Here’s something I’ve been meaning to post for a long time.
Back in 1998-2000, Brenden Fletcher and I devoted almost all of our time to creating a comic series called Miki. It was a lot of things to us: a crash course in storytelling and writing, an experimentation of form, and an introduction to the comics industry and pitching to publishers. Like most rookie efforts, it was a massive, sprawling epic of a story that was destined to go unfinished. What began as a simple idea about a girl surviving in a world full of zombies grew into a multi-part, genre-spanning tale of love and loss. We spent months brainstorming, hours in cars driving to and from various Comic-Cons talking about the story, creating soundtrack playlists for inspiration, and I have I-don’t-know-how-many pages of sketchbooks filled with character and creature designs, costumes, locations, etc.
Then we began actual production on the comic. I drew several pages of the first scene over the course of many months and because we were young, brazen iconoclasts (and lovers of film) we decided that we’d eschew everything great about the medium of comics and tell our story in the form of film storyboards. We were too cool to even use word balloons–the dialogue is printed underneath the panels. And sound effects??? Please.
So we did all of this work, even going so far as to bother the talented Andy Lee for paintings to use in the story (they’re presented here as chapter illustrations), and then we put together the pitch bible you see above. Hours at the photocopier, ring binding, thick cover stock, hand-stamped sigils on the cover (we made our own stamp). Spared no expense. And we went to some comic shows and got it into the hands of a bunch of publishers in an effort to get it made into a real book.
And Image Comics got back to us! We had a phone call with Jim Valentino, who was the publisher at the time, who told us that it looked great and that they’d like to publish it but there was no way they could do it in this format. Three slow-paced panels per page did not make a very compelling 22-page comic (or even a 44-page one, for that matter). So we’d have to reformat it. I then spent an additional number of weeks RE-drawing pages in a more traditional comics format. The pacing was different. It felt different. Morale was low. And then I started taking other jobs…
And that was it.
What you see here is the culmination of all of those years and all of that work. The original pitch bible we gave to publishers. I found a copy at my parents’ house, water-damaged and getting mouldy, and I photographed all of the pages for you guys to see. It’s all there: the drawn pages, some colour samples, a story synopsis, and 35 pages of the script we were writing (in screenplay format, of course). It even has the old Horhaus studios information in it (it’s pronounced ‘whorehouse’ because again, we were young and thought it was funny. Let me tell you, it wasn’t so funny when Valentino called us and we had to say it out loud.)
There’s so much more of this in my archives, in sketchbooks, on old ZIP drives. There’s a black and white 3-page story we started with, another 4-page colour story we gave to people as a teaser in Chicago, so much more. But it would take a lot of digging to find it all.
What did I learn from all of this? Well, more than anything, I learned that working on creative stuff with Brenden was the happiest I’d ever been and that relationship is ongoing. A lot of what we’re doing in ISOLA (or in anything we write, really) is based on ideas we had back then. I learned that comics is an amazing medium that I should be taking advantage of, in all its forms. I learned that I should work on modestly-sized projects that I’m actually capable of finishing. I learned a lot. I’m still learning a lot from this. I went back and read through that script and you know what? It’s pretty good! It made me want to read more of it, which made me really happy and also a bit sad because we’ll never go back to it. It is what it is and I’m proud of it with all its flaws. I hope you find some enjoyment in it or learn something from it. Let me know what you think down below.
