Posted on August 20, 2024

Defiant Comics projects, 1994

When I was a teenager reading Marvel comics in the late 70s and early 80s, a handful of names formed a pantheon in my mind. Stan Lee. Jack Kirby. Sal Buscema. Archie Goodwin. Marv Wolfman. Gerry Conway. Len Wein. Walt Simonson. John Byrne. These creators (and others) brought me joy month after month. They were doing what I dreamed of doing one day…making comics for a living to entertain and inspire people like me. I could imagine no higher calling. It’s still pretty great when you think about it.

Another of those names was Jim Shooter. He became the editor-in-chief in 1978, so his name suddenly appeared on everything I was reading and stayed there through my most formative years as a developing writer/artist. (I later learned that he got his first break as a comic writer at the tender age of 14, which meant he started living my dream before I even had that dream.)

Jim was not beloved by all those he worked with, but he did a lot to shore up Marvel’s internal problems and keep the trains running on time. I did actually have one point of contact with him back then. It was in 1979, when I was 14, and becoming increasingly frustrated by the terrible artwork on the Star Wars comics (Carmine Infantino, blechh). I sent in a list of suggested alternates along with some Star Wars drawings of my own. I never expected a reply, so you can imagine my amazement when an envelope turned up in my mailbox from Marvel Comics. It contained my drawings, along with a hand-written note from Jim thanking me for my advice. He said, “We know who’s good and who’s better, but some folks just ain’t available.” It ended with the line, “Thanks for sending us your drawings. They’re real good.”

You can imagine me floating on that for days afterward. I couldn’t stop staring at that note and thinking about what it represented. A personal acknowledgement from the top of the pantheon. The following year, everything got better on the Star Wars comic. They finally replaced Carmine with artists who took their job seriously, and my goodwill soared. Then some of the best Marvels I’d ever read starting flowing in. My opinion stayed high until Secret Wars finally brought it crashing down in 1984. This was a patently obvious cash-grab with no redeeming value that Jim Shooter himself had engineered. After that, the party was over. He was fired from Marvel in 1987, by which time I had moved on to find my joy elsewhere. (Mostly anime and manga.)

It was probably for the best. After a certain point, it becomes unhealthy to elevate human beings (however talented) to positions of divinity. It gives you something to strive for, but it also sets you up for a major reality check.

This is why, when I finally met Jim in person in 1993, I was in a position to observe him as a person rather than royalty. He’d been through the wringer by then, taking some bruises as he formed his own publishing companies. First Valiant, then Defiant. Making comics was what drove him, and though I didn’t follow any of his work I had to respect his passion to keep going despite the obstacles. After all, that was becoming the theme of my own career.

We met at Pro/Con, an annual industry gathering that happened for a few years just in front of Wonder Con in San Francisco. It was always a blend of fear and fun; fear because of the instability of the comics biz, fun because it gave me a chance to hobnob with well-known creators in person. Everyone was welcome to mix and mingle. This is how I stepped into a conversation with Jim and it ended with me being invited to submit work samples. Sooner than I expected, I was hired to freelance for his company on their flagship title, Warriors of Plasm.

The pitch:

Far from Earth is a planet which is also a living organism: the Org of Plasm. The Org must constantly be fed. This is accomplished by conquering new planets. Lorca, the Supreme Acquisitor, leads this mission. Lorca soon sets his sights on Earth, but also devises an attempt to overthrow the rulers of Plasm. To do so, he genetically modifies five humans. The humans do not function well together, suffering leadership conflicts and the desire to regain their normal lives.

It was a kooky name, to be sure. It started out as simply Plasm, but legal action from Marvel forced the change. (They had a comic named Plasmer.) The first I’d heard of Plasm was when Defiant announced that the first issue would be sold in trading card form. You had to collect all the cards and put them in an album before you could read the comic. I’m all for asking readers to put in some effort, but this sounded excessive.

Nevertheless, it had all worked itself out by the time I met Jim, and my timing couldn’t have been better; Warriors of Plasm was in need of help. If I remember right, penciler David Lapham was losing a deadline battle. The work I presented in my portfolio caught the eye of both Jim and his co-editor Pauline Weiss, and they hired me to transform David’s layouts for issue 11 into finished pencils. These were then inked by Yurgo Tasiopoulos (now there’s a name you don’t run into every day) and painted by Brian Moyer. The only name in the roster I actually recognized was letterer Clem Robins, who did a great job on my first BROID series for Eternity.

Issue 11 was finished and published on time in June 1994. But there’s no time to rest in the comic biz. After 11, they kept me on to pencil AND ink issue 12 (plus the cover). And after that, they gave me David’s layouts for issue 13 and I took them all the way through penciling and inking.

I hadn’t read any of the previous issues before getting started, but this was not an obstacle. The brainwork on issue 11 had already been done by David. That gave me plenty of grounding to interpret the script for 12, and then David did the brainwork again on 13. Beyond that, it was just a matter of getting the characters to look right. I remember being intrigued by the concept that the super-powered humans weren’t your typical athletes in costumes; they were ordinary people (one was a grandmother) who brought different personalities and ideals into play than seasoned superbeings. The next time I saw such an experiment was 12 years later in the first season of HEROES (2006).

Another unusual thing I remember about this project was receiving an audio cassette along with the script for issue 12. It was a recording of the story conference in which Jim and his team brainstormed what would happen in the issue. The script already showed me where they ended up, but they thought it would be helpful for me to hear how they arrived at the ideas. Like the postcard I received in 1979, it was a personal gesture made purely out of courtesy. It made me better appreciate who I was working for.

There was one other project from Defiant during this time; they hired me to draw layouts for issue 5 of a series titled Charlemagne. It was published in July 1994, so it must have come my way between Plasm 11 and 12. The artist was obviously a beginner at the time, and I gave him a leg up by laying out the pages for him. Layouts are a half step up from thumbnails, but their purpose is the same; to break down the script into panels, figure out what should be in each one, and create a road map for the penciler to follow. Pure visual storytelling. It saves the penciler a step and gets them over the finish line a little faster.

I have no doubt that if Defiant had stayed in business I would have continued freelancing for them. But they were bleeding money due to the ongoing lawsuit from Marvel over Plasmer (not to mention continuing turbulence from the ’93 comics crash) and had to cut costs to stay solvent. Plasm #13 and Charlemagne #5 both turned out to be final issues. Defiant hung on for one more year and then were forced to close up shop.

I can’t say these were my favorite projects, but they came to me when I needed them, they proved that I didn’t have to rely solely on Malibu for my livelihood, and everyone at Defiant liked what I had to offer. It’s impossible to be unhappy about that.