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From Unpublished Author To Six Stories in a Year

Robert Menegus writes,

Space Monsters, Kaiju Taxidermies, Steampunk Zombies, Hallucinated Demons, Lab-Grown Beasts, Shadowy Specters… these are the subjects of my recent work, and this is story behind their creation.

Compared to writers like Charles Soule, Jonathan Hickman, and Brian Michael Bendis, six stories in a year seems like nothing, but for me, as an up and coming writer, it's exhilarating. The title of this article is somewhat misleading, however, since it's not like I woke last January and decided to write comics. Like most writers, there's a lot of work that hasn't gone much farther than my hard drive. Not including the stories that were recently accepted for publication by Arcana, GrayHaven, Alterna, Then it was Dark and SciFi Max, I've written scripts for nearly three hundred comic pages, somewhere close to 100,000 words of prose stories, poems, and short film scripts, and around two dozen plot treatments. That's equivalent to three trade paperbacks, a novel, and a bunch of story outlines, more or less as practice.

It's always hard starting as a comic writer if you don't know an artist, because everything you write is never fully realized. That's why I teamed up with a filmmaker I knew and made a photo novella when I was first starting out. Looking back on it, the result wasn't very good, but it did teach me how much can fit in a panel and on a page, how to letter my work, and that I needed to improve before I went searching for an artist. I studied published comics, read a bunch of books on writing, and then when I finally felt I was good enough that an artist might be interested in collaborating, I began scouring the comic sections of DeviantArt, keeping note of the artists I liked. When I found David Brame's page I was blown away, followed by extreme excitement when he agreed to draw up sample pages for a pitch. We both wound up being pleased with the results, so we began working on some short stories.
By coincidence, the first few stories ended up having monsters in them. This was primarily due to the themes of the anthologies we submitted to, but we decided to run with it and make more monster themed stories. This means we put a restriction on the types of stories we could tell. Now I, like most people, usually don't like restrictions, but they can actually be a blessing as a writer since they can push your work into areas you never would have gone before. For example, when we committed to the monster theme I started brainstorming all kinds of ways we could use monsters. One idea was to have zombies walking on treadmills to create power. I put the idea to the side since I didn't know how I'd use such a zany idea. Then an opportunity came along to submit to a steampunk anthology by Arcana. The two separate themes came together perfectly, which resulted in a story called "Flesh and Steel" that will be printed in the upcoming Steampunk Originals Volume VIII.

Flesh and Steel

In the story, a zombie outbreak has been contained and walkers have been adopted for use in industry. They are locked into geared contraptions so that when they walk forward, like a hamster in a wheel, they turn cranks and generate power. Mainstream society sees no problem with this, but the protagonist Marcus sees walkers not as the undead, but as victims of a horrible disease who are in constant pain. He sets out to release them from their torment by hunting down and killing every last one of them. I doubt I would have ever thought of this if I wasn't under the restrictions of "monster" and "steampunk."

Death on Display

Another example is when I was coming up ideas for GrayHaven's Kaiju anthology. I had never even thought of writing a Kaiju story before, but I knew I didn't want to do the standard "giant monster attacks city" plot, so I tried to come up with other ways to use Kaiju. I landed on three ideas, two of which got accepted into the anthology. The one I'm most pleased with is called "Death on Display," and it follows a couple's visit to a Kaiju museum, in which Kaiju eggs and bones are on display, along with an enormous taxidermy Kaiju. The girl, Kathy, feels like the museum's playful exhibit is disrespectful to the lives that were taken by the monsters, but her concerns are ignored by her boyfriend and tour guide. The story may seem fantastical, but is very relevant to a time where wars and serial killers are used as source material for video games and movies. I'm not saying these things should or shouldn't be used in this way, but it brings up interesting questions such as, "is anything sacred?" and "should tragedy be used in entertainment?"

Ticket Home

The remaining stories include a cyberpunk story where creatures are grown in vats and used in underground fighting rings (to be published by SciFi Max), a ghost story inspired by an experience one of my friends had at a the Byron Hotel in California (to be published in Then it was Dark), a story of a teenager struggling with a disease that is triggered by stress, which results in the world around him becoming a nightmare of a hallucination (to be published by Alterna), and the second Kaiju story which follows the exploits of a space poaching crew (to be published by GrayHaven).

What a Catch

David and I are currently working on new monster stories, and if you'd like to be notified when the above and future stories are published, you can sign up for our mailing list or follow me on twitter @Robert_Menegus. Thanks for reading, and may the only monsters you encounter this year be fictional ones.


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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