In With a Bang, Stela Two!
At Stela, I interviewed three times; phone, person, and person. It was interesting. The first human I talked to in person, (obviously the phone interview went well) at Stela was the marketing director, who not only was a low talker, (really, she almost whispered) but had a Chinese accent making it more difficult for my American ears to always understand her. I would come to learn all the management was from Taiwan or China, as was all the money that keep things afloat. That part of the interview with her (she was perfectly nice, if hard to understand. I didn’t want to be a jerk and keep asking her to repeat herself), was fine, but really I’m not a marketing writer, and then the creative director took over.
She sat down and looked very unimpressed with me. She questioned me on my comic book knowledge, said she knew about my plays, but wasn’t impressed, and the reason I was there was for my comic book experience. She brought up a property they had, called ‘Out With a Bang’ a murder mystery set in the near future. It concerned a senior nursing home for retired superheroes where the heroes are being killed off one by one. It was like Agatha Christie crossed with the Watchmen (well Watchmen-lite). She told me the storyline, and how they tried to continue it, several times (I found out later there were more attempts than I knew. This was a problem at Stela I would discover; nothing was new, everything was a variation of something they’d done before, or someone else had done before). She looked at me.
“What would you do with it, how would you continue it?”
“Well, you can’t, that story is done. It’s like trying to continue a romance. A romance depends on where you end. To continue, you have to do a different genre, or restart everything.”
“Okay, all right. So, what would you do?’
“Well, if you want to continue it, you must like the concept, right?”
“Well, we own it.”
“Okay, uh… well, maybe take the concept…” I started thinking, it hurt.
“A home for retired heroes…”
“Right. Take that and do something different with it, say, why are the heroes retired, why are they in this place, what happened to the others? What even made them all retire, and why there?” I was spitballing, of course.
“We’ll need to link it up with the world of magic we’re planning.”
“Magic…” I’m sure my right eyebrow went up.
She leaned forward. “We decided to have a universe, a Stela Universe, based on our properties Lumi White, our version of Snow White, and Alyan and the Lamp…”
“Your version of Aladdin.”
“Right. You can’t trademark a public domain fairytale, but you can change it enough…”
“Riiiight.” Industries are built on ripping things off. Look at Asylum Pictures. Atlantic Rim? Who are they fooling?
“And all these are based on Magic, so we’re basing the Stela Universe on Jingling. Jinn, and magic. Did you know Aladdin was Chinese?”
“Huh” I cocked my head, “No, I did not.”
“We found that out in research.”
“Really.”
“Oh yes. With our stories, we go back, long before the actual story begins, and map out their whole lineage. We use Excel to write a spreadsheet covering the whole timeline. We found out the whole history, what dynasty, all the ancestors, how he got to the Middle East…”
“You use all that in the story?”
“Not all, not most really, but we find it’s necessary to the process. We also use Excel to write out the scripts…”
And she called one up. It was true: a column for the character, one for panel descriptions, one for dialogue for each character, two to four columns for revisions to the dialogue, a column for review, a column to describe the action…
“Okay.”
She smiled a very ‘poor boy’ smile. “Not used to the format, huh.”
“I’ve written a lot of scripts, never in Excel.”
“We like it, it’s easier for the artists, you really have to explain things to them.”
I’m sure at least one of my eyebrows went up. “I was an art major, briefly.”
“Anyway, what would you do with the property?”
“’Out With a Bang”? Well, hire me and find out.”
“You’re a smartass. I like that.”
“I try.” I do, it mostly comes naturally.
“And you’re not as handsome as you think you are.”
“God I hope not. Don’t think I’m handsome at all.”
She laughed, “You’re also very arrogant.”
I had no idea where this was going.
“The CEO will be here in a second.”
Then the CEO came in. He was an artist of reputation in his 30s who had started the company five years before, first in China, then in California, and then moved the whole thing to Lynnwood. He wanted me to know it was a startup:
“We are a little company, we’re a startup…”
“Oh yeah, okay.” I nodded.
“For, uh, five years, still a startup, we’re growing.”
“Which is why I’m here.”
“Yes! Yes, very much. So, what about the Spidey-Clone thing? What is that?”
Yes, we then got into a long discussion of the Spidey clone saga from the 90s. Yes, Spidey-Clone. I had to run down the Spider Clone story (what I remember of it, it is some 20 years since it ended) That was pretty much the end of the interview; being backhandedly called handsome, fronthandedly called arrogant, and then a half-hour on Spidey Clone.
And in the next interview, the one where they actually hired me, (besides asking to accept the lower-than-market salary), we again got into another discussion of the Spidey Clone saga. The CEO had no idea of it before I sent him an article I wrote about it, but he became fascinated by it afterward. That the great ‘Marvel Comics’ might have made a mistake really interested him. Actually, fascinated him. I had to say different things than I had said the last time, and still, sound like I knew what I was talking about.
It was not easy.
He nodded at the creative director, got up, and left.
She swiveled back to me. “So, do you want to work here?”
I thought for a second. “Yes, yes I do. Sounds fun.”
And it did.
I only gained 25 pounds in six months from stress eating.
Huh, I figured I would wrap this up in two… let’s just make this open ended for the duration of this insanity. Next, the staff, the many aborted attempts to restart/extend ‘Out With a Bang’ and the calendar painted on the wall that led nowhere.