My newest book just hit the world!
Another BOOK!
On SALE!
GO, ME!
(I know, calm down. You’ll hurt yourself.)
WASTELAND 1989 is very special. It’s a comic book collection, made into a graphic novel that allowed me to finish a story that was quite near and dear to me. See, a few years back, when I was running my own publishing company, some wiseass decided it would be cool to see us do an adaptation of 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS. That was the first of what I believe was a trilogy of MAD MAX ripoff films, made in Italy, by Italians, because that what Italians did back then: They copied real cool stuff and churned it out ad nauseam. Personally, I love this shit. It marked a certain time in cinema, when the more shameless stuff had a whole industry to its own that revolved around using analog techniques to rule the world. These movies were shot on film. You had to look through the lens to line up an angle on set. Editing rooms were overflowing with bins of celluloid trims. Late night cable was filled with this flotsam all through the 1980s, from exploitation cop films, to sickening blood horror, to current zeitgeist sci-fi clones. Sometimes even a good movie might emerge from all this. Or not. But it was a glorious time to be a fan of this kind of film.
And so I wrote WASTELAND 1989.
The idea was to make a story shamelessly rooted in the setup of a ROAD WARRIOR ripoff film. But look deeper and you’ll find something else going on there. And that ‘something else’ eventually becomes something much bigger. And then it becomes its own special thing. That was the big idea anyway. The story of Janet of the Apocalypse gave me some inroads into exciting territory, and suddenly I was playing with heavy themes like living in denial, generational suicide, the scourging of children in the name of some misplaced higher ideal… and I even took a running leap at The Heroes Journey, because it’s a subject I always wanted to tackle and eviscerate in front of a gang of horrified onlookers. And all along, I offered a steady stream of meta commentary on the entire genre and an all-new driving concept for the story that invoked something much less obvious than a nuclear war or whatever to motivate the scorched earth and cracked pavement of my bleak “future world.” This page spread below gives you some idea of how I handled a few of these ideas. The characters are constantly being reinvented and reincarnated through multiple timelines, realities and even in movies within the story.
The rest had to be a storyboard for the most awesome action movie you’ve never seen.
Like this:
These images never saw print, back when WASTELAND 1989 was an ongoing series at Eibon Press. I mean, I was just two issues away from wrapping up the first main story arc, when the hammer fell and we were no longer able to make new comics. But Janet refused to die. I did eventually complete the series. I even wrote a sequel and a spinoff. And I collected the first five chapters in this swell book. It just came out the other day. Did I mention that? You can totally buy a copy RIGHT HERE.
Yeah, I know, shut up…
I’ll see you in the funny papers.
S