The last page of the series.

A lot of mixed feelings here. When I was writing this, and I say this with no shortage of embarrassment, I thought this was it. I was in. That the world would sit up and take notice of this interesting, intelligent, innovative approach to a stale genre and I’d work my way up to bigger and bigger things, scaling to the lofty heights of a Warren Ellis or Grant Morrison in no time.

I was around 30 years old, but still woefully naïve.

Five years on, I’m still hanging onto the comics industry by my fingernails — a series here, a few stories there, always with an oar in at the cool indie publishers but still three lifetimes away from ever making a living at this.

Which is… fine, really. This series was a huge growth curve for me, and taught me a few things — first, that having a great idea alone isn’t enough to get you noticed. Relentless self-promotion does. Second, that I’m not, at heart, a relentless self-promoter. I’d rather create new stuff than pimp published work, and that’s a barrier to maximum success that I’m willing to live with.

There’s also the “write it all out in advance” lesson, which I’ve gone on about at length.

What it came down to after Dead Eyes Open, though, was a wake-up call about comics, and what it takes to succeed in comics. I had the privilege of working with Dan Vado and Jennifer de Guzman, and continuing that relationship today through Captain Blood and maybe other projects in the future. But I also saw, up close, what I call “the churn” — the mass of thousands, literally thousands, of other hungry comic-book creators, clamoring for a shrinking market, all trying to yell the loudest and wave their arms the hardest to draw some attention. And quality often wins in comics, which is great, but what it takes to succeed in comics, barring an unprecedented set of lucky circumstances, is a life-consuming dedication to message boards, conventions, chatrooms, fan sites, comic shops, and, well, churn.

So the biggest lesson from Dead Eyes Open was that there are two sane ways to approach this:

First, to do everything in my power to Make It In Comics, to the exclusion of all else in life. Live on message boards, invest money in self-promotion and convention travel, kiss ass at every opportunity until the gates of Hell freeze shut, and work, work, work, work, work at it.

Second, to accept that I have a fantastic hobby, and one that may never be a profession. Write comics for love, promote because I believe in my projects, and do what I want with comics when I want to do it. Maybe I’ll catch a bolt of lightning and “make it,” maybe I won’t. But a deliberate decision to accept that this is work of love, not work that must be done so I can make it big.

I chose option two.

I think it’s working out pretty well so far.

So that was Dead Eyes Open. I hope you enjoyed it; if you did, please buy the trade paperback (it’s not too much money, and supports one of the longest-running independent publishers in this cockamamie business). You can also keep track of my and Roy’s current projects through our respective sites (links at the top of the page).

Thanks again.

So this is what John was fighting for since the beginning of this issue — since the beginning of the series, really, but nobody knew that at the time. A city in the frozen north, written in those blissful days pre-Palin when people could think of Alaska without imagining a seething cauldron of idiot guns-n-Jeebus hockey moms shooting the hell out of anything that moved while keeping a wary eye on Russia from the back porch.

I’ve first-drafted and never returned to a follow-up novel to Dead Eyes Open called Bolter; it’s a follow-up in the sense of being set in the same world some time later, but with none of the same characters or plot. It’s much more grounded in the mundane life of the people in this world; by this point in the world, Alaska is a distant promised land for run-of-the-mill Returners, and the idea of moving up there for a Returner is about as pragmatic and attainable as a dishwasher at a Denny’s yearning to retire to beachfront property in Boca Raton. The novel proves Ellard right in several small ways, and John right in some others. I really need to finish revising it.

As far as this story goes, though, we have a happy ending: John, slightly older and grimmer but intact, has reunited with Jane; Alaska is happening, all is right with the world.

Julie, however, is still a jerk. I like the idea of her minder being a chain-smoking skullfaced assassin corpse.

This is, and I say this as a guy that’s written a lot of horrible stuff including the mad scientist conducting his own autopsy in Issue #3, just about the most horrible thing I’ve ever written.

Ellard is trapped in a room with no food and no water. So he’s going to die of thirst, or starvation, or of sheer boredom eventually. He may, given the awesome number of sharp implements available to him, just kill himself.

But then he’s going to come back as a Returner, and — he’s already uncorked the vial in anticipation of Harvey breaking the door down — the virus is already loose in the lab. So however Ellard goes, he’s going to come back as a Returner, and get infected with the thing he helped create. Which, according to what we’ve seen so far, ain’t pretty.

Depending on how long the bunker is supplied for, this might all happen in the dark.

Ugh.

That being said — if I had the whole thing to do over, I’m pretty sure I’d drop the “only friend I’ve got” line. I’m convinced it’s true; that Ellard is a person that’s never had friends, or seen much use for social contact, and he can see what’s in store for him as much as anyone. Better, since he’s had first-hand exposure to what the virus does. So I believe that he believes that John is the only person in the world that knows him in any deep personal sense, and that he wants to spend his last few minutes-to-hours at least in human contact with somebody. Maybe to try to sell John on letting him out. But that’s not going to happen. It can’t happen, since he uncorked the vial. I don’t think I’d keep the “friend” lines in there, though. Just a plea for contact, one that John is morally and emotionally obliged to respond to.

Incidentally… Fulci succumbed to his own screwing around with his innards to see what made him tick, not the virus. I’m not sure if I was clear enough on that. There’s a potential read in there that Ellard killed him, perhaps even with the virus, but no — Fulci just couldn’t resist experimenting on himself to see if he could figure out the Returner biological process, and pushed himself past a point of no return at some point off-panel.

Yes, I am listening to some Mike Doughty at the moment, thanks for asking.

It is, all things considered, a very tidy trap. Ellard picked the best place in the world to hide, because it was an entirely self-sufficient space and entirely off the grid, save for his cell phone and Fulci’s network connection to his former lab. Since it was an entirely self-contained facility, nobody noticed the power drain or the use of resources that Fulci’s research required.

But that also means it’s easy to contain; a steel plate and a cellular signal blocker and Ellard is completely trapped.

After grappling with John’s tone and Ellard’s responses for a while, I bounced the second half of this script off Jennifer de Guzman, the EiC for SLG. I’ve regrettably lost the e-mails — does Gmail automatically delete older mails after a time? — but as I recall, I had John coming on vengeful and grim, lambasting Ellard as Ellard mounted an equally spirited defense of what the world under Returner rule would be like.

Jennifer came back asking if John — even Overdrive John, the John we’ve seen kicking ass and taking names for the last two issues — would be more regretful and apologetic about the whole situation. It was the perfect character note at the perfect time, and completely changed the last four pages of the book, which in turn completely change the feeling behind the series as the whole thing wraps.

One of the reasons I love comics is it’s such a collaborative medium, with various people bringing their vision to the mix and creating something often greater than the sum of its components. This relationship is often thought of as a writer/artist one, but a great editor is worth their weight in gold as well.

So, with a bit of help from Cowboy Wally, the Ellard/virus storyline was actually a reasonably easy problem to solve. It’s all laid out there on the page, and there’s no need to re-explain it, but it stands to reason that all DEFCON-type facilities be entirely self-sustaining.

It was the next couple of pages that gave me trouble, characterwise. How does John feel about this? Ellard, obviously, is going to be super pissed — or is he?

Jennifer de Guzman really helped me walk through some of the potential ups and downs of this script, and you’ll see the result of some interesting e-mails over the next couple of pages.

Kyle Baker is, in my opinion, just about the most underrecognized talents in comics.

I first became aware of his work because I loved the Shadow pulp novels as a kid, and picked up the Helfer & Sienkiewicz (another tragically underrecognized talent) Shadow series from DC when it started up. When Baker took over the title, I was initially put off — what the hell were all these people with giant weird mouths doing yelling all over my creepy gritty Shadow comic? But it only took to the end of the first arc to be firmly in love with Kyle Baker, and ever since then I’ve been a huge fan of everything he’s put out. His Plastic Man series a few years back was pure genius; his one-shots and personal projects are all some of the best things in the industry.

So I’m wondering how to prevent Ellard from releasing his crazy virus and killing all the Returners on the planet, and I think of Kyle Baker and The Cowboy Wally Show, and “Sands of Blood”, the French Foreign Legion epic film within the comic.

And I realize that, as Wally would say, the answer is remarkably simple.

“It’s a fort!

Close the door!”

While writing issues #5 and #6, it became obvious that #5 would finish off the Tom Clancy Radioactive Terrorist Thriller Plot, and #6 would focus on the Ellard threat. So I needed to start thinking, a while before writing this, of how I could revisit Ellard’s actions — which I hadn’t started writing as villainous, because I didn’t know he was the villain when I was writing #2.

Always plot out the whole comic first. If it’s an ongoing, plot out the damn arc. Grraahh!!

At least Ellard gets to throw in some of the Big Deadies Ideas Roy and I had been tinkering with back in the day. Not one of my damnable montage sequences, but he rattles off some neat ideas about where this series could have gone, if it went.

At any rate, as mentioned earlier in this blog, Ellard had been gaming me as much as the main characters, because in retrospect it was very easy to see how he’d been manipulating events. John gets into the hoary details in the above page from the comic, but Ellard has been working towards this from the beginning; the only mistake he’s made to date was not thinking John would find the guts to start pushing harder to figure out what Ellard was up to.

That’s it, really.

To my credit, as I strive to make sense of all this, it really is the visit to Jane that moves the whole plot of the book. John visits Jane, Jane gives him essentially an ultimatum: quit, or forget about your family. John goes back and starts pushing hard to wrap up his Returner dossier, harder than he ever would have left to his own devices. And that pushing gets Blakeney to investigate the basement, which reveals Fulci, which brings us to here.

So there is a character-driven, emotional through line here. Honest!

Oh — the Kyle Baker revelation that made it clear how to end this without Ellard winning and the virus getting released? Tomorrow.

The last seven pages of this comic got rewritten about sixteen times.

The whole comic, something felt off. And, in the first and second drafts of this script, it started around this page: I had Ellard and Fulci waiting, and even in the first draft a double-dipped betrayal where Fulci was going to release a virus that killed everybody on earth, human and Returner alike, because while he hated Returners he didn’t exactly have a shining view of humanity either. The virus would have been Fulci’s great nihilistic middle finger to the whole human and Returner race. It would have been prevented, everyone would have been saved, and Ellard, chastened by nearly committing speciescide, would vow to be a better man. Hugs all round!

Yeah, that didn’t make it past first draft. So, even before I sought advice from editor Jennifer de Guzman, I’d established that I wanted to play the Ellard/Fulci plot straight, with Fulci acting in good faith making an anti-Returner virus, and Ellard planning to release it to “save humanity.” It was clean, and even I have a point where I have to stop injecting new plot elements and twists.

But when you have a killer airborne virus and a guy that’s all ready to release it, how do you stop him?

I had to look at the problem from a couple of angles. Strangely enough, the answer came from a great comic by Kyle Baker.

This comic owes everything to The Cowboy Wally Show.

Additional note: There’s a good bit about Ellard’s phone ringing in the script below; Roy took that and improved the idea even more by having the now-intert Fulci in the foreground.

A bit of turnabout here, as Harvey uses the government’s standard trick for discerning Returners — infrared — and flips it, blacking out the corridor with smoke to blind opponents, then shooting them.

Again, I tried to live up to the conventions of the great zombie tradition by having some ultraviolence in every issue. I love Roy’s smoke effects, but — er — we forgot to add the IR goggles. Which I didn’t put in the panel descriptions either, so my bad there.

Minor fail on this page: what I wanted to convey, through the writing, was that Harvey went down there with a clear plan: gas the corridor, knock all the soldiers out, and stroll on in. The “Problematic.” panel was the soldiers all gas-masked up and therefore much more difficult to take out with, well, gas. So the situation is going to be much more difficult than Harvey thought.

A few problems with this:

First, I’ve clearly called for the soldiers in the previous page to get shot in panel 1 of this page, so obviously Harvey doesn’t really give a wet slap about loss of human life. Which is its own problem — detailed later — but this doesn’t really address why Harvey suddenly wants to go for the less violent option. Probably because it’s less risky, but then one wonders why he didn’t just use gas the whole way.

Second, I totally omitted to mention any of this in the script, and somehow thought that the writer/artist bond that Roy and I shared had grown to such dizzying psychic heights that he’d just intuit all of it. Durr.

Third, I’m experiencing what I call “Matrix Guilt Syndrome,” which is basically sympathy for those poor soldiers standing in the corridor getting massacred. I felt like this when I watched the Matrix and Neo and Trinity cut bloody swaths through dozens of security guards in that bank-type building. Granted, they are in the way, but even though they have “virtual bodies,” it’s still real people, connected to tubes out there in the Real, that they’re killing. Given godlike powers and l33t ninja skillz, they still just blast the crap out of ‘em. That strikes me funny.

I suspect, and this doesn’t speak especially well of me, that I was stressed out a bit about trying to wrap this up, and was looking at clear paths to goal rather than the details of said paths. “Blast your way to the bunker” was a very straightforward way for me, as a writer, to deal with the situation, but I’m finding it hard years later to accept that John, the humanist, would just green-light Harvey to “try not to kill anyone” and then kind of shrug off a bloodbath in which what are essentially innocent career soldiers get mowed down.

My stress maps onto their stress: as I get anxious to wrap thing up in a semi-coherent way, they start cutting corners too.