Posted on by michaelwconrad

What do I know about immortality?

So here we are, a handful of days following the announcement that I will be part of the creative teams for DC Future State “Immortal Wonder Woman” as well as “Midnighter” and I wanted to share the story about how these things came to be and some reflections regarding them.

At the beginning of 2020, I, like many creators, felt like the future was mine to take. I was to attend several conventions, notably one of my favorites, ECCC in Seattle where I was to meet with a number of upstart publishers that are currently the source of many of your favorite books. I had my foot in the door to work on an IP that is super near and dear to my heart, and I was beginning to think I could wave my hand and make things happen. “Doom Patrol” and our “Tomb of Dracula” story in Marvel’s “Bizarre Adventures” seemed to have captured the imaginations of readers and “Tremor Dose” my OGN at ComiXology Originals was getting more than its share of attention. 2020 was mine to shape and define.

Covid fucked up those plans, as well as the plans of everyone I know. Everything shut down, doors swung closed, and the thing I had spent years of my life striving toward fell into a deep set relief on the wall I had battered myself against. I wasn’t back to square one, but this was a major wound that would take the better part of the year to heal from.

So, I tried to do the thing we all promised ourselves we would do. I made stuff. In the first two months of Covid I made two comics while working on a video game. I was really proud to have done those books but they made it very clear to me that while I had an audience, it wasn’t growing much at all. I spent too much time wondering how one develops and expands an audience. It remains a mystery to me, but I do know that it took a bit of a toll on me creatively. You see, I’m used to this kind of shit. I played music for many years and most of the bands I played with made it RIGHT THERE to the cusp of being something people were aware of. We worked with small labels, toured extensively, recorded out of our pocket, played with bands that would shape the face of music to come and yet… we were always too early or too late, or fate would pull our card and remove us from the equation.

Becky will tell you, I didn’t believe “Doom Patrol” was gonna happen, even after being paid. I’ve been so programmed for disappointment that I figured that surely something would kill the project before it ever made it to the stands. I feared Gerard would decide it didn’t work, or that the editors didn’t want to risk their name on someone like me. When word came that Young Animal and the rest of the imprints over at DC were gonna fold I was gutted. Months had passed and I was sure nothing would come of the work we had done. Thankfully it did happen and I was able to put one up in the win category. That issue of “Doom Patrol” will forever be something that I’m grateful for, it’s quite possibly the moment when I rediscovered my capacity to hope for the best.

I can’t say that hope is always a good thing. Conceptually it works, certainly for folks in dire situations hope is often a critical component to making it through. But sometimes hope will lead to expectation, and expectation is the keystone to entitlement. While I pride myself on being humble (like the most humble, wayyyyy more humble than you could even dream of… so humble it likely deserves an award or a yearly parade), like everyone else I feel like the work I do is often overlooked and marginalized. This leads to bitter feelings and an endless quest to feel seen. I had crossed over to a foul place of feeling like I was due greater attention and more opportunities. I say this in effort to be honest, knowing full well that this is a sickening way to be, but our secret truths are often repugnant and can only be discussed openly when we see how wrong we were.

Hope isn’t the bad guy, but it’s likely to bring along his good homie Ego to the party without asking if it’s cool. Ego will always bring his cousin Disappointment, who in turn will invite his brothers Bitterness and Grief. Before you know it they start bringing in more of their people and what was intended to be a small gathering of good folks turns into the kind of rager that requires the host to secretly call in the cops to break up. We never wanna see the cops, but we don’t want the responsibility of tempering our own feelings and expectations so we put it in the hands of someone else. Editors, publishers, people who should know who I am because I wrote a hell of an issue!

I felt like I was disappearing. I’ve repeated that a lot over the past few months, a kind of fucked up way of displacing the blame. I had gotten wrapped up in my own expectant glory and was gulping down my own cyanide laced Kool-Aid. I was dumb to do so, I had ignored finding balance and feeling gratitude and had lept into feeling due more.

I share this shame as if I was stomping about with big demands, which isn’t the case. These feelings were internalized and I conducted myself in a more idealized manner. I would share the truth about how blessed I felt, and withhold the parts about wanting more. Facing myself now I understand that this kind of thing is very human and very normal. We are all seekers, even with plenty we want more, an overabundance, and even then we will seek. This is a critical element of abuse and if you don’t have moments of reflection such as this you will never be charitable, understanding, and compassionate. You will become a hoarder of emotions and commodities. You will become a dragon nested on a mountain of ill gained wealth and feelings that have been so tamped down they have become crystalline vestiges of the qualities that you have sacrificed in pursuit of the unattainable.

Do I still strive toward something greater? Of course! It’s fun to chase this vaporous idea of success, even as it changes form and deceives you at every turn. My father is an avid fisherman and he would be the first to tell you that a bass on the line is only a small part of the allure of it. It’s the ritual, the escape, the mystery of what waits in the darkened waters. The good stuff swims deep as David Lynch says, and the good stuff is only good when it’s rare and elusive. This is true in love and life and most certainly with regard to big creative goals.

Months into the Quarantine I was no longer feeling like I could keep it up. I wanted to keep making things but it felt unimportant. In addition to the disease we were seeing all kinds of dramatic and painful things happening day after day. My little dreams didn’t matter. Comics didn’t matter. I didn’t matter. In many ways this still rings true, but I worked to redevelop my relationship with the process and that continues to this very moment.

Out of the blue an email came through from the most unlikely editor. This editor is someone who I thought hated me, or at least saw me as some kind of abscess. The email specifically asked about me and my interest in writing a Midnighter book with Becky.

This was a no brainer of course, YES I am interested in writing Midnighter! I’m no fool, I recognize that Becky is the target here, but goddammit my name was there too… I was asked for! I felt like a polaroid slowly revealing its subject. I had been seen, however vaguely, and I was again visited by Hope. This time I was prepared and demanded that we meet in a public space and I let my loved ones know where I’d be and if I didn’t return to send help.

Immediately I knew what I wanted to do with Midnighter and I think my enthusiasm was appreciated. After a video conference with some of the other Future State teams I felt validated knowing that these ideas had inspired them to connect with us further to tie the pieces together. Not long after this the Goddess herself presented.

When we got asked to do the “Immortal Wonder Woman” book I was more prepared for the good feelings. I was riding high on Midnighter, and I was ready to simply smile and nod and commit to telling the best damn Wonder Woman story I could. It all came together quickly and since completing it I feel confident in saying it is going to shake people to their core. Between the recent work on Midnighter and Wonder Woman I feel like I have made the most of this opportunity and I have been a valuable asset to the team. I cannot wait for y’all to see what we’ve done on both of those books.

After these things come out I don’t expect anything. I hope that people like it. I hope I have done my editors proud, and that we’ve given the readers something worthy of attention. I hope that I find other opportunities as a result, but these are the limits of Hope this time. I have a healthier relationship with it and I feel proud to have killed that greedy nag that it can become. 

I’m one of several newer voices in Future State and I’ve seen some strange things as a result that I would like to comment on in closing. Something that has kind of bothered me is the way people have responded to some of my peers on social media as if they stumbled onto a loose bit of cash tossed down the street by some zephyr beyond their control. This is strange because getting a job is never like winning the lottery, especially in cases such as this. The folks who have contributed to the strange tapestry of Future State have busted their asses off in ways that some cannot imagine. Indeed, maybe some can, because it is this kind of heartache and soul crushing rejection and radio silence and perseverance required that keeps some from pursuing this kind of work. Even in my case as a co-writer, if what I contributed wasn’t up to snuff I would be cut. Plain and simple, this isn’t luck, it’s the product of a lot of sleepless nights, self doubt, and a willingness to walk through fire; and that’s just to get to the dance. We will only know if the pain was worth it when we are done and our self assessment is balanced against the response of the readership and critics. In the meantime we wait and develop stomach issues. We question our own value, right to the core, bypassing the work entirely. If you don’t like what we’ve done it hurts, I don’t care what anyone else says.

That aside, it’s been really neat seeing people get excited for this event. There is so much good stuff going on and it’ll be really thrilling when January and February roll around and the most important ingredient of the creative process is added. You.

Posted on by michaelwconrad

Guilty Bullets

I can’t imagine you will think well of me after what I am about to confess. Truthfully I’m not doing this to clear my conscience, I’ve made peace with the fact that I did some rotten things when I should have known better. I suppose I’m sharing this in an effort to create a more honest representation of my young life after the previous posts. Make no mistake, I was a thoughtful and sensitive child, but I was also a dumb kid capable of doing things that make me cringe in retrospect.

I had a partner in this, an older kid from around the corner. I was 12 at the time which would have made Shawn 15 or so. He was a big, rough kid who would have made a fine addition to our small towns struggling highschool football program, but Shawn had asthma that kept him from most forms of athletics. I was sensitive to this plight and when he would get gassed out I would hang back with him while the other kids in the neighborhood ran around, uncaring about the fact that medically Shawn couldn’t keep up. I say I did this out of empathy, but I was also using this opportunity to win favor with someone who normally would have dismissed me as a potential friend due to my age and nerdy qualities.

Shawn was cool, “wicked cool” as we would say, he was also a royal shithead. He had fought with my older brother, blown up toads with fireworks, taught us all kinds of “facts of life” stuff we had no business knowing, and was generally a bad influence. He was just one of those shitball kids who would later grow into a shitball man. As far as I know he’s still in that same neighborhood, in that same run down house, catching the occasional charge for dope slinging; really taking advantage of the opioid crisis that’s devastating huge portions of Southern New Hampshire. Like many quaint small towns across America without much going on, heroin has become the Great Pastime for once thriving commuter cities not far from major metropolitan areas.

Shawn grew to like me in those younger years, he taught me how to throw and catch, allowed me to look at the pornography in his tree house, he even once invited me to walk to the school to watch a baseball game with him. I became so excited by the idea and the permission granted by my mother (who, frankly seemed relieved that her bookish kid had an interest in something other than dragons) that I ended up not being able to go after all when I started throwing up all over myself. It was nerves. Similarly, not too many years later when I was to attend my first concert I became very anxious thinking that I would surely lose my virginity there. I had all of these strange notions about how life worked due to my sheltered upbringing. My parents exposed me to a lot of stuff, just not the stuff that would end up defining me as an adult, like film, music, and art. I had no idea that baseball games were boring, and that going to a punk show is not how one typically gets laid.

Anyway, Shawn kept coming around, while I was rarely allowed to leave the yard for extended periods this didn’t prevent Shawn from joining us in wiffle ball, or pitching around his Nerf football, one with a tail on it that would allow even an untrained arm to cast out long bombs that would spiral through the air like we knew what we were doing. My little brother, 5 years my junior would even be able to join, and along with him we added my direct neighbor Sammy.

Sammy was a pretty wild kid, foul mouthed and seemingly aware of life beyond his young age. He, like my brother, was barely old enough to be attending elementary school. He was the kind of problematic kid that had a spot with us only for lack of other viable options. There were plenty of kids around, but the aloof qualities that have been cited as the defining characteristic of my generation were already apparent in my local peer group. The other kids had stuff to do indoors that didn’t involve sweat, itchy grass, and hanging with the refuse of the neighborhood. For all I knew these kids had been instructed to stay away from me, perhaps through osmosis I had acquired the same reputation that Shawn was already developing in that little loop of stubby homes on the hill. 

Sammy didn’t have the kind of parenting that might protect him from kids like us. He and his parents lived with his grandmother and grandfather, but we rarely saw them. I had heard rumors that his father had shot a man a few years back. His grandparents seemed kindly enough, but they didn’t want us running on their grass, so my yard became the place we would do our thing. We were fenced in on one side, the backside barrier was a line of impossibly tall pine trees, with a bushy hedge on the other side. This backyard was all boxed in by the house and the garage that housed the hens. It was in many ways a perfect place to play, generally flat and soft enough that if you fell (and you would fall) the grass and soil would absorb much of the impact.

We did have the ongoing issue of fouling the ball off over the fenced side. The fence didn’t exist as part of our yard, it was a town requirement as there was an inground pool in the neighboring yard, owned and maintained by a woman named Michael, just like me. She was ok, but if we popped a foul and jumped the fence to retrieve the ball she would dress us down, admonishing us for trespassing. She rightly feared the lawsuit that would follow one of us falling in the pool and dying, or some other concern that seemed outlandish to us in our youth. She would tell us to knock and have her grab the ball, but if we were to take that approach we would have been at the place constantly. We ended up moving to the other side of the yard, but then the delight of a “homerun” became a collective groan from all as one of us would have to be elected to knock on Michael’s door. Eventually we tried to agree to a “no homers” rule that Shawn refused to follow, saying it was impossible for him to pull his swing, he was just too strong. Really though Shawn was the only one who would have needed to adjust, the rest of us too small and unrefined to hit a homer with any regularity.

Sammy desperately wanted to be respected so he was constantly jockeying for position, mostly by picking at my little brother Steven. He knew he couldn’t get away with much if he were to come at his older, bigger, playmates like Shawn and I, so Steve became his target. During football he would get rough with him, he would cuss him out, and at times get bold enough to try his hand at Steve in fisticuffs. Steve didn’t need anyone to defend him, already significantly bigger than Sammy (Steve now stands at 6’7” and had a beard fit for the Viking warship) and handy with the fists from having two brothers who would periodically test him in martial combat. But, being that this was my brother and that Sammy was just some shitbird kid that we hung out with out of some compulsory need to round out teams; I didn’t cut any slack and would often end up whooping on Sammy to remind him of his role in our backyard hierarchy. Shawn seemed to really enjoy such moments, egging on both sides equally until it became physical (usually briefly, with wrestling and choking being the primary violent engagement) and Sammy either retreated home or would cool his jets.

We all knew that Sammy, like Shawn was asthmatic. While Shawn got by with a couple puffs off of his inhaler, Sammy had this whole mask situation he had to do a couple times a day it seemed. It looked like an oxygen mask from TV and would puff out thick, milky, plumes of vapor. He needed to wear it for several minutes and more than once we left him behind, youthful impatience not allowing even a few moments delay once plans were set. If we did go out we would have to scamper off home by the time the streetlights came on, so time was a commodity we couldn’t spare, even if it meant leaving Sammy out entirely.

I don’t recall Sammy ever losing his wind like Shawn would, maybe that mask was something Shawn really could have used too, or maybe Sammy was just so damned determined to find his place in the pack that he refused to ever allow us to see such a thing. Sammy was actually kind of a bad ass now that I look back on it, a real turd maybe, but he was tough as hell.

One day he and Steve were starting to get into it and uncharacteristically Shawn broke up a scrum between the two. Incredibly he said was sick of the violence. He had something else in mind, a more gentlemanly way to settle the dispute. 

“We’re gonna do a decathlon.” Shawn said, like we were all supposed to know what that meant. I was vaguely familiar with the term, but I didn’t actually know what events comprised such a thing. “10 challenges, 10 tests of strength, endurance, and agility. Winner take all.” What the winner would take was never questioned and would remain unidentified. It was actually a brilliant way to end the fight because suddenly the three of us were all so enthralled at the idea of a decathlon that the dispute became unimportant.

“I’m gonna be Sammy’s coach and Mike is gonna be Steve’s.” Even then I hated being called “Mike” but whatever- DECATHLON!

“We go to 10, each one is worth 1 point. Who ever wins more events is the… winner.” Shawn continued, we were all glad that he was being thorough, it seemed like he knew exactly what he was talking about and we were glad to have someone so worldly in our clique.

“Now, before we start I need a coaches meeting, you guys start stretching out, we will be right with you.” Shawn said authoritatively, then grabbed me around the shoulder and pulled me along to the side yard by the oak tree that was a haven for the hated and reviled gypsy moth caterpillars.

“I’m gonna make sure Steve wins.” Shawn said with a wry grin, quietly so the guys couldn’t hear.

“How ya gonna do that?” I said. I didn’t think Steve needed any unfair advantage, but I was all ears.

“I’m gonna wear his ass out. His asthma will get him, it’ll be cake!” Shawn said devilishly, I just smiled back, unsure of what the plan was still but not wanting to look like I wasn’t keeping up.

We returned to our competitors. I didn’t know what to do so I just had Steve stretch out, meanwhile Sammy was kicking out burpees while Shawn, as his coach barked encouragement. The burpee is essentially a form of torture, if you’ve ever had the misfortune of doing them, you too will know the torment and toll it takes. After a couple sets of burpees Shawn saw fit to initiate the first round of the decathlon, a sprint to the end of the yard and back.

Sammy was visibly sucking wind already as he lined up against Steve, and the pair took completely untrained three point positions at the imaginary starting like. Shawn counted down from 3 and they took off.

Being bigger was a disadvantage in this event, but Steve was able to trounce Sammy without issue in what may have otherwise been a pretty close race. Back at the start Steve was awarded his first point and Sammy was commanded to do a set of 50 jumping jacks.

“You’re just not warmed up yet, now beat your face!” Shawn shouted, echoing something he had heard at football tryouts. In this case “beating your face” amounted to push-ups, it was a new term for me. Once Sammy could do no more, it was on to the next part of the decathlon which was the long jump. After Steve made short work of him in that one it was immediately followed by the triple jump, and again the already exhausted Sammy came up short, in one part due to having all the gas sucked from his tank, in other part simply by being physically smaller than my brother.

The events continued on and eventually the coaching sessions became even more intense, at times with all three of us shouting at him to do more and more strenuous prep work between events. To his credit Sammy was keeping up with the demands. Sammy didn’t win a single event, and as we celebrated Steve’s gold medal, Sammy slumped under that gnarly old oak tree panting like a dog, his face blotchy with reddened cheeks, and a very pale hue elsewhere. His lips were purple and he said very little. Sammy was right there on the edge of a significant asthma attack.

I don’t feel good about this, this is just one of those things that dumb kids do prior to the development of a well defined moral compass. At the time I felt no remorse, but looking back on it this was incredibly cruel. The very thing that enabled me to forge a kind of friendship with Shawn was being taken advantage of and I was unable to see how heartless and stupid I had been to allow such a thing to happen. Sammy recovered without a major medical issue, but it did take some time for him to rise and find his legs again. 

We continued to play and Sammy, being as young as he was, never realized how he had worked over by a couple of idiots. He was happy to have been coached by the oldest and coolest among us, and that is the way of kids. We just want to be seen, and in Sammy’s case I don’t know that he got a lot of that from his father. 

I didn’t learn anything from this situation at the time, there is no great moral victory here, and on the scale of bad things I’ve done it doesn’t really rank, all’s well that ends well right? Sammy didn’t get killed by the neighborhood kids… but this is one of those memories that pops up every once in awhile and chills me in the same way a close call with a bad car accident might haunt you, a dodged bullet.

This was not the last time I would be the bullet.