Creative Writing BFA alum ’76 Diana Marie Schutz was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree for her contribution to elevating the art form of comics and graphic storytelling.
We chatted with the legendary comic book editor on being part of the independent comics movement, working with giants including Frank Miller and Matt Wagner, and her tips on elevating your skills.
What initially drew you to comics editing, and what has kept you passionate about it over the years?
To be brutally honest: after forty-some years of editing comics, I’m actually a bit less passionate about it nowadays. A great part of the appeal, for me, of editing comics was creator advocacy. In the early 1980s, when I began editing—and then editing comics just a few years later—I was part of what came to be known as the “independent” comics movement. The late ’70s and early ’80s saw the rise of then-smaller, independent publishing houses—like Fantagraphics, Eclipse, Pacific Comics, and Comico, where I was editor in chief from 1985 to 1989. Dark Horse Comics would follow those pioneers in 1986, Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly in 1990, and Image Comics in 1992. These independent publishers were all founded on the principle of creators’ rights. Our mission, which felt especially urgent in the early years, was to provide an alternative to Marvel and to DC Comics, whose respective pantheons of superhero characters are, and were, 100% corporately owned. For decades, as a writer or artist, if you wanted to work in comics, your only option was to work for Marvel or DC—which meant signing away all your IP/Intellectual Property rights to the corporate owner. The independent comics movement wanted to change that and thereby change the industry. Well … we did! And while there is still more to do in terms of advocating for creators, we won the big battle, and as a result, ownership of your own creative IP is now taken so much for granted that most younger creators aren’t even aware of the history behind their ownership and how hard professionals of my generation had to fight to change what was a massively unjust publishing structure.
Editing comics, of course, also means having a significant hand in their creation, which is another obvious part of the job’s appeal. But for the last dozen years, I’ve been freelancing as a translator of (mostly) French and Spanish graphic novels, work that gives me an even greater hand in their creation.
Diana Schutz, drawn by comics colourist Brennan Wagner.
What do you love the most about comics as a medium of storytelling?
Words and pictures! I’d argue that comics are primarily visual, in fact. That’s interesting to me because of the ways in which words and pictures interact to convey meaning, and then the way each reader interacts with that combination of word-and-picture. Someone like the late Charles Schulz, the (genius!) creator of Peanuts, was able to convey an abundance of meaning with a minimum of line—which is the essence of cartooning.
We typically read comics by reading the words: following the sequence of narrative captions and word balloons, which are positioned on the page to be read in order. But, as readers of a visual medium, we seldom really focus on the art or on the sequential storytelling that is a defining characteristic of the comics form. Rather, we tend to absorb the visuals, as if by osmosis. But what that actually suggests is that the visuals communicate their meaning in very sophisticated and subtle ways. Really, the kinds of connections that the reader makes between panels are extremely complex forms of visual reasoning, both inductive and deductive—what Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics) calls closure. And we make those logical leaps from panel to panel largely at an unconscious level. Unless, of course, you’re a comics scholar, in which case you bring all of that to consciousness in order to analyze the form!
You’ve worked with many acclaimed comics creators—Frank Miller, Matt Wagner, Stan Sakai, Paul Chadwick … to name just a few. In your experience, what distinguishes a technically good story from one that truly connects with readers?
Hmm. I suppose you might, for instance, have a very well-drawn story that simply fails as a story. Comics stories are subject to all the same demands as prose stories. Bottom line: they must resonate emotionally with the reader. Depending on your perspective, the visual aspect of comics can be seen either as a constraint in that regard or as an advantage. But at the end of the day, just like prose, a comics story must immerse you in its narrative, placing you squarely behind the eyes of another person—or another character, anyway.
There’s a terrific issue of Hawkeye written by Matt Fraction and drawn by David Aja—Hawkeye #11, published by Marvel in 2013—which is told entirely from the perspective of Hawkeye’s dog Lucky. Aside from a couple rare, recognizable word(s), like “Lucky” or “good dog”, the comic book’s few balloons are filled with illegible marks or scribbles—what dogs, not humans, understand. The story is otherwise told entirely visually, playing with the way Lucky experiences reality: the iconographic connections he makes through smell and hearing, a dog’s two strongest senses; his limited colour perception, beautifully captured by colourist Matt Hollingsworth; and the pure emotionality of his decision-making, as opposed to our human tendency to complicate what we feel by what we think.
For the duration of the story, and even afterwards, the reader becomes the dog! And isn’t that the value of a well-told story? To try on different points of view, to live in other people’s (or dogs’!) shoes, and to move beyond the comfort zone of your own familiar perspective—and thereby begin to understand difference and to empathize with it.
Brazilian artists Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá show what it was like to work with Diana on How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2016), their graphic novel adaptation of the Neil Gaiman story of the same name. (Illustration by Fábio Moon, provided by Diana Schutz.)
Do you believe storytelling is a skill that can be learned? What practices do emerging storytellers often overlook that could help refine their craft?
In answer to your first question: yes, a resounding yes! And I should preface this by saying that I am a lifelong learner and believe very strongly in continuing education. At age 71, I still enjoy taking various university courses—from Shakespeare to Music Theory to Formal Logic. Why not? When we stop learning, we stop growing.
As for storytelling … well, look, no one can teach talent. But we can teach technique, we can give students the benefit of our own experiences as working professional creatives, and we can steer them to places they might otherwise not discover themselves.
Here in Portland, Oregon, at Portland State University, we have a Comics Studies program thanks to Dr. Susan Kirtley, the director of the program and its founder. Susan has consciously built the program in a way that, to my knowledge, makes it unique: with an educational approach that is both academic and hands-on. Which means that our students benefit from a certain amount of comics scholarship—theory, research, and comics history, taught by critics and scholars—as well as creative practice in writing, drawing, and editing comics, taught by those who walk the walk, like comics writers Brian Bendis and David Walker, for example. In association with the editorial department at Dark Horse Comics, we also offer on-site student internships every term at Dark Horse, where student interns receive on-the-job training in comics publishing.
So, yes, I believe that comics storytelling skills—techniques and practices—can be taught. We’re doing it! Just like Sarah Leavitt and Taylor Brown-Evans are teaching those skills in your own School of Creative Writing at UBC.
But to refine their craft, the practice that emerging storytellers most need to learn is exactly that: practice! Like any other endeavor, the more you write and draw, the better you will become at writing and drawing. Practice, of course, is something that we can’t teach. It just has to be done. Every time you hear about someone becoming an “overnight sensation” in any field, I guarantee you they have laboured sight unseen for at least five years in order to become so “suddenly” successful!
An interpretation of the comics classroom by one of Diana’s students. (Picture provided by Diana Schutz)
Turning to your own craft, how do you elevate your editing skills? What do you find most challenging as an editor, and how do you navigate those challenges?
Practice makes perfect. A cliché, but true. The more you immerse yourself in story—in whatever form—the more you understand what works and what doesn’t, what the rules are and when they can be broken, what fits and what needs to be jettisoned, no matter how precious those words might be to the writer. And they’re all precious to the writer! But it’s legitimately hard to kill your darlings, and your editor can help with that—and a good editor can also explain why those fixes are necessary.
So, of course, reading is tremendously important for anyone who wants to be a professional editor—and reading outside your own field is critical. Comics creatives who read only comics hinder their own capacity for exploration and innovation; the work becomes sort of stunted, inbred.
One of the greatest challenges to editing that I see nowadays—one of the reasons why, in 2015, I left my position as senior executive editor at Dark Horse—is the corporate shortchanging of our work. This is not restricted to comics editing or even editing in general, but an unfortunate trend throughout every business, it seems to me. Certainly in my own field, it’s clear that editors are becoming overloaded with so many comics and graphic novels that they risk being unable to do much more than a cursory job on each. This results either in too many corners being cut or in an over-reliance on assistant editors, most of whom don’t have the necessary skills or experience (yet) to provide professional edits. It was not unusual for me to work 60-hour weeks, and I still struggled to make the deadlines.
The upshot of this administrative disregard for our profession is that editing—at least in the world of comics publishing—is increasingly reduced to little more than traffic management: making sure that each component of the comic or graphic novel leaves point A on time to reach point B on time, and so on down the line. Under this model, “editing” becomes purely organizational, and while that in itself can obviously be challenging, it’s also not very fulfilling. Editorial creativity comes into play with story and in your relationships with the writers and artists who are creating that story. If you’re too busy chasing deadlines to engage with the story and its creators, you’re simply managing the comic’s production, not its content. All the juice—the joy—of editing gets lost in traffic. Smaller-press publishing or certain dedicated publisher imprints seem more inclined to cultivate quality of work over quantity.
I mean, when Dark Horse first moved me to Portland in 1990, it was barely four years old at that point, a company of only ten people all working out of one room, and owned by just one guy, Mike Richardson, who worked in that room with us. And though I helped build the company in my 25 years on staff—it currently numbers 187 employees—growth brought bureaucracy, a certain amount of standardization, and too many people “managing” the work instead of actually doing it. Then again, aside from the receptionist, when I started there I was the only woman (!) on staff, the publishing staff, and growth changed that, too—but for the better. So, growth has its upsides, but one of the downsides seems to be a shrinking emphasis on editors’ creative responsibilities. As a freelance creator myself these days, I miss having an editor who is engaged in the work, not just its on-time delivery.
Some of the many graphic novels, comics art books, and more that Diana has edited through the years. (Photo provided by Diana Schutz)
As an editor, how do you guide comics creators to find their voice, genre, and style? And how do you handle creative differences with writers?
Very delicately! But this goes back to what it means to be an editor for an independent comics publishing house. In 1978, when I first began working in comics, editors had a pretty bad rap—and by and large they deserved it. I often heard stories back then of tyrannical editors who routinely screamed at the talent, took credit for ideas that weren’t theirs, and fired creatives on a whim. And that was something else the independents wanted to change about the industry—something that I expressly wanted to change about comics editors and their overall approach to the work.
The thing is, if the publishing company you work for owns everything it publishes, then your job as editor is to represent the company’s interests and to safeguard that IP for the company. But the independents were all about creator ownership and friendliness. Frank Miller and Lynn Varley own 300, Frank owns Sin City, Matt Wagner owns Grendel—and being their editor meant shifting away from the traditional company focus to a creator focus. My job was to help realize those creators’ independent aesthetic visions—not the company’s and certainly not my own. I could not (and would not want to) fire Paul Chadwick from Concrete. He created it, he owns it, and he’s the perfect artist for it!
Once you understand that you’re there to shepherd the creator and the creator’s work, you immediately become united with the creator in pursuit of your common goal: to publish the best possible expression of the work—from Stan Sakai’s cartoon samurai bunny rabbits to the badass neo-noir lowlifes of Sin City. And once your own ego is out of the picture, creative differences rarely arise, but if they do, they’re pretty easy to resolve. If not, if creative accord is impossible, then as an independent editor, you must cede to the owner of the work—or choose not to publish it. Ultimately, a successful comics editor hires the best possible writers and artists … and then gets the hell outta their way! 😉
In addition to your work as a comics editor, you’ve worked as a comics educator and, in your retirement, as a comics translator. What do those roles offer that editing alone does not, and how has taking on these different perspectives influenced your work across each of them?
The late, great comics pioneer Will Eisner—for whom the Eisner Awards are named—had much to do with both. In 2001, he’d returned from giving a talk at Ohio State University, then home of the Cartoon Research Library founded by Lucy Shelton Caswell, which became the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum in 2009, hands-down the best comics art museum in North America! Anyway, after returning from Ohio State, Will called me all abuzz about OSU’s English department offering a course called Comics as Literature. For Will, who never went past high school but instead began supporting his family at age sixteen, that sort of academic acceptance of comics, especially back in 2001, was everything he hoped for the art form. He said to me, “You should take that fancy degree of yours and teach a course like that!” To Will, of course, any degree was fancy, and he’d been impressed that I’d gone back to school in my mid-thirties for a Master’s in Communication Studies—largely because the Communication department at the University of Portland had allowed me, in 1990, to design a graduate program around comics scholarship, an academic discipline that did not actually exist at the time!
In any case, when your hero Will Eisner tells you to do something … of course you do it! And in 2002, I began teaching the first regular Comics Studies course in the Portland area: one course a year at night, in addition to my demanding day job as a comics editor. Before too long, other more professional educators were doing the same, including Dr. Ben Saunders at the University of Oregon, who established an interdisciplinary Comics Studies minor there in 2011, and Dr. Susan Kirtley, who founded our Comics Studies program at Portland State University in 2015, hiring me to teach Comics History in 2016. I would teach for a total of twenty years, ending in 2022 by developing what, I believe, is the first-ever university-accredited Comics Editing course in North America, a course that has continued to be taught every year since by Shelly Bond, longtime DC/Vertigo editor, many of whose students—and mine—have gone onto editorial jobs in comics.
We have three major comics publishing companies here in Portland—Dark Horse, Oni Press, and Image Comics—as well as one significant smaller press, Floating World Comics, so there are actual job opportunities right here for our better students! It’s pretty cool. At this point, over half the members of Dark Horse’s editorial staff are either my former students or my former assistant editors, which feels like an important legacy to me—and worth all those hours and hours of work.
As for comics translation, again I’m influenced by Will Eisner. In 1978 at age 61, when most people are at least starting to think about retirement, Will published his first graphic novel, A Contract with God, going on to publish another twenty-two (!) graphic novels before his death in January 2005 at age 87. What an example he set for all of us seniors to follow!
Reading comics from other cultures helps to widen our own—and I love translating graphic novels. The process is quite different from prose translation: as always, in comics, space is the final frontier! We are bounded by spatial requirements and the existing art, so the translation has to be crafted to fit the space of the captions and balloons. Sometimes those cuts can get drastic, forcing you into more creative ways to preserve meaning. Hard but fun!
Whatever the restrictions, most people don’t realize that translation is writing. Jamie Chang, a Booker-nominated translator, compares the process to taking a watercolour landscape on paper and redrawing it in oil on canvas: the basic image is the same, but everything else is different! And it’s true: because each language is a separate system, when we translate a book from a different language, we’re actually writing another book in English. It’s tremendously challenging—and rewarding. But it pays for shit. I never thought, as an editor, that I could get any lower on the comics totem pole … until I became a translator. 🤣 Thank goodness it’s a retirement career, meaning I don’t do it for a living.
Diana’s notes on translation space and making sure the translated text fits within the available speech balloon. (Photo provided by Diana Schutz)
You were admitted to the Creative Writing Program in 1973 when the department was still relatively new. Do you remember what it was like? What did you enjoy the most about the program?
It turns out that thanks to poet Earle Birney, Creative Writing split from English to become its own separate department at UBC in 1965. (And it would be decades before it became a “School”.) But it was November or December ’72 when I first learned about CRWR at UBC. I was seventeen, still living in my parents’ house in Montreal, and aching to get out! In spring ’73 I would be wrapping up an undistinguished two years of CEGEP at Loyola (now Concordia), with no clue about next steps. Except that I was interested in writing. But English Lit—as a teen, not so much. And then … I discovered UBC/Creative Writing, with less than a month to put together my application, both to the program and to the university: pre-digital, pre-email, pre-online, even pre-FedEx. Meaning, I had to hustle!
Like every adolescent of my generation, I had a sheaf of bad, teenage angst-filled poems, but I guess Jake Zilber must have seen some sort of promise there because I was accepted, and in September ’73 I saw the UBC campus for the first time—man, I lucked out! What a gorgeous place, especially in those days. There were no high-rise buildings but for the three Gage Towers, then brand-spankin’ new, Canada’s first “co-ed” dorm (or one of the first)—very controversial in the early ’70s! Creative Writing was then located right across the Gage parking lot in tiny Brock Hall, a former army barracks, if I remember correctly. Two (?) classrooms, a departmental office, and not much more.
So, I was a Creative Writing major from fall 1973 till spring 1976, when I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. There were so few of us in CRWR that I don’t remember more than twenty students—max!—in any class, and usually fewer. Graduate courses might have been more varied, and even more exclusive, but undergraduate courses included only the baseline intro course and then introductory and intermediate courses in fiction, poetry, and screenwriting. That’s it! And there were only three or four instructors in that period, with one of them on sabbatical. So, I studied fiction and screenwriting with Jake, who was also my very kindhearted advisor, and poetry with George McWhirter—from whom I learned I was not going to become another Margaret Atwood, my favorite poet then and now:
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
To this day, I’m not much of a writer. Far too slow, in any case, to pursue it professionally. But it turns out that I’m a pretty good fixer of other people’s writing, so I guess those round-table critiquing sessions were of real value for my later editorial career—no matter how f***ing painful they were when it was your work on that table!
Nowadays that kind of peer review is especially significant. The internet allows for any jackass to opine publicly and at length about your work—and they do, so you need to get used to it!
What is some advice you received from your CRWR years that you still find useful today?
Well, it was fifty years ago, so I’m hard pressed to remember any particular advice. But those CRWR years were important not just because of the specifics I learned about writing, but also and especially because of the practice itself. Prior to Creative Writing at UBC, I wrote poems when I was sad or “inspired”. 😁 At UBC, I had to learn to write on a regular basis, no matter what I felt like: we had poems and short stories due every week. And that was invaluable. If you’re going to make a career for yourself in the writing business—and it is a business when it becomes your career—you need to write every day. No matter what you end up with on the page at the end of that day, you need to write every day.
What does receiving an honorary doctoral degree from UBC mean to you?
It’s pretty freakin’ awesome, isn’t it?! 🤩 I feel blessed and humbled. It’s something I couldn’t possibly have imagined.
In fact, I still can’t quite believe it’s real. Like, the doctorate will be rescinded once UBC figures out that’s my name on those idiotic Terminator comics! Hasta la vista, Dydie. 😂
Credit: Paul Joseph/UBC Communications
The degree recognizes individuals who have transformed their fields and inspired change. Looking back on your decades-long career, what are you most proud of and where do you wish to see the industry go next?
To be honest, I believe this says less about my work and more about comics at large and how far we’ve come from our “secret origins”, which are somewhat less than illustrious. Even vaguely Mob-connected.
But those of us who care about this narrative art form, despite its crude beginnings, also understand its huge potential, which we’ve only just begun to explore—in education, journalism, graphic medicine, history, language learning, and beyond. From 1938 when two Jewish teenagers in Cleveland—one a Canadian, by the way—led us to believe that a man could fly, to 1991 and Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer win for Maus, his graphic novel about the Holocaust, to Tessa Hulls’s Pulitzer, just last year, for her autobiographical graphic novel, Feeding Ghosts, comics really have come a long way. And those of us in the field have waited a long time to see our passion legitimized and our narrative art form recognized as an art form.
I think the poets and scientists and social justice leaders have more experience with this sort of recognition, but for those of us in comics, it’s a rare honour and a real privilege—which means I share that recognition with my entire comics community.
