Broken Frontier

Okay, I feel a little bad here. I've read about a million of these director's commentary-style features from a variety of great writers. I've been thrilled by their stories of last second changes brought on by late-night revelations, or bloody and brutal confrontations with editors over key plot points.

Yeah, well, I got none of that. A big part of the reason for that is our artist, Ron Salas, who is one of these calm and cool customers who just does the work in a no-nonsense manner and turns in pages that surpass expectations every time. Another reason is I have a dream of an editor in Kris Simon, who tends to let a writer be the writer, but also knows how to politely but firmly point out to you the points where you completely went off the rails.

So, as such, I don't have crazy stories about shouting matches or points where we got stuck for weeks on one precious panel or what have you. There was positively no drama, if you can believe it! The fact of the matter is this was the first book for both me and Ron, so neither of us were interested in much besides making the best, most kick-ass, exciting and involving book we had in us. 

And here's how we tried to do just that...

Page One

Of the entire book, I'm most proud of the first page. This was not the first pitch I'd sent Image Shadowline's way-- a couple others had been turned away, in large part because I, for whatever reason, thought I had all the time in the world to get to the point. So my stories would start out painfully slow-- the characters just seemed to have all day to get from point A to point B. 

What I eventually figured out is, when you're a new creative team with no prior works to your name, you are on a short lease. You need to give the editor, the retailer, the reader proof up front that you know what you're doing and can manage to entertain them for a full 22. You can't save your big moment for the last page or the end of your first arc or whatever. You do not have any credit built up. 

So, lesson at least partially learned, I would go to cons with pitch pages, and study editors' faces when I handed them over. What it confirmed is, if you don't grab them in the first few seconds, you are not gonna grab them, period. In other words, don't ask page four to do page one's job. And the same logic applies to the reader when they pick the book up off the shelf. 

So this page was all about hitting the person looking at it as hard as humanly possible, as fast as humanly possible. I am a sucker for opening and closing with "eye" shots-- like any good relationship (in this case, storyteller and reader), eye contact is key, right? Then boom, big violent action shot. And from there, mapped out as plain as day, the central plot point of our book: a physicist transferring his consciousness into the body of the hitman that just killed him. 

The little arrows are a tipoff to the sort of irrevent narrative style we were going for. To me, good narration feels like it's coming from over your shoulder, not from the page up, and this was a little trick to make the reader feel like Sly is outside the book, mapping it all out for us. 

Page Six

The temptation when working with Ron is to just load up on guns and strippers and explosions-- his style's perfect for that stuff. But he also has a serious gift for conveying facial expressions and attitudes in his characters, and that what I love about this page. 

He totally captures the mixed dynamics of Sly's family-- the loving relationship between father and daughter contrasted with the cold detachment of a failing marriage. It's not just in the faces-- check out the lack of eye contact, the postures, the distance between them... that's an artist doing his job right there. 

Page Seven

This page was, by far, the most fun to write. This is where Sly takes us into the world of black market science. Now, I realize a lot of people will be horrified by Sly's viewpoint on laboratory ethics, but the truth is, he has a point. Does anyone really think we won't be using cloning for practical purposes in a couple decades? Of course we will. Look at the trajectory on embryonic stem cells. Sly realizes that trying to slow human progress is a silly and pointless gesture-- what it takes us years to rationalize, he just accepts.

And the thing is, Sly is real. There are plenty of guys out there doing this, and they are working years ahead of legitimate research facilities. Sometimes they're working for organized crime or terrorist groups, but just as often they're working for big corporations who need to test vaccines or such on humans and animals in manners the FDA would never approve of. 

As much as I love this page... if I could go back and add one panel to this book, it would be here-- I'd love to give Sly credit for creating the swine flu virus in order to make big pharmaceutical some bucks. Consider that your deleted scene. 

Page Nine

I am a sucker for throwing situational comedy into stories where it might not be expected. When we did the pitch for this book, we did the first five pages, so it ended with the tease about the whole thing being the cat's fault. So part of the fun was asking people after they read it what they thought the deal was with the cat. And people always came back with it belonging to someone powerful, or being somehow valuable-- it was never just some common, slice of life story.

To me, when you can work that kind of thing into an action or noir or sci-fi piece, you're helping reel the reader into the world a bit more, giving them a better chance to connect. 

Also, credit to Johnny Lowe, our letterer, who I think did an awesome job depicting those awful wailing sounds that come out of cats when they're in heat. Every time I see this page, I can just hear that cat crying to get out. 

Page Sixteen

This is a page where Ron really shows off his stuff. The easy thing to do here would've been to caption the hell out of it, have Sly explain to us that his daughter is the only part of his old life he cares about and that now he's going to have to go back and dig into his past to save her. 

But, for one thing, Sly is not the kinda guy to just come out and say that kind of thing to us. Emotions are a source of frustration for him. He doesn't want to be a hero here, he feels like he has to.  

So the better call was to do this purely through visual cues. No matter how many times it's said, too many writers forget it's a visual medium. The rule is "show, don't tell," but sometimes we're conditioning readers to over-rely on the text by not making ample use of the imagery. If you're writing a script and too many panels go by where expressions and actions and dynamics aren't changing, you're writing prose-- and really, probably not even good prose. Sometimes, the words just get in the way. 

Also, for Sly, the guy talks so much, him getting quiet is a good way to tell something's serious. 

And again, when you have an artist on board like Ron, you can trust him to properly convey the impact here. The zeroing in on the phone, the shots of Jenny, the expression on Sly/Marko's face... if you came out of the first issue without seeing the love this guy has for his little girl and the frustration he has over this whole vacation life crashing down on him, you need to go back and take a closer look at this page. 

Page Nineteen

Okay, so, here's an example of an editor saving a writer from himself. This issue originally had a completely different ending, one that led to a completely different second and third chapter. I'd planned to put in a lot more "grindhouse" elements into the story-- more fantastical characters, more kitschy side stuff, and even a dot matrix effect in the color phase to make it look more like a 70's sci-fi comic.

Guess what it did for the story? Absolutely nothing. Hell, if anything, it pulled readers out of the book. It was a smirking, smart-assed idea that would've prevented the audience from connecting with these characters, and the only purpose it might've served is showing off how clever I think I am. 

Now, when Kris sent the note back to drop all that, I could've gotten defensive. I could've gotten stubborn. Hell, I could've gotten lazy-- changing that basically meant re-writing the entire story on very short notice. But instead, I figured I'd do the unexpected thing and just recognize that I was wrong. I made the change without a peep of protest, and now I thank my lucky stars I did so-- Kris was 110 percent right, and the book is much better for it. The story you're getting is a lot stronger than the one I'd originally planned, and I can take no credit for that. 

... And I now hereby turn in my writer card for giving an editor credit for something :) 

Now, onward and upward.

The only bad thing about having a well-received first issue is it makes you nervous about the second one. The production cycle of these things makes it so I've already just about seen #2 in its entirety, and I dare say it's a little more challenging than the first. If this issue was about science, the next one is about relationships, both real and imagined. We're about to turn a lot of things about this story on its head, and I can't wait to see people react. Stick around for all three of this arc -- we know where we're going, and we think you're gonna like it.