Friday, February 13, 2009

Caught in a nuclear accident or bitten by radioactive monster.

Hello and welcome to Origin Story, the thrilling tale of my attempts to create, write and ultimately get a comic series published. Calling it "thrilling" is just me being sardonic, but hopefully there will be some that find this interesting. I'm thinking of those that are themselves wanting to try to get a comic series published as well as hopefully those who are interested in the series and are potential readers/fans.

So let me begin by letting you know that I'm a little late on starting this blog as I have already created the concept, most of the characters and the mythology of the world of the comic. I've also already written the script for the first issue and, after an EXHAUSTIVE search, found an artist. Its just that it took me until all of that happened to say, "Hey, I should write a blog that follows the process of getting this comic published!" But I fully intend to play catch up and still fill you in on all the details of all the steps I've taken so far and on going.

So here we go. It all started with a dream...not a wake up in the middle of the night, sweaty and choking on your mouth guard dream. More like a brilliant, electric blue bolt of pure awesomeness that tore down from the heavens and invigorated my very soul! Or maybe I was slovenly pawing through a comic book (or cartoon book, as my girlfriend calls them), decided I liked the pretty pictures but couldn't draw and figured I'd try to make the funny words instead. Yeah, it was probably closer to that one.

For reals, I've always loved comic books and have fancied working in that industry in some capacity, while definitely knowing that I wanted to be a writer of some kind. That notion has been a part of me since my late teen years. A little over a year ago I turned 30 and still wasn't working in the comic industry, nor was I a writer of any kind (there were some semi successful start/stops in there, but my current income does not come my written word). Maybe I had one of those little "I'm 30 and not doing what I really want to do" moments. Or maybe instead of maybe, it was a definitely. So I forced myself to sit down and and start kicking around ideas and actually type them up.

Instinctively, like some type of species of goose native to Canada who's name I can't recall at the moment, I migrated to south. No, wait...I mean I migrated towards the types of things that I love. I guess if I really want to be a writer I need to work on the ol' similes. Anyway, some of those things that I love that I migrated towards were giant monster movies. Kaiju, if you like it sushi (uninteresting fact, though I'm highly interested in all things Japanese, I hate sushi. I know, I know: crazy. But it's more of out of an ongoing disagreement with creatures of the sea).

I grew up loving Godzilla, King Kong and the like. I like monsters and I like 'em (what is this, a "like" festival?) big and city smashing. So I figured something invloving giant monsters would be fun. I also enjoy teen and twenty-something social drama set against the back drop of crazy happenings, a la Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Ultimate Spiderman and Scott Pilgrim. And they say to write what you love, I think. Or write what you know. Or write what you just damn well wanna write I say.

So there it was, I wanted to create and write a comic series that combined all the best elements of those types of things. That is, giant monsters and teen stories, remember? Stay with me. So after long stretches of sitting on the couch with a computer in my lap and my head swirling with all these notions, it crystalized into a concept that I was excited about and thought others might be excited about too. It's the old "What If" and it goes a little something like this: what if a modern teenager trying to make his way through high school life (friends, girls, grades, parents, etc.) woke up one morning to find he had grown to monstrous proportions? Lets say he's now 300 feet tall. He's effectively, a giant monster. And what if his monster free city suddenly became overrun with various giant monsters all bent on either destroying him or eating his friends or both? And what if in between these giant monster battles, he was still trying to have a somewhat normal life as a teenager? What if?

Oh and he and the comic needed a name. After kicking around things like Giant Monster Boy and Kaiju Kid...all of which were terrible...I decided to use the character's name as the title of the comic. And I also made sure that his name was a nod/wink to the comic's influences.

Ladies and gentleman, I give you...

ZAK GOJI

Stay tuned for intriguing tastes of the comic including character designs, script samples and such, as well as notable incidents along the hazard-filled path to (hopefully) publication.