PART ONE: Peep the Recital

As with many things in publishing (apparently) there is a certain amount of serendipity involved with bringing any work to the marketplace. The story of THE RED LINE is certainly evidence of that.

It's safe to say that anyone who knows me knows that I am immersed in comics pretty much all of the time. Not the backstage intrigues of who drinks too much or who is cheating with whose spouse. I care about how often PLANETARY meets its schedule and whether or not Mark Waid's version of the Legion of Super-Heroes will be the one to stick.

It's safe to say that I spend a fair amount of time in conversations focusing on "what I would do if I controlled Character X." from this ongoing conversation, THE RED LINE, REDJACK and several other projects were born. ("what's with all the Red?" Coincidence, Virginia. Coincidence.)

Not that any of this is unusual. There are likely hundreds of people with similar stories and perhaps bigger libraries of ideas.

Only most them don't talk as much as me. I talk a lot. I talk fast. I talk, generally, with a big smile on my face because, nearly as much as writing, I enjoy talking. Eventually my incessant talking put me in contact with a guy called ROBERT ROACH, the force behind the MENTHU creator-owned series.

Truncating our many sporadic meetings, which took place over several weeks, I'll just say this: Robert is a great person. He loves comics more than anyone I've ever met and, more than that, seems to have zero ego when it comes to sharing what he's got which, in this case, was a big stable of talented creators who were raring to put togther a group book. Eventually he asked me, if I would stop talking for five minutes, if I would like to write something for that group book.

"Anything you want," I said.

"No, man. Anything you want."

He showed me several artists who might be fun to work with but it was Todd's portfolio that grabbed me. Nothing against the other guys but, for me, Todd was the one. When you see what he's done for The red Line, I think you'll all be well pleased. That first project was the upcoming REDJACK segment of THE SET (BLACK !NK), a graphic antho inlcuding stories from several creators. Our bit was only eight pages but it quickly became clear that Todd and I had similar ideas about comics in general and also lined up on different creators' specific approaches to telling comic stories. We both love BLACKSAD, for instance. We both enjoy Peter David's run on THE HULK.

So, after our very easy team-up on THE SET, I asked Todd how he felt about putting together a pitch for MARVEL using a character that it turns out we both felt hadn't had enough done with him. The pitch didn't go as far as we hoped but, again, we enjoyed the process of putting it together so much that it seemed foolish to let Marvel's obvious lack of good judgement deter us.

But, having lots of pay-the-bills work to do and precious little in the way of extra cash to self-publish, we were at a loss as to how to proceed. Enter Rob Burnett and the ubiquitous presence of the Star Trek Illuminati.




continued in part two: