LOS ANGELES, August 28 – Who knows where this shit comes from.

I’ve thought about it. I try not to, but it happens anyway. Part of me thinks it must be dangerous, thinking about it, about where this shit comes from. As long as it’s there, as long as it keeps coming, everything’s cool, but if it stops, you’re fucked. So don’t talk about it, don’t look too closely at it, don’t ask questions. Motherfucker, don’t even think about it. Start some fucking analysis of where your stories come from, and they may just take a powder.

It seems like that sometimes.

But fuck it, I feel like thinking about where one of my stories came from.

The story in question is Ultimates Annual #2. For the non-comics reader, The Ultimates is an updated version of Marvel Comics’ classic superhero team The Avengers. The Avengers were one of those ideas that was so simple and brilliant, it no doubt inspired a collective DUH from everyone who didn’t think of it. The idea being: Let’s take all our most powerful superheroes and put them in one group.

DUH!

Over the years the group has flexed, expanded, contracted, showed its age, rebounded, flailed, spawned sequels, endured, and, at one time or another, included just about every good guy in Marvel’s considerable stable.

Eventually, while the original continues, it was polished and modernized in the form of The Ultimates. And, oddly, it rocked. As written by Mark Millar and drawn by Bryan Hitch, it simply rocks.

An annual, in comics-speak, is a one shot story, usually DOUBLE SIZE and NEVER BEFORE TOLD not to mention GUEST STARRING SPIDERMAN that, at one time, graced just about every title out there on an, you guessed it, annual basis. At some point while I was reading other things, annuals fell out of vogue. However, in the last couple years Marvel has begun to ease them back into style. And, through an series of scheduling and technical mishaps, I ending up landing the plum gig of writing the second Ultimates Annual.

Plum if you consider being the first writer to follow the guy who definitively marked the territory long before you ever thought of going there as being plum. One might also say I’m the only sucker who was rube enough to take the job.

So I wrote a story.

This here, this is a SPOILER ALERT! If you have not read The Ultimates Annual #2 and plan on doing so, the information below will ruin several plot points etc. If you care about that shit, you may want to skip down and look at a previous entry or go peruse the archives or, you know, fuck your significant other maybe. That gets my vote every time.

Further warning: I will now talk about the Annual as if you had read it. If you haven’t, and don’t plan to do so, and don’t give a shit about the SPOILER ALERT!, you are going to be bored to shit and may want to, I don’t know, go fuck your significant other. Again, that’s a lot of fun.

So, my Ultimates story was about how Captain American and a guy named The Falcon go fight a reincarnated Nazi scientist who is poisoning people of color and harvesting their dead white skin to create mutant Nazi golems. The story takes place in present day with art by Mike Deodato and flashbacks to WWII with art by Ryan Sook.

The opening: Those radio balloons. I hate talk radio. I hate political pundits and right vs left fake argument shows. I fucking loath that shit. Does it show? I wanted both these guys to sound like idiots. I hear this stuff non-stop these days and now it’s in my work. Fuck me.

Liberty Island: Been there. Impressed. But not half as much as I was impressed by Ellis Island, which is a mind blowing place. When I read the issue of Ultimates where the Stature of Liberty is pushed over, in what I took to be an obvious reference to American soldiers pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, I was dumbstruck. That was some powerful shit. I originally wrote an opening with Cap talking to Lady Liberty in his head. For the sake of space we needed to put the radio balloons here and lose Caps inner monologue. The statue emerging from the water reminds me of another image that kicked my ass once upon a time: the closing shot of the original Planet of the Apes.

World War II: My folks were born during the war. My dad has had a life long fascination with WWII. We used to watch old war movies together on Saturday afternoons before cable or video tapes. Didn’t matter if the movies were in color, our TV wasn’t. I could ask him questions about the war and he’d tell me what was going on. I remember The Longest Day, Battle of the Bulge, Hell is for Heroes, and The Great Escape (still my favorite flick).

Evil scientists: I love the old Universal horror flicks. Friday nights in the Bay Area: Creature Features Hosted by Bob Wilkins.

The Falcon: I didn’t read superhero comics as a little kid. I read Donald Duck. Rather, I looked at Donald Duck, as I didn’t leard how to read until I was like sixteen or something. Somehow, I had three Marvel superhero dolls: Spiderman, The Lizard, and The Falcon. The Falcon. Dude, the red boots. Fuckin’ sweet. My favorite superhero as a small child, even though I knew fuck all about him.

Captain America: Of the few superhero comics I had, one came from the first storyline to feature Arnim Zola. That was my only Cap comic ever. I stared at it for hours, making up stories to go with the pictures. When I started doing research for the Annual, John Barber, editor, sent a pile of classic Cap comics. Guess what was in the pile? Fucking-A right. I stared at the pictures, it all came back.

Red Skull: I’d wanted to use Red Skull as my villain. I wanted to have some new villain, a racist neo-Nazi fuckwit, using the classic Red Skull’s red dust. It killed people and turned them red. That was vetoed as someone had already called dibs on creating Ultimate Red Skull. I thought about Zemo. Then I saw the Zola comic. Originally Zola was to be only in the flash backs, but he just kept getting bigger in the story. At some point John Barber, him again, suggested a white dust. This played into the idea of a neo-Nazi villain.

Race: Cap is a white man from the 1940s. Falcon is a black man from the 21st century. There might be some communication problems. Originally I planned for the whole issue to take place in the present day. Cap and Falc’s adventure would have taken them all over the States, with Falcon helping Cap to adapt to the 60 years of history he missed from being frozen in an iceberg (yeah, it’s a comic, remember?). The timing and length of the book dictated that we use two artists. Someone suggested that one of the artists do the flashbacks and the other the present day pages. And so it was, but that fact that each artists was contracted to draw a specific number of pages dictated that a larger portion of the story take place in the past than I had planned. A broad lesson in history for Cap became a brief lecture on race relations and African American pop culture. Veeery brief. I had asked several people what they thought were the most significant historical events of the last 60 years. Issues related to race came up again and again. Blend this with the Cap is white and Falcon is Black thing, blend that with the white dust thing, blend with my own observations as a guy who grew up in a town with no more than a handful of African Americans, blend with my adult years spent in places where that is not the case, and you get a comic that is about race as much as it is about anything. Add the values handed to me by my mom and dad about the irrelevance of race to the character of a person, and you get the tone.

Music: Yeah, my dad again. He’s a huge jazz fan. Glenn Miller isn’t his cup of tea for the most part, more of a Duke Ellington man, but I would know less than squat about big band if not for him. Likewise the Irving Berlin lyric. Chuck Berry and Jimi, that’s just rock-n-roll. That’s just all my musicians friends playing their shit for me as a kid who liked classical. Public Enemy, that’s Dave Francis. Thanks, Dave.

On the road: My dad, yet again. He loves cars. He loves race cars. He builds them and drives them and repairs them and they are loud and they are cool. Cap and Falcon in a Trans-Am? Yeah, baby! The cars and motorcycles and the chase, that’s my dad mixed with Smokey and the Bandit and Road Warrior.

Page 29: That’s Deodato. I asked Mike and Ryan before I stated writing if there was something they wanted to draw. Ryan was down for whatever I came up with. Mike was likewise ready to roll, but also sent me a Frazetta jpeg, Swamp Demon I think, and told me he’d love to do something like that. We’ll, the image had a hot nude slave chick’s dorsal view in the foreground, a snake wrapped around her thigh, and a huge swamp demon in the background coming toward her. I asked if Cap should have the snake or what. He explained it was the layout he was interested in. So, I tried to make sure we could get to a page where Mike got to use this layout with Cap facing off against a huge fucking monster.

Last Page: We had peace signs all over the house I grew up in. My parents, my mom in particular, raised me to hate war and view it as a waste. A contingency for which there is never any excuse other than ignorance and human weakness. This page, the final panel in particular, is her’s.

Where’s this shit come from?

Everywhere, man. Fucking everywhere.

Making shit up,

Charlie

The Real Henry Thompson

Some time back a reader asked me if I had named my protagonist Henry Thompson after the one time San Francisco Giant Henry Thompson. I did not. I did not because, until this question was asked, I didn’t know there had ever been a Giant named Henry Thompson.

Coincidence.

When I learned of the coincidence, I took the time to look up the Real Henry Thompson’s baseball stats. He played some good ball. Very recently, I had cause to look a little further into the life of Henry Curtis Thompson and found him to have been a bizarrely appropriate accidental namesake for my Henry.

If you are curious about his stats, they are here.

If you’d like to know more about the life of this baseball-pioneer/soldier/outlaw, you can find it here.

New Stuff

So some of the info and content around here has become dated. I’m on it.

I’m doing some gradual updates as time allows. The Thrillers, Joe Pitt, Comic Books, and Movies pages have all been updated to reflect the current status of all those projects. The Joe Pitt update includes some new material from the Joe Pitt series bible. I’ll be updating the Cover Gallery soon and posting excerpts from A DANGEROUS MAN and NO DOMINION.

Thanks for coming ’round.

LOS ANGELES, August 22 – The movie thing, it’s designed to make people mad.

I mean mad in the anglophile Britishy way of nutty, as opposed to the stalwart American way of just pissed off. Although both senses of the term apply.

Personally, I don’t feel mad about the movie thing at all just now. Either kind of mad. I feel rather peaceful and at ease. I, after all, have no reason to feel mad. My interactions within the realm of the movie thing have been passing, brief and, for the most part pleasant.

Not so for others.

I know some folks who have ample reason to feel greatly mad. Though I’ve seen no indication that they actually do. The folks in question are the kind people at Crossroads Films.

To wit:
After several years of diligent effort, and the expenditure of significant sums of $$$, they have been forced to give up their film option on CAUGHT STEALING. This is disappointing. But no so much for the obvious reasons.

Well, not for me anyway.

I’m disappointed because these folks had been putting their back into it for a few years now, come close on several occasions to having their financing in place, and never been able to get that boulder quite to the top of the mountain before it rolled back down on them. In the meantime, in order to continue this reenactment of Sisyphus, they had to dole out periodic checks to me and a few other people as well. I can only imagine the frustration of working literally for years on a project, investing some real capital in it, and seeing it come to nothing in the end. I can only imagine this because I have been, for all intents and purposes, a well paid spectator at the event.

Lucky me. Again.

The sick part, the really sick part, is that, having already made a nice piece of change off this effort, the option right to CAUGHT STEALING will now return to me. And I can sell them again. And again. And again. This can, and does, go on for a very long time.

Silly, yes?

Of course, as blasé as I may be able to play this, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to see a movie get made from one of my books, or all of them for that matter. There’s gold in them there hills after all. But it’s nice solace knowing (should I be lucky enough to have this continue) that folks will have to pay for the pleasure of trying to crack that nut whether they are successful or not.

Pity them.

Something is driving them. And clichés of Hollywood greed aside (and those are plenty real themselves), most of the people driven in this particular way seem to have as their greatest aspiration, the desire to make good movies. Go figure.

So, good folks at Crossroads, folks with a real desire to make a good movie, run into a self serving, money grubbing novelist like me and end up spending sweat and treasure on a fruitless venture while I happily whistle down the street with a slightly fatter wallet.

Right bastard that I am.

And I’m gonna try to do it again!

I’m gonna hang CAUGHT STEALING at the end of a line of piano wire and drag it through the heavy water, dumping chum all the while, and hope for a big motherfucker to come along and swallow the bait. Should this happen, it will be followed, inevitably, with a long and frustrating period of negotiation that will make me wish I’d simply thrown some dynamite in the water, but should I land the beast, I can cut it’s belly open and scrape out the roe.

Not to batter a metaphor or anything.

Tying a fly,
Charlie

Cap and the Falcon Hit the Road!

Tomorrow, Wednesday, August 23rd is the scheduled release date for The Ultimates 2 Annual #2.

How do I know? I wrote it.

Fuck you, Huston, you fucking hack! Who drew the damn thing?

Well, since you asked nicely, pencil duties were shared by Mike Deodato and Ryan Sook.

For the uninitiated, that being the folks who have better things to do than read books with lots of pictures in them, the Ultimates are an updated version of Marvel Comics’ Avengers. For those of you who don’t know who the Avengers are, I have no time to explain the concept of The Earth’s Mightiest Heroes!

The story told may require the slightest bit of setup: America was conquered by a force of foreign super villains. The Ultimates kicked their asses. Stuff got broken. Stuff is being put back together.

Go buy the bastard and read it. Pretty pretty pictures.

LOS ANGELES, August 13 – Shouldn’t I be selling a book or something?

Last time I checked, and it was only just recently, A DANGEROUS MAN was slated for release on September 19th. Why this is important to me is fairly obvious.

The aforementioned title is the final book in my HENRY THOMPSON TRILOGY. It is the conclusion to a three book work of fiction I’ve now been writing for several years, during which I’ve moved in with my girlfriend, gotten engaged to her, sold my first novel, started making enough $$$ to stop bartending for the first time in a decade, married my fiancé, moved to yet another apartment, sold a couple more books, written, in total, six novels, moved cross country, and done lots of other stuff but that’s kind of the big shit.

Needless to say, I’ve been living with Henry for many years now. But not recently. Shit, I’ve barely seen the guy for something like eighteen months. And, in the meantime, I’ve gotten cozy with some other fictional creations. But, for the book-buying public (god bless their little hearts and dollars), Henry is just about to make a last appearance at the plate before his extended season draws to a close.

And, really, shouldn’t I be making an effort to capitalize on all this previous effort and hustle that damn book and make some more damn money?

Well, duh.

But, you know, that shit is sooooo boring.

Not that I’m above hucksterism. This is my website you’re visiting, after all, all three of you.

But shouldn’t I be doing more? A couple conventions a year, a few readings, some oral diarrhea on the Internet?

You call that hucksterism, Huston? That’s just plain laziness. Why aren’t you out on the road? Why aren’t you getting in the asses of your agent and editor? Why aren’t you on the phone haranguing the publicity and sales and marketing people at your publisher?

Because I’m not that guy.

I’m not on the road. I’m not mailing postcards with my book jacket printed on them to all my friends and acquaintances and the literati of the noir (tiny as it is) community. And I am most certainly not in anyone’s ass or haranguing on the phone. Again, not that I’m above any of it, I just don’t do it.

Going on the road, that costs money. It costs money to travel, and it costs money to be on the road instead of writing.

Sure, but why isn’t your publisher sending you on the road?

Because it COSTS MONEY!

And for that reason, I don’t want my publisher to send me on the road.

For a writer, such as myself, at the shallow end of the pool, one who has no reasons to complain about his sales or success because he writes what he writes and what he writes isn’t big mainstream stuff like the big kids in the deep end, it makes no sense for a publisher to pay hard dollars to send him on the road. They only pay so much for this shallow end stuff, spending half again as much to promote this work is a good way to lose money. And if one’s books start to lose money, regardless of the reason, that is a good way to find oneself without a book contract. Thus, until such time (god and the book buyers and their dollars willing) that my books sell in numbers sufficient to justify it, I don’t want my publisher to put me on the road.

Then how do you expect to develop a readership?

Um, by writing?

Granted, it’s not the best strategy. But really, my little voice in the wilderness here has a better chance of reaching a moderate size audience than I do walking into a Borders in Terre Haute.

Not all writers feel that way. Some writers pine for the road. They finish a new book, they can’t wait for it to publish so they can go out and promote it. Newly published writers often dream with greater intensity about parties and signings and readings and guest lecturing than they do about hot sex. Nothing wrong with that. But it makes it hard to get work done.

Well, least you could do is work those phones and ask what all those people at Random House are doing to sell your book.

Yeah, I could do that. I could also avoid bothering them so they can get some fucking work done. This comes of my belief that sticking my fist in someone’s ass isn’t going to make them capable or particularly interested in working any harder on my behalf. If someone is halfway decent at their job, they’ll do it without a fucking amateur like me getting underfoot. If they suck, my interference won’t make them stop sucking. And if they’re really good, my being a pain in the ass will only ensure that they view working on my books as, naturally, a big pain in the ass.

Tell me, when was the last time you saw someone do a really great job on the behalf of someone they think is a pain in the ass? I’ll tell you when: fucking never.

No one wants to work with an ass-pain. It sucks.

My solution: when the talented and groovy people I’ve been blessed to work with in my writing life call me and ask me to do something to help support the marketing, sales and publicizing on my books, I try always to do it. If I have an idea or a question, I try always to submit it with the implicit message that they are the pros and know best. If I think I see something that has gone awry with the selling of one of my books, I try to make the appropriate party aware of this information without pointing a finger at anyone. I have been right about some of these things. I have been wrong about as many, if not more. In the end, by letting these good folks do their jobs, I get to do mine. It’s nice.

So, yes, I should be selling a book. In fact, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m talking it up a bit (I fucking love A DANGEROUS MAN and think it’s one of the better books I’ve written, although I also think it’s fair to say that it’s paced slower than the other books I’ve published so far, and doesn’t read as well on it’s own as CAUGHT STEALING and SIX BAD THINGS do. I think I’ve ended Henry’s story in a manner that’s honest to the character and fair to the reader. And I think it’s a pretty fucking ripping yarn with a good soundtrack.), I’ll be doing a few readings and a release party in Los Angeles and I hope to scoot up to the Bay Area as well before the end of the fall, I’ll be writing about some of those events and the attendant shenanigans here, and I’ll do my usual “I am my own pimp” act and whore myself for any interview opportunities that come along, and, most importantly, I’ll keep writing more books.

After all, baseball season is winding down and the Giants are slowly digging my heart from my chest with a set of dull and rusted spikes, I have to do something to keep my mind off the agony.

Shaking my money maker,

Charlie

Signs!

Or, rather, signings. To wit, these dates, times, and locations at which I will sign books and such.

Saturday, September 23rd:

1pm at Mysteries to Die For
2940 Thousand Oaks Boulevard
Thousand Oaks CA 91362
805-374-0084

6pm at The Mystery Bookstore
1036-C Broxton Avenue
Westwood CA 90024
310-209-0415

Sunday, September 24:
2pm at Book’em Mysteries
1118 Mission Street
South Pasadena CA 91030
626-799-9600

How ‘bout a shindig?

Sadly, the release parties of the last few years can never be again. Junno’s Bar has closed and I’m in Los Angeles and all things must change. So let’s party in a comic book shop!

The A DANGEROUS MAN release party will be thus and so:
Date/Time: Sunday September, 24th at 6:30 pm
Location: The Secret Headquarters
Event Details: Beer, and a reading by the writer, followed by the sale of books and the signing of same, followed by a brief stroll to a nearby booze dispensary where one may imbibe without fear of ruining valuable back issues of “Skyscrapers of the Midwest”
Join us!

SANTA MONICA, August 1 – I wish all I had to do was write.

I mean, I’d still like to hang out with my wife and see my friends and go to a flick and have a beer and take a walk and enjoy a really good crap and all that, but as far as the work side of things goes, I wish all I had to do was write.

Novels I mean. Not this.

Not that there’s anything wrong with this. This is a fine way of emptying the brainpan of detritus and waste. Writing a particularly good entry for this site is, in fact, on par with a really good crap. It’s a load off.

But I never planned on doing it publicly.

Speaking of making a public spectacle of oneself, after I had embarrassingly referred to drinking my own pee while speaking on a panel at last week’s Comic Con International, the discussion was steered, thankfully, into cleaner waters. One of the final topics discussed came from a woman in the audience who posited, with no offence intended, ( and I’m gonna paraphrase hear) that being genre writers we, the panelists, were not revealed in our work in the same way that writers of literary fiction might be. A thesis that was immediately, and, I think, universally rejected by the panel.

Not revealed in our work?

We’re peeling words from the insides of our brains and slapping them on paper for people to inspect at their leisure as often as they like. Were I writing about life on Omega 7 from the point of view of a Delirian Sloth Fish, I would be revealing something about myself.

My choices of subject, genre, character, where I put my commas, use of curse words, pronouns, tense, and every drop of ink on every page, reveals something about me. The act of trying to conceal myself would reveal something about me, were I to attempt to do so.

One of the panelists, telling the story of how odd it was to see a scene taken from one of his works, in which a father teaches a son to drive, translated into a movie adaptation of that work, told us that the incident was essentially an account of how his own father had taught him to drive. It was an intimate, classic and relatable, memory he had turned to fiction for the page and, finally, seen transmuted into projected light and sound. The major difference being that the father in the graphic novel he had written, and in the film adaptation, was a mob hit man. As he put it (paraphrasing again): It’s all just us with guns.

And, ideally, I’d like to leave it at that: writing stories that are just me with guns, and not go any further.

Just making the doughnuts.

But someone has the sell the damn things.

The woman who had started this discussion approached me after the panel. She had something further she had wanted to get at. What was really on her mind was the question of whether it was discomforting, this self-exposure in fiction? Or was it more uncomfortable to reveal oneself in more tangible terms, to sit on panels, do signings and readings and write an on-line journal for instance?

Well, like I say, I wish all I had to do was write.

Were things more simple, I’d sit in a box and write my write and send it off into the world and people would pay monies to buy my write and I would prosper and people would know fuck all about me other than my write.

Tis not to be.

Not that I don’t enjoy meeting people. Not that I don’t enjoy and am not deeply flattered by the attention when I am invited to a convention, asked to sit on a panel, asked to sign copies of my work, asked to do an interview, receive kind emails through this site, or any of a half dozen other amazing opportunities that have come to me by way of my being a published writer. It’s just that none of those things appear on my top ten list of how I want to spend my Sunday.

And so I told her.

I’d just as soon be writing and leave the rest of it alone. But it’s part of the job, and, as I’ve mentioned many times, the job don’t suck. Worse ways of spending an hour than sitting with five other writers shooting the shit about our work while an audience pays attention and seems to care a little about what we’re saying.

But are we saying anything about ourselves? That is a stage we’re sitting on, after all.

I’d rather be writing. Odd, because if my goal is to retain a level of privacy, it’s much harder to hide myself on the page, guns or no guns, than it is to hide when standing at a podium in front of a small cluster of readers.

Me without guns,
Charlie

Cue the Ominous Music
This is a link to a story over at NewScientist.com: “Make Mine a Zombie Bacteria” Anyone who has read ALREADY DEAD will understand my alarm. And, really, I had nothing to do with this. No my fault. The fact that it was done at UC San Diego is not connected at all to my recent arrival in California or my more recent trip to San Diego. I am innocent.