Comic
So this story was a little slice of heartbreak from back in the day, when I learned that it wasn’t going to be published.
Darwyn Cooke and I were approached to do a 3-part, 8 page each Golden Age Vigilante back-up in All-Star Western, one of the titles DC relaunched during DC52. I wrote the whole thing and Darwyn was about to start drawing when we were told the story wasn’t going to happen after all. Maybe I should have pushed more, but I had a feeling I knew the reason for this and didn’t want to involve Darwyn in anything messy. I let it go, although Darwyn told me many times afterwards how he harangued one particular editor for killing the tale. I would have loved to work with Darwyn again, too. Oh well, if you look at some of the imagery from The Shade #4 featuring the Golden Age Vigilante which Darwyn and I had done prior to this, you may get a vague idea of how the story might have looked.
Oh, and for anyone into crime fiction. I definitely drew inspiration from Hammett’s Continental Op short stories for this one. Just the way how in some of them the Op comes into these backwater towns rife with corruption and rips the place apart before restoring order.
Oh, and the way I end Stuff’s narration on the final page of the script is an absolute nod to how Jim Thompson ends the narration of his novel After Dark, My Sweet. (If you’ve read my mini-series Vigilante: City Lights/Praire Justice you’ll understand. And if you haven’t… what are you waiting for? Ha.)
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Unpublished Works
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