My Comic Book Journey

I was last talking about the comic book Preacher, and the impact it had on my life. It was a major impact. It literally altered the course of my life, and that change in direction is still being felt to this day, more than 20 years later.

When I first started reading Preacher, it opened up a huge world for me – a world that showed me that comics were not just superheroes. Of course I already knew that, but I’d really only read superhero comics up to that point (I mentioned reading nothing but Image books for a time.) But Preacher, man, this was something else – sophisticated, funny, bleak, scary and smart as all hell. After reading the first 6-7 issues, and seeing just what a comic was capable of, the kind of story you could tell in a comic book, everything changed for me.

Up to that point I had badly wanted to draw comics. I spent all my free time drawing, trying to teach myself to ink using actual India ink and a nib and a brush, I practiced different angles and different styles. I worked hard to teach myself how to draw comics. And after reading Preacher, I realized a few things. First, I realized that I didn’t really have the patience to draw comics. Spend 8 hours on one page? No thanks. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have that kind of patience. I also realized then that I didn’t have the technical skill to draw comics. I could picture things in my head, but I couldn’t make those things appear on the page.

My last and final realization was that I wanted to WRITE. I wanted to write comic books. It became the central thing in my life, my desire to create and write my own comics books. I’d always written my own stories to draw, and now I shifted all my focus to the writing side, teaching myself how to script a comic, how to direct panel flow, how to keep each panel to a single action (which is sometimes harder than you would think), how to think visually and how to structure a sequence of pages.

And it changed my life. I wrote. All the time, I wrote, I created scenes, I created characters, I wrote dialogue and then spoke it out loud to hear how corny it was, I plotted out massive, 60-issue arcs of my own creations, created literally hundreds of characters. And I studied how comics were put together. It got to the point where, for a while, I didn’t even really enjoy reading comics because all I did was dissect them to see how they had been put together.

I took an office job when I was twenty-four-ish? Somewhere around there. I’d always worked in warehouses and things like that, so this was a major change of pace, because here I was, sitting at a computer for most of the day, with a lot of downtime. So I started writing on that company computer, and I wrote my very first script, a superhero comic called Antihero (which I am still working to get made as of this writing). It was hard. All the studying in the world meant nothing when I sat down to write. I had to draw it all out with stick figures to get the angles and the flow down.

Eventually, I learned how to hold all of those visuals in my head, and I began to formulate my own script style, one that resembled most other comic book scripts I’d seen but was very distinctly (I guess) mine. The biggest advice I got at that point was from a friend, a freelance editor named Steven Forbes, who told me, “Page breaks in the script where there is a page break in the story”. It’s simple enough advice but wasn’t something I had ever thought of.

I kept writing, kept developing news ideas, kept struggling to write stuff that made sense. Everything I wrote in that time was highly influenced by the big Vertigo Comics books of the time – Preacher, Transmetropolitan, Y the Last Man. Everything was gigantic high concepts and sprawling, massive storylines. Stuff that was NEVER going to get made (I knew that even then, I was under no illusions.)

I remember, very clearly, when my first real, viable idea came to me. I was driving on the highway in my hometown of Brampton, Ontario (just outside Toronto), and for about two minutes, I was the only car on the stretch of road I was on. That might not sound strange, but imagine driving on a normally busy highway and there is no one else on the road with you for a few minutes. Immediately, my brain started to concoct a story – why was I on the road by myself? Where were all the other cars? Where were all the other people?

I went home that day and jotted down some notes about this idea, because I didn’t want to forget it. The idea nagged at me over the next few weeks until I sat down and worked out what had happened, why there was only a single car on the road – it was because everyone else was dead and gone. The superheroes had gone mad and killed them all. This idea became my first published work, a graphic novel called LONG GONE, published by UK-based publisher Markosia.

I’d changed day jobs by then, was working in a call centre doing customer service, and I kept writing, on my lunch breaks, between calls, whenever I could. I even used to stay late to write. It was here that I wrote my first miniseries, a 4-issue sci-fi comic called GHOST LINES. It was at this job that I also wrote the first issues of what would become my superhero spoof/love letter BREAKNECK, and the entire twisted sci-fi story that would eventually be known as SCUM OF THE EARTH. I was prodigious during this time, writing all the time, tons of scripts, full 4 and 5-issue miniseries. All stupidly saved on my work computer…

Fast forward to January 2012, and I, along with everyone in my department, got let go in a single swoop. Hand in your pass, get out of the building. I barely had time to clean off my desk, let alone do anything else. It wasn’t until a few days later, and the shock of losing my job wore off, that I realized what I’d left behind. This was a little before things like “the cloud” became popular. I’d lost a ton of work.

But I was still making comics – all of the books I mentioned were taking shape, Ghost Lines with my perennial partner-in-comics crime Carl Yonder, Breakneck with dynamic artist James Boulton, and Scum of the Earth with one-man-comics-gang Rob Croonenborghs.

I eventually did start getting work published. I signed my first deal, to publish Long Gone, and after having to change artists, got to work on that. The publishing deal for Breakneck came along not long after, and due to the speed of James Boulton’s art, it became the very first thing I’d written to hit the comic book store shelves.

I had some good years writing and getting work published, establishing relationships with artists and editors and publishers in the indie comics scene. It was THEN that I started doing more anthologies, rather than the other way around. Most guys I knew in the indie scene started out doing anthology work and then moving on to longer-form stuff. I went in the opposite direction. I did a ton of anthology stuff over the course of 2-3 years, getting stories into as many collections as I could. I had stories in multiple volumes of the FUBAR series, the Out of the Blue series, the revamped Caliber Presents anthologies, and a short in a book called Imaginary Drugs that was published by IDW (which remained my biggest published credit to that point.)

I kept writing, kept connecting with artists, kept making new things. I got paid here and there to write comics for others, but mostly, everything I worked on was mine (shared with the artist, of course). Brand new ideas, brand new stuff. At my peak, I was writing almost 15 different stories at one time.

Then something happened that really soured me on writing comics and almost made me want to quit altogether.