I had a slow week last week, where my brain wasn't quite firing, the producorial load was kind of high, the inbound seemed unstoppable and I wasn't getting enough actual writing done. If I don't get this script finished today, I'm kind of screwed. Losing two days next week puts me behind schedule on a couple of things. The rest of this month is going to be a death march. It doesn't help that the script I'm on today - an issue of THE WILD STORM - is insanely complicated. Speaking of Wildstorm:
My mandate with the Wildstorm Universe revival was to create and produce four titles over two years. The first was THE WILD STORM. The second, arriving in October, is MICHAEL CRAY.
Here's the press release. And check out that cover, created for me by the legendary Denys Cowan, inked by Bill Sienkiewicz and coloured by Steve Buccellato. I asked for Denys and was amazed to get him.
Working with my editor Marie Javins, I chose this creative team, and wrote a bible for the series. The writer, Bryan Hill -- who you may know from POSTAL and ROMULUS, the tv show ASH VS EVIL DEAD, or this news story from the past week on his sale of a spec script to Voltage. N Steven Harris has an amazing purity of line and sense of space that puts me in mind of masters like Chris Sprouse. Dexter Vines has been one of the best ink artists in the business for as long as I can remember.
The series spins right out of THE WILD STORM 6, which is out next Wednesday. It's a fairly simple premise. The best killer in the world is dying of a brain tumour. He believes himself to be an ethical actor - the hero of his story. What will his legacy be, and how much good can he do before he dies? (Given that, in Michael Cray's head, "good" equates to "killing the right people.")
A round of applause, please, for these fine gentlemen - Bryan Edward Hill, N Steven Harris and Dexter Vines, for they know not what they do by teaming up with me, the poor bastards. It's a rare privilege to get to work with them.