NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR
For The Reader, and for the PRESS
- ABOUT CREATING THE PROJECT
I’ve always been known for humor – for my own, odd specialized style of funny: surreal, wacky, sardonic stuff – and that was fun. This new series of mine is probably as far off as can be, in tone and form from my older work . It was not my intention. But I notice it now as I write this. 1
I did make a conscious effort to reinvent myself, that is, reinvent my work. And explore. To craft a new and unusual story, one that would compliment what I had done before, and – at the same time – delve off in another direction.
I had fun doing this story (and that’s what counts, right?) but I have no idea how it will be received or if if this story’s on the money, or if it’s junk. That’s the way it is when you first write a story. If you want to write something special, something non-derivative, something new, unusual and fun, then it’s going to be a gamble, you know, It’s in the can, yes, but what’s in the can?
Whatever, I went ahead, hell or high water, and initially got this thing done in a couple of weeks. I had a completed comic book script for a 32 to 40-page story a while back, but could I adapt it and turn it into a full-blown novel?
2. METHODS
The biggest challenge was making the supernatural elements work. I decided that I had to make that work – sort of at least – or the whole thing would flop, or at least be pedestrian. There’s a thing called “willful suspension of disbelief”. The audience accepts something like THE EXORCIST, THE GODFATHER or ALIEN because the audience sees that “if such things were to happen that it would probably happen just like this”.
I chose to help make the supernatural elements in my story work by creating a very non-standard character: a protagonist with an unglamorous, blue-collar lifestyle. For him the ritual and the murder were more a chore and a routine than a crusade or a quest. A working class guy doing his job, rather than a crusader do-gooder trying to save the world.
He was not a typical protagonist, but rather a regular, everyday sort of lout, trapped in a film-noir existence by his own poor life-choices, indulgent excesses and bad, bad luck. The idea of a knock-about-guy bumming around the country, doing investigations into evil behavior, killing bad guys and then selling their shit on E-Bay… well that works for me. So let’s go.
It would be fun to have/be a ner-do-well wanderer, living a vagabond life with a vague and dubious higher calling… that pays well. sounds like the perfect adolescent fantasy. He gets to wander, he gets to have a secret, gets to carry deadly weapons, lurk in the shadows, and evade the police….
Then I take the fantasy and mess it up, throw a lot of plot complications and monkey wrenches into the mix. What’s the worst that could happen? What nightmares can we conjure up?
To start with I embellish the CATCHER IN THE RYE type Holden Caulfield. loser. antihero I started with, and make him a good looking alpha-male. A little James Bond or Tyler Durden to add a little flip to the whole recipe.
The protagonist walks the edge of the razor between light and dark, good and evil, hero and villain. The story, the motive of the story, would be as much about the solution to his problems, but about balance, at the same time. There would be a dark humor and there would be Joseph Conrad/Emile Zola realism with all the sordid details and flavor that make the book an almost real-life experience. In effect, it is a juvenile fantasy told with hard-core authenticity, along the lines of two of my (many) favorite movies; BONNIE AND CLYDE and BLUE VELVET.
3. MY MOTIVES AND STRATEGY
I am a comic book writer/artist and I’m actually happy with that. I’ve had a lot of fun, met a lot of great and interesting people and made a few buck off it here and there.
I have always been pretty good at making really odd, off the track decisions, ones that seemed like the dumbest ideas, and then somehow actually worked out (though some didn’t). Years ago I decided to enter the comic book industry, on a whim more or less – I had never been to art school, I was writing blind, that is: mostly by instinct and impulse – and comic book fandom was very small, two or three thousand people in the whole country probably. Somehow it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Anyways, I had never been to art school and what little I had learned in Journalism school might help. I loved to draw, I was totally self-taught, never went to art school, but somehow, I just seemed to know how to do it – primitive, raw and often sloppy but enough to tell a story.
Over the years, I’ve published a number of strange offbeat stories about a comic character named Flaming Carrot. In a way, the character was the dumbest idea anyone had ever come up with for a super hero. He had no super powers, not secret identity, was not very smart (and often had to go into a state of “Zen Stupidity” in order to do the brave and daring acts required of him) and when he got into trouble he just blasted his way out in a hail of gunfire. His huge carrot head would burn the ceiling in any indoor, real-life situation and he would have to bend down to go through an ordinary doorway. Getting in a car… well we usually used open top convertibles.
We are currently re-launching the Flaming Carrot series through Dark Horse Comics as a 400-page omnibus reprinting a number of stories and to hype that book, I decided to launch HIT MAN FOR THE DEAD. A number of publishers had said they wanted the property, yet here we are, I am doing it myself. At least I’m doing it right, doing it myself and not turning into a sterile, cardboard genre piece like everything else out there.
Not everyone will like this book, but I’m hoping that those that do, will recommend it to others and also will check out the Flaming Carrot project. For me word-of-mouth publicity and viral promotion are the best advertising and also the most economical.
With my HITMAN FOR THE DEAD project, I wanted to have a thriller, I wanted to do some cool Neo-realism, hardcore reality, sexual fun and ultra-violence, but I also wanted to develop more of the anti-antihero concept I had started with my comics. I wanted to go for something that was commercial but could also be artistic at the same time.
My prime and overwhelming directive was to capture the essence of the “outsider”. The feeling of living beyond the fringes of civilization. Not so much civilization’s houses and infrastructure, but outside everyday humanity. Outside the monotony (and safety net) of the ordinary “grind”. And outside all its structure and rules. The feeling of detachment. The detachment from the “real world”. The detachment of the wanderer, the cowboy, the outrider, the lost, the forgotten. Anthony Harken is a rolling stone. Wherever he hangs his hat is…. you get the idea.
PRESS
If anyone in the press wants a digital version of this for review please email me at wildcraft7@mindspring.com.
HIT MAN FOR THE DEAD Q&A
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
A mysterious, young, nomadic drifter wanders America investigating and brutally avenging the murders of the innocent, so that their wanting souls that haunt our world, can pass on into the afterlife. It’s sort of DEATH WISH and DEXTER meet MEDIUM.
The idea is that people – wrongly killed before their time – feel unfinished and can’t let go. Their spirits hang around and haunt. Our protagonist, Anthony Harken, goes around avenging them. He contacts or is contacted by the ghosts – he conducts an investigation – and if there is just cause, he avenges them, dispatching the guilty parties.
A GENRE PIECE THEN?
No. Actually, I didn’t want the Hit Man For The Dead series to be a regular, one-trick-pony series based primarily on a repeating plot concept. This storyline is character driven, and hits on the human condition. The killings are the backdrop – a vehicle – for the characters and the adventures.
It’s a detective story with shooting and action but it’s also about the downtime, the carousing, the infighting, and the competition to rack up a score of death. I explore the personal experience of a traveling assassin. It’s written in the 1stperson. HMftD focuses on the people, on the protagonist and all the other, motley and varied characters in the crew of killers. Catamuso for instance, Harken’s assistant – a sort of “squire” – is an odd little fellow who makes balloon animals, writes romantic poetry and someday wants to go to New York and smell the statue of Liberty’s feet.
WHO IS ANYHONY HARKEN? WHAT DRIVE HIM?
Anthony Harken stumbled into this. He lost his soul in a card game three years ago to a bunch of drug cartel thugs he was dragooned into working for. He did too good a job and would up catching the eye of the boss. The other lieutenants got jealous and messed him up.
Overall, Anthony is more drifting than driven. He’s not a crusader but he’s not a zombie. When he sees things that outrage or appall him he acts. At the same time Anthony wanders. He gets drunk and parties. He goofs off and takes the time to embrace and savor his bleak and picaresque existence. He is not all that deeply dedicated to his calling, but does occasionally get emotionally involved and infuriated by the totally atrocious and acrimonious things that some people do in the heat of the moment, in the throws of lust and jealousy or when overwhelmed with greed or hate.
Anthony is still a bohemian. He likes staying in cheap motels, driving an unglamorous but mechanically tricked out car, and dressing in mundane, nondescript, thrift-shop threads. He enjoys the freedom, the detective work and going to the movies alone in the middle of the afternoon.
He’s not Brad Pitt, but he has a way with girls and is good looking enough to get by. He’s not a boring, black-suit-wearing hit-man. He’s a rambling, fancy-free nomad who has learned to enjoy his lifestyle. He enjoys sketching, exploring and taking pictures of obscure, lonely, ‘found’ things. He leaves strange, poetic, little messages wherever he goes, stuck in holes in the wall, under rocks and in the bottom drawers of the hotel rooms, where nobody looks. He like crossword puzzles.
I wanted to find a protagonist that would resonate with a contemporary audience, and yet one who contrasts from the former iconic stereotypes. This is a challenge in that modern audiences seem to have short attentions spans and want things more compact and pre-packaged.
Anthony Harken is not a reflection of the modern millennial but a revisionist vision. He is an expatriate from society, an echo of the Chandler/Hammett/Spillane detective, but more of a 21stcentury Holden Caulfield/detective. He’s more of a “On The Road” Neil Cassidyadventurer than the Skully and Mulder sort of protagonist.
But feel free to let me know what you think. Sorry but I get crossed up with the commonplace tendency to understand and evaluate things by comparing it to everything else out there, however vaguely similar. Even though I find me doing it myself sometimes.
THIS IS NOT THE FINAL FORM OF THE WORK?
This is a “beta” or test version of the project. And a prototype story for the series. And comic fandom is the guinea pig. This story was a test to see if the concept would work. Would sell. It’s not the only HITMAN FOR THE DEAD story there will be. Or so I’m hoping.
DO YOU SEE OTHER CREATORS
I don’t see me doing all the stories as there are a number of other Hitmen characters. And as the project gets going we can have a number of other creators coming up with their own (approved) characters.
YOU’RE GOING TO DO MORE WTH THIS STORYLINE?
What is here works as a book, but I definitely will try and flesh it out a little more. It started out as a 32 page comic script and 60% of what’s here now is all new stuff.
When I write something it needs to sit for a while before I can really evaluate it. In this case I started fleshing out the story a month or two ago and I’m still to close to it to really tell if it’s a home run or foul to left field.
My best Flaming Carrot story ever – the Artless Dodger – was an 8-page story in Visions #2 and then revamped into a full comic book story with Flaming Carrot #3. Guy Ritchie’s best move, SNATCH started out as LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS.
Revision can be good. Though often it isn’t. When a story reached its perfect state, you don’t want to mess with it anymore. You have to leave it alone. Sometimes a movie is perfect – not a word or a scene can be changed – like BLUE VELVET or BOOGIE NIGHTS, and that is what I call supremic. Supremic is when something is perfected and there’s not much you can do to improve. If you try you usually make it worse. Like APOCALYPS NOW REDUX. It was interesting – as a fan of the film – to see the deleted scenes but the REDUX version is not the one you want to show to someone for the first time.
HOW DID HE BECOME A KILLER?
Harken lost his soul down in Mexico about three years ago, and little by little he is getting it back through his “good works”. He is regaining his feelings actually. His ability to laugh or cry. The prequel was called DAYS ON FIRE. As Anthony’s story starts out, he is expatriate American, a rich kid that disgraced himself and blew everything and was now living in a Mexican border town, hiding out from charges and lawsuits. He was gambling and selling pot to the tourists to get by, and just going nowhere. “Wasting away in Margaritaville”.
Through a series of unfortunate events, he got sideways with a local police lieutenant and become a drug mule in order to avoid a shallow grave. Little by little he rose in the organization and became a “capo”, but the other capos didn’t like that and dry-gulched him into betting his soul in a card game. Antony thought it was just a joke but it wasn’t. He was screwed. But his housekeeper explained what happened to him and why he felt different the next morning. She got him to an old Irish Catholic priest who set him on the quest to recover his soul and gave him an amulet that guided and protected him. His only clue was to find the girl that they used to lure him into the trap – a Euro-trash hoyden with “I’ll Cry Tomorrow” tattooed on her arm. His search leads him though both the lowest and most wealthy and aristocratic elements of society in his search.
WHO IS JACK KETCH AND WHO ARE THE TRAVELERS?
Jack Ketch, is a 500-year-old executioner who got his start in the court of Charles the II. I picture him as a sort crusty, salty old pirate; the Robert Newton version of Long John Silver. He lords over a group of traveling killers, all going around avenging those who have wrongly died.
They are a motley bunch. Each has their own style, their own strengths or weaknesses and their own origins of how they got into the “Traveler” business. There are also the ‘squires’. The helpers and assistants who aid the travelers and clean up things after.
Then there is a building in New York that houses a whole tribe of Gypsies who spend all their time putting the loot that’s hauled in on EBay.
YOU’RE SELLING THE STORY AS A PAPERBACK BUT IT WAS ORIGINALLY ENVISIONED AS A COMIC BOOK?
We’re going to do a comic I’m sure, or I hope. I’m waiting for an offer from a publisher right now, but who knows. Some of the publishers move slow, and it may be a TV series first. But comics and novels are a good way to road test a story.
We rushed to get this out before ComicCon and will be selling it there. I won’t have a table there – at least I don’t have one right now – but it will be for sale at the Dark Horse booth – and who knows, I may have a booth somewhere hooked up with some of my old friends.
We have a facebook page we’re trying to get up and its called Between The Winds https://www.facebook.com/BetweenTheWinds but I’m still working on it now. It should be operational by SDCC.
HITMAN FOR THE DEAD 