Why I'm Here

A few of you that I have gotten to chat with have noticed I have no artwork posted here -- there's a reason for that.

I'm a horrible drawer, painter, or inker.  I mean, I totally suck at it -- my figures look totally unrealistic, with a lack of consistency that would make them look like stylistic, rather than just incompetent.  I know what I want to see on a page -- and in time, I might even acquire enough skill.  

When I was a lot younger, I would read the old comics my brother stored in his closet.   Most of them were from the early to mid-70's, which meant I got to see a lot of Neal Adams on Batman, GL, X-Men, Avengers, and my personal favorite, Deadman.  (The analysts will have a field day with that, someday.)  But there were some Batman comics in the middle of all that stuff that weren't drawn by Adams; they were drawn by Frank Robbins, who also wrote the stories.  And Robbins, to my untrained child's eye, was AWFUL.  It was messy, bright, garish, and all out of proportion.  He wasn't anything like Adams -- or even Jim Aparo.  (Hey, I was a kid when I read this stuff -- when I read Aparo's Spectre stories, I understood how great the guy was.)  The point of all this?  I see my drawings as Robbins to you folks' Adams or Aparo.  I know what I want to do; I just have nowhere near the skill yet -- if ever - to do it.

I'm a writer.  I've wanted to write comics since I was that girl trying to figure out why I liked what I liked in comics.  What I liked most was the big, crazy awesome stories that still had a look of being grounded in reality.  Give me Batman chasing Joker along a beach in Gotham (hey Chicago has a beach at the top of the Mag Mile; so why not?), and I will get you to that point.  I missed most of the 90's comics because I was too busy being a "girl" -- but when I came back to them, I found stuff like Nextwave, Planetary, Hitman, Runaways, Chase, Secret Six and Chew.  Not everything has to look like Neal Adams anymore.  But one thing I hope you noticed as that all those titles have story crammed in as much as they can hold.  I cannot write 22 pages of waiting for people to get out of the bathroom.  I won't make you draw them, either.

I want to write ordinary people doing extraordinary things because they have to in incredible ways.  There's a lot of ways people screw their courage to the sticking place -- my characters try to run that spectrum.  They do it because of duty, they do it because of lust, they do it because of infatuation, they do it because of politics, they do it because of hunger, they do it because of desperation, they do it because of nobility, they do it because of fear, they do it because of faith -- they do it because of love.  Heroes, villains, and all those in between -- in a Rebecca Martin story -- I HOPE -- there are no small actions.  Only small actors, who find themselves forced to be big.  I can't promise you a giant "'splode!" in every story -- but if I don't give you one, you will know why you didn't get it.

I will start posting stray pages here -- enough I hope to find a partner.  I want to make this dream come real.  And, if you don't like something, or don't understand something, ASK.  The only question I can't answer is the one that isn't asked.  For example:  I'm married, 38 years old, and my Pandora is playing Steely Dan's "Aja" at the moment -- because I have their channel on my shuffle.  I also have on another screen the page of a script where an art gallery owner and her husband are confronting the presence that caused Noah's Flood and the Plagues of Egypt.  Why?  Well, he found the staff of Moses, and that sort of messing around with the cosmic applecart is not a good thing.   Supposedly.  To find out the rest, stay tuned.