Recently we had the honor of speaking with Eisner-award nominated and multiple Glyph award winning writer Jeremy Whitley, who we’re also proud to say is a friend of the site. Best known for “PRINCELESS” (CLICK HERE for our prior interview with Whitley on this excellent book), Whitley has an issue of “MY LITTLE PONY: FRIENDS FOREVER” coming out THIS WEEK – don’t miss it! Here’s all the latest on “MY LITTLE PONY”, “PRINCELESS” and more from Jeremy Whitley:

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TMSTASH: It was great to see you taking on a My Little Pony book. Have you been a fan of the show for some time, or was there any catching up you needed to do?

WHITLEY: Actually I’ve been a fan of the show for a while. My daughter is two and it’s one of the few shows that the two of us agree on. My Little Pony is one of those shows that has enough humor and is enough of an all-ages show that it was one that I was thankful for, that I was happy to watch along with her.

TMSTASH: Is there any trepidation in taking on a title where you know there are some very avid fans of the show?

WHITLEY: I feel like it’s the sort of thing that I should be worried about, and I feel like I’ve been a little more worried about it since they announced the book, which was well after I had written everything. But, I enjoy the show enough and have enough love and respect for it that I feel like I can handle the stories and kind of how they’re structured, and know what it is that they wanted to do. They told me what the idea was for this series, that it was kind of a team up series. There were a couple of ideas that sprung to mind right away, like “I want to do this”. The one that’s coming out in February is about Discord and the Cutie Mark Crusaders. Instantly you’ve got this character that’s a god of chaos and this group of young kids which are in their own way, well, all little kids are kind of God’s chaos (laughter).

TMSTASH: There’s a lot of potential input from so many people on a licensed property, not just from IDW but from Hasbro, and from the creators of the show. How much did you get a chance to work with these guys, and how did you handle the process?

WHITLEY: Mostly, I dealt directly with my editor, Bobby Curnow at IDW. I basically submitted a whole bunch of ideas to him and he sifted through them to see which ones had the most potential and dealt with what was going on with the show, because he knows a little bit about what’s coming up. He could steer me away from the stuff that’s not going to work (with the show). Once he did that, we had a couple of different ideas and he had me flesh those out a bit more. He kind of directed me as to what wouldn’t work for (the creators) and what would. (Bobby) wasn’t too handsy with it, he gave me some space to work with it and gave some suggestions. But, by the time we submitted it to Hasbro we had fleshed out the story idea, which was a four or five page breakdown of it and they approved that right off the bat with no issues, and I wrote the script, Bobby made a few edits, we sent it back in, they approved it right off the bat without any changes. It’s not what you expect when you’re going in with a company that size. You figure they’re going to be a lot more protective of their stuff and rightfully so. They were great to work with.

TMSTASH: How did you get hooked up with IDW on the project?

WHITLEY: I met Bobby in San Diego when I was there, not this past year but the year before when I went to the Eisner Awards and met him through Dave Wachter who was doing a project with him at that point, they did “The Night of 1000 Wolves” together which Bobby wrote and Dave illustrated. I put the idea out that I’d like to work with IDW on some stuff, and there was nothing really open at that point, but this past year at Denver Comicon I ran into Tony Fleece who’s been working on “Pony” stuff for a while now, and he asked me if I’d ever thought of working on this stuff because he was a fan of “PRINCELESS”. I was flattered and of course said I’d love to work on “MY LITTLE PONY” stuff, it would be fantastic, and he put in a good word for me with Bobby and it so happened that they had this new line getting ready to come up that they were looking for story ideas for. It was all fortuitous.

TMSTASH: With the Cutie Mark Crusaders, it’s the kind of a story where if they ever achieve what they’re looking for, their story is basically over. What kind of a challenge do you have writing that kind of a tale?

WHITLEY: It’s tough, because you have to know it as a writer but the characters can’t know it, they can’t even get the inkling that this might not possibly go the way they want it to. It’s one of those interesting things that had been explored a lot in the show and they had done it really well, to the point that I was having a hard time coming up with things for them to do, and I thought that they would probably be at that point to, where they’re (the Ponys) running out of things to do. And where do you turn to, to provide ideas and situations that you would never even think of? And of course, Discord can pretty much provide anything, so…

TMSTASH: That makes sense. Now, you have at least one more issue coming up in this series. Is this another Cutie Mark story or a different team up?

WHITLEY: It hasn’t been announced yet, so I can’t talk too much about it, but it’s definitely a team-up story but its two different characters. They’ve pushed that one back a bit because it features one of the characters featured in the first issue, and they didn’t want to bunch them together too much.

TMSTASH: I think I read somewhere that you had some other stories in the pipeline that you’re talking to IDW about.

WHITLEY: I’ve actually been trading some e-mails with Bobby about that today (as of our interview). I’d really like to write a main line Pony story that goes across multiple issues and covers a bit more ground. And, I wanted to do, the story that I’m trying to work on right now is Zecora-centered. I’ve always been fascinated by the character, always mysterious and a little bit different. I don’t feel like it’s been quite fully explored with the show yet. They haven’t really touched on everything in the comics either. If that goes through I’m hoping that will be a big spotlight for that character.

TMSTASH: Besides this you have a lot of other things going on – “PRINCELESS” has the new volume coming out, along with the Encore of the original volume.

WHITLEY: The TPB (PRINCELESS), the new collected edition of the first four issues will be the first time we’ve had a full-size collection of those stories, with a nice new cover by the artist for those first stories, M. Goodwin. We’ve just been showing it off online. It’s in previews now. It’s nice to have that to show people again. It’s been a while where I’ve had to say “I have volume two, but not really any volume ones around right now”.

TMSTASH: It is good to see it back. Action Lab has grown so much since the first issues came out.

WHITLEY: Oh yeah, at the time “PRINCELESS” was the second multi-issue series that Action Lab had. “FRACTURE” was the first and “PRINCELESS” was right behind that. We had done some graphic novels in the meantime and Dave Dwonch’s collection of his webcomic “SPACE-TIME CONDOMINIUM”. Three of the months that it was in previews, it was the only thing that Action Lab had in previews. Now, that would be extremely unlikely. We have usually one or two pages of stuff in the catalog every month between the mainline Action Lab stuff and the Danger Zone stuff. We’ve got so much quality product, so many big creators now, from obviously Jamal Igle’s “MOLLY DANGER”, we’ve had a lot of success with “VAMPLETS” and of course they recently announced that Ray Height would do his “MIDNIGHT TIGER” series with us. I think that’s going to be a big one for us. It’s only the second superhero story we’ve done, along with “FRACTURE”, which was our launch title.

TMSTASH: I understand you may have a superhero title of your own coming up, with Jason Strutz?

WHITLEY: Yeah, Jason Strutz and I have been working on a mini-series that takes place in a superhero world of our own creation, that’s all about a girl who is the secretary a multi-billionaire industrialist bent on taking down the superheroes. When she discovers she has powers herself, she tries to ally with the superheroes and winds up on the wrong side of that and the wrong side of her boss. She wanders in on the middle of his plot to take everybody down. She’s only got some control of her powers, she’s still in the middle of being trained and barely knows what’s going on. It’s going to be a fast-paced book, where she’s going to be on the run from the beginning. It’s going to be five or six issues, and we don’t intend on taking a breath in there at any time. Jason’s been working on that proposal, and he’s also been doing some work as well with Red Stylo Media, the one-shot adaptation of Poe’s “CASK OF AMONTIDALLO” and they’ve been basically doing a continuation of that story called “THE HOUSE OF MONTRESOR”. It’s a really interesting, spooky continuation of that story. Jason has such an innovative feel for panels. I got a copy of the one-shot earlier this year and it is really something.

TMSTASH: We had a chance to review the one-shot, and I was really impressed. What else do you have going? Seems like you’ve been staying awfully busy these days.

WHITLEY: I am certainly trying. I’ve got another pitch that I’m working on right now with my friend Jessi Sheron, who did one of the short stories from the last “PRINCELESS” collection, the second half of the Prince Ashe story with the girl and the wolves. She’s working on a story called “SNOW” with me, which we’re shopping around a bit and pitching to some of the companies that we’d like to work with. Hopefully that will be something that comes through for us. I’ve also got a couple of other stories that I’m working with, obviously the one with Jason that we just talked about, and then I’ve got a story that I’m doing with Dave Foland, who’s co-writing it with me, a good friend who people have met if they’ve come to my table at conventions, and a new artist friend named Marcus Kwame who’s doing the art on that one. It’s kind of a spy/action-comedy of sorts. I’ve finished writing the second issue not too long ago and Marcus has been completing pages and I’ve just recently seen some of the completed colored pages and I’m really happy with how it’s coming together. Hopefully it’s just as well-written as it is illustrated.

TMSTASH: What else would you like to tell our followers?

WHITLEY: It’s the beginning of a new year, and I’m hoping to have some good stuff to announce soon. Obviously we have the “MY LITTLE PONY” book, and right behind that we should have some great new stuff coming from the “PRINCELESS” side of things. The volume 3 that’s getting ready to come out is a bit of a different experience than the first two volumes. Hopefully that will bring in a new corner of the “PRINCELESS” world that we’ll get to have some fun with too.

TMSTASH: As you get more of these coming out just let us know, we’d love to talk to you anytime.

WHITLEY: Absolutely. It’s always good talking to you.

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And that’s all for today! Don’t miss “MY LITTLE PONY: FRIENDS FOREVER” #2, due at your LCS February 26th, and also keep an eye out for the latest issue of the encore edition of “PRINCELESS”, also on your LCS shelves this week!