June 16th, 2009
Our Brilliant Career at Tekno (Pt. 4)
Between the crazy-quilt tinkering behind the scenes of Mr. Hero # 1 and the spineless treachery that turned Primortals into juvenile crap, it had become clear that the Tekno Comix business model had a lot less to do with professional publishing than with Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Editors with some experience in the field were obviously being steamrollered by corporate suits too arrogant to recognize their own ignorance, and the creative types were reduced to hitchhikers trying not to fly out of the back seat while the whole enterprise careened into ditches and went crashing through the hedgerows.
But unlike a lot of the new publishers in those days, the Tekno people had money, and they weren’t afraid to spend it. They’d bought concepts from folks who didn’t come cheap, they were paying decent page rates, and they were setting up glitzy little kiosks in malls around the country that were traditionally too upscale for the more conventional comics shops. It seemed possible that they just might last long enough to relax, ease out of panic mode and let the people who actually knew what they were doing get on with the business of doing it.
Of course, this was in the early days, before any of the books saw print, so it was still possible to think that. An advance look at the cover for the first issue of Mr. Hero should have warned me of what was coming next. After running a gauntlet of corporate bright ideas in order to shoehorn an introduction to the Teknophage character into the script (as described in a previous post), what else should I have expected but the cover I eventually received, with the Teknophage up front and my own leading character in the background?
Well, I might have expected Mr. Hero to look like Mr. Hero. But by the time the first issue was in stores, I already knew that he wouldn’t.
I should say here that I was (and still am) crazy about the work Ted Slampyak did on the interior art. Ted is one of those artists whose stuff makes you smile, not just a good comic book artist but a talented and versatile all-around cartoonist. I worked hard on the characters in that series, and was constantly happy with the way he turned them into charismatic actors. And I was particularly taken with his design of Mr. Hero himself, an elegant gleaming steam-powered automaton that was ornate enough to be a convincing relic of Victorian England without overwhelming the page or the reader with fussy detail.
Ted’s Hero was charming, as big and cuddly as a shiny St. Bernard, and just enough of a blank slate to make it possible for readers to project themselves onto him as his personality slowly developed. And it was a hoot to dress him in modern clothes.
But one thing he was not, was this guy:
But he got turned into that guy, anyway.
I’d already hit a snag from an unexpected source on the second issue. Having been forced to abandon my funnybook-of-the-absurd urban ninjas in the first installment, I’d decided to put that behind me and start implementing my plans for characterization; maybe later, when the big thinkers had settled down, I’d be able to make more overt changes in tone.
One of the simplest moves I’d planned was to start adding a little texture to Mr. Hero himself. We’d actually seen very little of him in action in the first issue, and that brief introduction had been very deliberately presented as Stock Victorian Brit #2, a big stalwart type with hints of a comic-opera dialect. With that comfy stereotype impressed on the minds of the other characters – and, knock wood, the readers – I then wanted to start injecting reminders that life under Victoria hadn’t been all warm scones and Masterpiece Theatre. Our steam-powered sleeper had awakened with some pretty ugly attitudes impressed on his brain, judgments about race and gender and class that would add friction to his relationships with the series regulars and keep him from being simply a big shiny teddy bear.
Early in the second issue, I wrote a scene in which Hero and Jenny chased a purse snatcher into an alley, only to find themselves confronted by a street gang. It was all stock stuff, a setup for the moment when our lovable champion surveyed the enemy and dismissed them with some offhanded but unabashed racial slurs. The rest of the scene involved Jenny rapping Hero out nonstop about his lack of P.C., oblivious to the fact that he was beating the crap out of the offended parties all the while. It was mostly played for uncomfortable laughs, but the idea was to plant the seeds for future situations.
Neil Gaiman had made himself available for questions during this early period, and I would occasionally check in to be sure that my ideas weren’t completely flying in the face of what he’d had in mind when he came up with the concept. During one of those conversations, I brought up the racism angle and he was clearly uncomfortable with it. I remember the conversation growing increasingly surreal as I offered one potential racial slur after another for his approval, eventually coming up with the relatively toothless “wog” – but he just couldn’t endorse any of them. Understand, Neil never tried to exercise a veto over my stuff, he was simply consulting in order to be helpful…but I told myself that if the book said Neil Gaiman’s Mr. Hero on the cover, then it would be really bad form to put material in it that he found distasteful.
I regretted losing that material, if not the reason for losing it, and I knocked together a lame last-minute rewrite of the scene which I intended to punch up before turning in the script. But as I bore down toward the end of that second installment, the phone rang, and Tekno editorial delivered the news that the suits had only begun to screw with things. As the latest round of goofiness ensued, I ran out of time to go back and tweak the script, and that stopgap emergency draft is what saw print. After all these years, I’m still a little embarrassed when I look back at it…but it was a minor hassle compared to the hoops I had to jump through next.
Only one issue into the run, somebody upstairs had decided that we should overhaul the look of our title character to reflect the way he’d been drawn on the first-issue cover. That first issue hadn’t seen print yet, so it wasn’t a matter of responding to reader reaction. Was it some dopey kind of buyer’s remorse on the publishers’ part? A flash of inspiration that struck while someone was sitting on the executive toilet? Whatever its origin, in terms of introducing a brand it was sheer idiocy.
I remember commenting on the wisdom of making the change while we were still getting to know the characters and trying to build a readership, and wondering aloud why we couldn’t simply have covers with Mr. Hero drawn on model – but the word had come down from the mountain, and, bottom line, my job was to work it into the storyline. I called Ted to get his take on this latest bit of wtf; he was no more in the know (nor any happier) than I was, and all we could do was shrug and try to make things work with a leading man who – as far as we were both concerned – had suddenly undergone a botched facelift that robbed him of all his charm.
Our cover artist was Marc Sasso, who would give us a number of gorgeous images over the book’s run. I never found out if the new design had been Sasso’s, or if he was also working under orders – but as terrific as most of his stuff was, his renderings of the new Hero just struck me as off-key.
Too brutish, too much the generic humanoid robot. Those big steam pipes sticking up from the character’s back were clumsy and unwieldy compared to the elegant vents Ted had come up with. And what the hell did an automaton need with toes? My best guess on the toe issue was that he’d evolved from this guy…
Worse, there was something about that design that just didn’t work inside the book. With the special events and crossovers that the company dreamed up during its brief existence, Mr. Hero was drawn by several different artists, and the new design looked like crap no matter who was pushing the pencil. Ted’s version came off the best, and it was still depressing to see his talent dashing itself against that ugly edifice.
But it didn’t matter how much I hated it. Unless I wanted to bail out after only one issue, I was stuck with it. So the storylines I’d mapped out for the next few issues went into the dumper and it was off on another round of last-minute damage control. Characters I hadn’t intended to introduce for 4-6 months suddenly got rushed onstage, and I quickly worked out a storyline that saw my metallic leading man’s body trashed and his essence transferred into the shell of one of the Teknophage’s steam-powered legbreakers. (Don’t ask.)
Unable to sit back and just be random geniuses like the suits at Tekno, Ted and I were stuck with actually turning out books that somebody would want to read, and I think we mostly pulled it off. I’d gotten editorial to agree to giving me a couple of issues to set up the change in Hero’s look, and those installments were filled to the brim with stuff I absolutely had to have in place to keep the readers from feeling as jerked around as I did. Major characters showed up with as little introduction as possible, and everyone zoomed about as though their pants were on fire. Somehow, it all made some kind of sense, and I even found myself feeling moderately proud of the face-lift installment with its flashbacks to Hero’s Victorian days and a bunch of mysterious types nattering at each other in four different languages. But it was the pride of someone who’d come out of a beating with only three broken limbs.
By this point – before the second issue had been completed, in fact – virtually every single thing I’d planned to do with the book had gone out the window, and none of it for reasons that had anything to do with storytelling. It was embarrassing to think that people would assume that all this pointless monkeying with the robot’s appearance had been my idea. Worse, the moment for establishing that tone of surreal edgy humor had passed; the storyline had picked up a new direction (and a lighter weight) born of the necessity of making all these changes, and I found myself approaching each new script with increasing wariness.
As Steven Grant recently noted in his weekly blog, “in work-for-hire…comics, creator intent is utterly irrelevant.” Having each come from creator-owned comics, Ted and I already knew that, were well aware that the first rule of this game was that we would trade autonomy for a paycheck. I wasn’t even all that surprised to discover that the rest of the rules were being made up on the fly. What irritated me was the fact that those making up the rules didn’t have the faintest notion what the hell game we were playing.
Somewhere near the end of my first year on the book, Tekno surprised me by asking the readers to vote on whether we should retain the newer version of Mr. Hero or return to Ted’s Victorian design. I’d invested a lot of time and effort into making things work with the new look; scenes and whole plotlines were affected by characters’ reaction to Hero’s less appealing appearance. At the point when the poll was announced, I was deep in a complicated storyline that wouldn’t have allowed me to do anything about it for many issues to come. But it did allow Ted the chance to do his first cover for the series, which is still one of my favorites:
As it turned out a few months later, Ted and I hadn’t been the only ones who missed the original design. By a three-to-one majority, the vote went overwhelmingly in favor of:
So all the scrambling and insane revising had been for nothing. All those stories – in a sense, the entire series – that I’d planned had been scrapped in favor of some executive’s brainstorm that hardly anybody thought was worth a damn, once anyone had bothered to ask them. All that wasted effort, just so they could publish a comic book about an ugly robot with shiny useless toes.
Next time, some final thoughts on the Tekno experience…











































