I saw the ghost of Pappy O' Daniel the other day at work. Or, at least, it looked a lot like him. He wanted a dry aged rib-eye, and his Texas twang recalled better days. "You look tired son; you must be working too hard." I wrapped up his steak and thanked him for his concern.
"Best be careful, son. These jobs can turn ya' into a zombie." He tipped his hat and walked away with the swagger of a cowboy.
Truth is, I have been feeling like a zombie lately. Wearing two hats has begun to get to me. While I am happier with my night job that I have been in a while. I still have a hard time resisting the urge to run away. Turn my wheels to this horrid city and drive off in search of god knows what. Leave beef steaks and bloodied aprons behind me.
The situation with my comic is much the same. Putting together a paperback is hard work. At times it's felt like the world's biggest clusterfuck. I'm expected to organize this whole thing, but I have little idea how - and seem to have less skill with keeping the various people involved on task. Despite having worked my entire adult life towards this one goal, quitting seems to have a morbid glamour at the moment.
Thankfully, I can't. The hard working cowpokes at Silent Devil won't let me, and neither will my editor. Aside from that, I don't really want to. So I stay up late writing emails and making phone calls. I go to cons and pass out thousands of fliers. I bug comic book retailers via MySpace. Anything I can to make this a success. Failure is not an option, though it's surely less tiring. Please keep all this in mind and order the book. It's in the current Previews catalog, page 339. Ref AUG07 3961.
So yes, I do feel a bit like a zombie. Not a flesh-muncher ala Romero, but more like something a sinister, goateed Bela Lugosi would keep as a slave. And yet, lately, my attention has been turning to another form of movie monster... dinosaurs.
It's been months since I've worked on a story for my web comic, so it's long overdue that I turn my attention back to Solomon and friends. And it's always been my intention to cover all of the classic monsters in the comic. Though dinos have a basis in truth, I've opted to focus on thunder lizards more as fantasy figures - the kind that captured my imagination while watching King Kong as a child.
My working title for the story arc is "Adam and Evil", and while I've yet to get beyond making notes for the tale, it's already combining two of my favorite pseudo-sciences -cryptozoology and creationism. Throw in a dash of Lovecraft & Edgar Rice Burroughs, and you've got a recipe for a rollicking good Halloween Man tale.
Researching oddball subjects can be a pain anywhere. Researching them in an unfamiliar city is a pain the size of the Las Vegas strip. Certainly, I could go the easy route and simply rely completely on Wikipedia and internet searches. But I'm old fashioned and love trips to book stores. Only problem is, I don't really know of any good book stores here in Vegas, and I don't know my way around the city well enough to search for one. While any "McBookstore" will likely have a
ton of books on dinosaurs, they're not likely to have much on the other subjects relating to my tale.
Of course a lot of you are probably surprised to learn that I do any research at all. The fact is, I typically stick to subjects I already know a good deal about. But when I do have to step outside of my "safe zones", I'll roll up my sleeves and do the work. More often than not I find research to be a lot of fun.
Another key thing is coming up with the proper "Halloween Man-flavor" for these creatures. Every time I introduce a new monster in our mythology, I want to make sure that while it feels classic, it also has something that sets it apart from other versions. A prime example of this is of course Solomon himself. At the time, having a zombie with superpowers and that could talk was a bit of novelty.
Another example is my version of vampires. Probably the most heavily featured out of the classic monsters. Vampires in the world of Halloween Man come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. The weirdest looking is of course the vampire gunslinger Dr. Owl, who appears in "Working Stiffs." Dr. Owl is fat, pale, has feathers for hair, and six arms. He's worlds away from the elegant vampires featured in Hammer horror. A lot of people have asked why he's so strange looking. Here's my reasoning:
There's a bit of vampire lore that's little used. It simply states that someone who was REALLY evil in life can return from the grave as vampire. No bite needed, you just have to be bad to the bone. My riff on this is that the more evil you are in life, the more inhuman you are as a blood-sucker. So you all can imagine what kind of person the Doc was in life. Cue that famous George Thorogood song again and you've pretty much got the idea.
With dinosaurs, my choice to not weave them in from the realm of science-fiction might be off putting choice to some. But I need to have them make sense to the world we're creating. So rooting them in biblical lore was a more logical way to go with it. However, I did make sure to go back and rewatch some of the dinosaur films that thrilled me as a kid. Just to make sure that I got that right touch of monster movie magic in them. While I'm sure my wife could use a break from the big brutes, I'm having a ball.
Of course, in a way, that's perfect. In a lot of respects the act of creation is one of pure self-indulgence. It's an assumption on the writer's part that they have something worth saying. And that people will care about what they're writing about. It's also a way to keep in touch with childhood fantasies. Carry them into adulthood with you. We write to escape, but we also write to enrich our lives. To keep us young at heart. To keep us from becoming zombies.
Drew Edwards is the writer/creator of Halloween Man and it's upcoming paperback SUPERDEFORMED! He is nether a zombie nor a dinosaur. But he's sometime mistaken for both.
