Broken Frontier

This week Silent War #3 and Spawn #166 went on sale along with the second collected volume of Spawn Armageddon. The re-vamped Spawn was a big hit with Spawn fans. We even had one long-time fan swearing he would rather give up sex for a month than miss this issue. Meanwhile Brian Haberlin is finishing up art for Spawn #167. Some of the pages of art are reproduced here.

We also have a very hot artist lined up for a future issue of Spawn. We won’t be announcing who it is for a while but we’ve been talking by e-mail about what kind of story this should be. After the success of our Mandarin Spawn issue (Spawn #165 - ed.), featuring a Hellspawn from thirteenth century China, we’re planning more of these short stories from the past. After talking with the artist by e-mail we’ve zeroed in on the trenches of the First World War as the setting for the story.

Thursday evening I found myself in Borders looking through a stack of books on the Battle of the Somme. There was an encyclopaedia of the Somme, the Somme from a German perspective, personal recollections of British soldiers. I started totting up the cost of the five books I was contemplating buying, and calculating how long it would take me to read all this stuff and I thought: Hang on a minute! All this for a twenty-two page story?! Just how much research is too much?

I do think research is incredibly important. I hate to get things wrong. For Mandarin Spawn I bought three books, one on Chinese history, a volume of Chinese folk tales and an illustrated encyclopaedia of historical Chinese costume and household objects. I also did lots of trawling through the internet for more background to the period. But I still made one massive error. I sent artist Lan Medina a reference pic of a Chinese peasant from the wrong period and he based some of the hairstyles on that. One of our readers pointed out that the Chinese only began shaving the front of their heads after the Manchu invasion of the seventeenth century, hundreds of years later. Red faces all around.

So can you ever do too much research? One of my first books for Marvel was Daredevil: Redemption, a story that focussed on Matt Murdock’s work as a lawyer. I was determined to get the detail right, so I sifted through stacks of books on American Law and trial procedure as well as spending literally weeks on the internet reading transcripts of murder trials and interviews with condemned men and women on Death Row.

The trial scene, which took up the whole of issue #5, was as accurate as I believe it is possible to achieve in a comic book. Reading trial transcripts made it clear that even in a murder trial the proceedings can be incredibly tedious and jury members, the accused, even the judges have been known to fall asleep. The secret is to select the essential moments. But I still wanted to achieve that authenticity, so I wrote over 50 single-spaced pages of dialogue. The transcript of my fictional trial. Then I reduced that by 95%, cutting and cutting again until I had the essence of the trial in a series of snapshots that captured the drama of the battle of wits between Matt Murdock and the prosecution.

I was pretty confident when I submitted the script that I had everything right. Then just as Michael Gaydos was about to start drawing, I came across something that hit me like a brick in the face. I’m British and it never occurred to me that in the USA a lawyer can only practice in the state where he took his bar exam. My story, including the trial, took place in the American south. There was no way Matt Murdock, who practiced in New York, could be allowed to defend an accused person in Arkansas.

I rang my editor, Jenny Lee, in a panic, convinced I would have to scrap the entire story. The response was to forget it. No one would notice, and if they did they wouldn’t care. But I did. I spent the next 24 hours desperately researching every scrap of information I could find on the internet for a way out. And I found it.

There are occasions when an attorney is allowed to practice in a state where he doesn’t hold a licence. Provided he is accredited with a licence in another state, has an impeccably clean record and the presiding judge agrees, an out-of-state lawyer can be allowed to defend a case. It’s called Pro Hac Vice. A Latin term meaning “for this occasion”.  I still wasn’t entirely in the clear. Further research showed that in Arkansas, the setting for the trial, the judiciary is very wary of outsiders and almost never grants Pro Hac Vice, particularly in a murder trial. However, in Alabama they are a lot more likely to accept an out-of-state defense attorney. So the story shifted two states east.

If you want to know just how obsessive I can get with research, I can tell you that once we were settled on Alabama, for the last part of the book I decided to find out where the witnesses to Joel Flood’s execution would be staying. So I researched hotels in the area, found the closest and went through the booking procedure, even to the point of checking the driving time between the hotel in Atmore Alabama and the Holman Correctional Center, where the fictional execution would take place. I then downloaded a photo of the hotel lobby and sent it to Michael Gaydos to use as reference.

That is too much research.

But in the end you are always going to get something wrong. It’s Sod’s Law. And that’s why Stan Lee invented No-Prizes.

Before I go, I must mention how pleased I was to see the cover to Silent War #3 make it onto superunderwearperverts.blogspot.com. 

This is such a great site. We need more fans like these. Check it out. Even if you’re not into hunks in shorts, you won’t want to miss Hitler’s Pal Jimmy Olsen!