Has there ever been a time that you remember, when you described a scene or a panel a very specific way in the script, and the artist - for whatever reason - drew it completely differently? I guess I'm asking if there's been a time when that happened and y

Yes.

MOSTLY, it happens because many of the artists I most love working with speak English as a second or third language, and some speak it not at all. In such cases, very rarely, they will draw something literally. I try to be really careful not to use symbolism in the panel descriptions in such a case. If I say, “She knocks the guy to the moon,” sure enough, at some point, an artist might draw that exact image.

It happens very rarely, amazingly rarely. I think some of the non-fluent English speaking artists work even harder to get the pages right, bless them. That’s been my experience, working with artists from Brazil, Japan, China, all over…there’s a very serious respect for the script. It’s lovely.

Like, Ed Benes gets the emotions I ask for on the page better than almost anyone I’ve ever worked with, and his English is very basic (a thousand times better than my non-existent Portugese). I don’t honestly know how he does it. I know he has translators, sometimes, but it always feels like more would be lost.

In a more classic sense, most of the artists I’ve worked with are great, if they want a different scene, they write or call and we work it out.

The exception was, one time, a well-known artist just decided to change a ton of things in the script. Two female characters that were supposed to die, he liked them, so he kept them, and killed the two male characters instead. And I wasn’t given a chance to fix the dialogue to match.

So the book went out with the characters referring to each other as characters who died, among many other problems.

But that is so rare, it’s actually only happened to me once in my career!