Twenty years ago, November 2004, I stumbled on
National Novel Writing Month, and assumed I had to come up with the story and
write it all in that month. I’d
graduated from college about a year prior, and that January had assembled
material for a Top Cow contest, coming up with a new story for an old character
I’d played with for a number of years, Bandit, and that didn’t go anywhere
because I didn’t win and had no idea what else to do with the material, but
since I still knew superheroes and superhero storytelling better than anything
at that point, I came up with a new superhero and a story to tell about him,
and for a month I wrote and completed 50,000 words, and assumed I was
done. Then November 2005 came along, and
I discovered not only did I want to try NaNoWriMo (as the acronym goes), but I
had more to write about that character, and then again in November 2006…So by
the end of that I had a hundred and fifty thousand words of a story, a novel by
any standard, and in 2007 I decided to self-publish the results, through
iUniverse, as The Cloak of Shrouded Men.
I somehow ended up getting my author copies the same day the final Harry
Potter was published that July.
The
edition that existed then had some editing issues I wished had been
intercepted. I’m not great at
self-editing, and I’m also not great at paying for or finding services from
others. I have no idea how much better
the manuscript is now, but I’ve certainly combed through it over the ensuing
two decades, so hopefully it’s better.
It’s been reformatted a little (Tom King’s A Once Crowded Sky was
an inspiration), and retitled (no one ever really got the original), and sports
a new ending, a dramatic turnaround for a character from the first act but
thematically putting a pin in an element that otherwise hadn’t really been
resolved or explored previously. Since
we follow Cotton Colinaude so closely throughout the book, it’s not
inconceivable that he wasn’t clear about what actually happened to Cassie
Dawes, and besides, there’s at least one comic book writer whose whole career
is owed to pointing out the “women in fridges” phenomenon.
Since
this all began, I’ve of course continued writing, and a few years back I
finally wrote a version of Bandit’s story, somewhat in alarm since in the
meantime a whole movie kind of borrowed from the ether one of its central
premises (Hancock), and that’s Nine Panel Grid, included in this
new edition, sort of a primer on the art of comic book storytelling. Since I never have yet broken into comics
themselves, I’ve dedicated more than a little time to writing scripts, just for
the fun of it, and that’s why there’s some of those included as well,
eventually tying together the careers of Bandit and the Eidolon (pronounced “Idol-on,”
in case you were wondering). There was a
time when I was promoting the original book at the bottom of columns I wrote
for a website called Paperback Reader with the tagline suggesting Cotton “never
had a ghost of a chance,” which would simplify things so much if I could just
call the guy the Ghost, but there’s already registered and trademarked for that,
and besides, I like Eidolon. The last
guy holding the ball at Paperback Reader was one of several acquaintances who
was going to help issue a corrected reprint of the book in the first decade of
its existence, which never ended up happening.
I tried traditional publishers. I
had a coworker at Borders who tried to help sell it to customers. Had it stocked on the shelves. This was around the release of The Dark Knight. No takers, alas.
I
remain proud of it. It’s the first thing
of substance I wrote, finished, completed, and it forced me to write in ways I’d
never managed to, before, when I was always scrambling for ways to tell stories
that felt authentic to me, which was a longer journey than many writers
claim. I knew, and know, comic book
storytelling, though, and in a lot of ways, its language is what still
permeates my work, perhaps more than ever, to this day, and its logic, its insane
publishing models, is what I still understand best, even while I still pursue
traditional publishers with other material.
Twenty
years has just flown by, though.
The Man Comes Around. Coming soon.
