FROM THE VAULT: PART 8: 2008-2009: INBETWEEN DAYS

2: BLACK HAMMER, MINNOW AND MORE

The years of 2008-2009 are a blur to me now. There are a few reasons for this, first and foremost, our son, Gus was born in 2009, and anyone with a new baby knows that those early months are a haze of sleepless nights. On top of this, I was in a bit of a transition in my work and career. I had finished my Essex County books at Top Shelf, and I was working on and then finished my graphic novel, The Nobody for DC/Vertigo. I was no longer trying to “make it” as a cartoonist, but instead, I now had my foot in the door and had a small library of books to my name. Suddenly it wasn’t all about doubting myself and trying to figure out what I could do…now; it was about what I wanted to do. Empowered by this newfound optimism and confidence, I think the floodgates opened for me creatively at this time, and several new projects started to take shape in my oversized sketchbooks.

The exact dates when I worked on these new ideas are mixed up in my head because it feels like I was always jumping between them around the same time, waiting to see which one took hold. We were still living in our first house, which was really tiny, and my “studio” was a small nook in the basement tucked between the washroom and the laundry machines. It wasn’t a glamourous spot to work. It was dark and cramped, but at the same time, it was in this space that I came up with and started to create Sweet Tooth, Black Hammer, Snow Angels, Underwater Welder, and more. I guess that shows that the space you have to work in isn’t always important.

Career-wise I was sort of at a point where I suddenly had all these different paths and avenues open to me. The Nobody was well-received, and everyone at Vertigo editorial seemed to want to keep working with me. So, I was actively trying to develop possible new ideas for a new Vertigo project (this would, of course, lead to Sweet Tooth, but I don’t want to go too far down that road here because Sweet Tooth deserves its own post or two). I was also looking to develop a new graphic novel as a follow-up to Essex County for Chris Staros at Top Shelf. And Diana Schutz, a long-time editor at Dark Horse, also reached out around this time, wanting me to pitch ideas to her. And with all these possibilities, I started working on many ideas…

I just found this journal entry from 2008 that shows all the plans I had. I don’t remember this at all, but apparently, Black Hammer was called “THE BRONZE MEN” for a while, and according to this entry, I was thinking of doing it as a daily online comic strip. You can see that Sweet Tooth and a GN called Minnow were in the plans, too, and flipping the journal a few pages, I found this early sketch for Underwater Welder.

With the help of the dates that I put in my various sketchbooks and notebooks, I have tried to piece together these various projects in chronological order as much as possible. The funny thing is, none of these projects ended up coming to fruition, but Snow Angels and Black Hammer would end up being picked up again years later and would come with various collaborators to great success. And in the case of Minnow, well…that’s the one that got away. But we’ll get to that…  the best way to do this, I think, is to go project by project.

First up are a couple of shorter miscellaneous projects, and this goes to show how skewed my memory is because I had thought the project “Soft Instruments” was done around this time, but looking at the dates on the art, it says 2005, which would put it before Essex County. Soft Instruments was a Victorian-era steampunk story that I started and intended on doing as a serialized online comic strip. Here, the art shows a few of those first strips together on one artboard. And now that I see the dates, I remember starting this before Essex and then abandoning it to do those books. But I later returned to it and pitched this story to Bob Schreck at Vertigo before I pitched him The Nobody, which is probably why my memory has it slotted around 2008. I think I even talked to fellow Toronto Cartoonist Noel Tuazon about drawing this strip at one point, and we pitched it as a team to Dark Horse after Bob turned it down. At any rate, it probably deserved to die an early death. Playing around with the creepy Victorian steampunk stuff was fun, but it didn’t have any legs.

Next up was a book that did see completion, but nobody really saw it. I did a short graphic novel for Scholastic Canada to be used in classrooms to teach kids about the space race.  I only have this one copy of the book myself, and you can see it has my younger sister’s surname on it. She is a teacher and uses this copy in her classroom. I can’t repost the whole book here because I don’t have the rights to it. But here are a few pages…

So, let’s get to Black Hammer. While I had become known for more grounded “indie” comics like Essex County, I still had a deep affection for more mainstream comics and all the superhero comics I read growing up. It’s hard to imagine now, where graphic novels and comics are a massive part of the collective culture. The walls between genres have become so blurred, but even back fifteen years ago, when I first published Essex and came up with Black Hammer, the worlds of “indie” comics and mainstream comics felt much much more separate. If you were an indie cartoonist, there was a real stigma around doing genre heavy work or liking superhero comics. You either did one or the other; the worlds didn’t cross as they do now. I think indie cartoonists doing more literary work were much more siloed and often tried to define themselves by not being part of the mainstream. So, all this to say, it wasn’t really “cool” for indie cartoonists to like superhero comics. But there was a growing generation of creators like myself and Matt Kindt who did more “literary” graphic novels and loved genre work and started to blend these things. Matt did it with his SuperSpy books, and I began to do it with this early version of Black Hammer. The idea behind Black Hammer was very simple, what if I did a superhero comic but in the style and tone of Essex County? What if I took my love of the history of superhero comics and did it in my weird style? So, with all this in mind, I started developing what would one day become Black Hammer.

In these early sketches and notes, you will see that the core cats of Black Hammer, Golden Gail, Barbalien, Colonel Weird, Dragonfly, etc., were pretty much the same as they would later appear in the Dark Horse series.  The noticeable difference is that Abraham Slam was two different characters back then. There was a much older character named Abraham Slam, who was once a golden-aged crimefighter. There was also a separate character just called “The Farmer,” who was more of a silver-aged Joe Kubert war-hero type character. This farmer character also has a robotic mech called “Tractor.”

I would later combine these two characters into the Abraham Slam in the Dark Horse book. But I did use this “Farmer and Tractor” idea as a short comic I did for a Canadian superhero anthology comic several years ago that Scott Kowalski drew. I tried finding a copy of that to post here, but my studio seems to have swallowed it.

I also would call this “The Farmer’s Five” at one point. So here are my earliest notes and character designs, most never before seen (and no, I can’t read my notes anymore either).

I ended up pitching Black Hammer, with me both writing and drawing, to Diana Schutz at Dark Horse in 2008 as a series, and she wanted to do it. Around this same time, within weeks, I also pitched Sweet Tooth to Vertigo, and that got greenlit. So, I had to choose, and I went with Sweet Tooth. Then, of course, years later, I revived Black Hammer with Dean Ormston and ended up bringing it back to doing Dark Horse and multiple Eisner noms, a win for Best New Series in 2017, and about 20 trade volumes later, I now have a whole superhero universe of my own to play with.  I can’t imagine what I would have done if I knew back in 2008 what was to come for “The Farmer’s Five.”

Next up is Minnow. So, what the hell is Minnow? This was an original graphic novel that I pitched to Chris Staros at Top Shelf in 2008. It would have been my follow-up to Essex County. I wrote an entire script for the book, something I’d never done before, and sent that to Chris.

I was riding high off of Essex and Nobody. Everything I had pitched in the previous few years had been greenlit quickly. So, I was caught off guard, and a little angry, when Chris didn’t like the script to Minnow.  It was my first bump in the road for a while, and admittedly, I didn’t react well at the time. Chris saw potential in the story but had some significant notes and criticisms. Re-reading it now, his notes were very valid, and had I worked on it more and tried to address the notes; I probably would have strengthened the story and made a good book. But at the time, I had other options with Dark Horse and Vertigo now in the picture, so I sort of pouted and abandoned the book to do other things. I did this all in private; I never bumped heads with Chris about it or anything. Instead, I sort of quit the book to work on other things.

I still regret this. I feel like Minnow could have been something special had I gotten over my ego and taken his editorial input the way I did when he initially gave me notes on Essex County. And there is not a year that goes by that I don’t dust off Minnow and seriously consider trying it again. I have even contacted other artists to draw the book with me, writing only at various points. Nate Powell, Emi Lenox, and Flavia Biondi have been attached to it at different times. But I could never quite let it go or give up the idea of drawing it myself one day.

This is why I don’t want to get into many details about the story of Minnow here, and I don’t want to spoil it in case I ever decide to do it. But, I will say it is very much in the Essex County style. Set in a small northern Ontario town, a coming of age story with some magical realism involved. Back in 2008, I released this teaser image for the book before I decided to abandon it, so that I will include that here as well. Who knows, maybe 2022 is the year that Minnow surfaces….

If this feels like a whirlwind of stories and ideas to you, trust me, it does for me too. This is the period where I started juggling multiple ideas and stories and jumping between them, one feeding off the other as I do now. And all of this doesn’t include Sweet Tooth or Underwater Welder which were both in development at this time as well.

So, next Vault, I’ll jump into Sweet Tooth and show you all the earliest notebook and sketchbook material and the genesis of what would become Sweet Tooth. And from Sweet Tooth I would get into writing comics for other artists at DC, and a whole new chapter in my career would start.

-Jeff