Where Did You Go Wizard Magazine?

Wizard Magazine closed its doors last month. 

Here is a tribute to the magazine I co-wrote with my buddy Dave Kushner. He did the art. It says everything we wanted to say (in 3 pages) about our best Wizard memories. 

REEL BIG FISH: The Comic That (ALMOST) Happened

UPDATED WITH MORE ART SKIP TO THE BOTTOM FOR MORE A SAMPLE COVER!!!!

Up until about Ninth Grade I didn't really care about music outside of the oldies my parents listened to. Then I discovered musical theater albums and movie soundtracks. Even with the soundtracks I wouldn't have called myself music obsessive. I may have liked certain songs but was never inclined to seek out more from any one specific band.

Jump ahead roughly ten years later: I love music now and actively search out anything new I can find. I have over twelve-thousand songs on my ITunes. At one time I had two 80 gig IPods that couldn't hold all the music I had acquired. So what changed? How did I go from being only partially interested in music to a full out music lover?



It started with a band called "Reel Big Fish" and their third major release, an album titled "Why Do They Rock So Hard". The RBF are a ska-punk band that formed during the height of the 3rd wave revival of ska in the mid 90's. Here's some info from their WIKI page:

Reel Big Fish is an American ska punk band from Huntington Beach, California, best known for the 1997 hit "Sell Out." The band gained mainstream recognition in the mid-to-late 1990s, during the third wave of ska with the release of the album Turn the Radio Off. Founding member Aaron Barrett has been with the band since 1992, and horn players Dan Regan and Scott Klopfenstein have been involved with the band for more than 14 years.

Their music was life changing for me. Their sound was hard but fun. Their lyrics were silly yet infused with a type of discontent that was familiar to me. They sang about being rejected, hurt and frustrated on some tracks. They also sang about being in the mosh pit, being vegetarian and having a lesbian ex-girlfriend. Their themes are eclectic but all of them struck a cord somewhere inside Young Shawn. Their music and lyrics combined into a sound and mood that seemed to be speaking direct to me. Their frantic energy was just like mine; scattered but mostly geared toward making people laugh and smile. They were and remain my favorite band.

In 2005 I contacted the RBF's manager Vince with a proposal to write and produce a comic about and starring the band. Vince could not have been nicer and was quick to put me in touch with two of the band members who I was to meet in person while they were on tour in South FLorida (where I lived at the time). Just reaching this point alone was a dream realized. I hung with the band, we discussed my ideas for the type of book it should be and the kinds of things they wanted to have in it.

When the meeting was over I had a legal pad full of notes and a brain bursting with ideas. I went home to start scripting with my buddy Dave (the guy who introduced me to the RBF in the first place) and we came up with a series of short stories, each focusing on one or two members of the band. Some of them were spoofs of super hero comics, one was a cooking segment, another (which you'll see at the end of this post) was a Tales From The Crypt type story. Part of me wants to post the full script here (and I might) but I'm reluctant because I still hold a thread of hope that this project might someday find its legs.

So what the hell happened, Shawn? Why don't I have an RBF comic in my hand right now?

The answer is both complicated and simple. The short version goes like this: after loosing a few artists and then gaining a few we seemed to be on track. Then the band lost a member who had factored into the book pretty heavily, but with some quick rewrites that was taken care of. The killing blow was when one of the founding members of the band, Matt Wong, announced he was leaving the band to be a family man. At this point there was so much art drawn that included him we would have either had to publish the book as is or struggle to have it all redrawn.

Ultimately the book stalled and has sat on my hard drive ever since.

It's sad to me that I could never give the band the gift of an awesome, published comic book. That's maybe the worst part. I just wanted to be able to give back to them. This was to be my "thank you" for being the greatest ska band in the entire world. Maybe someday we'll get to make this actually happen but until then, this blog post will have to suffice. Thanks guys.

Now I don't want your time to be wasted here at Shawn Writes so I'm going to end this with a never-before-seen look at one of the "Reel Big Fish: The Comic" short stories that was completed in its entirety. The art is provided by Andrew Drilon.

This story is called "I'm The Bad Guy", enjoy:




There it is. Any thoughts?


UPDATE: Here is some more art I found. This is Zac Trover's proposed cover:

 

The History of Special Comics Part Two

If you haven't read PART ONE click on the link and read all about it.

All caught up? Good.

Dave and I had three thousand copies of “Savior no.7” issue 1 and big plans for the future of the series and Special Comics. The first place we went was to Tate's Comics in Lauderhill, FL who agreed to buy ten from us and put them immediately up on his New Release wall. That was the single coolest day of my life. There have been other bigger event that I've experienced but none will compare to the very first time my very first comic was put on the New Release wall of my local comic shop. I wish I had a super cool cell phone like I do now because I'd have blogged and twittered the shit out of that moment, alas now I have to rely on my stupid memory.

The next place we knew we had to hit to move this mountain of books was the convention circuit. The first and biggest convention we knew of was MEGACON in Orlando, Fl. As I recall (which is actually the last thing I should be doing as I have a horrible memory, I'm like Faraday from Lost without the benefit of being super skinny or having traveled through time) we traveled up to Orlando and met up with our mutual friend Ethan who was going to college at UCF to party and head over to the con. Being our first convention we didn't even have a booth. Dave, Ethan, our friend Jessica and a few others plus myself walked around the convention floor passing out stickers and screaming the company name over and over again. We also put a company sticker on the back of a guys Darth Vader helmet and got chased down by some angry stormtroopers as a result. Whatever we did it had some effect because people found us at our table during lunch and we sold a few books.

Throughout all this time Dave was busy drawing Issue 2, which came out of him a lot easier it seemed to me. I caught flak in part one for talking negatively about how long artists can take to do things but I never meant to be insulting. I understand how it takes as long as it does and seeing as this was Dave's first full length book I realize the pressure that must have added. Contrary to how it may have seemed I could not have been more glad to wait for Dave to produce pages to issue 1, better my best friend that some guy I didn't know. Plus there's no one in the world who could have created those character exactly as he did and I wouldn't take those character designs back for anything. To this day I get a super happy joy when I see old sketches or Dave shows me a new sketch of one of those characters. I'm a huge fan of Dave's art (I like it more than he does sometimes) and even though I give him shit about not having backgrounds or taking a long time there is no artist I would like to work with more. I wish I could pay Dave the money to sit and draw our comics all day (and Michelle because she REALLY does kick ass costumes and backgrounds), and someday I will.

I believe that everything gets better with time and making comics is no exception.

Starting from the script all the way through the art, inking and lettering issue two was better than the first in every possible way. Our story was starting to pick up with issue two and my writing had improved a bunch in between issues. I actually felt like I knew what I was doing, due in part to the script that Dave, Zac (Dave's older brother) and I had written for Troma Studios called “Wolfie: The Werewolf Abortion Doctor”. Dave and Zac wrote a treatment and I took it and fleshed out a full script. This process started before we wrote issue one but I did the bulk of my work between issue 1 and issue two. Here are some early "Wolfie" sketches Dave did and some ad ideas I was playing around with.

Sketches of Wolfie and Belladar

Around the same time we had met and become friendly with two other South Florida guys who had started their own publishing company called Fuzzy Dice Studios. Jason Sobol and Matt Doucette are each brilliant in their own ways and have remained good friends and solid collaborators seven years later. Jason is an artist and Matt a writer. They had published two issues of their flagship title, “Forsaken Earth” while we were still working on getting issue two of ours off the ground so in some way they were helpful mentors as we put issue two together. Matt and I started writing what would become the soon to be released “Detectives In Space” but that's a blog for another time.

Issue 2 Cover

The day came and issue two was sent to the printer, this time we found a indie friendly printer who was willing to print a mere 1,000 copies of our book which was much easier to store and to get rid of. I have a lot of family up in Chicago so I flew up there and attended Wizard World Chicago, again not having a booth but wandering around the con meeting people and handing out copies of the first two issues of our comic. I met some cool people then who I have remain in contact with even now but it wasn't as much fun as the next two conventions I'd attend. The first was MEGACON 2003, which was the first great pairing of Fuzzy Dice and Special Comics, it was also the first time Dave and I had actual table space on the con floor. We shared it with Jason and Matt (also a hotel room, but we were perfect gentlemen) and had a blast signing and selling our books. That's the second coolest thing that's ever happened to me, selling and being asked to sign my first comic book. It is truly surreal (especially when you know you're going to drive home and go back to work waiting tables) to be looked at as special because you're sitting on the other side of a fold out table with three years of your life printed into 44 pages of black and white comic books but even at our amateur level it happened once or twice.

Issue Two Page 10 (My favorite page, wish I had I been a better letterer at the time.)

Issue Two Page 8

After MEGACON 2003 Dave and I would hit a bunch of local conventions in the South Florida area at places like the Hilton Hotel in Davey to the Pompano Beach Convention Center where we almost got into a fight with the Insane Clown Posse. I went out to my first San Diego Comic Con and spent the last of the money my Grandparents had given us on a booth at SDCC (which would turn out to be tons of fun but a total financial bust) and also hit Chicago one more time.

Sometime after that second trip to Wizard World Chicago Special Comics decided to combine forces with Fuzzy Dice and form one larger umbrella company to release our next set of books under. It made sense to pool all our resources, contacts and money to making the best possible books we could. Around the same time Dave decided that he wasn't able to work on “Savior no7” for a while and so the book was tabled (although there were and are zero hard feelings), however you can rest assured “Savior no7” WILL be back in some form or another eventually. Dave focused on working and moving up to NYC which is where he's always wanted to live and I put my efforts into writing and producing books for the Vicious Circle Project, a history that spans less time but is a bit more involved so expect a separate blog on the VCP years.

So after two issues and a bunch of conventions, “Savior no7” would be the only comic to be produced by Special Comics. I've thought about using the logo and name since but ultimately settled on the idea that only books Dave and I create together should be labeled “Special Comics”.

“What does that mean for the future of Special Comics?”

“Please tell us Shawnee D?!”

It means this is not the end. Not by a long shot. When the time is right there are a meriad of projects waiting to be fully developed, “Wolfie: The Werewolf Abortion Doctor” has been turned into a 139 page graphic novel that I'm currently looking for an artist on and there is the never released “Reel Big Fish: The Comic” that I plan on blogging about in two weeks when I return from vacation. We've also got a Marvel pitch about a mutant punk band and an original graphic novel called “Mallman” that will someday see the light of day. I can't say exactly when all these projects will surface but I'm confident they will and I cannot wait to be able to share them with you, dear readers.

As I mentioned above, I'll be gone for a week on vacation in New York City but here is a quick look at what the coming weeks blogs will cover, hope this interests you and brings you back for more. Also, check back over the next week as I tend to dump pictures here as well as blogs so if you would like to see how the NYC trip is progressing I'm sure there will be photographic evidence in this space. Okay, without any more digressions, here is a look at future blogs:

• New York City and the Trouble That Can Be Had

• The Story of The Vicious Circle Project (plus, where are they now? The member of the VCP)

• The Truth Behind the Reel Big Fish Comic You Never Saw

• Lettering: So You Don't Know What The Hell I Do...

• Why The FUCK Are You Moving To LA Shawn? - A Fictional Q and A.

The History of Special Comics - Part One

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What the fuck is a special comics? That's the question that I'm sure is on all of your minds and you would be wrong because it's not "A special comics"that we're talking about today, it's THE SPECIAL COMICS. To tell you the full story of the company that started it all I need to travel with you in a time machine. Let's get inside:


There's no backseat so it's going to be a little tight but we don't have far to go just back to the year....

2001

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The year Aqua, At The Drive-In and The Pilfers disbanded a young Shawn D. gets a call from a young Dave Kushner filled with ideas for a comic book. At the time I was living in Philly (a story for another time perhaps...) and the prospect of writing a comic with my best friend for him to them draw and then for me to letter and us to publish was to goo an offer to pass up.

That's how it begins. I moved back down to Coral Springs, Fl and Dave and idea start to write. Ideas are discussed and outlines written. We spend many days driving to Tate's Comics, next to Uncle Sam's, eating Taco Bell and writing what will start out being called "The Seventh Angel"©. It's the story of a guy named Max, employed as a mascot at a fast food chain called the Beeef Bus (the extra 'E' is for extra beef), who discovers he's actually the son of an alien king and the key to ending an ongoing battle between two warring alien races. There was an evil priest named Father Violence and a minotaur in a pope hat named Papal-Bull along with an escaped lunatic convict out to kill Max named Jackson Thorne.

CLICK TO MAKE BIGGER

After the first issue was written I began the long process of waiting for the art. This is something I wasn't excepting when I first started making comics and have now come to love/hate the most about making them. It takes artists a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time to draw. They are easily distracted, especially when you're nto paying them. Other than me only Dave knew how important this book was and that was what motivated him to finish it because there certainly wasn't any money in it for him.

We took these huge art blueline pages to a local print shop and had them scanned in. When I get the disc back I lettered the book and in a few weeks it was ready to be printed. Dave designed a company logo to put on the front cover that he would paint.

Pretty sweet logo if you ask me. (FUN FACT- Until I started the shawnwrites© brand I was specialshawn for years).

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We approached my Grandparents for the money to print the book and incorporate Special Comics. If I knew then what I know now I would never have Incorporated. I'd have saved the money and time and spent it going to conventions. Oh well.

2002

The company was formed (thanks to the fabulous attorney we hired, IRA, everything copyrighted and registered.... miss you Ira) and the book, which ended up getting a final title change and becoming "Savior no.7" was sent to the printers, who required a minimum order of 3,000 copies. I'm not sure if any of us realized how many copies 3,000 actually was until the book were at our door. There were....thousands of them (three thousand) and as exciting as it was to see my first comic book in print a voice in the back of my head cried out,"how the fuck are we going to sell all these books?" Luckily I was so excited to hold it in my hands the answer to that question didn't matter.

CLICK TO MAKE BIGGER

That's the end of part one. Next time we'll talk about Savior no7 issue 2 and some great comics that never were (at least not yet).

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