Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Time to Wear Tights
filed under: howard chaykin, john byrne, kyle baker, robert morales
Twelve months from now, I will be a comic book writer. I’m on some Oprah shit; this is a lesson in self-actualization. Once a month for a year, I’ll blog about my progress here on Furthermucker along with all the usual seeds and stems of weekly reflections about Paris, hiphop, et al., and the whole thing will be an exercise in goal-setting and witnessing a dream manifest. All is mind.
Pops was a collector as a kid and saved thousands of joints for me in a closet at my great-grandmother’s place on Findlay Avenue in the South Bronx. (In fact, I sold my comics for seed money to move to Paris… another story.) Whenever we visited that Morrisania neighborhood, which was often, I dug in the bottomless cardboard boxes for 1960s copies of The Uncanny X-Men, The Amazing Spider-Man, etc. (I’ve still got a cherished Avengers #1 from 1963 in a sheaf of Mylar plastic.) I could even argue that my writing career started when Captain America published my letter to the editor at 11 years old. Me and my Co-op City cronies – like millions of other fanboys – used to create our own characters, take tracing paper to our comics collections, and act out our own adventures to the break of dawn.
So this is like a reality show experiment: I’ll be a comics writer by November 2008. It’s not a career change; a one-off graphic novel or miniseries will do just fine. Author Jonathan Lethem (Fortress of Solitude) brought back Omega the Unknown for Marvel Comics this year; director Reggie Hudlin (Boomerang) revived The Black Panther before semi-recently taking over BET. I’m in it mainly to get it out of my system already. As of today, all I’m armed with is my 34 years as a comics fan and a used copy of The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil. Back in my brief Vibe magazine daze, I worked with Robert Morales (Truth) before he took off to write about a black precursor to Captain America for Marvel with Kyle Baker, another Vibe alumni who used to draw a cartoon strip in the magazine’s early days. They might give me some direction, they might not.
Oh yeah, and, I’ve got an idea. (Those always help.) It’s a team of heroes. The story will somehow transpose the so-called “New Spirituality” of Neale Donald Walsch (Conversations With God) to the world of superheroes. (Lord knows enough comics tales were stolen from the Bible to begin with.) (And the Bible stole those stories from…?) In movie-pitch terms, it’ll be John Byrne’s The Next Men crossed with Bill Willingham’s Elementals, with a little of Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg. Or maybe not. Let’s see how far I get by next month.
carlito at 5:17 PM on 11/21/07:
SUN!!!
We must be tuning into the same wavelengths!!
WORD UP!!
I feel you on that 100%!!
(Read an article related to the WGA strike which discussed the almost indefinable role of the contemporary writer, and I kept thinking: Yep. That’s me. No mufuckin limit to what I can do with these here words…)