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!