Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Where is my Mind?"
There's this fairly obscure comic book character called The Flaming Carrot. He's this guy who wears a rubber carrot mask, and at the top of the carrot it's, well, flaming. His major claim to mainstream fame? He was a founding member of The Mysterymen, which was adapted into the critical and commercial smash hit Mysterymen with Ben Stiller.
So yeah. The Flaming Carrot sucks.
I know this, because every once in a while, I'll be in a comic book store desperate to just find something to buy, and when I'm disappointed to discover they don't have the Flash back issues I want, I stumble upon Flaming Carrot, and say "What the hell. I'll give it another try." Then I take it home and get horribly disappointed.
I mean, all this comic is is this guy with this Flaming Carrot mask walking around, beating people up, and spouting non-sequiturs... and not even in a funny Milk and Cheese sort of way. It sucks!
The only reason I keep falling for this is that I'm astounded by the guy's secret origin. He wasn't rocketed from a dying planet to land on earth where our orange carrots give him superhuman strength... He wasn't bitten by a radioactive carrot... His parents weren't murdered before his eyes as a small child, traumatizing him to become a borderline sociopath who dresses up like a carrot because criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot...
No. Apparantly, the story with this guy is that "having read 5,000 comics in a single sitting to win a bet... this poor man suffered brain damage and appeared directly thereafter as -- THE FLAMING CARROT!"
How fascinating. How bizarre. (How utterly unreadable.)
I only mention all of this because I've just finished rereading every issue of Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate Marvel Team-Up (as well as the not-to-be ignored Ultimate Spider-Man Super Special). And while I don't think it's had too profound an effect upon my personage... you never know.
"Free Parking"
I had my first day at my new job today. I'm afraid it doesn't make for nearly as interesting reading as ice cream truck training day (the horror... the horror...)
I'll just say this:
Seven dollars to park at an amusement park that's about to gouge you 36 bucks to get in? Wow. Whoever came up with that had balls of freakin' titanium reinforced steel... A car caught fire today in the parking lot. It was the second one in as many days. I wonder if there's a car arsonist running loose. Is that the term? Car arsonist? Or would it be carsonist? ... Guys are idiots... This is my first job where I've ever had to handle a register. It was easy. I think I'm ready for retail. As long as every customer buys seven dollars worth of merchandise exactly, I've got it covered... Putting the deaf girl in the one booth with a phone so that everytime it rang she didn't notice was an interesting choice.
But hey. At least with a job like this, I'm guaranteed to meet fast and loose women. Woo-hoo!
The uniform makes me look like a dork. Especially the hat. Have you ever seen me wear a hat? No. There's a good reason for that. Of course, looking like a dork doesn't bother me so much considering, you know, I am a dork.
"Caveat"
My Crazed Former Roommate (not to be confused with Roommate Number Two, Brent Jones, Part Two; or My Beloved Tin-Tin) gave me a typewriter for my birthday. Don't tell him I told you this, but I will always be intensely jealous of My Crazed Former Roommate's ability to pick out a good gift. I'm horrible at it. I'm a "Here's a gift certificate," "Here's a stick figure story I wrote to feed my massive ego, but maybe you'll like it too," or "Well just pick something out, Jeffries!" type of guy.
Well anyway, he said that he wanted the first thing I type to be a list of five things I want to accomplish this year. And isn't that just like Prewitt? What type of bastard is always issuing ultimata to get you to get off your ass and actually do something with your life? I swear to god, it sounds like something a Texan would do.
So anyway, ten days later, I still haven't typed up this list, because any time I think about it, I always come up with joke goals like "Get spider-powers," or "House train Jones," or "Spend a hundred dollars in one trip to Rock Bottom Comics."
(Actually, I kind of mean the last one.)
Seriously, though. One of my goals is to get paid for writing something this year. So I spent my afternoon run brainstorming and this is what I came up with. Tell me what you think...
I must warn you though, in all honesty, my feeble attempts at the creative process will probably just bore or disgust you. So for those of you with more common sense than the rest, go ahead and stop reading. I'll see you next time.
And for all you poor, stupid bastards... brace for the calvacade of crap...
"Enter the Intern"
Short story about a guy who spends a summer interning at Marvel Comics, and it's once he's there that he finally realizes that he's wasting his life obsessing over comics. The challenge here is to write the story in such a manner that you don't have to be a comic geek (read "pathetic loser") to understand it, the same way you don't have to be a music geek (read "pretentious asshole") to enjoy High Fidelity, or you don't have to be a sports nut (read "useless jock or wannabe jock with deluded dreams of glory") to enjoy Sportsnight.
Also must hope this isn't just me thinking too much about that last Dawson's Creek episode where Joey says "You're a writer Dawson... That means you get to live you life over again." Though really, this is probably just a reworking of...
"The Bullpen"
Television show I've been dreaming of for a year that I always described as The West Wing if it were set in Marvel Comics instead of the White House. The more I think about it, though, the more it seems like it'd be closer to Sportsnight. I'm seeing Jack Black as crazed editor-in-chief Joe Quesada and a lot of guest spots by people like Kevin Smith and Stan Lee as themselves. Oh... this show would have heart to spare. Of course, the challenge is to write the show in such a manner you don't have to be a comic geek to...
"Sticky Situations"
The long clamored for (well, Jeffries suggested it...) L. F. Clark stick-figure Maneater comic strip featuring "all-new" characters Sticky Stickington III and Hobo, the Often Drunk and Disgruntled Clown Who Hasn't Left the Stickington Household in the Ten Years Since Sticky's Disasterous Eighth Birthday Party. This comic strip would beg the question: Can a nebbish nubian naysayer with no artistic talent to speak of make a funny in three panels that doesn't consist of an inside joke?
"Prowler"
This is a Marvel Comics proposal I came up with last year that I remember Prewitt poo-pooing something fierce. He was probably right. The plot points I came up with may have been somewhat out there, but it's the character that matters. The Prowler's this black geek named Hobie Brown who became a one-time Spider-Man villain to get some money so he could impress this girl, who his entire life seems to revolve around. I could write this guy with my eyes closed... and not just because I know how to touch type either.
The idea was to kill off the girl (who at this point in Marvel continuity has become his wife) in a seemingly arbitrary way that Hobie's convinced was the result of some sinister conspiracy involving a mission he did recently for S.H.I.E.L.D., the big honking intelligence agency. The more Prowler investigates the death, however, the more he finds out that it just kind of happened.
You tear his very reason for living out of his life for no reason, and then you see where he goes from there.
Oh, and I wanted the Gwen Stacy clone to show up.
"Common Man: Featuring Foggy Nelson"
Marvel now has this new imprint called Epic that's accepting random submissions from the legion of geeks out there who want to work for comics. Epic's kind of looking for comic book stories that are off the beaten path, and maybe not so superhero focused. In that vein, I retooled an old idea I had about a series that just follows a normal guy through his day to day life in the Marvel Universe, and instead of making it just some random guy, I decided to make it Daredevil's friend and law partner, Foggy Nelson.
The first issue starts off with Foggy jogging in a desperate attempt to lose some weight because he's tired of being the pear-shaped oaf next to Matt Murdock, carrot-top adonis. (Plus, I figured if I wrote some great running scenes, I could use it as a spring board to pitch a Flash story to DC entitled "Flash in the Pan," in which the Flash gets injured on a mission with the JLA, takes a month off to recover, and in that time gets hooked on watching the Food Network. He balloons up to 375 pounds. That's it.)
So after the run, Foggy learns that Matt's taken a day off of work to go track down lame, second-tier Spider-Man villain, Electro, leaving Foggy on his own in a mutant rights case involving Osborn Chemicals that has him going up against the law firm of his estranged mother, Rosalind Sharpe, and this hot shot young attorney that Rosalinde seems to consider the son she never had, which bums Foggy out, because he's the son she did have. Plus, this hotshot's client is none other than Liz Allen, Foggy's old girlfriend that dumped him during Kevin Smith's "Guardian Devil" story in Daredevil after he cheated on her (Smith, you hack).
Still with me? No? Who cares.
Anyway, things beccome complicated when Foggy learns that his mom doesn't just admire this hotshot, she's schtupping him, too. He's all icked out and feeling insecure about his whole life, and ends up at this diner where he starts talking to this guy who also feels insecure and inadequate. They both resolve to take charge of there lives and really make a go of things. It's at this point that Foggy's new friend jumps up and reveals himself to be none other than lame, second-tier Spider-Man villain, Electro, and with a new lease on life, he proceeds to rob the diner, endangering the lives of everyone present, and forcing Foggy into an unlikely confrontation to try to help people that sees him fairly severely electrocuted before Daredevil shows up and puts the cabosh on the baddy.
Foggy wakes up in the hospital, starts to put his life into perspective, and boom. End of first issue.
I'm not really sure where to go from there... But I really kind of see Foggy going back to his hometown in Ohio where he runs into this girl he had a crush on in highschool but never had the guts to talk to, and on a whim, he buys the local bowling alley and sets up a legal practice there and hilarity just ensues.
Or maybe not.
Oh, and I want the Gwen Stacy clone to show up.
"ESU"
This is another Epic proposal, this one taking place at Empire State University, Peter Parker's college alma mater. The series would focus on a group of college students living in a dorm and the weird type of stuff that happens to them. Imagine if there was an issue of Astro City about what college is like in a city filled with superheros. It's Undeclared meets Undergrads meets Felicity in the Marvel Universe. There's the issue where everyone's studying for Finals while one of those company-wide crossover events is going on, and the whole city's in an end-of-the-world panic. The issue where the campus Mutant Rights Association protest a lecture by Charles Xavier for complex political reasons. And so on and so on...
And imagine the classes they could take! Stuff like: Skrull Military Strategy from the Kree-Skrull war to present, or Advanced Temporal Mechanics: An Examination of Victor Van Doom's Time Platform.
Oh, and I'd import as many worthwhile ideas as I can from the Little Black Duck. I kind of like the idea of "Time Quack" repackaged as a storyline called "Tempus Fuggit".
"What If Steve Rogers had been a Japanese Warrior and the Red Skull was a Shapeshifting Master of Darkness, and When Rogers Stepped Forth to Oppose Him, the Red Skull Tore Open a Portal in Time and Flung the Foolish Samurai into the Future Where the Red Skull's Evil is Law, but now Rogers Seeks to Return to the Past and Undo the Future that is The Red Skull?"
Okay. This one's actually just a rip off of Samurai Jack. But why is he "Samurai" Jack? He doesn't seem to have a master/mentor/sensei... Shouldn't the show be Ronin Jack?
"Jesus Shaves"
Possible (graphic) novel in which the Messiah returns to earth to open the seven seals and bring on the Apocalypse, but the death of an elderly woman that gave him a place to stay leaves him reluctant to end the world before he's had the chance to give it one last look. Christ's wanderings take him all over, and he encounters a bevy of spiritual icons in his travels... He meets Anansi in Africa... the Buddha in Tibet... Apollo in Greece...
During all of this, Death and the Devil plague his every step, and God keeps popping up to check on His wayward son, and all the while, slowly but surely, the meaning of life is revealed.
Maybe all the Ultimate Spidey messed me up after all...
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Where is my Mind?"
There's this fairly obscure comic book character called The Flaming Carrot. He's this guy who wears a rubber carrot mask, and at the top of the carrot it's, well, flaming. His major claim to mainstream fame? He was a founding member of The Mysterymen, which was adapted into the critical and commercial smash hit Mysterymen with Ben Stiller.
So yeah. The Flaming Carrot sucks.
I know this, because every once in a while, I'll be in a comic book store desperate to just find something to buy, and when I'm disappointed to discover they don't have the Flash back issues I want, I stumble upon Flaming Carrot, and say "What the hell. I'll give it another try." Then I take it home and get horribly disappointed.
I mean, all this comic is is this guy with this Flaming Carrot mask walking around, beating people up, and spouting non-sequiturs... and not even in a funny Milk and Cheese sort of way. It sucks!
The only reason I keep falling for this is that I'm astounded by the guy's secret origin. He wasn't rocketed from a dying planet to land on earth where our orange carrots give him superhuman strength... He wasn't bitten by a radioactive carrot... His parents weren't murdered before his eyes as a small child, traumatizing him to become a borderline sociopath who dresses up like a carrot because criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot...
No. Apparantly, the story with this guy is that "having read 5,000 comics in a single sitting to win a bet... this poor man suffered brain damage and appeared directly thereafter as -- THE FLAMING CARROT!"
How fascinating. How bizarre. (How utterly unreadable.)
I only mention all of this because I've just finished rereading every issue of Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate Marvel Team-Up (as well as the not-to-be ignored Ultimate Spider-Man Super Special). And while I don't think it's had too profound an effect upon my personage... you never know.
"Free Parking"
I had my first day at my new job today. I'm afraid it doesn't make for nearly as interesting reading as ice cream truck training day (the horror... the horror...)
I'll just say this:
Seven dollars to park at an amusement park that's about to gouge you 36 bucks to get in? Wow. Whoever came up with that had balls of freakin' titanium reinforced steel... A car caught fire today in the parking lot. It was the second one in as many days. I wonder if there's a car arsonist running loose. Is that the term? Car arsonist? Or would it be carsonist? ... Guys are idiots... This is my first job where I've ever had to handle a register. It was easy. I think I'm ready for retail. As long as every customer buys seven dollars worth of merchandise exactly, I've got it covered... Putting the deaf girl in the one booth with a phone so that everytime it rang she didn't notice was an interesting choice.
But hey. At least with a job like this, I'm guaranteed to meet fast and loose women. Woo-hoo!
The uniform makes me look like a dork. Especially the hat. Have you ever seen me wear a hat? No. There's a good reason for that. Of course, looking like a dork doesn't bother me so much considering, you know, I am a dork.
"Caveat"
My Crazed Former Roommate (not to be confused with Roommate Number Two, Brent Jones, Part Two; or My Beloved Tin-Tin) gave me a typewriter for my birthday. Don't tell him I told you this, but I will always be intensely jealous of My Crazed Former Roommate's ability to pick out a good gift. I'm horrible at it. I'm a "Here's a gift certificate," "Here's a stick figure story I wrote to feed my massive ego, but maybe you'll like it too," or "Well just pick something out, Jeffries!" type of guy.
Well anyway, he said that he wanted the first thing I type to be a list of five things I want to accomplish this year. And isn't that just like Prewitt? What type of bastard is always issuing ultimata to get you to get off your ass and actually do something with your life? I swear to god, it sounds like something a Texan would do.
So anyway, ten days later, I still haven't typed up this list, because any time I think about it, I always come up with joke goals like "Get spider-powers," or "House train Jones," or "Spend a hundred dollars in one trip to Rock Bottom Comics."
(Actually, I kind of mean the last one.)
Seriously, though. One of my goals is to get paid for writing something this year. So I spent my afternoon run brainstorming and this is what I came up with. Tell me what you think...
I must warn you though, in all honesty, my feeble attempts at the creative process will probably just bore or disgust you. So for those of you with more common sense than the rest, go ahead and stop reading. I'll see you next time.
And for all you poor, stupid bastards... brace for the calvacade of crap...
"Enter the Intern"
Short story about a guy who spends a summer interning at Marvel Comics, and it's once he's there that he finally realizes that he's wasting his life obsessing over comics. The challenge here is to write the story in such a manner that you don't have to be a comic geek (read "pathetic loser") to understand it, the same way you don't have to be a music geek (read "pretentious asshole") to enjoy High Fidelity, or you don't have to be a sports nut (read "useless jock or wannabe jock with deluded dreams of glory") to enjoy Sportsnight.
Also must hope this isn't just me thinking too much about that last Dawson's Creek episode where Joey says "You're a writer Dawson... That means you get to live you life over again." Though really, this is probably just a reworking of...
"The Bullpen"
Television show I've been dreaming of for a year that I always described as The West Wing if it were set in Marvel Comics instead of the White House. The more I think about it, though, the more it seems like it'd be closer to Sportsnight. I'm seeing Jack Black as crazed editor-in-chief Joe Quesada and a lot of guest spots by people like Kevin Smith and Stan Lee as themselves. Oh... this show would have heart to spare. Of course, the challenge is to write the show in such a manner you don't have to be a comic geek to...
"Sticky Situations"
The long clamored for (well, Jeffries suggested it...) L. F. Clark stick-figure Maneater comic strip featuring "all-new" characters Sticky Stickington III and Hobo, the Often Drunk and Disgruntled Clown Who Hasn't Left the Stickington Household in the Ten Years Since Sticky's Disasterous Eighth Birthday Party. This comic strip would beg the question: Can a nebbish nubian naysayer with no artistic talent to speak of make a funny in three panels that doesn't consist of an inside joke?
"Prowler"
This is a Marvel Comics proposal I came up with last year that I remember Prewitt poo-pooing something fierce. He was probably right. The plot points I came up with may have been somewhat out there, but it's the character that matters. The Prowler's this black geek named Hobie Brown who became a one-time Spider-Man villain to get some money so he could impress this girl, who his entire life seems to revolve around. I could write this guy with my eyes closed... and not just because I know how to touch type either.
The idea was to kill off the girl (who at this point in Marvel continuity has become his wife) in a seemingly arbitrary way that Hobie's convinced was the result of some sinister conspiracy involving a mission he did recently for S.H.I.E.L.D., the big honking intelligence agency. The more Prowler investigates the death, however, the more he finds out that it just kind of happened.
You tear his very reason for living out of his life for no reason, and then you see where he goes from there.
Oh, and I wanted the Gwen Stacy clone to show up.
"Common Man: Featuring Foggy Nelson"
Marvel now has this new imprint called Epic that's accepting random submissions from the legion of geeks out there who want to work for comics. Epic's kind of looking for comic book stories that are off the beaten path, and maybe not so superhero focused. In that vein, I retooled an old idea I had about a series that just follows a normal guy through his day to day life in the Marvel Universe, and instead of making it just some random guy, I decided to make it Daredevil's friend and law partner, Foggy Nelson.
The first issue starts off with Foggy jogging in a desperate attempt to lose some weight because he's tired of being the pear-shaped oaf next to Matt Murdock, carrot-top adonis. (Plus, I figured if I wrote some great running scenes, I could use it as a spring board to pitch a Flash story to DC entitled "Flash in the Pan," in which the Flash gets injured on a mission with the JLA, takes a month off to recover, and in that time gets hooked on watching the Food Network. He balloons up to 375 pounds. That's it.)
So after the run, Foggy learns that Matt's taken a day off of work to go track down lame, second-tier Spider-Man villain, Electro, leaving Foggy on his own in a mutant rights case involving Osborn Chemicals that has him going up against the law firm of his estranged mother, Rosalind Sharpe, and this hot shot young attorney that Rosalinde seems to consider the son she never had, which bums Foggy out, because he's the son she did have. Plus, this hotshot's client is none other than Liz Allen, Foggy's old girlfriend that dumped him during Kevin Smith's "Guardian Devil" story in Daredevil after he cheated on her (Smith, you hack).
Still with me? No? Who cares.
Anyway, things beccome complicated when Foggy learns that his mom doesn't just admire this hotshot, she's schtupping him, too. He's all icked out and feeling insecure about his whole life, and ends up at this diner where he starts talking to this guy who also feels insecure and inadequate. They both resolve to take charge of there lives and really make a go of things. It's at this point that Foggy's new friend jumps up and reveals himself to be none other than lame, second-tier Spider-Man villain, Electro, and with a new lease on life, he proceeds to rob the diner, endangering the lives of everyone present, and forcing Foggy into an unlikely confrontation to try to help people that sees him fairly severely electrocuted before Daredevil shows up and puts the cabosh on the baddy.
Foggy wakes up in the hospital, starts to put his life into perspective, and boom. End of first issue.
I'm not really sure where to go from there... But I really kind of see Foggy going back to his hometown in Ohio where he runs into this girl he had a crush on in highschool but never had the guts to talk to, and on a whim, he buys the local bowling alley and sets up a legal practice there and hilarity just ensues.
Or maybe not.
Oh, and I want the Gwen Stacy clone to show up.
"ESU"
This is another Epic proposal, this one taking place at Empire State University, Peter Parker's college alma mater. The series would focus on a group of college students living in a dorm and the weird type of stuff that happens to them. Imagine if there was an issue of Astro City about what college is like in a city filled with superheros. It's Undeclared meets Undergrads meets Felicity in the Marvel Universe. There's the issue where everyone's studying for Finals while one of those company-wide crossover events is going on, and the whole city's in an end-of-the-world panic. The issue where the campus Mutant Rights Association protest a lecture by Charles Xavier for complex political reasons. And so on and so on...
And imagine the classes they could take! Stuff like: Skrull Military Strategy from the Kree-Skrull war to present, or Advanced Temporal Mechanics: An Examination of Victor Van Doom's Time Platform.
Oh, and I'd import as many worthwhile ideas as I can from the Little Black Duck. I kind of like the idea of "Time Quack" repackaged as a storyline called "Tempus Fuggit".
"What If Steve Rogers had been a Japanese Warrior and the Red Skull was a Shapeshifting Master of Darkness, and When Rogers Stepped Forth to Oppose Him, the Red Skull Tore Open a Portal in Time and Flung the Foolish Samurai into the Future Where the Red Skull's Evil is Law, but now Rogers Seeks to Return to the Past and Undo the Future that is The Red Skull?"
Okay. This one's actually just a rip off of Samurai Jack. But why is he "Samurai" Jack? He doesn't seem to have a master/mentor/sensei... Shouldn't the show be Ronin Jack?
"Jesus Shaves"
Possible (graphic) novel in which the Messiah returns to earth to open the seven seals and bring on the Apocalypse, but the death of an elderly woman that gave him a place to stay leaves him reluctant to end the world before he's had the chance to give it one last look. Christ's wanderings take him all over, and he encounters a bevy of spiritual icons in his travels... He meets Anansi in Africa... the Buddha in Tibet... Apollo in Greece...
During all of this, Death and the Devil plague his every step, and God keeps popping up to check on His wayward son, and all the while, slowly but surely, the meaning of life is revealed.
Maybe all the Ultimate Spidey messed me up after all...
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