December 2006
Because I have yet to find a format for anything I do that is catching on, I continue to try new things.
I’ve tried a 32-page comics series, which was cancelled after three issues (but which the distributor allowed me to publish through the story’s completion, a giant-sized issue five). I tried a humongous treasury-sized format. I tried a trade paperback. I tried sixteen-page formats. I tried writing a blog. I tried signing up at myspace.
So a natural next thing to try was a web comic.
I had envisioned a “Dick Hammer: The Dailies” comic book some time ago, although I hadn’t ever conceived an actual story for it. All I knew was that I wanted to draw it in a Chester Gould style. I owned one hardcover volume of Tracy reprints, spanning from the first strip and into the 1950’s. While in Portland for Stumptown, I found a second hardcover volume of just the 1930’s at Powell’s Books. I planned for these to be research material, and to reference them similarly to how I reference Kirby’s work for the Doris Dangers.
I also thought it might blend to reference DC’s Golden Age Flash Comics, which was an era before there were supervillains every issue, because the writers hadn’t come up with them yet, so the superheroes just fought gangsters with tommyguns. In a few more years, all these same superheroes would begin fighting Nazis or the Japanese, or Hitler himself or Stalin or Mussolini or whatever Red Enemy was hot in the news.
I had one idea for a story element, which came to me years ago, after watching “Out of the Past” with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. In the film, Kirk Douglas described how he had been shot by his girlfriend and nearly killed, and now that he’d recovered, he wanted private detective Robert Mitchum to find his girl, who he claimed he still loved. I found this idea hilarious, and decided I wanted to reproduce it, but with each time the girl was brought back, continuing to make attempts on his life and disappearing again, and the masochistic, love-torn guy continuing to love her and repeatedly re-hire the detective to find her and bring her back, again and again.
But that’s not enough to make a full-bodied story off of, so I let the project sit for a while.
The actual story idea came to me after watching the film “Somewhere in the Night”. And when I say “came to me,” what I mean is, I found the story I wanted to steal from to make my own story.
The more I brainstormed, the more elements I wanted to throw in, and the more complicated it all became. It had to be an amnesia story. Then I realized it needed two separate cases of amnesia. I should have Rob Oder and Tabloia Weekly Magazine. I wanted my characters, The Dirty Stinking No-Good Back-Stabbing Rats, who I created some time ago and who I planned to feature in a different Dick Hammer story that hadn’t come about yet. I wanted a politician who’s gone missing. Could I fit The Lump’s private detective, Lance DeLaney into the plot?
I always planned to use a daily comic-strip format. That was the fun of the whole story. But now I was realizing that this would be the perfect format for a web comic as well. I could post it as a comic strip online, and then collect it when it was finished. And that way, I will still be available to the public, even though I’d be between projects, with lag time while I worked on things.
At the San Diego Comic-Con 2006, on a whim, I sat down on my hotel bed with my laptop one morning and scripted the first five strips of the story.
Coming back from the trip, I grabbed out some paper and tried to sketch out a chart of all the different plotlines. I’ve got a few of these attempts on paper dated 7/3/06 and 7/24/06. But they would quickly fill up with scribbled notes and I’d run out of space to continue writing.
On October 4th, 2006, I opened a new file on my computer, and began typing all the various story elements I wanted to include. If I felt inspired enough by a particular scene, I might jot down some of the scripted text. The story was always on my mind, I was always trying to find ways to make it all work somehow. On evenings walking the dog with my wife, I would try to explain the story to her, and she would shake her head at how confusing it all was.
But it was so complicated, some things still weren’t lining up right. I had the elements I wanted, but now I had to boil them backwards to figure out a way that they could all work in one story. I began simplifying, and that seemed to work out most of the problems.
Finally, I just decided I knew enough general stuff about what was going to happen and what needed to happen, that I went to the very beginning and began scripting. Once I’d scripted about twenty-five entries, I began to draw it.