| | operative network | personal site: creative - relativity
WHAT IS BIGGER, AND HOW DID IT COME TO BE ... HERE?
Bigger is an original comic book property owned and created by Hannibal Tabu.
It all started with Brian Azzarello.
The year was 2001, and I'd been deluged by Axel Alonso's words, part of Marvel's marketing effort to make Cage "Blaxploitation." The actual facts of the story -- a take on an old Asian film which was pretty slow-moving in actuality -- were lost in an advertising campaign heavy on negative stereotypes and images of Black people. Predictably, I didn't respond well to that.
 Unfortunately for Marvel, I was writing a column for the now-defunct SpinnerRack.com, and I was compelled, nay, pressed to writing about it. The column, "Ethnic Cleansing/Rattled CAGEs" was widely reprinted and commented upon around the blogosphere, and it became a minor thing. Azzarello and I chatted it out at the 2002 San Diego Comic Con, and we respectfully agreed to disagree (since most of the negative writing I did was about the marketing of the work, not the work itself).
I was working with Eric Stephenson, who went on to become Executive Editor for Image Comics. At the time he was merely their Director of Marketing, and a good friend of mine after we'd suffered together through the horrors of eHobbies and NextPlanetOver. Yeah, good times, good times ... let's never speak of them again.
Eric and I were chatting about the furor around the column and he said, "Do you think you could do a better job?"
I stared at him incredulously. "I could do a better job with one half of my keyboard tied behind my back!" I replied, offended
"Then do it," he said simply. Eric asked me to make a pitch for Image Comics, reimagining the Luke Cage concept for a modern day, with the sensibilities of ... oh, somebody who actually happens to be Black.
With the assistance of David Gallaher, I got into contact with an artist named Eric Battle, who brought my reimagined ideas to life. We developed a pitch which many industry insiders thought was top notch, and sent it in to Image Comics. Eric loved it, and he sent it up the totem pole to then-president Jim Valentino.
According to what I was told by Image insiders, Valentino had a system. When he got a pitch that had a Latino lead, he'd find a Latino person that he knew, hand them the pitch, and ask, "what do you think of this?" Ditto for an Asian-themed project. However, when he got a Black-themed project -- along with a custom printed long-sleeved T-shirt -- he was stuck. According to the people I spoke with, Valentino didn't actually know anybody Black, and therefore couldn't figure out who to ask for a second opinion. So the proposal sat on his desk.
For more than a year.
 Image had a policy to respond -- yea or nay -- to proposals in a fairly quick amount of time. Me? Not so much. I ran into Valentino at two or three conventions during that year -- Pasadena, San Diego and I think Wizard World Long Beach. At each point, Valentino had no idea who I was. Despite the fact that every time I saw him I was wearing a Black fedora and a white t-shirt with my logo on it (it was my "convention outfit" for a long time -- I switched to Marvel Family t-shirts because I had more of them). Despite the fact that Eric told me that he'd discussed my proposal (which had the same logo on the front of it -- I'm twitchy about things like that) in more than one instance. Not that I take things like this personally.
Anyhoo, Valentino had some kind of coup happen at Image, and he was replaced as president by the two-fisted management of Savage Dragon creator Erik Larsen. What I did not know was that Larsen had a personal beef with my artist Eric Battle from their time on Aquaman. Apparently, Larsen wanted Battle to sign on for some ideological campaign against Peter David, over an Aquaman story point now lost to my memory. Battle, however, was a young Black artist in a less-than-forgiving field, so the last thing he wanted to do was get in the middle of an argument with two established names. Larsen took this as a bad thing, and apparently carried a grudge.
When Larsen took over and got the pending submissions, he saw that Eric Battle was on my project and booted it. Stephenson reluctantly told me this and BIGGER was done at Image Comics.
This was a big blow to me, given that I'd done a lot of work on this project specifically because Image had basically asked for it. I had tons of ideas I'd much rather have been working on, but this is where all the focus and interest was. So I kept plugging away, fool that I am.
Convention after convention, people loved the proposal. Not enough to publish it, but they loved it. Battle's art was solid, my writing was solid, and everybody agreed that this was good comics. Blah.
I'd been working with Speakeasy Comics on their proposed superhero universe (maybe I'll post that one day too), which was stillborn while they tried to take on Image in terms of publishing creator-owned work. Which I thought was suicidal, since they weren't even doing all they could with the stuff they owned themselves, and I said as much every chance I got. But that was the way of things. Someone told me, "Hey, you should submit BIGGER to Speakeasy and see what happens!" Bored, I did ... and they bit. At Wizard World Rosemont in 2005, I made an agreement to publish the title through Speakeasy.
 I brought this good news back to Eric Battle ... who bowed out. The work had been too politically embroiled in the comics indutry, too much of a heartbreak, too financially unrewarding. So he wanted out. Which I grudgingly accepted, moving on. Luckily, a few months ago I'd met the brilliant Canadian artist Jeik, who signed on and chipped in with some simply amazing character sketches. We set a production schedule, got a lot of great ideas ... and then Speakeasy shut their doors.
It's too much. I give up. This project is cursed. I somehow suspect Azzarello has something to do with all of this, but given a solid career and a beautiful wife, it doesn't make so much sense to strike out at me. Maybe Frank Tieri talked him into it. But whatever. I give it to the world, I post it. Here you'll find the first three issues in prose format, the script to the first issue (I had some last edits, but I don't see the point anymore) and all the art involved.
As always, questions, comments, concerns -- you know the drill.
|
