Dear Someone

I just updated the home page of my site. For no particular reason. I just didn’t like some of the words on it.

I’m not sure why I’m bothering to post this.

My next writing competition entry: Max Smart: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Full script for a projected Marvel Comics series.

The most common criticism I got was that it wasn’t funny enough. Humour is really hard to write. Well, it is for me. I mean, if I can’t make a premise like “what if Maxwell Smart was in Stan Lee’s S.H.I.E.L.D. comics in the 1960s” funny, I’ve got no hope. 

So, back to the drawing board…

Last year I started entering writing competitions on Mark Millar’s forum. This was just for fun and to get some feedback from other writers, but now I have a page for unpublished writing on my site, I have a place to store the entries for posterity.

The theme of the first competition was to take an established comic character and “re-imagine” a new origin for the character. I chose Wonder Woman.

(Wonder Woman is a registered trademark of DC Comics and no challenge to the trademark is intended, blah blah.)

My main aim in the script was to retain the iconography of the character while completely changing the origin, and to see how the new origin would inevitably produce a different character with a completely different set of morals and values. I had fun writing it but it’s not a version of Wonder Woman I would actually want to read.

I have no idea how to write a Wonder Woman comic that I would personally like to read. I hope somebody manages it some day, though. Wonder Woman is a character that many writers have failed to handle properly. The character concept is so perfect, but so many people write bad stories for her… maybe it’s not possible to tell any more great Wonder Woman stories, and the character’s potential has been exhausted. I hope not…

Fey was an entry in Shadowline comics’ ”Create a superheroine” contest. The winning entry would be published as a three-issue miniseries by Shadowline. Fey was rejected without comment, but as Shadowline apparently had several thousand entries I don’t feel at all discouraged by this. I don’t intend to try to get it published anywhere else, though. The comic market is notoriously difficult to break into for solo writers (which is why Shadowline’s competition was flooded by entries) and I am not committed enough to employ an artist to illustrate my pitch.

I later entered the proposal in a “just for fun” competition and got some good feedback on it. The main criticism was that although it was competently written it had nothing, apart from the setting, to make it stand out from the hunderds of other comics on the shelves.

Which is true. But I personally still like the character and the setting. I just accept that I’ll never do anything with it.

So I’ve uploaded the pitch and five pages of script (all that exist, outside my head) onto my web site. In case anybody is interested.

I didn’t finish all the things I wanted to do but the concert reviews have started again and I’ve started tidying things up.

Hopefully there will be some Real Stuff to download within the next few days.