This article on "V": The Comic comes from the Visitors Among Us archives, the interview with Marv Wolfman having been coducted back in the '80s while "V": The Series was still on the air.
Unlike other film tie-ins, the producers of the comic book and the producers of the series work hand in hand so that their ideas and approaches do not conflict, and in fact so that the comic book can achieve everything that Marv Wolfman has in mind for it.
"We get the scripts from the producer as they're written," said Wolfman. "They come in almost weekly, along with the updates, so we're pretty clear on what's happening with the TV show long before it appears on the screen. But of course one of the problems is that they're making such constant changes and characters live and die to such a degree that by the time we discover it, it may be eight weeks before the TV audience sees it, but it's still three months after one of our books is already set to come out. So we do lag behind them in certain aspects.
"For instance," he adds, "the Club Creole was destroyed, but by the time we found out about it, an issue was already coming out which had the Club Creole. But as fast as we were able to, we adapted and put that incident into our series. The producers of the show are very cooperative. I don't think that we've ever had as enjoyable a relationship with a studio."
In order to absorb color, authenticity and no small amount of inspiration, Wolfman visited the active set of "V" in California at the Burbank Studios.
"We were out there last summer and we were taken on all of the sets," he noted. "I sat in the control chair. The set for the spaceship is phenomenal. The corridors keep going on forever. The main set for the spaceship itslef, the main control room, is just beuatiful. I was very impressed by it. We watched a scene from the fourth show being filmed. It was really interesting, because I didn't realize where that scene fit in until I saw the show. Knowing it was in that episode, I didn't bother reading that paritcular script. I just wanted to be surprised by it and it was very interesting how that was done.
"The people on the set were really nice to us. They gave us free reign of the studio and all of the places that we could walk in and out of if we'd wanted to, all day long. We would have stayed even olonger if I hadn't had to get over and see Harve Bennett regarding Star Trek."
Which, naturally, leads to another important film related comic Marv Wolfman edits.
Which we'll get to in the third part of this installment of Re"V"lections.
For part one of this article, please click HERE.