GHOST ZERO BLOG

(Hello, everyone!  This is long and rambling, so you might want to get a snack before reading!)

In 1999, I learned of a new, superhero-themed MMORPG coming out called “City of Heroes”.  I’ve always been a superhero fan…I often pretended to be one as I was racing around the farm as a kid and drew them constantly, so I started reading the forums there to find out more about the game.  Some members of the community were interested in coming up with characters we might play in the game, and a few of the folks were interested in the pulp genre.  I had found pulps late in my life…first through old radio show collections (still a big, OTR fan, by the way), and later through the pulp stories of the SPIDER, so I wound up talking about pulps with those guys.

Someone suggested writing collaborative fiction involving the characters…each person would write a part of the story without knowledge of how it might ultimately end….and I found myself thinking about that “perfect” pulp avenger for me.  I wanted him to be involved with ghosts..I’m a huge supernatural fan..and to be a detective with interesting weapons, and Charles Pallentine-The Revenant, was born.

Charles was a typical, wealthy vigilante who wore a skull mask, had the mysterious “Seven Spirit Ring”, and his trusty, twin LeMat pistols.  The writer’s group eventually called themselves “The Midnight Society” with the motto: Audentas Fortuna Juvat (Fortune Favors the Bold) and we started writing some fantastically fun fiction.  That lasted for a few years, and several stories, until eventually, we all went our separate ways.  There’ll always be a warm spot in my heart for “Doc Midnight”, “Mister Mercury”, “The Bogatyr”, “Captain Lightning”, “The Nothing Man” and all the rest.

Years passed, and eventually in 2005 I started planning out fulfilling my lifelong dream of creating my own comic book.  The Revenant chararcter came to mind as an obvious choice, but I had already written lots about him already and wanted a fresh perspective.  One of the interesting things about the “Seven Spirit Ring” is that when the wielder dies, he becomes the ghostly mentor to the next person to who uses the ring, so I started thinking about the possibilities of who might get the ring after Charles died.  Eventually, I settled on a teenage boy named Edmund “Eddie” Quick to be the new ghostly avenger.  It was interesting to me how the boy would grow and change from his experiences as he followed his new “destiny”, and how he and Charles would interact.

With my “new” character in mind, I started designing him.  He would differ from the original Revenant character, in that he could be “possessed” by Charles for short periods of time, taking on the spectral visage of a skull with smoking eye sockets (to the curious, it’s not smoke.  It’s ectoplasm that is “leaking” into this world through the strange “combination” that Charles and Eddie make.  Eddie’s flesh turns transparent to some extent…more about this will be revealed later), and his LeMat pistols would be “loaded” with ectoplasmic bullets.

When I’d gotten the “look” of the character down to some satisfaction, I contacted a sculptor about creating a bust of the Revenant character.  The sculptor’s name was Eric Nocella Diaz, he loved the idea, and sculpted an incredible bust of the character.  Eric became a mentor, cheerleader, and all-around friend to me….the first of many…and I’m still very grateful for his talent and friendship. 

I took about a year to write and thumbnail out the first GZ story called “The Fleshless Legion”.  I was very intimidated by the process and unsure of myself and my talents, when I saw a one-panel comic called “Spacegirl” being put out weekly by the talented comic Travis Charest and thought “hey…one panel at a time?  That’s alot like the old newspaper strips…I could do that!”  I promptly tossed my “Fleshless Legion” idea (thought it would resurface as a short story later), sat down, and on December 2006 drew my first panel of a story I called “The Sea of the Dead”.

I put the story online as a webcomic and was relieved by the positive response given by readers.  I continued putting out a panel a week until I’d finished the story after 48 panels.  It was a great experience, helping me gain confidence in my art, and instilling the discipline to sit down every evening after my day job to work on the story.

Not long after that, I found that Image Comics was going to publish a comic written by Rob Worley (who is a great guy, by the way) called “The Revenant”.  Ouch.  I decided that instead of having to deal with the confusion of two comic book “Revenants” out there, I’d change my character’s name.  I went back to the pulps for inspiration in my search.  The name had to be pulp sounding, sound like something a 1940’s teenager would come up with, and not be lame-sounding if used today.  I loved the covers and storys of the old pulp character “Captain Zero”, so, I decided that “Ghost Zero” would fulfill my needs, and my character had a new name.

Another friend I met along the way was Anthony Schiavino, a New Jersey pulp writer and letterer extraordinarre who lettered my Ghost Zero comics, and who eventually taught me how to letter myself.  For my part, I introduced him to bourbon.  It was through Anthony that I also met Doug Klauba, a fantastic professional illustrator who has won much acclaim in the pulp world by his covers for Moonstone Book’s “Phantom” comics.  Doug loved the GZ character, and invited me up to Wizard World Chicago to meet Moonstone’s Editor-in-Chief, Joe Gentile.  Joe offered to give Ghost Zero a publishing home at Moonstone, and that led to the creation of the short story “Ghost Zero and the Cast-Iron Coffin!” that will debut in both “Phantom #26″ and “Buckaroo Banzai: Prequel #2″ in December, 2008.

So, there you have it, the story behind the creation of the character.  I dearly love GZ and the stories, which focus more on a rural setting than in the big city.  I said once that I wanted GZ to have a “Norman Rockwell” kind of feeling…like it could happen in any small town in America.  Ghost Zero is the culmination of everything I enjoy and have an interest in, and I hope to be going on the adventures with Eddie and Charles for years to come.

I hope you come, too.

-Dave