A wee bit more Godzilla behind-the-scenes stuff. I won’t pursue this further at this time; it’s no fun looking back on this project for me personally, though I’m still surprised how good the work that was done turned out.
I’ve still got the original roughs and photocopies of all my pencilled pages in my files. At some point in the first two weeks of discussion, it was decided to pattern the opening and closing pages after Saga of the Swamp Thing #21’s “The Anatomy Lesson.” This first page lead into to the double-page spread of Godzilla trashing Tokyo.
I wasn’t entirely happy with the derivative nature of this framing device, but editor/writer Randy Stradley wanted it, so off we went; as his letters to me from this time note, he reread my collaborative run on Swamp Thing and thought this framing device would work on the Godzilla Special.
After a bit of back-and-forth, I agreed to it. That was OK with me, especially after what seemed like an inordinate amount of time bouncing monster design sketches back and forth. It was a start — and I was eager to get going.
Like I said yesterday, this was a major clusterfuck — never agree to a project the project editor (in this case Randy Stradley) decides they’re going to script.
This was a lesson I should have learned from my experience years earlier at Marvel with Bizarre Adventures, then-editor Lynne Graeme, and my own story proposal “Kestrel Falconer.”
I was very candid with Randy in our initial November-December 1986 phone conversations concerning my misgivings about this, and my misgivings about tackling this on the heels of my horrific Swamp Thing experiences. I wasn’t too keen about doing a licensed project at all, despite the allure of the Big G, and the subsequent weeks and weeks of waiting for Toho/UPA approval on character sketches, plot, etc. only aggravated the situation.
I initially wanted to script and pencil, hoping for an opportunity to play, but that wasn’t to be.
On top of all this, Dark Horse was going through major expansion and restructuring at the time — an inevitable outcome of their success and growth in 1986-87. This, too, took an unexpected toll.
I tried years later to work again with Randy, who I’ve always liked personally — despite the hardships on Godzilla, we parted friends. I could say the same about Dark Horse Comics in general. Randy’s a great guy, but the later experiences, too, ended up being painful.
In hindsight, I worked with Dark Horse shortly after their beginning, and I worked with them at the end of my own quarter-century comics career. It was never a good marriage, despite my best efforts. It must be noted that my own commitment to other experiments in publishing which were in accord with my devotion to broader creator rights being honored (Taboo, and Tundra in particular, from 1990-1992, which Dark Horse considered a competitor) meant I was never part of DH’s creator-owned imprints or ventures. Would things have gone differently if I had? I was never invited, so it’s fruitless to entertain the notion.
Publisher Mike Richardson told me when we started work on our greatest success together, the novella Aliens: Tribes (1992), “I’m going to show you that you can be treated fairly doing work-for-hire creative projects.” In fact, that, too, ended badly: despite the success of Aliens: Tribes – including the novella winning a Bram Stoker Award for my writing, an award DH never exploited in promotion – DH allowed Dave Dorman’s and my proposed sequel Aliens: Kick the Can to malinger, forever locked in the starting gate, even as Dave and I endured seeing Aliens: Tribes published in the UK (serialized in the British Aliens slick magazine) sans payment or even comp copies. So much for Mike teaching me about the wonderful world of work-for-hire.
As I’ve already noted earlier this year in the SpiderBaby Archives overview of Rick Hautala, Michael Zulli and my orphan Little Brothers project, the Aliens: Kick the Can debacle was allowed to whither along with two other projects Mike had agreed to (Little Brothers and Taboo: Stick & Stones). When I pushed for some progress after months of DH dithering, I was reprimanded. Still, I tried repeatedly to work with Dark Horse over the years, including at one point submitting Tyrant to DH for consideration (this was a couple of years before Age of Reptiles existed; “sorry, we have something like this in the works,” I was told, referring to a project that predated Ricardo Delgado’s masterwork). I’m glad it worked out for Paul Chadwick, Frank Miller, Mike Mignola, and others, and I’m glad DH has ended up providing a steady employ and venue for friends/editors like Diana Schutz and adventurous editors I knew when they were younger, like Scott Allie and Phil Amara.
In the end, relegated (at the advice of my attorney; this was mid-divorce, mind you) to work-for-hire projects only, Dark Horse ended up being my penultimate comics publisher by luck-of-the-draw default. Even when the creative process and deadlines went smoothly — working with my Kubert School amigo Tom Yeates on the Tarzan story “The Soft Parade,” working with the most excellent Mark Nelson on an issue of Species – something about Dark Horse’s management would thereafter rear its ugly head (waiting months for payment on “The Soft Parade” script; Mike Richardson objecting to a key plot point in a few panels that Species licensor MGM had agreed to, requiring changes after it had been scripted, lettered, pencilled and inked and was on its way to the printer).
C’est la vie.
