FROM THE VAULT PART 7: 2008: THE NOBODY

So what do I do after Essex County?  I had spent every hour of my waking life from about 1999 to the publication of Essex County in 2006 dreaming of “making it” in comics. And by making it" I really meant getting published and putting out work that I could be proud of. Essex would accomplish that for me and more.

In 2008 I was nominated for two Eisners for Essex and the book sold much better than either I, or Top Shelf, ever imagined it would. I still wasn’t making a living on comics, but I was at least supplementing the income I made at the restaurant with royalties, so that I wasn’t living paycheck to paycheck anymore.

And, the success of Essex also meant I suddenly had new opportunities in comics open up to me. But I was also feeling a lot of pressure about what to do next. Essex had been a very personal story, one that drew on my entire life and childhood. It was sort of the classic “sophomore slump” that many bands have. They make a great first album because they have spent a lifetime saving up all those first songs, then suddenly, with all those songs now sung, they have to write a second album and record it in less than a year. That was sort of how I was feeling after Essex. I wanted to follow it up with something just as good and just as meaningful to me, but in a lot of ways, I had emptied the chamber making Essex.

It was around this time that I received a very unexpected email that would force this issue for better or worse. Bob Schreck was then an editor at DC Comics Vertigo Imprint. He was also a Portlander and knew Top Shelf co-publisher Brett Warnok pretty well. Brett had given Bob a copy of Essex County and Bob loved it, then he reached out to me to see if I wanted to pitch a project to him for Vertigo.

I had been an intense follower of Vertigo comics as a teenager. Vertigo officially launched in 1993 when I was 16 or 17, the perfect age to really fall in love with those early Vertigo books like Sandman, Hellblazer, Doom Patrol and Animal Man.  So, the chance to publish a book with Vertigo was mind-blowing to me. But what the hell would I pitch to Bob? I was really lacking inspiration and searching around for my next book. But I didn’t want this opportunity to slip by me.

Two random and separate things inspired an idea that I would pitch to Bob. Around this time I was re-reading some classic H.G. Wells stories. And I had also gotten really into Joe Kubert’s art and in particular his classic issues of The Unknown Soldier. I just loved the way Joe inked and the way he drew this guy with a bandaged face. Something about this, combined with re-reading H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man clicked and The Nobody was born.

The idea was to take Wells’ story, which was by now public domain, and do a modern update of it through an “Essex County-type” small town lens.  My love of Twin Peaks is also an obvious inspiration. The result was the story of a bandaged stranger showing up in a sleepy northern fishing town and the chaos that ensues.

As you will notice in these early sketches I cycled through a few possible titles before settling on “The Nobody”.  The town of “Large Mouth” in The Nobody was inspired by the summers I spent as a boy fishing with my family near North Bay, Ontario. I grew to love northern Ontario and tried to capture that feel in this story.

So, I pitched this idea to Bob and, as luck would have it, Vertigo Executive Editor, Karen Berger was also looking to do a new line of “indie-flavoured” graphic novels around this time (my friend Matt Kindt would also pitch to Bob at this time and end up doing his book Revolver for Vertigo at the same time). As luck would have it, my style, and the buzz from Essex County, fit Karen’s mandate perfectly. Bob really loved the pitch too and a couple of weeks later he emailed to tell me that Karen had greenlit the book!

I can’t emphasise enough what a huge deal this was for me at the time. Like I said, I was still working at the restaurant and not making a living with comics. But working for Vertigo meant that I would receive a page-rate for the first time. All these new Vertigo GN’s were to be 144-pages long which meant I would receive close to $60K for doing the book. This was life changing money for Lesley-Anne and I back then. I was able to quit my restaurant job and work full-time on The Nobody for a year. At the time I thought this would be the first and last time I would make any money with comics, but I figured I could at least work full-time as a cartoonist for a year and then I’d probably just go back to working part-time in another restaurant. Either way, there was a sense of freedom that I had never felt.

Up to this point I had only ever created comics for myself, and then found a publisher later. I had never gone into a project with a publisher already attached, a set page count, and all the expectations that come with that. So, despite the freedom I felt in quitting my day job, I did feel an intense amount of pressure while drawing this book. The other aspect that added a lot of challenges for me creatively was the set page count. This book had to come in at 144 pages. With Essex County, I just drew whatever I wanted. If a scene felty like it needed to be 10 pages long, I let it be ten pages. But with The Nobody I had to learn to be more economical with my storytelling and fit each scene into a set and scripted page count. I’ve gotten a lot better at this over the years and it’s not an issue anymore, but when I was doing The Nobody it definitely felt restrictive.

I do remember being incredibly excited for the book to come out. Below are some early promo image ideas I had that never got made.

The Nobody was published as a hardcover GN in 2008. I attended my first conventions with Vertigo and got to meet Karen Berger for the first time. We hit it off immediately and that opened the door to me pitching Sweet Tooth soon afterwards.

Having said that I have always had reservations about how The Nobody turned out.  I do feel that The Nobody is a book where you can see my growing pains on the page. It’s a transitional work between the deeply personal Essex County and me learning to apply that kind of storytelling to a more genre-centric story as I would do with Sweet Tooth. I have always felt that The Nobody was sort of “the one that got away from me”. Like I was not able to rise above the pressure and limitations to tell the best version of this story. If I could do it again now, I would likely make the book twice as long and really flesh out the characters and town. Having said that there is not a convention I go to where at least one person brings The Nobody to get signed and tells me it’s their favorite book of mine. So, in the end I have learned to let it go and be what it is embrace that.

A lot happened in my life at this time too and it is all linked to The Nobody. I got to quit my job (and never ended up having to go back to restaurant work thanks to a little boy with antlers). We bought our first house and moved out to the east end of Toronto, and about a year later we would have our son, Gus (both the real one, and the comic book one). So it’s hard not to think positively about The Nobody now.

The Nobody has been out of print for some time at Vertigo and I now have the publishing rights back. I have planned on maybe adding a few new scenes and re-publishing with Image or Berger Books for a while, but I have not had the time. Maybe this will give me the kick I need to get that going for next year.

Until then, here is a digital download of the full book once again for anyone who missed it when I dropped it back in September. And I’ll see you back in the Vault in a month or so with a deep dive into the creation of Sweet Tooth!

Nobody

37.6MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

-Jeff