The blog Nerds With Kids has posted an interview with indie-comics stalwarts Evan Dorkin (Milk & Cheese and Hectic Planet) and Sara Dyer (Action Girl). Together they were responsible for the script for my favorite episode of Bruce Timm's Superman: The Animated Series (it was "Little Girl Lost," to be exact, which introduced Supergirl), and more recently they've been lending their talents to the incomporable Yo Gabba Gabba (which I can't seem to shut up about).

I hadn't known that Dorkin and Dyer were involved with the show when Georgia and I first started watching it, but as soon as we saw the first segment with the young superheroine Super Martian Robot-Girl, I recognized the style immediately.



Dorkin talked a bit about Super Martian Robot-Girl in an interview last week.

We’re developing the animation and characters and backgrounds for the “Super Martian Robot Girl” segments, which were originally a series of live-action shorts, based on the “Spider-Man” segments from the Electric Company, if you’re old enough to remember that—or old enough to rent it now. Easy Reader would be reading a Spider-Man comic, and then they’d push in on the comic and show what’s in it, with a live-action segment. For Yo Gabba Gabba, they were doing that. We designed the Super Martian Robot Girl costume and the comic book that she’s in. They wanted it to look like one of those $1.50 Marvel Treasury books from the 70s, which was pretty cool.

The segment was killed by Nickelodeon—they didn’t like the live-action. It was going to be talking animals and monsters, with some cartoonishly dressed people who would then call the superhero character to come and save them. The show was for preschoolers, and I think they thought the segment was a little off-putting and creepy. Some of it looked a little like homemade 70s theater—cardboard sets, purposefully looking very theatrical. It didn’t work, but they wanted to save the segment, so they did it in Flash animation and asked us to adapt it. They had audio tracks for eight or nine segments. Long story short, we ended up doing a pilot segment, and Nickelodeon liked it and wanted more, which consisted of redesigning all off the characters, from all of the material that was shot, redesigning all of the background, and then doing a bunch of limited animation poses.

As much as I love the animated bits as they are, how cool would those live action bits have been?