Tag Archives: Writing

Unfair Use

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I was told under no uncertain terms will I be allowed to include the first 3 lines of  “I’m Too Sexy” in my upcoming novel. The reason I given is that the music industry is insanely litigious. They gave me several examples of the charges they’ve levied for the use of even “one lyric” (I assume they mean line because a lyric is a word). Note that I didn’t say “musicians” are so litigious. It’s the people who own the songs, which is not them.

I wrote Right Said Fred personally and asked them for permission to use the lines, and their assistant told me that to talk to the licenser. Now, “I’m Too Sexy” is not a work of art. The lyrics are uninspired, and the beat is childishly simple. It’s catchy, though, and most importantly, the brothers who make up the band wrote, performed, and recorded it. It’s their song. They don’t own it.

National Comics, which would one day become DC Comics, bought the rights to Superman from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster for a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars is worth a lot more than in the forties, but even then it was incredibly cheap. Superman launched an entire genre. Even before comic book movies became mainstream, the work of superhero creators inspired the movies. Remember the scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Lando leads Han, Chewy, and Leia into banquet hall with Darth Vader? That scene happened over a decade earlier in The Fantastic Four:

Jack Kirby, the artist of that scene (and cowriter; without going into detail, the Marvel method of storytelling leaned a lot more on the artist than the writer, contrary to what Stan Lee’s hype machine will tell you), did not get to keep his own art. Timely, which became Marvel, got to sell it at auction, and Kirby didn’t get a dime. This went on until the seventies, when Kirby and Neal Adams and other artists fought tooth and nail for the right to own what they created. Likewise, in the nineties, Todd McFarlane was the superstar artist whose work was selling literally millions of copies of Spider-Man comics. Marvel went nuts selling merchandizing with his art. McFarlane got nothing. (He rounded up other superstar artists to form Image Comics, in which creators were allowed to keep their creations until they didn’t want to do that anymore and did the same thing.)

Sorry I’m hitting you with the comic book history, but it’s all I really know. I know that Disney and the Creator’s Syndicate (which owns Peanuts, among its extensive catalog) are so litigious, they will send cease-and-desist and even subpoenas to daycare centers that paint Charlie Brown or Mickey Mouse on their walls. Every time I see a place with a Garfield hanging around, I wonder who’s going to squeal on them and bring in the lawyers.

All of this goes back to my book. It’s set in 1995, and while “I’m Too Sexy” was released in 1991, it was still fresh on our minds at that time. My twenty-seven-year-old work friend told me the song was a banger when I mentioned it to her, but in the nineties, it was kind of annoying. Really, really catchy, but annoying. The people I hung out with hated the song, myself included, and hearing the acapella “I’m too sexy for my love; Too sexy for my love; Love’s going to leave me” meant we were in for a very difficult three-to-four minutes. One of my friends thought it made him cool to play that song in the Kristy’s every time he came in. (For reference: if most of the people in Gallup, New Mexico were Power Rangers, Krristy’s would be the juice bar where everyone hangs out.) It was not cool. In fact, we all kind of hated him.

Kristy’s is a major setting for my novel, and a character does the “I’m Too Sexy” thing. I happens repeatedly, but I can easily edit the subsequent uses out. That first use, though, is supposed to capture the despair those first three lines brought in me every time I heard them. Why the fuck can’t I use those twenty-one words without paying out a fortune?

Greed. That’s all.

Music is ingrained in us, from catchy ad jingles to that guy whistling on the elevator. We sing the lyrics to ourselves or other people all the time. It’s a part of our lives, and denying writers the right to use these words is denying us the right to properly chronicle how we live, how we talk to each other. My novel is about teenagers, and what do teenagers care about if not music? That used to be the first question I’d ask of anyone I met when I was that young, even before learning their name: “What kind of music do you listen to?” How does that count as “Fair Use?”

When I wrote this novel a year and a half ago, I had come to terms with Right Said Fred. Their one-hit wonder was a classic by that point, and I had begrudgingly accepted that. Even though I haven’t exchanged a word with the asshole who heralded himself with that song like it was fucking “Hail to the Chief,” I kind of love his chutzpah in retrospect. But after talking to three lawyers and Neil Gaiman (relax, it was on Tumblr), and now the legal department of my publisher, I kind of hate it again.

If he’d had the right, would Fred have approved of my use of the lyrics? I don’t know. The characters’ reaction to them isn’t positive. But I can use the title, so it doesn’t matter anyway. I have to rewrite the paragraph or the entire passage so I don’t just say, “She heard the first words of ‘I’m Too Sexy’ and slammed her head down on her book.” I’m too good a writer for that, all so some rich douchebags can charge me a thousand dollars or more for their use, douchebags who have never a created a thing in their lives except enough money to buy a yacht. I am so mad right now.

I’m too sexy for this bullshit.

To Draw or Not to Draw

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Back when I wanted to make action comics, I had a little vigilante with no name. His original story was five issues, based on Hamlet. I wrote the first five scripts, but they are lost to history (Newcastle destroyed my laptop), and my attempt to make a novel of it failed when I couldn’t make five issues drag on for more than 20,000 words. The book would have been called Tantalus. I modeled the character after Bruce Lee, and I gave him a cane he never needed when he was fighting or doing parkour (symbolism) as well as a scarf that would have been a good visual. The book was always intended to be in black and white. I decided, after fifteen years, to draw the character again, and I went a little more stark than he had been in the past. It would have been called Tantalus.

Here is the one I just did.

Here is one of my earlier sketches from 2002.

A more dynamic one from 2003 I would like to have used as a cover:

As well as a couple of dynamic pictures from 2008.

I think I’m done with this character, but I loved his look, and he’s fun to draw. The one I just did didn’t turn out great, but I should give it another shot.

Justice Stinks!

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In west-central New Mexico there is a humble city. Maybe not that humble. Anyway, this city was a magnet for evildoers, and wherever and whenever crime, mayhem, and naughtiness struck, its humble (or not) citizens would cry out for the fragrant justice of their hometown champions!

            When he was a child, young Barry fell into a radioactive sewer and gained the power and abilities of that sewer! From that day forth, he dedicated himself to the protection of Gallup, New Mexico as Sewerboy!

When he was a child, young Eugene sat down on a radioactive cactus and gained the power and abilities of that cactus! His idol, Sewerboy took him under his wing, and he fought by his side as the Kactus Kid!

Over the years, they developed quite the rogue’s gallery, including The Nitpicker (“You’re going to jail, Nitpicker!” “How can I be going to jail if I’m standing right here?”) …

The Passive-Aggressive Giant (“I guess I could go to jail. I feel bad about my mom, though, who has a bad back and can’t do any of the yardwork.”) …

And Irwin, God of Cannabis (“Perhaps we shouldn’t, uh, talk about Irwin.”)

But never was evil more powerful than with the caffeinated villainy of Major Jitters, who drank a radioactive cup of coffee and gained the power and ability of that coffee, and she chose to use it for nefarious ends. All it takes to unleash her awesome gifts is a wholesome mug full of Joe.

With her army of café-themed goons, she has cut a swath through the innocent (?) city of Gallup.

But when it comes to muscle, none can defeat the Percolator.

When evil is afoot, when all seems lost, you’ll hear the battle cry of Sewerboy and know you’re in safe hands.

“Justice Stinks!”

Does Whatever a Mortal Can

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I love drawing comics. The comic book I’m working on, the second chapter of Best Fiends Forever, is not my first comic book. The first chapter of Best Fiends Forever was not my first comic book. The one I worked on nineteen years ago for those smug dudes in New York who badmouthed me after I quit was not my first comic book. My first comic book was MortalMan, in 2003, and I dug up some of my sketches from back then.

You probably don’t know this if you’ve picked up comic reading in the past twenty-five-to-thirty years, but once upon a time, issues were self-contained, and the only thing you needed to know was in a one- or two-sentence summary near the logo. For example: “When Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider, he developed abilities of a spider and learned that with great power comes great responsibility.” From there, you’d pretty quickly catch up on Spider-Man’s specific powers and enemies, usually through narration.

For MortalMan, the banner was: “When Joe Branford was bitten by a radioactive spider, he had a rash for three weeks and learned that with no power comes no responsibility.” Joe (first pic) was a good-natured teenager who watched TV and read comics perhaps a little too much. However, this prepared him for some of the weird shit to hit Gallup, New Mexico. For example, he was not fazed when he met a talking dog named Pete, figuring he was just bilingual. Pete is a goth. He sees the world as gray and bleak, he writes dark poetry, and he attempts suicide in the first issue (if I were going to write this again, I’d probably change that last bit). He and Joe hit it off, and they hang out at the mall.

This is Kgnydjll and Fphihln (pronounced “Nigel” and “Phil”) emissaries for the Galactic Empire who come to Earth in the first issue to welcome us to the fold. Unfortunately, they arrive in time for a Science Fiction Convention, and no one believes they’re aliens.

I had a lot of big plans for MortalMan, and I wrote a lot of scripts, but I never followed through with them. Joe and Pete were going to run afoul of a pair of John-Woo-inspired super spies and a mob of Tarantino-esque gangsters at a Mafia Convention being held in Gallup, and they were going to rediscover the long-retired superhero guardians of Gallup, Sewerboy and the Kactus Kid.

One of their rogues’ gallery was Irwin the God of Cannabis.

More on Sewerboy et al on a separate post.

At one point, Joe was going to get sucked into hell and would escape when a pair of little boys, attempting to tunnel to China, dig a hole in Perdition’s walls, leaving Joe stranded in Hastings, Nebraska. On his way home, he’d run into my most ambitious creation, M: the scourge of I-80, based on my dear friend, Emilie. With her sidekick, Pixie (based on our friend Abby), she leaps from car to car and liberates the change from drivers’ ashtrays. To pull her off, I’d have to learn how to draw a lot of cars and some very kinetic poses. Twenty years ago, I knew I had it in me. Now, I’m a little more humble.

I still have the original art for the comic, sans word balloons, but I don’t have the script, nor the scripts for future issues because Newcastle liked to sit on my laptop, and 18 years ago, he was much heavier and broke my hard drive.

And yet, I am starting to look for a projects after I’m finished with Best Fiends Forever…

Call It A Draw

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I’ve been prepping for a while now, and I have one more pre-production task to do, but this weekend, I’m going to start working on my third comic (technically my seventh, but the other four were done roughly two decades ago). I’m looking forward to this. I’ve got a script that’s been broken into pages and panels, and a lot of the obnoxious stuff has been edited out. All I need to do is finish layouts before I pull out the Bristol boards.

I learned some lessons from the last two comics I did, and I want to incorporate them into this one:

  1. Don’t rush. I’m not on a deadline, and no one is clamoring to see it. I need to take my time on each page.
  2. Don’t settle. I have an eraser, and I can use it as much as I need to. I’m never happy with the art I finish because I’m frustrated or I just want to get it over with.
  3. Watch the eraser. I’ve come to realize that the larger erasers I’ve been using are smearing the paper. I need one I can control.
  4. Backgrounds, backgrounds, backgrounds. I need to put as much work into those as into what I’d rather be drawing. A good background is invisible, and an over-simplified or missing background is glaring.
  5. Most importantly, practice. If I don’t know how to draw something, I shouldn’t learn on the page.

On the last point, the first page of my new comic focuses on children. When you’re used to drawing adults, it’s tough to remember that they’re not miniature adults. Take this panel from acclaimed comic artist, John Byrne. These are toddlers.

Mindful of this, I gave it a try for myself (while also practicing how to do a playground and mountains, both which also feature on page 1). I did way better than acclaimed comic artist, John Byrne.

On the left is Max Fuentes, Criminal Mastermind of the Third Grade. To the right is his enforcer, Lisa Green.

Another problem I have is likenesses. My former neighbor, the eccentric bombshell Cleo, guest stard, so I gave that a shot (while also working on backgrounds). I still need to do her roommate, Brandyn, who also puts in an appearance, but I have plenty of time to practice until I get there.

No more excuses. Time for layouts so I can get started. Wish me luck!

$&*#)%!#$&^$#%^&!!!!

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An Essay by Jeremiah Murphy

This is something that’s been low-grade bugging me for a while, and I’ve decided that I’m going to come right out and complain about it. I know several of you do this, which has stopped me from saying anything.

Before we go on, I want you to know that there are certain words I’ll never say, and they are all slurs. Most of them, I just don’t say at all. For example, there’s a seven-letter word that starts with W that refers to a person of Mexican heritage. I don’t say “W-word.” I don’t hint at it at all. There is no reason for me to say it, ever, so there’s no reason to bring it up, even obliquely.

In the case of a very bad word to refer to Black people, this one is so rooted in this culture that occasionally, you have to refer to it (hopefully without using it as intended), and “N-word” will do. There’s the case of the “R-word,” an attack on people with certain disabilities, I don’t use that word either, neither in its pure form or the abbreviated version. (Confession: in a moment of anger a few years ago, I used the real word to refer to Senator Tom Cotton, but that’s because he was acting like an R-word. I apologized to my audience immediately.)

There’s the “C-word,” the one that’s not that big a deal in the United Kingdom but is the worst word in America. I’ve never said the word aloud, but I’ve written it a few times in my novels, for shock comedic effect (like when I had a prim and proper mother call a ten-year-old girl a C-word). It’s best if you limit it to one C-word per novel. Other than that, there is no need for me to even say “C-word.”

You may have figured out my point, but I’m going to spell it out. If you’re not going to say or write it, don’t. It’s one thing to bleep out a word on Arrested Development. It’s another thing to bleep repeatedly for comedic effect. It’s yet another thing to be bleep out movie clips because YouTube’s draconian ratings system won’t let you monetize unless they can control your language. (There was one video I couldn’t get through because they bleeped out the word “sex.” In an essay about Ezra Miller.) But the people I’m complaining about aren’t even bleeping.

The aforementioned video about Ezra Miller put transcripts on the screen. When the word “sex” came up, which it did because it’s Ezra Miller, they spelled it like this: “s*x.” Why didn’t they just say sex? Are the potentially offended people supposed to read that and think, “That Ezra Miller person sure loves the saxophone”?

And that brings me to you. I see posts from friends and relatives where they will write f**k, and there’s no reason to censor the word “fork.” Sometimes they will go so far as to say “f*ck.” Why? I mean this sincerely, why? First off, why are you censoring yourself in the first place? Is it because you don’t want to say a bad word? You’re saying it. There is no difference between “fuck” and “f*ck.” It doesn’t fool people into thinking you’re not a bad person. You wrote “fuck.” Are you worried about offending someone? You said “fuck,” and they will be offended anyway, even if it’s a quote. The same goes for “s**t,” “a**hole,” “c*ck,” “d**k,” and, yes, I’ve even seen “c*nt.”

I have a potty mouth, and I have since I was a kid. In the musical Guys and Dolls, they extoll the virtues of the past by saying, “Good authors too who once knew better words; now only use four-letter words writing prose; anything goes.” I had a teacher in high school steal and read my journal and write in the margins that I cussed too much. So many people have told me that it’s a sign of laziness to use swear words. Well fuck all of you.

I can self-censor. I’ve don’t use the word at work. It is rare that I will make a Facebook post that has foul language in it (not counting my essays, in which anything goes). But I don’t understand what is so taboo about bad words. They’re a part of our language. They have rich meanings, and they’re very descriptive, not just in their literal sense or shock value. They even have very specific rules. For example, if you want to insert the word “fuck” into “absolutely” for emphasis, there is only one syllable it fits between. Otherwise, it’s like trying to say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious after you’ve had a root canal. I fantasize about using the word “fuckery” in a work email because there’s no other word that describes what I’m dealing with.

I’m not trying to turn you into potty mouths. I have friends who don’t swear, ever. (I did have a friend who never said fuck until the time he whispered it in my ear with no witnesses around, then denied it, just to fuck with me.) Most of the time, I don’t notice until they are about to say a swear word (mostly when quoting someone) and bleep themselves out. They don’t call me foul-mouthed for saying bad words, I don’t call them prudes for not. But one thing they don’t do is shut the “f*ck” up. They’ve made their commitment.

The people who write “f**k” understand the value of the word. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t use it. They’re not fooling anyone. You won’t commit to swearing, you won’t commit to not swearing, and that’s pretty weak. Say it or find some other way of expressing it. It’s time to sh*t or get off the pot.

Chapter 6

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[For context: the narrator, Nora, is a veteran assassin who thinks Julie Andrews is a righteous bitch, and Edgar is the guy she rescued from a suicide attempt.]

“Let me be the first to welcome you back,” Edgar said as he left the PATH turnstile.

I laughed “Well, let me just say I’m honored to be here.”

He led me out of the station. “The financial district is really my hood. I have done a lot of temping here.”

If you draw a shape that cannot possibly exist in a three-dimensional universe, it’s called a tesseract. You could conceivable fit infinity into one. The corridors under the World Trade Center were a tesseract. The only reason I emerged into the plaza between the towers was because I had a guide. I barely found the PATH station on my own from the subway.

We stepped off of the World Trade Center campus and went one block north. “We’re here,” he told me.

I looked around, a frown on my face. “Are you sure, because the only thing I see is a bodega.”

He nodded.

“That bodega makes the best bagel?” I asked.

He grinned and gestured me inside the building. In the back was a guy, probably Armenian, who said, “What you want.” It wasn’t a question.

Edgar reminded me, “They have everything, and everything.”

“I’ll take a plain bagel with butter,” I told the scowling man behind the counter.

While he sliced my bagel in half, Edgar said, “You have the choice of all the bagel flavors in existence, and you went with plain.”

“If they can’t make a good plain bagel,” I replied, “what good are they?”

The Armenian man put the bagel on a rolling toaster and asked Edgar, “What you want?”

“Cinnamon bagel with peanut butter,” Edgar said.

I smirked. “I never took you for a cinnamon bagel guy.”

He smirked back. “How was The Princess Diaries, by the way?”

“On reflection, I did walk into that one.”

We left the bodega and wandered the streets, unwrapping and biting into our bagels. It might not have been the best plain bagel in the city, but it was the best I’d ever had. I swallowed. “I’m coming back to this place as many times as—”

BOOM!

The ground shook under our feet.

“What the hell was that?” I demanded, looking left and right for some answers. South of us, I could make out people screaming.

Edgar looked straight up and dropped his bagel. “Fuck?”

I followed his gaze to the Twin Towers, half of which were on fire. How the fuck did something like that happen? It was probably a plane, a big one. Was the pilot drunk? Having a heart attack? Wasn’t there a copilot to keep this kind of thing from happening? That airline was going to get the pants sued off of it.

What was worse was that whole subway lines were going to be shut down over this. No cab was going to come here to pick me up, and I was wearing heels. How was I supposed to get home?

We stared at the fire for a long time, maybe even a half hour, and then a plane flew into the other tower, making that same BOOM and shaking the ground. The screams got louder.

Okay, that was not an accident. Somebody purposefully bloodied America’s nose. I was actually impressed.

The most important thing I needed to do was get out of there. Anywhere outside of the Financial District, I didn’t care. Just pick a street and go north.

Edgar took a step in the direction of the World Trade Center, and I grabbed his arm. “The way out is that way,” I told him, pointing in the opposite direction.

“I need to make sure they’re okay.”

“Everybody on the top of both towers is screwed,” I said, “and we’re probably going to get lung cancer from breathing in all this asbestos.”

“You think there’s asbestos?” he asked.

“It was built in the seventies, of course there’s asbestos. Now let’s get the fuck out of here.” Not wanting to wait around to explain it to him, I dragged him up the street with no idea where I was going. I needed a cab, a subway entrance, something.

I know I had been doing this a while because the first subway station I saw was City Hall. I pulled out my MetroCard, which was pay-per-ride, not unlimited, so I could swipe twice to get us both through.

While we waited, Edgar craned his neck to look outside, but he didn’t have a good view.

I said, “Look, Edgar, I have no idea what’s going on, but I know I can get you out of here. I will keep you safe.”

“I need to help those people,” he muttered.

“Edgar!” I snapped, holding his shoulders and forcing him to look at me, “the Twin Towers are on fucking fire. All those people on those floors were instantly burned alive or even vaporized. You’re just an out-of-shape writer without a story. I love you, Edgar, but the best thing you can do now is get out. We’ll get you to Hoboken somehow.”

The train arrived, and we stepped onboard. Considering that the previous stop was Cortland Street, inside the World Trade Center complex, I’d expected a lot more riders, but we were alone. Exhausted, I plopped down on one of the hard, plastic seats. Edgar sat beside me.

“I need to do something,” he sighed as the train pulled away from the station.

“Join the army as soon as we figure out who we’re going to war with.” Who would we go to war with? If both towers were struck by planes, that meant terrorists. I didn’t know much about terrorists, just that they attacked other countries, not ours. Destroying two of the tallest buildings in the United States was pretty ambitious for any terrorist. As long as the US treated this as a law-enforcement situation and not as a war, we had a chance of figuring out who did this and bringing them to justice. However, if we went to war with a stateless adversary, then we were in danger of another Vietnam. “On second thought, don’t join the military.”

The driver of the train didn’t announce our stop. They were preoccupied. However, we pulled into the Canal Street station as usual. The doors hung open for a minute, and, just before they closed, Edgar sprang to his feet and outside. I tried to follow, but he had timed it perfectly.

He mouthed, “Sorry!”

“Edgar, you idiot!” I screamed, hopefully loud enough to be heard through the shatter-proof windows. When the train rolled out of the station, I stated, “I’m going to kill you.” Coming from me, that was no idle threat.

I had a lot of patience, which was part of the reason I was so good at my job. I called upon that patience while the train rolled uptown, until we hit the next stop, Prince Street, close to Houston Street, which meaning not that close at all to the World Trade Center, which was where Edgar was headed. I calmly exited the train, walked up street level, kicked off my heels, and ran, barefoot, down Broadway.

Man was not meant to run barefoot on a sidewalk, and I could feel the abrasions on my feet. I’d soak them in Epson salt after I saved Edgar’s life so I could strangle him to death with my own hands.

While catching my breath, I saw one person tell another person, “They got the Pentagon!”

How many planes did these guys have? The amount of coordination involved in this endeavor was mind-boggling. Someone in a cave somewhere figured out how to bring the United States to its knees. If they had asked me to plan a way to freak America out to the bone, I never would have had the imagination to think of this. At the risk of giving them too much credit, these guys were evil geniuses.

Whoever it was, I’d kill them. Save the troops, save the billions they’d spend going to war with an invisible enemy. Just send me in there. Give me a week, problem solved.

I put up with the blisters on the soles of my feet as I started to encounter scores of people going in the opposite direction. But he closer I got, the more people were just gawking. I suppose they had a good reason. What were they planning on doing if the towers fell over? Me, I would be in a different borough, if it weren’t for—

“Edgar!” I shouted.

That was definitely him. He turned around and smiled. “Nora, I have to help these people.”

“There’s got to be five hundred firefighters in the towers right now,” I told him. “What do they want with a skinny, out-of-shape gothic boy?”

He studied the entrance to the South Tower far away and took a step toward it. I snagged his arm with my hand and held him in place. He looked at me with pleading eyes.

I said, “I did not save you from killing yourself so you can turn around and kill yourself.”

“Let me go, Nora.”

“But I barely had you,” I said.

“You don’t know me, Nora.”

I let him go. He ran off into the distance to the tower.

“Don’t you fucking die, Edgar,” I whispered. “I’ll wait right here.” He got farther away. “I’ll wait right—”

I felt like I was underwater, and a muffled roar, groans, and collisions were attacking me, and something shoved me onto my back onto the street, and the world switched to gray, with flecks of black and white, making it look like, as William Gibson would say, a TV tuned to a dead channel. A few feet away, I could make out a hunched-over shadow, and then another and another. The only thing I could think of to do was find something like a wall and anchor myself to that.

Using some of that patience I rely on, I waited until the air thinned out, and I could see for more than three feet. It was now closer to ten, maybe fifteen. I decided to take my chances, and I headed for the area I remembered the South Tower.

However, when I got there, the only thing I could see was the shadow of a section of the towers’ latticework shell sticking straight up out of the ground. The South Tower wasn’t there. I looked over my shoulder and saw more latticework and no North Tower.

I sighed, “I got to sit down.” I found what appeared to be a corner of the building and sat on that. “Ugh,” I grunted, coughing in the ash-filled air, “I am definitely getting cancer from this.”

You kill one person, you’re a bad guy. You kill ten people, you’re a monster. Is there a word for the six thousand people they probably killed today? I couldn’t think of anything big enough. I could safely say that I was literally a mass murderer, and I looked like a saint compared to these guys, whoever they were.

I got up and headed home. The searing pain on the soles of my feet focused me as I lurched forward, completely covered in ash—the remains of the people in the building, one foot in front of the other. I couldn’t let my mind wander like I usually would because the pain and the effort took so much concentration.

“Step, move my weight, step, move my weight …”

I wasn’t sure how I did it, but I opened the door to my apartment. With every two steps, I shed another article of clothing until I stood in the bathroom, naked. I turned on the shower, let it heat up, and stepped inside. Without a little cold water to cool it down, the water scalded. Good, maybe if it got hot enough, I could scrub the remains of thousands of people off of my body.

With crimson skin, I finally left the shower and laid down on my bed. It was still light out, but I didn’t have it in me to do anything tonight, not even sleep.

He was gone. I felt like I had finally found something I had never been looking for. I knew him for a week, and we only spent a few hours with each other. He got a coldblooded killer to care about something. And now he was nothing but ash.

“I don’t even know his last name,” I told the empty room.

Time passed, and my phone rang. Not my work phone, but my personal phone. I picked it up and barked, “Only one person has this number, and—”

“It’s me.”

Neither one of us spoke for a while.

“I thought,” I said with an eerie calm, “you were dead, Edgar. I’ve been mourning you for hours.”

“I underst—”

“Holy shit!” I shouted as loudly as I possibly could. “You’re alive! I thought I saw you die.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “Here I am.”

“Where’s here?” I asked. “Were you able to get back to Hoboken?”

“I’m at Union Square,” he told me. “There’s plenty of places to rest here.”

“Wait right there,” I said and hung up. I called the number for Brown Limousines and demanded, “I want a car to take me to Fourteen Street, no excuses.”

“Traffic is blocked below Fourteenth Street,” the dispatcher told me.

“It’s a good thing I’m only going to Fourteenth Street then.”

The car arrived in four minutes, and we were quickly at Union Square. The driver generously volunteered to wait for me to pick up my friend, and I quickly found a half-asleep Edgar on the lawn. I had to partially carry him, despite the fact that it was my feet that were destroyed looking for him, and we made it to the car.

The driver wasn’t having it. “You think I want to clean that shit off of my leather seats? Get a cab if you want to drive somewhere.”

“Do you even know what’s been happening today?”

“No, but traffic below Fourteenth is cut off. Is there a marathon or something?”

I closed my eyes impatiently. “Two planes crashed into the Twin Towers, and they don’t exist anymore. Apparently something like this happened at the Pentagon, but I heard that in passing, so take it with a grain of salt. The world is ending, and you’re going to begrudge a guy who was close enough to get covered in ash because you’re worried your car is going to get dirty? You’re going to do this today of all days? Where’s your generosity? Your charity?” That last bit was laying it on a little thick, but I was in a mood.

“I get it, I get it,” the driver muttered. “You can ride in my car. If you come to me covered in ash any other day but today, you’re walking home. Do you understand me?”

“I’ll tell him when he wakes up,” I said.

“This is just great,” the driver grumbled. “All the streets downtown will be closed for Allah knows how long, and the detours are going to go all the way up to the Fashion District. And don’t forget all the emergency vehicles, snarling up traffic. I tell you, I’d be better off getting blown up in the Twin Towers.”

The Printed Menace Revisited

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I learned how to read from comic books. My dad had a huge stack of The Amazing and The Spectacular Spider-Man, The Avengers, and my personal favorite, the first fifty or so issues of The Defenders, all from the seventies and early eighties, and I read them obsessively. He had an original copy of Amazing Spiderman #129. In many ways, my dad was awesome.

I stuck with comics through the nineties, and I refused to take sides during great rivalry between adjectiveless Spider-Man and X-Men #1s. I remember my friend Tony telling me I was stupid for not picking up Superpro #1 because it was a NUMBER ONE, DUDE! I foresaw the collapse of the speculator boom when this guy I knew bragged about how he bought five copies of Spawn #1, and I thought, “If he has five copies, and his friends have five copies, who’s going to buy them? (And sure enough, twelve years later, when Chris Claremont did a surprising signing at Jim Hanley’s Comics in New York City, I bought a copy of the gatefold cover of X-Men #1 for a buck, or 20 percent of what I paid for it in 1990.)

When a guy named Robert opened a comic book store in my tiny hometown in 1993, I had found home, as well as Grendal, and I hung out there until 1994, when I went to college and became an intellectual, reading only Sandman. After that, I branched back out into the comics world and discovered lots of new stuff, a collection only confined by the size of the tiny apartments that my ex-wife (X-Wife?) and I lived in. When we moved to the DC metropolitan area, she surprised me with tickets to DC’s AwesomeCon, where I met my first muse, Peter David. But one day, I just stopped reading, even books by my favorite writers, such as Ed Brubaker.

However, my youngest sister, who prior to this point, read only Garth Ennis Punisher comics, suddenly became fascinated by Robin, and from there has become her own encyclopedia. When I told her who Snapper Carr was, she found out quickly that I had no idea what I was talking about. The student has surpassed the master.

Which brings me to the main event. Originally written to pit Brian Michael Bendis and Warren Ellis against each other. I love them both. They’re both very clever, very exciting, very cerebral writers, but they couldn’t be more different. To explain this to my friends (and later to my sister), I let them both write Star Wars. As I’ve revisited this, I’ve added more writers with distinctive voices.

Brian Michael Bendis:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: You got a bad feeling about this?
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: About this?
LUKE: Yes.
HAN: A bad feeling?
LUKE: Yes.
HAN: You got a bad feeling about this?
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
LEIA: This?
LUKE: This.
LEIA: This is what you got a bad feeling about?
LUKE: It is.
LEIA: You got a bad feeling about this?
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!
LUKE: Chewie’s got a bad feeling about it, too.
LEIA: About this?
LUKE: He does.

Warren Ellis:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: Me, too. Let’s shoot it in the head.
LEIA: (Lights cigarette) Bloody right, then.
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!

Frank Miller:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN (In captions): I had a bad feeling about this, too. A real bad feeling. A bad feeling burning ice cold in my gut. It tells me things are bad. Real bad. I watch the boy. Luke Skywalker. Age eighteen. He thinks he knows what he’s getting into, but he has no idea how bad it’s going to get. This feeling he’s got? It’s roses. Roses and picnics and apple pies to how it’s really going to get. Luke Skywalker. Age eighteen. He’s in for a world of hurt.
LEIA: Oh, Han! I can’t stand it anymore! I have to have you! You’re so manly! Take me, you wicked, manly space pirate! Smuggle yourself inside of me! Take me now!
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!
HAN (In captions): The Wookie screams a dark, primal scream into the cold, dead interstellar void. A void colder and deader than that bad feeling in my gut. The Wookie screams. I know how it feels.

Joss Whedon:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: Then maybe we should go all Buck Rogers on it and kick its evil ass! Set phasers to awesome!
LEIA: Totally!
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!

Garth Ennis:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: Fuck!
LEIA: Cocksucker!
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!

Kevin Smith:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: That’s because my cock is in your mouth!
LEIA: You guys are so gay!
CHEWBACCA: Han, I think your bluster hides the fact that you do, in fact, have sexual feelings for Luke, but are conflicted because there is also something there for Leia, as well.
LUKE: Snoochie-boochies!

Chris Claremont:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: Of course you got a bad feelin’ about this, old friend, because the evil we face is the Empire, which has caused us no end of difficulties. If you’ll recall, Darth Vader has revealed himself to be your father as part of his master plan to overthrow his lord and master, Emperor Palpatine [See The Empire Strikes Back—Ed.]. We’ll need to face this together …
LUKE (In a thought bubble): Han’s talking tough, but it was only recently that I was able to rescue him from the clutches of Jabba the Hutt, and he may still be suffering from the side-effects of carbonite hibernation [See The Return of the Jedi—Ed.]. He can’t keep pushing himself like this. Hey, is that an Imperial Storm Trooper about to shoot at us? It is! I’d better warn the others. (Out loud) Look out!
LEIA: (Thought bubble as she jumps over the blaster fire): Incredible! It was only months ago that I was a helpless princess in the clutches of Grand Moff Tarkin [See A New Hope—Ed.], but now that it has been revealed to me that I am the daughter of the once-noble-Jedi-turned-evil, Anakin Skywalker [See The Return of the Jedi—Ed.], and with the training I’ve received with the rebels, I can easily evade this blast! (Out loud, still mid-jump) Luke! Use your lightsaber and Jedi training to deflect the blast! Chewbacca! Use your crossbow gun to stop the Storm Trooper before he can get another shot off!
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH! [See The Revenge of the Sith—Ed.]

Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
LEIA: What are you gonna do about it?
LUKE: Are you going to wear the metal bikini all the time now?
HAN: I have no objection to this.
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!

Ed Brubaker:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: It’s about to get a lot worse. (Shoots Luke in the back) Now we can be together, Your Highness, without him standing in our way.
LEIA: (Points her gun at Han) Oh, Han, don’t you see? It was never about you and me. You were the one standing in my way.
HAN: No!
LEIA: (Shoots him.) Now, Chewie, we can take the money and get away from it all! Just you and me.
CHEWBACCA: (Strangles Leia) WRAURGH! (Wipes a single tear from his cheek.)

Neil Gaiman:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
NARRATOR: The bad feeling drifts through the hearts and minds of the galaxy, like the smell of something foul, yet bittersweet, like kimchi. The words cross their lips as the feeling overcomes them. The Correllians know it …
HAN: I got a bad feeling about this.
NARRATOR: The Mon Calamari know it …
ACKBAR: I got a bad feeling about this.
NARRATOR: The Gungan know it …
JAR-JAR: Meesa got a bad feelin’!
NARRATOR: The Hutts know it …
JABBA: Botaka! Hoo hoo hoo …
NARRATOR: The Ewoks know it …
WICKET: Yub yub!
NARRATOR: The Wookies know it …
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!
NARRATOR: But never is it more real than in the dreams of the exiled royalty of a world that is no longer there …
LEIA: I got a bad feeling about this.

Peter David:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: Are you sure it’s not “More Than a Feelin’”?
LEIA: (punches Han in the shoulder) Han, this is serious.
HAN: Oh, dry up, Princess.
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!

Grant Morrison:
LUKE: I got a bad feeling about this.
HAN: The only way we can get through this is if break the parsec barrier and cause a chain reaction. This will require everything we got, all of us. And if we fail, we run the risk of turning every living creature in the galaxy into yarn.
LEIA: (turns to camera) That is if it’s okay with the writers.

Ben Edlund:
LUKE: As he stares out across The Galaxy, the galaxy far away, our intrepid hero stands there, asking himself the same tough questions. What is it far away from? If Darth Vader is indeed his father, why don’t they have the same last name? Do they have Chinese food in space? It’s these questions and more that make him think. They make him cry out to the stars! The warring stars! I! GOT! A! BAD! FEELING! ABOUT! THIS! AND I’M OKAY WITH THAT!
HAN: Who are you talking to?
LUKE: Hello there, old chum. I’m just setting the mood.
CHEWBACCA: WRAURGH!

My favorite writer is Matt Wagner, but he doesn’t have any consistent tropes to hang one of these on. I was also going to do Mark Millar, but thinking about it made me want to throw up a little.

And Another Thing

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One more point on the reason I hate AI so much and why it’s not art: What’s the point? If you can produce a professional-looking image or a coherent novel or even a movie just by filling in some Mad-Libs, why would you even bother?

It’s frustrating that my art doesn’t look like it does in my head or that I’ll never illustrate those action comics I used to fantasize about walking home from the PATH train. It’s disappointing that I’m not going to finish the last comic I started working on. But look at what I’ve done in the past 25 years. I can crank out a full-color drawing in about a day, and it’s hard. And yet I take pride in my poses. I savor filling in the details. I can’t do that by typing in a box.

I’ve written over 30 novels, plus several unfinished, and with each one I fell in love with the characters, and I learned who they were with every page. Whether you’re a plotter or a pantser, piecing together a story is a rewarding challenge, and one I hope to get back to someday.

I’ve even made 2 movies in my life, one in French, and I don’t even remember the finished project. I don’t even remember the titles–wait. They were The Rat and Rambo et Juliet. What I do remember clearly is hanging out with my friends and traveling all over town and being goofballs and how Max simulated the sound of someone falling off of a balcony (he stomped on a small branch behind the camera).

I’m never going to be a famous artist or writer or a filmmaker. My stuff will never be as polished as what some of these AI engines have produced, and I don’t care. It’s not sampled from other art (I use a lot of references, though, and some swiping) and writing and movies, it’s mine.

One day soon, all of our popular movies, books, and graphic images may be produced by AIs, but it won’t be art. And I, for one, and really smug about that.

Or, to put it another way, I bought this from an MOC site.

After spending an hour with it, I had this.

Another hour later, this:

I could have scoured the internet and found a Short Circuit action figure and put it on a shelf and forgot about it immediately, or I could have spent my drawing time this morning enjoying it, feeling it in my hand, guessing which iconic part of the robot I was constructing next, and building a scale replica of a memory from my childhood from a couple bags of plastic. I feel accomplished, and on a day I had Artist’s Block, I passed the time (somewhat) productively.

Some things shouldn’t be easy—not because it’s hard for me, but because it’s good for the soul.

Girl of my Dreams

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I could say I don’t dream, but humans will die if they don’t dream, so I’ll say I don’t remember them. Every once in a while, I’ll get one that sticks with me and inspires me. In 2005 or 2006, I dreamt that a middle-aged mentor type was tempting me to smoke marijuana (which I hadn’t done by that point for over a year) in the library by saying, “Let’s take a walk on the green,” a phrase that I don’t think was used by a marijuana smoker at any other point in history. I was also a student in high school, and I was my age at the time (let’s see, 2005 was eighteen years ago, so that would have been twelve), and I had a thing going on with a fellow student. I took the imagery, reduced the creep factor, and penned my first novel, posting it on LiveJournal while I was writing it.

A side effect of marijuana withdrawal is vivid dreams, which would explain why I’ve woken up over the past few weeks, swearing I would write this down as soon as I finished brushing my teeth, then forgetting everything. The other night, though, grabbed me. It wasn’t the part where Kim Basinger came onto me and eventually kissed me. Of course not—I think kissing is gross. It wasn’t that I tracked down Clark so I could brag. Clark was a childhood acquaintance of my ex-wife who moved to Bloomington while we were there who turned out to have a lot in common with me, and we became good friends. Ultimately, he was Team Kate, and like everyone else I met through her*, he ghosted me following the divorce.

But what got me so much I didn’t forget, even after brushing my teeth, was what happened when I was lying in the hammock in my backyard. The hammock exists in real life, though I haven’t touched it in over a year, during which it rained an average of every third day. Approaching me from the alley on a dirt bike was a slight figure wearing a hoodie, hood up. The figure hopped off the bike, let it fall, and rushed over to me. It was dusk, so it took me a while to figure out it was a girl in her mid-teens, her face obscured by the shadows. We fell into an easy conversation. I don’t know what we were talking about, but it had to do with my book. Eventually, she pushed her bike home, and I walked with her.

We did this every day—she’d meet me on the hammock, always at dusk, and we’d walk together through the dirt road that cut through my neighborhood. The hood stayed up until the last trip together when she pulled it down. I don’t know what color her hair was because of the grayish blue of the sky and the amber of the street lamps, but she was pretty, with delicate features. She also had the scars of a Glasgow smile, which is one name for the Joker’s disfigurement in The Dark Knight. It didn’t upset me, and it never occurred to me to even wonder where it came from. All I saw was the girl’s unique face.

That wasn’t the reason it was our last walk together. She invited me over to dinner to meet her family, but when I tried to drive over to her house, I couldn’t find it. And in the way that dreams will change the subject, it wasn’t about the nameless girl anymore.

The scars aren’t the reason I haven’t stopped thinking about her for the past couple of days either. It was her positivity. She had a warm, friendly, energetic personality that made me feel at ease, the way no stranger, or most people I know can. Our conversations, even though I don’t remember what they were about, were intimate. She didn’t think of herself as ugly, and the scars didn’t get in the way of her finding someone to talk to. I feel like I could learn from that.

In the way I took the classroom and the relaxed mentor of that dream eighteen years ago and spun it into a long tale, I’d like to write about this girl, but I don’t have any ideas for a story. And on top of that, I don’t want people shipping the me character and the girl. I’m thirty years older than she is, and even the idea of being her friend is already kind of weird.

In the way that I dreamed about falling in love when I was young, I dreamed about making a close friend, something I have a dearth of. The day after I watched a goofy Marvel franchise descend into DC darkness, I could use a little positivity. I have a new character now. She just needs a name and she needs a story.

* With a pair of exceptions—though she actively reached out and tried to recruit them to her side.

** Which was the dirt road in front of the house I lived in in high school.