What a Long Strange Trip It's Been

I got started on my writing career at the tender age of 19, thanks in no small part to the two great loves of my teenage life: girls and video games. I had zero clue at the time how much each of those passions would influence my career.

Technically, I had been writing for quite a while at that point. I wrote my first story probably six or seven minutes after I first felt comfortable with the whole “reading” thing. By my late teens I had produced fifteen or twenty short stories that I liked, a slew of poetry that’s not even worth acknowledging, and one fantasy novel that I completed at age fourteen, revised at age sixteen, and recognized for unreadable garbage around my seventeenth birthday. 

But, aside from getting me admitted to the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program (or “GHP,” as it’s fondly remembered by hundreds of nerds state-wide) in my junior year of high school, I had never profited from anything I had put down on the page. (And yeah, that was back when people still wrote things on paper. I typed out every horrible word of that fantasy novel on a manual typewriter. When Dad eventually brought home an electric model—complete with an “erase” button that would lift the ink of your typo right off the page—I thought I’d died and gone to literary nerd heaven.)

But I digress. The point is, by age 18, I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I had started college in pursuit of an English degree, but I was still pretty hazy on the whole “accomplishing actual goals” thing.

My older sister, on the other hand, had decided to go to college at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. After dabbling with drama for a while, she settled in to become a teacher, got her degree, and eventually landed a position at a small private school not far from Macon. And so it was that, a couple of months before my 19th birthday, I drove down to Macon to hang out with her for a week.

During that week—I think it was on a Wednesday—I decided to go out to the Macon Mall, hunt down the arcade, and spend what little money I had on video games, because I apparently hated money and wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible.

After a few stimulating rounds of Dig Dug, I had depleted my stockpile of quarters and was about to walk out, when the arcade attendant caught my eye. She was a petite, dark-haired beauty with little wire-rimmed glasses and a smile that made me dumber than I was already, but for some reason she seemed to think I looked all right too, and we started talking.

The talking led to a date, during the course of which I babbled at some length about my writing ambitions, and when I finally paused to take a breath, she said the words that would, at the risk of sounding over-dramatic, alter the course of my life forever:   “Hey, I know some comic book artists. Would you like me to introduce you?”

It’s hard to describe how important having a good editor is.   

One universal truth is that every writer needs an editor. It doesn’t matter who you are, or how skillful or talented you are, or how many millions or billions of dollars you’ve made, if you don’t have an editor your work won’t be as good as it can be. Sometimes that’s because a good editor can be a sounding board for new ideas, or help you make good ideas into great ones. But most of the time it’s because a good editor will tell you “no.” As in, “No, you shouldn’t include this sub-plot, because it undermines what the whole story is about,” or “No, you shouldn’t use this bit of description, because it breaks the tone and ruins the immersion,” or “No, Jar Jar Binks doesn’t really work as a character.”

I was incredibly fortunate that the first editor I worked with at some length was very, very good. His name was Dan Thorsland, and he was the editor at Dark Horse Comics to whom Joe Phillips introduced me.  

Dan didn’t have to give me the time of day but, for whatever reason, he chose to do so (maybe Joe was very persuasive), and we ended up on the phone one weekday afternoon. I told him I was just starting out, and that nothing I’d written had been published yet, because my issue of Vampirella was in something like its sixth month of delays. (It eventually came out a full nine months past its deadline.)   

So Dan started describing a page of a comic book he happened to be looking at just then. “There’s a guy getting off a bus,” he told me, “and he’s carrying an oblong box under one arm. And the caption reads, ‘The stranger carries an oblong box under one arm.’”

I burst out laughing.  

Apparently that pleased Dan, because he said, “Now that’s the proper reaction,” and he really started talking to me in earnest - in fact, that conversation became my first lesson in Comic Book Scriptwriting 101. “If the art shows you something, really clearly shows it, then you DO NOT describe it in a caption,” Dan said. “That’s what you call ‘explainy,’ and it’s bad writing.”   

He and I went on to have about an hour-long conversation, just sort of feeling each other out, figuring out if the creative chemistry was really there or not; we talked about favorite comics and novels and movies, and our individual senses of what made a good story, and at the end of it he decided to give me a shot.   

That shot became a 16-page, two-part story in the anthology title “Dark Horse Comics.” (Yes, the series had the same name as the company.) It was a story called “Cargo,” set in the “Aliens” universe, and when all was said and done, and I held my free copies of the actual comic book in my hands…   

…it wasn’t very good. I was still on the vertical side of the learning curve, and there were just a lot of things I could’ve done better. But thanks to Dan Thorsland, it wasn’t awful, and also thanks to him I got introduced to an artist I’d go on to work with on quite a few other projects: John Nadeau.   

An aside on John Nadeau: I don’t think I’ve ever met a comic book artist who’s more stable, more reliable, and more grounded than John. He started out as an engineering student, and it’s given him an amazing connection to what’s real and physical. Not to mention that he’s insanely talented.  

So. “Cargo” might not have been brilliant, but it did serve one incredibly important purpose, which was that it proved to Dan Thorsland that I was a writer who could be given a task that would actually get done, and done on time. You wouldn’t believe how rare that is, apparently, among creative people. I got the work done on time, the work was not horrible, and I was friendly and relatively easy-going.

(I say “relatively” because, especially early on, I’d occasionally flip out and lose my $#!+ over some minor detail that didn’t exactly fit my vision. Sometimes I still flip out - if the issue is big enough - but I try to keep it under control as much as possible. Here’s Rule #1: don’t flip out and lose your $#!+. It makes you look unprofessional and can cost you jobs. Depending on the circumstance, it can also be a lot easier said than done.) 

So after “Cargo,” the next firm project I got brought me back to working with Tony Harris, this time under Dan Thorsland’s watchful eye. It was an adaptation of the 1932 Boris Karloff film, “The Mummy,” and it gave me a new appreciation for the whole concept of “on-the-job training.”   

I never had any money growing up.

Both my parents worked, but not at jobs that paid very well, and especially when I was small (before Mom re-entered the work force, and was spending her days taking care of my scrawny, screaming little ass) there were quite a few months when the bank account showed a nice, round $.05 after all the bills were paid. 

This kind of poverty (and we were definitely below the poverty line) was not uncommon in the tiny little town in Georgia where we lived. What was uncommon was that my parents, each a product of small-town, rural life in the 1930’s, had found each other. Neither of them went to college, and yet they were both sort of scary-smart, and STICKLERS LIKE YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE for correct grammar. To this day my grammar remains very close to flawless, and I’ll actually stop and correct myself when I’m talking if I flub up. I can’t help it.  

I’ve often thought that my parents were, essentially, a couple of very high IQ’s and a heaping helping of pride away from being what Southerners call “poor white trash.” But those IQ’s and that pride were like a high steel wall, and things like wifebeater tank tops, food stamps, and cars on blocks in the front yard remained on the other side of that wall. Permanently. 

But I digress. The point is: I never had any money.   

This lack of funds carried over solidly into my college years. And I know, college students are always broke. I suspect I was probably more broke than most. I attended the University of Georgia, and worked part time at Spencer Gifts in the Athens mall, selling raunchy greeting cards and raunchy T-shirts and the occasional “personal massager” (also raunchy).  

Just down the way from Spencer Gifts was a little Chinese restaurant (operated entirely by Mexicans), and for the grand total of one dollar I could get an egg roll and a little cup of sweet-and-sour sauce to dip it in. That cup of sweet-and-sour was very important, and I always asked for a spoon when I got the egg roll, because as I dipped the egg roll in the sauce, little bits of it would fall out and accumulate in the cup. Then, when the egg roll itself was gone, I had a whole other part of the meal: sweet-and-sour sauce soup!   

Having an entire dollar was important, because it meant I could eat that night, but there were plenty of nights when I didn’t have that dollar and went hungry. (I know, I know, I could have bought groceries for cheaper than eating out and brought a sandwich to work with me, but you have to remember that I was twenty years old and a complete dumbass.)   

Anyway, I scraped by on what little funds I had, gnoshing on the occasional egg roll here and there, until the summer between my junior and senior years. I was sharing a duplex with two fellow students, Norm and Clint, and they both went home for the summer. I stayed in Athens and worked a truly craptastic job at a telemarketing place - which is why I’m more polite to telemarketers than most people are - and it was at that point that I found myself facing a dilemma:   

I had enough money to keep paying rent and buying groceries, and I had enough money to pay tuition for Fall Quarter, but I did not have enough money to do both of those things.  

I tried to conserve as much as humanly possible, and what that turned into was a six-week period during which I boughtno groceries, and instead lived off whatever I could find that Norm and Clint had left in the cabinets when they moved home. (I remember one day in particular when my food intake consisted of one can of sliced peaches. Those were some freaking delicious peaches.)   Basically, for those six weeks, I did three things:

1. worked at the telemarketing place for slightly less than peanuts, because we were on commission and I couldn’t sell a warm coat to an Eskimo
2. learned to live with hunger pangs
3. worried.

And oh, I got good at worrying. I’d lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling and just worry my heart out. To this day I’m sort of amazed that I didn’t give myself either a raging ulcer or some form of cancer. 

The way I saw it, grocery boycotts aside, I had an extremely unpleasant yet unavoidable situation bearing down on me: I was going to have to drop out of college, move back in with my parents, and get a job at the local carpet mill. Taken individually, none of those consequences were all that bad. People took a quarter or two off from college all the time; moving back in with Mom and Dad would mean a familiar roof over my head and all the brilliant home cooking I could eat; and the local carpet mill paid relatively big bucks, especially when compared with Spencer Gifts or the telemarketing outfit.   But I didn’t want to take that route, because in my mind that would mean I had failed, and I HATED the thought of just plain failing.   

So I made cold calls to people who very pointedly did not want any magazine subscriptions, and I rationed my peanut butter crackers and canned apple sauce, and I worried.   

The phone rang one day right around the middle of the summer, about two weeks before I had to pay tuition, at a point when I had just about perfected worrying into some sort of psychokinesis. I had fully intended to use my new worry-fueled and possibly hallucinatory mental super-power to bore holes in the ceiling, because I was too weak from hunger to get out of bed, but instead I answered the phone.

It was Dan Thorsland from Dark Horse, and his words might as well have been a magical incantation, they turned my world around so fast. “Hey Dan,” he said, “Do you think you could take over on this Colonial Marines mini-series and wrap it up in a couple of issues?”  

It was as if the Heavens had opened for me.  

When senior year of college got started, not only did I have enough money to pay tuition and keep a roof over my head (thanks to Aliens: Colonial Marines), but I also traded up after-school jobs. I had spent junior year toiling away in the somewhat off-color world of Spencer Gifts, but the final year of my under-grad degree in English saw me working as an editor at Student Note Service - a place that, little did I suspect at the time, would figure prominently throughout my twenties.   

The way Student Notes worked was that they’d put an ad in the school paper along the lines of, “Want to get paid to study? Call this number!” Students invariably came in, and they’d explain the drill: you go to class, take good notes, then come in and type those notes onto one of their computers. An editor - usually a grad student, but in my case, just a big nerd - would go through and polish the notes up. Then the business printed them up and sold them to other students in the class as “supplemental study guides,” with the understanding that they were not to be used in place of going to class, and that if there were any discrepancies between your notes and theirs, you were to use your own.   

Did students use the notes in place of going to class? Of course they did. But if they bought notes that I had edited, they could at least count on them being factually accurate and grammatically flawless.   

Working at Student Notes paid better than working at Spencer Gifts, but it was hardly what you’d call a gold mine, and I was still keenly interested in making an extra buck if I could. If that extra buck involved making up a story or two, I was all over it. So when Dan Thorsland called me up not long after school started and offered me another job, I said yes before he’d even explained what it was. If I had heard all the details first, considering what it turned out to be…I still would’ve said yes.   

Here’s the thing I was quickly and thoroughly learning about being a fledgling freelance writer: when someone asks you, “Can you do _______?” the answer is always, “Why yes! Yes I can!”   

THEM: “Can you come up with a story about a unicorn and a time-traveling toad?” 

YOU: “You bet I can!”   

THEM: “Can you fix the dialogue in this story so that it sounds appropriate to late 19th-century England?” 

YOU: “No problem.”   

THEM: “Can you create a character that will fit into an established superhero universe who is NOT a) a martial artist, b) an expert marksman, or c) an ace computer hacker?” 

YOU: “Consider it done!”   

(That last one actually happened, and led to my creator-owned DC series Bloodhound.)   

And of course you may have NO IDEA at the time how to do what they’re asking you to do - but are you confident that you can figure it out? Why yes! Yes you are! (And if you’re not, you should do your best to get that way.)   When you get hugely successful, and make a publisher enormous gobs of money, then you can afford to pick and choose what you want to do. But when you’re first starting out - even when you’ve been at it a while - every job you get is an opportunity to get better at what you do, make some money, and further establish your reputation. Maybe your philosophy differs from mine, but I don’t turn down paying work. I’m not sure I’d know how to.   

In any case, what Dan Thorsland offered me that autumn day was a job writing little tiny miniature comic books that were going to be packaged with several new kinds of Aliens toys. If I recall correctly, I did the Rhino Alien, the Snake Alien, and the Giant Facehugger.   

I also did one starring a new Colonial Marine who wore a special kind of armor that let him disguise himself as an alien and move among them unmolested. I think he was known as “A.T.A.X.” I don’t remember what that stood for.   

These comics were only twelve pages long, and that wasn’t the only thing about them that had been lopped off short: the pay was a good bit less, and the target audience was considerably younger than what I’d aimed for on my otherAliens work. The toy company said they wanted the stories aimed at 8-year-olds, but in my humble and not at all biased opinion, what they really wanted was Aliens meetsTeleTubbies.   

But it was paying work. Collectively those three mini-comics paid for another quarter’s tuition, plus I got to work with my favorite artist again: John Nadeau. He did brilliant work, as usual, though I suspect he was less than impressed with my stories on the mini-comics. John is one of the more low-key people I’ve ever met, so it was hard to tell; he usually makes the comedian Steven Wright look like Jim Carrey.   

So we did the comics, and out they shipped with the toys, no doubt to be flapped about and ripped up and trod upon by very small children across the country.   

By this point, John and I had actually met and hung out, at the Dragon*Con convention in downtown Atlanta, and decided we got along pretty well.   Well enough, in fact, that when he started doing some work for Valiant Comics, he offered to introduce me to his editor, Jesse “Hurricane” Berdinka. That led to a series of events that would prompt me to ask, “What exactly is an ‘inventory story’?”   

I was going to make this column all about my time writing inventory stories for Valiant Comics, and I still will talk about that in a future entry, but then I remembered an experience I had before I got to Valiant. It’s an experience I wish I hadn’t had, but hey, part of the reason I’m doing this is to put my mistakes out there front and center, so that somebody coming up the same path I took might be able to avoid them.

This is the kind of story that involves real people, real properties, and details that could be tracked down and verified—IF I used real names. I’m not going to. As I have commented in earlier posts, I’m really not interested in being sued for libel, and besides, the important parts are the situations presented and the choices made. Those are the same no matter what I call these guys.

The year was 1993. I was soon to receive my Bachelor’s Degree in English from the University of Georgia (a degree that, in and of itself, has helped me get ZERO jobs as a writer), and I was weighing my options as to what I wanted to do after I had the diploma in hand.

I don’t remember why I called Bill, a comics artist I considered a friend, but I wound up on the phone with him one spring afternoon. My question of “How’s it going?” led him to tell me that he was trying to get a new project off the ground, but wasn’t satisfied with the writer he had chosen for it. Summoning up some confidence and bravado that I did not in any way truly feel, I said, “What? You need a writer, and you didn’t call me?”

Bill apparently liked my moxie, as it were, and invited me to come to his place and meet the team he’d put together for this thing. It was going to be an ongoing, monthly sci-fi book called GALAXY 799, and just from what Bill told me about it I was intrigued already, so I piled into my sun-faded Ford Escort and went over to Bill’s apartment.

And I met The Team: Bill on pencils, a guy my age named Stu doing inks, and a friend of Bill’s named Terry who was going to serve double duty as letterer and editor. (The outgoing writer was a guy named Morris, and I remember meeting him once, though I don’t recall the circumstances. He seemed nice enough.)

I read the one script Morris had finished, and I saw why Bill wasn’t happy with it. In my carefully considered opinion (as if I knew what I was talking about), the pacing was kind of clunky, and the dialogue was way too on-the-nose. I thought I could do better. Bill decided to let me prove it, and gave me the task of re-writing Issue #1.

Now, some of you may be thinking, “Why was this artist handing out jobs? That’s not how the industry works.” And it’s not - at least, not now. But the early 90’s was a bizarre time for comic books. A grand, overblown, sort of ridiculous, very bizarre time. I’m not going to get into the particulars and mechanics of it, but the early 90’s saw a boom in the business that defied description. Comics that only sold 100,000 copies a month were getting canceled. The best-selling titles moved millions of issues at a time. Some people in the industry made a HUUUGE amount of money.

I was not one of those people. By the time I had a chance at becoming one of those people, that enormous boom had gone bust, and the industry hasn’t recovered from it to this day.

At the time, though, that period of prosperity was still very much in effect, and one of the people who had made a gazillion dollars was a guy in Philadelphia named Kurt Norton. He had created his own unique comic book series, found an enthusiastic and loyal audience, and just raked in the dough hand over fist.

Norton had so much money, in fact, that he decided to whip up his own little corner of the industry, populated by creators that he hand-selected and - this is the important part - funded himself. Essentially, Norton said, “Hey, Guy Whose Work I Like. Go make a comic book. Pick your own team. I’ll send you the money to pay them, and we’ll split the profits.”

That was how Bill had gotten into the position he currently held: he was one of Kurt Norton’s chosen few.

Anyway. I had my assignment, I was eager to prove myself, and I went home and re-wrote Morris’s script for GALAXY 799 #1. I don’t remember exactly how long it took me, but I know that I was back at Bill’s apartment one week later for another team meeting. I had faxed the script over beforehand, and when I got there, Bill and Terry and Stu all told me how much they’d enjoyed it. “We’ve definitely made the right choice,” Bill said, and I became the official writer of GALAXY 799. It was the first time I had been attached to an ongoing series, rather than a one-shot or a limited-run project. I was over the freaking moon!

We did a lot of dreaming at that meeting. Kurt Norton had sent Bill a breakdown of what the profit split would be at each sales milestone: if we sold 30,000 copies, we’d get X number of dollars, if we sold 60,000 it would be X times 2, or something along those lines. As the number of copies sold got larger, our profit from it reached (to me) astronomical heights. And as writer, I was guaranteed a 20% share when the cash came rolling in.

You know how I knew I was guaranteed that? Because Bill told me. He looked me in the eye and he shook my hand and told me so. I was thrilled; a handshake was certainly good enough for me. I don’t think it even occurred to me to get a written contract. Happy as the proverbial clam, I went home, wrote GALAXY 799 #2, and faxed it over to Bill.

This is the point at which everything began spiraling into the toilet.

I heard not a peep out of Bill concerning my script for issue #2. He didn’t call. Nothing. So, when I showed up for the next team meeting, I was quite surprised when Bill pulled out my script and, addressing everyone, said, “Well, it’s obvious this isn’t very good. It’s basically just a re-hash of issue 1.” He went on to rip the story apart as if I weren’t even in the room.

Full disclosure: the script for issue #2 WASN’T very good. I was still so green as a writer I could’ve been mistaken for Kermit the Frog, and yes, there were things about the script that were probably pretty stinky. But for anyone out there interested in becoming an editor or, say, someone who manages a group of writers, believe me when I say that it is a REALLY BAD IDEA to ambush a writer in front of a group of people and rip his work apart. Particularly if he hasn’t had the chance to fix what might be wrong with it or, worse yet, doesn’t even know you had a problem with it.

I was humiliated and furious. I tried to defend the script, but Bill calmly told me—still in front of everyone—how wrong I was, and how my work wasn’t good enough, and that I had better fix it or I’d be out the door.

I was humiliated and furious, yes, but I also really wanted this job. Doing my best not to choke on it, I swallowed every bit of my pride and got to work improving the issue #2 script.

It’s pretty unlikely that this sort of scenario would even come up today, because the comics industry is in no way prosperous enough to have piles of discretionary cash lying around, waiting to be used to fund crazy new projects. But, based on this experience, here are some guidelines I would strongly suggest following:

1) As a freelancer—not somebody trying to break in, willing to take risks so you can finally get that first thing published, but a working freelancer—the only way you should work without a contract is if you’re writing for a company that usually works that way, and has a solid reputation for paying its contractors. Otherwise, get a contract.

2) If someone asks you to do work for them otherwise—whether it’s a “scrappy startup company” or even a good friend of yours—GET EVERYTHING IN WRITING. I would say it’s even more important to get things in writing if it is a friend. Clearly delineate exactly what everyone’s role is, what each person is going to be doing, and how any money involved is going to be used down to the last penny. Not doing that is a good way for everyone involved to become ex-friends.

3) Once you know exactly what everyone’s role is, don’t be afraid to stick to that. I’m not saying be a jerk; there’s no need to get in anyone’s face. But if someone starts to go off the rails on a project, there’s nothing wrong with politely addressing the issue and trying to fix it. Going to IHOP with the inker and bitching about the penciler might be fun, but it doesn’t solve anything.

4) If you can see that, despite all best efforts, a project is going to go off the rails anyway, don’t be afraid to walk away from it. If it’s in that bad a shape, you might not be doing yourself any favors by having your name attached to it.

I understand that that last point is sometimes easier said than done, believe me. I’ve been involved in projects that had, shall we say, drawbacks, but I stuck around either because it was opening new connections for me, or I needed the money, or both. You have to look at these things on a case-by-case basis.

If you get hired to relaunch a major character at DC, for example, and what seems to be the entire Internet descends upon you with torches and pitchforks and tells you that you suck and you’re raping their childhood and you shouldn’t even be allowed to write checks, well, sometimes you stick with it as long as you can because the publicity you’re getting from it is pretty good, and the steady paycheck really helps out in supporting your family. (Not that I’d know anything about that. ::cough:: Firestorm ::cough:: )

But if some guy you’ve never met before comes up to you at a con and says, “Hey, I’m starting up my own comic company, and I’m looking for writers!” and you start working for him, but then he begins insisting that every story feature the word “scrotum,” and when you meet him to discuss the next issue he’s being tailed by a plainclothes cop, and then you realize he’s living out of his van and wants to give you stock in his company in lieu of pay, it’s probably okay if you decide not to hang in there for the long haul.

I’m just sayin’.

(NOTE: neither GALAXY 799, nor the actual book whose title shall remain undisclosed, ever went to press.)

I sputtered for a second. “But…but I, uh…I withdrew my application…”

Without missing a beat or changing expression, he said, “Oh. Well then, never mind.” And he started class.

Anyway.

I finished Spring Quarter, got my diploma, worked the summer at Student Note Service (getting a promotion to Assistant Manager along the way), and when Fall Quarter started, I dutifully reported to the first of my classes in the mysterious halls of the Journalism School. Long story short on my Journalism career: it took me a quarter and a half to realize that I really, truly, honestly despised Journalism.

I was fed up with higher education as a whole, honestly, plus I already had my degree in English… …so I quit. No more academics for me. The closest I ever came to going back to school was seven years later, when I took a class on International Horror Films at the University of New Mexico, and that was just for kicks. But leaving college behind was okay, I thought, because I started working full-time at Student Note Service, and that paid well enough for a bonehead in his very early 20’s to rent a cheap apartment with a roommate and put gas in his cheap car and buy cheap food.

And because, by that point, John Nadeau had called me up and offered to introduce me to his editor at Valiant Comics. The future looked pretty darn bright. Bright enough for me, anyway.

But let me tell you something about being a freelance writer and getting a college degree (or degrees). I’ve mentioned this before, but just to be as clear as possible: those letters you can put after your name? NO ONE CARES ABOUT THEM. You know how many times, over the last twenty-one years, an editor has asked about my education? None. None times. It doesn’t come up. Editors care about whether or not you can write, period.

Now, don’t think I’m telling you not to go to college. You should absolutely go to college if you can, because you’ll have a wealth of experiences you can get no place else, and if you get good teachers and work hard, you’ll learn a lot. Writers are like sponges, and every bit of the knowledge and skills and wisdom you can soak up will make you better at what you do. College is great. But if you think you’ll get work just because you passed all your classes and got your diploma, well, that’s where you’re wrong, I’m afraid. I don’t know if any of the people I’m working for right now even know whether I went to college or not. What they do know, and what matters, is that I turn in quality work, on time, without being a pain in the ass.

That will get you work.

Most of the events I talk about in this entry — the comic book-related ones, in any case — have taken on a very hazy quality, for reasons that I will explain later on. If anybody who worked with me during this time wants to correct the sequence or details of this stuff, by all means, please feel free.

The year was 1994. I had been getting paid actual money to make %$#& up and write it down for two and a half, maybe three years at that point, but I was still firmly in “scramble mode” as far as getting more work went.

Almost every freelancer out there knows exactly what I mean when I talk about “scramble mode.” It’s that gut-churning time when you either don’t have any more work coming in, or you can see a definite end to the work you’re doing now and realize you’d better line something else up ASAP. (The only freelancer I know of who has never had to scramble is Gail Simone, who was asked to write the “You’ll All Be Sorry” humor column that got her noticed, and was then asked to write for DC Comics. I only hate her a tiny little bit for that.)

This was in the wake of the God-awful GALAXY 799 debacle, and took place at least in part during my comically unsuccessful foray into Journalism school. John Nadeau, with whom I had worked a handful of times, had started doing some penciling for Valiant Comics, and offered to introduce me to his editor there, an enthusiastic fellow named Jesse Berdinka.

(Everyone at Valiant referred to Jesse with some regularity as “Hurricane,” and for months I figured that was either because he was full of destructive energy, or because he really liked the University of Miami. Turns out he had an affinity for a mixed drink known as the Hurricane. I felt only slightly let down.)

Jesse gave me the lay of the land around Valiant at the time. They had a list of core titles, including Bloodshot (the gun-toting, sword-wielding hardass you see up there at the top), Rai, Shadowman, Harbinger, X-O Manowar, Ninjak, The Second Life of Dr. Mirage, Secret Weapons, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Eternal Warrior, and Magnus, Robot Fighter. When I started writing for them, Valiant’s sales figures were a thing of beauty, and had made them major contenders, right alongside books like Batman and The X-Men.

There was another editor there, for whom I would soon do some writing as well, named Maurice Fontenot, and he and Jesse reported to senior editor Tony Bedard. All of my scripts had to get approved by either Jesse or Maurice, and then by Tony.

Aside from John, the only other artists I remember there were Bernard Chang and Sean Chen. I got to meet them and Jesse and Maurice in person when I went down to MegaCon in Orlando, and everyone was really cool and friendly. It was a great atmosphere, and I was thrilled to be a part of the company.

“But Dan,” some of the more astute comic book readers in the crowd might say at this point, “I don’t remember you writing any of the Valiant titles!” And those astute readers would be correct, because what I wrote for Valiant were inventory stories.

INVENTORY STORY (noun): A one- or two-issue story that stands alone and does not affect the continuity of a comic book series in any way. Used to fill in production gaps when the regular creative team on a series falls behind schedule.

Mainstream comic books are published on what is supposed to be a strict monthly schedule. In general, an artist can do about one page per day, so, allowing for him or her to have at least a little bit of a life, a standard 22-page comic book will take about a month to draw. That way you get a fresh new issue of your favorite title every four weeks.

Unless something goes wrong.

Most comics are produced on the razor’s edge of going off-schedule. They shouldn’t be; if everything were perfect, you’d have somewhere between six and twelve fully completed issues in the can before the first one ever comes out. But that doesn’t happen very often, and what does happen very often is that the penciler gets the flu, or the inker has to drop everything and go out of town, or the writer takes an extra two weeks to turn the script in.

(That’s still completely alien to me. I just cannot imagine holding up production like that because the script isn’t done. I’m told that puts me in the minority.)

Anyway, if/when something goes wrong and the editor doesn’t have a book to send to the printers, he can pull out an inventory story that was done a week or a month or a year earlier, and slot that right into place, no muss, no fuss.

So I boned up on my Valiant comics and started sending pitches in to Jesse Berdinka. I don’t remember which one got accepted first, but I do remember that I wrote inventory stories for Eternal Warrior, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Secret Weapons, and Bloodshot. In fact, as I recall, the one I did with John Nadeau was a two-parter, and featured a crossover between Bloodshot and Secret Weapons. I wish I could remember what that story was called.

It involved a distress signal from an orbiting research satellite, and for whatever reason, Bloodshot and the Secret Weapons crew (which consisted of three men and one woman wearing super-suits, sort of like Iron Man) hopped on board a Space Shuttle and rocketed up to see what was going on.

I’ve mentioned before in this blog how significant seeing the movie Pulp Fiction was for me as a writer. Pulp Fiction came out in 1994, I had seen it not long before I started writing these scripts for Valiant, and because of that my dialogue underwent a serious shift.

The two guys in the cockpit of the Space Shuttle in my story were Bloodshot and Tank, the biggest, toughest member of the Secret Weapons team. Before 1994, if I were going to write a scene in which some superhero types were on their way up to a space station to investigate Something Bad, the dialogue would have been really stilted, really on-the-nose, and supremely awful — something like this:

BLOODSHOT: There’s no telling what we might encounter up there. I hope you’re prepared for anything.

TANK: Of course I’m prepared for anything. This is the kind of danger the Secret Weapons face every day.

BLOODSHOT: Good. Everyone’s counting on us to figure out what’s gone wrong.

Ugh. Just…ugh. Those words would never be spoken by anyone, under any circumstances, ever.

Because Pulp Fiction gave me a crash course in natural-sounding dialogue, though, I decided to open that scene up — same setup, Space Shuttle blasting off, zooming up into the Orbiting Unknown — with this exchange instead:

BLOODSHOT: Are you serious?

BLOODSHOT: There is no way Spinderella is hotter than Janet Jackson.

TANK: I know what I like, man.

Is that award-winning dialogue? No. But it’s a HELL of a lot better than what I would have written pre-Pulp Fiction, and at least sounds as if actual human beings might have said it. I don’t regard Quentin Tarantino as the same kind of cinematic demi-god that a lot of people do, but I do owe him a debt of gratitude for that movie.

So I did my inventory stories, and continued learning things about writing, and really thought I stood a good chance of maybe picking up a continuing series and getting regular work for the first time. Everyone seemed happy with the work I was doing, so why shouldn’t I join the Big Boys Club and really start getting my name out there?

Well, as it turned out, 1994 was also the year that Acclaim bought Valiant outright and re-booted the entire universe, rendering all of my inventory stories inapplicable. Not only that, but the new people in charge were also thoroughly uninterested in talking to me. So I was dumped right out of the whole Valiant experience and back into “scramble mode”…which slowly turned into “well, I’ve got a day job, so I don’t guess I have to scramble too hard”…which turned into a great big depression-filled writing slump that lasted a full two years.

Not the proudest time of my life.

Plus, the reason the whole Valiant thing is all a bit hazy now is that, not only did none of the scripts I wrote for them ever get published, but at this point I’ve changed computers and moved households often enough that I don’t even have any of those scripts anymore. All of that material has just evaporated.

Maybe I’ll try to track down Jesse or Maurice and see if they kept any of it.