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…

To resolve some server-related problems, our intrepid webmaster informs me that we’ll be shutting down this blog, the comment email and the various linked websites for a few days. Knock wood, full services should be restored no later than Wednesday, 6/17/09. Join us then as our thrilling narrative resumes…

Congratulations to Neil Gaiman for stepping up from perpetual bridesmaid in the annual Audie Awards for the best in recorded books.

After several years of recognition as a nominee, last week Neil took home two first place trophies for The Graveyard Book: for Children’s Titles Ages 8-12 and for Audiobook of the Year.

This kind of thing is damned hard to do. I’ve done audio work here and there over the years, and when it came to recording fiction I always found other people’s work easier to do than my own, probably because I tend to not take my stuff seriously enough to do a proper job. Neil’s found that sweet spot where taking yourself seriously and simply having fun come together, and he’s finally been recognized for the very good hard work he does in front of a microphone.

Bravo.

(In his very readable blog “Ink Destroyed My Brush,” artist Charles Yoakum recently commented on this series of posts and added some interesting perspective of his own about a few of the players on the publishing side. It’s a good read in general, and it includes a brief ugly anecdote of petty editorial arrogance at play during his time working for Defiant Comics.

(Yoakum’s mostly right when he notes, “Read all the creative types’ blogs and you’ll see that the blame seems to fall squarely on the editorial shoulders” – we’ve all heard those stories, and I have no doubt that many of them are true. I may have been lucky in that – but for one goofy case of miscommunication at Dark Horse, which was more of a trip down the rabbit hole than a clash of visions – I never had any major conflict with editors during my first go-round with comics; I was allowed to tell the stories I wanted to write and for better or worse, the words I wrote were pretty much what appeared in print. Even the hair-splitting and what Yoakum calls “value adding” that I slogged through in getting Mr. Hero off the ground seemed, like most of the problems that dogged us at Tekno, to come not from the editorial staff but from further upstairs – which leads us into this week’s post…)

Kate had been eager to get started on her Primortals assignment for all kinds of reasons. For those who came in late, Kate Worley had done her first comics writing on Omaha the Cat Dancer when creator Reed Waller hit a serious writer’s block that threatened to bring that new and popular adults-only series to a premature end. In the boys club atmosphere of the late ’80s, some dismissed her at first as being simply the cartoonist’s girl friend who’d managed to piggyback her way into a professional credit. It soon became clear, however, that the book had not only gotten better, it was twice as good. Thanks largely to grassroots response, Kate’s contribution came to be seen as equal to Reed’s, and she became one of the more esoteric stars of the comics world.

Even so, critics and readers alike expressed amazement when Disney Comics hired her to write their Roger Rabbit series. Having established herself with Omaha’s sexy soap for grownups, she had to buck typecasting again in order to prove that she could produce family-friendly entertainment. She pulled it off nicely, getting good response (including a fan letter from Roger’s creator Gary Wolf) and showing the pigeon-holers out there how versatile a good writer could be.

So she was pleased when the Primortals gig came along and gave her a chance to show what else she could do. It was an ongoing science fiction serial about aliens coming to Earth and interacting with the locals, but it wasn’t the standard zap gun funnybook nonsense – no Independence Day-style property destruction opera, no superheroics in clever chrome disguise. There was some kind of conflict-generating maguffin, of course, but essentially it was a classic first contact story about groups of strangers struggling to co-exist. Having developed Omaha’s anthropomorphic cast into some of the most complex human beings in comics, breathing life into exotic aliens while telling a serious story was right up her alley.

And there was the book’s pedigree of superstar creators. These days, with TV actors and other show-biz types jumping onto the comics bandwagon, the presence of celebrities who dream up comics concepts isn’t much of a novelty; in 1994 things were different. In the case of Primortals, the big names were science fiction legend Isaac Asimov and Star Trek star Leonard Nimoy.

We were never told what concepts of Asimov’s were part of the mix. He’d died in 1992, and we were under the impression at the time that his estate had sold some undeveloped notions to Tekno. For all I knew, his contribution amounted to no more than a post-it note with the words “exploit me” scrawled on it, though I suspected it was more substantial than that. This was the man who’d given us The Gods Themselves, Foundation, “Nightfall” and a lot of other intelligent, first-class entertainment, so the odds were good that whatever he’d come up with was both engaging and scientifically plausible. (Another explanation, for what it’s worth, can be found at Wikipedia, which says that Primortals “involved a first contact situation with aliens that had arisen from discussion between [Nimoy] and Isaac Asimov.” That may well be true, but keep in mind that the entry is not only unsourced, it’s also…well…Wikipedia.)

Though Asimov was the deep thinker, Nimoy was the really big gun of the project. After years of distancing himself from Mr. Spock – during which he appeared in serious dramas like Vincent, The Man in the Glass Booth and Equus – he’d eventually come around to publicly embracing his most famous role in a series of big-screen films and a new memoir. As a marketable commodity, he was in a great place – at once a celebrity with hard-won artistic credibility and a cult figure worshipped by thousands of male and female SF media fans.

Writer Steve Perry has written that Nimoy’s concept “was originally intended to be part of a prose anthology” before ending up as a Tekno series. Considering that anthologist Martin Greenberg later hired Perry to do a Primortals novelization, it seems a fair bet that Greenberg was the contact man with Nimoy throughout the property’s history.

Compared to the parade of psychic paper cuts I’d experienced while launching Mr. Hero, Kate’s writing time on the first issue of Primortals was a walk in the park. No eleventh-hour demands for tie-ins with other properties, no backseat driving of any kind. I’d have been a little jealous if I hadn’t been so relieved for her.

One of the things she’d worked hard on was the degree of the aliens’ alien-ness. Given the nature of their interaction with us regular folks, she had to keep them recognizably humanoid. Given her own need for self-respect, she also avoided standard BEMs and junky fin-headed comic book models. She’d asked the artist (I’m not sure if she knew who that would be at first) for designs that were fairly subtle, more like a distinctly different race than a different species. Imagine her surprise, then, when the fax machine beeped one day and stuff like this began to roll out:

Guys with animal heads…superheroes in clever chrome disguise…yup, the whole idiotic depressing package.

It reminded me of a Pat Broderick-drawn series from the ’80s called Sun Runners, a quirky little space opera that lost a few steps and gained in predictability after its leading man gained superpowers and its futuristic politics began to take a back seat to manly adventure. (Oh, yeah, and note the elephant-headed guy:)

Staring at the images from the fax machine, I commented on the similarity.

“Shut up,” Kate very reasonably responded, and went back to looking pole-axed.

We never heard if someone had asked the artist to work up something a little more, uh, imaginative, or if he’d simply sent the office some additional designs which they’d fallen in love with. Whichever it was, somebody at Tekno had been very busy adding value to the project. Given the book’s high priority at the corporate level, I have a hard time believing that a mere editor would assume the responsibility of screwing with Nimoy’s baby to that extent without getting upper-echelon approval. (On the other hand, I also can’t see Martin Greenberg subscribing to the notion that nothing says serious science fiction like a guy who looks like a rhinoceros, so go figure.)

And they’d apparently been helping Kate out a little behind her back with the scripting, too. Though the story was more or less what she’d written, the script had been anonymously re-tailored to fit the requirements of the chrome-vested super alien, his new zoo crew and a bad guy who’d been modeled on a pterodactyl. “I don’t think I can fix this,” Kate told me – but it turned out that it was too late to do much of anything. Soon the new and dumbed-down Primortals was being presented for Nimoy’s approval.

He hated it.

So, having irreparably screwed up her work behind her back, Tekno accepted responsibility for their actions and fired her from the book.

Lawrence Watt-Evans, a writer who’d worked with Greenberg a number of times, was brought in to salvage the mess, getting a credit for “additional story concepts.” He went on to script the second issue before Tekno editor Christopher Mills took over the writing. Watt-Evans would also turn out the script for the company’s Gene Roddenberry’s Lost Universe #1. (Yes, Roddenberry was dead at this time, too.) As Watt-Evans notes in his online bibliography, “I am credited as having scripted Gene Roddenberry’s Lost Universe #2. This is an error; while I wrote a script for #2, none of my work remains in the published version.”

But thanks for dropping by, Lawrence. We hope you enjoyed your brilliant career at Tekno.

I’d guess that Watt-Evans did a solid professional job with Primortals, but I’ll probably never know. I couldn’t bring myself to read it. I would try to dip into subsequent issues from time to time as the stack of contributor comps would show up, but it was hard to concentrate on the storylines while Isaac Asimov was making all that noise rolling over in his grave. All I could see was warmed-over imitation X-Men. If that was what they’d wanted, why couldn’t they have said so? And why would they bother hiring people like Kate or Watt-Evans to crank that kind of stuff out in the first place?

Nimoy was apparently appeased somehow, though I can’t believe it was the brilliance of the final product that won him over. He showed up for promotional events like a pro, and hung on long enough to see what was left of his concept turned into a paperback novel and a CD-ROM game before putting the whole thing behind him and moving on with his career.

As for Kate, she was initially humiliated and outraged – no one at Tekno had given her so much as a heads-up during the mangling process, let alone anything resembling an explanation (she knew better than to expect an apology) – but she soon found herself relieved to have the Primortals meshugas behind her. She would turn her attention to the John Jakes project and cross her fingers that the weasels would leave her alone this time.

Speaking of outraged, I was ready to tell Tekno to get stuffed and find themselves a new Mr. Hero writer when she got scapegoated, but Kate reminded me that I had some important financial obligations of my own. She suggested that I bide my time and see how Mr. Hero worked out now that we’d gotten past the initial surprises.

She was right; I needed that steady gig, so that’s what I did. As we’ll see next time, I’d learn that those initial surprises had been just a warmup.

(A day or so after the first installment of this thrilling narrative appeared, Neil Gaiman let me know that it was he who originally recommended Kate and me for our assignments at Tekno Comix. According to Neil, he wasn’t aware then that Kate and I had become a couple. Given the fact that Kate was much better known than me at the time, I can finally stop wondering if I’d ridden into that job on her coattails. All corrections are welcome, as long as they’re as flattering as this one.)

So it’s late 1994, and we’re back in Minneapolis. Kate has been told to start work on the first Primortals script; the Jakes project will be scheduled later. We both assume the reason for that is sheer box office. Though John Jakes is a hugely popular mainstream writer, the core comics readership is infinitely more likely to open their pocketbooks for a series with Leonard Nimoy’s name attached to it. And since Nimoy’s concepts have been blended with ideas by Isaac Asimov, Kate’s more than happy with the decision. How often does anybody in comics get the chance to write serious science fiction that doesn’t smell like Superman or Flash Gordon?

As for me, I’m trying to flesh out Neil’s brief notes for Mr. Hero. As a series bible, those notes could have been seen as annoyingly skimpy or unbelievably generous. I’ll admit to leaning toward the “skimpy” take on my first reading, but it quickly dawned on me that Neil had laid out a few interesting set-up points and then gotten the hell out of the way. His notes gave a skeletal run-down of how a Victorian automaton is discovered in a crate by a young woman who works at a museum and picks up spare change as a street mime. (Yes, this was the ‘90s.) Apparently, the automaton was once the property of real-life stage magician John Nevil Maskelyne, who named the steamed-powered robot in honor of the ancient Greek inventor Hero (aka Heron). Oh, yes, and Mr. Hero would eventually have two different heads, each of which gave him a distinctive personality.

And that was about all there was. I got to name the young woman who’d be Mr. Hero’s companion, I got to invent her personality and her circle of friends. I got to create Hero’s twin personalities and speech patterns. I got to not only tell the stories, but also to decide which stories we would tell. Best of all, it was clear that I didn’t have to take either myself or the series too seriously. Neil, best known at that time for the predominantly serious Sandman, had given me permission to have a romp.

By this time, I’d learned that Mr. Hero would be tied in with another Gaiman creation, Teknophage, which would be written by Rick Veitch. My impression was that Rick’s book would be the more serious of the two, and that worked for me. I found myself thinking of the way Jack Kirby had used Jimmy Olsen as a sort of comic relief companion title to his early ‘70s New Gods material, providing a ground-level perspective on all the cosmic hoohah going on in the other books. I knew we were on the right track when I called Rick to kick things around and it turned out that he’d been thinking of the very same parallel. He wasn’t going to screw with fistfights in space any more than I was going to drag Don Rickles into my storyline, but the relationship was clear, and I was happy.

Veitch had joked about turning his gag “Whorin’ Rick” persona into the real thing for this gig, but only a fool would have believed that the man who’d written Brat Pack was going to crank out generic mainstream oatmeal. As far as I was concerned, the more gonzo he wanted to go with his book, the more room I had to push at the edges, too.

If my mandate was to create a humorous adventure strip, I wanted to do something a little more interesting with it than the standard slapstick superhero parody of the day. Overwrought and underwritten material like Spawn and Youngblood was on the ascendant then, and I could see having some fun with that stuff from time to time – but I didn’t want to drive myself crazy by hammering on the same note over and over. I started outlining a concept that would allow me to drop some sympathetic characters into a series of situations that would slowly become a progression of surrealistic non-sequitors while still maintaining the illusion of series continuity. All these years later, the best description I can come up with is sort of a marriage of Bob Burden’s Mystery Men and Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol – gentler and more accessible than either of those, but equally out of left field.

I took special care to ease into the approach gently, making sure that the human point-of-view characters were well defined and entertaining on their own. The oddball element was soft-pedaled in that first script, consisting of a tongue-in-cheek take on the super-stealthy ninjas that had infested comics like cockroaches in those days. (Mine were the Urban Ninjas, able to blend in seamlessly with any brick-and-mortar city landscape, but pathetically visible and vulnerable anywhere else. Not exactly cutting edge satire, but as I said, easing in to the good stuff.)

I created a narration-heavy prologue calculated to appeal to readers who’d picked up the book because of its connection to Neil, and incorporated all of Neil’s notes into that first script to make sure that the folks who were paying the bills could see that I was playing ball.

So off the script goes to the Tekno offices, and while I’m outlining the next one, I get a call from editor Ed Polgardy. Ed tells me that I need to insert a scene that firmly connects Mr. Hero to Teknophage, to be drawn by that book’s artist Bryan Talbot. I’m a little surprised – I’d thought that we were going to break the relationship in gradually as part of the unfolding storyline – but I suppose I can reduce one of the existing scenes by a page or two and make room for the new stuff. But isn’t losing these pages going to cost Mr. Hero artist Ted Slampyak money? No, says Ed, we want to up the page count to have Teknophage in the book, so Ted won’t lose out; he’ll do his full complement and Bryan will draw six more. Oh, yeah, and we want to open the book with the new material.

Okay, I know that work-for-hire has its own rules, and none of this stuff is worth bursting into tears and storming off – but that doesn’t mean that I have to like it. In the first place, I know by now that Rick’s approach is going to have a much harder edge than my own, and if I’m to do justice to what he’s doing, it’s going to make as much artistic sense as editing snuff scenes from My Bloody Valentine into A Fish Called Wanda. (Remember, this was 15 years ago; I really have been to the movies since then.) As Bryan Talbot’s style doesn’t mesh at all with Ted Slampyak’s, I’m also less than thrilled with the prospect of giving readers whiplash as they turn the page. (Learning that Rick isn’t being asked to bend over backwards to plug my book in return is an irritation of a pettier kind.)

But what disturbed me most of all was the sensation that Ed was embarrassed to be telling me all this. He was Tekno’s editor-in-chief and a guy with solid credentials; there was no reason for him to feel reluctant to ask for any changes that he believed were for the good of the project. But this felt very much like the case of a man under duress doing his best to carry on like a pro. I told him that I didn’t think it was a good idea and it didn’t make me happy, but that I’d do my best to make it work.

So back to the script, write a three-page Teknophage prologue, find a way to link it to my existing prologue (which is now page 4, structure be damned), massage the already-written stuff here and there so I can insert three more pages for Talbot to draw, send it in, shrug and move on.

A week or so goes by and I hear from Tekno again (Ed again, I think, though at this late date I can’t say for sure). It seems that I’ve done the job too well, and the new Teknophage prologue is too disturbing, too reminiscent of Auschwitz. I point out that what they’re objecting to is all in the mood of the descriptions, not in any essential action, but I offer to talk to Bryan Talbot and make sure he doesn’t get carried away.

So I make the transatlantic call on my own dime to tell the guy who gave us Luther Arkwright that he should tone it down, only to have Talbot assure me that he’s already heard from Tekno and that he won’t be doing anything to frighten the kiddies. He also mentions in passing that he’s fixed a mistake in the script, changing “Bill of Fare” to “Menu.” I point out that they’re the same thing, but Bryan is certain that “bill of fare” refers to the bill for payment. I know he’s mistaken; the gaudier phrase was deliberately chosen as an illustration of the fastidious facade which the Teknophage has built for himself, and the change has transformed a minor though valid bit of characterization into a Will Elder sight gag. But at this point, I’m really not in the mood to split hairs and I simply drop it.

Back to work on the second script, and the phone rings. It’s Martin Greenberg, the well-known editor of anthologies, who has the title of Senior Editor of Tekno’s corporate (not publishing) end. He’s heard that I’m unhappy with the changes I was asked to make, and wants to know if it would help for him to fly into Minneapolis, take me to lunch and talk it over.

I tell Marty, which he insists I call him, that I’m flattered to hear from him, I have a lot of respect for his work, and I’m sure that I’d enjoy having lunch with him. Even so, nothing’s going to make me think a bad idea is a good idea, but that hasn’t stopped me from doing the best job I could on the material nonetheless. So it might be a better use of everyone’s time for me to just get on with the next script and put the last one behind us. He ultimately says okay, we end the conversation amicably, and I hang up wondering why a senior corporate officer would be asked to get involved in a minor difference of opinion over a few pages of comics. I’m also no longer wondering if it had just been my imagination that Ed Polgardy was passing along orders from upstairs. But whatever the hell’s going on at the Tekno offices, at least nobody’s actually screwed with the material I’ve written, so I can proceed as planned.

Ha, as they say, ha ha.

There’s one more phone call about the first script. Like the old gag about the mummy movie, I’m told to lose the ninjas. Ninjas, I’m told, are too over-exposed. That, I reply, is the point, and did anyone actually read the scene? – but I quickly realize that I’m in the no-win position of trying to explain a joke. I’m starting to wonder if I’m ever going to stop writing Mr. Hero #1, and I express my concern that this book’s not going to get finished on time if we keep fooling around with it. In the end, we agree to fix it by leaving the art alone and changing the dialogue. The Tekno solution is to turn my goofy ninjas into menacing shape shifters and change their name, God help me, to the Dark Chameleons. So now I suddenly have super-powered bad guys with a name right out of a fanzine strip added to the mix. Seeing my plans for the book’s idiosyncratic tone swirling down the drain, I say okay and crawl away, nibbled not quite to death by ducks.

At that point, the phone calls stopped and I was able to get some uninterrupted work done on the next script. Peace reigned in our apartment…until the fax machine in Kate’s office began to grind out pages. A few moments later, I heard a sharp intake of breath, followed by some truly impressive nautical-level swearing. It was Kate’s turn to be micro-managed by the suits; but while my experience had really been little more than a series of pointless annoyances, what was about to happen to her would be ugly.

It was the beginning of a gig that would last the better part of two years, but whenever I try to remember how it started, the most vivid memory is always my view of Mickey Spillane’s neck.

We’re talking late 1993 or, more likely, early ‘94. I’d just resigned the editor’s post at Kitchen Sink, chugged more antifreeze and left Massachusetts to join Kate in Minneapolis. (The very concept of “Tundra” seemed to haunt me in those days; God, the snow, the ice, the piles of unsold sketchbooks…) I wasn’t technically out of work – I had a Batman story lined up with Archie Goodwin and a handful of freelance editing jobs with KSP – but a nice steady gig was definitely in order.

Out of the blue came invitations for Kate and me to write series for a new company called Tekno. It was the first we’d heard of the operation, but the projects came with intriguing pedigrees. I don’t know who’d proposed my name, but Neil Gaiman had okayed me to work on a concept he’d created called Mr. Hero. Kate was asked to write two separate series – an ongoing thing called The Primortals, based on concepts by Leonard Nimoy and Isaac Asimov, and The Mulkons, a mini-series dreamed up by novelist John Jakes.

We didn’t know going in that the entire line was to be made up of similar “by proxy” titles. (The internet at that time wasn’t all that much more than tin cans and a limp string; for industry information, you frequently had to rely on gossip and whatever snippets your publisher felt like passing on to you.) But the names behind our books were a combination of solid professionalism and good box office, so we had reason to think we were on firm ground.

In the years since, of course, Tekno has come to be seen as the epitome of a certain kind of publishing that reveres the marquee over the content. Most recently, when Virgin Comics did a not-unexpected Hindenburg back in September, commentators all over the blogosphere set about reviving the shambling corpse of Tekno Comix in their search for comparisons.

With celebrity names like Guy Ritchie, Hugh Jackman and … uh… Jenna Jameson attached to some of the Virgin projects, I can see the obvious parallels. And the rumors of financial overreaching certainly ring a bell. But for those of us who actually worked on some of Tekno’s books, the wonky business model was only part of the problem. I don’t know anything about the in-house methods at Virgin, but to this day I can’t help thinking that Tekno might have lasted a little longer, might have had a few really marketable titles, if the suits behind the enterprise hadn’t insisted on micromanaging the heart right out of their comics. In our case, at least, that was what ignited the hydrogen.

Things started well enough, with an introductory meeting at the July ’94 Chicago Comicon with Ed Polgardy, who would be our editor at Tekno. Ed had worked for Jim Shooter at Defiant Comics, and knew how to talk to the talent. A smart and personable guy who didn’t take himself too seriously, Ed made an immediate good impression that left me feeling optimistic about the project and the fun to be had with it.

I knew practically nothing about the project before the meeting, and my biggest concern had been, simply, that they’d asked the wrong guy to do the job. Standard superhero stuff just wasn’t my thing – my only brush with that world, the in-progress Batman gig, was taken on only because of the opportunity it offered to work with Archie Goodwin, not out of any affinity with tights and capes – and I wasn’t looking forward to turning the Tekno job down if that’s what was required.

Fortunately, it turned out that the “hero” in Mr. Hero had a different origin than its typical funnybook usage, and the book was intended to be a lighthearted adventure strip with little relationship to mainstream mutant holocausts. According to Ed, I was the guy they wanted because they were in search of someone who a) could write characters who were recognizable human beings and b) wasn’t likely to indulge in the over-the-top teeth-gnashing sort of stuff that Marvel and Image were cranking out in those days. That kind of flattery works wonders; by the time I’d finished smiling over some terrific samples by Ted Slampyak, the artist they’d decided to hire for the book, they had themselves a writer. In fact, I’d agreed in principle to write not only Mr. Hero, but another book that would be scheduled later after the first wave of titles had been established.

Kate’s meeting had apparently gone equally well, and we were in a pretty lighthearted mood when we suited up for a big launch banquet sponsored by Tekno. I can’t remember everyone who was there at this point, and it’s easier now to remember those who couldn’t make it: Neil was away at some other function (his best recollection is that he was doing something at Minneapolis’ Mall of America), Nimoy was in L.A., Jakes was working in South Carolina, and of course Asimov had been dead for two years. The only person in attendance who’d actually generated any of the ideas the company would be working on was Mickey Spillane.

Spillane was one of those rare famous people who look just like themselves. He was 77 at the time, and still unmistakably the guy from those old book jackets and TV beer commercials. Hell, it wasn’t much of a stretch to recognize him from his portrayal of Mike Hammer in the 1963 The Girl Hunters. We should all age so well. And he was clearly having a lot of fun being the biggest celebrity in the room.

Seated next to him and hanging onto his every word was Max Allan Collins, who’d be adapting Spillane’s old aborted “Mike Danger” comics proposal into a hardboiled-dick-gets-transplanted-into-the-future-like-Buck Rogers series. Max had brought his family, including a young son who – rocking a bowl haircut and thick-rimmed glasses just like his dad – anticipated Austin Powers’ “Mini-me” by several years.

By this time, we’d learned that Tekno was part of a start-up outfit founded by Mitchell Rubenstein and Laurie Silvers, who had previously created and sold the Sci-Fi Channel. The two of them hosted the banquet, and there was a fair amount of snake oil served up during speeches in which we were told how brilliant we all were, how much money everybody was going to make, and – who knows? – maybe we’d all be celebrating one of these days on a lavish Tekno ocean cruise.

I think it was dangling the cruise at us that started Kate’s shoulders quivering – she spun a hell of a fantasy later about a Ship of the Damned whose passenger list of cartoonists and movie people slowly drove each other mad and devoured one another. As for me, I’d been spun pretty lies by self-styled producers more than once in the past – my favorite was the guy who wooed me for weeks to take a meeting about adapting one of my plays to film; when I finally agreed to have lunch with him, he asked me to meet him at Burger King. So I wasn’t so much amused as resigned to sitting through another litany of sky-high promises as the rite of passage to another job.

I spent a lot of time that night hypnotized by the back of Mickey Spillane’s neck. Seated at the table behind him, I couldn’t stop staring at the stevedorean roll of gristle that bulged out over his collar. This was not the neck of a guy likely to be easily led by big talk of cruises and amusement parks and Hollywood money. This was not the neck of a guy you wanted to screw with. I’d never been a fan of his work, but I found myself liking and being impressed by Spillane the man. With Mickey and his neck on our side, how badly could things go?

Unfortunately, Mickey and his neck eventually had to go home, leaving management with no one to impress but themselves. When bean counters confuse themselves with the talent, beware.

We hadn’t gone into our assignments starry-eyed, but – given the caliber of talent assembled – Kate and I had agreed that it would be a hell of a trick for management to screw this thing up.

As it turned out … It was easy.

“They ['enhanced interrogation techniques’] did work. They kept us safe for seven years.” – Dick Cheney, 2009

“I fought the war in Oklahoma…I was an instructor… first at Altus, Oklahoma and then…at Frederick, Oklahoma, and…just remember, there was not one Japanese aircraft got past Tulsa.” – George Gobel, 1969

Two months into this reviewing-the-blogosphere thing, and I’m starting to suspect that I’m ready for a break. When I find myself resorting with a straight face to anything resembling the same superficial kiddiesnark that this feature was created to spank, I should probably swear off subjecting myself to the land of comment threads for a while.

Last week’s piece contained a rant about people who not only go to frightening lengths to violate the privacy of their fave professionals, but also encourage others to do the same. I don’t have any regrets about the intent of the piece or most of the points I made there, though a few friends and readers of a particular blogger who I singled out certainly let me know what an old meanie and menace to society I am.

(I’d begun to wonder if it was possible for that many people to completely miss the point, or if I’d just made it that badly, until I heard from the blogger in question, who didn’t have any trouble distinguishing a barbed example from a personal attack. We’ve established a cordial correspondence as a result, inflammatory posts have been edited or deleted, and hatchets have been duly buried. Even in the blogosphere, individual intelligent adults can still trump surface-reading mob hysteria.)

But where I stepped in it was the point at which I let my disgust with the situation lead me to belittle the work of that blogger – who’s also a writer – just to hammer home the points I’d already made. It was unnecessary and, in retrospect, as mean-spirited as some of the blogs I find myself repelled by.

I’ve been hired as a reviewer at various times over the years, so I’ve been in the unhappy position of saying negative things about people’s work. On one occasion, I received a letter from a writer who was unhappy that I’d violated his perception of the writing community as a band of gypsies who had to stick together in this cold world. That’s a lovely romantic view that probably got him through a lot of cold nights, but I don’t subscribe to it. No artist of any kind is above criticism. When we turn out crap, we shouldn’t be treated like serial killers…but even the best intentioned crap is still crap, and you can’t fault readers for thinking so.

In this case, however, I sneered at the work of a writer just because that person had done something which I found offensive, and which was unrelated to writing. I had no business making that spurious connection, and in fact based my comments more on perceived attitude and publishing choices than on the work itself. It was an offense against the gypsy code known as simple human decency, and for that I apologize profusely.

Meanwhile, back in the funnybook blogosphere…

I CAN’T HELP WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW: A couple of weeks ago Nina Stone wondered aloud if she might benefit from using Wikipedia in order to get the background on what she’d been reading. In the case of her “Virgin Read” blog, of course, reviewing things with no prior knowledge is the point, and dumping that schtick would mean abandoning half the charm of her entertaining pieces.

It’s too bad that the notion of knowing what you’re talking about doesn’t occur to other self-appointed reviewers. It’s annoying enough to read tossed-off posts written by bloggers who admit that they don’t have the time or inclination to back up their assertions with anything resembling facts. But when reviewers make it clear that they haven’t bothered to gather the most basic background on a piece of work before they pass judgment on it, I find myself wondering why anybody else should be bothered to read what they have to say.

I’m still shaking my head over a review that was posted of the comics series Galveston, which was based on the real-life friendship of Jim Bowie and Jean LaFitte. That relationship was a relatively obscure bit of history, and I’m not surprised that a number of reviewers admitted that they were unaware of it; not knowing the BFFs of historical figures doesn’t necessarily make you an ignoramus. But I was taken aback by the admission by one reviewer that he’d never heard of Bowie and LaFitte themselves. It ought to be hard to judge a piece of historical fiction when you’re so totally ignorant of the history involved, but common sense doesn’t seem to get in the way of those who are too damned busy to know things.

A more recent example came up in a review of Warren Ellis’ Ignition City. Though the whole point of that series is to offer a deconstruction of classic pulp science fiction heroes – most of whom are incredibly easy to identify – one reviewer was apparently mystified by the presence of a character who’s recently returned from the 25th century. I don’t care how old you are or how much sack time you piled up in class; when comics reviewers can’t pick up on a sledgehammer-subtle reference to Buck Rogers, they have no business reviewing this comic book. They probably have no business reviewing comics at all.

When I write, I assume that most readers understand the words that I understand and know as much as I do about the basic background of a subject. I know there are pros who love to wear their research on their sleeves, but I think the majority of writers try to do their work in a way that doesn’t leave readers behind. But there’s no failure on either part if you occasionally stop to look something up if it might enhance your grasp of what you’re reading. That’s called learning, and it can actually enhance the entertainment experience.

For a reviewer, the willingness to know ought to be a requirement. Even Wikipedia is better than nothing.

NEW HOPE FOR THE ILLITERATE: Modeling attire from the Eddie Haskell Bitchslapmenow Collection, blogger Tucker Stone starred in a Comixology webcast version of his “Factual Opinion” column. A PG-13 approach to his usual snark that appears to be aimed at folks tired of moving their lips while they enjoy his comics reviews, it drove home the point that Stone’s only about half as funny when he isn’t using variations on “fuck” as a fallback. (Not that that’s a problem on the Net, where there’s always another crop of 13-year-olds coming along.) I don’t particularly want to see this become the way of the future any more than Tom Spurgeon does; personally, I’d rather read some composed thoughts about reading matter than watch some guy amusing himself in front of a camera and tossing off simplistic one-liners. But if this is the way things are headed, we could do a lot worse than to keep watching Stone, who’s personable enough and – when he bothers to make the effort – funny and interesting enough to make it worth our while.

More next week, if I still have the heart for it…

Interesting to learn that we’ve detected chemicals in space that taste like raspberries. If we ever discover alien life, maybe we can jump right over the human race’s traditional enslave & exploit model and go directly to eating them.

Once a week I devote this space to a quick survey of the comics blogosphere, with its bizarre mixture of interesting commentary, bonejarring leaps of logic, childish flamewars, creative spelling and pithy quotes. I’ll return to that survey format next week, but this time let’s focus on a single issue.

Last week, Tom Spurgeon posted a link to a blog in which a person we’ll call “T,” who identifies him- or herself as a writer, waxes obsessive about the “mystery” surrounding Neil Gaiman seldom mentioning his wife in his blog. T’s post, dated Aug. 27, 2008, is a follow-up to one she posted on Jan. 1 of this year, and it contains a huge stack of links with references to Mary M. Gaiman that strains the border between obsessive and downright creepy. According to T, “I have had enough hits on this blog concerning Neil Gaiman’s wife that I could no longer ignore the curiosity seekers,” and T obliges by providing 35 links to give “the curious a good place to start.”

In a note inserted the following day, T mentions that a paragraph has been removed “due to privacy concerns” – God knows what that might have said, considering the rest of the post – and offers “sincere apologies for any trouble I’ve caused Neil, his family, or staff.” T could, of course, have deleted the entire post; but prying into someone’s private business is generating hits, and inquiring minds want to know…

On April 11, Neil responded to a question about his marital status that had appeared on WikiAnswers.com with a brief and obviously reluctant summary of his personal situation and his reasons for not broadcasting every detail of his personal life: “I figure that the moment you do start talking about it, you lose any right to try and say ‘No, that’s actually part of my private life, and is honestly none of your business’…And besides, anyone whose business it is to know, knows.”

I’m sure that I was particularly appalled by this because Neil’s a friend and a genuinely nice guy who treats people decently and expects the same in return. When I was introduced to his family some years ago, I found Mary to be a charming person who simply had no interest in the spotlight, so the question of why he didn’t blog about her never occurred to me. But even if I’d never met any of them, I’d still find this level of prying sad and outrageous, because it’s so clearly nobody’s business.

Granted, we all have different comfort levels where this sort of thing is concerned. When I started this blog, I decided that certain parts of my life would remain off-limits. I’m sure, for instance, that I’ve never referred to my children by name here, and have rarely referred to them at all. It doesn’t mean that I’m not proud of them, it doesn’t mean that I don’t love them. It simply means that I don’t think this is an appropriate place to talk about them.

Neil’s children obviously don’t mind being fodder for their dad’s blog, and it’s often delightful to read what he has to say about them. That’s his decision, they’re okay with it, and that’s absolutely fine; it should be up to him to say how much of his personal business will be made public. My oldest daughter made a cameo appearance in Kings in Disguise when she was about five years old. Until now, no more than maybe a couple dozen people have known about her short happy life as a funnybook character. I mention it here (with her permission, incidentally) to demonstrate the extent of my own comfort level. If I wanted you to know more, I’d tell you. Just like Neil. Or anyone else.

But that clearly isn’t good enough for T, who followed Neil’s post with yet another on April 16. In this one, T claims with a straight face to sympathize with Neil’s desire for privacy but quickly shrugs it off because “there is no way he can stop people from thinking about these sorts of things.” The “proof” T cites is the fact that the previous post has gotten thousands of hits. T wraps the whole thing up with the following:

“…when we tell ourselves positive fictions about those celebs, we become more invested in seeing them succeed, which leads us to purchase their products. This is precisely what marketers want us to do. They want us to care enough to spend money, and if they have to help the fiction along (’cause they know it’s a natural human propensity), they’re happy to oblige.

“Gaiman also gets another direct benefit from our fiction-generating minds.  If we didn’t enjoy it so much, we wouldn’t be reading his, or any other, fictional work.”

Silly me, for having appreciated Neil’s work years ago, before I ever knew anything about his personal life, and never thought I needed to. Silly most of us, I think. But, hey, T’s really doing Neil a favor; prying into his private life and trumpeting the number of hits that have resulted are only the means by which he’s been provided with a valuable marketing tool.

T’s right in that people who find themselves in the public eye because of their talent shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that others will be curious about them. But that doesn’t mean it’s open season on them, or that there’s any obligation to open their lives to every nosey jerk who comes along. And pointing out that there’s a few bucks in it for them doesn’t make you a pragmatist, it makes you an oaf.

I really shouldn’t continue to be amazed by the cluelessness of people who post on the internet. The columns and features I usually refer to in this space are dotted with morons who can’t understand why anyone would take it personally when they’re advised to go die in a fire, and property thieves who share pirated works because of a selfish sense of entitlement. And what T and other gossip mongers have done here is no different. They’ve helped themselves to a portion of a person’s life to which they had no right, simply because they felt that their curiosity entitled them to it.

The trouble with raising questions like this, and starting the rumors that ensue, is that there’s so much information available online about everyone that it’s far too easy to make the subject’s life a living hell. In Neil’s case, no literal harm was done, but it was unnecessary and fairly disgusting that he felt compelled to make a statement about something that he didn’t think belonged in a public forum.

But, according to T, if he wasn’t asking for it, he shouldn’t have worn that sexy outfit.

And that’s okay, because it’s generated lots of hits.

It isn’t just a matter of ferreting out who’s married to whom; when a five-minute search can yield information like one’s home address, how much harder would it be to work out where your children go to school, or your family’s personal financial information, and posting that online? Once you start pushing the line, it eventually vanishes altogether. I don’t think T intended to do anything hurtful, but it’s been done all the same, and T won’t stop justifying it.

Inquiring mind or internet stalker? Sometimes there’s no difference, and in this case they can both get stuffed.

(Note: Parts of this post have been altered from their original version because “T” has stepped up and done the right thing. What remains should be considered a general screed against this kind of unthinking harrassment, but at this writing T specifically has earned everyone’s respect for getting the message and behaving like a responsible adult.)