To the extent that there’s any writing news this week, it’s this: I’m working with my old high school friend Niki to adapt Bronx Angel: Politics By Another Method for the stage. The backstory here is that I used to own a little comic book company called Proletariat Comics, LLC. I founded PC LLC with a friend named Jerry as a way to promote our work. Because look, unless you’re writing a franchise property for one of the existing Big Two comic companies, the simple fact is that comics is a pay-to-play game. Which is to say that if you want to write and produce original work of your own design, that’s fine, but no one is going to pay your art costs up front. As with prose writing, would-be comic producers who’re starting out need to be prepared to produce fully finished work that they can take to a publisher or agent. In many ways that’s unfortunate, but then again, it’s also reasonable from the point of view of the publishers. I mean, I’ve been on both sides of the issue, and you can trust me when I tell you that the number of folks who think they can write comics is exponentially larger than they number who actually have any talent and/or any desire to take formal training or in any way hone their craft, and beyond that, there is a literal TON of great comics out there that are totally unknown to even the most hardcore of comic fans. And publishers need to make an actual profit to stay in business. They cannot afford to take on “development” cases, and even if they could, there isn’t any need when lots of folks are already willing to pay their own costs up front or basically write and draw on spec. So since the game was a loser anyway, Jerry and I opted for max freedom and started from scratch under our own homegrown brand name.
While we’re talking, let me take this opportunity to note that “Proletariat” was a really crappy name for a comic book company. It wasn’t meant to be half so incendiary or counter-culture as it came out, but bottom line, where we merely wanted to “revolutionize” comics by promoting new creators with high-quality non-superhero ideas (giving power to the comics “workers”, the creators), most folks instead saw us as a bunch of quasi-pinko Leninists living in New York City. And what’s worse, the whole thing framed Bronx Angel in an entirely unintended genre-space.Look, BA: PBAM was never meant to be a specifically anti-war book. In fact, I started writing it well before the Invasion of Iraq made it timely. The original high-concept came out of a story I started writing when I was stationed in Korea back in 1999, and it was based a little on my father. At the time, my dad was suffering from some pretty severe PTSD, and it occurred to me that a lot of action heroes out of the movies would probably also suffer from PTSD if they were ever given the time on-screen to develop their characters in that direction. But no one in Hollywood ever wanted to look at it that way back then; they preferred the summer popcorn formula of happy killers who cheerfully blow away legions and legions of bad guys without ever suffering the consequences. So I decided to write a story about a Scottish knight who returns from the Crusades with PTSD, only to discover that his family’s place in local politics has been usurped by a local villain. And I got about 30 pages into the manuscript before I realized that this story had been done before—in the form of the classic legend of Robin Hood—just not with the PTSD angle.
The idea kind of sat that way for a few years, but I eventually dusted it off in 2002, about the time I started working in the South Bronx. The imminent invasion of Iraq provided a new Crusade from which our returning Robin Hood could emerge, and with that in mind, I started writing. The final form of the story changed a good deal, especially when I cut it from 135-pages down to the 68 that are in the version that’s currently available on WOWIO, but even now, that core idea remains. Angel is a guy who’s dealing with his post-war demons, and half the characters are named after characters in Robin Hood, including Little John, Angel’s spotter in BA #0, and MaryAnn, Spice’s ill-fated girlfriend whose role in the original full-length script was much different than it became in the version that actually got published. The original version also had a Father Tuck, but his storyline was one of the casualties of the cut-down.
But, you know, events kind of got away with me. Our company was named after a widely reviled revolutionary idea, the story in PBAM actually offended my father, and when the Invasion of Iraq went so quickly sour, I wrote a new Foreword for the book that put my personally feelings about the thing front and center. And then, too, at the time that PBAM was actually published, things were so bad that most would-be readers just didn’t want to think about the war—at all—under any circumstances. And having passed over In the Valley of Eli any number of times at Blockbuster myself, honestly, I can hardly blame them. The war was on TV all the time, and folks didn’t want yet another reminder of it. Ironically, any number of reviewers later came back to me and expressed confusion about the actual story’s lack of anti-war sentiment, but of course, that was never the point. The point was and is about my dad, and he was in Vietnam. I wanted to show the costs that soldiers pay for their heroism on his behalf. If readers—including me—see that cost as being disproportional to the gains achieved, well, that’s not the fault of the story. It was more like a sign of the times.
So anyway, now it’s 2010, things have been looking up in Iraq for a good while, and I think maybe it’s time to try bring the full Bronx Angel out of the dustbin of history and find a way to get it out there—again. I want to tell the story the way that it was meant to be told, and I want to do it in a way that doesn’t require some artist to spend 8 hours drawing each page. So Niki and I are trying to re-write it as a play, and we’ll see how it goes.
Here's Niki's prototype set design for the first scene:
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