Deadlines are rushing me and my fellow Z2H editors like something big and fast that you don't want rushing at you if you can possibly avoid it. It'd be a tough week on my best day, but my best day this is not, as Foley's Back Blowout 2008 continues more or less unabated. While I haven't spent any more time at the emergency room, I also haven't moved more than a couple feet from my bed for the better part of nine days, now. Even our pets think the room smells a little hinky and are actively avoiding it, and our dog thinks other dogs' poo is the most alluring scent imaginable...

One of the things I did move out of bed for was a visit to the doctor this afternoon, to tell her, in the most concise, well-considered manner possible that "I NEED SOME DRUGS EITHER THAT OR JUST PUT A BULLET IN MY HEAD I DON'T CARE ANYMORE MY BACK HURTS IT HURTS IT HURRRRTS!"

She opted to add a few more medications to my already-considerable prescription list (some people treat their body like a temple; I treat mine like a pharmaceutical company waste dump site.) The upside of all this is that I will hopefully be feeling less discomfort tomorrow. The downside is that I'll be feeling very little at all this time tomorrow, and will in fact have the intelligence, wit, and general demeanour of someone playing a background zombie in a George Romero Living Dead flick. From the sounds of it, this particular medicinal cocktail won't make me hunger for human flesh (any more than usual), but it will leave me in the kind of semi-comatose state I used to strive for back in art college but discovered to my detriment isn't terribly cool when you've got a deadline bearing down on you. 

So, no Density from Foley today; instead I present to you the mostly unedited answers KNIGHTCAP creator/writer Stephen Cmelak gave to my Nine Questions That I Meant To Follow Up On But Never Did Because I Screwed My Back Up. My thanks to Stephen for the blogging save. I hope to be back to normal blogging next week, but then I hoped to be back to normal blogging this week and instead I'm going on about back pain and associated medications. You just never know what you're going to get here, do you?

THE NINE QUESTIONS THAT I MEANT TO FOLLOW UP ON BUT NEVER DID BECAUSE I SCREWED MY BACK UP and STEPHEN CMELAK'S ANSWERS TO THE AFOREMENTIONED QUESTIONS 

AF: How long have you had the idea for BLACK JACK/KNIGHTCAP, and what inspired you to create them?

SC: Knightcap the character has been with me, in one form or another, since I was about sixteen. My nickname in high school was “Hatman”, owing to the fact that I wore a baseball cap to class every day, usually paired with a superhero T-shirt. In grade 11, the baseball cap gave way to a grey fedora…because if you’re going to be singled out for being different, then goddamn it, you might as well to embrace it. Hatman became a superhero in grade 12 when I was invited to read the announcements on Friday mornings, and adopted a cheesy sign-on that I intended to be reminiscent of The Shadow, but which probably came off more as Darkwing Duck.

Months later, during my first forays into the world of internet message boards, I used ‘Hatman’ as my login name. Eventually I became a regular at the site that would eventually become Jonah Weiland’s Comic Book Resources, the Kingdom Come Message Board, where I met a number of friends who I remain close with to this day. While the main topic of discussion there was the Alex Ross/Mark Waid limited series, between issues the board’s regulars started writing our own superhero epics featuring our online alter-egos. Hatman became a non-superpowered urban detective hero—not coincidentally like a certain Dark Knight with whom his name rhymes—who used a series of trick hats to fight crime instead of a utility belt. The battered grey fedora became his symbol, as it had been mine in high school, and his go-to weapon: the Boomerang Fedora, a combination of Batman’s batarangs and Captain America’s shield, which struck with the force of fifty hats.

Gradually, over time, Hatman became less and less of a Batman parody and more of his own character. As a fan of DC’s legacy heroes, like the Flash, I invented a legacy for him that went all the way back to the Golden Age—a grandfather who fought in WWII, who he idolized, and whose example he struggled to live up to. In the course of writing those early stories, I discovered he was less Batman than Captain

America-by-way-of-Spider-Man, an aspiring square-jawed paragon of goodness, justice and virtue, who is nonetheless a young and impetuous smart-ass. And I learned that he is a hopeless—some would say reckless—romantic, who has extraordinarily bad luck when it comes to women.

Enter Fugue.

Originally called ‘Deus Ex Girlfriend’, a play on the name of a friend’s band, I originally wrote her into the stories as the ultra-powerful ex-girlfriend of one of that same friend’s characters, the Hawaiian Puncher. The idea that this godlike character (who could alter the very fabric of the universe just by singing) once dated this one-note loser (a superhero by virtue of his ability to punch really, really hard) struck me as really amusing. And though she only ever appeared the once, the idea stuck with me. What on earth could she have possibly seen in him? My rationale was that she could ‘hear’ something in the music of his soul that hinted at some kind of untapped potential for greatness, a hint of what the universe’s plan for him actually was.

And that’s what made me think of SWEET NOVEMBER, one of my mom’s all-time favorite films, in which Sandy Dennis plays a quirky, bohemian hippie who lures emotionally crippled men into affairs, then helps them repair their lives. She invites Anthony Newley’s uptight English businessman to spend a month with her—as she has all her previous ‘cases’—on the promise that she will change his life around. An honest-to-goodness relationship begins to develop between them, but Sara refuses to extend it past their agreed month. Charlie eventually learns that she is dying of a terminal disease, and that her goal is to help—and be remembered—by as many people as humanly possible before her end comes. In an emotional end to the story, Charlie agrees to abide by Sara’s wishes and walk away from the relationship, “brim full of memories”, but his spirit has been irrevocably changed.

What if “Deus Ex Girlfriend” were doing something similar—serial dating seemingly useless superheroes, or taking them on as sidekicks—for similar reasons? Given her powers, what if her “terminal disease” actually wound up being ‘terminal’ for reality itself? And what if her goal wasn’t just to be remembered, but to save the world…from herself?

It was an idea I kicked around in the back of my head for awhile. But it wasn’t until Zeroes 2 Heroes and C:CCN came along that I actually worked it up into an actual pitch, almost on a whim. And it had never occurred to me until that point to put her together with Hatman…who was now called ‘Knightcap’, at the suggestion of my friend Brian Joines, as the final step of his evolution away from Batman parody to full-fledged original character. (As an ironic aside, though, my high school’s sports teams were called ‘The Knights’, bringing Knightcap’s origin back around full-circle.)

It made sense, though. Who better to play the neurotic straight man to my quirky, extra-dimensional hippie-goddess than a smart-assed neurotic superhero-wannabe who threw a hat at people? And why hadn’t I seen it before?

The rest, as they say, is history in the making…

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?

SC: The answer for this is somewhere in between ‘ongoing, potentially unending’ and ‘a finite number with a set ending’. I do definitely have an end in mind for Knightcap and Fugue—CENSORED BY ANDREW BECAUSE IT’S TOO COOL TO REVEAL BEFORE THE COMIC (WHICH SIMPLY MUST BE MADE) IS MADE—but there’s potentially hundreds of stories that could be told between now and then, with either of them. Like every good Star Wars nerd, I envision it as a trilogy…but with an ‘Empire Strikes Back’ that can be as long as I need or want it to be.

Also, Fugue’s been at this—one month at a time—for at least as far back as the early 40’s, when Eric’s grand-dad was wearing the fedora…so there’s your prequel trilogy right there. ;)

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?

SC: It’s funny you should ask that, because this project bears the influence of both my parents like no other I’ve attempted before. The science fictiony, fantastical elements are all thanks to my dad, who shared his love for things like Star Trek, The Twilight Zone and Planet of the Apes with me, from a very young age. The romantic comedy and star-crossed lovers bits are the product of my mom exposing me to movies like Breakfast At Tiffany’s, Some Like It Hot, Arsenic and Old Lace and Peggy Sue Got Married…sometimes against my will, but less often than I would have had her believe. The only way I could make it more a product of my parents’ influence on me would be to produce it as rock opera with music by ABBA and book by Carl Sagan…

I’m very lucky, in that my family has always been very supportive of my creative endeavors…my dad, because he’s a frustrated creative-type himself, whose old-world parents urged him to get his head out of the clouds and focus on something sensible…and my mom simply because she can see that I’m happiest when I’m doing something creative. If anything, my mom’s support has actually meant more, since she doesn’t really get the whole ‘sci-fi/fantasy/comic book geek’ thing, which is really the only level my dad and I have ever had a real connection on. The fact that it can be such an impenetrable mystery to her, and yet she still urges me to pursue it so fiercely, is both endearing and inspiring.

AF: Each of your stories also contain a romantic angle. Where does love fit into the grander scheme of things in your stories?

SC: Well, being a romantic comedy, love is naturally kind of central to KC:NS. Like John (Sullivan, writer of BLACK JACK O’BREEN) said, it’s a terrific character motivator, and one that’s pretty universal to the human experience. I think everybody, at some point, encounters that special someone who turns your world upside-down and makes you want to be more, somehow…older, smarter, better looking, more sophisticated…somebody who pushes you to strive to be a better person overall, just by their mere presence in your life. Sometimes you fall flat on your face in the attempt—that’s where the comedy comes in—and it doesn’t always wind up happily ever after, but it changes you nevertheless. Knightcap meeting Fugue, and falling for her when she sees a potential in him that he can’t, sets him on a path that he probably wouldn’t have taken, otherwise. It’s not just about impressing her, it’s about proving himself worthy of her, of that faith she has in him. And I think we all experience that, to some degree, especially in adolescence and young adulthood, so it’s an easy thing for an audience to plug into and invest in.

AF: What's the most unexpected thing you've experienced so far in working on your Z2H comic?

SC: I’ve been most surprised by just how collaborative the process has been, and how much input that I as the writer still have even after the script is finished. I wasn’t expecting to be so involved in discussions over page layouts and word balloon placement—I figured that, as the writer, you just handed your completed script over, left all the art decisions in the hands of the artist and editor, and hoped for the best. I’ve been very fortunate in working with Andrew and John (Keane, artist of KNIGHTCAP: NOVEMBER’S SONG), in that they’ve both been terrific partners and generous collaborators. Together, I think we’re producing one awesome book.

I’ve also been continually amazed by how closely John’s art keeps coming to what I saw in my head when I was writing the script. Seriously—right down to facial expressions, camera angles, the works. It’s like he’s downloading images directly from my mind’s eye. (Which I hope he’s actually not, because that would be creepy. He’s not, though….is he?)

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?

SC: I’ve never been professionally published, but I was pretty heavily involved with the fanfic community over at CBR for several years, writing short stories and participating in collaborative story arcs. A lot of the groundwork for KC:NS was laid there, as I mentioned above, but it also taught me a lot about things like story structure, character development and motivation, pacing, “showing” as opposed to “telling”, and the give-and-take nature of artistic collaboration. A surprising number of my friends there were either already working writers, or have since gone on to break into comics, film and electronic gaming, so what started as a bunch of friends goofing off between issues became kind of an informal writers’ workshop. It was a really exciting time, and an invaluable learning experience.

A while after that, I worked for about a year on a little-seen webcomic project called “Avatars”, handing both the writing and the art myself, after a few attempts with a couple different artists stalled out. While I’d toyed with scripting comic pages here and there at CBR, this was my first time writing scripts that had to be turned into actual comic pages…by me, with my rather limited art skills. It gave me the opportunity to figure out how to incorporate the visual aspect of things—choosing shots and angles based on word balloon placement, how much dialogue needs to be stuffed into a particular panel, the order in which characters speak, as well as the overall impact and pacing of the page. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but I’d like to think I got better at it as I went along. And while it never really took off, I’m definitely glad I did it, if only so I could apply everything I learned on “Avatars” to the script for “November’s Song”.

AF: If you could actually meet a character from your story in real life, which one would it be, and why?

SC: Fugue, definitely Fugue. Not only because she’s quirky and fun to be around…not only because she has cosmic awareness, and could cheerfully answer all my questions about life, the universe and everything…not only because she could listen to my “soulsong”, hear what the universe intends for me, and tell me exactly what the heck I’m supposed to be doing with my life…but, because the way John draws her, she’s kind of a cutie.

OK, yeah, so now I’m the one being creepy…

AF: If you could only have one form of narrative entertainment in your life (comics, novels, films, videogames), which would it be, and why?

SC: Hmm, tough call. I think about choosing films, and my brain recoils at the thought of never being able to read ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ again. (Yes, I know there’s a film—a great film, even—but the book is better.) But then I back up and choose novels, and think “Wow, no more ‘Bone’ or ‘Rear Window’? Bummer.”

At the end of the day, though, I think my all-time, desert-island pick would be novels. There’s an intimacy to books that’s lacking in the others, in that you’re actively working with the author to create a world in your imagination. You invest a lot more of yourself in engaging it, whereas film especially is mostly passive, and I think it reaches you on a deeper level as a result. Nothing compares to the exhilaration of a really good book you can’t put down, or that pang of regret you feel when you get to the end, and have to say goodbye to characters you’ve really come to know and love. Not to say that there aren’t films or comic books that haven’t had this effect, but they’re fewer and farther between. Pound for pound, novels have had the greater emotional impact on me.

AF: Is it better to burn out than to fade away?

SC: c) None of the above

_______________

Ever upward, heroes!

 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-filledshot 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 

Over at CBR's Comics Should Be Good! blog, Greg Hatch has an interesting post about what comic editors do--or at least, some of the stuff they're supposed to do. He uses continuity issues in Grant Morrison's FINAL CRISIS and Chuck Dixon's abrupt departure from DC to illustrate his points.

Dixon himself chimes in with some telling comments about his perception of the state of DC after the post, but the real meat here, as far as I'm concerned, is the discussion/dissection of editorial responsibility. Then again, there's an outside chance I might be biased towards discussion of matters editorial...

Nah. 

Foley