You’d think with the Olympics going on and all that sloppy security Mitt Romney told us about, the authorities would have more important work to do than to count the number of penises (peni?) Howard Chaykin can squeeze into a single comic book. But – obviously, since I’m writing this – you’d be wrong.
I got an email from a British comics shop owning friend of mine, subsequently confirmed by our pal Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool, that Chaykin’s Black Kiss II #1 was the only title missing in his shipment from Image Comics. Knowing I have a long-standing friendship with the writer/artist (and, ahem, edited his American Flagg! and Blackhawk), he thought I’d be amused.
He’s right about that. Howard’s pushing 62 – not quite as hard as I am – and he’s still raising a ruckus. He’s more than my friend. He’s my hero of the week.
With the Olympics in town, perhaps the Brits are simply wallowing in testosterone and can’t handle Chaykin’s multitude of peni. Perhaps they can’t tell the difference between Black Kiss and Beano. Or maybe they’re simply very insecure.
Howard’s response to me was “And I can only hope Canada is next!”
Black Kiss II #1 goes on sale tomorrow at the more sophisticated comics shops across the nation.
Noted comic book junkie (and occasional comic creator) Patton Oswalt delivered the third annual keynote speech at the Just For Laughs Comedy Conference in Montreal last week. He presented his address in the form of two open letters, one to creators and one to gatekeepers, and everything he said to those audiences can and should also be said to every comic book professional, be they creator, publisher, or retailer. Here’s a large snippet:
When I say everything I know about succeeding a comedian is worthless, I know what I’m talking about because everything I know became worthless twice in my lifetime. […] All the comedians I remember starting out with in D.C., all the older ones, told me over and over again ‘you gotta work clean, you gotta get your five minutes, and you gotta get on Carson.’ And it all comes down to that.
And in one night, all of them were wrong. And not just wrong, they were unmoored. They were drifting. A lot of these bulletproof comics I’d opened for, whose careers seemed pre-destined, a lot of them never recovered from that night. You’ll never hear their names. They had been sharks in a man-made pond and had been drained. They decided their time had passed.
Keep that in mind for later. They had decided their time had passed.
The second time everything I knew about comedy became worthless has been pretty much every day for the last three years.
I know that’s not an exact date. Some other younger, not yet famous name in this room – you are going to pinpoint that date 20 years from now. But for now, every day for about the last few years will have to suffice.
I just want to give you a brief timeline of my career up to this point, when I knew it was all changing again. Listen to my words very carefully. Two words will come up again and again and they’re going to come back later along with that phrase “they decided” and people are going to carry me around the room.
[Huge ego-stroking credit dump omitted.]
I know that sounds like a huge ego-stroking credit dump. But if you listened very carefully, you would have heard two words over and over again: “lucky” and “given.” Those are two very very dangerous words for a comedian. Those two words can put you to sleep, especially once you get a taste of both being “lucky” and being “given.” The days about luck and being given are about to end. They’re about to go away. […] What I mean is: Not being lucky and not being given are no longer going to define your career as a comedian and as an artist.
Remember what I said earlier about those bulletproof headliners who focused on their 5 minutes on the Tonight Show and when it ended they decided their opportunity was gone? They decided. Nobody decided that for them. They decided.
Now, look at my career up to this point. Luck, being given. Other people deciding for me. […] I need to decide more career stuff for myself and make it happen for myself, and I need to stop waiting to luck out and be given. I need to unlearn those muscles.
I had one hell of a weekend, and I don’t mean that in the swinging wild party, gorgeous male strippers in thongs stuffed with dollar bills, wake up and don’t remember what the hell happened. I mean hell in all its Dante’s Inferno Nine-Circles-Of, sturm unddrang blitzkrieg, complete with crying jags and sheer, utterly emotional exhaustion.
We moved my parents to what is called in healthcare parlance a “continuous care retirement community.” They’re still living independently. It’s not quite assisted living. Yet.
Not that it’s a bad place. Actually, it’s quite lovely. Their new apartment is more spacious than the place they left; we didn’t have to get rid of any of their furniture, and by the time I left early yesterday afternoon, it looked like “home,” especially after brother Glenn, daughter Alix and her husband Jeff hung all the pictures and what-nots and set up the phone and the cable TV.
Actually, my brother was there with the cable guy when we arrived, so we didn’t miss any of the Olympics opening ceremony. Of course Queen Elizabeth II, with a little help from Daniel Craig, absolutely rocked the evening. Her outfit was stunning – luved the feathered “fascinator” she wore instead of one her standard hats, which I wouldn’t be surprised to find out her new granddaughter Kate picked out – and watching Her Majesty was lots better than watching Team USA wearing Ralph Lauren by way of a Chinese sweatshop.
Previously, my parents had Cablevision but now they have Comcast, so they’re having trouble figuring out how to use the remote, which is waaaaay more complicated and harder to read than the remote you get from Cablevision and Comcast’s channel guide is waaaay more “busy” (visually) than Cablevision’s, which really, really, sucks when you have macular degeneration like my dad does.
And the apartment overlooks a small lake with swans and a walking path and a gazebo. The staff is superb, caring and friendly, everything you could possibly want for your parents. And several of the residents were sort of a “welcome wagon” for Mr. and Mrs. Newell, accompanying them to their first meals in the main dining room.
But the first thing my mom said to me on Saturday morning, when she woke up in her new home was “I want to go home.”
I gave her a big hug, we talked, she went into the shower. I went outside and sat on one of the lovely rocking chairs on the lovely front porch and had three cigarettes in a row…between tears.
But I basically held it together – hung up their clothes in their new closets, folded the shirts and sweaters in the bedroom furniture, even did the laundry for them while they were went to dinner – until this morning, when I lost it completely. The above-mentioned sturm unddrang blitzkrieg, complete with crying jag.
Absolutely the wrong thing to do in front of my parents, who are stressed enough. Pissed off Glenn and Alix, disturbed Jeff.
So I went out for a ride. Went to the nearest WaWa, got a whole bunch of bagels – plain, garlic, onion, and pumpernickel. Checked out some nearby dry cleaners, which is the one service the retirement community doesn’t offer. Stopped at Rite-Aid and picked up some personal sundries for Mom.
And smoked some more cigarettes. (I admit it, I smoked a lot of cigarettes this weekend.)
And popped a Xanax.
So here I am, sitting at the computer, writing this column. Meant to write about moving, what it would be like to be Superman moving all that shit, Terran and intergalactic, to the Fortress of Solitude from his apartment in Metropolis. Wondering what was in Diana’s suitcases when she left Themiscrya. And how many times the moving vans have pulled into and out of the driveway of Avengers’ Mansion, with the constantly changing membership of that organization.
And where the parents of super-heroes – and super-villains, for that matter – go when they’re unable to live on their own.
But I’m just too exhausted and emotionally spent tonight to think about make-believe.
We don’t want to think we’re all just one brain-vein rupture away from committing murder, but most of us know in our heart of hearts this is so. To avoid that horrible prospect, every time something like the Dark Knight slayings happens we try to pin the blame on … something … somebody.
Attention-hungry quack shrinks who have never met the accused killer in Aurora Colorado let alone examined him or even studied his still-unfolding life history run to the nearest media outlet to promote themselves and their baseless theories – baseless because they don’t know the suspect or his story. And the media, like greedy whores in their own gravity-free reality show, lap it up and put it all in print and on the air as though there’s actually some legitimacy in these pontifications.
Liberals clamor for gun control, nonsensically posturing that if there were no guns there would be no killings. This is like blaming water for drowning. Mr. Holmes – and I note the American Way caveat of innocent until proven guilty – seems to have been resourceful enough to come up with alternatives, as the 24-hour stand-off at his booby trapped apartment clearly illustrates. Sure, citizens need assault weapons only slightly more than we need personal tactical nuclear weapons, but it doesn’t take a PhD in science to make a weapon of mass destruction. 20 minutes alone at a Home Depot should do it.
Modern conservatives say if everybody were armed, the shooter would have been put down early. Right. In a dark theater. Many of these same people put down Scientology or Mormonism because they think that stuff is wacky.
Some media, in their insatiable need for gaudy art, blame the comics – in particular Frank Miller’s best-selling Batman work. At least this gets Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan off the hook for creating a villain with a name that sounds just like the Republican presidential candidate’s Achilles’ heel. Of course, there have been about a million Batman stories published 73 years and you could find hundreds of similarities within the greater Bat grimoire. In fact, the whole Joker-gassing-the-public bit dates back to the earliest stories. I can’t forgive Frank for The Spirit, but people who are trying to conflate the Colorado shootings with his work are lazy slobs.
The fact is, James Holmes is a smart, highly accomplished young man of 24 from a church-going family in San Diego, California, the nicest city in the nation. That’s reality. Some cheap-shot artists are braying “somebody should have said something!” Well, his high school friends said he was pretty normal. His colleges acquaintances said he pretty much kept to himself, although there are reports he would frequent bars and other public places and engage in rational conversation, even up to a few days before the killings. I don’t think Philip K. Dick could have seen this one coming.
Again, reminding us all that he is merely the suspect and hasn’t been convicted of anything, Holmes appears to have simply snapped. Perhaps this happened a couple months ago when he started the process of dropping out of his post-grad programs. It would have taken him that long to put together the guns, the ammo, the hand-wired bombs and whatever else turns up.
I’m not saying he’s insane, at least not in the legal sense of knowing right from wrong. That’s a matter for the prosecution, the defense, and the jury. I’m saying he snapped. Just like anybody could snap. Anybody who feels he or she has nothing to lose, or something important to prove. Under the exactly wrong circumstances, that can be any one of us.
And that’s the true horror of the Aurora Colorado Dark Knight shootings.
What do we say? How do we react? A guy named James Holmes slipped into a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in a suburban town in Colorado and opened fire with an AR-15 rifle, a shotgun and two 40-caliber handguns. He set off what may have been tear gas as he started his killing spree. According to CNN, the suspect was dressed head to toe in protective gear including a gas mask. CNN also reported that a federal law enforcement official stated Holmes had colored his hair red and told the police he was “the Joker.”
He killed 12 people and wounded 58. As I write this, eleven are in critical condition.
His apartment has been booby trapped with incendiary and chemical devices and trip wires. Residents in the surrounding five buildings have been evacuated. It may take days to defuse it all.
What do we say? What can we say? Should we say anything at all at this point?
If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t be writing this column. I was working on a different one but I’ve let it go for now. Why?
Words are important. It’s how we take something that is inconceivable, incomprehensible, horrific and give it a shape and form. We communicate thoughts, beliefs, fears and give them a human shape. Some will misuse the power of words and cast the events in terms of their own ideology. They will try to shape the narrative to support or further their views. The events will not be described; they will be twisted. You can see some of this already on the Internet. I know I have.
In the past I have said that nothing that is human is alien to me, that I am capable of understanding anyone on a human level, that somewhere within myself I can find something of that person. Is that true in this case? Am I capable of understanding Holmes?
If I was writing the Joker, I’d have to find somewhere inside of me where I felt like the Joker. And that can take me to very dark places, not places to where I am eager to go. When I was writing Wasteland, I wrote a story from the point of view of a serial killer, or at least what I thought was a perspective a serial killer would have. I now think it was a little naïve. The story was interesting but I don’t know if it was successful in what I set out to do. Would I really want to be successful in that sense? Could I?
The Joker in Nolan’s previous Batman film, The Dark Knight, was not a “criminal” as much as an anarchist forcing Batman and the entire city of Gotham into choices that would reveal that, at heart, they were not better than he was. He would expose them as what his own dark twisted concept of humanity said they must be. Is that what James Holmes thought he was doing? If so, what more appropriate venue that the opening night of the next Batman film?
I’m speculating, of course. Guessing. That’s all any of us can do at the moment. It may be all that we can ever do. I think it’s important that we try. I don’t want to dismiss Holmes as an aberration, a freak, a monster – something that is not me. That’s too easy. He is human. Yes, a very screwed up human but human nonetheless. If I deny him his humanity what happens to mine?
I don’t have answers. Maybe I won’t be able to find any. Maybe the only answers will be the ones I impose on the situation. Maybe I’m wrong and there are monsters. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s not possible to find a common humanity with this killer. In the days and weeks to come, we’ll have more information. Maybe that will help; maybe it won’t. The attempt, I think, is necessary.
We also need to look at a basic fear underlying all this, one that hits home.
The Dark Knight Rises’ director, Christopher Nolan, was quoted as saying, “The movie theatre is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.” I think that’s true for all of us in this little community. This is our home, too, and this weekend was supposed to be a triumph for us in a summer of triumphs – the best summer of comic book movies ever. Now it’s sullied, bloodied and sullied, and whatever sales records the film sets, whatever awards it may win, that opening night in Aurora will be forever linked to it.
And I think that what we fear, deep down, is the possibility that the killer may have been one of us – a deranged, twisted version but one of us nonetheless. That’s the fear we need to name and only words will ultimately serve.
Just read Emily’s column (which is here) about her, uh, misadventures as a woman who loves comics.
*sigh*
Next year will mark twenty years since I first wrote Jenesis for DC’s New Talent Program. And for the last twenty years everything that Emily said last week has been said ad nauseum by me, Kim Yale, Mary Mitchell, Jo Duffy, Marie Javins, Gail Simone, Joyce Brabner… and the list goes on. Every woman involved in the comics world – writer, artist, colorist, letterer, inker, reader – has experienced the overt and covert misogyny typified by Emily’s experience in that comic book store. Every one of us has been on a Women In Comics panel once, twice or more during our professional lives. We’ve all talked about changing people’s attitudes, fighting the good fight, gaining respect. The faces on the panels, the faces in the audiences, they all change, but in truth, nothing changes.
It’s all the same old guano, just ladled out of a different tureen.
I’ve always said that the comics world is a microcosm of Hollywood, and we’ve all heard or read the stories of what it’s like to be a woman in Hollywood: the struggle for respect, for work, for equal pay (well, maybe except for Meryl Streep). But now I’m thinking, maybe I’ve been wrong. I’m thinking right now that the comics world is a microcosm of American society.
After all, this is an America in which a female law student is called a whore on a nationally syndicated radio show because she wants to be able to get birth control pills through her insurance plan. An America in which the House of Representatives just voted for the 33rd time to repeal the Affordable Care Act – “Obamacare” – which improves women’s access to maternity care, covers birth control without the need for a copay, and bars insurance companies from continuing to discriminate against women. An America in which women in the military who are raped are told to “put up and shut up.” An America in which women are told to hold an aspirin between their thighs – Bwha-ha-ha! That’s a humdinger! – to avoid pregnancy.
And it ain’t just comics or Hollywood. Female nurses – that’s me, folks – make 86.6% of what their male counterparts make, even with the same experience and education. And women in general still make $0.77 on the dollar compared to male earnings.
So what do you do about it? Don’t vote for Romney, that’s for sure. No way is he gonna improve women’s rights.
But what about in the comics world? We’re not quite at the level of law or medical school, where female students now dominate the classrooms, but women are more prevalent than ever in the field, as readers and creative folk. And most of them, I am willing to stake money on, are involved in comics because they love comics, not because their boyfriends or their fathers or their brothers dragged them to a comics shop or to the San Diego Comic-Con.
In other words:
I am woman,
Hear me roar,
In number too big to ignore….
Sorry, I forgot, this is the post-women’s liberation era.
Seriously, my advice to Emily and every other woman out there when confronted with a misogynistic geek?
Laugh at ‘em.
And watch their paraphernalia –
Well, to paraphrase George Constanza:
“The water was cold! It’s shrinkage!”
TUESDAY MORNING: Michael Davis Post-Con
TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Emily S. Whitten Post-Civil War
Last week I bitched and moaned about how we’ve turned our backs on comics that can be appreciated by readers of all ages in order to follow the money that kids ain’t got and some adults might have. I also tied this into continuity impenetrable to newcomers that is spread over about a hundred dollars’ worth of monthly product. I can be snotty that way.
In just the past couple of years, we have seen something of a return to comics that can be enjoyed by readers young and old. Publishers can’t help the self-consciousness suffered by Baby Boomers and some Gen-Xers, but today’s new middle-agers were raised without much of the stigma us old folks suffered during the Wertham rage. So, I am now taking it upon myself to point out a few titles that work for a general audience that is fearless enough to read comic books on the bus, be it to work or to school.
I’ve been quite impressed with Dynamite’s Zorro Rides Again, written by Matt Wagner and drawn (now) by John K. Snyder III. That’s quite a pedigree, and their work lives up to it. You do not have to be steeped in a century of Zorrodom to understand what’s going on: it’s all about a revolutionary with a sword on a horse who fights Spanish oppression in the name of the people of California. Solid action, great storytelling, and an even greater story. You can’t go wrong here; it’s a damn fine book.
Image Comics has been running a little superhero series called Savage Dragon for almost 20 years now – the main series is up to issue 180, for crying out loud – and there’s a reason why writer/artist/creator Erik Larson’s work has endured: it deserves to. Yeah, it’s all about a big hyper-muscled green-scaled head-finned superhero; what’s it to you? It’s chock full of solid characterization and mayhem alike. I think it appeals to the same sort of 11 year old that found Marvel Comics so accessible and so exciting a couple generations ago as well as to older readers get a solid comic book experience that isn’t fraught with sturm und drang. The real old farts will be reminded why we liked comics in the first place without having to hit up 50ccs of nostalgia.
The real surprise here comes from DC Comics. While all the focus and attention has been on the New 52, a line too interconnected and too continuity convoluted to access the broader spectrum of readers, over on the West Coast their editorial operation has been publishing a nice little self-contained universe of superheroes in a continuity that had its roots in a teevee series cancelled long ago. The book is called Batman Beyond Unlimited and for those who are unfamiliar with the proto-show it’s The Old DC Universe – The Next Generation… except some members of the original generation (Bruce Wayne, Kal-El) are still around.
There’s three different series going on in this giant-sizedish monthly: Batman Beyond, Superman Beyond, and Justice League Beyond. The latter group has Superman (the original, a man out of his time), Batman (Terry McGinnis, although Bruce Wayne is still around and more cranky than ever), Warhawk – the son of Hawkgirl and John Stewart, as well as contemporary versions of Green Lantern, The Atom and others. They back-fill the origins while remaining constant with previously established continuity, but – and this is why it works – you don’t need to be Mark Waid to understand who’s who, what’s what, and how everybody got that way. Available as weekly downloads in individual series titles or in the Batman Beyond Unlimited monthly, by avoiding the grim and gritty wallowing in apocalyptic hopelessness, this is a title that can be enjoyed by all but the most anal-retentive cynic.
And when was the last time I wasn’t the most anal-retentive cynic?
THURSDAY MORNING: Dennis O’Neil and the Trilogy Trend
“All you can do is open up the throttle all the way and keep your nose up in the air.”
First Lieutenant Meyer C. Newell
P-51 Mustang Fighter Jock
Separated from his squadron, shot up and leaking hydraulic fluid somewhere in the skies over Burma
What is the measure of success? What is the measure of failure?
In the previous three columns, I’ve told you a little bit – well, quite a bit, actually, about early failures in my life. And for a very long time I let my, uh, lack of success, hold me back, drag me down. That old albatross had a permanent nest on my shoulder. The Fantastic Four may have visited the Negative Zone, but, guys, I lived there.
In my mid-thirties I was divorced and living with my parents. Alix was two or three. She was sleeping in a portable crib, I was sleeping on a cot in the den. And then one day – sometime in my late thirties, I think – I was driving with my father in the car. I don’t remember where we were going; I think he was driving me to an appointment with one of the numerous psychiatrists and therapists I had seen in an attempt to “figure out what was wrong with me.” Oh, that was fun, let me tell you. One doctor put me through a round of physical tests and blood work to see if there was a physiological reason for my “blues.” (Tests came back. I was perfect.) Another doctor gave me his trench coat, telling me to cover up my legs because he was getting sexually excited. I went to a therapy group for newly divorced women; all I remember of that is the woman whose husband regularly beat the crap out of her. “Jesus, honey,” we would all say, “get the hell out of there.” She would just start to cry and go on and on about how much she loved him until the hour was up. We never got to talk about anything else. There was one doctor who talked to me for five minutes and gave me a prescription for Valium, the drug of choice in those days for women on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I took one Valium, fell asleep for 18 hours and dumped out the bottle. A week later I got a bill for $500.00 for “services rendered.” I called him and told him I was sending him $50.00, and just try to take me to court. Never heard from him again.
The best, though, was the shrink who was an Orthodox Jew. He told me that the only thing wrong with me was that I wasn’t married, so “I should stop dating the goyim, marry a nice Yiddisher man, and have lots of babies.”
Anyway, back to that day in the car with my dad. We weren’t talking much, just bits here and there. Suddenly my dad started talking about a mission he had been on during WW II. It had been a bombing and strafing mission somewhere in Burma, the objective being to destroy the latest installment of the railroad the Japanese were building – see The Bridge On The River Kwai for reference. They had met a lot of resistance, and on one strafing run my father’s P-51 got hit up badly. One of the hydraulic lines was hit, and he couldn’t keep up with the rest of the squadron on their flight back to the base. They had to leave him.
“Wow, Daddy, what did you do?” I asked. (The answer is above.) And then he said, “Know what I’m saying?”
And the light bulb suddenly clicked on over my head, just like in the old Looney Tunes cartoons. “Thufferin’ Thuccosthasth!” I said. “I do!” (No, not really. I mean, yeah, the light bulb went on, but I didn’t suddenly start sputtering and slovering like Sylvester the Cat.)
I’m not saying that all of a sudden my life was a bed of roses and that everything was hunky-dory. No. Quite the opposite. It took finding the right therapist. It took swallowing my pride and starting on an anti-depressant. But mostly it took a lot of hard work, a lot of tears, a lot of self-recrimination. Most of all, self-forgiveness.
These days I wonder. All my failures – but were they really failures? Weren’t they just part of the pattern that’s made me who I am today? And any failures, any successes that I continue to experience will just add to that person who I will be tomorrow, next week, next month, next year or in a decade.
These days most people would say that my life is a success. Well, I don’t know about that, but if it is, it didn’t happen without failures, some my own, some caused by outside factors. For instance, two years ago I got laid off. (Yes, Virginia, registered nurses do get laid off these days.) It sucked. I cried. I ranted. I worked at a couple of hospitals I wouldn’t send my worst enemy to. (Well, maybe I would.) But I also went back to school and finished my BSN, opening up new doors for me.
As for my other career, the one in comics? A lot of people in the comics industry have commented and complimented me on my “ear for dialogue,” my ability to get into the heads of the characters I have written. Maybe that wouldn’t be true if I hadn’t lived the life I have lived. I probably would never have submitted a story to DC’s New Talent program. I wouldn’t have written When It Rains, God Is Crying, or Chalk Drawings with a certain mensch who goes by the name of George Pérez. I wouldn’t know Mike Gold or Martha Thomases or Len Wein or Karen Berger or Neil Gaiman. And I wouldn’t be here writing this column.
Black and White.
Stop and Go.
Yin and Yang.
Success and Failure.
The ups and downs of life.
TUESDAY MORNING: Can Michael Davis Possibly Still Be Black?
TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Can Emily S. Whitten Possibly Be Talking About Deadpool?
Latchkeys #4, “The Bootleg War”, is now available for Kindle and Nook. Author Paul Kupperberg talks about the writing experience.
By Paul Kupperberg
For writers, ideas are like stacked up airplanes circling the fogged in airport. We want desperately to have all of them land safely, but some are going to have to stay up in the air a little longer than others until the weather clears or a runway opens up. As a result, we’ve all got lots of ideas circling our brains but no opportunity to bring them in for a landing on paper as quickly as we would like.
A few years back, Steven Savile, on a writers email list to which we both belong, suggested that a bunch of us join forces to take some of those high-flying ideas, throw them into a hat, and pick a few on which a dozen or so of us could work together. The idea was to hasten the development and writing of these various concepts by sharing the workloads. The result of Steve’s suggestion was a collective we came to call the HivemMnd.
While Steve has already related the secret origin of the HiveMind in an earlier post here on the Crazy 8 Press blog, the work of actually writing Latchkeys takes place not as a community activity, but in the individual workrooms, offices, and minds of our fourteen writers. The current episode, “Chapter 4: Speakeasy, Part One: The Bootleg War” began with a story by Kris Katzen, which landed on my desk for fleshing out and was a particularly fun story for me to work on. It incorporates elements that play to several of my strengths as a writer: It takes place in New York, the city in which I was born and about which I have an insatiable curiosity (I have shelves containing nothing but histories and biographies related to this, the greatest city on earth), and is set against a historic backdrop, in this case the Prohibition era of the 1920s (coincidentally, I recently read Daniel Okrent’s fascinating history, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition).
I love to pepper period stories like “Bootleg War” with interesting little historic tidbits, whether about its locale or some incidental information (did you know Converse All-Stars sneakers were introduced during the First World War?)…just enough to give it the right flavor and a dash of verisimilitude. Of course, stories have to come from out of the characters first, but those characters need to be rooted in a world that’s as real as they are. The use of the wrong slang or an anachronistic prop and the reader is yanked out of the moment and all the mood and drama the author was hoping to set up is ruined.
And speaking of characters: Latchkeys stars a roster of good ones. I was already familiar with two of them, twin sisters Mercy and Marguerite, from writing one of the later Latchkeys episodes (#13, “Emmett”), but “Bootleg War” gave me the opportunity to get to know a couple of the other fascinating teens who populate this world. I hope you’ll find their intelligence and resourcefulness as interesting as I did while writing them.
So, to torture my opening airplane analogy just a little further, bringing Latchkeys in for a landing has been, in some ways, a long and sometimes bumpy ride, but now that we’re safely home, I wouldn’t have wanted to miss a moment of the trip. For readers, on the other hand, there’s nothing but clear skies and some good reading ahead.
I’ve been writing for much of my life, whether for school and my career, for my blog and online columns, or creatively. In the creative vein, I’ve written short stories, and poetry, and silly humorous things, and am currently working on-and-off on two novels. But in none of those endeavors did, or do, I have a collaborator – a.k.a. a partner in crime! Writing is generally a lonely business. It can be a joyous experience; but even if you have an idea you know you want to express, it can also be a struggle to formulate it, get it down on paper or in a Word document, edit it, and then show it to another human being. That last bit can be especially hard. Even if you’ve been encouraged in your writing, it can be damned difficult to open yourself up for criticism about something so personal – a thing that’s come out of your head and your (mental) sweat and tears, and that you think you might just love, but fear others may scoff at.
For example: back in high school, I was a winner in a fairly competitive poetry contest for which the prize was $100 (yay!), a book of poetry, an invitation to read your poems at a local event for the judges, some poets, the other winners and their parents, and then an opportunity to read on stage at the Dodge Poetry Festival. I didn’t make the Dodge Poetry Festival, seeing as how I had to be in another state starting college the week before it occurred, but I did go to the local reading. I’m not generally a nervous public speaker when it comes to presentations or debates but on that day I was thoroughly dreading getting up and reading my own creations in front of everyone – and particularly the professional poets and other winners.
What made it worse, of course, was that with my “W” last name, I was one of the last to read. I sat there and listened as winner after winner read these deep, sorrowful poems about dying and winter and illness and frozen birds (really) and all of this very, very angsty stuff, and I started wondering if perhaps the judges had added my name to the winners’ list by accident. You see, the poem I’d chosen to read was sort of a happy thing, about nature and peace and contentment and family; and as I listened to all of this raw, dark emotion pouring out I thought, “You know, I don’t actually think I’m supposed to be here. Can I just go home now, please?” Even after being chosen as a winner, I was still afraid I didn’t really fit in there, and nobody who listened would think my little poem was any good, and I’d be left standing at the podium in embarrassed silence while everyone just sort of stared at me or, worse, golf-clapped.
Fortunately, it all went fine, and one of the poet-judges came up and shook my hand and said he’d really enjoyed my poems. I’d like to say that I’m completely over that sort of negative thinking now – but I’m not. Although I am better at sharing my work these days, I still sometimes feel as if whatever I’ve just written is awful (this column! It stinks! Get the Febreze!); and I’d hazard a guess that many successful writers still deal with that fear as well. However, I’ve found one method of writing that doesn’t come with the side effect of staring dully at your computer at 2 a.m. while moaning, “This is just terrible.” And it is: collaboration!
One of the best things I’ve discovered about writing comics in particular is how much fun it can be to collaborate, with either an artist or another writer; and how, if you’re lucky, you can find someone who not only complements your own ideas but adds to them to make the whole shebang that much better. Comics is an art form that naturally lends itself to collaboration and often actually requires it, and I’ve learned that I love that.
One great thing about having a collaborator is that you’re both in the creative process together, with the goal of producing a good end product; and so you have someone who cares as much as you do to tell you if they think something’s funny or if it works, or to bounce ideas off of, or to brainstorm with. Because you know they care, you can trust that they’ll be honest in their opinions or suggestions on how to improve the work. Having that other person adds a new dimension of fun to the process, gives you ongoing external feedback that you can trust, and, for me at least, strips away a lot of that internal worry about whether one single other person out there will like my work – because I already know that there’s at least one other person out there who likes it enough to work on it with me!
I first learned the fun of collaborating while working with Marc Vuletich, who’s the artist for all of the webcomics I’ve written to date. I “met” Marc (in the internet sense) two years ago after seeing his work on DeviantArt, and particularly this comic (so wrong but so funny). I’d commented on a few of the webcomics he’d done with Liam Bradley, and then later on I got a Deadpool script idea (which turned into this strip). But, alas, I cannot draw (well not very well, anyway). So I contacted Marc and asked him if he was game to draw it for me. Happily, he was, and it turned out he’d actually read Ask Deadpool before, and liked it, which was a pretty good sign for us working together.
Thus begun our collaboration. I could tell from the first comic that he was going to be fun to work with, because not only did he enjoy my scripts, but he made me laugh at my own comic, adding things I hadn’t mentioned but that fit right in with the spirit of the script, or doing such a good job on a character’s expression that it was just like what I’d pictured, only somehow better. Marc’s work improved on my vision, and strange as it may sound, that made me enjoy my own writing more. It also helped me to see where I could improve my writing, as, for instance, when I would get too wordy and then realize there was no way Marc could fit all of that text into one frame. Okay, so I’m still too wordy sometimes (sorry, Marc!) – but at least now I know it!
Writing for an artist also helps a writer better visualize and develop the balance of text versus action that makes a scene work. Seeing the results of your imagination as visualized by someone else provides new ideas for future ways to frame things or order your storyline. And, of course, working with someone else forces better discipline when it comes to responsibly meeting deadlines, as you need to finish writing in time for your artist to draw the comic and send it back for editing and finalization.
One of the great things about collaboration can be when you find someone you work well with, and work with them long enough to establish a good sense of teamwork and synchronicity. I asked Marc to weigh in on what working together is like, to see if his perspective matched mine, and here’s what he said:
“Emily is really great to work with. First, we both share the same passion for the character Deadpool, and second, her writing style totally complements his comedic personality which makes drawing her comics so enjoyable. The scripts are always very descriptive, which gives me a clear picture of what she’s looking for, while at the same time I still have the artistic freedom to add my own little touches to the comic. The only trouble I used to run in to was finding a way to balance the amount of dialogue in each panel with the action happening around it, but now that we’ve been working together for a while I think we’ve reached this cool little groove where we know exactly what each other wants and we make this awesome team because of it.”
Yep, I think we’ve got some synchronicity going.
Along with my collaborations with Marc (and he’s working on a new script right now that may appear here soon), as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I’ve recently started working with another writer to develop a new comic series that will be epic in scope. I don’t know if it was luck or fate, but it just so happens that we started talking at just the right time and under just the right circumstances to come up with this fantastically fun idea and discover that we are the perfect foils for each other’s zany brainstorming. I’ll suggest a scenario, and he’ll add something that’s like the missing puzzle piece as to why that scene would be awesome. Or he’ll say something that I’d never have thought of but that fits perfectly into another idea I haven’t even mentioned to him yet. And the best part of all is that he loves my ideas just as much as I do, and vice-versa. There’s no sitting around worrying about whether anyone but me thinks this would be any good – instead, there’s enthusiasm on both sides and a new horizon of infinite possibilities stemming from our creative partnership.
I can tell you right now that this is probably the most creative fun I’ve had in my whole life. And it’s a writing experience I might never have if it weren’t for the collaborative nature of comics. So hooray for comics, and collaboration, and the way this process helps us overcome our writing inhibitions and become better creators.
And remember, we’re in this together! So until next time, Servo Lectio!
You’d think with the Olympics going on and all that sloppy security Mitt Romney told us about, the authorities would have more important work to do than to count the number of penises (peni?) Howard Chaykin can squeeze into a single comic book. But – obviously, since I’m writing this – you’d be wrong.
Latchkeys #4, “The Bootleg War”, is now available for Kindle and Nook. Author Paul Kupperberg talks about the writing experience.
