Tim Lucas Wants You --
-- To Know He Was Here First!
Lest anyone think
Tim Lucas's comments on yesterday's blog post are in any way sour grapes or offbase,
Tim indeed proposed using the very
Uncle Sam zombie recruitment imagery
Leah Moore and John Reppion are using in their lively new comics series Raise the Deadin his stellar screenplay
The Gore Corps almost (or exactly)
two decades ago. I know, because way back then
Tim graced me with a copy of his screenplay in (I believe) its second draft.
Now, this is not a matter of plagiarism, to my mind. I can likewise vouch for the fact that
Leah and
John have never, ever read Tim's script , nor ever heard of it. Hence,
Leah and
John are blameless -- nor is
Tim saying they copped it from him. He's just saying, "
Hey, I came up with that 20 years ago!", and he did. It's one of those images/ideas whose time has come -- in fact, one could argue current American foreign policy, and domestic military policies (e.g., abuse of its own volunteer Army and National Guard) in particular, have made it more timely than ever, and dead-on target at that.
I read and loved Tim's screenplay before
Taboo was taking shape -- a project
John Totleben and I began work on in earnest in 1986, based on
Dave Sim's proposition to publish anything
John and I wished to do -- meaning I read
Tim's script
at least 20 years ago. In fact, it was reading Tim's screenplay
that led to
Tim and I discussing his writing something for
Taboo, which survived the inauspicious first script proposal "
Your Darling Pet Monkey!" -- a 'cute' idea for a decidedly 'uncute' anthology (no dis on
Tim, mind you;
Alan Moore's first
Taboo script submission was likewise rejected for being too funny, built as it was around an agonizing slide show of a family vacation -- a very funny script, decidedly
not what we were looking for given
Taboo's manifesto).
Tim came back with "
Throat Sprockets," and the rest is history.
Alas,
Tim's screenplays remain unknown quantities to the world, though thankfully
Tim has shared them with me over the years. More thankfully, his most recent one seems to be attracting some welcome attention -- keep an eye on
Tim's blog for info, updates and announcements.His sensitivity to the matter is understandable, given the number of ideas he's cooked up that have somehow made their way into produced films (it was
Tim, in a proposal for a sequel to
David Cronenberg's
The Fly, who came up with 'The Freak Pit,' which made its way into
The Fly II sans anything for
Tim; there are other examples I could but won't cite, as I've probably mortified
Tim enough with this post as it is).
As it stands, no lesser stellar exploitation cinema talents than
Larry Cohen and
William Lustig graced the world with their collaborative effort
Uncle Sam on July 4, 1997, thus acing
Tim's unproduced script imagery a decade past
my reading of
The Gore Corps -- and trumping the above
Raise the Dead covers by a decade, too.
Criswell Predicts: When you've got an idea that seems like a natural, by any means possible, get it out there! If you don't, someone else will.Mind you,
Tim tried like hell to get his script filmed -- it just didn't happen. Sometimes, it doesn't reach fruition, or ever get seen by the public. It's the nature of the beast, and I do mean beast.
Still, there is the sometimes inflated nature of our (completely understandable) proprietary feelings for our ideas -- published or unpublished, seen or unseen -- that can distort things, or turn the all-devouring, '
you snooze you lose' nature of the pop culture machine into a real irritant for those who find themselves
personally facing these issues.
I recall a phone conversation with
Frank Miller in February 1995, when his and
Geof Darrow's vivid bullet-cavity-through-the-skull-framing-the-gunslinging-hero cover for their Dark Horse comics series
Hardboiled had seemingly been 'borrowed' for one of the splashy deaths in
Sam Raimi's then-in-theaters
The Quick and the Dead.
Frank wasn't amused -- but he sure didn't want to hear from
me that
that very gory 'gag' image had
already been featured prominently in
Antonio Margheriti's
Apocalypse Domani (1980, released in the US theatrically in 1982, aka
Cannibals in the Streets, Invasion of the Fleshhunters), and in fact was the centerpiece of the film's Japanese ad campaign.
But
that was a bullet-hole-through-a-
torso, not a bullet-through-a-
head -- well, OK, fair enough.
Still, the bullet-hole-through-a-torso-framing-the-shooter gag had already, pre-cannibal movie setpiece, been seen worldwide in
John Huston's very popular
Paul Newman vehicle
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), when
Newman's
Judge Roy Bean blasted a bucket-sized hole clear through
Stacy Keach's villainous the
Original Bad Bob the Albino -- and
Huston and screenplay author
John Milius had arguably 'borrowed' that punchline from the identical throwaway visual gag in
Ernie Kovacs's brilliant black-and-white TV series,
The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952; don't take my word for it, the sketch is on the first disc in
The Best of Ernie Kovacs DVD set from White Star). 
One could justifiably argue, coming full circle back to comics, that
Al Capp's "
Fearless Fosdick" comic strip parody -- in
L'il Abner -- of
Chester Gould's
Dick Tracy predated
Kovacs -- and
Mad's -- popularization of such
cartoon holes-through-human-bodies iconography, and I've no doubt something, somewhere predates
that.
Still,
Frank was unhappy, and might have been right -- after all,
Geof Darrow's eye-popping
Hardboiled cover
had been one of that comic season's most iconographic images, visible in every comic shop (usually on a top shelf or visible behind the counter, with a 'mature readers only!' warning self-imposed by retailers), and that may indeed have been where
Raimi 'borrowed' the image from.
Who could say? Who
can say?
These unwelcome '
there goes that idea, though I had it years ago' speed bumps and indignities are part and parcel of being a writer -- and artist, for that matter. Things can be and often are worse --
Rick Veitch's sky whale imagery was unique when he started writing and drawing Abrasax and the Earthman for serialization in Epic magazine in the very early '80s ---- but
the very month his first episode saw print,
two other adult-oriented newsstand comic zines featured their own 'sky whale' stories (and, after all,
Astro the killer space whale in the 1965 American/Belgian animated feature
Pinocchio in Outer Space/Pinocchio Dans le Space predated them all). Ditto
Steve Perry, among whose unsold scripts (which I had hoped to draw) was a 1980 opus entitled "
Tiny Dinosaurs," which quite directly anticipated
Gremlins as much as
Charlie Band's popular 1990s direct-to-video series
PreHysteria.
Mark Martin had a great li'l strip about a boy and his robot dog published in
Nickelodeon that seemed
awfully close to a certain
Nickelodeon movie and TV series -- but apparently it wasn't a case of plagiarism, either, but it was a bitter pill to swallow when it all went down.
So it goes. I could go on and on -- I've got my own sob stories, sisters. But then again, a major part of my own career wouldn't exist without such a conundrum having borne fruit. I mean,
Swamp Thing/Man Thing. Huh. Who thunk of it first,
Gerry Conway or
Len Wein? Does it matter, with
Theodore Sturgeon's "
It" and
Airboy's
The Heap predating both 1970s "things"? Sometimes, it's just the
Jungian reality: when that kind of iconographic image surfaces in the collective unconsciousness, it's there for any creator to pluck and use -- and many often do, either at the same time or over a span of time.
But one doesn't need these peculiar sets of circumstances to suffer the slings and arrows too many writers endure over the course of a career. I can hear
Mike Dobbs now: "
Get off the cross! We need the wood!"
Then again, Mike has his own stories of this nature to share---- as a book authorand as a journalist ---- so he's got his
own share of wood to go around. Most of us do.
James Robert Smith is a frequent reader (and poster) here, and man oh man, has
he got stories, again going back two decades or more. One of the most prolific, published novelists I know (who shall remain here nameless, so as not to cause embarrassment) continues to write with amazing skill and speed, but has been
hammered by editors and publishers and treated abominably -- business as usual.
Anyhoot, all of this is to say "
Tim's right, folks," and I'm a witness to that, and to thereby and roundabout-ly call your attention to
Bennington-based writer
John Goodrich, who has just launched
a new blog, Flawed Diamonds, intended for writers, and it's well worth keeping attuned to.John says, "
I am writing about the publication process. In truth, it's partially to ameliorate the sting ofrejections, but some of you may be interested in the wonderful, free gravy train that all writers experience as they push toward publication."
Some of you may recall the multi-chapter blog essay I posted here over a year ago on my own misadventures with trying to write again for the newsstand horror zine market, and what a delicious little ego-stroke, ego-mash clusterfuck that debacle was; whatever measure of celebrity I may enjoy after three decades in comics and writing, it still doesn't shield one from savoring the same abuse up-and-coming writers endure.
And whenever a writer draws your attention to a writer's blog with such a blustery lead-in, abusing wholly invented words like "roundabout-ly," you best pay attention.
On to merrier matters...
Could It Be -- The First Dino Comics?
In accord with the above rant, I always tell my students to be immediately suspect when anyone calls anything '
the first' -- usually, some earlier precursor turns up in due course, or is already known. It could be known, sort of, but under the wraps of obscurity -- usually meaning some more potent historical 'authority' hasn't recognized the precursor as such, or preferred to 'promote' the more popular precursor.
In the realm of the understandably marginalized genre of dinosaur comics -- a most rarified breed comics historians are happy to ignore, unless your name is
Don Glut -- these kinds of "firsts" are tough calls. But I think
Seth may have steered me to what must be, might be, indeed
the first dinosaur comics series!
More on this amazing body of work tomorrow!
No Criswell again today.
Sorry. I have no idea where, in a matter of seven hours or so, I put that book.
So, here's Ernie Kovacs again, just 'cuz.
Have a great Wednesday, one and all --
Labels: Abrasax, Ernie Kovacs, Frank Miller, John Reppion, Leah Moore, Mike Dobbs, Prehistoric Peeps, Rick Veitch, Steve Perry, Tim Lucas, zombies
