Contrary to popular belief, Matt Haley is not an Adam Hughes clone. Sure, they share a lot of the same influences, worked on some of the same books, and they miss a lot of their deadlines, but that's pretty much where the similarities stop. Matt is a talented artist (and soon to be writer?) in his own right, and on his own terms. With this fall's sell-out hit, ELSEWORLDS FINEST, and the soon to be released THE KINGDOM: NIGHTSTAR, he is showing the comics world just what he's capable of, and what he's capable of is exciting, quality work.

I got to sit down with Matt recently, and talk about his work, past, present and future. This is an excerpt from that interview wherein he talks about his collaborators - Barbara Kesel and Tom Simmons - giving his editors ulcers, and being a "stinky white male".

Mike Jozic: Alright. Your ELSEWORLDS FINEST is now out, selling well from what I hear, and deservedly so. You guys really put together a nice piece of work.

Matt Haley: Thank you.

MJ: I just had a chance to flip through it the other night and I was really quite impressed with both the story and the artwork.

MH: Nine months out of my life.

MJ: Nine months?

MH: Oh yeah.

MJ: That's a long time in the making.

MH: It really took me way to long, and I swear I'll never do it again. I'll never take that long on a book again - he says, knowing full well that he will.

MJ: Well, hey, it's worth the cost of admission just to see Ambush Bug in the Justice Society.

MH: You know, that's what I thought, and I thought we were never going to get away with that. When Tom Simmons and I had come up with the idea for the book, I was working on the BATGIRL Special that Kelly Puckett had written, and I was getting to the end of it and I wanted to draw some more Batgirl. But I couldn't figure out how to do it because she had been shot in THE KILLING JOKE and was stuck in a wheelchair, so Tom and I came up with this Elseworlds thing. And we were nobody, nobody knew who we were and we didn't figure that they'd let us do it, but we decided [that] if we were going to do this pitch, let's go for broke. We started redesigning characters and we stuck in Ambush Bug - kind of on a lark because we're both big Giffen fans, and big Ambush Bug fans - and stuck in John Henry Irons as Captain Marvel, and Abin Sur as Green Lantern and a robotic Flash, and they approved all of it. They didn't say a word.

MJ: Well, being an Elseworlds, there's a certain amount of freedom that you have.

MH: Yeah, there is that, but even with that, sometimes they can be kind of sticklers about what characters you can use, and what ones they want to see in print. But everybody so far has recognised Ambush Bug and they have all said the same thing: "Oh, he looks kind of like Bug from Micronauts," which was totally intentional. They let us do a lot of fun stuff.

MJ: You didn't run into any problems with Marvel about the similarities?

MH: No, no, no, no. I don't even think Marvel's doing anything with MICRONAUTS at this point.

MJ: I think there was a proposed ongoing series that they wanted to do.

MH: Really? Well, nobody has said anything, so I'm assuming they're not going to sue us. You know, it's just a one-shot kind of deal.

But I really wanted to use him, and of course, everybody was saying, Oh, you used Ambush Bug, and wow! You made him cool!" So I'm kind of hoping someday we could revisit him.

MJ: You mentioned that you and Tom had come up with the story idea...

MH: We basically plotted it, yeah.

MJ: Yeah, I noticed that you had a plotting credit there.

MH: Yeah.

MJ: How did Barbara (Kesel) come onto the project?

MH: We asked her. We had been friends of hers and Karl for a long time. Karl's part of the studio, and they live eight blocks from where the studio is located. And we had been talking to Karl about doing another book and mentioned this to him, and he said, "Well, I'm too busy, but you might talk to Barbara." So we talked to her, and she really got into the story, and it really made sense to have her write a book with two female lead characters. She would have a better understanding of that than we would, being stinky white males.

MJ: [laughs]

MH: And she came to us with a really strong third act, and helped us make sense out of the story. We basically had the plot - we knew what we wanted to do, and where we wanted to go - but she helped us kind of bring it to life.

MJ: So, how much of the story did you guys have worked out prior to Barbara's coming onto the project?

MH: Almost all of it. We knew Batgirl's backstory, Supergirl's backstory...Although Barbara added a little more to Batgirl's backstory, mainly because she thinks she is Batgirl.

MJ: [laughs]

MH: She really does. She thinks she's Barbara Gordon. She thinks she's Batgirl, so she's put a lot of thought into Batgirl, and who Batgirl should be and what should be up with her backstory. So, the flashback scene with Joe Chill killing James Gordon, we knew that was going to happen, but she added all the character stuff.

We knew that Supergirl was going to be Kara Zor-El, we knew that she was going to be raised by Wonder Woman. We figured, since there's no Superman or Batman in the story - there is a Bruce Wayne, obviously, and there is a dead little baby Kal-El in a jar - that was really the crux of our story. So I wanted to do the crashed alien UFO, and the little alien baby in the jar in the basement of LexCorp. That was kind of the crux of the story, and everybody seems to have really gotten a kick out of it. And we knew that we'd have a Justice Society. Then, once we had made the initial pitch, and Joey (Cavalieri) had told us it had been approved, he encouraged us to go a lot further with our designs. Instead of just having yet another Hal Jordan Green Lantern, or Barry Allen Flash, to do something totally different. So we just went hog-wild.

And also, he let us include a bunch of new characters, so this let us use a bunch of characters that Tommy and I had invented in college that we were never going to use. Like the guy that Batgirl's fighting on the first couple of pages, Tarantula, is an old design of Tommy's from college. The revenant design is an old one of mine, the Interceptor is a couple of characters of mine from college mushed together. There's a bunch of them in here. And it was kind of a kick to see them in print because we were never going to use them.

MJ: I noticed that this particular book was more Elseworlds than many other Elseworld books that I've read. To me, it really did feel like there was something very alien but familiar to this world. Did you have a lot of fun playing in the Elseworlds format and designing all these new uniforms and characters?

MH: Oh, yeah. I was working on TANGENT: JOKER at the time when we knew the pitch had been approved, so they gave us a chance to get the designs done. And we spent...We divided the design work probably equally because we had a lot of characters, and some of them didn't even show up. I think it was just whoever had an idea for the character.

The one that took longest was Wonder Woman. Supergirl and Batgirl I designed before we did the pitch. I did a sketch, basically of a female Superman. and I gave her the crew-cut and we dickered over the costume and realised that we need it to be just a plain blue bodysuit. Don't put any red underwear on her, or any of that stuff.

So, their designs came together pretty quickly, but Wonder Woman, man...We fought, and struggled, and wrestled and couldn't make it work, and then one day, I just sat down and banged it out and it came together.

I designed Barda, the Green Lantern design was an old design of mine, Tommy did Hawkwoman and Dr. Mid-Nite and did a Flash design that I adapted. I designed Firestorm. I was really proud of the Firestorm design because it was one of the first ones that I did, and I had to figure out a place to use him [even if] he didn't really get to do anything. Tommy designed Jade, Black Orchid, he designed Black Canary and Starbolt and a bunch of others.

So, yeah, the design work is probably split right down the middle.

MJ: Seeing as how you've invested so much time and energy - as well as your own original ideas and characters - into this project, would you like to do a sequel and keep the torch going?

MH: We thought about that. Almost as soon as the book came out, Barbara called me and was talking about sequel. I had no idea the book was going to do as well as it's doing. It sold out within two days. At least, that's the word that I'm getting. And I think last week, they had to scrounge around Ronald's (the printer) to find the last few...I think, like, a thousand copies of their overprint, which is every copy they could find in the warehouse, to sell. And I think those have sold out as well. So at this point, I'm hoping that they'll go to a second printing, which is just unheard of.

In fact, I just looked at COMIC SHOP NEWS today, and this book - it's a six-dollar book - but it came in right behind SPAWN as a money-maker for the comic shops this month. People are apparently just ripping it off the shelves, and I'm very pleased because I put poor Joey Cavalieri and Maureen McTigue - the editors on this book - I put them through just hell. And I'm sure Joey's got an ulcer the size of Nantucket with my name on it, but after all the hell we went through, I feel a little vindicated. I mean, I am sorry that it took so long to get done, obviously, but...I don't know what we did, but we seem to have done it right because people really seem to dig it.

MJ: It's a fairly well fleshed out universe you guys have created for these characters to operate in. It would be a shame not to go back.

MH: That's funny. I look at it, and all I see are the mistakes. Maybe that's just me.

MJ: After spending so much time on it, I think it would be hard not to.

MH: Yeah, because even now, I sit and read it and think, "Awww, we should have fleshed out that story bit," or "That background isn't very good"...Whatever.

MJ: So what would be one of these glaring mistakes?

MH: I don't know. I feel like the story isn't deep enough. There's not really much of a conflict between Supergirl and Batgirl at all. There's a minor fight when Supergirl first shows up, but I think they become partners a little too quickly. But we only had 64 pages.

When Barbara originally pitched it, we were at lunch with Joey and Bob Greenberger - the editorial co-ordinator at D.C. - at this great little deli around the corner from D.C.. And it was my first trip to New York - we went out there to sell this thing - [and] she pitched it as three 48 page prestige-format books. [laughs] And I looked at her stunned, and I said, "That's going to be a year and a half out of my life. No way!" So Bob suggested, "Why don't you just do a one-shot." I think that made a lot more sense.

MJ: Did you have to cut out a lot? I remember reading an interview with Charles Vess or Neil Gaiman a few years ago, and in it they was talking about the third BOOKS OF MAGIC issue that Charles would be doing. Apparently, when Charles broke down the pages, it was 74 pages long and they had to cut a bunch of stuff out.

MH: I don't know. I think we pretty much got everything that we wanted. I would have liked a longer fight between Supergirl and the Joker. I wanted him to just wail the tar out of her. For her to finally meet an opponent that was capable of kicking her butt. And I also wanted Batgirl getting a little more involved with doing some detecting. There was going to be a longer sequence where they were going to detect where Luthor has gone. He's been kidnapped by the Joker, and the one mistake I think we made, is [that] we tried to portray Luthor as a good guy throughout almost all of the book. But the audience is going to know [that] he's obviously going to be a bad guy because, well...It's Lex Luthor. So I feel like we kind of missed the mark there because that was a real big crux of our story. The people were supposed to believe that Lex was not a bad guy at all, but early on you've got Emil Hamilton talking about how Luthor discredited him, and he made his discoveries on the sly, and he stole from people to make his fortune. So, I think in retrospect, we could have rearranged the story a little bit.

Mike Jozic is a freelance writer, publisher and the editor-in-chief of MEANWHILE... The Web's Snappiest E'Zine. If asked, he will vehemently deny being, or having ever been, a 'stinky white male'."