The Power of a Good Editor
It feels more than a little strange to sit here writing about comic books with everything that’s happened in the past 48 hours. I find solace in comics and creativity, so I’m soldiering on, but I will understand if you want to sit this one out. Take some time to focus on yourself this week. It’s been a rough couple days and I don’t know what the future entails, but I’m definitely depressed about it.
So, last week, I talked about the beginnings of A Real Slobberknocker, how it started as a rejected pitch to an anthology. It was only 5 pages! Now it’s 90, told over the course of three issues. How did it go from the short to a mini-series?
After the rejection, I started reworking the story. The original focused on a single wrestler. For this new version, I reworked the script to focus on a tag team. At the time, MSK was a big tag team in NXT. Wes Lee and Zachary Wentz were entertaining to watch in the ring and put on some great matches. Unfortunately, some allegations were made about Wentz and he was fired. Lee was very talented in his own right, but when a tag team is broken up, it can often leave one of them in obscurity. Just look at what’s going on with Giovanni Vinci right now after he was split out from Imperium. I wondered what it would be like to have so much of your career tied up with another person and then to have that person suddenly ripped away.
That’s the catalyst for A Real Slobberknocker. Our team, The New Kicks, focuses on these two best friends and life long wrestling fans, Bret and Jake. They come up through the indie circuit together and just when they get a shot at the big leagues, something happens that prevents them from debuting as a team. I’m purposely avoiding spoilers for those that haven’t read the first issue yet.
With this in mind, I started writing and writing. I hacked away at the script until I got to an ending. At this point, it was 45 pages long. It was a good length for a graphic novella and I was happy with how the story flowed. I was nervous though as this was the longest script I had ever written by myself. Before this, I had co-written a three-issue mini-series with
, called Feed Them to the Crows, which coincidentally, we’re starting production on soon. As such, I wanted to make sure I was on the right track. Enter .I had previously interviewed James and reviewed some of his House of Fear comics for Horror DNA. I had also reached out to him to get some pointers on comic book editing as I had picked up that duty for Killchella and I liked his style. James agreed to come on as editor and dug into the script. His notes were very helpful and really focused on bringing out the potential of the story.
One of the biggest and most frequent notes were about the reactions of some of the characters. They either felt too big or not big enough. They didn’t feel earned. This is when I had a big “A-Ha!” moment. I realized those elements were in the story. I saw them every time I read the script or thought about the plot. The problem was that they weren’t on the page. I had glossed over some details.
With this in mind, I went through some revisions. I added in those elements to make sure the reactions were earned. Again, these were all things I had thought about already, so it wasn’t hard to add them into the script itself. When I finished, I had a 90 page script. Now we’re in graphic novel territory. As I continued to think everything over, I was walking to my car after work one day and realized that there were two natural breaking points in the story that could serve as the ending of the first two issues. With that, I had a game plan and we started planning the first Kickstarter campaign.
We’ll tackle that process in a future post. Next week, I’ll talk about the design for the characters and delve into some Easter Eggs from the first issue. To stay on the ride for A Real Slobberknocker, please sign up to be notified when we launch the Kickstarter campaign for the second issue on November 30th!
As I have to fight with my children to use my own Playstation 5, I’ve been revisiting games I never finished (and in some cases never started) on the Playstation 3. One of which is Heavy Rain. This was a game I did not appreciate the first time around. I was more into action games filled with excitement. I have matured a bit in my old age.
I also realized that I was only missing 2 trophies in order to get the Platinum. Yes, I am a trophy hunter. It’s a fun hobby and it adds another level of enjoyment to the games I play. I went through a pretty fierce competition with a buddy of mine awhile back and I played some games I am not proud of, like Hannah Montana. I’m better now. In any case, I finished my first playthrough of Heavy Rain earlier this week and it left me stunned. This is an amazing murder mystery that had me guessing until the very end. It was such a great story. The way they reveal each element until you ultimately learn the killer’s identity was extraordinary.
Speaking of the end, there are 18 endings to Heavy Rain. I completed the “perfect crime” ending, where the killer gets away and everyone else dies. It was a bit of a bummer, but fortunately, it’s easy to go back a few chapters and change things to get a different ending. With that complete, I’m now getting my last trophy, which is seeing all the endings. I’m definitely enjoying this and I’m looking forward to seeing how the other ones work out.
Once this is complete, I’ll probably finally get the Platinum trophy in Borderlands. I just need to get my character up to level 50. I’m on level 43 right now. It’s just been so long since I’ve played it that I feel like I have to relearn everything. Other games that are on my plate from this era are Spider-Man: Edge of Time, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 1 and 2, and Ratchet & Clank 3. I hope to play a couple of these by the end of the year. Are there any other games from the PS3 era that you’d recommend?