Team 7, DC Comics, and How I Got There.

I am writing the Team 7 book for DC comics. Which is awesome on any number of levels. I mean, first of all, DC Comics! Second, Team 7! The original was my favorite Wildstorm back in the day, so it means a lot to me to get to write the new one.

Here's a bit about it: http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/06/08/dc-offers-zero-issues-in-september-launches-new-titles

Anyhow, since this went public, I was asked to talk about how I broke in. I'm not sure if what I have to say is all that useful, but I'll give it a shot.

Well, I did Luther Strode, obviously, which Image liked well enough to get me on the cover of Previews. That, obviously, got the book a lot of attention (as did Tradd's badass art) so people were aware of the book.

We got a lot of good reviews and our sales were good, and we got great word of mouth, so our sales actually increased from month to month. Which again, got noticed.

Which led to a prominent DC writer (not mentioning his name here, because I don't want him to get flooded by people thinking he's the gateway to DC) liking the book and my writing, and he told DC editorial that they should take a look. They read Luther and liked it, and asked me to pitch them on Team 7.

Annnnnd, here we are.

So, basically, write a book people like, and then get lucky.

Contrastingly, I have another big WFH that I got by flat out sending the editor an email, and then sending him my stuff, and going from there.

The Hack/Slash gig I got because I wrote a book that Tim liked, and then we met in a bar and got along.

So, I guess, if I have any advice (which is a dubious idea, but I'll run with it) it's this:

1. Don't Give Up. I've been trying to out together books for the last ten or so years. I was rejected maybe twenty times? Possibly more. I kept working and kept going.

2. Work Hard. I am lazy as a fuck, in general. But I do take my writing seriously and I work as hard as I can at it. I've got ten projects that I am trying to get off the ground (not the failure rate above - I don't expect more than one or two to pan out, if that). I try to write twenty or so page of comics a week. It adds up. And it continues after - I worked twenty or thirty hours a week for two months leading up to Luther, just trying to get the word out.

3. Don't be a dick. I am, fortunately, mostly not a dick naturally, but being someone who is fun to be around and easy to work with goes a long way. If you're super talented but you piss off everyone you work with, you're going to have a hard time of it.

4. Be lucky. There's a lot of shit you just can't control. I had no control over whether Tradd would like the book. I had no control over whether above mentioned writer would like the book. Whether DC would have something they like. Whether Tim Seely would be at that bar.

What I could control, and this is really what points one and two are about, is my opportunities to be lucky. If you do the work and keep doing the work, you vastly increase your chances of luck going your way. I can't and won't tell you that if you work hard and don't give up, you will succeed. You might still not make it. But what I can tell you is that if you don't work hard and you give up easily, your chances are essentially zero.

I don't know if that's useful, but it's what I got.

True Crime

I didn’t know him. Or at least, I don’t think I did. My college was a small one, a few thousand students in a small town, so it’s near certainty that our paths crossed at some point. Especially considering that I worked at the library’s front desk. But if we did, I don’t remember it.

What I do remember is when he died. I came on campus for lunch, and the whole feeling of the place was wrong. I don’t know that I’ve ever really subscribed to the notion of a place having atmosphere, but you could feel it. I’m not sure how, exactly, something in the way people moved, the way they talked. Something was wrong.

What was wrong was that a popular student had been found in a nearby park, shot to death, his body burned. It hit people hard. I’m not sure that if it was the only murder the school had in its century plus history, although my recollection is that it was.

We had enough of the sort of crimes you get in a college town, but not murder. Especially not one as cold blooded as this turned out to be. The murder turned out to be drug related. He was sold marijuana, and one of his regulars and two other men abducted him to get his money.

They got a thousand bucks to split between them. And after they did, one of them placed a shotgun in the dead man’s mouth and pulled the trigger. They had brought a can of gas to burn the body.

It was the first and thank fuck so far only time I’ve been even vaguely near to that sort of crime. It’s not that I didn’t know of people getting killed, growing up. But they were all cases where people got caught up by their emotions and did something stupid. Evil, maybe, but not cold.

This, though, this was different. It was three guys who decided to plan out and kill another person. They might argue that the plan was simply to rob him, but the facts show another story.

And I’ve never really been able to get my head around that. There’s a gap, there, between thinking a terrible thing and doing it. I can certainly think of terrible things; indeed, it’s in my job description, but because I am a relatively normal person, the process of jumping that gap to the real is fascinating, horrible and inexplicable.

I could just about wrap my head around getting so pissed off you grab a gun and shoot someone. But these guys, these guys might as well be aliens. Whether they fit the textbook definition of a sociopath, I couldn’t say. But they’re a different sort of human than most of the rest of us.

I won’t say that the whole thing affected me in any dramatic way. It didn’t. I didn’t know the guy. But I think about it. I remember a girl that I was acquainted with that knew him breaking down in class. And I remember it’s the first time I really thought about the gap, the invisible but infinite distance, that separates us from monsters

How Luther's Powers Work

Last issue of the first mini is out today, so if you haven't yet read that, you may or may not want to read this.

I've been asked, a few times, about the exact nature of Luther's (and the Librarian's, by extension) powers, so I'll take a second to explain it. I think you should be able to get this from the comic, but I don't go in for the 'splainin much so I'll do it here.

For the right people, what The Hercules Method does is allow complete knowledge and conscious control over your body. At the most basic level, you get greater strength, speed and stamina, and perfect coordination. At the more advanced levels, you get the ability to make your body knit itself back together, which you see in six.

This same knowledge also gives you a couple of less obvious abilities. Because you are so in tune with your own body, you begin to be able to see other's people's body's the same way. What you're seeing with Luther's meatvision is a visual representation of that.

That same thing also allows Luther and the Librarian to tear people apart, because they know exactly where the weak points are. That they are superhumanly strong is helpful there, too.

Related to that is the ability to read body language, presented here as the millity billion ghost images Luther sees. It's not quite seeing the future so much as it is being really observant and having a terrific reaction time. The reason he can't really do that to the Librarian is because the Hercules Method allows the Librarian to control his body to cloak it from Luther.

Less obviously, it also allows you to hone your senses to greater than human levels. You see a wee bit of it in issue six.

None of this makes them invincible, as the Librarian found out. Destroy the brain or the heart or the spine, and they die.

Create A Character Day

It is, apparently. Since I a writer and not a drawer, this is a written thing. But I give you Casey Atwell, a ghost who is haunting herself.

Outside

For 107 minutes, Casey Atwell was dead.

Her revival and subsequent full recovery were hailed as a miracle. And it was, but not the kind that most people think, because Casey never came back at all. Casey is trapped as a ghost, outside her own body, watching something that is not her take over her life while Casey can do nothing but watch.

And the other Casey is evil. She is slowly destroying everyone and everything that Casey cares about, and she is the only one that can see Casey. Now Casey needs to find a way to fight her before everything she loves is gone.

Because I'm Dumb, That's Why

I've been working on a project called Red Winter (just Winter, now), off and on, for the last five years or so. While the plot has always worked, something about the mechanics of the story never quite gelled for me. I could never get it where I wanted it.

Now, this story began life as a pitch to Marvel about, of all things, The Red Guardian and was, at that point, called The Last Guardian. The editor I was in contact with liked it, but since it was an unknown property by an unknown writer, it wasn't going to go anywhere. He did suggest that I rework the story and do it myself, since it was a pretty good story.

The basic underlying idea is what happens to a person who is meant to be a living symbol of a country when that country no longer exists? Where would Captain America be without America? This is where the Red Guardian was, and I thought there was meat there.

I've always really liked the basic concept here, so I did indeed rework into something else. But the one thing that carried through was the contemporary Russian* setting. I was interested in exploring the aftermath of a collapsed country, and what it did to the people.

And this was, I've come to realize, The Problem. Despite my research, I couldn't get the story to feel right and true. It was interesting, and the plot moved, but ultimately the feel of it was just wrong. I couldn't get myself to move forward with it as it was, so it ended up being moved to the tinker with pile.

Today I realized, when discussing it with a new artist, that it didn't have to be set in a Russian setting. Change the setting to a post collapse America, and all the lingering problems that I'd been having just go away. And changing the setting opens up a whole new set of things that I can work into the overall theme. Things about disillusionment, hope, the end result of where drown it in the bathtub politics are taking us and the death of the American dream.

Which, naturally, makes me feel like a big fucking idiot. Because it's a simple elegant solution that doesn't just solve a problem but makes the story better. Only took me five years.


*Not actually Russian, but former Soviet Union. As a child of the eighties and the end of the Cold War, that is all "Russia" to me.

Merchandise!

Behold, Luther Strode tee shirts are now available. Feel free to spread the link far and wide: http://lutherstrode.spreadshirt.com/

What The Hell Is A Protodraft?

I mention that I sometimes do what I call protodrafts and, since I made the word up, is something I should probably explain a wee bit. Basically, it's a draft where I layout the rough form of the action, usually just a line or so for each panel. I don't necessarily do this for every page of every script - I tend to use it most during action scenes.

After the protodraft, I go back and fill in more panel description, if needed, and then dialogue. It looks like this:

Page Thirty

Panel One – He lifts Tower by his neck.

Panel Two – Draws back his fist.

Panel Three – Grace grabs.

Panel Four – Quest looks at him.

Panel Five – Grace speaks

Panel Six – Quest speaks

Page Thirty One

Panel One – Grace speaks.

Panel Two – Quest draws Tower close in.

Panel Three – Tosses him at Grace’s feet.

Panel Four – Grace orders the men to take him away. Tower yells at Quest.

Panel Five – Quest turns.

Panel Six – Tower dragged away

Page Thirty Two

Panel One – Est Shot, Leavenworth Military prison. 1944

Panel Two – Inside hall, two men.

Panel Three – Come to the door.

Panel Four – Opening door.

Panel Five – Men looking in.

Panel Six – Very old Tower.