Chasing Half-Assed Dreams
Comic Book Artist
I’ve always wanted to be a writer.
No, actually that’s a lie. I wanted to be a comic book artist first. I started like most kids, by copying comics. I was pretty good at looking at things and drawing them. Really good, if I say so myself. But drawing from imagination? Not so much. It’s not that I couldn’t imagine cool things. I could. I just couldn’t get them to look on paper anything like they looked in my head.
So I practiced. I invented all sorts of superheroes. My favorite was the Aviator, who started out at am amalgamation of Speedy from the Teen Titans and Angel from the X-men. For a couple of years, he was just Speedy with wings.
Eventually I ditched the stupid bow & arrows for a sword, and the lame yellow Robin Hood hat for a bandit mask. Instead of having wings all the time like Angel, I made him a shape-shifter, who could change from a human into a white eagle, or anywhere in between. He could turn his hands into talons and grow wings at human size and shit. Much cooler.
But it wasn’t enough, so I gave him invisible force fields like the Invisible Girl.
I was drawing a picture of Avitator in 7th grade music class one day, when I noticed the kid sitting next to me was drawing superheroes, too. I didn’t know him, since I went to Davis Elementary, and now we were in Albert Leonard Jr. high, and he was obviously from another grade school. This was before the kids from different schools started to really mingle and blend, so he was still an outsider.
But let’s be frank. I was an outsider even with the kids I grew up with, and my love of comics over… say, baseball, was a big part of it. So I struck up a conversation. Turns out, the kid was to one day become the Picktarian. He liked baseball, too, but I forgave him that.
We started making comics together. His main character was Prism, a hero who could project beams of light in 7 colors (ROY G BIV, if you will), each with a different property. Aviator and Prism had their first team up soon after, and formed a group of superheroes called The Fellowship.
I know, I know, but we were 12.
The Fellowship were the arch-enemies of Malus Magisti, the supervillain group run by Aviator’s rogue twin brother Hawkwind, separated at birth, who had the same powers, only orange. The Pickytarian’s friend Kenny named him that. We later kicked Kenny off the creative team for wanting to put Conan in the group.
The Fellowship and Malus Magisti drew an endless supporting cast, as the Pickytarian and I were much more interested in creating new crappy characters than we were in writing and drawing actual comics, which turned out to be MUCH harder than we had thought.
The main problem was that we both wanted to be the artist, and neither of us could write for shit. We couldn’t really draw, either, but that didn’t stop us. We would take turns with blank sheets of paper in a cheap plastic book report binder, drawing panels of a comic we were more-or-less making up as we went along, and coloring them on the spot with colored pencils. I would draw a panel in latin class, then Picky would take it for like a week, and give it back with 2 more panels done. I’d take it for another week, and maybe knock out a page.
I still have that comic. I found it a minute ago when I dug up that pic of Avitaor. I’ve got all SORTS of gems from high school to scan and post.
Though we started at more or less the same place, Picky’s pencilling quickly outstripped mine. I was a star in my art classes, because I could draw from life or copy from photographs really well, and had a good sense of color, but comics put different demands on the artist, and it was clear I was losing the race for head-artist on the Fellowship.
But I was also frustrated at the haphazard progress of the book, because we had no plot, much less a script. So Picky and I cut a deal: He would pencil and I would ink. We would both create characters and discuss plots, and then I would write the script.
Sounds fair, right? Only there were two problems. I didn’t know how to ink and I didn’t know how to script.
So I tried to teach myself inking, but I sucked. There’s only so much you can learn from How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way. If I had had a decent art teacher to show me anything, I bet I could have improved greatly, but art class before high school is just baby sitting with finger painting. Even in HS, it’s still pretty shitty.
I also wrote scripts, only to have my IBM PC jr. overheat and lose them before I saved to the giant floppy disk (this was before they invented hard drives).
Picky and I also played creative games, passing loose-leaf paper in class and co-creating little comics. Sometimes, the game would be to do one complete panel about whatver we wanted, and pass it on without saying anything (we couldn’t talk in class). The other person would have to do the next panel and pass it back, and on and on. That resulted in some crazy shit. Somtimes we would create ridiculous plots to allow us to try drawing things we had never drawn before. Other times it was just talking heads.
We would also draw full comics with blank word balloons, and have the other person fill them in.
<–Click the thumbnail to see one such comic full sized. This was a not-so-subtle parody of my HS relationship with Meredith 1.0. I did the art and Picky the dialogue. I am proud to say we did the whole thing in one 45 minute Global Studies class.
Writer
Anyway, I started to like writing. I still aspired to be a comic book artist one day, and took a lot of advanced elective art classes in High School, but I started writing more and more. Short stories and poetry, in addition to comic book plots and “Marvel Universe” style chartacter sheets.
I wrote my first novel in high school. It was called “An Unlikely Champion”, and it was about a metalhead and a jock in high school who are kidnapped by aliens and forced to fight one another in a galactic gladiator contest with specimens from a dozen worlds.
They escape and have to find a way to get along with one another despite their differences in order to survive as the Challenger, their kidnapper, sends all the other specimens to hunt them down. Then they learn magic. It was sort of… The Breakfast Club meets Star Wars meets Dungeons and Dragons. And some “jokes” that I look back at and cringe over how insensitive I was.
Yeah, yeah. It’s stupid, I was in high school.
I tried to rewrite the book in college, but gave up after a while. My writing was improving, but the plot wasn’t. The Pickytarian illustrated it for an art project. I hope he got an A.
The real shift in my dreams came during college applications, when the Pickytarian majored in Art and I majored in English.
Applying to art school is HARD. You have to make a portfolio, which is easy, and it has to be GOOD, which is not-so-easy. I have no doubt that I could have done it, but I was lazy, and decided I would focus on writing and just take a bunch of elective art classes.
I discovered after getting to the University at Buffalo that it would not be so easy. If you weren’t in the Art Department (meaning you had your portfolio reviewed and accepted on application), you had a choice of 3 art classes, and they were always booked up solid LONG before underclassmen got anywhere near them.
I kicked myself for having been lazy, but it was too late. So writing it was. I don’t really regret it. I miss drawing, and sometimes I wonder how good I could have gotten had I really committed to training, but all in all I think it worked out for the best.
For a while, I wrote a lot of bad poetry and crappy short stories. In college I got most of my creativity out in Dungeons & Dragons, writing huge, elaborate plots for my Dungeon Mastering. I was reading a lot of Forgotten Realms fantasy formula novels, and wanted to hone my skills to eventually try my hand there.
Aldun Orion
After college, I went and got a job at a comic shop, which subsequently closed. I also started playing D&D regularly with the Pickytarian and the Suckytarian (AKA Matt). In one game, the Night Below, I created a character named Aldun Orion. I also had a character of the same name in An Unlikely Champion, but the similarity ended there.
Aldun Orion was a half-elven D&D ranger, who started at 1st level and went on through many adventures to achieve 9th level. His crowning acheivements were killing an immense two headed troll king with one backstab that did TRIPLE digit damage, and his killing of a black dragon with the aid of his companions Arkemn and Tasker Vex, and their pet monkey Haverford. Haverford didn’t make it out of that little adventure alive, alas…
I was never satisfied with standard D&D characters. Any character I played had to be special and unique. What made Aldun special was that instead of worshipping the gods of nature, Aldun worshipped the goddess of love. He was the only ranger in all the world to do so, and walked a thin line between his warrior’s path and his devotion to love.
He was the goddesses’ hand in dark places where her more peaceful worshippers dare not go. He was forever doing things he thought would damn his soul, his days filled with violence and killing, but he was doing them because they NEEDED doing. Because someone HAD to protect the gentle worshippers of love from those would would take advantage of their peaceful nature.
I loved that aspect of the character, and it was around that time in 1995 that I penned the first word that put Aldun on the center stage: “Free them, or die.”
In the scene that follows this threat, Aldun slaughters an entire village of goblins in order to free his friends, who are about to end up in a goblin cookpot. Against such numbers, he goes into a berserker rage that relies on lightning-fast murderous instinct, and in the process, when goblin women and children get in the way, they are cut to pieces as well.
When the deed is done, Aldun comes back to himself and has a nervous breakdown.
Most of Aldun’s companions were based on people I know, or D&D characters my friends had played. I wrote a few more chapters, and had notes for more, but then it fell to the side for a few years as life got in the way.
In 1998, my friend Myke was working on a novel of his own, and e-mailed me some chapters to read. I sent him the Aldun stuff, which was laced with great sex and violence, but very little substance. Myke and I began critiquing each other’s writing, and that got me back in the saddle. Really, he gets a lot of credit for everything I’ve written since, as it’s not impossible that I would have put writing aside like I did drawing. Or not. Who knows?
Anyway, I rewrote the Aldun scenes to edit out the D&D references and put him in his own world. The book grew in the telling, and became Heart’s Guard. In it, Aldun is forced to kill his own brother in order to save the woman he loves, and is so doing, nearly damns himself. As a whole, it reads like a clunky mess, but there is some stuff in there that I swear to this day is great.
Following the less-than-stellar completion of Heart’s Guard, I realized that you can’t make a book up as you go along and hope it will all tie together. You also can’t write a book with almost no dialogue. So I decided to table it and write the sequel, but this time, I would do it right.
In Snowcrest, Aldun returns to Snowcrest, the mountain city of his parents, to return the body of his half-brother to his mother, a powerful priestess of the goddess of love. While he’s there, he and his companions have to save the city from a group of powerful citizens who have discovered a powerful new magic that shifts the delicate balance of power in the region. They have to do all of this while working out numerous personal problems.
To date, Snowcrest is the best thing I’ve ever written. Every character has their own story arc, and each grows and develops over the course of the novel, their personal issues woven into the the overall plot with skill and grace, if I do say so myself.
After that book was finished, I read Shogun, and it blew my mind. That book is so goddamn good. It really raised the bar on anything I had ever written, and showed me how much you can accomplish with a novel.
Flush with excitement, I started another book, Crestwood, in which Aldun travels to the ancestral home of his father. The last true heir of a powerful house, he knows nothing of aelven culture, and must quickly adapt if he is to honor his family and name, while protecting himself and his human friends from the murderous intentions of the xenophibic aelves, who do not wish to see one of their noble houses sullied with an heir of impure blood.
I showed Snowcrest to an agent last year. He said it was very good, but that it was ultimately flawed (the second book in a series), and that he couldn’t represent it. He suggested I take my focus away from Aldun for a while.
So I have, working on The Painted Man, another project of mine that has gotten much more acceptance, despite the fact that I don’t love it the way I do the Aldun books. More on that in my next blog entry.
But Aldun is still out there, waiting. His sword, Heart’s Guard, is tattooed on my right arm, to remind me to never forget him. Crestwood will be finished. Heart’s Guard will be fixed. And it will be awesome.
P.S.
A little treat for the nerds out there:
Aldun Orion hem (R9):
Stats: Str: 19* (13) Dex: 17 Con: 15 Int: 13 Wis: 14 Cha: 15
Ac: 1 (Bracers, dex.) Hp: 64
Thac0: 9* (Backstab: 5*, x4 dmg)
Move Silently: 85% Hide in Shadows: 71%
Race: Infravision (60′), Less Sleep, Sword Bonus
Class: HiS, MS, Priest Spells, Sneak Attack, Two Weapon Style, Tracking, Weapon Specialization, Speak w/Animals, Bow Bonus, Animal Empathy
Phobia: Scarring (face) Trait: Allure
Spells: Two 1st level (Usually Cure Light Wounds and Command)
Spheres: All, Charm, Healing
Proficiencies: Healing, Herbalism, Singing, Dancing, Read/Write, Tracking, Common, Elvish, Religion, Riding, Tumbling, Etiquette, Bowyer/Fletcher, Swords broad group, *Katana, Bows tight group, Whip
Free cp: 3
Weapons:
Heart’s Guard – A nonmagical Katana of Sharpness +3, folded mithril. (Specialized, weapon of choice, Thac0: 4, Backstab: 0)
Bond-Cleaver – Dagger +1 (Thac0: 8, throw: 6)
Whip of Entanglement +1 (on command, magically entangles any successfully hit creature or object until commanded to let go). (Thac0: 8, pull/trip: 6)
Longbow (exceptionally well crafted, but confers no bonuses, Thaco:9)
Misc. Magic: Girdle of Giant Strength
*Due to Girdle of Giant Strength