Kill All Monsters! update

"I'm getting pretty tired of series that don't spell out their concept(s) in the first issue; the concept is supposed to be the hook, and if it isn't good enough to be the hook, why do the series? If it is good enough, why hide it?"

--Steven Grant

Jason Copland's already mentioned it on his blog, so I should probably update you guys too. Kill All Monsters! has gone back to the drawing board.

We sent the initial pitch to three publishers and got three different reasons for rejection. The first one suggested that we make some changes that frankly, none of us saw a need for at the time. Stuff like making the settings and characters less exotic and doing more city-smashing instead of staging our battles in the wilderness. I still don't think that exotic characters and settings are a drawback, but we should've listened about the city-smashing. More on that in a second.

The next rejection was due to the publisher's having a similar concept already in the works. Can't help that, so on we move. It's tempting to be nervous about knowing there's another giant monster vs. giant robot comic in the works, but we're not letting it bother us. It's all in the execution and I'm confident that no one else is doing a story like ours.

The third rejection got us thinking hard though. I'm not going to comment on the publisher's thoughts about Jason's art except to say that I don't see it, but Jason thinks there may be a point and wants to rework it a bit. What I do want to comment on is this publisher's opinion that the first issue we sent in presents characters that aren't very compelling. "The main character is sympathetic because of his condition," the publisher told us, "but beyond that -- nothing. We, the readers, have no reason to like him -- he has no likable qualities -- no personality to speak of." Also, "the situation doesn't ring true" and "isn't very convincing."

And the publisher is exactly right. When I first got involved with this project, I knew that I didn't want just twenty-two pages of fighting. There had to be an emotional connection and I put a lot of thought into trying to make that happen. But I think I went so far into trying to make our hero Spencer sympathetic that I pushed him into "pathetic" territory and that's not what I wanted. He's gloomy and morose and I agree that he's not very likable.

You should understand though that the plan was always for that to change. We introduce a light-hearted character in the first issue who would eventually begin to affect Spencer in a positive way, but you don't see any of that happen right away and yeah, the first issue's dark. Too dark, really, for people who just want to see some giant robots wailing on some giant monsters.

For some reason, I've been shying away from letting the story get really big. One of the first comments our editor made to me was that there wasn't enough action in the book. Because of that I boosted it some, but I didn't go far enough. I was still holding back. I wasn't fully embracing the concept, which is why that Steven Grant quote above hits me right in the nose.

I made the same mistake that the new Flash Gordon series made, which is to get so into telling a grounded, character-driven story that you forget that it's also supposed to be fun. So that's what we're going to correct in the new version of KAM.

We're letting the first story stand, but we're moving on to what would've been our next story arc. Instead of first telling the story of how Spencer became a robot-pilot, he'll already be a member of a team of pilots who are just beginning to get out into the world and fight monsters. He'll still be the pessimist of the group, but he'll have lightened up considerably from the first story and he'll have a couple of fun partners to offset him even more.

There will also be more monsters. And there will be city-smashing. And swamps. And Science Gone Awry. And other kinds of monster-fighters. And hidden jungle cities. And as soon as I can figure out how to add mutants, cyborgs, dinosaurs, and talking gorillas, I'll throw them all in there too. I don't know why it's taken me this long to come around and fully embrace the Awesome, but I'll tell you this: continually exposing myself to the Awesome and writing about it in this blog has helped. Jason and I are both stoked again and we'll keep you updated on our progress.

Also: screw mini-series. They're dead. This is a graphic novel now.