(PROCESS) THE THING: NIGHT FALLS ON YANCY STREET PITCH

This is the pitch I turned in to editor Andrew Lis at Marvel in 2002, for a four-issue series that would be part of the "Startling Stories" series being planned at the time. "Startling Stories" was probably a response to DC Comics' Elseworlds line of non-continuity takes on their universe of characters and an updated version of Marvel's own "What If?". I wasn't originally part of the Thing project, Andrew and artist Dean Haspiel asked me on board to flesh out some ideas Dean wanted to build into a series. Dean's concept included a romance, some visual cues he had in mind, and some exploration of Ben Grimm's character. 

I saw these elements as a basis for a potential noir take, lessening the cosmic aspect of the FF, taking things to the New York streets for the most part, and concentrating on Grimm's self-pity, self-loathing and self-isolation. I threw in a woman who isn't bad so much as she's in a bad situation, the Frightful Four styled as a crime family in the vein of nightmare crime writer David Goodis, and the Ultimate Nullifier as our Maltese Falcon. Instead of guns we have superpowers and tech weapons, and instead of a private investigator in a trench coat we have The Thing in the trench coat he used to wear to hide himself from prying eyes in the silver age -- which was where much of our inspiration was coming from. 

The pitch was far more detailed than it needed to be. Pitches are a bit like rough sketches for covers or illustrations. I used to also do overly tight roughs when showing a visual idea to an editor, out of anxiety, and with more than a touch of impersonator syndrome. I thought if it looked like I worked hard on it, it might compensate for all the faults it obviously had to have because I disliked my work and assumed the people who hired did as well (there's logic for you, at least self-destructive, catastrophic thinking logic). 

I had the same worries with pitches, along with additional problems. A bad habit I have when figuring a story out is doing it while I'm typing up a pitch or outline that's just supposed to hit the basic selling points. I tended to go way beyond the necessary information because I always feared that if I didn't detail everything, the editors or producers would think I was trying to bluff my way through. When I started out I used to think you had to have the entire story worked out or you didn't have a story, you "only" had an idea for a story. Which is another reason I didn't pitch much back in the day -- I never thought anything was ready to pitch. I should have calmed down and paid attention to things going on around me, but I was afraid to ask questions and look foolish, even after being in comics for a good amount of time.

A big help with pitching visual was working for MAD and realizing I could just turn in very rough layouts that showed the main points. Not draw the details and come up with every background joke, or render it tightly to prove I deserved to keep the job I already had. The people who hire you know what your style looks like and what you're capable of. Writing is more nebulous, perhaps, but I try to apply that reasoning to story pitches now. Especially after not following that approach on the Blackwood pitch, which turned into a series bible over three versions. That's a process post for another day. 

Night Falls on Yancy Street has not been collected by Marvel, but the comics are out there in back issue bins and eBay auctions for very little money, and I'm sure are available digitally. 

THE THING: NIGHT FALLS ON YANCY STREET
A proposed “Fantastic Noir” by Evan Dorkin and Dean Haspiel
 
NIGHT FALLS ON YANCY STREET is a four-issue, self-contained mini-series taking place outside current continuity, its characterizations and situations being based on the “old school” version of the Fantastic Four (although the storyline takes place in the “present”). 

The story concerns itself with a several day period in the life of Benjamin Grimm, aka,   The Thing, who meets the apparent girl of his dreams, only to lose her in a tragic turn of events brought upon by their intertwining pasts and secrets.   

The approach of the mini-series can be described as a sort of “big-fist superhero noir”, mixing the elements of superhero comics with those of crime fiction. Lee and Kirby colliding with Hammett, David Goodis and Jim Thompson, with the Hollywood versions giving us the visual cues. Shadowy alleys, rain-filled night skies, desperate people doing desperate things in a hopeless attempt to escape their lives -- only our people are wearing costumes and can lift oil tankers and turn into sand. All superhero comics are basically crime comics, and while noir is a genre one would associate more with Batman or Daredevil than with the universe-hopping Fantastic Four, it’s a perfect vehicle for the morose, tortured and tragic Thing.   

He’s our tortured hero, the innocent loner who falls deeper and deeper into a no-win situation that began with a simple desire to be happy. He meets a girl with similar intentions, but where he has desires, she has obsessions -- dark and complicated and sometimes beyond her ability to control. She is attracted to men who are no longer exactly “human” in the physical sense, but meta-humans with extreme “bodyscapes” – her name for those Marvel Universe denizens who are made of rock, covered with fur, or can change their bodies or skins at will. Her superficial attraction to these sorts had, in the past, brought her into close contact with some very bad men. The girl’s feelings for Ben run deeper, she sees the Thing as a truly beautiful person, as well as her salvation. But the bad men come back into her life, and they’ve brought other bad men, all of whom have desires of their own. These desires will bring them into conflict with The Thing and with one another, ultimately dooming them all, saints and sinners alike. 

Putting it simply, it’s “The Thing versus the Frightful Four with a girl in the middle”, with elements of noir and traditional superhero comics combined to come up with something a little different for a Thing story -- something that has knockout fight scenes, but also has real romantic moments, real emotional payoffs and a real sense of character, setting and mood.  It would also adhere to ‘classic” continuity and reference a nice cross-section of Marvel history in the nooks and crannies, so the fanboys will bounce up and down and look to see if Dean drew the correct number of thingamajigs on Galactus’ belt in the origin recap. (Speaking of the art, while the interiors will have a traditional look, I’d be interested in exploring some less traditional cover designs for an FF-related series, using the look of vintage crime books and movie posters as a basis for the designs.)  

And there you have it. Yes, this one has it all, effendi – well, maybe not “all” all, but it has a hell of a lot: The Thing, The FF, The Frightful Four, the Absorbing Man, the Yancy Street Gang, romance, super-powers, fight scenes, courtship, wholesale destruction, torture, guilt, betrayel, sacrifice, broken hearts, tough-guy dialogue, paste guns, bizarre sexual obsession, outer space action, the Ultimate Nullifier, urban landscaping, the Negative Zone, Chinese food and, uh, super-apes.   

Not to mention a tragic ending.    

“NIGHT FALLS ON YANCY STREET” BASIC PLOT OUTLINE     

Most of the plot takes place in the section of New York City known as the Yancy Street District, a lower-working class slum where Ben Grimm was born. It’s a far cry from the Baxter Building, a gleaming marvel of a skyscraper which serves as headquarters of the Fantastic Four – the world-famous superhero team that THE THING belongs to. Only at the moment he’s not too happy about being the odd man out of the quartet, especially after coming back from a near-fatal mission in space where he found himself tangling with a crazy intangible commie and his three crazed super-apes.   

Ben Grimm is tired. Sick and tired. Tired of near-death battles, despotic tyrants in metal suits, cosmic planet-eaters, microscopic hate-mongers, dragon-men, puppet-masters, scheming commies and oh yeah, sick and tired of goddamned super-apes. Tired of being the always dependable strongman of the group, tired of being beaten, battered, chipped and bruised in the service of a populace that considers him a freak, and tired of simply being that freak. Finding no sympathy from his teammates (in whose faces he sees everything he’s not), no respite from the gawkers and wise-asses on the street (in whose faces he chooses to see only fear and disgust), and no solace from his long-suffering girlfriend, ALICIA MASTERS (who he cannot bear to look at in his self-pitying melancholy), Grimm meanders towards his old neighborhood to find some peace of mind. But even there he can’t find a moment of solitude, as the YANCY STREET GANG taunts and pesters him mercilessly, driving him into a rage. He chases the shadowy members of his tough-love fan club into a local public park – bringing him him face to face with a young woman named HAZEL DONOVAN.   

She is a young and pretty 24-yr old free spirit who came from the neighborhood, left to study landscaping and returned with the idealistic notion that she could use her talents to transform Yancy Street into something beautiful despite itself. The park is her first public project and her first love -- until she gets her first good look at the massive pile of orange rocks assembled into the form of a man standing before her. A brick-faced golem with impossible skin the color of Egyptian sand, an endless expanse of cracked Arizona rock interrupted only by a pair of wet, blue eyes. 

A relationship quickly develops between the landscape artist and the landscape. For her, it is love, lust and more at first sight. For Ben, it is the first person who can see him for what he is, with both eyes and heart. He feels guilty over Alicia, but is too wrapped up in his feelings to stop from seeing Hazel. For a very short time, they are lost in their own little world, a world where a woman finds the man of her dreams, and a man finds someone who sees him as attractive in all its myriad meanings.   

But just as quickly as it came to being, their world inevitably falls apart. Because Ben Grimm is not the first human landscape Hazel Donovan has become entranced with. Earlier there was a man named William Marko, also known as Flint Marko, also known as the SANDMAN. Marko, like Grimm, is also more than human. He is a man who can turn to sand. He is also one of those things Ben Grimm is tired of, a super-powered screw-up he’d fought countless battles with over the course of their careers. And now he has blown back into both of their lives, as intent on reconciling with Hazel as he is with escaping the criminal life – no matter what the cost.   

Making matters worse, The Sandman brings his own baggage to the party, in the form of the Frightful Four, a criminal outfit he is currently on the outs with. After the WIZARD, THE TRAPSTER and their latest recruit – THE ABSORBING MAN -- broke him out of prison, he showed his appreciation by promptly running out on them. Since then they’ve been holed up in Yancy Street, watching Hazel in the hopes that Marko would show his face. The reason for this goes beyond petty revenge for a slight  -- the Wizard has designs on stealing the fabled Ultimate Nullifier – a mysterious weapon said to have the power to destroy anything, a weapon even Galactus the planet eater fears -- from the Fantastic Four’s headquarters. And the Sandman’s powers are crucial to the planned assault on the Baxter Building.    

However, these plans change when they realize that the Thing’s budding relationship with the girl makes her an obvious hostage -- despite the Sandman’s violent protestations. Grimm suffers a brutal beating from the Frightful Four, is subjected to an equally brutal torture session, and is then told that if he doesn’t bring them the Ultimate Nullifier, the girl is dead. If he alerts his teammates, or the police, the girl is dead. If anything happens other than his appearing quietly with the device within the hour, the girl is dead. 

With no way out, Ben agrees to their terms. They release him, and he lumbers towards the Baxter Building in a daze. Avoiding his teammates, feeling like the thief he is, he steals the Nullifier and removes it from the building undetected. He delivers the Nullifier to the Frightful Four, which leads the four members to quickly turn on one another in a series of double crosses – several of which surprisingly involve Hazel. Of course, Ben has double-crossed the entire Frightful Four, because there’s no way our hero is going to hand over any ultimate weapon to these sorry sob’s. With all the cards finally on the table, all hell breaks loose -- resulting in a massive final battle that not only destroys all of Yancy Street, but also the hopes and dreams of everyone involved, especially those of Ben Grimm.    .    
 

CAST OF CHARACTERS     

BENJAMIN GRIMM, AKA THE THING 

A terrible accident changed his life forever, giving him tremendous strength but robbing him of his human appearance. As a protector of a world that often shuns him, he’s become hardened by his experiences, and desires to be “normal” again -- or at least pass for normal, like the other members of his “family”, the Fantastic Four    

REED RICHARDS, SUE RICHARDS AND JOHNNY STORM, AKA MR. FANTASTIC, THE INVISIBLE WOMAN AND THE HUMAN TORCH Changed by the same accident that transformed Grimm, they were also given powers beyond normal men and women – although you wouldn’t know it by looking at them.       

WILLIAM FLINT MARKO, AKA THE SANDMAN   

Radiation turned him into a walking sand castle, but his own weaknesses turned him into a luckless career criminal. He’s come back to Yancy Street looking for salvation in the form of a girl who has the power to build him up or knock him down. A girl named --

HAZEL DONOVAN 

A landscape artist trying to give Yancy Street a makeover. She also happens to be obsessed with people whose looks have changed radically. She has no super powers, yet a word from her can destroy six lives in a heartbeat.      

THE WIZARD 

A scientific genius obsessed with prestige, power, and the destruction of his enemies, both real and imagined. He is the leader of a criminal outfit called the Frightful Four, whose members invariably include the Sandman and 

PETE PETRUSKI, AKA THE TRAPSTER 

A second string crook with a chip on his shoulder as large as his idiosyncratic weapons arsenal. He sticks by the Wizard and Sandman as if glued to them by one of his paste guns, but even so, he fears and resents the Frightful Four’s newest fourth member.    

CRUSHER CREEL, AKA THE ABSORBING MAN

A dangerous, hardened criminal whose ability to absorb the physical properties of anything he touches makes him even more dangerous and hardened. He’s as cold as the steel ball and chain he carries, and his loyalties change as often as his mutating skin.    

ALICIA MASTERS 

Before now, the only woman in Ben Grimm’s life. Although blind, she sees more keenly than he does into what troubles his soul. 

THE YANCY STREET GANG 

The Thing’s shadowy fan club that shows their appreciation via tossed eggs and insults. Them’s they don’t like get bricks and baseball bats.