Holy Jesus I got so fucked up last night. DCC throwdown, I drank a lot. I’ll put pictures up tonight on the DCC blog. Seriously, though, so fucked up. I think I spread ever comic rumor I heard in the past year.

I’m going to do something a little different this week, in addition to my usual daily story. I get a bunch of people asking me what an editor does, exactly. The answer to that depends on what the publisher and creators need combined with what the editor in question is capable of.

At Hoarse & Buggy I do a lot of the coordination on the books we put out, make sure things get in on time, assist in promotion, write press-releases and make sure everything we put out looks as good, if not better, than every other book on the stands. Josh and Chris help with a lot of these chores, though, so they’re not really my bread and butter, per se.

I’m sort of the story guy. This may not be a big shock, for the past three months I’ve put up a 1-3 page story every Monday through Friday. I’m hands on with my editing, I like getting in on a project from the ground floor. I give notes on the pitch, give notes on the story, and I like to look at the script as it comes along, in ten page increments, to make sure we’re accomplishing what we need to accomplish for a given issue. I give notes on the final script, offer dialog suggestions and art suggestions before going to the artist. I make comments on the layouts, the final art and the letters. I like to work on the phone as much as I can, talk over the project with the writer, make sure we’re both seeing eye to eye and the vision for the story and individual issues is clear and easily expressed. That’s the stuff I really like to do and that’s where I’m used the most.

So, timed with all of the hoopla over the Liefeld/Simone Teen Titans announcement I decided to do something constructive – I decided to edit Supreme #1. Now, I’m in no way going to catch every little thing nor do I care too. I’m also not going to point out every little art problem. But I will be pointing out some of the things I would have suggested changing have I been editing this story myself. Some of the stuff I would have caught in the story, some in the script, some in the layout and some in the proof but these are all things I would have seen and, taking the story for what it is, suggested they be reconsidered or looked at. Maybe you’ll get something out of this, maybe you won’t. I just thought it’d be fun to do.

Pages 1-5 today:


The Cover: It’s a nice cover; it’s what a Liefeld fan would expect from a cover. The silver foil is nice and not in excess. The font is strong, it’s in demand. On the whole, it pops – it’s functional for what it is.

Page 1
This page is pretty disorienting. You have to take your reader through the world you’re creating, give them a sense of orientation. We’re zooming into a solar system, presumably ours, and we only see the sun and a red planet which I originally assumed to be Mercury do to it’s proximity to the sun but then realized it’s likely Mars. No sign of Earth. Then, out of nowhere, we see a huge earth and in the bottom right is what I assume to be the corner of the red planet we saw earlier, still guessing it’s Mars. Supreme’s dialog here kind of lets the reader know that we are seeing this from Supreme’s point of view. Then we pull in even more and see a couple of satellites that establish the fact that the dialog we see is coming from the people that are using the satellites to watch the skies. On the whole, not bad. But then we all of a sudden go back to the Mars planet, which is unimportant to the scheme of things and out of place. It leaves the reader disoriented, especially when the reader thinks we’re seeing things through Supreme’s eyes.

Supreme’s dialog is a bit stiff and clichéd. That’s sort of a recurring note for all of the characters so I don’t want to call it out over and over again. Read it out loud and you sound like William Shatner. The cut off sentence is a bit awkward as well.

Page 2
Panel 1: Now, I’m not going to make too many comments on the art but blatant things I’m going to call. The headsets that match the hair colors are passable but the lazy psychedelic colored-in headset on the guy in the middle is not. First guys dialog, I’d hyphenate “red-hot” and change “zero” to “oh” since that’s what he said on page one. You need to create a sense of continuity in your character; the speech pattern can’t change too drastically. As far as everyone wearing the same white shirt with red tie and perfectly sculpted hair – I want to remind you this is his style and his vision, that’s not the point of what I’m doing.

Panel 2: The guy’s talking gibberish but it’s gibberish that speaks to the intended audience so it’s not that bad. The red flash, however, makes me think that we’re in a separate room and this guy came out of left-field. I’d probably add a siren to let the reader now that this is the same room, in a state of emergency. Plus the siren will put you in it more; the dialog on its own is kind of bland. I’ll get this out of the way now, way too many exclamation points. Throughout the entire book. Everyone has their thing. When I get a script from Josh it says “fuck” almost every sentence (something I now realize I do as well, times ten). A good editor will whittle it down. No-one ever whittled down Liefeld’s exclamation points. Sometimes you just don’t need them, other times you put in dialog with a little more meat. But they can be whittled.

Page 3
I like this page, it’s a nice shot. Breaking the atmosphere is always cool. I’d suggest engulfing him in more flame, all of the flame is behind him. The random, floating thumb on his right hand that is in no-way attached to his body would pass but the left hand is just laziness. That wouldn’t make it as is.

Page 4
Again, style. I wouldn’t reestablish the descent. The angle change, arm position change and color change is again a bit disorienting. It looks like he’s belly-flopping into orbit. If I were really being a stickler, I would point out that the flow of his cape is sort of hinting that there is wind in space and, plus, if he’s going mach 4 it would be straight over his head but, style. This is what Liefeld’s audience wants - poses. So, I would call it a waste of a page but it works for this book. However, I probably would have asked Rob to put Supreme's arm brace thing back on.

Page 5
Panel 1 – That “beep” is horrid. Letterer should be fired. The only thing worse than that is the talking button. Again, letterer should be fired. Combined, it looks like the “beep” is coming from somewhere else, not the talking button. I understand this is the art you got but you need to work with it more. A better “beep” should be laid closer to the button; the voice should come from the ether, not the other way around.

Panel 2 – I’m really digging the reflection thing, it looks cool. The angles and perspectives make no sense but it still looks cool. I would probably suggest some redecoration, the striped wall and the cactus are kind of, I don’t know, not indicative of a super-government spook that has his finger on the “Youngblood button.” Also, this is a great example of unnecessary exclamation points. Look at this guy; he’s calm, collective, mysterious. 100% certifiable bad-ass. Bad-asses don’t scream - they calmly give orders with enough substance in their voice to let the people on the other end know that this is some serious shit. You have to write dialog for your character, don’t make everyone sound exactly the same.

On the whole – These five pages established the premise - somewhat. We know this big ole guy is coming to earth, we don’t know why or where he’s coming from but we do get the feeling that he’s been here before. However, we also get the feeling that no-one knows who he is or remembers him which is kind of a spotty dynamic throughout the first issue and will be addressed later. Towards the end of the five pages, a conflict is introduced and we get the sense that some major ass-kicking is about to take place. Looking at the first five pages of the first issue for what they are, the preview pages we’ll be putting up on Newsarama, CBR, etc, they serve the purpose of exciting Liefeld fans with glorious poses and the promise of big, mindless action but they do little-to-nothing to get a new reader jazzed. There’s no hook, just a promise of an upcoming hook. And with sloppy art, dialog and situations, a promise that there will eventually be a hook isn’t enough to get me to buy the book.

Tomorrow, I’ll tackle pages 6-9. For now - it’s story time. Short one today.

____________________________

The Chinskimo was the name we came up with for this kid Neil that lived on our floor freshman and sophomore year in college. He was this freakishly tall Asian kid that had this puffy, fur line jacket that he would wear the second it got cold and it made him look like an Eskimo – hence, Chinskimo.

The Chinskimo wasn’t a bad guy at all, but he had his quirks that made him quite annoying. The one thing he did that drove people nuts was this excited, high pitch “hoot” he let out, not only when he was laughing, but pretty much randomly throughout the day. It sounded almost exactly like the sound a kid makes when he’s imitating a choo-choo train but couldn’t make the “ch” sound.

He had other quirks, enough to make him 51% intolerable. But he had his uses, so we kept him around.

One such use was this genius plan devised by Nico from Rico that was supposed to skew the curve of our Organic Chemistry final (pre-med, now that was a waste), a test we needed to do good on because we were all failing the class, in our favor. Beyond that, and probably the real reason for the plan, was because it was really, really funny.

The plan was to have the Chinskimo take the test despite not being in the class. But, there were rules. He had to write gibberish on every page of the exam, stuff that made no sense. Twenty minutes into this three hour final, he had to stand up, scream out “YES!”, make his way up to the front of the class, slam the exam on the professor’s desk, thank him for such an easy test and then run out of the room doing the Chinskimo hoot.

The theory behind it was, everyone would get freaked out and think the test was really easy and that they’re fucked for having a hard time with it. It would cause panic and cause people to throw the test.

In reality, it was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life but the average for the final was still in the seventies and I still go a grade in the forties.

Speaking of finals, I have my final today which is, hopefully, the last exam I’ll ever take. Sorry for the rushed, probably crappy story. I’m hung-over and stressed and didn’t study enough and don’t have access to a Chinskimo to skew the curve for me.

knock out that hangover, fanboy: Alka-Seltzer Morning Relief