In April 2001, while staying for a couple of days in a motel in Lake Elsinore CA, I bought a comic book.
I still have it somewhere. It was issue #13 of the 24-issue Rising Stars comic by J Michael Straczynski, an epic that should be read by both those new to comics and those who are embittered veterans. It is easily the best cure for the Civil War blues, that’s for sure - and there isn’t a few decades of continuity to sort through (and ignore by choice in places) if one wants to keep up with the story.
While reading this comic book - with a case of Wild Cherry Pepsi, and listening to Ten by Pearl Jam, which I had bought from the second hand record store that shared a parking lot with the motel I was staying in - my mind was filled with ideas. Heroes grasped at my subconscious, demanding attention, glorifying in the deeds I imagined for them.
They have taken many different shapes since then. It was only in 2004 did I concieve of a setting named Minute Silence, with a unifying genesis story for all involved; but still some of the characters that I originally envisaged stuck with me, in particular, two that lodged so deep in my mind that I couldn’t shake them from any other incarnation of Minute Silence.
There have been four of them. The first looked very much like the Golden Age, in which the Enhanced flew around like true heroes, battling the evils of the world and living the life of public figures, adored by the populace. The second was darker, grimmer, and evolved from my reading Watchmen and V For Vendetta; it carried a hint of X-Men to it, a world in which the Enhanced were viewed with mistrust, and were suppressed by those in power. It carried more of my political leanings, and the message wasn’t one of hope and justice, but one of standing against hopelessness and injustice. The Contingency era, as I called it.
The third incarnation was a mental exercise undertaken over New Year 06/07, which resulted in what I named the Rebirth - it was to start at the very beginning, when the virus was first unleashed and the Enhanced didn’t know what they were, how they were made or what their purpose was. It included many new characters and embraced new concepts, such as the destiny of the individual, how one deals with power, and the harshness of a world that fears what it doesn’t understand.
So it was in January 2008 that I began work on the fourth incarnation of Minute Silence, which has no alternative name or series monicker: it is what I wanted Minute Silence to be. A dramatic re-imagining of the way in which the Enhanced came about, a re-tooling of the two core characters that have sat shotgun in my head for seven years, and the true beginning of what has turned into an alternate history all of its own ran rampant in my head; Juggler and Calibre (whose first name was Bullet) found their place in the first days of the Enhanced, a group now far less a widespread Marvel-a-like, and now more of a unit of their own.
The book as I imagined it should be changed a great deal between brain and page. Many scenes were introduced that I previously didn’t concieve of; a few were cut or altered radically. Certain aspects of the characters went unexplored, while other aspects were brought closer to the fore.
And now, after some hundred thousand words, bordering on 180 pages and six and a half month’s hard slog, it is finally finished.
It needs a brush-up, of course. Various little tweaks and checks - I don’t entirely trust spell-checkers, because it’s too easy for “cases he” to become “case she”. But the main thing is, the story I wanted to tell when I opened that issue of Rising Stars has finally been written, and I am proud of both it and myself.
And if anyone tells me I am ripping of Heroes…call the police.
