Mary Sue Interview: Jem and the Holograms Creator Christy Marx: Storyteller of Steel

This interview is in four parts, because there was so much to talk about! You can navigate through each section at the bottom of each page.

RG: Nowadays, with the internet, I see a lot of creators speaking out when they feel something has been done unfairly at the company that they’re working with. And thanks to the internet, it’s pretty easy for their editors to find out, even without them sending the link, and sometimes, there are repercussions, and sometimes, there are not. I think it often depends on who the person is. Do you have thoughts on that?

CM: I think the creators should be speaking out and that it should be out there in the open. We should be fighting censorship. I support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and I wholeheartedly encourage everyone else to, because censorship is something we should not tolerate. People should speak out. The problem with the internet is that it’s a little too easy to speak out without thinking—always catch yourself. I find it’s a good thing if you’re going to write your rants, don’t post it right away. Write it and then let it sit there for a while, and then make sure you’re really ready to put that out there on the internet. Because once it’s out there, there’s no getting it back.

RG: What’s the difference between a censorship rant and a work process rant? Like, sometimes, things just change in the work process.

CM: I think we know pretty clearly what censorship is. It’s when someone tells you that you can’t write something or draw something, or they try to shut your work down or try to keep you from being published. Or not allowing you to be published ever. Or put you in jail!So many people around the world are being jailed or killed for daring to speak out!Complaining about a work process, to me, putting that into a public forum seems a little bit unprofessional, unless it’s a widespread abuse, some kind of significant abuse that should be brought out to public attention. I guess I would need you to be more specific since it’s really hard to say.

RG: I think that’s a really important differentiation to make, between censorship and “I had a crappy day at work.”

CM: Oh, absolutely. I mean, sure, if there’s a publisher out there that never pays anybody? I think, yeah, that the information should get out (laughs)!

RG: Yes, I would agree with that.

CM: Or something along those lines. I was actually heavily involved in trying to organize animation writers. I was one of the people in many attempts to get animation writers organized to try and get Writers Guild coverage. And even though we weren’t able to do that because of the labor laws, we did just by banding together and speaking out against some of the more abusive practices, we were able to get some changes in places. We were able to shut down those horrible cattle calls where they’d call in a hundred people for maybe like twelve jobs, or not giving someone a credit or putting your credits in a gang credit at the back of every episode with a dozen other names. There were all kinds of abuses that we were fortunately able to make some headway against, so that sort of thing is valid.

RG: I would definitely agree with that. So, through these animation writers, you also ended up working with J. Michael Straczynski?  

CM: Well, interestingly, I first got to know Joe through the bulletin board system for the animation writing. He was writing animation back then, and so was I, and there was a group of us who got to be friends and knew each other that way.

RG: True story: one of my favorite episodes of The Real Ghostbusters turned out to be written by him. It was about this guy who found this flute that would bring about Ragnarok, and when I found out years later he was the guy who’d written that, I was just totally amazed because it was one of the few episodes that really stuck in my head.

CM: Well, Joe’s a tremendous writer. And we were all in animation back then, and Joe was putting together Babylon 5 and pitching it around. I was married to Peter Ledger at the time, the Australian artist—he became my second artist on Sisterhood of Steel when we published our graphic novel with Eclipse Comics—and Peter ended up doing some of the concept art for Joe as part of his sales pitches he’d show to people. Consequently, I was involved with it pretty early on, watching as Joe went through this whole process, and then when he was shooting the pilot, he asked me if I’d do a newsletter for fans. He was trying to create a fandom ahead of time. So I would interview the actors, and I would put out this newsletter for all the people who were interested in the upcoming series, and then I got to write the “Grail” episode for the first season. Before that, Captain Power came first, and I ended up writing two episodes of Captain Power, and then he did B5, and then he did Twilight Zone, and I wrote an episode of that.

RG: Now Captain Power—that got canceled before its time, right?

CM: It ran for one season. It was a hell of a good show, but it was based on an interactive toy. It was the first TV show that had digital interactive elements, and the toy could actually interact with the CG elements on the TV screen. And there was some guy that made it his crusade to kill this show, because he thought the worst, most violent, awful thing kids could do was to shoot this toy at the TV screen, at CG robots that were incredibly crude at the time.

RG: God, Halo must really have blown his mind.

CM: No kidding. But he was a crusader, he was one of these crusaders who ended up killing the show. We were already into writing the second season. I’d written five scripts actually, kind of a miniseries, and I’d already written them all, we were underway into writing the second season, and the show got killed because the toy company didn’t want to deal with this crusader.

RG: That’s when you met Dan [DiDio] though, right?

CM: That occurred after Babylon 5 and Twilight Zone. He was a development executive at ABC, an executive in Saturday morning television. So the guy who did the CG for Babylon 5, Ron Thornton with his company Foundation Imaging, did all the early CG for Babylon 5, Ron created this show, came up with a concept that was going to be live-action and have lots and lots of really great CG that he was going to provide. And he sold it to ABC, to Dan. I was brought in do the development and write, and that was how I got to know Dan. He and I worked together very closely, very collaboratively, on developing Hypernauts, which was the name of the series.

We got to be good friends and stayed in touch with one another after that. Then, of course, Dan went on to get his dream job over at DC. I mean, he just could not be happier.

RG: I suspect he was bouncing off the walls that day.

CM: So that was always nice. He was always so happy about that job.

RG: I hope he continues to be happy about that job.

CM: Yes!

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