Tripwire Talks To Producer Dirk Maggs About Audible’s Audio Adaptation Of Mark Waid And Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come

Bringing The Thunder Down Again

Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows spoke recently to veteran audio producer Dirk Maggs about adapting DC’s epic comic series Kingdom Come for Audible…

TRIPWIRE: So what was the genesis of this particular project?

DIRK MAGGS: Well it was strange because 30 years ago, no a bit less because it came out in 96, when we’d sort of finished doing our DC and Marvel adaptations, I did originally talk to the guys at DC I knew at the time to see if it was possible to get the rights to Kingdom Come and I think I talked to Charlie Kochman who’s who’s no longer at DC, but who cameos actually in this.

And Charlie, I think, put me on to Alex Ross and I actually spoke to Alex on the phone from my other home in Winchester, our previous house in Winchester.

Alex was really nice. We had a good talk about it. And, you know, he said, “Yeah, great idea.” And then somebody else got the rights. And before I could, I think I tried.

There was an audio adaptation, many moons ago, which Mark Waid charitably described as cheesy. which I only heard bits of it and I couldn’t bear to listen anymore. So that happened, but this time I got a call, Dan Zitt, who’s the head of Penguin Random House Audio, that department. He and I meet for a beer once a year when he comes over for the London Book Fair each year and so he said: “Do you fancy meeting for lunch.” So I said, “Okay”, and he said, “look I wanted to see if you’d be up for doing some stuff with us.” And that’s when we talked about All-Star Superman, but that was already in production. So it was a bit too soon for me to get involved. But then he said, “Well, I’ve got something later in the year. Would you do Kingdom Come?” And I said, “Ah, that’s about the only one I actually would just jump at immediately without checking any paperwork, because it really is one that got away for me. “ And so, yeah,  it was handed to me in a sense, which was lovely of him.

TW: So how long has it taken. Is it 18 months? Is that about right since you first started working on this this time around?

DM: Oh no, no.

TW:Are we talking a few years?

DM: No, this is actually since March. I mean, insanely quick.

TW: Isn’t that a ridiculously quick turnaround for a big project like this?

DM: It is. It is very quick, certainly for me. because I’m terrible. I’m like the opposite of Scotty on the Enterprise, you know, when he is asked, “How soon can you fix this?” And Scotty says ”Two weeks” and then turns it around in two days. I’m a little like that, but I’m actually also more than that. I’m  always trying to extend it as much as I possibly can because the more time I have, the better the job I can do.

So it was a pretty quick turnaround. I started writing in April and we were in studio this June in the Soundhouse and then the delivery date was going to be August, but because both DC and myself said, “Please, can we have more time? That’s too fast,” we actually made it slightly later in October and that that we got there. You know,I was unbelievably happy with the result, whereas if I’d had to rush it, I would have been very unhappy.

TW: So how do you deconstruct a story this epic for audio?

DM: Yeah, that’s a good question. Well, of course, the other thing about it is that so much of it is told visually as well. But I did, as I do with everybody, I ask for the script, so whether it was, you know, for Douglas Adams, when Douglas was alive, you know, he let me have the material that he’d actually written, you know, as word documents, or what were they in those days, you know, Claris Works, or Apple.

And the same with Neil Gaiman on his stuff. Neil would send me his scripts, and on this one, Penguin provided me with Mark’s original outlines and scripts, which was great because there’s there’s always stuff in comic book scripts that don’t appear in the artwork or are changed in the process.

But the other thing was I, you know, I also just had Alex’s artwork. I think the biggest challenge on this one is a monster story and it, you know, there’s a lot of visual elements and I think that was a real challenge was turning those visual elements into audio that kept the story moving along and reflected Alex’s amazing art, which is just beautiful. but also explained who was involved in what was going on because this was Mark showing off his encyclopedic knowledge of the DC universe.

TW: There were so many characters.

DM: Yes. And and it really that was the daunting part. And it was weird because in my time I have done DC stuff like Batman, Superman and Sandman. And so I have, you know, a pretty good working knowledge of DC stuff. of the worlds of DC and the characters but, my goodness me, this was something really challenging. There were characters that I really was not aware of at all and some characters who actually Alex and Mark had basically invented for the purposes of the story. There were certain characters that actually hadn’t appeared before. I’m just actually trying to find, let me just see if I can find my list because I’ve got… One was Magog obviously was created for Kingdom Come. Yes, absolutely. And interestingly, this was one of the things I actually asked DC very early on, Mike Pilotta and and Victor Diaz at DC are in a way the guardians of DC lore throughout these sort of adaptations. And they’re brilliant guys, but they’re busy guys. And early on in the process, I said, “Look, I’ve got all these characters that are new or very, very much kind of marginal in the existing DC universe. And I said, could you give me some notes on these? Could you tell me their ethnicity? Which part of America they might come from and what sort of age they are. And also what level of education they have had. Because if it’s the Guy Gardner Green Lantern, that’s one kind of education,you know? And then if it’s the Alan Scott, Green Lantern, that’s a whole different kind. He’s an elder statesman. So there were all these very nuanced, but sometimes pretty drastic, changes to characters. Is it the Golden Age version of The Flash? Or is it the Silver Age? Or is it the post -Crisis? So it was very interesting, but also quite confusing. They couldn’t help me. So we got into a situation where I was playing catch -up a lot of the time, which was tough. So I got ensemble recordings, which was a bit of a victory really, because Penguin don’t tend to do that, or certainly didn’t seem to think that they thought I could record the actors all individually down the line, and I explained that’s not how I work. I like actors to smell each other and see each other. And the first two days recordings we were doing it with this character Magog, and I’d sent some stuff over for them to hear how it was going and a note came back saying, “It’s not Maygog, it’s Magog.”And so we had to re -record all the scenes with this line in, with this name in. So it collided with itself a bit along the way, which was tough going. But on the other hand, you know, it was great to have a sort of hotline to DC, even if belatedly, to make sure that we were really colouring inside the lines and all of it, which is what we did.

TW: Did you work with Mark and Alex [Ross] at all during the process? Did you have any direct contact with them?

DM: Well, not at first, and then I actually emailed Mark  and I messaged him on Facebook, I think it was, and he came back And I said, “Look, do you want to have a part in it? Do you want to have a little cameo?” And he said, “Absolutely”, because he majored in audio or something like that when he was doing his degree back in the day. So he came in first of all, as a newsreader, but he said he also wanted to be the person who said, “Look up in the sky”, even though in the book it’s actually two women who say it. Mark said I want to say it, so he did and he did it very well. With Alex, I asked via DC would Alex like to be involved and I was told he wouldn’t. So I thought, you know, fair enough. And then I spoke to Charlie Kochman a bit later on, quite late in the process, because I wanted Charlie to do his cameo. And he’s in touch with Alex a lot. He goes to a lot of comic conventions. Yes, he’s there. And he said, “oh, Alex is really disappointed that he wasn’t asked to take part.” So that was a that was a bit of a blow. But but in the end, you know, we’ve got some DC Comics alumni cameos, which is rather nice. Mike Carlin, who was the editor of Superman, is the judge. They’re all in the courtroom scene. They’re the ones putting Superman on trial, which is kind of an in -joke all around. There’s him and there’s Sandy Resnick, who used to be one of the VPs. He’s the prosecuting counsel, and Charlie Kochman is the clerk of the court, swearing Superman in. So that was quite fun.

TW: So I want to talk to you about the voices. You have a pretty impressive voice cast. I mean, what is your approach is the same in terms of getting the voice talent in? Is it always the same or does it vary from project to project?

DM: Well, the thing about going back to the world of Superman and Batman is I’ve been there before and I tend to develop relationships with actors I’ve worked with. And quite a lot of the time we become friends and they become people I see socially. And certainly on Superman and Batman, which was over 30 years ago, I can’t remember exactly, I was working with Lorelei King, Stuart Milligan and Bob Sessions, who was out on Batman.

These are people who embodied the roles for me. So I desperately wanted to get back in anybody I could. I was very pleased to get Lorelei in as Wonder Woman. Lorelei got the voice and was approved, so that was wonderful. I was heartbroken that there was already a Superman signed up, or perhaps, not heartbroken because Mark Thompson is absolutely brilliant as Superman. But I was secretly hoping I could get Stewart Milligan to play the oldest Superman because he was and remains in my heart, you know, Superman in the productions we did. But it wasn’t to be. Mark was already cast in All -Star Superman that they did earlier in the year. And he did a fantastic job. I mean, he’s got the most amazing voice and worked very well. The problem I had with I then had to find a Batman because Bob Sessions passed quite a few years ago, bless him, was finding a Batman.

And I needed something, someone who just sounded absolutely bang on as this older, toughened, scarred, battle -hardened Batman. And then someone suggested this actor Glenn Wrage , and my son said to me, “You don’t know who Glenn Wrage is: he’s in all the games”. And I didn’t, although I do play the odd game. And when I heard his voice reel, I just thought, “Holy smoke, this is absolutely brilliant, what we want.” This is where, because the Batman, ‘my Batman’, if you like, is not the guy who talks like this and then goes, ‘I’m Batman’, in that sort of gruff voice when he’s being the part.

The voice is already there and Bob Sessions had it. And the other thing about it that I liked, which we, when we did it with Bob and we had Michael Gough as Alfred, because it was back in the nineties, was Bob and I discussed the character and we said, “Well, he’s a playboy, he’s an educated person. He’s not a street tough, he’s naturally intelligent. And so it should be a slightly East Coast kind of accent”. Anyway, long story short, Glenn brought all that to the part. I mean, he did Bob proud and did it his own way, which was fantastic.

Another bit of casting I was really pleased with was I’ve been working now with Ray Porter for about six years and Ray is one of the world’s top audiobook narrators, and in his own right, a superb actor, both Shakespearean and otherwise. He’s just come out of a production of Waiting for Godot in the Oregon, Portland, the Shakespeare Festival Theater up there.

But he also does amazing audio, and of course in Sandman he played Gilbert on the screen and The Griffin and other odd parts and he and we just met each other at an audio awards about six years ago and we just saw each other across a crowded room and just saw someone who was in the same tribe as me.

Audio book dudes tend to be typical people from publishing. I don’t know quite how to put that. I mean, you know, they’re lovely people, but it’s a certain kind of person. And Ray and I are a little bit rougher, I think. Ray’s just fantastic, and I’ve just worked with him whenever I can.

And as soon as I’d met him, even before this project came up, I thought, this is the person who, if I ever have something I’d have cast William Hootkins in, I would cast Ray, because Ray has a similar sensibility, educated West Coast, if you like, but also tough with it. And Bill Hootkins, who was in Star Wars, as Porkins, and then he was Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yes, he had quite a career as a character actor. He was the loveliest man, lived in London, absolutely great. And he was in my first ever Superman. I asked for him to be Lex Luthor, and he played Luthor and he was just perfect, absolutely perfect. He passed sadly around 20 years ago or so, and when I met Ray, I thought, “God, your voice is so close to Hootkins.” Anyway, along comes this project, Luthor is a leading character in it, so who else would I ask for but Ray? And Ray is not only a mate, but also he flew himself over to do this gig. He wanted it so much. And he loves working. He gets what I mean about working ensemble. So Ray came over. And so we were in the room with him, Lorelai and Glenn and a lot of the other cast. And so we got this amazing ensemble feel in the room, which is great. And you can kind of feel it in the, There’s a lot of glue holding these performances together. But at the same time, Ray is doing a Hootkins. I mean, he is playing it exactly the way Hootkins would have played it. And in fact, because of that, I could write in a lot more comedy than is in the actual comic, you know, because Hootkins’ Luthor was never funnier than when things were going wrong for him.

So we did that and in fact in his final scene in this story there’s a little diatribe that Luthor delivers which actually pays tribute to Bob Sessions and and Bill Hopkins and Bill Roberts who died sadly at the beginning of this year, who would have been in this if he’d lived on. He was the best J. Jonah Jameson ever. So, there’s a lot of Easter eggs in this for me. And if anyone remembers the work I did before, you know, they, for them, not only with the acting, but also in the sound effects, there’s a lot of original Superman sound effects from back in the late eighties, early nineties, which still stand up.

TW: So I was going to ask, how much re -recording do you do with stuff? Or once you get into a rhythm, does it depend on the scene and the voice actor?

DM: In terms of things like pickups?

TW: Yes, exactly.

DM: How much of that is there? Not a lot. For the simple reason that I cast If I get, if I cast it right, I shouldn’t have to do too much in the directing department to get it to work. And I joke about this, but it really is true. I learned very early on to trust actors. Yes. Um, in fact, I learned it in a way from Hootkins, because we were doing the very first thing we did Superman on Trial. I wasn’t the director because I’d literally just arrived in the department so they allowed me to write it and I had to stand at the back of the cubicle while it was being acted down at Maida Vale7, BBC Studio Maida Vale 7. And Bill Hootkins was in there and Shelley Thompson was playing Laura Lois in this one.

They were like the he was the prosecuting attorney and she was defending supes.

A silly conceit, which worked really well. Anyway, and Bill had a speech and he delivered it and the director, who’s a lovely guy and very very good comedy producer but this was a bit different for him kept putting down the talk back button and saying: ‘Can you do that again’ and Bill would do it again and then he says ‘Oh that was nice, can you do it again?’ Bill does it and he asks him: ‘Can you do it again?’ And eventually, Bill, after about four takes, threw his script down. And he said, ‘Please tell me what you want. And I’ll give it to you. We’re actors. Many of us are American actors. We just need to be told what you want, and we’ll provide it’. And I think the director was a little bit nonplussed by this.

So I was behind him out of his line of sight. And I just wiggled my finger around at Bill to say,’Speed it up a bit’, because I thought that’s what it needed. And Bill saw me, gave me a huge wink, and said, ‘I think I know what you want’, and did it. And that was exactly it. That was the take that was bought. It was nice for me to think, ‘Oh, I can do this.’

But also, I just thought, ‘You know what? In the end, you could have said one thing to him, and he would have had it’. And nowadays, when I’m doing things, because people who come aboard either have worked with me or know my work, generally speaking, I don’t have to do a lot of directing – I just make sure, if I give them a gentle steer and set them off in the right direction, they’ll get there on their own. And that by far gives me the best performances I can possibly get out of actors. It’s very much a business where you get out of their way and let them do their job. It’s how I like to work, how people who produce me, I like them to stay out of my way and let me do my job.

TW: Luthor is a very different character in Kingdom Come. I mean, he’s almost like an anti -hero and I guess that throws up some kind of different challenges for you because, you know, people who have read the more classical Superman stories are familiar with him as just a rather horrible figure but in Kingdom Come, he’s not the big villain here, he’s actually a man who’s got some sympathetic aspects to his personality.

DM: That’s a very good point, because he’s kind of standing up for mankind. There’s a kind of yin and yang between him and Wormwood, who’s the head of the UN. Both of them are trying to stand up for mankind. But for me, Luthor is really Trump.

TW: DC did a one shot that had it was written by Brian Augustyn that was almost like, as you said, like a Trumpesque multi -millionaire demagogue figure.

DM: I fact, when John Byrne first started retelling the Superman story, when he did Man of Steel back in 1986, which is very much where I took my Superman from.

TW: That was a brilliant run. I mean, it really captured the spirit and the flavour of Superman and the entire supporting cast, I thought.

DM: I thought so too and what I really liked as well about it was that it also set up the idea of Luthor as a political animal who would wanted power, wanted to seem and look legitimately honorable in order to secure votes to get himself put into high office in order then to line his own pockets. I can’t help feeling that that has very much come true in recent years in real life and for me the Luthor in this story can be that person because politically he’s trying to become a presidential figure, you know, in terms of manpower. And he’s got this super weapon in the form of Captain Marvel, in the form of the grown up Billy Batson and and I thought that was a really, really great plot device.  So I wasn’t worried about playing him in the way that we played him with Bill Hootkins, because I felt this actually was bang on what the character needed.

TW: Yes, so obviously it’s so highly regarded as a modern superhero comic, it’s one of the most highly regarded superhero series. So I guess it was a little bit daunting to try and do this justice when you were brought on to create this project?

DM: Oh God, yeah. And especially because it’s this beautiful artwork, isn’t it? Of course the one thing I don’t have is Alex’s artwork. I had a big conversation with DC, with the guys at DC about this, because sometimes they would say ‘You know it’s not that you’ve wandered from the story but you maybe have embroidered too much here’ and I pushed back on that. And I said, ‘The thing is, lads, I don’t want this to be a read -along.’ Because the very excellent Realm Media’s High-Volume Batman that’s going out in the States at the moment, which I advised on in its early stages, is a very good piece of work but it is basically page by page and arguably the Sandman I did was page by page but that was because there was going to be a TV show so I knew I had to do something unique with Sandman. And getting inside Neil’s head while he was writing it and having him narrate it was my route into that. But on this story, you’ve got a picture,  Alex paints, there’s a panel, there’s around nine panels on a page and it’s microscopic figures fighting. Yet in the script it says, you know, this is black mongol versus whoever, so I’ve got to identify a character who appears this one time, put them into a context, give them a character and then haul them out again.

TW: It’s a huge task really, isn’t it?

DM: Yeah, it’s a kind of weird sort of puppet theatre thing, where a character drops in, does a line, and is yanked and plays strings. So I would love to have been able to expand it more, but that wasn’t the brief. But at the same time, I had to add material to explain things, and that was that was a challenge. It was slaloming between landmines.

TW: But I mean, as you say, this is such got such a huge cast of characters, I guess. Whatever you work on next, you want something a little bit more intimate as a contrast to having to deal with 300 different characters.

DM: Oh, my God. Yes. And also. And how many could we double up? No, absolutely. I don’t mind a big cast. I love it. But I what I what I felt at times in the story was, what I do have a problem with is something which has no sense of humour. And there was a sense of humour in places in this, but I did add some gags. Like every time you hear Ace the Bat Hound referenced, you will hear a dog go woof in the background. Just, just things to keep my, just keep my spirits up in its darker moments, because it is apocalyptic.  It comes from an era where America was pretty much obsessed with how the apocalypse would engulf us all. Yeah. But it obviously does have a very upbeat ending. And again, you know, it’s a nice scene in the Planet Krypton diner.

TW: That’s a great postscript for the story, because I reread, I got the compact edition, I guess, about six months ago. So I sat and reread it. And, you know, there’s so many wonderful scenes in the comic. There’s so many clever touches in the story. It’s such an inventive book.

DM: Oh, it’s super inventive. What I didn’t get and what I’ve forgotten is, that postscript was actually added some months after the original run had finished.

TW: It was in the hardcover, wasn’t it? They put it into the collection. It was in the hardcover, But it’s such a brilliant conclusion. It’s one of these things that really caps off the story so well. And talking about the humour, it’s a very warm end.

DM: It is a warm end and there’s so many references I couldn’t get in there because of all the Easter eggs, like the Planet Krypton, which is like a Thank God It’s Fridays type diner where there’s all this bric-a -brac up on the wall.  I can’t get it all in. It was an honour to do it, and I’m thrilled that Mark really, really enjoyed it and came back afterwards and said,’ Look, you know, this really is how it should have been done all along.” So that’s a huge weight off, it really is. But it’s an amazing thing to add to the Dirk Maggs canon of adaptations.

TW: It’s obviously a worthy addition to your huge list of works and projects that you’ve worked on over the last 35 years.

DM: Yeah, I know. I think perhaps it’s time I hang my headphones up, you know, go full circle, finish with Superman, get out while the going’s good?

TW:  But are there any projects or dream projects that you would say, ‘I’d love to have a crack at this’, that you haven’t done, because you’ve done so many.

DM: Yeah, you know what? when Dan said Kingdom Come, and honestly, you know, I’d discounted it already as it had been made. And then I thought, oh, yeah, no, I’d love to do that. There’ll always be things that come up, and I think, ‘Oh,I fancy that’. But at the moment, I’m just, happy to sort of put the headphones down for a little while and get me energy back.

TW: I imagine it must have been a mentally and physically quite exhausting production to work on because it was a very short period.

DM: It was. It was intense. It was intense. And also, I think, when one is working with something that has so much resonance, have so many people who love it unconditionally the pressure is greater. And I’ve had this now with Douglas Adams on Hitchhiker’s Guide and I’ve had it with Neil [Gaiman] on all his projects, but particularly Sandman. And now on this, I’m dealing with stuff that matters to people with a capital M. And you screw it up at your peril.

TW: You want to make sure you get these things right.

DM: I want to get it right or if I’m going to be adventurous and change something or do a little bit of an ambitious casting on it, I’ve got to know that I can back up that argument either through the performance that’s given or the writing that I do. So it’s definitely not a job for the faint -hearted. But at the same time, it’s usually rewarding when people say, ‘Oh, that really is how I heard it in my head when I read it.’ And the other thing, of course, is when people say, ‘Oh, golly, you know, I really enjoyed that. Now I’m going to go and get the book.’ Yes. So, and I honestly don’t mind if people want to crack the book open and, and read along to the audio because it’ll work. But hopefully the audio stands up on its own.

TW: Well, I guess the only character I can think of that you haven’t worked on would be something like Hellboy, because that could work quite well as an audio adventure.

DM: Yes. Somebody mentioned that the other day. I don’t think it was you.

TW: It wasn’t me, no. But just off the top of my head, I think it could work really well.

DM:  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely.

TW: Because it’s a very rich tapestry to work with.

DM: It really is, yes but I just don’t know. It’s at this point in time, I think one of the times that my wife says, you know, I say, well, I’m unemployed now, you know, there’s always this thing. I remember Roy Hudson saying…

TW:  Well, you’re between jobs, obviously.

DM: Yeah, between jobs. It’s something that makes you go, ‘You know what? I’d be willing to give up six months of my life and work seven days a week on that’. And it’ll come, but not quite yet.

Kingdom Come Audible drama is available now

https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Kingdom-Come-Audiobook/B0FMS92LWJ

https://www.audible.com/pd/Kingdom-Come-Audiobook/B0FMS8ZVZH