Glorious Bastards
Before I was a mystery writer, I was a video game developer. And before that, I wrote comic books.
I got into comics in the summer of 1974, firmly anchoring the notion that the "Golden Age" of everything is twelve. My family moved to Hollywood that summer and I had little better to do than wander down to the boulevard and buy comic books. They were twenty-five cents for Marvels, while DC was five-to-a-dollar.
I was a Marvel kid, all the way, remaining a regular reader, more-or-less, for the next twenty years.
One of the things that put me off comics was writing them. From 1988 through the middle nineties, I freelanced for Malibu Comics, one of dozens of black-and-white companies that mushroomed from the Direct Market comics boom, an era where collectors bought multiple copies of anything looking for the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Writing comics didn't pay well, but it was fun (mostly) and for a while it was my sole source of income. It's as near as I will likely ever come to being a pulp writer, writing all day every day, concentrating on speed more than craft, and learning as I went. My stories from those years are never worse than indifferent, sometimes decent, occasionally pretty good. But writing comics was a tombstone for my hardcore fan years, mostly from the frustation I felt at not being able to leap from black & white books to color superhero books at Marvel and DC ... largely because I lacked the business contacts to make that leap, and I didn't have the skills or the determination to work those contacts even if I had them.
Alas.
I left comics in the mid-1990s when my last opportunities at Malibu dried up, and more serious paying work in the video game field demanded my attention. Now I'm out of comics (until I'm not), I restrict myself to nostalgia reads and sometimes reprinting articles here from my closed comics blog, Longbox Graveyard.
What remains is an obscure list of titles that I created or wrote for -- fodder for dollar boxes and landfills, with one or two copies archival copies of each residing in my personal Longbox Graveyard. As one of the first entries in that epononomys blog, I listed my comics credits, as best I could remember them, and that "checklist" is reproduced below, largely unedited. This is the part where Stan Lee tells you to "COLLECT 'EM ALL, TRUE BELIEVER!" ... but I don't suggest that. Seriously. Don't.
4 Seconds: A quasi-interactive, online, one-shot comics I wrote for Mark Waid's Thrillbent after winning a pitch contest at San Diego Comic-Con in 2014. Threw myself into the job without reservation, deciding I would either succeed in comics at last or leave a good-looking corpse. (Ahem). Even the corpse has vanished, with Thrillbent going offline, but this story has a Goodreads page, which was news to me.
BadAxe #1-3: My original sword and sorcery epic, and a love-note to Joseph Campbell. Re-read these recently and they're ... kinda cool. BadAxe had an unexpected moment recently with reprints in Cirsova and an out-of-nowhere podcast interview.
Bones #1-4: First comics I ever wrote. Light, goofball fantasy. I remember it as uneven, but heartfelt.
Empire #1-3: An original space opera that I deeply loved, but poor inks trumped good pencils in the first issue, and the book met with untimely cancellation. (If by "untimely" you mean an outer space epic based on Henry II deserved three issues to begin with).
Ex-Mutants: The Shattered Earth Chronicles #1-15: Grind-it-out work-for-hire. The check I got for issue #1 was the most I was ever paid to write a comic. For most books I never got paid beyond my advance-against-royalties (because most Malibu/Eternity books never generated royalties!). For that first Ex-Mutants I probably made six or seven hundred dollars, which was two or three times what I made on any other book.
Ex-Mutants Winter Special #1: I turned in my scripts every thirty days, and sometimes we’d get way ahead of schedule and end up printing a book or two as a special edition, or an annual, or a double issue. I think that’s what happened here.
Heavy Metal #645: An outlier from 2005 — everything else here is from the early 1990s. A promotional story I helped create to launch Darkwatch, a video game I co-created for High Moon Studios.
Interactive Comics: Dudley Serious & The Dungeon of Doom #1: Our splicing of comic books and “pick a path” adventure books. We also did Dudley Serious & The Space Patrol and Dudley Serious Saves The World.
Lensman #1-6: I thought some Lensman would be better than no Lensmen at all, but I ended up underserving a great genre tradition. I loved space opera and leaped at the chance to do this series, but it had to be based on a pretty crappy animated series (rather than the original books). Not great.
Lensman War of the Galaxies #1-2: Really just a continuation of Lensman, but we started a new series to juice sales numbers owing to a new #1.
The Liberator #1-6: Along with Bones, the first series I ever wrote. My homage to Captain America, by way of Alan Moore. I’m afraid to read it! Pencils by my old pal Jim Chadwick, who recently retired after a long career at DC Comics.
Monster Frat House #1: I remember writing a dynamite series bible for this, and then having nothing left when it came time to write the issue itself. This was a naked IP pitch for animation, or something. Fizzled. I re-wrote one of the stories in this issue as "Agua Fantasma," a mystery flash short story that's still fighting its way through the slush piles out there.
New Humans, Volume 2 #4-15: Another long run that I can scarcely remember. This was more work-for-hire in the Ex-Mutants universe.
New Humans Annual #1: See comments above for that Ex-Mutants special.
Paranoia #1-6: Certainly the best art I ever had on a book, and a rare color book for me (pretty much everything else here is black & white). This was based on the role playing game license, and I initially wrote it as a “straight” Paranoia story, but then we scared up a wild-ass South American artist who went completely off the rails with his own look and feel, and I gleefully followed him. We might have done a disservice to the license and its fans but I liked what we did. There are scans of a couple issues over at Mars Will Send No More. I recently re-read the series and quite enjoyed it.
Roger Wilco #3: Comic book version of the old Space Quest computer game. Pretty sure I wrote #2 as well, but I can’t find it.
Rune #4-5: Inventory issues for the Ultraverse character created by my friend, Chris Ulm. Notable in that this is as close as I came to working for Marvel Comics. Marvel had acquired Malibu and my checks for this book came from Marvel. Yay, me.
The Three Musketeers #1-3: I loved Dumas. I probably loved Dumas too much, because I tried to put too much of him into the three issues of this book. I nearly killed my poor letterer (the good-natured and very professional Clem Robins) — these books were a wall of words! I failed to understand the difference between adaptation and transcription. But I loved Dumas so much that I couldn’t cut a word …
Tiger-X Book II #1-4: I got to play with Ben Dunn’s giant robot property for a couple issues.
Ultra Monthly #1-6: A promotional rag I wrote to support the Ultraverse line. It was a clever idea — a newspaper from inside the Ultraverse — and an idea that might still work for marketing superhero comics.
And I know I’m missing some of the kids, too, probably all lurking in the same box someplace. There was a “Shattered Earth” anthology series I remember, and other things that I do not.
There were also several unpublished books (some of which I was paid for), including a multi-part history of baseball; an undead pirate epic called The Black Joke; a fill-in issue of Sludge where the deeply-missed Steve Gerber put me through the wringer (and did me a great service); a transmedia comics/RPG project called BattleArmor that Chris Ulm and I did together; an extensive pitch for Ultraforce that didn’t get picked up; two or three long-gestating original superhero stories that I still remember fondly; even a translation of a French pornographic comic that I wrote under the name of “Armand Jean du Plessis” (all the more amusing because I don’t speak French).
Comics will break your heart, kids!
This post was originally published as Longbox Graveyard #22.