Regular readers of the daily update will recall the comics-making experiment we're doing over at Comic World News called "Proof of Concept." Every three weeks, editor-in-chief Caleb Gerard will post up a twelve-page script by me, and artists can draw it. The one Mimi and I like best will be published in December as part of a graphic novel. I do commentary and make suggestions on the previous week's work and offer another script for artists to draw. Lather, rinse. Repeat.

This week's script, Hemogoblin, is one I'm real proud of, because it's everything I like about writing. I'd had the marketing hook in mind for a while: Anne-Rice-meets-The-Fugitive, but nothing in it really gelled for me. Seemed a little on the banal side. Then, when talking about it to the missus, she asked me if I was stuck because I thought the story was about the last vampire in the Blade Runner-esque future. "Seems to me the story's not about the vampire, but what a vampire suddenly appearing does to society. Pick a couple of folks and see how it relates to them."

ding-ding-ding

But even that's not why I like this one so much.

You'll have to hit that link for the column and scroll down to the bottom and download the pdf or the rtf and give it a read, but the short version of why I like this one so much is because these guys in the story just whispered in my ear, like what happened with Astronauts in Trouble: Live From The Moon. That the act of writing the story was more like transcribing a history of what happens than of crafting a story to entertain. It's a weird metaphysical distinction, I know.

Anyway, when writing Hemogoblin, even I thought I was writing the story of a retiring security guard and his replacement on the night their world changes forever.

I got to page twelve, and it turned out I was writing something else.

No one was more surprised than me when those two showed up at the door.