Sunday Comics--Bronx Angel: Born Leader (Page 14)

Bronx Angel: Born Leader--Page 14.
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When I came up with the idea for Bronx Angel, it was originally 135-pages of sequential art.  There was a whole issue's worth of material that was set in Iraq, and then there was the rest, which was set in the Bronx.  But I thought that a lot of the Bronx flashbacks were redundant with the stuff that had already been set in the initial part of the story.  So I cut it up, creating this #0 story that I then printed as a $1 zine for the first annual New York City Comic Con, and I (eventually) shortened the rest to a 66-page 3-issue arc, and that's the main story, Bronx Angel: Politics By Another Method.

As a matter of full disclosure, pretty much everybody likes this first part of the story.  It got reviewed favorably at places like The Fourth Rail (back when they were still in business), and folks at the NYC Comic Con really liked the idea of the $1 zines.  It's the next piece that struggled, mostly for the same reasons that movies like Stop Loss struggled.  First, because I think folks expected the story to be super-anti-Iraqi invasion, and it isn't, and secondly because when folks sit down to read comics, they mostly aren't looking for a treatise on either war theory or the costs of war to the folks doing the fighting.  

I personally didn't understand that until the movie Stop Loss actually came out.  Until then, I kind of figured that folks just didn't get what I was trying to say.  When Stop Loss came out, though, what I realized--because it applied to me, too, this time as a potential customer--was that folks want to be entertained.  They want to be lifted up.  And here I am, writing this story that's basically throwing them off the emotional cliff.  They want to sit there and see the good guys win, and they want to feel good about that.  Meanwhile, I'm trying to get up on their desk, kick all their crap out of the way, and get them to stop being so passive and lazy all the time.  This proved to be a serious issue for me as far as sales were concerned, and that's before we even get into the issues of art-style and story execution.  I mean, Bronx Angel was my first novel, and it has all the problems that a person's first novel is apt to have.

I would, in time, resolve the commercial issues that this particular novel brought up with a later piece of work called Green Mountain Gunslinger.  I've gotten close to being famous with my writing a couple of times, but it's my inability to get GMG made that really put me off writing comics long term.

Anyway, I wrote a little afterword for the BA: BL zine.  At the time, I thought that we were embarking on a beautiful venture.  Take that for whatever it's worth.

Click here to see this thing at full size.
You're probably gonna have to if you actually want to read this.

As always, to read the story from the beginning, use the Sunday Comics tag.  That's what it's there for.