded its first season on DisneyXD with another year of episodes to come beginning in the fall. Loeb's influence on the show will be felt on the last 12 episodes.
VOICES FROM KRYPTON: My understanding is that you had more influence on the last 12 episodes of the Avengers' second season. What was your impression of the show when you got involved?
JEPH LOEB: I thought it was a really bold endeavor, particularly given that up until that point the only show Marvel had produced was Superhero Squad, which was created in order to skew younger with a very stylized look. The Avengers was, in many ways, Marvel's step into the light that, to be perfectly honest, Warner's animation has dominated for so long in the boys' action adventure land. So to have something that could be compared creatively with the Justice League shows was, I think, the initial concept.
VOICES FROM KRYPTON: In your mind, was the show meeting that goal?
JEPH LOEB: Yes. We see Marvel Animation moving into a style that is more uniquely Marvel, and this is a step in the right direction. I think with Ultimate Spider-Man we'll see a REAL leap forward in terms of where we want to go.
VOICES FROM KRYPTON: Are you saying in comparison to Warners which has had the Bruce Timm style of animation?
JEPH LOEB: Correct. And while we're huge fans of those shows and of Bruce, we also feel like there's a disconnect between Warner's animation and DC Comics; that you don't look at them, at those shows, and think, "Oh, those look like DC comics." What they look like is the style that Eric Radomski, Bruce Timm, Alan Burnett and Paul Dini all put together for Batman: The Animated Series. And it is by no small coincidence now that Eric is the head of our production, and Paul is writing the Ultimate Spider-Man pilot. And if Bruce ever wants to change sides, there's a home for him here as well.
JEPH LOEB: It's like the old saying, I can't tell you what Marvel DNA is, but I can tell you when I see it. So the idea is to try to have something that, for want of a better expression, looks like Marvel, and some of that we're doing by involving Marvel artists in terms of inspiring the designers. I'm not saying the Marvel artists are designing them, but we go to the Marvel artists and we say, "What does your Spider-Man look like?" And it can be an eclectic group of artists. We asked them to show us their Spider-Man, their Peter, their MJ and then we took those images and blew them up in the design room at the animation studio. The designers then sort of soaked it in, as opposed to saying to them, "Draw what spider-Man should look like." So when you look at Ultimate Spider-Man animation, you get a little flavor of each of those things, so it's not uniquely one person's vision, but the kind of vision that is hopefully pure Marvel. And back to The Avengers, I think it's in the right direction and certainly elements of that, but more than anything what makes it as good as it is, is the writing and for that I completely credit [supervising producer] Josh Fine and [story editor] Chris Yost.
JEPH LOEB: The initial concept of the show was doing more long-term arcs and making the show serialized. When I came on board, the feeling was to try to make the shows more standalone. So that's more of what you'll see. It doesn't mean the continuity has changed, it just means more of what it does will be standalone. We didn't give up on antyhing -- it was important that we maintained the continuity throughout, so all of the plotlines are certainly tied up. And we had Chris and Josh with us, so it wasn't like we were suddenly going off in some bold new direction. We were just taking a look at the stories and saying, "OK, how can we focus on them in a particular way so that the show would have more of a conclusion?"
VOICES FROM KRYPTON: So the show is not going beyond 52 episodes?
JEPH LOEB: In terms of clarity, this is important -- we're not saying that at all.
VOICES FROM KRYPTON: When a show like this is created, how important is it to have symmetry with what's happening on the feature film side of things?
JEPH LOEB: That's something we'll move towards, but when the process started, I don't think that anyone knew that there would be an Avengers movies. Of if they did, it wasn't as clear as it is now. What I love about the show is that it's incredibly faithful to Marvel's DNA, so the characters that are there feel like the characters that are in the movies. Even the depiction of Thor and Thor's story -- the feature hadn't even gotten on its feet, so there are certain elements that we would certainly embrace if we were to go forward that would be more of the movie than of its own cartoon world.
VOICES FROM KRYPTON: If there was a show of the Hulk, would there be an attempt for a connection beetween a TV Hulk and a movie Hulk?
JEPH LOEB: I think the best way to answer that question is that in TV it's important that it feel like it's Marvel. What the studio has managed to do with the features is that they have been incredibly successful at bringing the comics to life. While there are certainly things that are different in the Iron Man movies and Thor and Captain America may not line up beat for beat with the ocmics, there's nothing there that doesn't feel like the comic book, the source material, the DNA. That's where you start getting into trouble, and there have been an awful lot of bad examples of that. Daredevil was a good example -- terrible film, and it's a wonderful comic book, but it sort of moves off and goes into its own little land. When you do that, that's the result you get. So our feeling is that animation and live TV will embrace what the studio embraced, and, yes, there are people who say that the films live in a Marvel movie universe and then there's a comic book universe, so we're not committing to any universe. What we're doing is telling stories, telling Marvel stories. Again, with The Avengers, credit to Josh and Chris, who are enormous Avengers fans.
VOICES FROM KRYPTON: As the show has gone on, it's really kicked ass.
JEPH LOEB: That's everyone's general feeling. The most fun -- and I would recommend this to anyone -- is to come to our panels at any of these cons [such as next week's San Diego Comic-Con], because we show the peisodes that haven't been seen yet. Watching them with an audience is extraordinary, because the feeling of universality in terms of the thrills and the adventure and the humor, and all that stuff, when you play to 1,000 people is terrific. Particularly with the Hulk, who explodes on screen. People cheer when he comes on screena and it's just fun and thrilling.
VOICES FROM KRYPTON: What do you think is the power of the Avengers series?
JEPH LOEB: That it combines sort of the best of Marvel in that it has real world drama and real world stakes; extraordinary and complex characters with epic storytelling -- THAT'S Marvel. And as a team they have such unique personalities. With Cap, Thor, Iron Man and Hulk alone, you have four different ways of looking at what it means to be a hero and that is something that is unique to Marvel. You don't have that same kind of experience with Justice League. They're much more of a well-tuned machine running around over there. With The Avengers, you don't know at any given time who's going to quit, who's done talking. It's more like a family in that not everyone is happy with everyone else, so, in classic Marvel form, there are stories where they win the day, but they may have a lost a case with an Avenger. The Avengers has always been a group of heroes who came togeher for a cause, as opposed to because they wanted to become members of a team. And that kind of interpersonal friction is what makes the show fun. The experiences you can identify with are both familial and at business,so if you can't get along with people at the office or you can't get along with people at home, it's going to feel like The Avengers.
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