SpiderBaby Sketchbooks: Little Brothers (1990-92), Part 2
By srbissette on April 2nd, 2009Posted In: News
The process of crafting a proposal from scratch is quite different from that of creating an issue of a periodical comicbook — a process I’m analyzing at length in the ongoing (more to come!) Saga of the Swamp Thing #20 SpiderBaby Archives series.
Little Brothers was a critter of a different color, if you will; based on both a popular novel (1988) by Rick Hautala, and a fresh brace of Rick’s newly-published short stories spinning off from that novel (first published in Night Visions 9, 1991), Little Brothers came with a certain genre pedigree that I (and Rick and Michael Zulli) hoped might make this an ‘easy sale.’
It was also a project Rick, Michael and I were dearly in love with — we really wanted to find a home for the untcigahunk in comics, we really wanted to work together on this miniseries.
“Easy sale” — want to make God laugh? Make a plan.
We in fact landed a sale on Little Brothers, or so it seemed. Alas, it wasn’t to be.
In one of our many phone conversations of the early-to-mid 1990s, Frank Miller once said to me how much easier it was to sell proposals in the comics market than in Hollywood (this was during Frank’s Robocop screenwriting days, before his subsequent ‘fuck Hollywood’ period and way before Robert Rodriguez courted Frank, a courtship that culminated in their excellent collaboration on Sin City, the movie). “Easy for you, Frank — you’re Frank Miller!” I replied, and Frank was aghast.
The fact was for me — and many professionals — I had files and flat file drawers brimming with unsold proposals, solicited and unsolicited, that had gone nowhere despite months and sometimes years of work. Pages and pages of proposal outlines, full scripts, character sketches, full cover art, complete story and/or issue layouts, etc., all remaining orphans.
Then again, Frank had an enviable track record of success and productivity within the mainstream; Frank was in the industry and had been since Daredevil. He was a troublesome insider at times, but he made the mainstream publishers a lot of money, so he was worth the trouble. I (and my collaborators, from Tom Veitch to Rick and Michael and others) was an industry outsider. I also had a rep as a troublemaker (for my Creator Rights stands and activism) and a major risk on making deadlines, two liabilities I never overcame during my 25+ years in comics.
Thus, though I was the catalyst and sort-of kingpin of the Little Brothers comics project, I was quite likely its greatest drawback, too. This isn’t sour grapes, just a pragmatic assessment of the reality of the situation. Keep that in mind as we get into the following.
[Above: original cover art for Little Brothers (Zebra Books, 1988, art uncredited, ©1988 respective copyright owner or owners), Night Visions 9 (Dark Harvest, 1991, cover art ©1991, 2009 Phil Parks), original back cover copy for Little Brothers (Zebra) -- note the misspelling of "untcigahunk." Oops! The untcigahunk will no doubt retaliate, once they learn to read.]
I’ve chosen Little Brothers to showcase here because it remains one of the most comprehensive project proposals I was ever part of. We did our homework, so to speak, and painfully aware of my poor standing in the inner industry with deadlines, we front-loaded this proposal with complete thumbnail roughs of two full issues (one by Michael, one by me) — half of the proposed series, thumbnailed! — along with cover roughs and proposed cover pencils.
This proposal also benefitted from my having worked on numerous proposals in the previous decade, which included some pretty expansive efforts: Tom Veitch and I hammered out a sweet proposal for a miniseries entitled Grumm in the 1980s, which I’ll showcase here one day as I still love the characters and the art; Jack Butterworth and I labored over October Black off and on for about a year; and there were my own solo proposals, from Rip Hunter Time Master and Tyrant to numerous Swamp Thing proposals (all solicited, then ignored).
Little Brothers also became a parallel channel for the creative energies Michael and I had been pouring vigorously into Rawhead Rex.
Having learned our lesson trying to work long-distance with an author whose story, precious as it may have been to us, was essentially a transferable license property, Michael and I instead forged a much closer organic creative relationship with the author of choice — Rick Hautala — in which the comics adaptation would be an equally-shared creative endeavor and property. We worked hand in hand, and looked forward to working even closer once we found a venue for this project.
[Hmmmm, I may have still been working out some Rawhead-related imagery at this early stage; this is a very early concept sketch of the untcigahunk jaw and mouth structure, the inner gums lined with rings of shark-like teeth, all pointed toward the throat; this changed radically within a month or two after this 1991 sketch.]
Little Brothers was one of three proposals accepted by Dark Horse’s Mike Richardson at the 1992 San Diego Comicon (the others were Aliens: Kick the Can, the sequel to the successful Dave Dorman instigated and illustrated novella Aliens: Tribes, and a Taboo anthology one-shot entitled Sticks and Stones, with a Moebius cover and art and stories by Chet Williamson, Tim Truman, Joyce Brabner, and many others). It was a handshake agreement handily forgotten in the ensuing months, ending acrimoniously. Little Brothers subsequently became my first (collaborative) pitch (of many) to Vertigo Comics, none of which ever bore fruit.
Ah, well. We gave it our best shot. (No surprise in hindsight I soon after pumped every ounce of energy I had into the subsequent 1990s one-two shots of 1963 followed by Tyrant.)
Little Brothers was special. I can still feel the energy from these drawings and photocopies from our respective sketchbooks — and the lost opportunity. We had a lot of fun working this up, as you can see on the comments thread of Part 1: Rick recalls, “I have such great memories of working up this proposal with you guys…,” Michael remembers “sheer fun …the ideas just buzzed all over the place.” It was, indeed a hoot.
There’s a bit more backstory to share before we get into the proposal proper. Rick himself described how this all began in his two-page introduction to his section of Night Visions 9 (the following text excerpt is ©1991, 2009 Rick Hautala; quoted with permission).
If nothing else lasting emerged from this fertile creative period, at least Rick ended up with a brace of short stories that wouldn’t have otherwise existed, and that still kick ass. In Rick’s own words, written when it was happening, here’s what happened:
We started tinkering with the design elements of Rick’s li’l monsters, and felt our way around in the dark toward something that worked for both of us. These designs would change again once Michael jumped on board, but these provided a diving board for that swim.
The initial look was too reptilian, in Rick’s eyes. Here, above, from the earliest sketchbook on my shelves sporting Little Brothers artwork, is a bit of the first face-to-face session Rick and I had at one of the horror cons we were both at. At right are variations on my first untcigahunk sketches, at left (on hotel stationary) is Rick’s first tentative step toward modifying the harsher nature of my first sketches.
Note that I was already tinkering with how the untcigahunk gender characteristics could be made distinctive — I was fascinated by the fusion of humanoid, mammalian species living an insect-like hive colony life Rick had proposed in his novel and stories. That said, I didn’t want to base the Little Brothers on mole rats, the most obvious model in nature.
This back-and-forth process eventually yielded some sketches Rick cottoned to. I experimented with making the untcigahunk more human in some ways, as you can see in these variations. I was wary, though, of making them look too much like the little cellar-dwellers in John Newland’s unnerving TV movie Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973) — a favorite of my generation — and there were very specific aspects of the untcigahunk Rick had described in his novel and the new short stories that were pushing me away from the ‘little people’ model.
Rick wanted more features echoing Native American facial characteristics, since the Little Brothers were supposed to be, literally, ‘little brothers.’
This mythic resonance was intrinsic to his concept, but I also didn’t want to be doing a gross caricature of Native Americans. That certainly wouldn’t work!
This back-and-forth process yielded a lot of sketches.
I love this part of the process, dark blind alleys and all. A lot of sketches go nowhere, except to articulate where not to go, and there are no ‘Dead End’ signposts to alert you to how off the track you are until you find yourself adrift and having to backtrack.
This is all part of the creative process — you have to be willing to invest the time and energy into the exploration. There are no easy shortcuts, and only rarely does a character simply present itself, fait accompli, in something resembling his or her final form.
Eventually, the ways these design ideas were splitting out suggested that both approaches were valid — and, indeed, given the possibilities of variations within the species to fulfill specific gender and hive roles (e.g., soldier, harvester, drone, etc.) I thought I could hone certain characteristics to specific untcigahunk colony tasks. The potential was rich, I had a lot of wiggle room to play with, and we were arriving at some agreements to the particulars. All good!
I can still see that ‘play’ factor at work in this old sketchbook. A lot of experimentation, a lot of ‘what if?’ this and that direction, and all the while Rick was sending me, via FAX, a new story every so often. That was more inspiring than I can tell you!
By the time I’d arrived at the designs below, Rick and I had begun working with Michael on the project, too.
It was a bit of a tightwire act to (a) codify some of my Hautala-approved design concepts about the Little Brothers while (b) giving Michael the same space to play I had been enjoying.
Still, we had so enjoyed this stage of the Rawhead Rex process a year or so before that we were feeling quite comfortable with the give-and-take of the game, and having Rick sort of ‘in charge’ (these were, after all, his characters) also gave us surprising legroom to really kick the shit around.
More on that next time!
[Above: Rick's hand-written note to me in my copy of Night Visions 9. Sweet.]
Tomorrow: SpiderBaby Archives continues its ongonig dissection of Saga of the Swamp Thing #20 — not to be missed!
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For more on Rick Hautala and Little Brothers, check out:
…is there an echo in here?
Hello — lo — lo — lo — lo…