Happy Samurai New Year

To ring in the new year, I am posting a teaser page from the upcoming Bushido .44 one-shot graphic novel.  Be warned: Harvey Tolibao's pencils will cut you down like Toshiro Effing Mifune!

R.I.P. Dr. Manhattan (2009-2011)

The following story is dedicated in memoriam to my hamster, Dr. Manhattan.  The first draft was written the same day that he was laid to rest.  As he rides with the Valkyrie in the Halls of Valhalla, may his fur be forever fuzzy, his balls ever so large.

HAMSTER MAN

By Stuart C. Paul

David was a hamster person.  By the time he was thirty-nine, he could rattle off the names of the sixteen hamsters he had owned over the course of his lifetime with the same effortless cantor usually reserved for reciting the Presidents of the United States.  His first hamster, Squeaky, had been a gift from his parents when David was six.  It was supposed to be a training wheels pet—the hamster’s low maintenance requirements coupled with its short life span intended to teach the child the virtues of responsibility in preparation for the inevitable day came when David began pestering his parents for a dog.  The assumption that the boy’s tastes would grow more sophisticated over time proved to be incorrect.  While his preferences in food, clothing, entertainment and friends changed over time, his taste in pets never did.

To say that David liked hamsters would be an understatement.  To say he loved them misses the point entirely.  It was a bond born of an understanding that went beyond species, transcending the traditional roles of owner and pet.  The boy’s unusual predilection did not go unnoticed by his parents.  His mother first began to worry when she would glance over from the television to see David perched with his face pressed against the bars of rodent’s cage for hours on end, gazing deep into the noble Squeaky’s eyes as if they contained the very secrets of the cosmos.  This concerned her, for the hamster is, by design, a stupid creature. 

Her apprehension that the boy’s attachment to the ham went beyond what might be considered completely normal remained only a seed buried deep in the recesses of her mind.  That all changed when she was getting ready for dinner one night, only to discover her favorite pair of heels had been chewed to bits.  It seems that her son, having determined it cruel and unusual punishment to keep imprisoned in a cage, a creature who so obviously possessed such a keen desire for freedom, had begun letting Squeaky run free.  A family discussion was held in the living room, during which David’s parents sought to make the boundaries between hamster and human more clearly defined.  Despite her son’s promise to keep his friend locked up when not under direct supervision, David’s mother would still, on occasion, find the telltale oval-shaped nuggets dotting the carpets which told her that a hamster was afoot. 

For his part, David’s father took the boy’s antics in stride—that is until the night he was awakened by the sounds of scurrying within the walls.  The rest of the night was spent hammering, drilling and sawing; and then calling, coaxing and cursing.  The hamster was finally lured out around dawn, leaving a series of gaping holes in the baseboards of the house.  Worse still, the night’s excavation had also exposed a sea of gnawed wires behind the entertainment system.  This led to another talk in the living room, during which David’s father threatened to release the hamster into the wilds of the suburbs to fend for itself against the neighborhood cats if something like this ever happened again.

For a while, things calmed down.  Then came the day David began insisting that a benevolent wizard had transformed him into a hamster overnight.  Abandoning his human identity, David would answer only to the name Garbanzo.  He filled his room with shredded newspaper and went about in the nude, abandoning showers in favor of licking himself in the corner.  Soon after, a pungent smell alerted his parents that Garbanzo had abandoned use of the household bathroom facilities.  An appointment with a psychologist was quickly scheduled.  After three sessions, the doctor concluded that David was not insane—just a little strange.  David’s human identity reasserted itself soon after.  Despite a tumultuous beginning, David’s antics soon faded away into the domain of family lore.  After the death of the inimitable Squeaky, David’s parents felt a pang of relief, but within a day, David had already begun inquiries as to when he could get another hamster.  So it was that neither nature nor nurture, psychology nor sociology could account for David’s unnaturally potent affinity for the noble Mesocricetus auratus. 

Hamsters came and went, and in all the years of David’s youth, there was scarcely a week in total when there was not a hamster in the house.  As he grew older, certain analogous qualities between pet and owner became apparent, the most obvious being their sleep cycles.  Like companions, David was nocturnal.  As a boy, he often had difficulty sleeping at night.  As a teenager, his days were plagued by sloth, his nights the only time when he truly came alive.  His eating habits were also rather rodent-like, his preference being to eschew regular meals in favor of snacking on whatever food he had on-hand.  Like his friends, sunflower seeds, cashews, peanuts and assorted sweets were a favorite.  The last point of comparison was David’s uncanny ability to expand the size of his cheeks to extraordinary proportions, a favorite party trick which earned him many free drinks, but very little in the way of female companionship.

As a rule, David was monogamous in his hamster relations.  One hamster at a time—that was the lesson he learned when he accidentally placed Nibble (#3) and Hampshire (#4) in the same cage.  A series of furious shrieks alerted him to his mistake, and he found the two rodents rolling around, their bodies melded together in a furball of mortal combat.  David himself did not escape unscathed as Nibble’s teeth dug into the skin of David’s index finger when he reached in and grabbed the wrestlers, vigorously shaking them to peel them apart.  When the wounds were tallied, the battle came out overwhelmingly in Hampshire’s favor.   Nibble suffered multiple lacerations, losing a large chunk from his left foreleg, while Hampshire got off with a minor scratch under his right eye. 

The milestones of David’s life were marked not by changes in the world around him, but in the cage across from his bed.  His induction into the world of adolescent obsession with sex came not from the girl next door, TV or the Internet, but when he saw Quasimodo (#6) pleasuring himself.  He shared his collegiate descent into drunken debauchery with Bond James Bond (#9).  Unlike his namesake, the hamster never took to martinis, shaken or stirred.  And never had David felt such palpable rage as when he returned from class to find his roommate and three of his friends blowing pot smoke into Mr. Bond’s plastic hamster ball.  007 spent the rest of the night hiding under David’s bed, chattering his teeth and obsessively grooming.  David’s first and only experience with marijuana went much the same. 

Of all of David’s hamsters over the years, only one, Mary Todd Lincoln (#5) was female.  Finding her smelly, he swore to stick to male hamsters from then on, but years later, after meeting a most enchanting human female who accepted David’s proposal of marriage, he decided it was time to give the fairer sex another shot.  His marriage was mirrored in the coupling of George (#11) and Gracie (#12), the lone exception to his one-hamster-at-a-time rule, whose honeymoon came to an abrupt end when David found Gracie cannibalizing the brains of her ill-fated husband and newborn litter.  David’s own marriage ended under slightly less diplomatic terms.

While it is undeniable that hamsters offers a number of substantial positives (easy to clean up after, quiet, fuzzy), there are also some negatives which any hamster owner can tell you are keenly felt (impossible to housetrain, enjoy to chew on expensive things, tend to hoard food in unexpected places), the most potent of which is their short lifespan.  The average duration of a hamster’s existence is two years—a high turnover rate when one considers that the death of each and every one of his hamsters struck David like the loss of a beloved relative.  The most aged hamster David ever had, Miyamato Musashi (#13) lived an epic four years.  The shortest was Gilgamesh (#10), who after being left beside an open window by the maid overnight, contracted wet tail and died within two weeks. 

Over time, David’s grieving process had grown into a ritual as precise and layered as that of any religion.  Whether the creature had to be put down by anesthesia (Beast, #10), died peacefully in his sleep (Jesse James, #11), or fell prey to the laws of gravity (Evel Kanevil, #2), David always followed the same procedure. 

First, the coffin was constructed, preferably out of balsa wood.  Next, a coin was placed between the hamster’s teeth (one must do this quickly before rigor mortis sets in).  Once the coffin was glued shut and the proper Buddhist mantra concluded, the coffin was covered in Sterno, placed upon a body of water (an ocean or lake is preferable, but a bathtub will do) and lit aflame, the remains transferred afterwards to an appropriate resting place. 

Such was the process which David undertook two weeks before his fortieth birthday, laying to rest Dr. Manhattan (#16).  The death of the good Doctor hit David particularly hard, for he had nursed Dr. Manhattan from the time he was no bigger than David’s own thumb.  The doctor’s disposition was most pleasant.  Never once did David feel the sting of the hamster’s bite.  The Doctor was also favored among all David’s hamsters for his habit of climbing a stack of books that David had leaned against the wall.  From there, the adventurous sprite crawled up the window blinds, onto a speaker shelf and down to David’s desk where he would sit, illuminated by the glow of David’s computer screen, the two of them working side by side, deep into the night. 

Two years came and went, and with them, the good Doctor’s salad days passed into requiem.  The first sign of mortality came when David heard a solid thud followed by a series of pained shrieks from his office.  The Doctor, his grip not what it once was, apparently slipped whilst engaging in his nightly climbing ritual.  But even a broken leg could not slow him, nor dampen his spirits, though he did walk with a limp from then on.  The next thing to go was the doctor’s eyesight as his pupils clouded over with cataracts.  Still, his sense of smell took over where his sight failed him, and Dr. Manhattan still got around as well as ever.  Then came the night when the Doctor did not emerge from his cage at the appointed hour.  When David picked him up, the strength had gone out of the hamster, his body limp, his gaze full of apathy.  The tumor, which had no doubt been brewing beneath Dr. Manhattan’s lustrous coat of fur, had sprung up nearly overnight.  It was located on the lower, right side of his abdomen and quickly spread into his right rear leg.  The nails on his foot began growing at a spectacularly accelerated rate, curling up into spirals as the cancer cells continued to reproduce at breakneck speed.  Dr. Manhattan’s decline was swift and merciless.  He became lethargic, stopped eating and drinking, and lost most his muscle tone.  When David picked him up, the hamster stared at him with an apathetic look on his face, his body limp like a lukewarm marshmallow.  The Doctor’s death was inevitable, a blessed release from an existence which had become filled with suffering.

For two weeks, David barely ate.  He slept all day and rarely went outside.  He felt he had lost the best part of himself.  As in his youth, his existence began to resemble that of the hamster he now mourned.  When he finally did work up the strength to shower and go to the local breeder to look into procuring another hamster, something had changed.  He no longer felt the same tingling anticipation as he waited to see with which animal he would have a connection.  He looked upon the poor creatures piled upon one another like the residents of a refugee camp, and all he could think of was death, death, death. 

The knowledge of his coming loss overshadowed all possibility of joy in the present, and David decided that perhaps the day of the hamster man had come to an end.  Two years was just too short a time.  Assuming he lived to 80 years, he would, at the present trajectory, have to suffer through the pain of losing twenty more beloved companions at least.  Perhaps, he thought, it is time to move on, to get a pet less susceptible to mortality.  Like a macaw or a tortoise or something like that. 

David looked into every species, genus and phylum under the sun, conducting research both in physical libraries, in zoos and online.  He came very close to purchasing a San Salvadorian iguana, but decided he could not get past the reptile’s notable lack of fuzziness.  No, it was time to face up to the facts—it was hamster or nothing.  Just as David resigned himself to the idea of spending the rest of his life in hamsterless spinsterhood, a message popped up in his inbox.  The sender’s name was listed as DR. GENE POOLE.  The subject:  LIVE FOREVER.  

Though he normally would have deleted such a message out of hand, David found himself opening the message.  The advertisement read:  SCIENTISTS CAN NOW FORESTALL AGING AT THE GENETIC LEVEL.  ADD YEARS TO YOUR LIFESPAN FOR AS LOW AS $9.99 PER CHROMOSOME!

David had heard the hubbub on the news a few years ago when the first designer genetics salon opened up.  The proponents of genetic engineering, quick to dispel any accusations of eugenics, said that disease, aging and death were nothing but an accumulation of errors at the genetic level—errors that could now be corrected for a price.  The opponents’ arguments were many, but eventually, someone always brought up the words “playing” and “God.”  Indeed, the Pope had come down firmly against the concept of gene tampering.  But nobody really gave a damn what the Pope said once the geneticists announced the first cancer patients had been cured. 

Most of Dr. Gene Poole’s marketing was targeted at movie stars, trophy wives and expectant parents hoping to give their children an edge.  It had always struck David as grossly narcissistic.   Frankly, he didn’t want to live forever.  And even if he did, with forty-six chromosomes per cell in the human body, he would never be able to afford it.  Plus which, he was far too old to fix the damage that had already been done.  The procedure was most successful when applied to an unborn embryo.  David moved his cursor over to the delete button, but he did not click.  A question, a notion, a fancy had come, unbidden, into his head, and once thought, it could not be un-thought.  He wondered to himself, How many chromosomes could a hamster possibly have?

 *    *    *

 Hamster #17 cost David $440,000 plus tax.  David died at the age of eight-five.  He was buried in the graveyard next to Hamsters #1-16.  He had no children.  The headstone on his grave reads:

DAVID AVERSANO

1972-2057

Survived by Enoch

The World’s Oldest Hamster

13 Reasons We Should Restore Funds to NASA

I am not an expert on physics, economics, politics or any field of study considered even remotely useful to life as we know it.  Therefore, I am eminently qualified to voice my opinion that the United States government should restore funding to NASA.  Here are thirteen reasons why:

1. Education -- America's children are stupid.  Everyone else is better than us at everything, especially science.  If we want to fix this, we need to reprioritize and foster an educational environment that encourages future generations to enter the fields of engineering and science that will allow our country to maintain relevance through invention.

2.  Health -- One thing leads to another.  The research involved in creating technology that will help us reach the stars may lead to discoveries to improve public health and eradicate disease.  And by technology, I mean nanotechnology.  Take that, cancer!  Robo-zapped!

3.  Plan B (Part I) -- It's always good to have a backup plan.  Some day, life on Earth will end.  Sure, people have been expecting the world to end since it first began, but just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it won't ever.  Granted, the United States will probably have long ceased to exist as a geopolitical entity, its memory recalled only in the campfire tales told in the hushed tones among the few literate survivors that have not yet fallen prey to the radioactive cannibalistic cowmen that will evolve sometime in the 33rd century.  But still.

4.  Moon Outpost -- Because it's a freaking moon base.

5.  Listen to Michael Bay (Plan B: Part II) -- That meteor killed the dinosaurs.  And that other meteor recently almost hit us.  It passed between the Earth and the moon.  Do you have any idea how close that is?!!!  We need to get some antigravity lasers up there, STAT.

6.  Colony on Mars -- See Reason #4 but replace the word "moon" with "Mars."

7.  Population -- The stupid people are having more kids than you.   While some scientists say overpopulation is not as big a problem as we once thought it was, recent traffic trends suggest otherwise.  Also old people are living longer.  Also China.  On that note...

8.  China -- They already own the country.  Do you want them to own Mars, too?  Well, do you?!

9.  Energy and the Environment -- You want to talk about moving past fossil fuels and onto hydrogen power?  Most of the matter in the universe is hydrogen.  The sun is a giant hydrogen battery.  The solution to our environmental crisis lies not on earth, but in the stars.  Plus we need to be taking fusion power more seriously.  Seriously.

10.  The Economy -- More space travel means more jobs.  It's going to take a lot of contractors to build our Intergalactic Earth Armada of Doom to say nothing of the bureaucrats and military personnel required for our malevolent takeover of other galaxies.

11.  Hyperspace Travel -- Though unconfirmed by other laboratories, CERN recently broke the speed of light, but we have a long way to go before we get warp drive.

12.  The Future Survival of Humanity -- The exploration of the universe is the best hope we have of uniting mankind and redefining ourselves not as citizens of a particular country, but of the same planet.  I do not subscribe to the Roddenberry's vision of the future.  We will always be cruel, petty and violent, but why kill each other on a planet with only one sun, when you could do it on a planet with three suns?  And like, maybe a green sky.

13.  Maybe There's Aliens -- I'm just saying.

Here is a link to a petition you can sign if you agree with what you have surely found to be rock-solid and convincing arguments:  https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/reallocate-defense-funds-nasa/HrxpT8pf?utm_source=wh.gov&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=shorturl

More comics about dinosaurs

The blog's recent trend away from reporting on my legitimate writing endeavors and towards things involving dinosaurs can be attributed to three key factors: 1 - Dinosaurs are awesome, 2 - My wife is currently taking an art class, so we have all this art stuff lying around and 3 - DINOSAURS ARE AWESOME.

Thus, despite having no particular talent or genetic predisposition, I've occasionally been using the pen for pictures instead of words as a way to relax when I'm not writing movies or TV pilots or comics for real artists to work on.  I used to draw comics in high school when I was bored during class, and I figured now that I've actually written some comics that got made, it might be interesting to try and draw some pictures, too.  Perhaps I will come to a better understanding of the artist's plight in this world.  Soon, you may find me wandering down the street screaming at my own reflection in the window of a Norwegian clothing boutique as I curse myself for ruining my beautiful art with all my stupid, ugly words.

Thus, I give you PREHISTORIC TYRANNY.

Prehistoric Tyranny

I call it "art."

Hollywood Reporter Announcement

Comic Scribe Adapting 'Nye Incidents' for RKO

Stuart Paul takes on Whitley Strieber's world of alien abductees for the project, to be directed by Todd Lincoln.

Screenwriter and comic book writer Stuart Paul has been tapped to adapt The Nye Incidents, the comic book co-created by Communion author Whitley Strieber.

The project is set up at RKO, with Todd Lincoln attached to direct. Lincoln is also producing with Daniel Alter.

Set in the world of alien abductees, the Devil Due’s comic centers on a seen-it-all and logical medical examiner whose faith in the rational is shattered when she runs afoul a brutal murder of a supposed alien abductee. The case puts her on the path chasing a serial killer working in the alien abductee community who may or may not be human.

Paul is a relative newcomer in both the comic and screen scene. Last year he wrote a six-issue mini-series for Wildstorm/DC titled Ides of Blood, a Roman Empire-set vampire story. This past summer, his spec Terminal Point was picked up by Strike Entertainment, the company behind the upcoming horror movie The Thing, and is currently being packaged.

Paul is repped by Verve and Caliber Media Co.

Lincoln and Alter previoulsy teamed up on The Apparition, a supernatural horror movie starring Ashley Green and Sebastian Stan; the movie is due out next year.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/comic-scribe-adapting-nye-incidents-239314

Fun With Corpses

Today, I spent an amazing day with the members of Decedent Services at the Los Angeles Coroner to research a movie I am writing for RKO. A very big thanks to Ruben Pena, Fidel Fernandez and John Killen for letting me tag along on their pick-ups and teaching me new life skills such as how to suck up the spilled fluids from a leaking body bag.

Speed Colors

Here's a little something Martin Hernandez was kind enough to send me!  Pictures are prettier with color!

64 pages of samurai awesomeness

I can finally announce that a 64-page Bushido .44 one-shot entitled "The Seen and the Unseen" is currently underway.  I am very excited to report that the immensely talented Harvey Tolibao is doing the pencil art.  I recently visited a major American landmark to take reference photos for the comic.  Expect continuing updates in the months to come.

Bushido .44 Completed Samples

The Bushido .44 sample pages are finally complete!  Behold the work of penciller Christian Duce, colorist Martin Hernandez Tena and letterer Elizabeth Paul.  Logo design by Hide Konishi.  I will be printing a limited run for Comicon in July.  In the meantime, stay tuned--a very big Bushido .44 announcement is coming soon!

Fantastic Forum Interview

Here is a link to an interview I did on Fantastic Forum recently to discuss Ides of Blood's nominations in the CBG Fan Awards:  http://media.allgames.com/fantasticforum/FF040611EDIT.mp3

Thanks to Moses and everyone else for having me on.

Ides of Blood receives 3 nominations!!!

Behold the news which has put me in a state of baffled befuddlement!

I just got the news that Ides of Blood is nominated for Favorite Comic Series and Favorite Story (Issue #1 "Rome of Shadow, Rome of Light) in the CBG Fan Awards.  What's more, Shannon Eric Denton is nominated for Favorite Editor, and I am nominated for Favorite Writer!

A great big thank you to everyone who voted for the comic, and especially to my fellow collaborators. 

You can vote here:  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7W9BW2S

Full list of noms here: http://cbgxtra.com/new-from-cbg/vote-for-your-favorites-in-the-29th-annual-cbg-fan-awards

Bushido .44 in Technicolor

Here is a preview of the Bushido .44 pages in color, courtesy of Martin Hernandez.   You can check him out at www.aladecuervo.com.

Bushido .44 Samples

Here are some samples that Christian Duce drew and my wife lettered for a new alternate-history neo-samurai spaghetti-western hybrid comic that I'm looking to get off the ground.

In Defense of the Douchebags

So, Jason Aaron, writer of the amazing Vertigo series Scalped, one of the best comics being published today, posted an article on CBR recently (link!) in which he criticized comments made by Darren Aronofsky about taking scripts that Hollywood won't make and turning them into comic books.  While I agree with many of Aaron's points, I found myself unable to ignore the resentful tone he directs at screenwriters looking to break into comics.

As a screenwriter who recently published his first comic--a comic which began as a screenplay--I felt mildly affronted by Aaron's article.  Alas, the Internet is not for the mildly affronted.  It is for unleashing enraged tirades of nuclear blog bombs of racial, political and religious intolerance.  Therefore, I shall attempt to assume the proper spirit of vitriol in my response.

You see, Aaron's article only serves to confirm a suspicion I have been harboring ever since I, a screenwriter of no particular note or repute, snuck into the comic world through the back door--they don't like us.  To be fair, I don't like screenwriters either.  We're a bunch of obnoxious, pseudo-intellectual, caffeine-addicted hacks who step right off the film school assembly line with a copy of Final Draft, five-day-old scraggle and oversized Buddy Holly glasses.  

Every idiot thinks they can write a screenplay--because they can.  At least before typewriters, wannabe novelists would get tired and give up before they hit page 50.  But with no need for paragraph breaks, quotation marks or any understanding of the English language whatsoever--even my drunk cousin Random Dan can knock out a "screenplay" in a week or two.  And if you look at the crap that comes out in theaters every week, it's easy to tough not to hate screenwriters.  

But the truth is that only a tiny fraction of screenplays ever get made.  There are more good unproduced screenplays than there are hairs in Alan Moore's beard.  A screenwriter has three choices: 

1. come to terms with the fact that most of what you spend weeks, months or even years on will never see the light of day
2. ritual seppuku
3. tell your story any damn way you can

It is on the merits of Option #3 that Aaron and I disagree.  

But whenever I hear about a failed screenplay being turned into a comic book, simply to try and get Hollywood’s attention, because, you know, Hollywood loves comic book, I can’t help but cry a little bit inside.

I know there are lots of struggling screenwriters out there with scripts lying around that they haven’t been able to sell. And I know a lot of them have recently been getting the idea to turn those scripts intocomic books, that they can then turn around and try to get optioned as films. 

I also find the practice of making comics just to launch film properties to be anathema.  One of my first jobs in comics was writing for a company that did exclusively that, but I needed the money and I got some experience.  In the end, the company folded and the comics were never published, so I suppose there is some poetic justice in that respect.  However, I feel that Aaron is making unfair assumptions about the intentions of screenwriters seeking to turn their scripts into comics.


Ides of Blood started as a screenplay (actually, the original idea was to do Ides as a comic but the aforementioned comic company of ill repute passed on the project--thank God).  The entire reason Ides became a comic in the first place was because DC's film division wanted to try and reverse engineer it into a movie--exactly the kind of medium-hopping malfeasance Aaron is warning us against.  Yet I do not consider Ides of Blood to be included among the projects that would cause Jason Aaron's innards to shed tears.  Why not?

Because I didn't write Ides of Blood the comic to make it into a movie.  I wrote it to be the best damn comic I could make it.  When the decision was made to make the comic, I started over from scratch, never once looking at the screenplay.  I changed numerous elements from plot to character to setpieces and completely reinvented the story for the comic medium.  Do I want a movie to be made out of Ides?  Uh, yeah.  Do I want to write it?  You bet I do.  But that's all icing on the cake.  All I want is to tell my story.  And that is exactly what comics allowed me to do--a gift for which I am deeply grateful.  Aaron goes on to say:

We don’t need comics that are hanging out at our party only because they couldn’t get an invite to the much cooler shindig down the street. We don’t need comics that would rather be something else.

On the surface, Aaron's reasoning here seems to make sense, but the more I thought about it, the more Aaron's treatment of a comic's secret screenplay origin as something akin to a back-alley abortion in the '50s creates a slippery slope towards anti-adaptationism (I invented a word!).  If you follow his statement to its logical extreme, then screenplays should not be made into comics because a story can only be intended for one medium. It's as if a writer must choose which caste his story should enter into at birth and once that caste is chosen--to change one's mind is somehow disingenuous.

So I guess novels shouldn't be made into comics, either.  That's bad news for Orson Scott Card's Ender Series and George R.R. Martin's Fevre Dream.  Someone should have told Stephen King that The Dark Tower, The Stand and The Talisman aren't allowed.  Right, you say, but the difference is those stories were already successful novels before being turned into comics.  And that's exactly why I don't want to read them.  I tried reading the Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep adaptation that Boom put out.  The art was beautiful and all, but all I could think was, "What's the point?"  If I wanted to read Philip K. Dick, I'd read Philip K. Dick.  I would rather see a dozen unpublished screenplays turned into comics rather than a dozen rehashed adaptations of stories that already exist in other mediums.

I quite enjoy and agree with Aaron's 10 tips to screenwriters looking to turn their screenplays into comics--save for one to which I take exception:

Have you already said in interviews that you’re bringing this story to comics because you couldn’t get it off the ground as a movie? If so, then know that we are likely already biased against you. Nobody likes being told they were your second or third choice for a prom date. At least have the decency to lie to our faces.

Guilty as charged.  Sorry, but I'm not going to lie about the origin of my story just because I'm afraid it might piss you off.  Aaron acts as if there is an unbreachable us vs. them mentality between comics and movies.  Like it's some kind of personal attack to want to write a VISUAL story for a VISUAL medium.  Look, man.  It's not personal.  If you can't handle that your girlfriend went out with other guys before you, maybe you should just stay in your room and read more comics.

This brings me to my main point.  A writer's loyalty is not to the medium but to his story. The medium is nothing but a hypodermic needle for injecting awesomeness into the brain.  Aaron wants to read comics that want to be comics.  I want to read stories that want to exist.  I'm with Aronofsky on this one--a story is made to be told.  I don't give a damn if the comic I'm reading started as a screenplay, a novel, a haiku or a tattoo on a syphilitic hobo's back.

In the end, there's only one question that should concern the reader--was the comic written with integrity?

I don't know how you determine the answer to that question, but whatever criteria you choose to decide if a comic is worthy of merit, I don't think that the fact that it started out life as a screenplay should automatically disqualify it.

Alakazam Signing Cancelled

To anyone in Orange County who might have been planning to come to the signing at Alakazam tomorrow, be forewarned I won't be there. However, you are encouraged to go in and when you find out Stuart C. Paul is not in attendance, wave a fat stack of cash in their face and say, "Then you aren't gettin' none of this lettuce, honky!"

Vote for Ides of Blood!

You are strongly encouraged to vote in the CBG Fan Awards.  Please vote for Ides of Blood for Favorite Series, Stuart C. Paul for Favorite Writer, Shannon Eric Denton for Favorite Editor and Christian Duce for Favorite Penciller.

If you do not wish to vote or prefer to vote for some other crap, that's fine.  But I will have to kill your puppy and eat your grandmother.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/D39NYT7

Issue 5 Podcast

Here's a podcast review of issue 5 where the fellas at Wildstorm Addiction tell you why you should be reading Ides of Blood and implore comic fans to buy issue 6 and push for a trade paperback release of the series.

http://www.wildstormaddiction.com/2010/12/wildstorm-addiction-podcast-episode-21/