Tommy, Stela and the Graphic Novel that Never Was.... Part the First.
In 2018, I was hired by the comics app Stela to produce a new comic based on an old property called ‘Out With a Bang’. The story involved a young man working at a senior citizen nursing home called ‘Haven’, populated by retired superheroes. I liked the concept, but the execution I thought could go a little deeper. I changed the main character, the audience surrogate, to a young black woman named ‘Kenyetta Ali’ who was drawn to the center, was obsessed with the heroes within, and started exhibiting her own powers when coming into contact with the facility. I based the character on, and named her, after my own wife. I think I kept the name of one of the villains and tossed just about everything else.
I moved forward with great excitement, building the world of Haven, the world Kenyetta would explore and inhabit.
Except.
Ah, that word. Pretty awful, isn’t it? Except. The creative director told me we already had enough black characters (really?) and I should make her… something else. I elected to make her half black, half Latina, and as brown as possible. After all, I had promised the real Kenyetta. That got shot down, fast.
So, then, out of utter spite I’m sure (one of the things I’m good at) and the fact I was pissed off, I made her as white as I could. I changed her name to “Brigid Flynn” and made her a red-haired, green-eyed Irish girl. I threw out all the backstory I had done (about struggling to be accepted, even in the future, as a ‘nerdy’ Black girl) and went ahead. It took a while, to build the backstory and the world (the story starts in 2060, but the background timeline started in 1890) but I got into it.
I developed a world where that was controlled by one government, and run on the mysterious Nuergy. I built the world and the characters. The creative director urged me to go deeper, (I had a timeline that started 150 years before the actual story started) and came up with a lot of odd plot twists I didn’t think were necessary, but she was the boss, so I worked them in, diluting the narrative as little as I could. When I presented it to the entire staff (around 30-40 people, not sure as we were adding more all the time) it was something of a convoluted mess. And I knew it.
I got the green light to go ahead (aside here, the ‘greenlight’ was always conditional and could be withdrawn at any time, often without you actually knowing it). So, I sat down, and wondered about the feedback I got, about how complicated the story was, how there wasn’t enough agency in Brigid… and they were right. So, without telling anyone, I tossed the storyline I’d presented and came up with a new, stripped, and slimmed one on the fly. As I wrote the scripts.
It was sooooo much better. I was assigned a storyboard artist (in regular comics, we would usually have a writer -me-, a penciler, an inker, a letterer, and a colorist. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Stela operated as if they were an animation studio; character designers, storyboards, concept artists, environment artists, main character artists, background artists, color designers, colorists, inkers, and maybe a few more I didn’t know about. Very complicated and expensive. And then it had to get past the CEO, who was also an artist and seemed to believe only he know what real art and story were. In fact, writers were seen as very, very low on the totem pole, like below ground. The CEO said to me, more than once, he felt writers weren’t really all that necessary to the process.
Ah well.
So, I wrote Haven, I developed the characters, and I loved the characters. As a writer, you come to love your characters. It’s a complete cliché to say your characters are your children, but they really are. I grew with them, I was gutted when they died, and I felt stronger when they succeeded. Loved those SOBs.
I wrote ‘Haven’ as a dark take on Superheroes, think Watchman, but not. I put a lot into it. And then I met with the assigned artists. They were nice people, I actually liked them, but they were all wrong for this project. The main artist? She drew in what I would call a ‘cutesy Manga’ style’ her partner, would do backgrounds, but when I expressed trepidation that the style would not fit a dark, somewhat dystopian superhero story, I was told it would be fine.
It was not fine.
When I got the first character designs (which were not actually shown to me, as I was just a writer and didn’t know anything about design <did I tell you I was an art major and cartoonist at one time?>) Brigid’s red hair was turned blue and was manga ‘cute’, a badass biker chick streetfighter heroine (dressed in leather, long flowing hair) came back looking like a character from ‘Battle of the Planets’ and totally inappropriate for what her character was.
I was so depressed by the cutesy cartooniness of them, (although in their late teen and early 20s, everyone looked like they were twelve) that I literally could not go on for nearly two weeks. I updated my plotline, and I helped edit other projects, but I was too depressed to move on with Haven. I am a playwright, I have written other comics, and I have had my work messed with over and over, but this really killed me. I complained to the creative director, the art director, and the CEO. They all agreed, the designs and style were wrong, Tweaks were made but the main problem (the style problem) was ignored. I even drew up my own designs, which were ignored. They all agreed with me, but it was what it was.
Now, as an artist, I had been called upon to draw in different styles. It was part of the job; you drew what the story required. But this artist (a talented artist in her own right) was miscast, and put into a role she was not able to pull off. It was not her fault at all, but that of the person who put her in ill-fitting clothes and sent her down the runway. I had no real animosity towards her (okay, maybe a little, especially when she didn’t bother to follow character descriptions), but I felt it didn’t work, and I was less than quiet about it. I was kind of a jerk about it actually, a loud one. I probably hurt some feelings… hell, I know I did. That’s on me.
Finally, after doing other projects, and being promoted to ‘head writer’ (head scapegoat, as another manager referred to it) I restarted Haven. Again, I loved Haven, loved the characters, and the storyboard artist assigned to me Glenn, was sympathetic to the characters, and the people, as well. After a couple of bumpy starts, I felt we were a team well-matched. Glenn was fast, and loose and his style had an energy that matched the writing. Occasionally he made changes, sometimes I liked them, sometimes he anticipated later plot developments and I asked him to revert to the script. I would always explain why, he was always cool about it.
Now, how was I able to change the original, approved storyline, the cumbersome, everything-elbowed-in version? I just didn’t tell anyone. One thing about Stela? People hate reading. They’ll read storyboards, with the visuals, but the scripts? Only if they absolutely have to. So, I knew no one but me was reading the scripts (and the other writers, whom I consulted with all the time) or would read them until they got to the storyboard. By then they would have forgotten the original storyline. I was right.
I am genius,
The first thing they has us do, even before getting the project started, was come up with three short ‘Christmas/Holiday’ scripts to be used as introductions. I did two, one featuring Blue Nightingale (a street fighter biker woman who wore leather and was one of my favorites) and the other was to be done as an episode of ‘Lightning and Streak, the Wonder Dog’, a 1960s cartoon show one of the characters had done (think Johnny Quest, but with a girl and a dog). That was the winner. I shortened the script, finished it, and gave it to Glenn. He had it done in a day. It was ready to go. Only it wasn’t.
At Stela, I would learn, nothing was ever ready, nothing moved, and nothing went forward. There were multiple approvals, then changes, and then changes to the changes, all needing approved. We had two months to get what was basically a one-page comic approved, drawn, lettered, and colored. Two regular issues of Batman could have been done at this time. We could not do a page. Turns out none of the new stories would be used, and none would ever be published. But dang, it was a good, funny story.
Lightning was a backstory character, actually only referenced a few times in the narrative. I had created a cartoon show she had done in the 1960s. So for the Christmas episode for the Christmas chapter meant to give a preview of the series.
So, in the beginning, remember that ‘always tentative’ greenlight thing? Well, after getting the greenlight, everything stopped as I did the Christmas story. I had to get approval to go to script on the regular Haven series (planned for 60 chapters), but could not get a meeting with the creative director. After I finished Lightning and Streak, I sat down, wrote the first Haven chapter script (introducing the world, the background, the main character and the main baddy), and gave it to Glenn who got his storyboard down in record time. When I finally got my meeting, we sat down:
“So, you have an outline for the first chapter.”
“No.”
Uh huh. What have you been doing?
“Oh, I finished it.”
“The outline.”
“The script. Glenn has the storyboard done, it’s on the server.”
She raised an eyebrow at me, turned and called up the storyboard. “This is good, this is really cool. Great intro into the story.” She swiveled to face me. “How many scripts do you have done?”
“First ten. This is the only storyboard though.”
“Okay. Let’s get going. When we have the first five storyboards, we’ll do a presentation to the CEO.”
“Cool.”
We discussed some changes that might be made to the boards, and Glenn and I got up to leave.
“Thomas, I like initiative, but don’t do that again.”
“Of course not, just moving the process along…”
I would do it again. Several times.
In the next chapter, we introduce some staffers, I get yelled at for forty minutes, and threatened with being fired for fixing damage done by others, and I lose it. Big time.
Be there.
Here is some unpublished Haven goodness; Brigid finds Blue Nightingale’s unpublished diary, and reads of the event that caused the time she now lives in; The Legion of Freedom vs, Dr. Destiny. This is chapter 36 of 58.
