Writers/EPs Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker talk their all-new animated series about a B-class villain, first introduced in their other hit show, ‘Harley Quinn,’ who turns a dive bar into a haven for underappreciated henchmen, now streaming on Max.
In contrast to the uproar and heated criticism over Harley Quinn’s first season release, writers and executive-producers Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker say the immediate love and adoration fans showered on their new Harley-verse series Kite Man: Hell Yeah! has been a career highlight.
“I mean, San Diego Comic Con is about as friendly an audience as you can have so it can be hard to judge if you’re going to get the same response from audiences after the release,” says Schumacker, whose team shared a Kite Man sizzle reel at this year’s convention, as well as a sneak peek of Harley Quinn Season 5. “But the reviews and response for Kite Man have been super positive and that's been really gratifying. People have said to us, ‘I was expecting a carbon copy of Harley Quinn,’ but Dean Lorey and co-executive producer Katie Rich figured out a way to make it unique. Justin, Dean and I wrote the pilot, but then Justin and I bequeathed the show to Dean who oversaw it with Katie, and they took the ball and ran with it in a really interesting direction.”
Kite Man: Hell Yeah!, which released its first two episodes on Max last month, features DC Universe characters from the Max Original adult 2D animated series Harley Quinn. While Halpern, Schumacker, and Dean Lorey’s first series – now a highly praised award-winning triumph – focused on super villain Harley Quinn and her friend-turned-lover Poison Ivey, Kite Man: Hell Yeah! follows B-class villain Kite Man who, in an effort to give underappreciated villains a place to call home, turns a dive bar into a henchmen haven with his lady-love Glider.
The newest episode of the animated series releases Thursday, August 29 with the final episode airing September 12. Lorey, Halpern, Schumacker, Kaley Cuoco, and Sam Register serve as executive producers. Production companies are Delicious Non-Sequitur, Lorey Stories, and Yes, Norman Productions in association with Warner Bros. Animation.
Check out the trailer:
“Harley in its bones as a sitcom, is The Mary Tyler Moore Show from 1970,” notes Halpern. “We cut our teeth in sitcoms, and we love old sitcoms. I probably have seen every episode of Cheers, and both Patrick and I loved that show, and Dean the same. So, when we were trying to think about sitcoms we love that would translate to this DC Universe in a way that was interesting, Cheers was really it. I love that sort of idea of found family. It’s a common trope, but you don't see it a lot in villains. It’s probably pretty lonely to be a villain and it's even lonelier to be a D-list villain. You’re so disposable. You don’t get any of the credit, but you do all the grunt work. So, we thought, ‘What if they had a place where they could go?’ And we're like, ‘Oh. A place where everyone knows their name? Let’s just do a DC Cheers.’”
Halpern and Schumacker say they’ve had a lot of fun with this series, knowing there’s a bit more trust between themselves and the DC community.
“When we did Harley, nobody knew who the fuck we were,” says Halpern. “We had not built up any cachet with DC. Harley was our first sort of partnership with the DC community. I do think and I hope we earned some trust with them that we were going to shepherd a show that would be something that stayed true to what they loved about DC, but also had its own sensibility and felt like it lived in the same universe.”
But the big difference between Kite Man and Harley was that the character hadn’t been used nearly as much by early comic creators. Back in the 60s, he provided minor comic relief. More than 50 years later he was finally given a backstory; a very dark one. But it got the character noticed. And it was up to Schumacker and Halpern to find a middle ground for their Kite Man, who’s a mix of tortured existentialist and all-out frat boy.
“Harley, as a character, has been this pillar of DC for 25-30 years, and it felt like there was more expectation because of that,” shares Schumacker. “But with Kite Man, even though he’s a character that originated in the 60s, he hasn't really had that big of an impact on the DC Universe in the comics until Tom King brought him back in in a big way.”
Since first appearing in Batman #133 in August of 1960 until the late 80s, Kite Man (“Charles Brown”), created by Bill Finger and Dick Sprang, was a supervillain primarily used as a minor character and viewed as a bit of a joke, especially after Tony Isabella used the character in Hawkman #4 (November 1986), gave him the civilian name "Chuck," and had him using “Peanuts” comic character Charlie Brown's catchphrase "Rats!" after flying into a tree. He was a gag, a gliding gimmick, until King gave him a tragic backstory that made Kite Man not only a comedic character, but an iconic one.
Kite Man’s first appearance in King’s 2016 DC Rebirth-era Batman consists of the character smashing through the window of a building, stealing a woman’s pearls, then leaping out another window while he glides away saying, “Kite Man. Hell yeah.” This is where Patrick and Justin’s show got its name.
But the previously unnoticed villain's tragic origin story, rather than just his catchphrase, is what grabbed Schumacker and Halpern’s attention. Kite Man was a divorcee trying to survive as a single, deadbeat dad. After hearing his son proclaim an excited "Hell yeah" when playing with a kite, Chuck decides to make it a part of his criminal persona. Kite Man was a mere pawn for more notable supervillains in The War of Jokes and Riddles until his son was murdered by the Riddler, using a poisoned kite in an attempt to get the Joker to laugh.
The story was horrid, ridiculous, and completely brilliant. It gave Kite Man the wings to fly (pun absolutely intended).
“It made a large impact in the Batman books and helped us define a lot of the character as he showed up in Harley, and then we ran with it in our own way in the show,” says Schumacker. “The character’s backstory was pretty much exactly what had been established in The War of Jokes and Riddles storyline. But that character that Tom created was a much more, I would say, tragic version of the character, and ours is tragic in his own way, but you can still laugh at him. Tom's Kite Man – dealing with the death of his son at the hands of the Joker – and the origins of his ‘Hell yeah’ catchphrase are extremely dark. We did toy around with that in the show, but we ultimately decided that was going to be a little bit too dour for our show.”
Instead, for the series, Kite Man’s tragedy stems primarily from being an undervalued henchman and unappreciated villain. That is, until he creates a space for villains like him at a bar called Noonan’s, where everybody knows their names, and how to hide a body.
“The interesting thing about Kite Man was that we had originally conceived of using him in Harley as this male supervillain, who has no actual power, and yet somehow has more confidence than these two women who are incredibly powerful,” notes Halpern. “We used him as a proxy for what is institutional misogyny within the villain world. But then, as we dove into the character a little more and fleshed him out, he started to become three dimensional. He became this character who was coming to terms with the fact that everything in his life was due to privilege and who started to question his own worth and wonder, ‘How do I fit into the world?’ That, to me, is a really interesting character with a lot of meat for future episodes. And that's not so dissimilar to Harley's arc in the flagship show, finding out who she is separate from Joker.”
Schumacker adds, “Dean theorized that, of all our B-listers that we've brought to the table in Harley, Kite Man had the opportunity for the most growth. He is the lowest of the low of the underdog. His rising to the occasion felt like there would be a long journey in there that would be worth multiple seasons.”
Much of the Harley Quinn team – executive producer Jennifer Coyle and lead character designer Shane Glines – joined the Kite Man: Hell Yeah! production wearing the same hats. The unapologetic humor and crisp and colorful 2D animation style are both very much the same as in Harley.
“We really didn’t want to reinvent the wheel with Kite Man,” explains Schumacker. “Aesthetically, we wanted it to feel like it was cut from the same cloth. As a comics reader, whenever I read long runs of books, it's always a little jarring, despite how amazing they are, when a fill-in artist comes in and does an issue where it doesn't look like the same artwork. It oftentimes throws me. I didn’t want our show to have that feeling. I wanted it to be consistent.”
And, if it ain’t broke, why fix it?
“It is such a testament to everybody on the animation side and everybody who works on the show, period,” says Halpern. “We're lucky in that, with Harley and Kite Man, the people who work on these shows genuinely love the show, and they give everything to the show, and it is the reason these shows work.”
The two EPs also attribute their success with Harley and optimistic future with Kite Man to the unusually trusting partners at Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment.
“We had the benefit of two things during Harley that were really rare in this business and the first was Peter Girardi, executive vice president at Warner Bros. Animation, saying, ‘I know what you guys want to make, and I want to help you make it,’” notes Halpern. “And then we had Erin Wehrenberg who, at the time, was the head of comedy development at Warner Bros., say, ‘This is not my lane. I do not totally understand these shows, so I'm going to trust you guys and Peter to make this show and do a good job.’ You almost never, ever, ever see executives understand when something isn't their lane and allowing you creative freedom. I think that’s why things ended up the way they did.”
In other words, Halpern, Schumacker and Lorey found people in power willing to take the big swings.
“So often, when you’re working for these big corporations, people are trying to come up with the perfect cocktail of what will sell and what will get on the air, but it’s a fool’s errand,” says Halpern. “That never leads to cool stuff. In everything animation, I'm mostly interested in big swings. I know that sounds ridiculous coming from two guys who took one of the most popular DC characters around and made a show for them. But taking a big swing doesn’t mean that the idea has to be so crazy or auspices. I want someone to take a big creative swing that they feel is risky because I think that's generally what makes for exciting things on television.”
Schumacker adds, “For DC to take a risk, and Warner Bros. to take a risk, on doing an irreverent take on this beloved mythology, and to do so in a way that’s targeted specifically for adult eyes only, and kids who can convince their parents to let them watch it, is huge to me. That feels like a major step forward in this landscape. And with shows like Star Trek: Lower Decks, we’re seeing examples of riskier projects being taken on that could backfire in a horrible way. Of course, Lower Decks is fucking phenomenal, and I’d love to see more shows like it and like ours.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
