Project
Definitely a "what might have been"...
I could go down the rabbit hole of bitching, moaning and criticizing the way things were handled during the New52 era at DC Comics, at least pertaining to me and how I was treated. But DC has moved on, the people in charge there at the time are gone, and the books seem more back-on-track than not, so what’s the point?
However, I will share this dead project, from that time, which until I found it in my files I almost completely forgot that I did it. So…
At some point as I first geared up to do a New52 version of the J.S.A., at the same time it seemed like the 1960s were making a comeback in terms of the public’s interest with shows like Mad Men, Vegas, Magic City, and the airline series Pan-Am on the air and a lot of 60s aesthetic to advertising and such.
The idea was broached that I do a J.S.A. series on an Earth 2 that had started later than Earth 1 and so, while the main universe was in the present day, Earth 2 was in the 1960s. This was actually a novel idea and one I was thoroughly intrigued to explore. I came up with a concept which was all the 1960s spy/sci-fi elements I loved from TV and fiction, with nods to Steranko’s Nick Fury, cold war movies and even a nod to Mary Tyler Moore, whose independent female in the 1960s I used as a model for how Donna Troy would be depicted. Oh, and the way Carmine Infantino's 1960s Flash comic had a streamlined look and empty streets and areas that felt almost like a "future scape" to me.
I worked out a backstory and a history for the characters that felt somewhat familiar but still fresh and fun and very much like something you might have read at that time. There were so many things running through my mind that I wanted to include or give a taste of, including Our Man Flint/Man From U.N.C.L.E., 1960s soap operas (I had one idea where the book would go “horror” for an arc and have somewhat the feel of Dark Shadows), and the idea of a 1960s government superhero organization with a nod of Wally Wood’s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. (Yeah, lots of nods.) I also thought it was fun to have superheroes smoking and drinking in the everyday way people did back then and were shown to do so in Madmen.
The 1960s J.S.A. series would have been a lot of fun and now, looking back, I really wish I’d done it.
I guess some of the feel that I intended made it into the Fury mini-series I did for Marvel with art by the amazing ACO, so at least there’s that.
Anyway, I include everything I did at the time. Outlines and the script to Issue 1 for Nicola Scott. Some things change from document to document, like Hawkwoman being dead in one version and alive in another. All stuff changing in development. Things get worked through. Anyway, in the end it was all for nothing and the ideas were all thrown out in the way ideas often are, and I ended up writing Earth 2 until things got to the point that I quit DC for a time.
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Download jsa-outline-8-12-11.doc
Download jsa-outline-world-charaters.pdf
Unpublished Works
This original version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is something I remain proud of. As you’ll see it’s almost totally different from the film that made it to the screen. At the time I was given this as a writing assignment, I confess that I questioned making it into a big...
If there’s one project of mine that soured me to screen writing more than any other it has to be Nottingham, the last script I wrote before returning once back more to comics. (Although the pendulum has swung back since then a couple of times.) Still, the fact is that getting a...
