Uma... Oprah. Oprah... Beef.
- Joe Kelly, "New Year's Evolutions" or "How To Get Ahead In Business Without Really Trying"
"As Usual" or "Today's Hidden Subtext Includes..."
1) Haps to The Bride's birthday!
2) The soundtrack to The Adventures of Pete and Pete.
3) The artistic stylings of Mike Wieringo.
4) Deadpool dialogue from years ago.
"Ashamed of the Story I Told" or "Write On and Other Bad Puns"
I've been reading through the old archive in my ongoing attempt to feel my way through the darkened dorm room of my soul, and I've noticed something: I write some looooooong ass entries. (Who knew I could go on and on about the absolute nothing of my life?) This little realization had me asking myself whether I should go easier on you guys and pare down my entries.
I never even properly answered myself before a week went by and I noticed that my entries seemed to be getting shorter and shorter (but then again, after "The Death of the Little Black Duck," everything seems brief.)
Here's the thing though: While entertaining the literate masses is indeed my ultimate goal, when it comes to this blog, the idea is to maintain a vast diary from which I can constantly cull writing material for years to come. (It's an idea that works! I can't tell you how many of my Maneater columns are roughly reworked blog entries I slapped together on some desperate, idle Tuesday.) So strap in bunky, 'cause this is more about me than you, and the sooner you get that through your head, the happier we'll all be... or at least that's what I thought until Blogger went funky on me.
You see, I've written all of this before. Not only have I written all this, but I've also written what I felt was a delightful essay detailing my proposal for a new ongoing series featuring Hobie Brown. It was sad, and funny, and honest and really really long and now it's gone. I tried to post it as a draft and something went horribly horribly wrong and it's lost to the vagaries of fate and the goddamn internet.
And this all happened after I wrote out this whole diatribe about how my blog entries will go on for days and days if I see fit and there ain't a damn thing anybody can do to stop me. Do you think it was a sign? I think it was a sign. It was definitely three hours of my life down the tube...
"She is Staggering" or "Shakedown at the House of Concretes"
Back in the salad days of my sophomore year, Caleb made me this shirt with The Thing on it. I love this shirt. Love it. I get a lot of comments about it, or at least far more than you expect. Usually what happens is, someone says "Hey, you've got the Thing on your shirt," and I get all confused and say "What thing?" 'til I calm down and figure it out. (This can take upwards of thirty minutes sometimes.)
So anyway, I was wearing this shirt yesterday when Kate and I went to Shakey's -- which I guess is just called Shake's now, but come on, that's dumb. We're standing in line, when this moderately attractive girl ahead of us turns to me and says, "Nice shirt. Great comic."
Now I don't want you to be under the impression that I wake up every morning thinking to myself "Maybe this is the day when finally, I run into a cute girl who reads comics," but that's just a bullshit pride thing and we all know it.
So this girl says this, and fortunately, I cobble together the brain capacity to understand that she's indeed referring to the graphic on my shirt and not a booger or huge freakin' spider or something, and say "Thanks" in a tone that I felt would communicate my heart-felt appreciation for her appreciation not just of my attire, but graphic literature as a medium, because this girl didn't just say "Nice shirt." She added "Great comic."
I say "Thanks," but I immediately get the feeling that more is required of me -- maybe it had something to do with the way Jeffries was glaring at me. I need to say something. Strike up a conversation perhaps. Endeavor to show myself as another pleasant member of society. But what do I say?
Do I say, "You read Fantastic Four? Me, too, but that's a pretty recent thing. I've only really been reading Waid's run, and I missed, like three issues of "Authoritative Action," but I was reading his proposal in the Imaginauts trade at Borders a few months back, and he wrote this great bit about Johnny Storm wearing a collander on his head that actually made me laugh out loud..."?
No. I mean, what if she's just saying "Great comic," because she used to read comics but hasn't actually read one for in years? Then I look like a some non-hipster doofus, and I don't need that type of branding when all I want is a good old Number-9, No Nuts. And worse, what if she does read comics, but thinks Waid sucks? I don't want to have to get into a fistfight with a girl with Jeffries watching so she can go back and tell everyone what a lunatic I am.
So should I go for a broader approach, saying, "My Crazed Former Roommate made it. He made three others with pictures of the rest of the Fantastic Four, too. He kept the Human Torch one because he's a hothead, gave Mr. Fantastic to his crazed former roommate because this guy was a big science geek like Reed Richards and the geek's girlfriend got the Invisible Woman because, well, she was a girl. I'm the Thing because I'd always hang out in their room, but didn't really belong there, kind of like Ben Grimm's not really part of the family, but just this weird, mutated hanger-on. We thought about making a She-Hulk shirt for my friend Erin, but that got all complicated"?
No. Because that little ice-breaker gives waaaaaay to much personal information, and makes me look like a non-hipster doofus with diarrhea of the mouth.
So, the wheels are turning in my head as I try to figure out what else to say, but I realize that enough time has passed in which I've kind of lost the moment. I mean, I can't just suddenly launch into an amusing anecdote about how when I play Smash Brothers, I like to liken my chosen character to a Marvel superhero, and have worked out a system where Donkey Kong's the Hulk, Pikachu is Thor, and Doctor Mario's Reed Richards, so whenever I'm playing as Doc Mario and I get a magic wand, I say stuff like "I'm an idiot" or "I don't know what this thing does," just like in Fantastic Four #500, much to the consternation of My Crazed Former Roommate. No. I can't say that now, because it's too late (plus, this particular diatribe is both an example of my rampant comic geekery and my admiration for Waid's run, as well as another bit of psychotic overshare).
So I stand there, wracking my brain silently, until this girl eventually takes her strawberry milkshake and leaves.
"Summerbaby" or "Summer Loving Having a Blast, Summer Loving Happened So Fast, Met a Girl, Taught Her to Ski, Met Her Boyfriend Broke Both His Knees"
So of course, during the carwash and drive to Barnes and Noble that followed, Jeffries was sure to chastise me for my reticence. At some point, she said that perhaps it could have been a nice summer fling. I told her that I'm really not the fling type, but the truth is, I really think I could be but spend a great deal of time trying to convince everyone that I'm not...
Let's just change topics.
"Coronado II" or "Let's Give This Prowler Thing Another Shot"
It should come as little to no surprise to you that I want to write comic books. It's not my utmost literary or career ambition, but it's definitely pretty high up there. I don't know what I've got to do to break into the industry, but Jeffries dropped a book in my lap that's given the old pipe dream a little more substance.
There seems to be a huge trend for writers to sign exclusive contracts with DC these days, so hopefully Marvel will be looking for raw talent in the next couple of years -- of course, that's unlikely unless someone does something to stop Brian Michael Bendis from taking over the whole freaking universe. (How long until we've got a Nellie the Nurse mini-series rife with long-winded and redundant interrogation scenes?)
Marvel's got this godawful monthly series called Spider-Man Unlimited in which two new, unproven writers get 11-pages to bore the hell out of you with the help of professional artists who must be so desperate to draw this character they'll put up with this crap.
I want to be one of those guys so bad. So right now, the plan is to send a query letter to Marvel to see if they'll let me start pitching off-beat Spider-Man stories, and if I'm lucky (yeah, I know... just go with me here) I can start pitching more of my off-the-wall ideas, like the one-shot or Daredevil fill-in focusing on a strange day in the life of barrister and quasi-sidekick Foggy Nelson (think Ed in the Marvel Universe) or ESU the nine-to-twelve-issue miniseries about a college freshman from Iowa who moves to Marvel's superhero-populated Manhattan in a story I plan on pitching as Higher Learning meets Astro City but really consider Felicity in the Marvel Universe.
The idea I'm most jazzed about, though, is Prowler.
I first came up with the idea of writing a series about Hobie Brown two years ago, because he was a black Spider-Man wanna-be who's never amounted to much. You know, like me. The original plan was to kill off Hobie's wife Mindy, who's basically the center of his entire world, and watch this man search for meaning in his life when his heart's been torn out and he's not sure he's got anything to live for. It eventually occurred to me that as much as I like to write sad stories, I like to work in the funnies, too, and it'd be hard to sell the Prowler making jokes when his wife's dead. Plus, when I ran my ideas by Prewitt, he felt I was really just trying to pass off some vague amalgamation of Deadpool and the Black Panther as a proposal, and I can't say he was too far off the mark.
I'd basically given up on the whole Prowler premise until I linked to this picture on Erin's blog:
I don't know much about these guys, and I can't say I like their music that much -- I will admit, I do dig on "Ambulance," though -- but I took one look at this and said "Holy shit, the guy in the middle's Hobie Brown!" (But not out loud. Kate hate's when people shout at the computers in the lab.) Just imagine the guy on the right is Peter Parker and the one on the left is Luke Cage, and you've got a picture of my new Prowler proposal:
Hobie Brown's washed up and burnt out. His wife has left him. He's lost his research and development job. He's broke, living in Hoboken, and he hasn't put on that ridiculous green and purple costume in years. If he's on the prowl for anything, it's a decent job...
The first storyline, "Little Brown Boy Blues" (a tentative title I may end up using for my final screenwriting project if "Mr. Universe" doesn't pan out [it has occurred to me that the Third Act Climax in which Jesus fights 100 demons with a samurai sword in a Buddhist temple may be a little derivative]), is all about Hobie's search for work. Along the way he gets reluctantly drawn into a super-powered tussle or two with some third rate Marvel villains like the U-Foes and Stiltman, but the emphasis here wouldn't be on action as much as it'd be a meditation on the absurd turn his life has taken. Eventually, he'd get a job with SHIELD (Marvel's foremost intelligence operation) as a freelance troubleshooter -- kind of like MacGyver and the Phoenix Foundation if you ever watched that show or live with someone who still does.
The idea is that Prowler. would be the quirkiest, most off-beat superhero comic Marvel's produced in years. To be honest, I don't see him ever putting on the suit in the series. I mean, how can he? How's he gonna get that mask over his hair? (Actually, that has the potential to be a great sight gag.) He might wear the claws if he needs them, and I really like the idea that he can't afford to buy new shoes so he wears those goofy boots all the time, but why would he want to put that suit on? Hobie's not out to save the world, he just wants some peace and quiet and for his wife to return his calls.
You don't know how much I love this idea (unless you're Brent and have to deal with me pacing around the apartment mumbling, "In the third issue, maybe he'll try to get a job with Advanced Idea Mechanics" and the like all the time), but I have this terrible fear that I'm the only comic geek on the planet who would want to read a series like this. And I'm also kind of scared that I'm going to waste my whole life trying to write the same character over and over, because let's face it, I've already envisioned the scene where Hobie's cashing a paycheck and Doctor Octopus shows up to rob the bank and Our Boy Brown mutters "I hate every single day." Prowler's basically just the next evolution of the Little Black Duck, only without some green chick driving him crazy...
And now that I think about it, She-Hulk would really work well for issue 4.
My problem is that I don't want to do nice and normal, standard-issue stuff. I don't want to tell a straight story, and everything I've learned from taking creative classes indicates to me that the people who don't want to tell a nice, simple story are the people who just don't know how. The stuff I get excited about is the lame stuff, like using Hobie's resume as the Everything You Need to Know About the Character Re-cap at the start of Issue 2, or the issue where he hangs out with Luke Cage for a day and we learn that Cage's whole gangsta thug mentality scares the piss out of Hobie, who's kind of an Uncle Tom, if you catch my drift.
Why am I only capable of writing about myself? Let's face it, this whole notion of Hobie searching for a job is really more about me worrying about myself than good storytelling.
Of course, if I'd been born in the United Kingdom, they'd just call me a genius and be done with it. What is it about the British Isles that drives us geeks wild?
"Monster's Loose" or "The Ills of Same"
I seem to have unleashed an unspeakable evil. And while I don't think this was my intention, it may have been my hope.
Sorry 'bout that.
- Joe Kelly, "New Year's Evolutions" or "How To Get Ahead In Business Without Really Trying"
"As Usual" or "Today's Hidden Subtext Includes..."
1) Haps to The Bride's birthday!
2) The soundtrack to The Adventures of Pete and Pete.
3) The artistic stylings of Mike Wieringo.
4) Deadpool dialogue from years ago.
"Ashamed of the Story I Told" or "Write On and Other Bad Puns"
I've been reading through the old archive in my ongoing attempt to feel my way through the darkened dorm room of my soul, and I've noticed something: I write some looooooong ass entries. (Who knew I could go on and on about the absolute nothing of my life?) This little realization had me asking myself whether I should go easier on you guys and pare down my entries.
I never even properly answered myself before a week went by and I noticed that my entries seemed to be getting shorter and shorter (but then again, after "The Death of the Little Black Duck," everything seems brief.)
Here's the thing though: While entertaining the literate masses is indeed my ultimate goal, when it comes to this blog, the idea is to maintain a vast diary from which I can constantly cull writing material for years to come. (It's an idea that works! I can't tell you how many of my Maneater columns are roughly reworked blog entries I slapped together on some desperate, idle Tuesday.) So strap in bunky, 'cause this is more about me than you, and the sooner you get that through your head, the happier we'll all be... or at least that's what I thought until Blogger went funky on me.
You see, I've written all of this before. Not only have I written all this, but I've also written what I felt was a delightful essay detailing my proposal for a new ongoing series featuring Hobie Brown. It was sad, and funny, and honest and really really long and now it's gone. I tried to post it as a draft and something went horribly horribly wrong and it's lost to the vagaries of fate and the goddamn internet.
And this all happened after I wrote out this whole diatribe about how my blog entries will go on for days and days if I see fit and there ain't a damn thing anybody can do to stop me. Do you think it was a sign? I think it was a sign. It was definitely three hours of my life down the tube...
"She is Staggering" or "Shakedown at the House of Concretes"
Back in the salad days of my sophomore year, Caleb made me this shirt with The Thing on it. I love this shirt. Love it. I get a lot of comments about it, or at least far more than you expect. Usually what happens is, someone says "Hey, you've got the Thing on your shirt," and I get all confused and say "What thing?" 'til I calm down and figure it out. (This can take upwards of thirty minutes sometimes.)
So anyway, I was wearing this shirt yesterday when Kate and I went to Shakey's -- which I guess is just called Shake's now, but come on, that's dumb. We're standing in line, when this moderately attractive girl ahead of us turns to me and says, "Nice shirt. Great comic."
Now I don't want you to be under the impression that I wake up every morning thinking to myself "Maybe this is the day when finally, I run into a cute girl who reads comics," but that's just a bullshit pride thing and we all know it.
So this girl says this, and fortunately, I cobble together the brain capacity to understand that she's indeed referring to the graphic on my shirt and not a booger or huge freakin' spider or something, and say "Thanks" in a tone that I felt would communicate my heart-felt appreciation for her appreciation not just of my attire, but graphic literature as a medium, because this girl didn't just say "Nice shirt." She added "Great comic."
I say "Thanks," but I immediately get the feeling that more is required of me -- maybe it had something to do with the way Jeffries was glaring at me. I need to say something. Strike up a conversation perhaps. Endeavor to show myself as another pleasant member of society. But what do I say?
Do I say, "You read Fantastic Four? Me, too, but that's a pretty recent thing. I've only really been reading Waid's run, and I missed, like three issues of "Authoritative Action," but I was reading his proposal in the Imaginauts trade at Borders a few months back, and he wrote this great bit about Johnny Storm wearing a collander on his head that actually made me laugh out loud..."?
No. I mean, what if she's just saying "Great comic," because she used to read comics but hasn't actually read one for in years? Then I look like a some non-hipster doofus, and I don't need that type of branding when all I want is a good old Number-9, No Nuts. And worse, what if she does read comics, but thinks Waid sucks? I don't want to have to get into a fistfight with a girl with Jeffries watching so she can go back and tell everyone what a lunatic I am.
So should I go for a broader approach, saying, "My Crazed Former Roommate made it. He made three others with pictures of the rest of the Fantastic Four, too. He kept the Human Torch one because he's a hothead, gave Mr. Fantastic to his crazed former roommate because this guy was a big science geek like Reed Richards and the geek's girlfriend got the Invisible Woman because, well, she was a girl. I'm the Thing because I'd always hang out in their room, but didn't really belong there, kind of like Ben Grimm's not really part of the family, but just this weird, mutated hanger-on. We thought about making a She-Hulk shirt for my friend Erin, but that got all complicated"?
No. Because that little ice-breaker gives waaaaaay to much personal information, and makes me look like a non-hipster doofus with diarrhea of the mouth.
So, the wheels are turning in my head as I try to figure out what else to say, but I realize that enough time has passed in which I've kind of lost the moment. I mean, I can't just suddenly launch into an amusing anecdote about how when I play Smash Brothers, I like to liken my chosen character to a Marvel superhero, and have worked out a system where Donkey Kong's the Hulk, Pikachu is Thor, and Doctor Mario's Reed Richards, so whenever I'm playing as Doc Mario and I get a magic wand, I say stuff like "I'm an idiot" or "I don't know what this thing does," just like in Fantastic Four #500, much to the consternation of My Crazed Former Roommate. No. I can't say that now, because it's too late (plus, this particular diatribe is both an example of my rampant comic geekery and my admiration for Waid's run, as well as another bit of psychotic overshare).
So I stand there, wracking my brain silently, until this girl eventually takes her strawberry milkshake and leaves.
"Summerbaby" or "Summer Loving Having a Blast, Summer Loving Happened So Fast, Met a Girl, Taught Her to Ski, Met Her Boyfriend Broke Both His Knees"
So of course, during the carwash and drive to Barnes and Noble that followed, Jeffries was sure to chastise me for my reticence. At some point, she said that perhaps it could have been a nice summer fling. I told her that I'm really not the fling type, but the truth is, I really think I could be but spend a great deal of time trying to convince everyone that I'm not...
Let's just change topics.
"Coronado II" or "Let's Give This Prowler Thing Another Shot"
It should come as little to no surprise to you that I want to write comic books. It's not my utmost literary or career ambition, but it's definitely pretty high up there. I don't know what I've got to do to break into the industry, but Jeffries dropped a book in my lap that's given the old pipe dream a little more substance.
There seems to be a huge trend for writers to sign exclusive contracts with DC these days, so hopefully Marvel will be looking for raw talent in the next couple of years -- of course, that's unlikely unless someone does something to stop Brian Michael Bendis from taking over the whole freaking universe. (How long until we've got a Nellie the Nurse mini-series rife with long-winded and redundant interrogation scenes?)
Marvel's got this godawful monthly series called Spider-Man Unlimited in which two new, unproven writers get 11-pages to bore the hell out of you with the help of professional artists who must be so desperate to draw this character they'll put up with this crap.
I want to be one of those guys so bad. So right now, the plan is to send a query letter to Marvel to see if they'll let me start pitching off-beat Spider-Man stories, and if I'm lucky (yeah, I know... just go with me here) I can start pitching more of my off-the-wall ideas, like the one-shot or Daredevil fill-in focusing on a strange day in the life of barrister and quasi-sidekick Foggy Nelson (think Ed in the Marvel Universe) or ESU the nine-to-twelve-issue miniseries about a college freshman from Iowa who moves to Marvel's superhero-populated Manhattan in a story I plan on pitching as Higher Learning meets Astro City but really consider Felicity in the Marvel Universe.
The idea I'm most jazzed about, though, is Prowler.
I first came up with the idea of writing a series about Hobie Brown two years ago, because he was a black Spider-Man wanna-be who's never amounted to much. You know, like me. The original plan was to kill off Hobie's wife Mindy, who's basically the center of his entire world, and watch this man search for meaning in his life when his heart's been torn out and he's not sure he's got anything to live for. It eventually occurred to me that as much as I like to write sad stories, I like to work in the funnies, too, and it'd be hard to sell the Prowler making jokes when his wife's dead. Plus, when I ran my ideas by Prewitt, he felt I was really just trying to pass off some vague amalgamation of Deadpool and the Black Panther as a proposal, and I can't say he was too far off the mark.
I'd basically given up on the whole Prowler premise until I linked to this picture on Erin's blog:
I don't know much about these guys, and I can't say I like their music that much -- I will admit, I do dig on "Ambulance," though -- but I took one look at this and said "Holy shit, the guy in the middle's Hobie Brown!" (But not out loud. Kate hate's when people shout at the computers in the lab.) Just imagine the guy on the right is Peter Parker and the one on the left is Luke Cage, and you've got a picture of my new Prowler proposal:
Hobie Brown's washed up and burnt out. His wife has left him. He's lost his research and development job. He's broke, living in Hoboken, and he hasn't put on that ridiculous green and purple costume in years. If he's on the prowl for anything, it's a decent job...
The first storyline, "Little Brown Boy Blues" (a tentative title I may end up using for my final screenwriting project if "Mr. Universe" doesn't pan out [it has occurred to me that the Third Act Climax in which Jesus fights 100 demons with a samurai sword in a Buddhist temple may be a little derivative]), is all about Hobie's search for work. Along the way he gets reluctantly drawn into a super-powered tussle or two with some third rate Marvel villains like the U-Foes and Stiltman, but the emphasis here wouldn't be on action as much as it'd be a meditation on the absurd turn his life has taken. Eventually, he'd get a job with SHIELD (Marvel's foremost intelligence operation) as a freelance troubleshooter -- kind of like MacGyver and the Phoenix Foundation if you ever watched that show or live with someone who still does.
The idea is that Prowler. would be the quirkiest, most off-beat superhero comic Marvel's produced in years. To be honest, I don't see him ever putting on the suit in the series. I mean, how can he? How's he gonna get that mask over his hair? (Actually, that has the potential to be a great sight gag.) He might wear the claws if he needs them, and I really like the idea that he can't afford to buy new shoes so he wears those goofy boots all the time, but why would he want to put that suit on? Hobie's not out to save the world, he just wants some peace and quiet and for his wife to return his calls.
You don't know how much I love this idea (unless you're Brent and have to deal with me pacing around the apartment mumbling, "In the third issue, maybe he'll try to get a job with Advanced Idea Mechanics" and the like all the time), but I have this terrible fear that I'm the only comic geek on the planet who would want to read a series like this. And I'm also kind of scared that I'm going to waste my whole life trying to write the same character over and over, because let's face it, I've already envisioned the scene where Hobie's cashing a paycheck and Doctor Octopus shows up to rob the bank and Our Boy Brown mutters "I hate every single day." Prowler's basically just the next evolution of the Little Black Duck, only without some green chick driving him crazy...
And now that I think about it, She-Hulk would really work well for issue 4.
My problem is that I don't want to do nice and normal, standard-issue stuff. I don't want to tell a straight story, and everything I've learned from taking creative classes indicates to me that the people who don't want to tell a nice, simple story are the people who just don't know how. The stuff I get excited about is the lame stuff, like using Hobie's resume as the Everything You Need to Know About the Character Re-cap at the start of Issue 2, or the issue where he hangs out with Luke Cage for a day and we learn that Cage's whole gangsta thug mentality scares the piss out of Hobie, who's kind of an Uncle Tom, if you catch my drift.
Why am I only capable of writing about myself? Let's face it, this whole notion of Hobie searching for a job is really more about me worrying about myself than good storytelling.
Of course, if I'd been born in the United Kingdom, they'd just call me a genius and be done with it. What is it about the British Isles that drives us geeks wild?
"Monster's Loose" or "The Ills of Same"
I seem to have unleashed an unspeakable evil. And while I don't think this was my intention, it may have been my hope.
Sorry 'bout that.
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