He’s written for Marvel and Star Wars and has a global TV show. So who is Tom Taylor?

Tom Taylor is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning comic book author who has written stories for Spider-Man, Batman, Wolverine, Iron Man and Star Wars among many others, and is the current writer of Superman. He is also the creator of animated adventure series The Deep, soon to release its fourth season.

How hard is it to get a TV series made in Australia?

The Deep was originally a co-production between Australia, Canada and at one stage France, and now being animated in Singapore. So while it’s an Australian show and was created here based on the comic books of the same name by myself and James Brouwer, it’s been quite a journey to get here, including the first producer who saw this in London and was key to getting this happening. So it’s really an international effort.

Taylor has written stories for Spider-Man, Batman, Wolverine, Iron Man and Star Wars.Credit: Eddie Jim

So maybe I should ask: how hard is it to get a TV series made internationally?

I think it’s a matter of everybody pushing in the right direction. We were really fortunate right from the outset: we had Robert Chandler pitch this to Technicolour originally, and the woman who ran that at the time – who was the woman who ran Warner Bros. – said this was the best thing she’d seen since Batman: The Animated Series. We were very happy with what we had: certainly when we were first creating the comics and creating the logo, we weren’t just thinking about the comics, we were thinking hey, will this look good on a lunchbox? We always felt we had something special here.

I can’t help feeling, when I look at your resume, that you should be a lot more famous than you are.

Um … I’m famous in some circles. I think I try and keep a low profile in Australia on purpose. So while I’ll do interviews for CNN and BBC and whatever about Superman, in Australia I’ll often turn down interview opportunities because I like being a bit anonymous here. My work is everywhere and obviously the TV show is on in 140-plus countries, and then there’s Superman and Nightwing and my Marvel work, and that’s all very big and reaches far.

A scene from The Deep.

Well, this is what I’m talking about. You are a huge success, but you deliberately fly under the radar in your home country?

Yeah. I don’t want things to be weird for my kids. I certainly go to conventions and sign autographs and stuff. Pre-pandemic I flew around the world and did signings. But I think we have a thing in Australia about tall poppies and people who take themselves too seriously, and I don’t want that kind of ego. If it’s something important – I did a lot of press for when we had Superman come out as bisexual, I did radio in Australia, or when Stan Lee died I agreed to go on The Project. But as a general rule, I like to keep my head down and do the work and just write every day and not do too much press.

I feel quite privileged then.

You shouldn’t. I try to avoid me.

Speaking of Superman coming out and the reaction that got – in your line of work is it an occupational hazard to risk the wrath of fans?

Oh, of course. That’s daily, on Twitter and everywhere else. Superman coming out was an incredible thing for the LGBTQIA+ community. We had so many positive messages from people all over the world, people from countries where they couldn’t come out, but just wanted to contact me to let me know I’d made their world a little bit better. People who came out in their 40s, as well as a host of young people. But obviously that comes with a lot of negativity as well, a lot of nasty. But the positive far outweighs it, and just the positive of doing something like that far outweighs it. You take the slings and arrows and try to focus on the good.

How different – or how similar – is writing for comics to writing for TV?

There’s actually a lot of similarities. I was originally a playwright, and I took a lot of my play-writing to comics, as far as dialogue. In comics, because you have to describe so much for the artist, every panel, I tend to bring that to television as well, so it’s like I’m describing something for an animator. I probably overdo it actually: I’m sure there’s a director going, “We’re the director, Tom, thanks for this”. But obviously we’ve got a great team of writers on this show, so my day-to-day writing on The Deep is less than it used to be, when I felt I had to rewrite all 26 episodes of a season.

You’ve learnt to pull back, to delegate a little.

I have, yeah. To trust that we have good people. Obviously I come up with all the storylines with Phillip Dalkin, and I’ll do the last pass. But aside from that we let it go, try to be a bit more hands-off.

It’s quite an unusual thing in Australia, The Deep – adventure-fantasy-superhero story, we don’t get a lot of that locally.

Yeah, this is what I love, though: action-adventure-comedy, with a lot of heart and a lot of hope, is what I set out to create with the comics originally, back in 2009. I was writing them because there was nothing for my kids. This idea of “all-ages books” – I’d pick up these all-ages books and they were so safe, and they were so boring. I’m like, this isn’t all-ages, I don’t want to read this with my kids, this will just insult people. So I really set out to write a story, and a family, that was exciting, and that parents could sit down with their kids together and be excited and transported and get into the mythology of it all. With this great diverse family who love each other.

The Deep (season 4) premieres on ABC Me and iview on June 24. Seasons 1-3 are on Netflix.

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