Where It Started, Where It's Going

Four years ago, in my post-DC Comics life, I launched a blog (old fashioned, I know) with the stated purpose of indexing Marvel Age. As I wrote previously here, that’s where I got my start in this business we call comics.

I took this project on because of my love of Marvel Age, and because no one else had done it. There are listings for Marvel Age on comics.org, Mike’s Amazing World of Comics, and elsewhere, but they don’t go into much depth as far as each issue’s contents were concerned. Not the kind of depth I wanted to see, anyway.

I’m now coming to the end of Marvel Age. Last week I posted about issue #133, and the series reaches its end with issue #140, which I will write up in a few short weeks.

This was a project for me. No one asked for it, so I was pleasantly surprised that when I took a long-ish break from it, I heard from several people that they enjoyed it and hoped I’d continue. That encouragement got me back on the metaphorical horse, and I’ve kept plugging along, one issue per week, through the entire run of the series, plus five annuals and two specials.

As big as this project has been, it also served to remind me how much I like to write about comics, which led to the launch of this newsletter about 14 months ago. I’ve been doing some other writing as well, and here are some hints about that…

I’ve always felt a bit intimidated about writing comics. Yes, I have written a few: some minicomics that I both wrote and drew, a handful of Archie stories in the 1980s, and a couple of promotional comics I wrote about here. While I was an editor at Welsh Publishing Group in the 1990s I worked on a never-published magazine about Tromafilms that included a six-page adaptation of the first half of their then-new release, Sgt. Kabukiman, N.Y.P.D., which I wrote myself:

Art by Manny Galan

Cramming all that exposition into a few pages was a challenge, which led me to add that line saying “Again with the evil one?”, which is one of the few bits in the story that sounds like I wrote it. (I did find Lotus’s little speech above funny in how long and ridiculous it was.)

A few years later, I joined DC Comics, which had some restrictive policies around writing comics. Members of the Sales and Marketing department were prohibited from writing comics for the company at all, and no one at DC was allowed to write comics for any other publisher. DC kept me busy enough that I didn’t think about writing comics – until pretty recently, that is.

Last year I was chatting with a friend about a licensed character who had appeared in some comics several decades ago. In our opinion, those comics never lived up to the character’s potential, and I came up with an idea about how to take advantage of that untapped potential. As it happened, I knew the person who owns this character, so I called him up and ran the idea by him, and he liked it. “Now,” I said, “all you need is a writer.”

“Why don’t you write it?” he said.

Within a few days I had sent off a several-page proposal for a miniseries, with background context, tone, and issue-by-issue plot springboards. He liked it – and right now we’re just waiting for the stars to align to get it all moving.

That kind of lit a fire in me, and before long I had written a proposal for another miniseries starring a well-known character, and a third one featuring original but somewhat recognizable characters. The second of these has been accepted by a publisher – not the same guy I mentioned above – and we’re waiting for feedback from the license holder. And the third one…well, I am looking for a home for it. Oh, and I have a fourth project I’m thinking about which would star some characters I’ve had running around my head since college.

Surprisingly, whatever stage fright I felt about writing comics back then has gone away. So far I’ve found writing these proposals relatively easy and fun. I look forward to writing more of them.

On top of that, it looks like I will be writing articles for two magazines published by TwoMorrows – some comics-based, some not.

And, to bring things back to the start, I am looking to develop my love of Marvel Age into something bigger than a blog. Comic-Con International: San Diego is coming up next week, and I hope to make progress on several of these fronts while I’m there – fingers crossed!