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It's been a while since we've been there, so I'm doing a re-reading of all the published Beasts of Burden comics as well as the four notebooks of handwritten material I have on hand. I also have to go over my computer files (ugh), because I never was any good at organizing, and my notes are scattered between those, the notebooks and a batch of post-its, index cards and receipts with semi-legible words written on them and tossed or affixed randomly into a notebook. Those are the "scrapbook notes" I guess.

They all have material I need to re-familiarize myself with for the next four issue-arc. And because things have been so haphazard as far as the schedule and the new directions we've taken for various reasons (the Wise Dogs weren't supposed to be a source of comic book material for some time, or even until after we had completed the Burden Hill storyline). Circumstances and all that.

The other day I sent in the notes to Benjamin Dewey for the next cover (also sent to our editor at Dark Horse Comics, Daniel Chabon, as well as assistant editors Chuck Howitt and Misha Gehr) and the original notes on this first story are so old now that I had to update the file format so that modern humans can open the files. I think it was last saved on a Microsoft format with a copyright of 1991-2003 or something ancient like that.

The schedule has been the biggest monster our characters have had to face since they first appeared 2003, nearly twenty omg-wtf-please-kill-me years ago. With every delay in publishing, each subsequent story becomes  a bit more difficult to write because we have to readjust to take the loss of time, memory and even readers into account. Loss of time and memory means having to use up space in the new scripts for recaps and exposition, which the stories had not been designed to contain.

Every page loss is a kick in the guts and a pain in the ass and an albatross around the neck of a new script, especially on a book that doesn't come out often, doesn't have a long-standing and well-known established IP driving it (Exposition: "It's Superman!"), and -- and this is my fault -- often does single-issue stories with beginnings, middles and an actual ending that wraps up the issue. Making matters worse, budgets have cut a single issue comic down from 22 pages to a standard and hateful 20. I remember 24-page issues, and because I used to do everything on my own for no page rate upfront, I used to fill the book if I felt like it. Which was stupid, but that's another issue entirely (get it? Ha ha ha). Something you might not know, but we can do more than 20 pages in a comic at some publishers. The thing is, if you see more than 20 pages, 99 times out of 100 the creators are donating their time and effort to those extra pages. I've been able to push for a paid extra page here or there over time, but in general, if you see more than the usual number of pages, keep in mind it's another way comics creators bend over backwards to make these things. No one forces them, but, sometimes the story needs that extra space. Especially in a one-shot.  

(You might not be aware that most Image books and many creator-owned books published elsewhere are propped up by writers working for virtually nothing so that the artists can be paid virtually something, right? It's an open secret but the thing about open secrets is that many people still don't know about them. I didn't know about it until I began Blackwood, which is on hiatus partly because I could no longer afford to work on it. We still want to continue it, Veronica and Andy and I are in touch and we have stories set up, hopefully we can bring it back after the oversized HC Library Edition is released later this year collecting all eight issues). 

This is very much on my mind right now because the next Beasts script has to be pulled apart some to make room to let folks know what's going on, what's been going on, and who everyone is to a degree, before I can start the actual script I'd planned a number of years ago.

Speaking of backstory and exposition, I've been thinking of doing some "notations" on Beasts of Burden as a way of better showing my thought process on writing comics. I have always meant to post here about the process of writing, but for someone like me, who is largely self-taught and intuitive, I find it very difficult to put my thoughts together and then get them across in a purely descriptive way. I don't feel qualified to "teach" drawing because my technical skills are iffy, and, again, I don't have the vocabulary. But with art I can at least show this and that and you can see the construction lines (or lack thereof) and I can use the visuals to attempt to show what I'm trying to get at. With writing, it's even more difficult, which is why I think we have so much "How To" material on drawing comics, designing characters and even breaking down a script page, while there's little about writing out there other than format and published scripts.  I's also a reason slush piles of art would get cleaned out faster at publishers than scripts (back when people could submit blind examples of their work). In this context, at least, art is "easier". if you've ever seen a professional look at portfolios at a convention, the basics get trotted out (and usually for good reason): Perspective is off32, anatomy needs work, pay more attention to backgrounds, what's happening in this panel?, you're breaking the 180 degree rule here, vary your faces and body types, work on expressions, your main influences are overly apparent, tangents, tangents, tangents, don't quit your day job, etc). Writing needs to be read and digested and broken down and gone over, the drawings are there to see. You can't even bring writing samples to a convention. Talking about comics writing is harder to pin down than drawing the stuff. Maybe not for everyone, but the point is, showing stuff helps for me. I can show you pages and panels and tell you why I made those choices, what happened to get that stuff on the page, what wasn't able to get on the page, what was a set-up or a callback or a reminder of a plot bomb still ticking.

While going over the earlier comics this week I kept being reminded of certain choices I made back in the day, and certain plot points being set up, some of which have still not been revealed. I know why everything in the comics is in there, there is very little randomness in those pages, like with a Milk & Cheese or Murder Family comic. A script will veer away from original intent ("What the Cat Dragged In" being the best example, it started  as a funny story about an inept demon and instead turned very depressing as it got into Dymphna's past). I can go over the pages and point out that This is an exposition dump, this is plot, this panel set up that later bit, this is comedy relief to puncture the balloon of over-sentimentality or solemnity, this is a plot detail introduced casually by wrapping it inside a joke (there's one that goes back to 2009 which might finally pop in the arc after this). That doesn't tell anyone how to write, but it shows that writing is a series of choices, and a series of structured ideas. Unless you don't outline and fumble shit constantly and make a mess of things.

(A very simple example -- which I will still expand upon to no end, because that's what I do -- can be seen in the image above the post, from the first part of  the Beasts of Burden story "The Presence of Others" (art by series co-creator Jill Thompson). I needed a panel or two to break away from the main action, as you will when you don't want something like picking a mausoleum lock to be played out too long, or seem too easy and abrupt. Cutting away is a great way to collapse "the other thing" into a nebulous amount of time you can control.  Cutting away covers you, if you follow, an action is begun, it serves its purpose, and you use a panel or two to let it finish in it's own time away from the viewer, so you can return to it as a completed act with a "it's done, let's go in", or you can switch back with an interruption or surprise.  Anyway, this cut allowed the mausoleum door to be dealt with while Pugs asks a question that's been boiling inside him since the Hellboy crossover. He's met humans who do the sort of thing Hellboy does, and it's an opportunity for him to ask if they know anything about his missing hero. he never gets an answer, because that's as far as I'm willing to push the callback to the Hellboy story, as it's not my character, there are proprietary, personal and legal issues to avoid, Mike Mignola was kind enough to allow us the use of his character once, stepping on that trust without asking is just not kosher, and asking him to let us stress that meeting again is something I would consider to be pushing my luck. If we were good friends, that's a different matter. Anyway, I used a structural break from the main action to squeeze in the idea that Pugs is still sad (and always will be) that his hero, Hellboy, went off and never came back. Poor Pugs, he may be wiser in how the supernatural works, but not comic book crossovers. The idea here is that a simple panel or two that's needed to change things up before the next main beat doesn't have to be "wasted". That space can be used to add some texture, or a little emotion or a bit of information, or as much of it all that you can slide in all at once. Every panel counts, especially  when you have a limited number of panels).

Above: Picking a lock can be dull, even with fairly obscure references to terrible dialog in video games. So, yeah, cut away to the pug. 

Anyway. Those are plans for another day, and mostly for livestreaming or making videos to post because it's easier to say all that rather than type it, especially when your old man fingers are going through some things.  Now back to what I actually meant to write in regards to backstory (see what happens without structure, writing kids?):

For those who may not know, the first Beasts of Burden story was published in The Dark Horse Book of Hauntings in 2003. We didn't call it a Beasts of Burden story because there was no such title, and no such series in mind. The story was called "Stray", and it was 8-pages long, and it was all that was planned and all that we had planned for. The inspiration for the story was my being asked to contribute a ghost story to an anthology, eight pages long, for pay. That and I'd been wanting to write some horror stuff, which the editor was aware of. The inspiration for a haunted dog house story was that I'm very competitive when I contribute to an anthology, and I always try to think about what other contributors might do, and try to avoid doing that so my piece has something different going for it at the start. If it's a serious action/fighting anthology I might go with a humor approach or even four panel gag strips (Captain America: Red, White and Blue/Marvel, Attack on Titan/Kodansha USA), if it's a popular franchise I might pick a less-popular character to work with (iirc I had the only Roger story in Hellboy: Weird Tales/DHC), if people expect something stupid like Milk & Cheese, I'll come up with something even stupider like The Eltingville Club (Instant Piano/DHC). Oh, yes, I am so clever, look at my cleverness in awe, please. Pffft.

With the Hauntings book, I assumed someone would do a haunted house story (or two), because, duh, haunted house stories are ubiquitous, and that's because (duh, pt. 2) haunted house stories are kind of awesome. At least to me, and to enough people that you can pretty much expect to see a haunted house crop up in a book of ghosts and hauntings. So, how to do a haunted house story without doing the same old expected "haunted house story"? Unless you have an idea in your files to dust off or build upon, the unexciting answer is that you work at it.

You start the thinking process. Sometimes you become inspired, sometimes you steal (I try not to, I mean, we all take and borrow and lean on what we know, but I don't think I've ever started straight out with an elevator pitch), sometimes you just start clinically rattling off related things out loud about the subject. "Haunted house...haunted houseboat...haunted dollhouse..." maybe making a list, in the hopes something clicks, now or later. And you flail around trying to push along a haunted dollhouse story up because that ones seems agreeable, and there's the visual angle and what it might offer/inspire (this is for a comic, always remember someone has to draw the stuff and someone will be reading/looking). Dollhouses are nifty and can easily be made creepy. Doll houses brought to mind doll house makers, young girls, adult collectors, old toy shops, fathers who never finished doll's houses for their children, the two little cats who invaded a doll house on Sesame Street -- it's interesting that I knew a clip from a T.V. show but didn't know about children's books like Miss Suzy until years after our child was born.

(Miss Suzy, written by Miriam Young, art by the wonderful Arnold Lobel)

Nothing comes of it, though. You can't think of anything for inspiration, even (you'll eventually read M.R. James' "The Haunted Doll's House" (1923), see a few of them in a few movies, and assume it's been done hundreds of times more, besides). But the doll house idea is a non-starter, you have zilch, nothing, jack shit, mrs jack shit and  jack shit junior for an idea that isn't third-rate EC horror comics, second-rate Harvey and just good enough for St. John (hello, pre-code fans, how are you? Hope you liked that last reference!). You know someone must have already written about a haunted dollhouse and it's not in the job description, so why bother? Move on.

The next idea that puts a hook in your head is a haunted dog house. Has someone done it?  Of course, but it's not something you're aware of specifically, it's not something you'll get dinged on for ripping off, it's an obvious bit but like the dollhouse not an overused bit that will make readers immediately think about some popular take on it. It's worth thinking about.

A haunted dog house means...well, dogs. Duh. So, there's our characters taken care of. The dogs have to talk, or we have to everything in captions like a storybook. I'm not crazy about using captions in my comics. I try to avoid them, I don't even like setting the location or time that way. It's a handy device, it gets things done, but it's easily-abused by too many writers who are either lazy, full of themselves or feel a  need to prove that they can write real prose like in a real book. Or whatever. I like to tell the story in the panels as much as possible, narration can work, but comics just flow better without blocks of descriptive text. My two cents. which can't even buy penny candy anymore.

Even so, a storybook approach is interesting, visually and in how to script things, a sort of folktale belief running through it, like with the rabbits in Watership Down.  Talking dogs are not your thing at all, but remember The Plague Dogs? You got sucked in and wrung out and murdered. By talking dogs, and also talking rabbits, of all things. And the animated adaptations also murdered you. So, that, but with ghosts. Something goofy, but a little emotional weight to keep it from floating completely away. A storybook feel but with real dogs in a real neighborhood setting, not anthropomorphic animals in a fairy tale world or it will just be twee and collapse. Maybe this will work. You're excited about the idea, and that excitement is always a tell that there's something there. This is the idea you want to work on. Get out a notebook before you forget something good.

And it went on from there, so I can drop that second-person thing I fell into for some reason (to put you in my head, or to have you "think along" in coming up with ideas, as you yourself might conceptualize a story?). Unlike most of my stories, things tumbled very quickly.

The Hauntings concept led me to a haunted house -- which I refined to a haunted dog house.

A haunted dog house required talking dogs. At that point I had a location and the basic characters set.

A haunting requires a ghost (unless you're Nigel Kneale), a haunted dog house required the ghost of a dog. So that's locked in.

Who helps out with a haunted house?  An occult detective, a psychic, a priest or an exorcist if someone's possessed. Tangina Barrons, the medium from POLTERGEIST was the inspiration for the Wise Dog, along with Father Merrin THE EXORCIST in regards to character. I didn't want an actual priest-like stand-in, though, more of a Gandalf-type, a believer, but stressing fairly generic magic rituals over strict religious rites (I try to avoid mumbo-jumbo talk as much as possible in Beasts and Blackwood, it drives me up a wall). Pragmatically, there wasn't enough room in eight pages for any defied expectations that would need remarking on -- the storybook approach called for a traditional shaman/wizard Gandalf-type who could show up and be exactly what they appear to be, rather than a Barrons or Kolchak or quirky X-Files character that comes with tics or quirks or shtick to deal with. All that being said, I tried to puncture the sense of seriousness and "otherness" around Emryss (as he was later named) by having him kick the cat into the grave. A little levity helps, especially if it's folded into the scene.

Doghouses are in yards, yards are in neighborhoods. Neighborhoods have stray cats roaming around. I prefer cats to dogs, myself, although in my dream home there are cats and dogs, living together. I love both. But that's why there's a cat in the story, for a little variety, and to have an outsider that can comment. There was no Pugs character at this point, later on he would not be an outsider, but the character than complains and argues, which requires others to react, usually to explain something in a way that isn't completely boring.

So, there was everything in place, pretty much. Poltergeist and The Exorcist (it was hard to resist having the Wise Dog say, "This doghouse is clean"), whatever talking animal stuff was stored in my head from pop culture (I saw LADY AND THE TRAMP as a kid in a 70s re-release and cried when I thought one of the dogs was killed, I never thought of that before, maybe that was bubbling along with 101 DALMATIONS, and the WATERSHIP DOWN and PLAGUE DOG adaptations, among others. MILO AND OTIS? Then where was Pugs?). Both versions of Watership Down were an overall inspiration for the folkloric aspects to the story, the references to a larger world and the beliefs the dogs shared, with only glimpses of the encompassing human world (people being unseen except for a few pairs of legs in one panel). World-building wasn't a goal, the references were just to ground things in "their" world and give things texture in the short time amount of space we had). A storybook use of captions to help move things along and keep a certain tone above the proceedings, because other than the Wise Dog, our dogs were plain-spoken, modern characters, displaying more-or-less "realistic" animal behavior.

The ending fell into place along with everything else in a very natural, simple cause-and-effect, question-and-answer way. Who was the ghost? Why was she unable to rest? The story just wrote itself, the sad parts and the happier ending.

After the plot and characters were finished, we approached Jill Thompson to illustrate it. Jill was my only choice, I loved her watercolor work and I knew she loved animals. Her art would complement the storybook feel perfectly, and I knew she could pull off talking animals without it looking stilted or ridiculous. They would look real enough to ground the story, but she'd be able to make them act their parts, with expressions that didn't shatter the illusion. She agreed on two conditions. One was that we had to have a pug dog in the cast for her to paint. Which is how Pugs got into the story. We had a cynical/obnoxious dog in the original breakdown -- originally all the characters were personality descriptions rather than names or breeds, the hero (Ace), the coward (Rex), the lamb (Whitey), etc. Pugs was perfectly cast and the breed gave that character a voice and personality right off the bat. He has always been a  fun character to write and is more useful to getting things done in the scripts, if not in the actual stories.  Little legs will limit you in the animal hero business.

I say everything fell neatly into place, but that simplifies things a bit. The plot fell like dominoes, the script was tougher, mainly because Jill's second, very reasonable request, was that the pages be limited to a maximum of five panels to allow her room to paint. I've had that request made before by collaborators, Jaime Hernandez agreed to work on World's Funnest if I kept the pages to six panels, knowing my own work would regularly hit 9-14 panels, or more. And that's with pen and ink work, painted comics tend to require keeping the pages more open.

Mistakes and oversights were made, at the time and in hindsight. All the animals were male, except for the ghost, something I regret to this day because of how it skewed things going into later stories. With the schedule such a mess it's been difficult to redress that situation. Another thing I regret is some of the names I used for the dogs in the first story. The intent was to give these characters very common, even silly names to further ground the mundane aspects that kept things grounded. I didn't even think about the fact that "Ace" was also the name of Batman's dog (a character I was well aware of even before he appeared in an episode of BATMAN BEYOND that Sarah and I wrote in -- let me look it up -- 1999), not to mention that "Rex the Wonder Dog" was also a DC Comics character from the 1950s. I'd love to say it was intended as a comics in-joke, but it wasn't. I was just picking very basic names a kid might call their pet, including the unfortunate and embarrassing "Whitey". Oh, Whitey. What was I thinking? If I knew there was going to be a second story, let alone it would become a series, I would have spent some time on those names.

("The Orphan" was the only character name that didn't sound like a kid came up with it, because it was what we called our cat, Crushy, before we rescued him off the street (Crushy was abandoned by neighbors, who let him roam most of the time, because their dog was attacking him -- later they claimed their daughter was allergic to him. He spent a lot of time in our yard and we built a shelter for him. They wouldn't let go of him even though they weren't taking care of him. Eventually they moved, and we took him in. We never met the stinkers, other neighbors were go-betweens after I first placed a note in The Orphan's collar asking if we could adopt him. Other cats beat him up, including Spooky, a black stray who, as it turned out, had no claws. The go-betweens eventually adopted Spooky before they moved. Fun fact: Crushy shared some traits with Winky, our Pirate Girl, as far as timidity and often looking helpless goes).

Above: The late, beloved Orphan, aka Crushy, aka Crushinto, seen here in 2011. Why "Crushinto"?. because I misremembered the "Crushito" character's name from Orange Crush soda, duh. Only the veterinarian knew, we only really called him Crushy.

Above: Sammy, a neighbor's cat that Jill Thompson used as her model for The Orphan (RIP, Sammy).

I would have made a few other changes to the script if I knew we'd be continuing the series. For one thing, there's a panel where Jack the beagle whose doghouse is haunted, is taken to a pet psychic by his worried owners. It's a joke panel, it shows the difference in perceptions between humans and their pets, but the main bit is Jack's reaction to what the people are saying, shown through a thought balloon. This is the only panel (that I know of), where a "plain" animal can understand "plain" human speech without the means of a spell or the human being a ghost or whatever the hell.

The other thing is that we never came up with a title for the series even after we had done four stories. They were listed in the books by the story's name. They were referred to in the office as "Jill and Evan's dog and cat stories". We decided not to go with that title, although it would have been a good laugh seeing it on the cover. By the time Sarah and I wrote the final anthology story, "A Boy And His Dog" (hitting an issue-length 20 pages with Jill's expansion from an 18-page script), Jill and I were in discussions with Dark Horse about a dedicated series, name TBD. Which is why the town gets named Burden Hill in the fourth anthology (through captions, which we used quite a bit in that one, ugh, because sometimes you've bitten off more story than your pages can chew). I was playing around with the Beasts of Burden title after no one could come up with anything better, myself included, so we dropped the town's name in just in case, to set it up. Coming up with a name was such a pain in the ass, I still have trouble sitting all these years later. It was like naming a kid but only having three choices, none of which anyone loved. Sarah kept coming up with joke titles, I still remember "Pugs and His Pals". Anyway, Beasts of Burden was the best I could think of. We're used to it now, but at the time, no one was satisfied by it. Mike Richardson wanted us to call it Beasts of Burden Hill, but I never warmed to it (I think the script for the abandoned REEL FX film project used that title. It also had Pugs as a salty sea dog living on a boat (Burden Hill was now coastal, apparently) that was missing a leg and using a little doggie scooter to get around. Nothing against dog scooters, or dogs with special needs, or salty sea pets (I have a pirate cat), but I never read past his introduction. The first six or so pages were bad enough.  Salty sea dog Pugs was the clincher (I should find the script and try to get through it, someday. The guy who wrote it was probably paid more than everyone who has worked on all the comics combined. His two other movies bombed big-time. Hooray for Hollywood. Big respect to Hollywood. Much respect to Hollywood. Yaaarr, don't mind me, I'm a salty sea cartoonist, with a one-eyed pirate cat. Yaaarrr).

Above: While looking online for an image of Dymphna (see below), I stumbled onto the picture above. This was a piece of concept art by director Shane Acker for the proposed REEL FX adaptation. I always forget that there are a couple of character portraits on his site, which I believe he posted after the project was abandoned. I didn't remember this one of Pugs, to be honest. It's really good, even if it based on the rewritten character. The thing you can't see, or read and hear in your mind, rather, is the terrible dialog written for the character in the screenplay. Woof! (Acker did not write the screenplay, just so you know). It's so freaky to realize this was actually in pre-production and people spent time, energy, thought and money on our characters. Just bizarre.

There's probably more I could say about the first story, but I've already gone to ridiculous lengths. Hopefully you haven't abandoned ship on this post like I jettisoned the REEL FX script. Let's wrap this up, shall we?

Wrapping up.

Stray got a very warm reception.  Dark Horse was very happy with it. Someone on staff cried while reading it, which was sort of shocking to me. Eve after Jill told me she cried while painting the first panel of the last page, where the ghost is freed, hoping to be reunited with her loved ones. A tear drop hit the watercolors and became a part of the panel (I own the original, I'll scan it and try to identify the spot). Mike Richardson let us know how much he liked it. People said nice things at signings. We got a few nice mentions in reviews of the book. Dark Horse republished the story as a Halloween mini-comic for retailers to give away that year.

Scott Allie asked Jill and I to contribute another story for the second anthology, the Book of Witchcraft.

Jill and I talked things over. We asked if we could do another story with "the characters".

I had an idea about witch's familiars...

The next Beasts of Burden series, by me, Benjamin Dewey and Nate Piekos, will be called Dark Woods and Dead Streets.

Unless we change it.