They’ve Taken on Clayface, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and Star Trek. But Can They Survive Each Other?

Our product picks are editor-tested, expert-approved. We may earn a commission through links on our site. Why Trust Us?Hearst Owned8 min readRELATIONSHIPS ARE HARD. Interpersonal dynamics of any sort require work to maintain—Ben Affleck took a lot of shit for saying his marriage was work, but he was right. A myriad of different factors can destabilize a dynamic between people at any given moment: ego, money, miscommunication, and on the list goes.Unless you’re Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing.The comic writing duo, collectively and colloquially known as “Hivemind,” have worked on major properties including, but certainly not limited to, Captain America, Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Trek, and Thunderbolts. That’s not to mention their creator-owned work, like the new horror comic, You’ll Never Leave This Place Alive, which is akin to Marvel’s Runaways meets M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. And right now, their work on the 2022 one-shot Batman: One Bad Day: Clayface, is part of the DNA that makes up Clayface—the latest production from James Gunn’s DC Studios and the current #1 movie in America. These are the kinds of projects that most writers would kill to be a part of. And, at every step, this pair has done it together.In a profession where it often feels like a Battle Royale-style competition to land a paid gig, how and why do these two decide to work together?The answer dates back to 2005, when the pair met at the University of Southern California’s famed film school. Lanzing remembers being on his very first film set and passing by a sound guy, David Server, talking about the Avengers. After doubling back and clarifying if he was, indeed, talking about the comic, the pair hit it off. Not long after, Lanzing went over to Server’s place to hang out, where he met Kelly, who was Server’s roommate. “We met briefly and became friendly,” Lanzing says. “I was definitely—let’s say—a little more hubristic back then,” Kelly states. “I think I was a little bit high on my own supply and wasn’t really quite as engaging with other folks as much.” Kelly went off to Ireland to study abroad and “came back and discovered that this guy, [Lanzing], was still in our lives. I really thought it was going to be a short, summer fling.”The trio would pile in a PT Cruiser lovingly nicknamed “The Beast,” because it would “growl anytime you tried to gas it” and trek down to local comic book shops Golden Apple or Meltdown to pick up new issues for the week. The trio would then go to a greasy pizza place, read their books, and talk about them. “Because we were all film students, we’re breaking apart the story,” Kelly says. “We were really doing our best to effectively just be passionate nerds within the space. Once you spend enough time with someone and see their real passion for something, it's hard not to start to bond. Once you start to see that passion in someone's eyes and understand what they care about, that's how real relationships are built.”In a way, Kelly’s relationship with Server developed as a Step Brothers-esque “Did we just become best friends” moment. But his relationship with Lanzing had more of the slow-burn nature of a courting.“It genuinely was,” Kelly confirms. “Absolutely.”If hanging out and talking shop was the getting-to-know-one-another phase of their relationship, the consummation, as it were, came out of shared vulnerability. The two ended up in a writing group, sharing material back and forth. That’s when they finally read one another’s work, and their perspective shifted. Kelly, who had come to USC from small town roots in both Hawaii and Washington state without much of a plan before the screenwriting program took him in, was similarly moved by Lanzing’s work. “I'm realizing the story he wrote was my experience, he says. “This is a brother, not a foe. Embrace him like a brother. From that moment on, that respect changed the dynamic of our relationship.”The pair spent more and more time together, especially after they graduated and took a road trip to Lollapalooza to see Radiohead—which Kelly wryly describes as “pots and pans being tossed down the stairs music”—where their respect for one another grew. “I have so much respect for who he is as a creator, " Kelly says. “It's almost like they say, Don't meet your heroes, but it's like, I kind of just get to hang out with one of my heroes all the time.” Lanzing quickly chimes in, saying, “ I just had never met somebody who thought the way Collin did . . . I learned pretty early, not as a writing partner, but as a friend, he filled in a lot of my gaps.”In those early days, the pair didn’t always have the language to express the depths of their friendship to one another, with both agreeing it was easier to pour that into the work and have it manifest there.“We were able to have that rich emotional relationship without saying those words exactly because we were able to funnel it all through our characters,” Kelly adds. “We were almost forced by the fact that we had pledged our careers to each other. We were like, the only way we're going to get through this life is together, making beautiful stories together, making things that are tragic and real and sincere. That necessitates us opening up and being real and tragic and sincere with each other in a way that's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is just for the story, man.”THE AFOREMENTIONED LOLLAPALOOZA trip turned out to be beneficial not only in furthering the pair’s friendship, but giving them a real foot in the door in Hollywood. As they drove from Los Angeles to Chicago, the boys started riffing on story ideas, eventually hitting on their shared love of Akira Kurosawa movies and Japanese culture. On the road, they put together an outline for a movie called Sundown about seven samurai defending a town from Daki, aka Japanese vampires. “Ultimately, it's about this guy having to kill his best friend,” Lanzing says. “We didn’t really realize we were writing a lot of the early parts of our relationship into the script.”By the time the trip back to LA concluded, the duo thought Sundown was in good-but-not-great shape. Kelly had a deal with William Morris, and brought the script to his agent there with the understanding that any sale involving the story was now a package deal. While the movie ultimately never got made, it made enough of an impression to get them recurring work, even as the industry shifted in real time, often being tapped to work on web series, which became all the rage after the 2008 financial crisis.The two worked part-time on storytelling while holding full-time jobs. That schedule meant they’d get together for face-to-face working sessions on Thursday and all day Sunday. “Our wives, our friends, everybody had to accept the fact that, look, if you want Jack or Collin on [those days], you don't get them,” Kelly says.With such a complicated working arrangement, the possibility of not working as a duo did come up. At one point, Kelly took a chance to co-write an animation with another writer friend, but the production ended up spanning six different time zones. Fundamentally, the project was messing and began taking a toll on Kelly, to the point where it finally came to a head.“It genuinely is one of the only times I’ve gotten angry at Collin,” Lanzing adds. “That’s the one time I’ve ever had to deploy it in our relationship because it had literally gotten to the point where it was like, he’s disappearing. Not just into this project but into himself.”Lanzing found it to be the “scariest” moment in their entire relationship. “I think that is legit one of the first times we were ever really emotionally vulnerable with another,” he says. “The crazy thing is, I think it actually brought us closer together.”“Oh, yeah,” Kelly interjects. “I was scream crying.”“We lost it at each other and were able to put it back together,” Lanzing says, picking the thread back up. “I think it taught us both, like, okay, we can do this.”A FEW YEARS ago, DC Comics published a series of Batman-related one-shots. The series, titled “One Bad Day,” draws inspiration from Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, and John Higgins’ seminal The Killing Joke story. In the story, the Joker rolls out his MO, a fitting bit of text that’s become totemic within comic book lore: “All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That’s how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.”The one-shots featured a handful of stories, all told from the point of view of a Batman villain. Kelly and Lanzing’s story, drawn by Xermanico, follows the Basil Karlo version of Clayface, who is on the verge of a breakout role and slowly descends into madness as he kills more and more people in the film industry to get what he wants. It’s also clearly one of the main sources of inspiration for the DCU’s new body horror film Clayface, which released earlier this month to the excitement of DC fans (and landing at the top of the box office). The film follows a version of Clayface named Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) and his quest for continued fame on the silver screen (even with plenty of body mutations and murders coming along the way).Kelly says that DC reached out to them specifically because of their Hollywood background—and thought that would be perfect for Clayface. “Talk about taking our trauma and doing our therapy—that book is taking all the pain that we've had and expressing it through the character and taking him through something really genuinely emotional and horrifying,” Kelly says. “And it has nothing to do with being a Clayface.”DC ComicsBut for both men, the book is another kind of cautionary tale. It’s what could have happened to them if they hadn’t found one another. “[Basil] kills and impersonates his supposed best friend,” Lanzing says. “That's the pivot point. That's the thing that makes it not Collin and I's story. Rather than look at the other guy and be like, I want the jobs you have, I want the opportunities you have, I want the talent you have, I want the ideas you have, I want the life you have, I want the face you have. Rather than doing any of that, what we did was we said, What if we take the monetary sacrifice involved in splitting that fifty-fifty, but then do it together and make an alliance that doesn't break, that doesn't lead to one of us stuffing the other one in the back of a car? Does that lead to a better outcome? “At this point, we’re getting to the part of the summit that seems like it led to a better outcome.”Based on the expansive depth and breadth of their work, the answer is a resounding yes. But in how the two men talk about one another, and their friendship, and what they’ve meant to one another, even without creating together, it’s the kind of relationship anyone would love to have. A perfect partnership where each brings out the best in the other, resulting in something that transcends and goes beyond—even if maintaining and cultivating that relationship can sometimes get tricky or rocky, it’s worth it. Being in a foxhole with someone else is always going to be better than doing it alone.William Goodman is a freelancer writer, focused on all things pop culture, tech, gadgets, and style. He’s based in Washington, DC and his work can also be found at Robb Report, Complex, and GQ. He’s yet to meet a jacket or cardigan he didn’t love. In his free time, he’s probably on Twitter (@goodmanw) or at the movies.