DrowZ: Comics, we're making one.

I've spoken about comic books a lot on this blog, and sometimes I worry that I worry that it sounds like I hate the genre, when in actuality, it's more that I'm disappointed with them.

The idea of the modern comic is like, a hundred years old? Something around that - and in that time, they've been used to fight hate in so many forms. Everyone knows that Jewish immigrants created Superman, everyone knows the X-men are an allegory for racism. If you didn't, well, you know now. It's just that they suffer from the same issues that every other medium has: capitalism.

 "Woah DrowZ, put down the torch," I hear my friend, Straw McMahon, say. So I'll be brief - comics are a business, and to stay afloat, they have to make money, which isn't very conducive to making the first step, especially with how little money they make nowadays. Instead, what more frequently happens is that they'll try a new, progressive thing, give it to a 50-year-old white guy who doesn't get it, and then cancel the if it doesn't explode into popularity. 

Dwayne McDuffie created Static Shock comics out of his comic studio, Milestone Media. DC bought them after they started to get popular, creating the Static Shock TV show. They canceled it because executives figured it wasn't going to sell toys.

Static Shock is so unbelievably popular that it still blows my mind that, under DC, he's only had 14 issues named after him. (He also probably started the trend of black people in comics having electric powers, weird!)

Remember earlier this year when Marvel debuted Snowflake and Safespace?  Two black characters, one nonbinary, created by two cis-white males, and put them on a team with Screentime, a "Meme-obsessed super teen whose brain became connected to the internet after becoming exposed to his grandfather's experimental internet gas." That was the best. Read indie comics.

So yeah, I'm writing and lettering a comic with my friend Fernando Cruz because I was tired of waiting for comics to realize their potential.

 

Go follow Fernando over at  his instagram

Death and Taxes is currently a comic pitch that Cruz and I started for his art school final and both of our portfolios. And now I have to talk about what it's about. So I will. Right now.

So, Death and Taxes is an adventure comic about capitalism, superheroes, isolationists, and cool stuff. It takes place on a world pretty similar to ours, only that the earth has been broken up into chunks floating around a tar-covered core because of what the series' villain, Taxes, did several generations ago.

 


Basically, a couple hundred years before the comic, Taxes came down from outer space and slapped all of the not-avengers until they let him plug his big death machine into the earth because he wants to kill the crap out of some other interplanetary body. That machine didn't immediately trigger, so he's been waiting on earth until it goes off, biding his time by taking over the whole world and then promptly getting bored of ruling it all, so he runs a talk show.

One day, Pryce, a sanitation worker on one of the several hundred chunks, gets a mysterious helmet in the mail. He puts it on, and the helmet gets stuck -- turns out that the helmet is this crazy important thing that gives people superpowers to whoever is wearing it. Taxes' enforcers don't like that - so he and a mysterious courier go on the run in search of the helmet's creator.





https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/387318637242875914/743195756713869312/image0.jpg?width=703&height=543

Writing-wise, the idea was inspired by Sorry To Bother You, FLCL, Samurai Champloo, and Matt Fraction's Hawkeye. It's a loud, in your face comic that I hope is both funny and interesting enough to warrant continuing following the initial pitch. We're in production of the first issue, but a lot is up to change -- so please tell me what you think!


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Thanks for reading guys, it's kind of weird writing about something I'm doing. I've always wanted to work on comics, so even if this goes nowhere, at least I can say that I'll have done it. Once again, feel free to share anything you've been working on; I'd love to hear it!

 

As always, if you'd like to donate to the blog do it here - podcast at 300, and I'll read Midnight Sun at 400.

See you guys next week.

 

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