A couple of years go by, I finish my undergrad and get a job at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs for U.S. Fencing (it's not really as cool as it sounds. I did data entry for a year and a half before I quit. Yuck.) So, I'm stuck in the springs, bored out of my mind, so I start looking at some comics again. I am standing in the store reading some garbage title, thinking "Man, I can write better than that." So I decide to put up instead of shutting up. I start playing around with a script for a story like I want to read.
My ideas ran something like this.
In a nutshell, DC has good heroic characters, but they have a real problem
with what I call "Power Creep." As writers shift around, the easiest way
to impress the audience is to make the the characters face greater and
greater challenges. Unfortunately, writers forget to come up with a clever
escape and just kind of increase the power of the characters ever so
slightly. This gives the writers that follow more tools and resources to
draw upon to get the character out of problems. Then the characters just
get more and more powerful until they can't be challanged by anything
besides a cosmic event. Yawn. No drama. Heroes can't win all the time,
it's boring.
Breaking a back or chewing a hand off, approaches the problem, but hero setbacks need to be more frequent and subtle. If you have a lawn that's out of control, you just mow it regularly and don't let it GET out of control in the first place. Alternatively, you can just kill it all and reseed every summer, but you're not addressing the real problem, which is not the lawn itself. Superman when first introduced could not fly. Just jump to the tops of telephone poles. Not even in the old Fleischer cartoons. True, he jumped onto the back of a plane in flight, but it still wasn't actual flight. Just super-leaping. That's it. But by the 60's Superboy is blowing earth into it's proper orbit with his super breath. Drastic Power Creep.
This is why Spider Man is the greatest super hero of all time.
Because after 50 years or whatever it is, he can still get nailed by
some punk who gets lucky with a saturday night special. No hubris there.
In the newspaper this spring, Stan Lee spent 2 weeks of daily strips
trying to get Spidey to cash a check. YHEA! now that's a story I
can relate to... anyway, you just have to respect story pacing like that.
Stan Lee must live in a pressure free zone. Can a comic strip get tenure?
I'm looking around and DC has no friendly neighborhood characters. Ah, I say, "A niche!" So, I start writing this script, well dialogue mostly, about this guy who gets powers by accident and then he and his roommate are forced to deal with them. Mostly the first few issues involved him and his roommate sitting around talking about costumes, other DC heroes, the question of if a rational person should swoop out of the darkness and beat people senseless, and how to get media coverage. (A bit more practical than Hard Drive, my guy just wanted people to know he was a hero so other heroes wouldn't beat him up.)
Well, Chip had convinced me to pick up Impulse by then and I really liked what Waid was writing. So I stop by my local comic vendor one afternoon and pick up Impluse. Right below it was Young Heroes #3. What an awful title, I think. Curious, I pick it up. I thumb through it in the store, and pages 7,8, and 9 are all about heroes talking about... costumes. Wow. Real people in a comic book. What a concept.
Sold forever more.
Another year or so goes by, I go back to grad school, get a job, writing goes on hold to study, yadda yadda yadda. Sometime around march Chip sends me a e-mail about the YHIL action figures some guy had made. Interesting, I thought. But what was more interesting was that it was a reply in the newsgroup to a complaint that there was not any YHIL websites to be found.
My HTML was way rusty and needed some loosening up for some projects I want to do for US Fencing, (I hated the job, but fencing is still my life) so I said, "Hey, I can fix that. I could whip together some kind of page."
I start fiddling around with layouts and stuff at work. I work as computer telephone support for faculty and staff at UNCG (still an office job, but the pay's good) Plus, I am allowed to play between calls, as long as I can chalk it up to learning SOMETHING about computers. That's an incredible perk. I love this job. I am now hands-down the office expert in scanning comic art. If a professor ever calls in and wants to know how to scan comic art in with vivid colors and clear text, I am the man with the plan. So I spend April and May just kind of tinkering with it, aiming for a Mid-July release date.
Then I get the news. Chip was trying to convince me the rumors were true, and I was in denial. That's where the Hard Drive banner came from. Chip picking on me about being in denial. Freshman psych rears it's ugly head again.
"They can't cancel the series!" I cried, "I'm not done with the site." (Denial)
"Dammit!" I said. "I should do something!" (Anger)
"Maybe if I get enough people to buy issues it won't be cancelled!" (Barganing)
"If I had gotten the site done sooner maybe I could have got some more readers and it wouldn't have been canceled." (Guilt)
But that sounded really pathetic, so I went back to Anger and set up
camp.
Then I created the Massive Buying Campaign and the rest is
history.
That being said, go back and sign my guestbook since you bothered to read this far.
Adios.