THE BUZZ(ES) THAT ALMOST WAS(ES) – PART I

A long time ago, I promised myself once LOVE BUZZ was published, I would find the time to write down the story behind the story. For all I know, the journey in getting the book made might very well be more interesting than the book itself. It's officially been 10 years now, since I first conceived the project and set out to make it tangible, and now here I sit, ready to lay bare for all you budding comic makers out there, the hardships and triumphs of getting published in this fickle industry. From starry eyed beginnings to that triumphant yet punch drunk moment when you finally hold the first copy of your blood, sweat, and tears in your hands and everything in between, this is the story of LOVE BUZZ. The journey that myself, Michelle, Dave, Thomas, and a slew of other people who joined and encouraged us along the way as we forged on over the eight year period to it's completion. It's a long story, which I will break up into six parts along the coming weeks. A nice little companion piece we'll be sharing along the way, with the help of Tim Simmons and the Comic Book Script Archive is the original script I wrote for LOVE BUZZ dating back to 2004. This original draft, clocking in at very nearly 300 pages, includes numerous things that were cut from the book that finally saw print from Oni Press. Needless to say, we cut a significant bit of story out of the final product to get it down to the 184 page mark. I consider sharing the original scripts to be a gift to other young writers out there, to help them appreciate the importance of the editorial process. 

We'll start our story with the same words that have begun so many others before it...

IN THE BEGINNING…


I first conceived of LOVE BUZZ as a long haired young rascal who looked something like this...

My first job as a filing clerk for an insurance firm had eventually yielded me the thousand dollars I would need to buy myself a top of the line (for it's time) digital video camera, as a couple of high school buddies of mine and I sat up a few late nights on weekends, coming up with ideas for short films and features we mostly never got around to producing. These late night gatherings did however inspire me to go off and write a trio of never produced scripts that still sit in the bottom of a drawer somewhere in my house. My first finished work, MIND IS A ROLLING THUNDER, a title I will freely admit that even I don't know what it's supposed to mean, but used because it sounded cool at the time, LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS, a concept I some day look forward to revisiting, about two rival high school "know-it-alls" seeking to rig an election for Class President with their own Manchurian Candidates, and finally, a script called LOVE BUZZ, which share's only two things in common with the book that's in stores now. The title, and the name of it's main character, Norm Raymer.


The original LOVE BUZZ was a story written by a guy who'd known nothing about love, and had only been out on maybe two dates with a girl who ended up getting tired of him and moving onto another guy. Convinced that my first time getting dumped was the end of the world, I began to set pen to paper writing Love Buzz. This first version had Norm getting dumped by a very different version of Maggie Gunther, who went off to date some dude with a Motorcycle, while leaving Norm to ponder what comes next, until he met a girl named Christina who was something else all together more special. The first LOVE BUZZ was written by a man with no experience in the realm of love. Regardless, I showed it to a few friends, who all said they really enjoyed it, including the girl who would become the basis for Maggie in the final incarnations of LOVE BUZZ, and the reinforcement from them kept me going and wanting to write.


Despite my film making dreams dying early, what was done was done. I had officially spent the last two years of my high school career dicking around in class, writing stories and movies that never got made and making wreckage of my GPA. Despite the fact that those things I had written are things that I can now look back and cringe upon, the writing bug had bitten me hard and there was no going back for me. Not everyone figures out what they want to do with the rest of their lives at the age of 16, but I had. I didn't know where I would go from there, but I knew that by sheer determination and refusal to quit, I could get there. My on again, off again relationships with the girl I based Maggie upon stayed rocky for some time, which is all pretty well documented within the book itself, so I'll just skip the back story on that and tell you if you haven't already, to go buy LOVE BUZZ right now off Amazon. 


So, doing a movie was out, at least for the moment. As much as I love reading prose, the idea of writing something as elaborate as a book made my testicles retract up into my body, so that was out. Plus, I had already spent so many months writing the ever bulging screenplay for LOVE BUZZ, which had grown well over the 90 to 120 page limit of most rom-com scripts and by all measures was still growing. It was around this time that I had gotten back into reading comic books in a big way after an several year hiatus, in which I had discovered that girls thought guys who read comics were dorky and unkissable. (Thank God THAT’S not the case anymore, amIright?)

     My realms of comic reading had broadened considerably as I discovered there was more beyond the cape and tights set. Books like Craig Thompson's BLANKETS, Chynna Clugston's BLUE MONDAY and particularly Sean McKeever, Mike Norton, and the Brothers Fraim’s THE WAITING PLACE had begun to made a great cases for a bold format change and new direction for LOVE BUZZ. I had begun to doubt that I could find an artist crazy enough to commit to drawing an almost 300 page book for me, but that’s fine. I took some cartooning classes as a kid. How hard could it possibly be?

     Remember what I was saying about “a healthy dose of self-delusion”?

     Yeah…

     TO BE CONTINUED…

Information Dump!

What? You expect a guy like me to have a post title with the word "Dump" and be mature about it?

C'moooooon!

Anyway, a couple months have passed since I last posted anything of substance here, and I could name off any of the thousand fucking reasons for that, but the cardinal rule of any comic maker worth his salt is "Show, don't tell", so for those of you who like making your little mouses (mice? Is it still that way for computers?) go clicky-click, have I got a blog entry for you!

First off, I know I posted a blog about this right before I went to this thing, but my first ever book signing experience at ACME Comics in Greensboro, NC went off without a hitch.

Click here to get a look at more pics from ACME Comics' MARCH MADNESS signing event on my Flickr!

Next up, not even a month later, I was off to Chicago to sign at the Oni booth with Michelle and Dave in tow. It was a real milestone, as it was our first ever experience actually being in the same physical place together. It was a great feeling to finally have the whole team (minus Mauer, sadly) together for once.

Click here to get a look at more pics from C2E2 on my Flickr!

And last, not least, but most recent, (this past weekend to be exact) Free Comic Book Day brought me back to my hometown of Louisville KY for the first time since the end of 2009 to do a signing with Love Buzz 'sketchbook' artist Dave Tuney at Comic Book World. We even brought my girlfriend!


Click here to get a look at more pics from FCBD on my Flickr!

Also was informed that my recent interview with Paul Aponte went live on their "Indie Spotlight" podcast at their Ideology Of Madness website. Listen to Paul and myself jaw on for a good half-hour about Love Buzz and what other projects I've got coming down the line very soon at the link below. A very fun interview to say the least!

Love Buzz on Funnybooks with Aron and Paulie!

Also, while the gang and I were at C2E2, we did a brief interview with Pants from ComicGeekSpeak just as things were closing down at the show for day two. It's only about five minutes, but it's one of those rare occasions where you'll get to hear me, Michelle, and Dave stutter and "Umm..." our way through a conversation after an exhausting day on the killing floors. 

Team Love Buzz on ComicGeekSpeak! (Look for us at the 59:26 marker!)

My buddy Tony Fleecs, in an effort to blow through his commitments to do hundreds of sketchcards he had commissioned last year after offering them for three bucks a pop, finally sent me one of the ones I'd commissioned. Anyone who's not checked out his auto-bio comic "In My Lifetime" is doing themselves a great disservice. I've said it before, I'll say it again and again until I'm blue in the face,  it's the funniest 32 pages you'll ever read in one sitting. Here's his interpretation of Love Buzz's Maggie Gunther.

That's it for now, I guess. Next week though, come back for a the first part of a long series that will chronicle once and for all, the long, drawn out battle Michelle, Dave, and myself have gone through to put Love Buzz out over the last eight years!

Live From My House, IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT!

Got a visitor over for the weekend, or possibly longer in the form of my buddy Rich Caldwell who needed a place to crash for a little bit. The majority of our time has been spent sitting on our individual laptops working on comic shit. We're boring. We know.

But I'm on a roll, lately. Tonight, I cranked out 30 rough pages of script in one day. Won't beat my record of 45 in one day back in '03, but it's the best I've done in about as long. I swear to God, having Love Buzz all but completely off my plate has been the most freeing thing ever.

On the LB front though, Oni has informed me that they'll be printing up a batch of ashcans for the first couple chapters of Love Buzz, for Dave Tuney and myself to drag along with us to the Nashville Comic and Horror Festival, where our buddy Jay Leisten hooked us up with a free table. If you're going to be in the area drop by and say "Hey!" We'll be the ones looking horribly out of place, trying to peddle romance comics to the horror and death crowd! It should at very least, be hilarious!

You've Come A Long Way, Davey!

I get a lot of people asking lately about the contributions to the book of Dave Tuney, who's relationship to the book thus far, is only known by his name on the solicits. His contribution to the book is only about 30 pages, as opposed to Michelle's 150, but the quantity of Dave's work is part of what makes what he and I have been cooking up for his role in the book so special. Just because he gets less stage time doesn't take away from the fact that his contributions are just as important, and in some ways, a bit more fun.

In Love Buzz, the book's central male character Norm is like most of us, crazy about comic books and wants to become a professional artist when the story takes place. At a point through the book, Norm in his budding relationship with Maggie, begins keeping and trading off this big sketchbook with her that he'll every now and then begin drawing little comic entries into about their relationship and later their love and numerous break ups along the way. Dave's role in Love Buzz is essentially acting as Norm's hands through these segments.

I get a lot of people asking me to show off some examples of Dave's work on Love Buzz and how it relates and contrasts to Michelle and what she does as the person telling the book's central story. I've worked with Dave on several small projects over the last several years, and his role in Love Buzz was cemented into place even before Michelle came on board. I applaud him for sticking with us through everything, and I'm even more in awe of seeing how much his art has grown since our first work that we abandoned half way through, [URL="http://www.myspace.com/cousinwinslow"]My Fair Zombie[/URL].


My first work with Dave on the short-lived, unfinished opus, My Fair Zombie.

Here's a page Dave just recently completed in a 4 page sequence. An homage of Norm's to Jim Steranko's original Nick Fury comics. The rest of the sequence is a blast, and adds a little extra flavor to the story of Norm and Maggie's relationship as well as the whole "Hero worship" aspect of Norm's own "coming of age" story. There are several independent Dave scenes as well as a few other really fun homage sequences that include Frank Miller's Daredevil, Herge's Tintin, and the campy Adam West Batman TV series among a couple others.


Love Buzz - Page 46 - illustrated by Dave Tuney

Dave and I have also worked on a couple of short stories for various anthologies that either have already, or will soon see print, and he's been a great go-to guy for kicking out some of my better small ideas over the years. That said, with the improvement in his game and the spotlight that will be provided to us both, post-Love Buzz, Dave and I are in the process of looking forward into a new, bigger collaborative effort in the coming future. We've yet to hammer out any concrete details yet, and probably won't be able to until Love Buzz is turned in and off to the printers in a couple weeks, but there's something big brewing there.

Here's to you, Dave. And your luxurious girl hair!