by Don McGregor
Some people should just leave you the fuck alone when you're due to write an introductory piece that is about your personal history.
Some people seem to feel they can write about your life, without your having a say in defending yourself.
Some folks will twist what happened, and they will forget what they did, and how underhanded they went about it. Some will want to take credit for what you achieved on your own terms, and at a cost of your own life, and to those close about you.
And think maybe you'll die before ever telling what really happened.
I'm writing this a month after Steve Gerber died.
I'm writing this after being told I "ruined" Sabre by making Melissa Siren a white woman, and having her pregnant, and "Don't I know this is a racist country?"
No, I don't know that America is a racist country!
I do know there are racists in this country. I do know they are as virulent a force today as they were thirty years ago.
I do know race was a factor in this book almost not ever becoming a reality.
I know somewhere, some time, I have written these words before, but they need repeating here: It is not enough for a writer to an idea as to what a book can be. It is not enough to figure out how to keep the vision alive and true until it becomes a printed reality the reader can hold in their hands. It is not enough to desire to do something in the entertainment industry if it hasn't been done a hundred Goddamn times before! You don't only have to fight to create it, you often have to fight to get it even close to what you dreamed it could be.
I've read recently that it's claimed I was saved from life as a security guard by being offered a job in New York City.
Well, I worked a number a job in the state of Rhode Island. I worked in a bank, and had some incidents there that showed what could happen to you when surrounded by lots of money. I was summoned to the paneled offices and told I'd have to work nights on computers. I was told I had no choice. I disagreed. The titled, suited man insisted I had no choice. I said,'Yeah, I kind of do. When I walk out this door, I quit." The titled man with the paneled wood office couldn't believe what he was hearing, and insisted on my future. "This is the last you'll see of me." It was.
I worked at the Providence Journal, and I wrote book reviews of authors I loved.
I worked at a movie theater, and got to see all the censored parts of movies that would have cuts "suggested" by Rhode Island's then "Civics committee." I'll tell you a story some time of an X-rated Western and a corpse in the audience, for real.
But that's another story.
There's always another story.
I worked for the National Guard in the Military Police in a time when riots exploded in this country. I could have retired at 45, full Medical Benefits, Government retirement plan. Except you can get Court-Martialed for telling a Lieutenant, "I'm tired of being subservient to mental incompetence," and saluting and doing an about face and striding out of the office.
You have to be careful about reporting racists in a Military Police Unit, ignorant bastards who talk big-mouthed, small, bitter-minded, violent racist thoughts of what they would do to blacks if the unit were called into action.
You think the ones with the bars want to know.
You can find out otherwise. You can go before a promotion board, in a cellar room in an old Armory, where they only view of the outside world is through an ankle-high window, showing feet going past in the free world, while you stand before the ones with the bars, and they ask you, "Are you prejudiced against military policemen?"
And the world turns surreal.
And scary.
And you wonder if you will get to walk out there in the light, where you can only see feet, free feet of people who aren't aware of this room beside their ankles, and you are isolated and realize they are angry with you for telling a truth.
And they have a power that can keep you in that room.
I wrote about this bizarre ordeal in a Marvel Comics Black and White Horror magazine called MONSTERS UNLEASHED. It was called THIS IS THE VALIANT ONE, SIGNING OUT, and it was illustrated by my good friend, Billy Graham. You probably never saw it. It wasn't a series story. I was trying two different types of writing in that story. The Military Police part of the story was written all in captions. The Monster on the loose in New York City portions were done all in dialogue.
Billy is dead now. I hope to write a tribute to him if we get the chance to finally publish his art in SABRE: AN EXPLOITATION OF EVERYTHING DEAR, without any horrendous coloring in his early issues.
Billy was the first black Art Director in this medium. I don't think Billy got any obituaries in this industry, as a man, as an artist, as an editor, as the truly Renaissance guy he was. Might hint a little about this industry.
I hope to get a chance to tell a little of the man who first gave me a place to stay in New York City, along with Alex Simmons, because I had to come to Harlem, and Spanish Harlem, and Hell's Kitchen to find a place where people understood what I loved, and what I was passionate about, and gave me the chance to try to add to that love.
Billy Graham is someone who believed in who and what I was. Billy often told me I was "effervescent." Personally, I always thought Billy was the effervescent one.
But that's another story.
There's always another story.
The comics world can try to banish you. They can hold their own inquisitions.
They can try to get your name banned from a company. The can intimidate you with edicts that you'll never write in this business again.
But they can't lock you away, the way the military can, because you tried to speak or write something you knew to be true.
I worked for Grandfather's business. They printed the patches on the Astronaut's suits for the trip to the moon.
It was one of the worst places I ever worked, and maybe some day I'll tell stories about that.
Could have stayed there. Wouldn't. But could have.
The point of this is, along with all these jobs, I was already writing, long before I came to New York City. I was known for horror stories at Warren Magazines.
You get labeled in this business. You can get labeled fast.
For the record, when I was in the state of Rhode Island, I had a three bedroom house, with a fireplace, with a garage, with a view out the bow window of a pond with lily pads. I was three blocks away from about two miles of private stretch of beach and ocean. I had my daughter, Lauren, who was about 3 years old at the time.
I walked away from it for a $125.00 a week job at Marvel Comics.
I did that. Not any of the people claiming they "saved" me from a life as a security guard. How many people do you know will leave the safety net, the daily way of life prescribed? Walk away without a backward glance.
Thirty years later, I cannot, for the life of me, recall what life was like on daily basis back in that time.
I recall the exhilarating times in New York City, being in the offices of Mike Shayne, Mystery Magazine, and many other magazine publishers. Denning and Rainier almost made their first appearance, after my 1969 comic version, drawn by Alex Simmons, in Mike Shayne, in a story called ASSASIN STREET.
Steve Gerber was present in a meeting where it was said that I'd be given a jungle series to write, because everyone knew jungle strips did not sell. Joe Kubert couldn't sell TARZAN for DC.
I'd be given KILLRAVEN, WAR OF WORLDS, because although it had started out with strong hopes, it had had three different writer/artist teams on the series in the first three issues, and hope for it had the series on a terminal list. Science Fiction wasn't noted for being a top seller, either.
When the books died, as they were expected to die, it could be said, I'd been given a chance to write, and died, and I would still be on staff. I was safe as a proof-reader. I wasn't especially good at it, but I had no political end-game. I wasn't seeking to become the next editor-in-chief. Or if I were, I was doing it in the most baffling, self-defeating manner ever. So, I was safe there. I wasn't a political threat.
When I learned, after I was gone from Marvel, how planned it all was, how there seemed so little human feeling, how little regard there was for me as an individual, I found there were people there who could still bring me to tears.
I was naïve. I had wanted to believe.
It was an exciting time. It was a traumatic time. It was an exciting time of story-telling and of learning the unwritten rules of the game. It was a time of learning the writer could be locked in a cage, and truly, part of the job, was picking the damn lock and getting outside of the cage as much as you could.
I wrote those books. For better or worse, they are MY books. And the artists I worked with. Anyone else, they had no idea what I planned do until it was in their hands. A done deal. They could censor them (and upon occasion did), but only with deadline clock running.
You can love those books. Or you can hate them.
But however anyone felt, they were my stories, they were stories I felt compelled to tell.
I realized during that time that I was never going to be a fast writer.
I realized I wanted to be able to create, and include all types of people in my stories.
There were people who would tell you I wanted to fight.
I have never been confrontational, by nature. I'm more or less willing to live and let live, and avoid those that would stifle you. Let them live their own lives. I have too much to do to waste time with them.
But I will fight for those stories, and for what I think they can be, and what I believe comics can achieve. Even now, battered, and in some fights I never thought would have to be fought, I'll sigh, I'll wish it weren't so, but I will still fight for these books.
And thus came Sabre.
Now, for my first independent book I wanted to do RAGAMUFFINS, a series about little kids growing up in the 1950s. There would be Flash Forwards into the 60s, 70s, etc. And eventually, Flashbacks to the 19-teens, 20s, 30s, when the kids parents were Ragamuffins. Thus it would be a series about what changed in America, and what didn't. What parents thought they taught kids, and what they really learned.
It was a book about childhood, for adults.
And, as stated, I had created DETECTIVES INC in 1969.
In 1981, I got to do it in the version most people know today, A REMEMBRANCE OF THREATENING GREEN, with Marshal Rogers. I got to tell Marshal, the year before he died, how much his work on that book still meant to me. He could have done any book at that time, and he chose to devote two years of his life to those private detectives I still love so dearly, Denning and Rainier. Marshal never shied away from anything in the book, the complex story-telling, the sexuality, the small human moments that I treasure so much to this day.
At the time I was conceiving the original series, in 1976, I told Dean Mullaney there weren't many people who remembered me as the horror writer, now I was known for heroic fantasy. The medium was ruled by iconic looking heroes. Make no mistake, I loved writing about heroes, as well.
I knew I couldn't start with RAGAMUFFINS or DETECTIVES INC., as much as I loved both series. No one knew if there was a market for comics aimed strictly for the comic book stores. If you talked to the pundits in the biz, they'd have told you as if it were fact, that the comic book stores were only a small percentage of their sales, and could not, the fans could not, support a title.
I thought they were wrong.
But I knew to test the thought, I needed to do a larger than life character. I told Dean the series would break all the rules that were unwritten in the comics' medium. The rules few will admit to now, thirty years later.
Sabre helped change that perception.
It wasn't but a few years later that the major comics companies launched their own graphic novel, creator-owned line of books, and started marketing comics for the direct market they had so vigorously stated didn't exist.
Here we are thirty years later, and as I began this piece, I'm still hearing about Melissa Siren being white and pregnant. Nowadays, what I hear is all about how I "ruined" Sabre as a "Franchise", because I guess that's all creators or writers should be thinking about, how to make a "franchise" that Hollywood will want to do.
I wasn't thinking of Franchises.
Dean Mullaney recently told me that the people at Marvel Comics during the time period of the BLACK PANTHER and KILLRAVEN didn't have a clue about who I was. That I might as well have been an alien to them. That I was about the story, about what the characters and the story telling were about. Not the political agendas.
I always thought story-telling was about telling the stories, the best you knew how on the day you wrote the words.
Thirty years ago, before Sabre became a reality, this is what I heard.
"Don, who is going to buy a book about a black guy with a lot of guns?"
"What's his gimmick?" "You're going to have sex in there? Between a black man and white woman?" "$6.00 for a comic book!"
In the two years it took to produce this book you hold in your hands, I was asked if I was afraid someone would steal the concept, the idea.
Not in the least. I knew most of the people in the business on some level at the time, and I knew many thought I was nuts to be doing this, and even if someone thought it could work on some level, they would never approach it as I would. For better or worse, I would approach it in my own individualistic style.
I was a story-teller. Had been since I first felt its power when I was about 6 years old. Long before I sold stories. Long before my first publication as a poet. Long before starting to make films before I came to New York City. Long before the novels I was writing, which included BERNIE CHOJNACKI and AN EROTIC PRIORITY. Long before writing for Warren Magazines with the first published story, THE FADE-AWAY WALK.
I could never really comprehend why we couldn't have characters of different backgrounds, different races, different religions, different sexual orientation. If the major color for comics companies was green, why the Hell would they want to ignore all that potential audience?
When I created Taku and Venomm in PANTHER'S RAGE, I had many sequences of them together. They were the first gay characters I ever wrote.
But as I wrote earlier, it's not enough for a writer to want to do something, you have to find a way to get into paper reality. If I saw the opening, I was primed to do it, and if you re-read those books, you will see the relationship is there. If I had done it, I promise you, it would never have seen print. Not at that time. I was having difficulty enough in that the series was primarily an all black cast. "Where are the white people?" "In Wakanda? Isn't it your mythology that made Wakanda a hidden African nation? Just where are all these white folks supposed to come from?"
And if I'd gone for it, come out with Taku and Venomn being gay, I would not have gotten through, and it would most probably have been the last book I got to write at Marvel.
My favorite sequences as a writer in Sabre aren't in this book. They are the sequences with the babies being born. I think we did manage to capture a real joy of birth there, in the midst of chaos and war and death. I still like the moment Deuces Wild and Summer Ice manage to come together.
There's a great story about when those pages were first drawn with Billy Graham.
There's always another story.
This one is just waiting for the printing of AN EXPLOITATION OF EVERYTHING DEAR.
My favorite sequences as a writer, though, of Sabre, is in THE DECADENCE INDOCTRINATION. Perhaps it is because finally I was able to write Sabre as an actual novel, rather than as 38 pages being called a novel.
I love the scenes between Sabre and Melissa Siren on the beach, the intimacy in their conversations, the sensuality between the two, the breast-milk scene, all the positive things between a man and woman, what they can give to each other, to each other's lives. I had the chance to write poetically about the feel of a woman's breast, or discuss masturbation, or have them playful.
Those scenes were the ones I wanted to write from the very beginning.
I think I took a token sum of money from Dean Mullaney when we started SLOW FADE OF AN ENDANGERED SPICIES of $300.00. I wanted Dean to be able to afford to do the book. He invested in the book for over year. Everyone else was paid over their page rate. Of course, I had no idea how long it was going to take for this book to be finished, or the trials that would ensue that even threatened if it would ever get done.
Now, I know I have been labeled as being "difficult." When HEAVY METAL expressed interest in printing Sabre, Dean had kept his word to everybody for over a year. He had my word that this was the book that would start his company.
I have never regretted not breaking my word.
I would have regretted, all my life, if my word didn't have any honor. If I did not back my words with action.
It's been written that I had an agenda with Sabre. Well, someone will have to explain that "agenda" to me, because I'm not certain what that would be.
I know I wanted to open up this medium I loved. I know I wanted to include all kinds of people. I know what I did and when I did it.
I think I did it for the right reasons. For human reasons.
For people who felt Sabre, and Detectives Inc., and Ragamuffins spoke to them, made their personal lives a little easier, seeing an approximation of how they lived reflected in Pop Culture.
When I started writing SABRE: THE EARLY FUTURE YEARS for Joe Pruett, my biggest fear was coming back to Sabre and Melissa Siren and Crimson Dawn and Blackstar Blood and Midnight Storm that some might read it and go, "He should have left it the fuck alone. He had it some years ago."
I suppose it's a natural fear for a writer.
I came back to DETECTIVES INC.: A FEAR OF PERVERSE PHOTOS/A REPERCUSSION OF VIOLENT REPRISAL as one of the most complex, demanding stories I have ever attempted.
I wrote somewhere along the way that it might be the last story I ever did. Story-telling was just costing me way too much. Not the writing, but everything surrounding it.
I got lucky. I have been lucky many times, because as a writer in comics you must have a partner who believes in the vision, believes what the book can be. I have been so fortunate to be with Gene Colan and Dwayne Turner and Tom Yeates and Mike Mayhew and Tom Palmer, and others I have written about though the course of this piece.
I got lucky to meet Craig Hamilton, who understood Denning and Rainier, who loved who they were, who knew where they were alike, and where they were different. And who figured out a way for me to stay alive, to be able to afford to keep doing the book. He got me in contact with Michael Bair. I had no idea in our e-mail conversations that I knew Mike from years before, under another name, and that we had worked together on the original CRIMSON DAWN series, FINAL TRANSACTIONS.
Craig also introduced me to Tess Fowler, who is drawing SABRE: THE EARLY FUTURE years. You can see some of her work here in this book.
What's not to love about this woman? She's talented! She's passionate about what she does! She's intelligent! She has a sense of sensuality and humor! She's beautiful in flesh and spirit!
She says she was born to do these characters! To draw this book!
A writer can't ask more from a partner than that.
And hopefully, when you finally see the new series, you'll say, "We're glad Don didn't leave it alone!"
Be kind to each other.
Be kind to yourselves.
And hang in there!
Don McGregor
March 26, 2008
Some people should just leave you the fuck alone when you're due to write an introductory piece that is about your personal history.
Some people seem to feel they can write about your life, without your having a say in defending yourself.
Some folks will twist what happened, and they will forget what they did, and how underhanded they went about it. Some will want to take credit for what you achieved on your own terms, and at a cost of your own life, and to those close about you.
And think maybe you'll die before ever telling what really happened.