I had grown up in South Lake Tahoe, and the closest they had to a comics shop was the local supermarket. So growing up, if I wanted to find any comics that didn’t come out that week, I would have to drive an hour and a half over the mountains to Reno, which had a mall with a Walden Books and a rack of graphic novels. I wasn’t even aware of comics shops until high school. I found one two hours over the mountain to Sacramento, Sunrise Blvd’s “Comics and Comix.” The selection wasn’t especially cutting-edge, but wow, I could find issues of Marvel Team-Up with thirty-five or forty cent covers, and they only cost two or three bucks!
Through high school, I had slowly weeded down my comics buying list to only Frank Miller and John Byrne books, and by college I’d given up on John Byrne. I tried to keep buying Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz, but neither of them put out very many books, so the next thing I knew, I wasn’t buying comics anymore. This lasted from roughly 1990 to 1995 (my leisurely five-year art degree from UC Davis).
After college, with no more homework, I was looking for things to do besides watch three movies a day, and I found myself popping into comics shops, pretty much for the first time in my young life. Now I lived in Sacramento, and I found a half dozen comics shops all around me. I had completely missed the ’90’s Image bubble, and now stores were all on the verge of going out of business, so everyone had comics for half off or twenty-five cents or ten cents. And I found myself going home with a stack of fifty or more comics every time I went to a comics shop, and going to comics shops once or twice a week. A lot of the books that were so hot during my childhood eighties weren’t hot any more, and it was fun to pick up these books I previously held such a reverence for but had never read or seen.
I went to a small local convention, the Sacramento Comic-Con, where I found a ton of back issues. I thought it was great, and I started going to this quarterly convention … quarterly. Then I heard about Wondercon down in the Bay Area, which is only an hour or so drive. I went there, and thought it was a pretty fun gimmick how all these big name comics artists were there, but it didn’t interest me much more than a fun glimpse at people’s badges to see if they were artists or writers whose names I recognized. I just kept buying comics, and not really spending more than cursory walk-by time with all the artists. Certainly not speaking with any of them.
There was a small comics shop, The Comic Box, next to where I worked, so I found myself popping in each week to see what books were coming out. I befriended the owner, Paul Martin, who had had a Punisher story published for Marvel, and had been paid for a Thor story that never saw print. He had a number of friends who began showing up in print as well, including Tomm Coker, Keith Aiken, Melvin Rubi, and later, C.P. Smith.
I’m ashamed to say, the first time I started thinking about writing comics is when Paul told me Tomm just happened to get put on an issue of Wolverine, and in the issue in question, Wolverine fought Magneto, and during the fight, on a full page splash, Magneto used his magnetic powers to wrench Wolverine’s metal skeleton out of his body. The result of this happenstance assigning of Tomm on this one issue was that Tomm received a royalty check that either bought or at least put a down payment on his new house.
But take heed, fans! This story was a fluke, and I’ve heard nothing like it since! THERE’S NO GODDAMN MONEY IN THIS INDUSTRY! Don’t be lured by the dreams of celebrity fame, or by the exciting superheroic tales of fortunes to come… like I did! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It’s a life of misery and despair!
HOWEVER. I heard this story, and thought…That would be fun to write some comics.
I was getting excited, at that time, by two things. Same as everyone else in 1995. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, and the X-Files. My first brainstorms for stories involved wanting to tell all kinds of horror stories, and have a host like Tales from the Crypt. But I quickly got more interested in the host than the stories I planned for him to tell. I wanted a quiet, intellectual host, and I began to imagine Tom Virgil, who was an atheist who had died and gone to a Christian afterlife. And the premise stemmed from a “Bible as Literature” class I took, when the Professor asked his students, “Think about your own beliefs, and ask yourself if there’s anything a person could say to you that could convince you to change your beliefs, or if there’s anything you could see. Most likely, even if you can come up with some outrageous proof, and then you saw it, and it disproved your beliefs, you would still find rationalities to ignore the evidence. Because we’ve all spent our lifetimes giving ourselves reasons to believe what we believe, and that’s just what we believe.”
So I pictured Tom Virgil being confronted with this Christian afterlife, with all the evidence right in front of his face. Standing in clouds. Angels with wings and halos. The Gates of Heaven before him. But he held his ground and refused to believe in a Christian afterlife. He just said, “Look, I’m an atheist. I just don’t believe in this stuff.”
And I came up with this entire universe of Heaven and Hell, and earth and Limbo, and all these denizens in all these places. Probably enough fodder for forty or fifty issues of comics, I naively imagined.
It’s obvious now, of course, looking back, that I was ripping off all the metaphysical ideas and story structures and universes and themes of Sandman.
Not quite ditching the horror-host scenario yet, I pictured an initial story arc of seven issues (twenty-four pages each), which would establish the character. Then I imagined follow-up issues going into different stories with different characters, each with their own story arcs, and with my Tom Virgil character as the “Tales From the Crypt”-style host. Again stealing from the Sandman, I imagined some story-arcs as six or eight issues, some only one. Some characters would come and go in later stories, appearing, disappearing, and returning over time.
I did a shitload of Christian research. I read and read and read about Christian beliefs. I started writing, and initially had no interest in drawing. I was too busy writing and researching to spend extra time drawing. I spoke with religious friends, acquaintances, and strangers, and made them read my script. I sent my script to a friend’s father, a Christian scholar, and got a couple letters of reply and encouragement from him. I spoke with a Christian theology professor at UC Davis. I made all my friends read the stories, and we all got into lengthy religious and artistic discussions. I wanted advice from everyone.
Each time I finished a chapter, I would send it to myself, certified mail. I was told this is a simplistic way of proving in court that you had this idea at a given date, and is cheaper than getting an official copyright.
I began jotting down all my pages and pages of notes early in 1997. I began writing the script for issue #1 on Tuesday March 11, 1997. I worked on it that Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday, and had a finished first draft on Monday March 17th, although I re-read and re-edited a lot afterward. I mailed myself the completed scripts for issue #2 April 14th and #3 April 21st. After that is anyone’s guess, because I stopped sending certified mail copies with the dates I had completed each chapter, and I never completed the big finale of number seven.
Three issues was a good bulk of writing for Wondercon, so I felt confident that I had a decent, smart, well-researched, well-written, and interesting story. And heck, all my friends said they thought it was smart, well-researched, well-written, and interesting. It was time to go to the comics convention and DC and shop my stories.