A Decade Of Making Comics - Part I
And you’d think I would have learnt something…here I talk about the decade I put in before the decade started.
“I been in the game for ten years making rap tunes comics!”
This month marks me being one full decade in the game of making comics - well, making comics that people can read. A period of time that feels really long, and really short, and when I step back from it all I know making comics has been a large portion of those ten years.
These posts will be a fairly decent gaze into the navel, forgive me, I’m just reflecting so I might better push on into the next decade :]
I released my first proper comic, FATHERHOOD with Daniel Schneider, Paulina Ganucheau, Brandon DeStefano, and a Christopher Kosek cover, back in March of 2013.
The comic was a 24 page one-shot story and I got it printed up and sold it primarily at comic conventions. The first one on my slate to table at was Emerald City Comic Con, in Seattle, a hemisphere away from home.
But before I get to the start of this decade of creativity on the page, I want to talk about the creativity behind the page. Let’s go back to 2004…
This was the year I’d be finishing my studies and beginning to teach. I had locked in a degree, and a professional career, and I was pretty keen on both. But I’d always said I’d also be a writer, so I wanted to figure out how to find that balance.
All through the 90s, I’d wanted to be a writer. Specifically, a horror novelist, like my favourites King and Barker. So I tinkered with [and abandoned] short stories and I dreamed of bigger things to come.
Then I went to uni and I was lucky to find time to even read books, which I look back on now as a shame. I dropped reading comics because of financial reasons, I didn’t carve out much time to read novels, and I certainly didn’t write anymore. The creativity was replaced with two things: study and socialising. Both good life skills, and they got me into the world, but as I entered the world, the life balance changed and I could see I wanted to return to writing.
With my first tax return, I bought myself a laptop. It was a commitment to start writing again. And I did. This decade of 2004-2013 would see me slowly play with words and try to honestly figure out who I was as a writer and what my voice was. It was a formative time.
I moved to a completely new city, where I didn’t know a soul. I made new friends, I joined new workplaces, I tried new things. I became a sports coach [which is completely outside of my wheelhouse, but I loved it] and I put in time working with students and families to guide young people to new potentials, skills, and passions. I took a Girls Cricket program from a history of zero wins to the State Championship. Then I discovered the merits of technology in schools and trained myself up to run whole school ICT programs. By the end of my first decade teaching, I’d spent a few years in various Acting Assistant Principal roles. I was enjoying the day job, finding challenges, stretching myself, and really committing in huge ways.
Alongside this, I got married, and had some children, bought a house, settled down into another new town. And all the while, I was always writing somewhere in the background.
I wrote four novels in this time, a bunch of short stories, even some poetry. I started off just tapping away at my couch, and when I moved into a share house that continued a way until people started moving out and I had a few months before I would move in with another mate, so I set up one of the now empty rooms as a proper office. I got a desk, I parked the computer in there, and I can remember I covered the walls with National Geographic maps that I had scored when a friend hooked me up with 20 continuous years of issues for a song. I can still remember writing in that office, and when I needed a name, I’d browse the maps [Europe, Mars, cities, countries] and pluck something interesting out. That office was the first time I ever felt like a “real” writer, even though I don’t think I wrote all that much in those months.
But while the words and works might not have smoothly tumbled out, what I remember is going into that room with the intention of writing. Sometimes it would flow, and I’d tap the keys, and sometimes I’d sit for half an hour and not be able to get a single thing out. I’d wait, and think, and wait, and look at the maps, and then I’d leave, just knowing that it wasn’t my day. I think those early days of “writer’s block,” or something like it, were really important to have and to work through as they were like early training sessions. Like a runner going for their first few laps around the block and realising they were not ready for the coming marathon.
This office was where I really committed to the idea of wanting to write to become a writer. I distinctly remember cancelling my gym membership because I didn’t have time to teach all day, go there every night, and then still write. I made a choice, and even at that age/time, I thought it was a little silly, but I wanted to back the play. I don’t know that I actually thought I had a shot at being a proper writer, but I was going to try.
After some tinkering and false starts, I got on a plane to go visit family and on the plane got an idea. I asked the flight attendant if they had any paper and a pen and then used that to make notes for the entire journey about a story idea of someone on a plane chatting to the person next to them - back then, I always loved striking up random conversations on planes and meeting the person next to me, if they were down for it. The notes flowed well and when I got up to see my family for a week, I spent some time on the laptop writing a short story titled THE FRIENDLY SKIES.
This would become the first “real” thing I would finish. I think it clocked in around 10k words, and I ponied up to print a short run of it like a chapter book. It sold in my local independent bookstore, and some teachers/parents bought copies, and I sent copies to all my mates for Xmas. Looking back, the story is fairly amateur, and the blind enthusiasm to send it to my mates and family like a proud kid who just built a sandcastle is somewhere between charming and lame. But I had created a thing out of words, something I knew was I enjoyed writing, and the final step was publication. It was a really important moment in my journey as a writer.
Then, around 2005-06 and alongside my short story success, my brother bought me a copy of THE WALKING DEAD Vol. 1 and it would change my life. I’d been an avid comic reader all of my teen years, but walked away due to financial reasons. Returning to TWD brought me back to Daredevil [via the Kevin Smith run I’d missed] and then more superhero stories leading into more creator owned works.
This then gave me the direction of writing in a form I loved, and within this decade I pushed out well over 60 single issue scripts [of varying degrees of quality]. I read comics, explored the form, and did my best to write my scripts as best as I could. It was all a learning process.
I started off cooking up these grand ideas. 60 issue runs, mammoth storytelling, launching straight into my huge opus. As the decade wore on, I wrote smaller and smaller ideas. 6 issue runs, mini-series, ogn-type material. Most of this was just me learning on the job. The majority of these scripts never saw anyone else, and never made it into an artist’s hands. I mean, I wrote a Daredevil graphic novel and a 12 issue series focusing on Marvel’s HYDRA. I was tinkering, and doing so alongside a really mentally full day job, and a wonderful life load of building a family.
I slowly came to the realisation that writing short stories and one-shot comics was a smarter play. I’d pitched a few minis around with little success, and I was hungry to finally get something made and put it out into the world.
So I wrote FATHERHOOD and I met Daniel Schneider on Twitter and we made the comic that would launch my career. Let’s look at that next time - and to be transparent, there will be 7 posts in total, but I won’t send them all to your inbox. This one and the final one will go to email, the rest will just be live on my Substack, and easy to access in the app. I figure that will be a happy middle ground between sharing and being a pest :]
Dan is a rad dude - local to me! Didn’t really put two and two together until this newsletter regarding Fatherhood. Sadly didn’t manage to get this in print, but apparently can still dig and find this on my ComiXology.