Getting It Done: Bill And Ted's Excellent Comic Book #9, Page 12 (Et Al)

Commercial monthly comics can become a grind. You want to do the best job possible while keeping to a monthly schedule and not causing monthly nightmares for everyone involved. It's a system dating back to the golden age of hackery, where largely substandard work was being poured out to fill pages, usually with an assembly line approach. 

We're past the days of the steady monthly mainstream comic series done by a steady creative team over an extended time. Creators come and go for short heralded runs, for the most part. Which allows them to concentrate on a specific arc or storyline. Basically, a trade collection or two. Since this is America and not Europe, it all has to be done under the old system of monthly releases, as parts of a title's run, more or less. Every month that comic has to come out and be the best comic possible. The comic series themselves aren't as stable as they once were, now we have endless reboots, re-numberings, re-titling, regurgitation. And by and large creative teams don't stick around for 

Some folks can work at this pace and do a solid job for an impressive length of time. Most don't. Corners are cut, ideas are truncated, cliches are trotted out, splash pages are called for, dialog is perfunctory or dialog becomes the point in order to pad out a few pages on useless chatter camouflaged as character work, plots are stretched, storytelling is designed to be drawn as quickly as possible, difficult scenes are reconfigured to be less difficult, heavy visual lifting is left to the inker or, more likely nowadays, the digital colorist. In the worst cases known in comics lore, you have Vinnie Colletta erasing some of Kirby's Thor pencils to have less to ink. 

The monthly is still more or less a factory job but in modern times everyone's a fan trying to up their game while knowing the fans at home are watching everything from the internet sidelines. Fill-in and file stories are no longer tolerated, a layout artist and a team of Diverse Hands is, I am guessing, frowned upon. Not having to meet newsstand schedules has made it so a late book will be a late book without a 20-page plug being shoved into the gap. By and large, though, the monthly grind goes on. The creators don't stay as long, but the books are supposed to come out, and under modern scrutiny where we're all fans now, everything has to be up to a standard we didn't have in the past. if a book was behind schedule, a gang of artists and letterers would be thrown on it, it would be tackled in-house, something, anything would happen to get a comic book to the printer, distributor and retailer. There are stories from the golden age about how a group of artists would hole up in a studio or hotel room to bash out an entire comic in a weekend. And those comics were generally 68 pages of material. Quality was obviously less of a concern that getting it done. 

Nowadays we want the schedule and we want the quality. We want the story to be compelling and the art to be pure, detailed and exciting. We want 20 pages that better read and look great. Well, if it's Batman some fans will buy it even if rabid weasels drew it in human excrement, but you know what I mean. We expect more, monthly. We want better-looking, more fascinating comics done in the same amount of time it took for a few people to hack out a comic, often creakily drawn and propped up with exposition captions, dream logic and a plot already used several times (see Robert Kanigher for a glaring example of recycling plots, in the decades before obsessive reprint collections he understood that the constant turnover of readers meant he could literally reuse the same plots). If you think of the I Love Lucy candy factory scenario, it's not so much that the treadmill has sped up, but that instead of wrapping a single candy you're supposed to wrap it, add a neat ribbon bow, and a hand written card. 

I am amazed anyone can do this and stay relevant. More power to them. I could never work this way, it's just not something I can do because of the way I work and the amount of thought I have to put into my scripts. Forget drawing a monthly book, I'm far too slow these days, and I abandoned developing a useful and authentic mainstream style. I like detail, I work slow, I try to make scripts airtight and filled with incident. I try not to pad, I try not to hack. I try not to reuse or recycle ideas. I try to not put things in a script that have no reason being there other than getting it done so I can get to the other scripts due that month. I don't write incomplete scripts that ask the artist to do extra lifting to figure scenes out or come up with additional script material. That doesn't mean the artist is shackled to the script and can't change the way through a scene, the storytelling, breaking panels up or combining them, having ideas on how to stage a scene or reach a moment to better effect. But I don't just write. "They fight for three pages, good luck". There's giving the artist breathing room or  letting them have their head, and then there's passing the buck. 

I'm not unique in this, I'm just speaking for myself here. The best I can maintain as a writer without driving myself -- and my editors and collaborators -- nuts is a four-issue arc. Maybe five, maybe six. I'd be too anxious and uptight to take on a monthly unless it was the only thing I could work on. Which isn't pragmatic, income-wise. Some writers need a week for a full script, some more, some less, some do bare-bones plotting and notes and can put out eight stories a month. I am a slow writer, I constantly go over a script and try to tighten it and make sure there aren't plot holes. That's not a great way to become a successful comic book writer in the DM system, unless your one of the top guns with a top page rate and a guarantee of royalties. That's not me.

I've only worked on two monthly comics. One was Bill and Ted's Excellent Comic, which I wrote and penciled. The other was an Eternity series I wrote called Wild Knights. I inherited the concept and the money wasn't much but I was young and eager and had fewer doubts about everything. Which is funny, because my work was strictly sub-par. I often wonder whether it's better to be talented or confident, and how amazing it must be to be both. Anyway, I wrote the Wild Knight's scripts in a day or two, straightforward, on a typewriter. I would come up with a very basic idea so a solicitation could be written up for the issue. Then I just wrote it before it was due. Typed all night and maybe part of the next day or so and mailed it in before going to work (either at Jim Hanley's Universe to sell comics or to The Red Spot, to set up the bar, bus tables, bar back and clean before we went home around 6 a.m.). Barely thought about it, just did it, came up with the panels and then did the next page and kept in mind how much room I had left. No notes, no worries. It was like I was a different person (I guess I was, in many ways). It's not good work, not very original, raw chunks of movies and books and comics spun out through a meat grinder. I was honestly trying, but the concept was boring as hell (post-apocalypse hoo-ha, spun off from the Ex-Mutants book) and I created too many characters for it as a substitute for story and my heart was barely in it (the only issue that I thought had a touch of something interesting was one that featured a plague of tentacled severed heads, a bit I used to spark off the events in Beasts of Burden: Occupied Territory. And, yes, I know I said that I try not to reuse things. I decided it wasn't a major crime since the old comic is so obscure). The artists were as raw as I was, but rawness is more obvious in a comic's art than in the writing, you have to spend more time with a comic to realize the script is crap as well. 

It was a learning experience in collaborative comics, and the small press publishers of genre comics at the time. The artists kept changing on the series so there was no real consistency in our amateurishness. Details would be missing from panels, crowd scenes were reduced to "a few people", action was muted, spectacle scaled back. But it got done, and it mostly made sense, and I wrote ten issues on schedule before it was canceled. I was asked to wrap the series up in a giant-sized final issue, but Eternity would only pay me for the regular 22-pages. I had the ending worked out in me head, but I wasn't married to the series, and I didn't own it, so I turned them down. Apologies to anyone who was actually looking forward to a conclusion. It was no great loss to the medium. 

Bill and Ted was a different situation. It was published by Marvel, it paid decently, it had actual editors, and I was both writing and penciling the series. I was nervous as fuck about the whole thing but it was too good an opportunity to turn down. And I only committed to the Bogus Journey adaptation and the first four issues of the ongoing.  

If anything, I worked even more loosely on Bill and Ted, as far as the scripting went, in order to maintain the schedule (which I eventually blew, which is why issue #8 is a fill-in story). While finishing the adaptation I came up with an idea for the first issue so editor Fabian Nicieza could approve it and use it for solicitation.  Then I pretty much started drawing. I may have done very rough layouts early on, but I don't remember that being part of the process. I usually figured out a beginning and an ending and had a loose idea of when things would happen throughout the issue, or at least a notion of what kinds of story beats were needed to get from A to B. Every page was a complete story unit (I still tend to work that way out of habit) so I could worry about the next page when I got to the next page. At times I just knew a page would be "jokes", or "introducing characters" or "explain stuff". While drawing the page I'd come up with ideas to explain stuff or introduce characters in a hopefully entertaining way. I was loathe to not have a joke in every panel, a habit that came to cut my legs out from under me on numerous occasions throughout my career. From almost day one, I was running late enough on the schedule that most of the Bill and Ted lettering was done as pastedowns over the inks rather than over the pencils. They'd be working roughly at the same time.

I wrote almost no notes, I had a skeletal idea and strung ideas and bits of business together as I was drawing. I plotted as I went along, as long as things got to where they needed to be, everything eventually worked out okay. I was influenced by 50's and 70's MAD (Kurtzman, Elder, Wood, Don Martin, Sergio Aragones, etc), Jack Kirby, George Perez, silent comedies, Monty Python and The Goodies, It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I threw stuff in. Then more stuff. Add signs and labels and references. Things going on in the background. Maybe  some other stuff. 18 hours a day shifts, sometimes 24 hours or more. Bring the pages in at the last moment -- by car, without sleep or on the ferry (still drawing, finishing up details) and then fall asleep in Fabian's office until the office closed. Sometimes I came in early enough to sleep and get a free lunch (and create Fight-Man as a joke).  I would also use the Xerox machine in the Marvel office to copy my pencils at full-size for my files. The Xerox machine was always in sad shape and you rarely ever got a good copy.  But it was free, and it was just something to have. Who knew I'd be using the copies for the BOOM! collection decades later. Not me. I would've made better copies. .

I was enjoying the work even though it was difficult. I was putting in a lot of hours, and felt like I was in free-fall a lot of the time truing to come up with ideas. I worked up a large cast to open the series up, adding timelines, planets and other dimensions, making Death part of a larger group of entities that included the embodiments of War, Fate, Nature and Time. I worked all the characters from both movies back into the series. But by the later issues I was feeling like I was burning out. After the three-part story running in issues #5-7 I was kind of flailing around for ideas.

Issue #9 was another take on #2, where Death quits and people stop dying. In #9 he's fired for slacking on the job after spending so much time with Bill and Ted. They're both very different issues but I could tell I was running out of steam. The page above is a badly Xeroxed example of my being stuck for material, and stuck for time. This issue was cobbled together in a more piecemeal fashion than usual. I didn't know what the hell I was doing here from one page to the next. I had no set pieces in my head to work from or connect to. I didn't even have an ending. I knew that Death would go through a series of jobs and fuck everything up, the replacement Death (Morty) was a bastard, and by the last page things would be back to normal. I plotted/penciled a page, then the next, then the next, and wrote everything as I moved along. I made up some jobs that Death could fail at. I used an incident from my childhood (where I covered up the school bus driver's eyes with my hands and got thrown off the bus) for a bit. By page #12 I was flailing. I needed to get a page done fast and catch up and keep moving, as usual I was behind schedule. 

And that's why Bill and Ted #9, pg. 12 features Death holding up a shitty-looking comic page that "he drew", which I drew with my left hand so it would look terrible. It did the job and I got through one page to wrestle another. I completely hacked a page, but I folded the hackery into a joke that made it work. Even better, Marie Severin inked it to perfectly retain the childishness of the pencils, and Robbie Busch sloppily colored Death's "art". It's one of my favorite pages because it's just so silly, and it's in a Marvel comic. 

I wish I knew how to work like this again. Not the corner-cutting (I could do with more of that, actually), but the problem-solving. Coming up with a clutch bit, the ability to let go of a page and not cram a million things into it.  Not being overly precious with every page. Not worrying overly much. Relaxing. Getting it done. 

 issue #10 was desperation time again, relying on a superhero parody, which I swore I wouldn't do in an interview with Starlog Magazine. I tried to make it funny, but it's a bit of an outsider issue, I think. #11 was a concept I'd been planning but didn't really have a handle on, the old "go back in time to save Lincoln" chestnut. The twist being that saving Lincoln ruins the future, so the boys have to make sure their friend actually does get assassinated. I had so many problems figuring out the nuts and bolts on that story that I ended up doing a few pages of them watching a Planet of the Apes marathon with Death before leading into reveal (to Bill and Ted) of the Lincoln assassination. I threw a lot of jokes in, but if it wasn't a humor comic I wouldn't have gone there. I was stuck for time and used an old Pirate Corp$! pin-up as the basis for the splash page outside the movie theater. I don't think I've ever recycled a drawing like that otherwise.  

In the end, I was so late on delivering everything that it was inked by multiple artists to get it in under the wire, Marie Severin being joined by "Diverse Hands", one of those belonging to Jimmy Palmiotti. The issue has a disjointed look owing to my rushed, stiff pencils and the different inkers. 

I had no ideas for a twelfth issue. But fate solved that problem for me and the office. We were informed the series was canceled and that #12 would be the final issue. This wasn't a surprise to anyone, that entire line of kid's comics Marvel attempted arrived DOA save for Ren and Stimpy, the only property in the bunch that had any actual oomph behind it, pop culture-wise (the Marvel Barbie comics were a separate deal, those books were successful and ran for years). The flipside of my always running late was that we got the news in time for me to plan #12 as a full wrap-up of the entire series. Which is why #12 is a fun issue. We were collecting all the characters, addressing all the stories and movies, providing a few happy endings, and saying goodbye. Fabian got us an extra page and I penciled and inked a big farewell double-page splash. 

Which my cat, Mr. Jinx, peed on*. 

Everyone's a critic.

*It wasn't damaged too badly, thankfully. When I sold the original art many years later, I cleaned it up and re-inked the areas affected and touched up some lettering. R.I.P. Mr. Jinx, beloved neurotic cat.