Doug Petrie on Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Ring of Fire GN

Shawna Ervin-Gore

webdate: June 2000


Doug Petrie became a comic book writer by eager default. As one of the main staff writers of the hit television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he's had a great time helping craft the mythos of an irrepressible teenager named Buffy Summers and her all-out war against the legions of Hell. For all the glamour implied by the notion of writing for such a popular and critically-acclaimed television show, Petrie is quick to note the long hours and re-writes that come with the job. Any measure of success he's achieved is due in equal parts to natural talent with the written word and loads of perseverance working at jobs far less note-worthy than the one he has now.

Not that Petrie has anything to complain about--after four-plus years, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is still one of the hottest shows on television, and its spin-off partner show Angel continues to break new ground. Plus, Petrie is just getting started writing comics, which is something he's always been interested in. Recently you might have seen issue #20 of Dark Horse's line of Buffy comics--a brilliant one shot focused on Angel and Buffy's final separation--and in August, we're releasing Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Ring of Fire. Ring of Fire is an original graphic novel by Petrie and artist Ryan Sook, which details a battle that can essentially be described as Buffy Vs. Angel. Read on for Petrie's insider look at the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and how it translates to comics.


SE-G: So, Dark Horse is releasing your first real graphic novel--Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Ring of Fire--in August...

DP: That's right. I'm eager to see it finished.

SE-G: After reading the script, I am, too. Before we get to the book, let's talk a little about how you became involved with comics writing...What did Scott (Scott Allie, editor of the BTVS comics series--ed.) have to do to wrangle you?

DP: (laughs) It was pretty easy. There wasn't a lot of wrangling there. I am a huge comic book fan and pretty much always have been. And when I first started working here at Fox I actually asked the production people if I could get involved in writing the Buffy comic book.

They said no...They really wanted me working and concentrating on the TV show since that's what I was being paid to do. So I forgot about the comics side of it for a while and had a good time writing for the show. Then, at about the end of the first season I'd worked on, Caroline Kallas came to me and said, "How come you're not writing the comic books?" And I told her I was very interested in that from the start. Eventually--maybe because by then I was a little more established on the show--some of the producers told me they thought it would be good if I took a shot at the comic books, which sounded great to me. So I talked to Scott about it, and since he'd already read some of my scripts and liked them, he gave me a sixteen-page story to write for last year's Buffy annual. And that was my first comic book story.

SE-G: Before you began writing for television--and before your involvement with Buffy--did you ever think of writing comic books?

DP: Yeah, both writing and drawing. I'm an amateur cartoonist, and I just enrolled in the Joe Kubert School of Comic Book Art.

SE-G: That's cool! I had no idea you're an artist.

DP: I come from a family of cartoonists, actually. My older brother and sister are great cartoonists, so they've inspired me since forever, and lately I've been drawing like crazy. So I'm really happy to be writing comics right now, but I'd also like to ultimately draw comics as well.

SE-G: I think enrolling in the Kubert school is a great start. And the good thing about people who are dedicated to practicing is that art really does improve over time.

DP: It's really true. I've got to keep practicing, so I've been very fascistic with myself.

SE-G: What other comics do you read right now?

DP:
A few of my friends have been or are getting into comics, and one of them has been pushing me to read Preacher, but I just couldn't get into it. But I started reading The Authority, and Planetary--I just got the first collection of Planetary, and it's just awesome. The Authority is nuts...It's like the movie Independence Day--five thousand warships attack the earth in every issue. I picked up Planetary at about issue eleven or twelve, and it had the best splash page I'd ever seen, which was just a house with a rocket rammed into the roof.

SE-G: That sounds like great stuff.

DP: I also read anything Hellboy I can get my hands on.

SE-G: Understandably so!

DP: I even have one of those limited-edition Hellboy prints up in my office. I'm a huge fan.

SE-G: Are you a horror fan in general, or did you inadvertently end up writing for a horror television show?

DP: I was somewhat inadvertent, I guess. I am not a big horror guy--I'm much more of a science fiction or action-adventure fan, which is also a big part of the chemistry behind Buffy. But as for horror, I was never into it as a kid, and I'm still not particularly into it--so much of it is just kind of gross.

It's funny, though--I just went into a comics store yesterday and bought a bunch of old Conan comics that I read when I was growing up.

SE-G: There's a little horror in that sort of stuff, too.

DP: Sure, but it's very fantastic stuff. It's so fun to go back and see what great work was being done. Roy Thomas was a great writer, and John Buscema and Berti Chan were doing great art. That's one example of stuff I would be inspired by as a comics creator. I would like to do something like Conan, but more of a science-fiction version...I guess I like more sword and sorcery stuff over horror.

SE-G: Buffy must fill some of that for you. It's not straight horror, but it does take the best elements--like the intensity and creepiness you might associate with horror, and the monster mythology--and combines it with more mystic elements.

DP: I love all that. I love it that Willow's become a blossoming witch. That gives the writers a lot to play with.

SE-G: So tell me how you got into writing for television.

DP: Well, I wrote plays in college. I was an actor in high school and in college, and I got into writing plays with the writing department of my school. I really liked it, and eventually I became a playwright for the Cornerstone Theater Company, and I ended up in New York City writing one-act plays, which were fun and maybe a little nasty (laughs).

Then I sort of decided I wanted to write for TV, and I worked my way in very slowly. I worked at VH1 writing Entertainment Watch and I worked for Nickelodeon, where I wrote a few spec scripts before got my big break, which was writing for a show called Clarissa Explains It All. And that's how I got started as a TV writer.

SE-G: I'm guessing there are a lot of people out there who assume that working in any sort of entertainment medium--and especially television--is really glamorous.

DP: (laughs) Probably.

SE-G: From your story, though, it sounds like it's more about hard work and persistence and producing work of a consistent quality.

DP: It's all of those things, definitely. And it's a lot like what we were discussing earlier about comics and art--practice, practice, practice.

SE-G: I'm sure there are people reading this who are curious which episodes of Buffy you've written.

DP: I wrote a bunch of Faith episodes last year, and I wrote one of the Faith two-parters earlier this year.

SE-G: Is that the one where she and Buffy switch bodies?

DP: Yes. I wrote part one of that, and I wrote the first episode where you realize that Reilly is a secret agent. That was called "The Initiative," and it was a really fun episode. Right now I'm working on part one of the season finale that's coming in May...I guess it'll be part of sweeps week.

SE-G: As a writer, how would you compare working in the format of comics and writing for television? I hear from other people who have worked in film or television that not having to consider the budget is a big plus.

PD: That's the big one. I mean, in Ring of Fire, I get to blow up Main Street (laughs). I just get to go crazy, which makes this a whole heap of fun. Other than that, I don't notice a lot of difference. I try to structure the comics as much like a Buffy episode as I can, but I give myself a little more freedom in the comics to be sort of a big, dumb boy. And that's not intrinsic to comics, it's just my take on one of the more fun possibilities of writing.

Obviously, a good, emotional story can be extremely satisfying. The fun thing is when you get to choose which emotion to work with. To my own surprise, Giles became of big part of the graphic novel.

SE-G: Have you written much for him on the series, or is he a character you're just getting a handle on?

DP: The very first episode of Buffy I wrote was called "Revelations", and that's where the group finds out that Angel is still alive and that Buffy has been hiding that. There is a scene where Giles just destroys Buffy--he brings up that Angel tortured him, killed his girlfriend, and he tears her apart for hiding the fact that Angel is still alive.

SE-G: I don't think a lot of people think of "rage" when they think of Giles, but he's obviously feeling that.

DP: Oh, yeah. I've always really liked the character. I've always loved the idea of "Ripper" (The name Giles went by as a younger, angrier man--ed.) but I've never gone into full Ripperness with him. That has sort of become Giles' emotional back-story for Ring of Fire.

SE-G: Please talk about that a little...I know most Buffy fans are up on the situation, but let's give the background.

DP: The basic idea is that when Angel turned bad, he killed Giles' girlfriend, and Giles had to deal with that. It was a very graphic episode, but they decided to go ahead with it.

SE-G: I have to say I was a little surprised when first saw Angel. I watched it for the first time a few weeks ago, and it was an episode where Angel is sort of seeing a woman who finds out he's a vampire and she wants him to bite her. So he becomes enraged and forces her to drink blood. It was an amazingly powerful scene.

DP: It was pretty shocking.

SE-G: The image and the idea were very disturbing, but the absolute disgust of having to drink blood was the main point of the story, so it wasn't egregious. It was just amazing to watch.

DP: When that scene was scripted, I think we saw it in our minds as being different than it came out. We didn't realize the full impact of what was scripted until we saw it ourselves. That was a particularly good episode.

SE-G: So, you also write for Angel?

DP: I wrote one episode early on called "In the Dark."

SE-G: I guess we should talk about the graphic novel, hm?

DP: Sure.

SE-G: We refer to around here sometimes as "Buffy Vs. Angel", since that seems to be at the very heart of the story. First, where does the book fall in the continuity of the series?

DP: This was Scott Allie's idea, and I thought it was a great one: The story takes place pretty shortly after Angel returned to being the evil vampire Angelus.

SE-G: As further background, this is after he and Buffy consummated their relationship, and the experienced ultimate happiness, which is a big no-no considering the curse that was put on him...

DP:
That's lightly put (laughs). Ring of Fire is an epic that takes place squeezed between episodes of season two. So Jenny Calendar has recently been killed, and Giles has not yet fully realized how devastated he is. On the show, he takes a bat--I think it's a flaming baseball bat--and beats Angel with it, and Angel very nearly kills Giles until Buffy steps in and rescues him. This is all squeezed in around that time period.

With that in mind, I thought it would be fun to have Giles really lose it, so in the book he sinks into despair and becomes kind of self-destructive. I liked thinking of Giles being self destructive and not taking care of himself.

SE-G:
And he stops taking care of other people, too.

DP: He's usually the most responsible, so I wanted to see him devolve into this dark mess of a guy. He stops shaving and starts threatening people with guns, and his ultimate goal is to get back his girlfriend. I tend to think of Giles as being sort of a referee for the universe. He is the one always keeping the rules straight and making people obey the rules. I thought, what would happen if this guy gave up--not only stopped caring about the rules but actually became resentful for having been a good person all this time only to have such a terrible thing happen.

Essentially, he begins to really misbehave, and his only goal is to get everything he wants, and what he wants is his girlfriend not to be dead. The scary thing is that he's knowledgeable and he might just be able to gain dark powers and resurrect Jenny.

SE-G: This whole situation starts with a Japanese legend about the resurrection of demons...I'm curious about this element of the story. Is Japanese mysticism something you've been interested in?

DP: I definitely find it all very interesting. One of the things I really like about Buffy is that it's evolved into being a pretty global show. Essentially it takes place in one southern California town, but I'm always pushing to have both good guys and villains come from different places all over the world.

Kendra is from Jamaica, and obviously a lot of our characters come from England, so there's a pretty heavy British influence. It adds a lot of dimension to the show and makes it more fun to write.

SE-G: And it's difficult to think of a more global theme for a story than the fight between good and evil, so it's certainly appropriate. It would be a little limiting to keep this completely sequestered in the world of white kids in L.A.

DP: Exactly--we try to avoid that.

SE-G: Where does the title Ring of Fire come from?

DP: The ring of fire is part of a ritual that is used in resurrecting the demon Kelgor. Kelgor was a samurai demon, so he had both samurai training and supernatural powers.

The story opens with a ship carrying Kelgor's armor to the United States, and of course--as this is an adventure story--the cargo never reaches shore and the crew is killed during a storm. I have to say that this was the most fun I've ever had writing anything in my whole life.

SE-G: It's a really dramatic scene, and I think it works really well because it sets the story up as being pretty far beyond the realm of the Scooby Gang's more typical adventures.

DP: I'll tell you where that comes from, too--when I was growing up in the late '70s, I saw that great Langella Dracula movie. There's a great scene with a ship in a storm, and the crew tries to dump this coffin overboard that just happens to contain Dracula. And of course his hand bursts through the coffin and pretty soon the whole crew is dead.

SE-G: That's a really creepy scene.

DP: As I said, I'm not too into horror, but that one really stuck with me, and I've always wanted to make a scene either in a movie or comics with a scene very much like that. And, in this case, the supernatural force on board is Angel...It couldn't be more fun.

SE-G: Angel must be an interesting character to write. He's such a paradox--it seems like he's had equal air time as both a really repentant person who has vilified himself and will do whatever it takes to do the right thing, and again as a total bastard who enjoys killing and torturing people.

DP: It's true. I've only written one episode with bad Angel in it. It was an episode of Buffy from last season called "Enemies" where Angel basically goes under cover to find out more about Faith and the mayor, and they perform a spell which makes him go back to being bad. To do that one, I researched a lot of Joss's episodes with Angelus and what I realized was how much fun the character is when he's bad (laughs). He's such a blast to watch because David Boreanaz just kicks out the jams...He's so good at being bad. And the thing that really gets me is that he almost never says anything really bad. He says what you really want to hear in this horrible, sarcastic voice. He really knows where all the buttons are and how to push them. So when he goes back to being good Angel, that's what makes him so compassionate. He knows what makes you tick when he's being a prick, and he'll use it against anyone. And when he's good, he really understands what people need.

SE-G: And he's pretty much bad Angel all the way through your graphic novel.

DP: Oh yeah. It's good fun. But I have to say one of my very favorite things about the graphic novel is Ryan Sook's art.

SE-G: I'm so glad you mentioned that. He's just incredible.

DP: The art for this book is awesome. I am so pleased with how it's turning out, and talk about artists making leaps in progress...

SE-G: I know what you mean. Ryan's art has been great from day one, but he's really learning how to finesse things. I think his portraits of Buffy in Ring of Fire are some of the most flattering and beautiful drawings of Sarah Michelle Gellar we've produced. The characters all look so appropriately emotionally destroyed and exhausted...He was a great choice for the book.

DP: I couldn't agree more.


Entire contents trademarked (® or TM) and copyrighted (©) 2000 by Dark Horse Comics, Inc. and its respective Licensors. Dark Horse, Dark Horse Comics, and the Dark Horse logo are trademarks of Dark Horse Comics, Inc., registered in various categories and countries.


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