It’s nuts that I’ve done 17 of these. I say it every week, but there’s so many left to show you still, so many pitches that never stuck, so much work done that never saw the light of day.

Until now!

This one is a fun one and I can’t wait to get into it, so without further adieu…

DEAD PITCH WEEK SEVENTEEN – THE WOLF IS LOOSE.

First off, metal fans might recognize where I cribbed the title. Second, this was a take-off on the idea of Batman and Robin, more specifically the idea of having a sidekick that you were willing to put in harm’s way at any given time.

The Wolf is Loose is about a dark detective/vigilante, a Batman pastiche called The Archon, who sends his young sidekick undercover into a criminal organization in order to dismantle it from the inside. However, the sidekick goes native, really becoming the criminal he was prentending to be, and ends up being far worse than any of the criminals they were hoping to stop.

Had the story played out further, we would have seen The Archon go into the criminal underworld in order to find his errant ward, having to fight through waves of underlings and henchmen to get to him. I think it could have been a ton of fun and I wish it had panned out.

I guess it wasn’t mean to be, but that just means you all get to see it now here. So feast your eyes – The Wolf is Loose – art by Graeham Jarvis, and letters by Matt Krotzer.

So I was looking at the list of my “dead” comic book pitches (pitches that were developed and never went anywhere), and there’s like 18 more weeks worth – and we’re already on week 16! It’s actually kinda shocking to me to see it laid out like that. It’s a lot of work that didn’t make a dent in the industry overall. I’m not sure if I should be proud or depressed about that.

Anyway, moving on to this week’s dead pitch…

DEAD PITCH WEEK SIXTEEN – BROKEN HILL.

There’s an interesting story attached to this one. First, I developed this idea with one of my very first comic book co-creators, Carl Yonder. Carl and I created a 4-issue miniseries called GHOST LINES which was legit one of the first things I ever started, finished and had published, and we were always looking for something new to work on together, always throwing around ideas and starting new pitches and then moving onto other things.

A few years ago, pre-Covid this was, I was hired by a group to adapt a screenplay into a graphic novel. This was the first time I would be paid to write comics, and holy shit was I pumped about it – every comic book creator knows the feeling I’m talking about, that first time you make money doing the thing you’ve been doing for free for years. I set aside time every day to write and work on the book, taking this unmade screenplay and doing the best I could to make it into a cool comic.

Several things happened. One, I asked if I could bring an artist of my choosing on-board, and they said they’d look at anyone I wanted to involve, and I thought of Carl, thinking he had the right style for this graphic novel. It was a crime noir screenplay that I was adapting, and I can say it now – it sucked. Truly, I could see why it never got made into a movie. I had to change so much to make it a decent GN, something I’d feel okay putting my name on. Carl did some samples but they wanted to go a different way, and then more things happened, the biggest being they stopped paying. We’d arranged a deal where I’d get a percentage upfront, a percentage halfway, and the remainder when I finished the script. I got the first two payments, and then sent the finished script (this was my mistake), and then…crickets.

Luckily for me, I have a wife who doesn’t put up with that kind of shit. She went on a one-woman-mission to get my money, and badgered these guys until they eventually relented and paid me, something like over a year later? I can’t recall now, but it took A LOT of harrassing to get my money.

The book never got made, as far as I know. I like to think my script was pretty good – much better than the crap I was adapting. But that was fine by me, these guys had burned me and any goodwill I had toward them, so I was done and out.

The one good thing that came of it was that Carl and I had gotten a little taste for some crime noir and decided we’d do our own crime story. We set it in a small town (the aforementioned Broken Hill), created some interesting characters, and got to work creating this pitch. It had the subtitle “The Burning Man” because it was going to involve a serial arsonist trying to destroy the small town. It never really picked up any steam or got its legs under it, but it was a lot of fun to work on nonetheless. And working with Carl again was great. Maybe one day we’ll try again.

Here you go, this week’s dead pitch is Broken Hill, co-created and written by me, co-created and illustrated by Carl Yonder, and lettered by Micah Myers.

Welcome back! Fifteen weeks in a row is far and away a new record for me and this blog. It’s never seen this much action. Take that as you will.

Fifteen weeks of comic book pitches that never went anywhere, with SO many more to come. It really is inspiring and depressing at the same time to see how much work I and my talented co-creators have put into these ideas. But making comics is just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks, and so far, 15 weeks of non-sticking. But here we go:

DEAD PITCH WEEK FIFTEEN – THE THREE GHOSTS OF ALEISTER KINGHEART

This one was a departure for me for sure! No superheroes, no overly gruesome stuff, more on the comedic side (for me, at least). The story is about a supernatural investigator named (as you might have guessed) Aleister Kingheart. He’s a cranky old sod who is haunted and assisted by three ghosts, The Yurei, the Bell Witch, and the General, who torment him but also act as his investigative partners. When there’s crimes involving the supernatural, you call Kingheart and his Three Ghosts.

The art on this pitch was done by Adam Cahoon, an incredibly unique and talented artist who has since gone on to work on The Nasty with John Lees (published by Vault Comics), but his style brought so much to the story that I revamped it and really wrote it to maximize his strengths as an artist. The lush artwork, the black and white and gray tones, man, I absolutely love this pitch! It was a murder mystery involving ghosts. Tell me that doesn’t sound like fun.

But, like all the others, this one failed to grab any attention at a publisher and eventually fell into the dead pitch files, but I’m happy Adam has moved on to bigger and better things.

Letters on this pitch were done by Ken Reynolds. Here you go: THE THREE GHOSTS OF ALEISTER KINGHEART.

Man, 14 weeks of these and no end in sight. I hope whoever might be checking these out is enjoying them – let me know, shoot me a comment! I’m an attention whore at heart.

This week is a fun one, created with one of my perennial comic book-making partners. Let’s get to it.

DEAD PITCH WEEK FOURTEEN – SECRET ACES

I’ve never made it a secret (no pun intended) that I love the old school pulps. Stuff like The Shadow, Doc Savage, The Spider (Master of Men!), those stories float my boat, and I’ve done a bunch of work in the homage space to the pulps (see The Man Who Shook the Earth, or Secret City).

So Secret Aces, created with artist JE (who I’ve done a literal ton of work with, lots of short stories, our 6-issue series Knowledge, and the aforementioned Man Who Shook the Earth), was a throwback pulp with some modern influences.

The basic story was about the Secret Ace, a retro-futuristic crimefighter in a modern city of the past who acts as the city’s protector. He wears a funky, semi-intelligent vest called the Coat of Arms that can create weapons, flying apparatus, or whatever else he needs. He’s a mystery man for sure, and one night while thwarting a crime (being committed by a villain called the Terrorchrist, where the hell did I come up with that?), he is mortally wounded and decides that in the time he has left before he dies, he’s going to take out as many of his enemies as he can, to leave his city safe.

What we never get to in the book, and how it would have ended, is that once the Secret Ace dies, the Coat of Arms disengages from him, and flies back to a secret location where a newly cloned body of the Secret Ace is just being born. The Coat of Arms attaches to the new clone, downloads the Secret Ace’s personality and information, and they set off to continue fighting crime, thus making the Secret Ace functionally immortal.

I think it could have been fun and a little dark, but this was as far as we got with it. HOWEVER – in our graphic novella The Man Who Shook the Earth, there is a section in the middle where the main character of that story meets up with the pulp characters from some of my other stories, the Secret Ace included. It was fun to write him again.

So here you go – Secret Aces, written by me, illustrated by JE, and lettered by Micah Myers.

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Yow, thirteen weeks of these, and there are SO MANY MORE TO GO.

I’ve put together a lot of work that I’m super proud of over the years, evern if it never gained any traction or found a publishing home. This story in particular I really love and would love another jab at. Here we go…

Dead pitch week thirteen – PATCHWORK.

Patchwork was one of those ideas where the entire thing came to me almost fully formed, which is really rare, but I even remember where I was and what I was doing – I was at work, my dayjob at the time for a large cellular company, bored out of my tree, and started thinking about a creature that ate souls (the way it felt like that job was eating mine), and then BAM! The story came to me and I had to rush to write it all down before it got away from me. Notepad on computer, thou art my friend.

Patchwork is the story of a once benevolent creature known as the Patchwork Collector, a being who has existed on Earth as long as human have and who’s sacred duty was to collect and sort lost souls to their final resting place in either Heaven or Hell.

However, over millenia of evil souls moving through it, the Collector became corrupted and began forcibly stealing souls from people, leaving their bodies like dry husks in the streets of New York City. Enter NYPD Detective Dan Gale, known as “the Ghoul” behind his back by his fellow police. Det. Gale’s job was the find the serial killer responsible for the bodies, but little did anyone know Gale was on the edge himself, having lost his wife and children and was drinking too much. One night he puts his service pistol to his head and ends it all…

Only to be immediately ressurected by an angel and a demon, who need his help. The Patchwork Collector has been keeping the souls it was stealing, which was upsetting a very precarious balance between Heaven and Hell, so both realms dispatched an agent to Earth to stop the Collector and get things back on track, and Detective Gale was to be their Earthly anchor.

God, even writing it all out here again make me want to work on it more. One day!

These gorgeous looking pages were drawn by Ken Perry, colored by Jack Scorey, and lettered by HdE. Enjoy!

Thanks for reading! If you got this far, please remember my current Kickstarter is still going:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wolvesofafeather/wolves-of-a-feather

Okay, after a skip week last week to promote my Kickstarter, WOLVES OF A FEATHER (now live – check it out here: https://tinyurl.com/t6k9pe45 ) I’m back with another pitch that I thought could have gone somewhere, but ended up going nowhere at all.

2014. I had made the decision to go to NYCC (New York Comicon for you newbies) and my plan was to take a bunch of pitches, printed out, with me – leave-behinds, stuff to hand to editors, etc. This was one of them…

Dead pitch week twelve – FUNHOUSE

This one was dead easy to pitch – ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST meets SAW. It’s not always that easy to get that comparison, but this one had it from minute one. The story revolved around a investigative journalist, a muckraker, who was investigating the various illicit streams of commerce of a local crime family. Probably not the smartest thing he could do, but it makes the story more interesting if he’s a little bit willfully naive, right?

One of those illicit streams of income the crime family had was putting their enemies, people they wanted to disappear, into a mental hospital. An asylum, where they would get lost to paperwork issues and medication and never come out again.

Our poor journalist, having finally really pissed the mob guys off, gets knocked unconscious, and when he wakes up, he’s A PATIENT IN THE ASYLUM.

Oh, and there’s a full-scale riot happening. He’s armed with a few items (if you look hard, you can see them on page 8 – a scalpel, a notepad and a pen, and a ring of keys. It was at this point in the story that FUNHOUSE turned into a survival horror video game in comic book form. Oh man, the fun stuff I had planned.

I did hand out ten copies of this pitch at NYCC, but surprise, surprise (since we’re highlighting this as a dead pitch), it never got picked up anywhere. That was still very early on in my fledgling comics-creating career, so I’m sure the pitch itself probably wasn’t very stunning. Maybe I’ll try this one again, I think it could have some legs.

FUNHOUSE – art by Conan Momchilov, colors by Will Anderson, letters by Micah Myers, and cover art by Carl Yonder. Enjoy!

Hello faithful readers, today, instead of posting a new dead pitch, I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce you to something new – a new project coming to Kickstarter that I’m running with my buddy, artist Steve Mardo. Presenting…

WOLVES OF A FEATHER

A Lovecraft/Cthulhu Mythos inspired crime story, Wolves of a Feather follows a gang of thieves looking to make a major score on a new heist, only to accidentally stumble onto the end of the world.

This is being published through my little vanity imprint, Quick & Dirty Comics, so I’m psyched about that as well. This is the first of 2 issues that tell a fun, terrifying story of otherworldly chaos and real-world crime.

Here is our Pre-Launch page – the campaign goes live on May 1st, but signing up at the pre-launch helps us immensely, please consider signing up to be notified when the campaign starts: https://tinyurl.com/t6k9pe45

Steve Mardo is the artist, you can find him at https://www.instagram.com/stevemardoart?igsh=ZXNhNXVqaHUxYnNi

Rick Joseph is the letterer, you can find him at https://www.instagram.com/lightamatch?igsh=MTR4b2lnaTVpYnQycA==

We have some amazing rewards available – digital comics, the physical book, exclusive bookmarks, postcards, and sticker sets – even remarqued comics, creature illustrations and full-on cover quality commisions by Steve! Great value retailer bundles as well.

Oh, also – here’s a sneak peek at the exclusive variant cover, illustrated by Valentin Ramon (the IDW D4VE series) and colored by our very own Mr. Mardo – ONLY available through this Kickstarter campaign!

I hope you consider checking the campaign out, this type of crowdfunding lives and dies with the help of people seeing the value in the work and wanting to help support it. Bringing new comics to the market isn’t easy, but it’s a worthwhile thing and I will never get tired of doing it. Cheers!

Greetings Earthlings! I’m back with week eleven of my ongoing series of “dead” comic book pitches – ideas that were created and pitched and never found a publishing home. I never realized just how much work I’d created with my artist friends until I started this. This is week eleven, I have a LOT more to come.

Without further adieu, I am proud to present…

Dead pitch week eleven – FISTICUFFS

Ah man, sometimes looking back at these, I realize just how much I REALLY wanted to make this into a real comic. Fisticuffs was going to be super fun. I was describing it as “X-Men meets Fight Club”, and it’s basically both of those things smashed together.

There’s an underground fight ring where supervillains and disgraced superheroes go and fight while onlookers place bets. The fights can be with or without superpowers, depending on the fighter’s agreement. This illegal fight club was run by a former patriotic superhero called Captain Conquest, but he’s an old letch now. One of the fighters, a demonic-looking science-villain called Doctor Diablo was placed undercover in the fight club by the US government to get info on the illegal doings that Captain Conquest and his henchmen were up to.

It would have been a fun conspiracy-filled, superpowered brawl, but we never got to do more than what we have here.

Note: this pitch contains one of my most favorite conceits ever – the idea of the “trading card” showing the character at their peak, compared to how they are now. I always loved that idea, and have plans to use it again in another story.

There was a cover once, but unfortunately it’s been lost to time and multiple computer moves. But the pages are here for your enjoyment.

Art by Ademir Sabic, colors by Matt Northrup, letters by Micah Myers.

Ten weeks! Boom goes the dynamite, or something like that, right?!

Okay, today, we’re going to pull out a pitch that I absolutely LOVE and I wish so much that it had found a home and a publisher and an audience.

DEAD PITCH WEEK TEN – PIG HOUSE

Oh man, Pig House! This one was awesome, and would have been so much friggin’ fun. Here’s the scoop: a pair of internationally known badass hitmen, who specialize in the impossible, are hired to break into the world’s most secure prison (the aforementioned Pig House) and kill the world’s most dangerous serial killer. However, something goes horribly wrong, and all the inmates in the prison manage to escape, so the two killers feel it’s their duty to bring them back. Or kill them, whichever is easier.

Lots of fun stuff (at least, to me) in this pitch – the title, Pig House, is the title of a Melvins song. The two main characters are Jim Fear (the title of a Dillinger Escape Plan song) and Tom Violence (the title of a Sonic Youth song). I love the idea of a bad guy being forced, either internally or externally, to do good. It’s a theme I’ve gone back to multiple times in my work.

I had a really cool miniseries planned out for this, and the artwork was stellar. I wish we’d been able to make more of this. The snakeskin boots on page 2! The little Pulp Fiction nod on page 5!

Anyway, at least you get to check it out here. Please enjoy responsibly.

Pig House, written by me, illustrated by Steven Austin, lettered by Micah Myers.

I’m back! Did you miss me? Did you even recognize that I didn’t post a new dead pitch last week? Or that the week before I posted 2 to compensate?

Aw, you’re killing me here. Just pretend at least, okay?

Alright, week nine! That’s crazy, but man, there are so many more of these dead pitches to come. That’s the crazy thing, how much work was created and never seen or used or anything. But let’s get to it:

Dead pitch week nine – HEAVY HITTER

Oh man, I really loved this one (I feel like I say that about them all, but they’re all my children, you know?), but it never connected because it really strayed into the same territory as my Darby Pop miniseries Bastard’s Waltz, just this one didn’t have superpowers in it.

Meyer Henry is the Heavy, a legendary hitman, and when there’s a change made at the top of the organized crime group he did a lot of work for, they decide to cut off any loose ends, including him. So he’s on the run from the mob, the law enforcement they own, and even his underworld friends and contacts. It could have been fun, but alas, it never got picked up anywhere.

One of my favorite parts of this happens on page 13, panel 4 – the baby in the stroller. You’ll see it when you get there.

Written by me, illustrated by Josh Thompson (who also did all the hand-drawn FX, which I absolutely friggin’ love), colored by A.H.G. and lettered by Micah Myers. Enjoy!