Well, as my esteemed, soon to disappear mysteriously never to be heard from again, colleague Robert noted on his blog, yesterday was my birthday. I spent the bulk of the day lying in bed, either sleeping or watching movies. Which would’ve made it my ideal birthday, if it wasn’t for the excruciating back pain that sent me to the ER for a long, long wait and a short but bliss-filled shot of demerol between midnight and 4AM Tuesday morning.
I can now get myself out of bed without assistance, and a walk to the bathroom, while unpleasant, no longer fills me with the horror it did for the entirety of Monday (and 12:00 to 4:00AM Tuesday.) However, thanks to my deeeelightful regime of painkilling medication, along with the frequent resurgence of the pain it’s trying to kill, my current level of functioning could charitably be called “suboptimal.”
And so I am going to keep my work on this week’s blog to a relative minimum.
BUT!
You will not be without something to read, oh no. After last week’s dog and pony show, I thought it would be neat to get some input on the blog from the writers I’m working with, KNIGHTCAP’s Stephen Cmelak and BLACK JACK O’BREEN’s John Michael Sullivan. I sent them a handful of questions that were intended more as springboards for a conversation that we haven’t yet had, partly because, y’know, I’m really dizzy.
And so I give you something that makes my skin absolutely crawl: the raw, UNEDITED Q+A between me and John. May God have mercy on our souls. Or at least mine.
(In case it isn’t obvious, in the following exchange, I am “AF” and John is “JS”, which somehow seemed preferable to the technically more accurate “JMS”)
AF: How long have you had the idea for BLACK JACK/KNIGHTCAP, and what inspired you to create them?
JS: Black Jack was originally created as a movie pitch about a year ago – it was the best of a half dozen ideas I ground out as pitches aimed at a pretty specific target. A producer was looking for sci-fi/creature movie ideas. They wanted them to be based roughly on properties that were in the public domain, so they didn’t have to pay anyone, but still had some name and concept recognition. Basically they wanted stories and characters from faerie tales and folklore updated into very action-y B-movie formats. So I came up with about a half dozen ideas from folklore and thought about how to make a modern action movie out of them. The nucleus of Black Jack was the Wild Hunt. They seemed spooky and cool, but instead of just getting taken away by them, I figured an action movie format would have somebody facing them head on, with heavy weapons and explosions and stuff. I dabbled with doing it as a modern piece with an elite commando squad, but it didn’t feel right. A cowboy, on the other hand, taking on pagan gods with his six-shooters, that felt cool. And everything else just kind of grew from there.
AF: In your ideal world, how long would Jack O’Breen and Knightcap’s stories be? Are the stories you’ve begun telling the only ones you have for the characters, do you have other stories but a finite number with a set ending, or would these be the lead characters in an ongoing, potentially unending series?
JS: Well, there’s a definite arc for Black Jack – I don’t know how many actual comic book issues that would be if it were actually going to be a print comic, but there’s an endpoint where they stop the bad guys and rescue Jack’s brother. But that doesn’t mean the character’s done. Assuming anyone wants to continue the story, I’ve got ideas for other stories featuring Jack as kind of the gunfighter to the faerie court, mixing his increasing magical capability with the only cold iron shooting revolvers under the hills. If the market is there, I could definitely see Jack’s adventures as an ongoing franchise. Of course that’s an enormous if…
AF: Both your title characters take action largely in reaction to situations involving other members of their family. Without getting too personal (I’ll let you decide what qualifies), how have your families affected your creative lives? How does your family feel about the fact that you won a contest and are having comics you wrote created?
JS: I can’t say mine has. My family has always been a very, very small number of people, and I’m kind of mystified by the dynamics of big families. It’s something I explore in stories, but I have very little to draw on in that regard. As for reacting to my CCN win, I don’t think my Mom fully understands what this is all about. I seem happy about it, so she’s happy for me, but I think it’s going to take some explaining once the book comes out.
AF: Each of your stories also contain a romantic angle. Where does love fit into the grander scheme of things in your stories?
JS: Well, love and romance are great character motivators, aren’t they? We all want those things in our lives, and often we have to struggle to get them, and that equals story. In Jack’s case, it was one of the later dominoes to click into place. I realized fairly quickly that it couldn’t just be pure chance that it was Jack’s brother who was taken by the Hunt. There had to be a reason, and that implied a connection with the faeries from his days back in Ireland. And I realized that Jack’s story was largely about coming home again to deal with all the crap you’ve tried to put behind you. That seemed a very happy thematic fit for a character out of the western myth, where everything is simple and plain and your past was left back east somewhere. Westerns almost always seem to me about characters trying to reinvent themselves as new people in this new landscape. They’re always running from something, or else to some idea that things will be better out west. They’re always leaving something behind. And since Jack – having made that break and become the cowboy/gunfighter of the wild west – has to go back where he started and deal with a situation he thought he’d escaped, it just made sense to have the rest of his life be a huge, untended mess as well. So Jack’s wanted by the law (another appropriate element for this misplaced western genre), his family relationships are a disaster. And there’s the girl he left behind.
AF: What’s the most unexpected thing you’ve experienced so far in working on your Z2H comic?
JS: The visual element, easily. I’m confident enough in my storytelling abilities, but I have absolutely no artistic talent whatsoever. I mean can’t even draw a stick figure doing anything except standing there. It’s truly pathetic. And, while I imagine scenes, place myself in them and see them, my mind’s eye is incredibly abstract – able to simultaneously see a half dozen different angles at once. Of course that doesn’t work so well when someone has to actually draw what I’m describing. So I know it’s occasionally been frustrating for the people I’m working with, but it’s been a definite education in a field I never really expected to be studying.
AF: What writing or comic work did you create prior to winning CCCN, and how did those experiences affect the creation of Black Jack and Knightcap?
JS: I’d sold a bunch of short stories, I’d worked as a journalist, I’d written, co-written and rewritten other people’s screenplays, so I had a bunch of writing experience. But almost no comic experience whatsoever. I’d been hired by Zeros2Heroes last year to do some development work and write several short comics “trailers” for a project called BiosFear. It’s one of the beta projects Zeros has used to ready the online launch. The story and character work I was very comfortable with, but the actual scripts were literally the first comics pages I’d ever tried to write. If anything, the visualization process on Black Jack would have been even more difficult without that shakedown. And thankfully the people I was working with on BiosFear gave me the room I needed to thrash around and figure things out. I’m actually pretty proud of what we came up with there, and I hope people will check it out when it goes up.
AF: If you could actually meet a character from your story in real life, which one would it be, and why?
JS: Oh, Jack, no question. He’s the one that’s safest to be around. I mean sure the faeries are fun, but hopefully if you take nothing else from Black Jack O’Breen, it’s that faeries are not cute, harmless little scamps, like flying puppies. They’re ruthless, deadly little forces of nature, red in tooth and claw. It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Or a limb. Or a thousand years.
AF: If you could only have one form of narrative entertainment in your life (comics, novels, films, videogames), which would it be, and why?
JS: God, I don’t know. Probably novels just because they seem to me to offer the most immersive, detailed experiences. Yeah, they’re less fully realized, but you can do a lot more in a novel than you can do in any of the others. They put more weight on you engaging with the narrative, but that pays off if you can do it.
AF: Is it better to burn out than to fade away?
JS: You’ve got to get the fire lit before you can do either one. That’s the tricky part, isn’t it? At that point, burning out or fading away is generally something the universe will decide for you.
***
OK, that’s it for this week, hope you enjoyed it. Thanks to John for saving me in my hour of need. I’m going to go towards the light, now.
Ever upward, readers (after Monday, there’s no place to go but up…)
Foley
