By 2005, four years had passed since
a handful of friends and I had first discussed self-publishing our comic
anthology, with nothing to show for it.
We all harbored ideas of one day being (magically) discovered as the
brilliant creators we knew ourselves to be.
That road is more difficult to hoe when you don’t do the work. We wrote some scripts and got some pages
penciled, but we did not create enough content to fill a proper book, and, even
more to the point of why we never published anything, we left all the
production stuff to a single person rather than taking on that responsibility
as well. So, in January of 2005, Dan and
I decided to finally do something about it and published the first issue of Warrior27. [see here,
here,
and here for more on that]. 2005 also saw my
first published work outside of Warrior27. That was the year I started to take my
writing seriously – emphasis on “started.”
That first issue, and our first
time exhibiting at a convention, was a bust.
But Dan and I learned from the experience and moved forward. With a bit more lead time, we were more
successful in finding artists for the next issue (a few who agreed to work on
the inaugural book fell off the face of the earth…or just didn’t return our
emails). Having not found our audience
at Wizard World Chicago, we wrapped the new book with a thematic spine across
all the stories and decided to exhibit at SPX in 2006, a crowd more in tune
with what we were doing with Warrior27.
That second time exhibiting was a great experience. (might’ve helped that our writing had improved,
as well)
Two years later, taking Steven
Grant’s advice to write within genres or mediums outside those one aspires to,
both Dan and I began writing for the Pulse, a pop culture website where Heidi
MacDonald had written. I wrote the
weekly column, “For Your Consideration,” at the Pulse, spotlighting online and
small press comics and creators. Dan wrote,
“Am I Alone In This?” encompassing his personal reading journey through comics. As Grant stated in his own column for CBR, if
one wishes to be a writer, one needs to write and take the opportunity for
publication wherever it may come, because any and all writing can only help you
improve your craft and evaluating one’s writing upon publication affords one a
different, and often better, perspective on its success, or lack thereof.
Dan and I published two more issues
of Warrior27, in 2008 and 2009, with ITMOD co-founder, Matt Constantine, joining us, along with some more great
artists. Dan and I also started finding
some publishing success outside our own venture. He got a short story published by Arcana, in their
second Dark Horrors anthology, and I started writing some short fiction for a
couple of burst culture sites – 50 Years From Now and Elephant Words.
In my mind, I was going to take the
Harrison Ford route – just keep plugging away at this creative endeavor until,
through atrophy, those others who started at the same time I did will have
fallen away like leaves, deciding it was too much effort for too little
reward.
After we published a 254-page of Warrior27,
which included all the best stories and articles from those four issues, along
with extras like the interview I did with Joe Quesada in 2001, Dan embarked on
a year-long blog adventure, My Year In Crime. For the entirety of 2010 and half of 2011,
Dan posted every day on his crime blog. It
was a great exercise and it garnered him a bit of attention, as he landed short
interviews with authors Duane Swierczynski and Victor Gischler. Achievement unlocked.
Not being a fool – and hewing
closely to the paraphrased adage to steal the best ideas – I started my own
year-long blog project in 2012, Reading Watchmen. For years, I’d been thinking about writing my
own page-by-page analysis of this seminal work by Alan Moore & Dave
Gibbons. With the template Dan provided, I finally went all in. Each month was dedicated to a single chapter
of the comic, opening with a quick thematic overview of the issue at hand,
followed by examinations of the cover and then the page-by-page annotations – a
page a day, every day, with the issue’s full annotations at the end of the
month. It was a big project, with daily
deadlines, but incredibly fulfilling. In
the end, I wrote a bit over 87,000 words on Watchmen and did not miss a
deadline.
At this point, the writing
continues, for both Dan and myself. I’ve
met with some success, having short stories published – comics and prose, alike
– every year since 2010, with two more scheduled, hopefully, for publication
this year. Right now, Dan is hip-deep in
his non-fiction novel, while I have begun the second half of a novel that’s
been sitting in the back of my brain ever since I taught on Matinicus Island,
twenty-four miles out in the Atlantic.
We’re not done yet – Dan and I are too damn pig-headed – and with the
tenth anniversary of that first issue of Warrior27 coming up this
August, we’re thinking of publishing something new. I don’t know what it will be – and I can’t
even say, for certain, that it will get done – but it’s exciting to think we’ve
come this far.
Here’s to the next ten years.
-chris
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