Meet Ben Wan | Indie Comic Book Writer, Author, Podcaster, & Voice Actor

We had the good fortune of connecting with Ben Wan and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Ben, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
My original career goal was to become a TV writer. Around 2012, I was well on that path. I had representation, a few awards for my TV specs and pilots, and had just gotten into the NBC TV writing program, which was called Writers on the Verge at the time. But a cancer diagnosis with Hodgkin’s lymphoma set me back. After my cancer went into remission in 2013, I was able to get back on my feet and write more pilots. But while my scripts got me meetings, I wasn’t landing staffing positions.

Eventually, I asked myself if I really wanted to only write for TV…or did I just want to be a writer?

My focus gradually shifted from churning out TV writing samples to, instead, getting my work published or produced for an audience. I got the first taste of it when I submitted a short story novella, “Shortcut to Happily Ever After,” to different magazines and it was eventually published by Metaphorosis Magazine in April 2023. After that, I saw that I could take my previous scripts and turn them into self published works, specifically into independent comic books. I had already been co-hosting a growing podcast, Superhero Stuff You Should Know, that was built around comic book characters. So my manager, Le’Ander Nicholson at Believeland, prompted me to publish my own independent comics, while using the podcast to market my work to my audience.

Publishing these myself has already been more fulfilling than hoping for someone else to produce my scripts. There’s something rewarding about being able to hold a physical copy of something that I wrote, as opposed to it sitting on my hard drive as a pdf file that’ll only be read by a handful of people.

As of this interview, I’ve self published the first issue of my series Alter Ego, in which the main character goes undercover as a henchmen for five families of supervillains, with the goal to eliminate them one by one. The second issue is due in November while I also have an independent manga set for release in early 2025 about the real life samurai Miyamoto Musashi and how he trained his adopted son, Iori, to become a warrior.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
As you can see from my description, I’ve ended up doing more than just write comics! I’ve written prose stories and audio dramas, I voice act, and I co-run the podcast, Superhero Stuff You Should Know. In another time, this might have felt like I was all over the place, but we are in the age of having multiple jobs and being a hyphenate, so I think they’re all connected in promoting me as a brand.

These avenues of writing, podcasting, and voice acting are all a way for someone to know me or my work and want to check out more. The way I see it, people aren’t going to read my short story or buy my comics just because they exist. Most people who have read my writing are ones who either know me personally or know me through Superhero Stuff You Should Know. But without the podcast, I wouldn’t have much of an audience to market anything towards.

The show began with my co-host and friend Andrew Bush. He had initially started the show under the name SuperHouse. He and his friends would occasionally bring me on to discuss Batman and other movies, but it wasn’t until 2019 that I decided to come on more regularly as a co-host. We ended up growing an audience in discussing superhero scripts that were never made, casting that never happened, or concept art for ideas that were scrapped. This eventually led into us doing interviews with the people who formed our favorite childhood movies!

The podcast has allowed me to grow an audience and get people to know who I am in order to become invested or interested in my own creative work. It’s also led to other creative opportunities that I couldn’t have anticipated.

Since the YouTube channel and podcast Neuverse Creative produces audio dramas of unmade superhero scripts, we naturally came into contact with each other. I then began writing adaptations for them around 2023, where I ended up voicing small parts for them and even narrated one of my scripts. Outside of Neuverse, I recently voiced both the villain Ra’s al Ghul and Batman himself for the YouTube channel The Bat Feed in their ongoing analog horror series The Arkham Tapes. And I’ve booked a lead voice role in an upcoming fan-produced animated feature that will be announced in November. Another fan, Jeffrey Scott Richards, wrote in a part for Andrew and me in his short film, Derrick Magnum, where we became executive producers. The short has gone on to win multiple awards at film festivals, including a Best Actor award for me.

None of these would have been possible without the podcast since these opportunities all came from fans of the show!

In terms of challenges and lessons, I don’t think I realized how much being a writer was going to involve…not writing, haha. For comic books specifically, I not only have to write the dialogue and story, but also specify in the script about what’s in every panel of every page, what the characters look like, and even what colors they’re wearing. Then there’s the matter of learning the software to put together all the pages into a book. If you want your comic on Kindle or any kind of ereader, you should program the Guided View so that readers can just tap from one part of the panel to the next without having to zoom in. So I manually set each part of where the Guided View would take the reader on each panel. Then there’s obviously the marketing through social media platforms and getting interviews to talk about my comics. These are all things that most people would find to be too much work or not be willing to do, but it’s what you have to put up with if you want to self publish.

Another challenge in both podcasting and writing is dealing with perfectionism. For a lot of writers or creatives, the biggest risk sometimes is just hitting “submit” in sharing your work to someone or putting it out there. But it’s a risk you have to take. You can be one of the most talented writers in the world, but no one will ever know if you never share your work. This is where podcasting has helped in that you have to be okay releasing episodes where you don’t sound as great as you would have liked. You might have flubbed saying something or you said “umm” too much or you accidentally got a fact wrong that a listener will correct you on next week. But you know you have to release a show for your audience and you just have to make a note to yourself to improve next time. For writing, it’s similar in the sense that I obviously want to put in my best effort for the storytelling. But I also couldn’t be so precious about it that I would never show it to anyone or publish it. I had to be okay with putting my work out there, with the confidence that I would improve over time and that it’s natural in a writer’s career for some work to be better than others.

If I never took that risk to publish anything, I’d never get to see my work published.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
For listeners or subscribers of my podcast, I’d obviously recommend the WB Studio Tour to visit the filming locations of different movies and of course, the variety of DC superhero costumes they have on display at the end. You’ll see a Wonder Woman statue outside of the doors and there’s a Batman statue at the Burbank Town Center for you to check out afterwards, where you can take a picture with it outside of the AMC and maybe even go to Round One to play Injustice.

For hidden gems in that area, there’s the Red Maple Cafe, which is an amazing breakfast/brunch spot. Their Applewood Smoked Bacon is the best in town and unlike anything that you’d get elsewhere. And you can get your favorite celebrity’s face on your latte or even upload your own photo for them to put on your coffee. Just make sure to get there early because it’s usually packed. For those with a sweet tooth, Cookie Dough Dreams is a must. It’s cookie dough you can eat, just like when you were a kid. They have a variety of flavors, but the chocolate chip is still the best and anything you don’t finish, you can take home and bake cookies with it.

Lastly for thrillseekers, I just tried Santa Monica Trapeze School at the pier and it was an amazing experience, though not for the faint of heart. You’ll learn a variety of moves and potentially even get caught by one of the instructors, who’ll grab you while swinging on the other trapeze, all in about an hour. Definitely a great push for your comfort zone as it challenges you to keep moving in spite of the fear up there.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
There are a ton of people who have helped my writing over the years but one of my biggest supporters is also thankfully my manager, Le’Ander Nicholson at Believeland. He’s always believed in my journey, has promoted me, and fought for me. He was the one who helped encourage me to shift gears and self publish my work.

I also have to thank everyone who’s given me an opportunity to produce or publish my work, specifically B. Morris Allen at Metaphorosis Magazine, who published my short story as well as re-published it in three anthologies this year. It was the first time I’ve ever been paid for my creative writing. I also want to thank Tim Maxwell at Neuverse Creative, who’s helped produce several audio drama podcasts I’ve written, which adapt existing comic books and screenplays and allow me to promote my own original work for anyone who likes my writing.

My biggest shoutout though would be to my own family. It feels rare for Asian families to be supportive of someone who wants to go into the creative arts. But I was blessed with people who encouraged and believed in me from the beginning, especially my parents. None of them questioned me on whether this was the right path for me nor made me doubt myself on whether I could pull this off. My mother has always wanted to read my work (or listen to it if it’s in audio form) and spread the word about it to other people. My father was a doctor who did not have any experience in the arts or creative fields, but in spite of that difference, he always had faith that I would succeed. Unfortunately earlier this year, he passed away. I will always be grateful that he was alive to see my work published and that he was able to hold the physical copies in his hands. My upcoming manga on Miyamoto Musashi, which already tells the story of a father and son, will be dedicated to his memory.

Website: https://www.benwanwriter.com

Instagram: benwanwriter

Twitter: benwanalterego

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@benwan4141

Other: Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Ben-Wan/author/B0CZBKYPF3

Image Credits
Ivan Khoe