So I wanted to drop a quick update so that I could outline what I’ve got in the pipeline and who I’m working with. It’s a really busy time for me and the future’s looking bright. There’s a lot of excitement on my end with all the art I have flowing into my inbox these days!

So first, THE KIDNAPPED LIGHT. It’s a Japanese fairytale I’m working on with Anna Puchalski. She’s awesome and we’re having a lot of fun on the book.  We’re targeting this one at a YA audiance but I’m writing it for everyone to enjoy.

Second, FEAR OF LIFE. This is a somewhat true story about a sort of me being mistaken for the only next of kin of a dying man. What follows is a pretty personal rumination on death, dying and being alone. There are bits of comedy in there as well! Overall, I’m very pleased with the script for this one. I think it’s really strong and I’ve got a great artist, Philip Elliot, working on it with me. He picked up on exactly what I was going for when he read the script and I believe this will end up really special.

I’ve got a miniseries in the works with Angel Tovar as well. It’s called NANOMANCER, it’s a balss to the wall highfantasy scifi romp through cyberspace! It was a lot of fun to write and I think it’s something people will really enjoy. The work so far that Angel has turned in has been top notch. FYI, we’re looking for a colorist on this one. If you know anyone, be sure to have them get in touch.

On top of that I’m working on a ZUDA entry with Nosochu, my collaborater on DEATH RATTLE. It’s a LORD OF THE FLIES style thing that I think will really do well. Speaking of DEATH RATTLE, SEQUENTIAL SUICIDE by 803 Studios will be out this month! Be sure to grab a copy from their site or hit me up at Chicago, I’ll have some with me, though I won’t have a table.

As you can see I’ve a ton of stuff going on right now. Hopefully quite a bit of it will see print over the next year or so. I’m pretty confident in these projects. I’ve been really lucky to work with so many talented artists. These guys are all great people and awesome collaborators!

-Steve

So Shadowline is running a contest for writers. They want you to create a new Super-Heroine for a 3 issue miniseries. Kris Simon the editor-in-chief of Shadowline is going through them and will choose the top 10, those 10 write a 5 page script and from those scripts 5 will be chosen to be voted on by the public at Newsarama.

So I submitted something like 8 proposals so far but I realized …. I’m not giving them what they want! Shit! Yeah so I misinterpreted what they were asking for.. or actually I just got confused by some of the thread. I initially submitted what they wanted on two proposals; a full breakdown of the series in about 7 or so sentences with ending and all. Then after reading some of the thread it seemed they wanted just a quick synopses sort of like a blurb. That was wrong so I wasted like 6 good ideas on that.

Ah well I’m to an idea I really like and I’m going to give some good thought.

In other news, my new comic Misspent Youth is going into art production later this month. I’m really happy with this one. I collaborated on this one with David Boozer, one of my buddies. We have a guy named Paul Williams doing the art. He’s quite the talented Brit! We’re really excited that he’s doing the art and I think the series will be really fun.

As far as Right Way Wrong goes Anna has finished something like 20 pages and she’s working on the cover! We’ll start pitching that pretty soon, so hopefully we’ll have some good news soon.

–Steve

So let me catch you up to present day.

See when I was a little kid I loved to read, write and draw comic books. At that time I really wanted to be a comic book artist. Now I had generally supportive parents and they never out and out said “Hey jackass you’re probably not going to get to do that” but they were more than happy I think to see that my priorities shifted around age 12. This is when I got my first computer.

Man when I got that IBM I was in love. Comics fell to the wayside for the most part. Now I still read Jeff Smiths Bone from time to time and would go back and look at old comics I had. I honestly don’t know why I dropped them like that. I think because one time when I went to one of my “friends” houses they said I couldn’t come over anymore because all I ever did was talk about comics. It was true, I can be a little obsessive and I certainly didn’t know how to control it when I was that age. Anyway I stopped collecting but still read a few off and on.

So I devoted myself wholly to computers, I learned everything I could about them. Learned to design web-pages when the web first appeared (yea! Mosaic!), learned how to program in a few different languages and generally learned how to tear apart and fix the damn things. I don’t regret this at all. It’s put me in a position to have a shit ton of marketable skills and currently keeps me in a job that I don’t hate.

Alright then you might ask “Why the hell do you want into comics then??”. Well when I was nineteen I was given a store to run for a computer repair and Internet service. I was fucking nineteen and was nowhere near ready for that kind of responsibility. Essentially over a year period I got completely burned out on computer work and pretty much went bat shit crazy and broke down. Yes these were the wonder years, except with out a hot math genius named Winnie and more of a nervous breakdown vibe.

So I vowed never to go back into computer work and decided to go back to school and get my art degree. Alright, that seemed like a fairly decent plan. Turns out I really didn’t care for it, even though I loved the illustration classes. My second semester back I was taking a creative writing intro course and I turned in a short story I had written called “The Right Way Wrong” (why yes, that is my new comic..). Well my teacher was floored by it I guess because he wanted me to swap to creative writing and the dept. wanted me to skip the rest of the intro classes and go straight into their higher level writing courses. I said what the hell and swapped majors. I always loved writing and when I really took a long hard look at my skills I knew I was better at it than I would ever be at illustration.

So I’m an English major now, well for a bit anyway. I started butting heads with one of the other professors in the dept. He hated me, I honestly don’t know what I did to this dude but he would never miss a chance to make offhanded insults at me. Constantly looking at me and saying shit like “The people it comes easy too won’t make it”. After 2 semesters of that shit and knowing I had quite a few more classes to go through with this jerk off I decided to swap out again. I went to anthropology, another subject I’d been really interested in. Well that went well enough I suppose and I wasn’t particularly opposed to it but I found myself not quite enthralled either. So what did I do… you guessed it I swapped majors again. This time I went to Liberal Arts, it allowed me to use a large cross section of the classes I’d taken and would put me within a year or so of graduation.

So here I am, with this degree a year or so away and I really get an itch to start drawing and writing a webcomic. I had barely read any other webcomics when I started The Devil and Ted and honestly didn’t know how to go about it. I had gotten a good chunk of financial aid that semester so I dropped it all on a wacom tablet, a new monitor and a scanner and went to work. I basically started with no plan whatsoever, I just wanted to get into it. Well it had … haphazard results. I did some genuinely good writing in some bits there but I also did a lot of really shitty writing. For a year I was basically coming home from school/work each Monday and Wednesday night and punching out a strip. I could never get ahead and man it sucked!

So after a year of pretty solid updates twice weekly I decided to start on some other projects. Now I had planned just to completely shut DnT down but one of my readers and someone who gave me some great pointers when I was doing the strip, Howard Russell, asked if I would collaborate on something with him. I said “hell yeah whatcha wanna do”? He ended up sending me this outstanding shot of Ted and the Devil on a couch and I was sold. So I started writing scripts for him, we turned out about 5 or so weekly strips. Howards class load was/is really heavy so we decided that the update schedule would go out the window and maybe something a little more long term would be in order. I had an idea for a storyline that I thought would be great in printed form so I ran the idea by him and he was all for it. So we’re currently in the middle of production on “The Devil and Ted: Gone to Hell” that we hope will get picked up by someone. This was my first real script I wrote. It was funny, had pretty good pacing and all in all I’m pleased with it.

By this time I had started reading comics again. I found a great shop Kapow and started reading a crap load of books (lets hear it for 30 some odd books on my reserve list!). I had devoured all of Scott McClouds work and read scripts from Ellis, Moore, Ennis and any number of other writers out there. It was about this time that I said hell, I should be doing this full time.

So I started writing another script, I decided to tackle an adaptation of the short story I’d written a while back in that first creative writing class. So I started on what was supposed to be a single graphic novel but has since been split into 3 parts entitled “The Right Way Wrong”. I reworked the story, cutting out some characters and changing some of the themes of the work. All in all I ended up with what I think is a pretty fucking good script. So how the hell was I gonna get it made?

Well this brings us up to about October 2007. I was at the point I really wanted to give this a try and I had just gotten a promotion at work that gave me some financial room so I said what the hell I’ll pay someone to illustrate it. I ended up getting a second job to keep a bit of a buffer and went on a hunt for an artist. I finally settled on a gal named Anna Wieszczyk. She is insanely talented and is working for a really manageable price for me.

Alright so two books in the production stages, not to shabby I figured. I mean in pretty much 4 months I’d gone from just a webcomic to working on two multi issue books that I was gonna try my damndest to get picked up.

So one of my friends David Boozer saw what I was doing and approached me with an idea he’d had brewing and wanted to know if I’d collaborate on it with him. This was … about a month ago I think. I loved the idea and said hell yeah. So we started working on the world we’d set the book in and all the details etc. We worked through a script and I pounded out a final version. We’ve attached an artist to it and it’ll start production in early January.

Now as of 2 days ago Shadowline, Jim Valentino’s imprint, posted a writing contest. They want you to design a super-heroine for a three issue mini series. I saw the thread, promptly wet myself and then after clean up started putting down ideas. Well early on it came out you could submit multiple ideas so I’ve so far submitted 5 and plan on submitting at least one a day until the end of the first stage (jan. 28th). Actually even if none of them get picked there are a couple that I think I might flesh out anyway because they turned out to be pretty cool ideas.

Alright. We’re at present. So the rest of the blog will be me detailing everything that happens up to and beyond that fateful day when one of my books sees publication. Trust me it will happen, of this I have no doubt. It’s just a matter of when.

–Steve