Requiem For the C21st Gods

Any career has it's share of disappointments, and the fate of my comic book C21st Gods perhaps wasn't the biggest I've had, but it's one that stuck with me - maybe because the project was so beset by disaster and then because it came so close to a measure of success.  To have a book unpublished is one thing; to have a book partially published and doomed to never be finished is quite another.  And somehow, the release of one issue of a three-and-a-bit part miniseries was almost worse than having nothing out at all.

But the very worst of it was, it's not that great an issue.  I mean, if we're honest, it's probably not that great a script full stop; beginning as a five page strip, then expanding into ten pages, then expanding into a graphic novel, it was born out of a few short, sharp shocks of effort that all seemed to occur at particularly rubbish times in my life.  And once the artist it had been written for dropped out, it looked for an age as though it would never see the light of day.  So I was all the more thrilled when eventually the pieces appeared to be coming together: with interesting-seeming independent outfit Rosarium in place as publisher and the talented Anthony Summey taking over on artist duties, it appeared that some good might come of all that work after all.

Yet, for reasons I guess I could dig into but won't, there was only ever this one issue, the weakest part of a book that was, in a weird sense, intended to start somewhat weakly.  The thing is, I'd never meant for C21st Gods to appear in separate segments, and it was never going to comfortably fit that format; issue one was deliberately rife with clichés and the entire concept was built on playing with the reader's established expectations.  Essentially, the book was two parts prologue, one part climax, and the climax was what everything was about.

Nevertheless, while it's certainly not the best thing I've written, there's plenty in C21st Gods that I think genuinely stands up, that last issue would have been pretty damn cool, and I wasn't comfortable with leaving things the way they'd been left.  Therefore, as promised rather a long while back now, I've tidied the entire script a bit and stuck it up on my website.  I realise I've been kind of negative about it, but I swear, it's worth a read - especially if, like me, you're one of those folks who likes to get a glimpse behind the scenes!

There's an index of all the parts here, or you can find each separate issue at the following links:
Issue 1, Issue 2, Issue 3, Epilogue.