War Rocket Ajax #123: Landry Walker Talks ‘Danger Club’ And ‘Supergirl’

This week on War Rocket Ajax, we're joined by Landry Walker! Best known to super-hero fans as the writer of Supergirl's Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade and Danger Club with artist Eric Jones, Walker talks to us about his inspiration for Danger Club and how he was building to the death of Supergirl (really!) -- and you can listen to the whole show right here at ComicsAlliance!War Rocket Ajax #123: T-Bane Microphone with Landry Walker

(WARNING: Contains NSFW language)

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This week, Chris and Matt discuss the Beatles and Chris's teenage reluctance to get into what pretty much everybody else thinks is great. Plus, a listener question takes the hosts on what can only be described as "an uncomfortably erotic journey," and all the Bane voice you can handle.

When Landry Walker joins us, he talks to us about how Supergirl's Cosmic Adventures came about:

It was interesting. Eric and I worked together for about... 20 years now? We've been doing comics together for 20 years. We worked for Disney Adventures for about 7 years, and I'm not sure if you're familiar, but Disney Adventures collapsed like a house of cards in 2007, and with it went our jobs and a lot of other people's jobs. So we walked up to Bob Schreck at WonderCon, who we'd known very casually for several years, and said "Hey, we need to find some work because things are getting dire." He said "You need to talk to Jann Jones, she's putting together an all ages line," so we looked at what they were doing and they'd just announced Tiny Titans with Art and Fanco. They'd also been on Disney Adventures with us, so we knew that Art and Franco were taking what they'd done everywhere else and were doing it with the DC Characters.

We thought about doing something like that at first. We had a series called Kid Gravity, so we thought about doing a Superboy thing, then we decided we hated that. We just decided to pitch Supergirl, and it turned out they were looking for Supergirl.

I think they were looking for something very different than what we gave them, in all honesty. They were looking for something at the time more along the lines of what they're doing with Super BFFs these days, with sleepovers and pillowfights and tree houses and that sort of thing. We went back to the source material and thought "How do you take Supergirl from her first appearances, her earliest apperances, being true to that material and then simply putting it in this day and age?" One of the first things we did was say "Well, she should be a few years younger," because if we tried to sell her as a 15 year-old with the personality that we presented for her, it would come off as artificial. We tried to make her a little younger.

So we put that together, this big package of what we wanted to do. We turned it in to DC, and they asked for a couple small changes, we did that, and it got approved in record time. And then we did a completely different Supergirl book from that.

He also tells us about the surprising direction he was planning for the story:

WALKER: We were hoping to do Supergirl's Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade, then 9th Grade, 10th Grade, 11th Grade, 12th Grade, and then after that is Crisis on Infinite Earths. So it's sad then.

SIMS: So you were building to her death?!

WALKER: It's in there! Read issue 6. We mention it, Lena actually says "the red skies are coming!" I don't think we were going to actually get to that, but one of the scenes I had planned for 11th Grade, you know the scene that takes place in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, where Supergirl visits Superman after her death? We were going to redo that scene from Supergirl's perspective, because she was going to spend that 11th grade year in the 30th Century. I usually don't like to tell this stuff, but we're not going to get to do it, so...

Plus, find out more about Supergirl and Danger Club!

Show Notes:

Donate to help the victims of the Aurora, CO shooting.

Follow Landry Walker on Twitter!

Check out Danger Club on Facebook!

The Supergirl: 9th Grade designs.

Euge and Chris Haley's Gravity Falls Podcast.

Chris's Rec: 33 1/3: Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love, by Carl Wilson

Matt's Rec: Gravity Falls

Comics Reviewed:

X-Treme X-Men #1: "Look: Clearly we needed another X-Men title. That's not even up for debate. But this is also an X-Men title that opens up with 100 severed heads of Professor X that have been linked up to create a teleportation device in an alternate universe. That's pages one and two. That's pretty fun. Then the rest of the issue focuses on Dazzler."

Amazing Spider-Man #690: "I would love to see a mini-series with this: The Lizard, in the body of Curt Connors, learning how to live like a human being. There's a scene where Curt Connors, with the Lizard's brain, having to act like a person, is offered Doritos."

Richard Stark's Parker: The Score: "I think it's fair to say that we're both fans of The Hunter and The Outfit, but here's the thing: Our friend Jay Pinkerton has talked to us before about how once you read the Parker novels, the Darwyn Cooke comics don't seem as revolutionary or great, and The Score is the first time I've read one of the adaptations after having read the original novel. I can kind of see Jay's point, a lot of the feel of it gets lost in the adaptation. I don't want to say that it's not worth reading, especially if you haven't read the novel, but I can totally see where Jay was coming from."