What’s this all about, then?

Back in 2003, I began, with Roy Boney Jr., work on what was originally to be an online comic about what we called the “Thinking Dead” — zombie stories with the unique twist of having the protagonists be intelligent, emotional, in-all-ways-but-the-obvious human creatures.

Just… dead.

The site we were working on it for folded and we packed the whole thing up as a publisher pitch, sent it around, and almost a year later, SLG Publishing decided to roll the dice on two wholly unknown creators and a very unusual concept.

Lots of retooling and re-thinking later, Dead Eyes Open was born. It was my first time out of the gate as a “professional” comics writer, and Roy’s as a print comics illustrator, and I, at least, made a lot of mistakes.

The trade paperback has been out for a while now, and as I was saying to Dan Vado, SLG Publisher, pretty much everyone who is going to buy it has already bought it. Barring some improbable mention on Oprah’s book club (made much more unlikely by the events of Issue #5 — stay tuned or keep reading!), it is now just going to fill warehouse shelves with copies trickling out every now and again.

And I still think it’s a work that deserves reading. So, with Dan’s blessing, we’re releasing it “into the wild,” making it available in blog format with copious annotations and notes by yours truly, detailing the process and thinking behind it, and often getting into where I — in retrospect — screwed things up, often in agonizing-to-me detail.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as Roy and I enjoyed creating it. If you do, please consider buying the trade paperback — the links are right there to your left — and supporting my and Roy’s current work in the comics field.

Flaws and all, I love this book. It was too ambitious by half and too scattered by even more, but for all its rough edges there are some undead diamonds here. I’m proud of the work done on this series, and happy Dan gave me his blessing to help it find new eyes and minds on the Internet.