Since I’m focusing on stories that take place after college (mid-2000 and beyond) I’m going to have to talk all about my decision to get into comics. I’ve floated a couple of stories around over the pass few years but The Moose in the Closet is all about honesty. So you’ll be getting the true story here for the first time and it is FULL of embarrassing fanboy moments, glorified fan-fiction, and hero worship, everything I now preach against.

The story I tell people is how I wrote a script for a sci-fi play called “Ask”, showed it to my boy Guam, and Guam said, “This is a shitty play but it’d make for a great comic book.” I researched comic companies and discovered Marvel was accepting pitches for their relaunched Epic line. I worked long and hard on an issue one script and beat sheets for the next three issues, sent it in, waited a couple of months, and got a rejection letter that was different from any other rejection letters I’ve seen on-line.

The only thing completely true about that story is that I got a rejection letter for a pitch called “Ask”. Everything else is me covering up my embarrassing decisions.

The concept behind “Ask” came from a conversation I had at lunch with my boy Max – we were talking about what superpower we’d like to have, typical lunchtime conversation. I told him that I’d like to be able to answer any question. So, if anyone asks me a question or if I ask myself a question – I’d instantly know the answer.

We got to talking about an idea for a movie that starts with the main character (who has this question-answering ability) deciding he wants to sleep with some Hollywood starlet. He does something like goes out and buys a candy bar. You then follow this chain of events that lead to the gruesome death of the Hollywood starlet’s husband and, at the end of the movie, the guy who started it all is at the right place at the right time and he has sex with the girl of his dreams.

So, he’s essentially the world’s most powerful douche.

It’s a fun concept, I might dig it back up again, and I’m sure if I put some serious energy into it I could make it sing. The version I sent into Epic, however – a twenty-two page script and four beat sheets that I wrote in…

A. Single. Day.

Reread it once. Said, “This is good enough, if they like it they’ll assign me an editor.”

I saw the call for submissions, published sometime ago, and was like, “Fuck – they probably received a MILLION submissions by now!” And I just started typing. Never wrote a comic script in my life. Fuck, never even seen one, honestly. I typed my ass off, printed it out, and mailed that shit in.

I almost instantly realized that I made a TREMENDOUS mistake. I don’t know, maybe that’s what sets me apart from other people – I know when I just did something stupid. I started, you know, learning about comic production and theory at that point. I’ve done stage and editorial writing since college, I knew how to tell a story, but I had no idea how to write a comic book.

Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to focus on the first pitches – pre-Western Tales of Terror. I ended up sending three concepts into Epic and three other sad, sad pitches before finally deciding to go at it another way.

Hopefully we have some fun over these next couple of weeks. I’ll even be posting some of the original pitches – they’re good for a laugh.