Jump to Comments
Submit to del.icio.us

(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.