So a lot of you have seen it before: I get good steam going, I’m writing and writing and after about four or five issues, I lose steam and that’s all you hear from me for a while. That happened this week to some extent. It was a combination of a lot of things. I’ve been throwing myself at this project at the expense of a lot of other things lately. I have other projects that are literally screaming for my attention that will have to wait because I’ve been riding the wave of creativity and trying to knock out the all important issues to set the background for the series.
I need to get the zero issues done and I need to make them important. I’m setting up the world, something I’ve never done before. If you can see the old comics, I sort of start out of the blue. Bozzie is already dead, Johnnie is already in trouble, everyone sort of knows each other and the situation. Starshine Downs and Universe, while departures, are the same way. You never see the formation of the world, you just sort of jump right in and go along in these developed universes with no flashbacks (other than the Bozzie/Celine wedding night) and no real history.
Writing the zeros is changing things for me and it’s a challenge. While they won’t really have an impact when I remake volumes 01 through 05, volume six is establishing the “real” history of these characters and a lot of it is as new to me as it is to you. This week, if you’ve seen the five page preview, I’m establishing Johnnie’s connection to Darrin and a new character named Tandy. This was talked about in an issue of Starshine Downs, I believe, but it never played out in any of the main stories. It was just sort of Darrin’s motivation for hating Johnnie. Now, it goes deeper. What you’ll see is that they had a Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis-esque TV show for years and much like Martin and Lewis, one abused things by barely staying sober while the other did all the work. There’s animosity there and it sort of shapes the first half of issue 01-00.
The second half of issue 01-00, well, that’s where I hit the wall. Bozzie has always been dead. Even in the past, the “real” Bozzie was never in play. The only extended use I had for the character, his appearances in Universe, he was eventually revealed to be a robot or construct or whatever. He wasn’t the ambitious devil-may-care founder of this mess, he was just a guy with problems with his wife and a deeper secret. I think Bozzie had like three lines in the only flashbacks I’ve done for the series and maybe a line saying goodbye to Cindee, but that was it. There was nothing really to go by.
Sometimes I have problems wrapping myself around new things. Old things. Older things. I never liked my issues where Elvis Presley was a featured character. I just couldn’t properly do his voice other than the same 12 or 13 “bad Elvis” lines we’ve all heard over the years from every impersonator under the sun. I really wanted to approach the creepy side of Elvis to make him stand out (his thing for young girls, his out of control drug habit, the sheer gluttony that was Elvis etc.), but I never could get past his voice. How do you know what’s “real” about the guy’s character when everything we’ve seen is a mockery?
With Bozzie, I don’t know. I know what I want him to be. He’s a 65-year-old man with a 21-year-old wife. He can’t keep a marriage together because he has a secret (as revealed in this issue). He belongs in another time and he’s prone to making random catch phrases and silly lines. He’s a total rogue and very manipulative. I think he’s more together than Johnnie ever will be. He knows how to channel his mania to control the plans he has and he’s very possessive of people and things, to the point where it’s destroying him to let go.
So why can’t I write that “voice”? I don’t know. I’ve been struggling. I hate to admit it and I hate to doubt myself, but as I’m preparing to letter a very late issue 01-00, I know I’m going to be revising the lines I have for him. Right now I’ve written his exchanges with Cirque (not really a spoiler if you’ve read issue 06-00 aka the old 05-06), as generic dialog. They’ll need to be touched up a bit and right now I’m drawing a blank.
I’ll probably throw myself into issue 02-00 rather than face it today, but even in that, I’m going to come to the head of what to do about Bozzie’s voice. 01-00, 02-00, 03-00, 04-00 and 05-00 have at least 50 to 60 pages devoted to him (out of 100 story pages), so I’m going to have to find my way quickly.
Sigh. I signed up for this. Now I have to figure out how to make it work.
Jim