Monday, June 8, 2009

Pilot Season Preview (UPDATED)

Over the weekend, I finalized three of the four projects I'll be revising for my Pilot Season project. As I mentioned earlier, they're all based on pre-existing concepts from the boxes in my office, including one of my very first original characters, Johnny Chaos.

The first three projects are:

DESTINY WALKER, FREELANCE WITCH in "The Horror of Hartley Hall"

TWILIGHT & FENCHURCH in "The Black Pearl of Askotha"

JOHNNY CHAOS in "Ghost of the Machine"

I'm still debating what the fourth project will be. The 32-page limit is too short for a lot of the concepts I've been developing over the last couple of years, but there are still one or two that might work as short one-off stories.

I'll be posting the first Pilot Season proposal by the end of the week, so keep an eye out. Now I just need to find time to work up a presentation piece.

UPDATE: For the handful of people wondering what the longer projects that have been knocked out of the running were:

THE OCTOBER GIRL, a 90+ page graphic novel. Since I've already folded the main character into the FADE novel, this one will probably stay in the files unless I find a new approach to it that adds to FADE instead of taking away from it. And if I ever did it, I'd really rather have Michael Gaydos draw it.

FADE: SIGNS & WONDERS, a series of inter-connected short stories that began in NEGATIVE BURN. I abandoned this project three stories in when the FADE material started to go in a very different direction, but I still feel guilty that I never completed the story. This one I WILL do someday, but probably not until AFTER the novel is finished. And I'll have to completely redo the stories that have already appeared.

WALK THROUGH OCTOBER, a one-off graphic novella. This was one of my very first projects at Caliber in the early 90's. I put out a version of it that I wasn't entirely happy with (I was working for Disney and drawing an issue of STARMAN while working on it), and I've long been planning to expand it. I started work on a prose version of it that I intended to pitch as a heavily illustrated Middle Grade novel (I was hoping to talk the previously mentioned and disgustingly talented Michael Gaydos into doing the illustrations), but the idea for the FADE novel was coming together at the same time and I decided to focus on the new material instead of 'fixing' the old stuff. Still, I'd really like to do a new version of this story. It ties into FADE in an oblique way, so maybe after I'm done with the novel, I'll pull it out of the files again. I considered including this in the Pilot Season options, but if I did it as a straight-up comic book story, it would run to at least 90 pages, if not more.

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