⚠️Take the RYSK
Hi-tech, Heists & Heroes
Episodes of Storymaze feature: writing tips or a work-in-progress; something creative I’m digging; + a quote that’s got me thinking.
True creative opportunities are long odds. Especially when my comics career seemed long over. Which makes my initial diss of Blackbox Comics not just a poor life choice, but a bad bet on my future self.
(Hold onto all these ham-fisted gambling refs — they’ll pay off later!)
Publisher/edtior Dimitrios Zaharakis had reached out to me via my old Daredevil creative partner, Scott McDaniel. Dimitrios was a fan of the work Scott and I had done together on Fall From Grace. And as he was launching Blackbox, Dimitrios wanted the chance to work with creators whose work he was into. He’d already recruited Scott for Blackbox’s launch title, The I.T. Department. Now he wanted me to help him develop a new comic about…a psychologist.
It wouldn’t have been my first choice as a super hero character. But as I’d later learn — that’s a bit of Dimitrios’ genius: coming at things from another angle and giving creative folks license to make it work. And make it their own. However I was less savvy and sanguine in those days — or, perhaps in keeping with the psychologist theme — I just needed to have my head examined.
Worse than turning Dimitrios down — I kind of ghosted him. It wasn't my plan! I had actually set out with the very best of intentions. I had invested in a number of psychology books (which I still have partly unread — shudder), to try to find a way in. And I did start to become intrigued by the possibilities of a character who could work a mind in a very incisive, critical way. How could that understanding manifest as powers that would benefit a character in a role as an adventurer or protector?
But I was deep into my on-staff corporate marketing roles at that point. Chief This, Head That, Director of Whatev. I didn’t think I over-identified with all that—but it clearly took enough of me. The lesser part of me had control of the volume. “This is what I’m doing. I have to build this.”
And while this new possible comics was at the heart of who I told myself I was, I couldn’t break through that noise. I wasn’t strong enough to recognize what was right there for the taking: creative storytelling.
In a spiral that’s left me dizzy and embarrassed too many times, I kept telling myself, I’ll get to it tonight… tomorrow… next week… the week after. But marketing is a ravenous black hole, eager to bend time and space away from anything outside its endless non-event horizon. So I let it slip—right past the point where a reasonable apology was still possible.
Better to…just let it go.
Which is a shameful place to admit I once frequented. 😞
By all rights that Blackbox door should have been nailed shut. But as chance would have it.… (Told ya we’d get back to the gambling refs!)
I pulled not one but two wild cards at my sophomore appearance at Terrificon. The first was C.B. Cebulski offering me what would become Daredevil: Black Armor. The second was a chance to apologize to Dimitrios for whoever I was back then. He not only graciously accepted — but in the same beat wondered what I thought about a miniseries where the lead character was a female bookie running a heist.
As with the psychologist that got away: not my first thought for a super hero comic! But this time I was ready to roll the dice. Dimitrios had a few cards to play in terms of initial ideas and personality. Then it was up to me to bring this bet-taker to life — a co-creator deal I was glad to go all in. Conceived alongside Black Armor — and actually written before — Dimitrios “What if…?” evolved into something neither of us was expecting.
This now cyber thriller centered around Ruby Chance and her ever-present other: a fledgling sentient AI intruding in Ruby’s mind. Going by the name of Rysk, the AI would be a boost in terms of strategic insight, giving the already savvy Ruby a whole new level of calculating the odds on any situation with startling precision.
But Rysk isn’t just in Ruby’s head: it’s at work in her body. Heightening her reflexes. Giving her more conscious control over normally autonomic functions like breathing, heart rate, adrenaline. A survival edge in a savage, near-future where every day is a gamble.
(Of course, going in such a radically new direction also meant an insane amount of world building: social classes and traumas, economies, global sporting events, a whole cast of strange characters and oddball tech. (Brought to visual life by the fab Mannix Francisco.) I told Dimitrios, “Next time I’m writing a story with one character in an empty warehouse.” Then he asked me, “What about a barbarian comic?” Sigh.)
Was it worth it? Damn straight. Ruby feels real. She tells her story as much as I did. That’s the best a writer can hope for. I’m grateful for Dimitrios for thinking I was worth the risk, in spite of my past BS — and we’re both looking forward to sharing RYSK with you in late April. (Fingers crossed the whole Diamond implosion doesn’t mess things up.) Here’s the preview tease:
When mankind is rocked by a flesh-ravaging virus, people rebuilt themselves with scavenged tech. Bookie and hustler Ruby Chance got more than expected: her fix unlocked a radical A.I. that calls itself Rysk, amping Ruby’s senses and skills — an edge she’ll need to survive an attack by road-raging assassins.
Tell your Local Comics Shop to order you a copy. Heck, convince ‘em to order a bunch! In the meantime, watch this space over the next five Storymazes: I’m going to be sharing the proposal I sent to Blackbox, outlining how I imagined “a female bookie running a heist.”
I’m a sucker for horror anthologies. Having been raised on a steady diet of Eerie, Creepy, Tales From the Crypt and many hours spent wandering the dark halls of the House of Mystery — I’m always up for cracking the cover on something new in hopes of finding some good spiderwebs stretching between the pages.
Just as often I’m disappointed. Tired retreads are too common. And “bold new tales of terror from modern day masters of comics!” seem to translate into meh-exercises in gratuitous gore with a side of slaughter.
Ice Cream Man does it right. He’s restored my faith in menace. Its title character is sometimes center stage, but often on the fringes, cracking a fiendish freezer door on dread and misery that serve up an enticing mix of spooky stuff that’s existential, abstract, eerie and directly venomous. And the occasional backstory that opens up his own twisted history is just the right amount of sprinkles. Two scoops, please!
While my Daredevil Fall From Grace gets most of the attention, I always felt its follow-up — Tree of Knowledge — to be the tighter story. Like RYSK, it explored themes of technology gone wild/weird/wrong from the street level. It even got the notice of that beacon of the digital age, WIRED magazine, which ran this lovely lil’ sidebar.
I recall reading it and thinking, “Hey, that sounds like a cool story!” — before keying into the fact it was indeed *my* (and Scott’s) story! Apologies for the lo-rez scan. No doubt there’s some hyped up AI tool that can tweak the pixels, if you’re so inclined.
“They will see an America in which no man is handicapped by the color of his skin or the nature of his belief--and no man will be discriminated against because of the church he attends or the country of his ancestors.”
— Lyndon B. Johnson
End of the month I’m at GalaxyCon in Richmond, VA! Will I meet some of you fine folks face to face? First guest of the show to come by my table with a copy of any Daredevil: Black Armor issue or trade — the autograph is free. Show up in a Black Armor cosplay: get a full set of the original Fall From Grace comics!
Amazing Times
If D.G. Chichester looks pretentious, feel free to just call me “Dan”, and have a go at the last name as Chai (like the tea) Chester (like it looks). I’ve written comic books like Daredevil, Terror Inc., Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD and Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, along with all manner of digital widgets in the world wide web of marketing. I like weird tales, so if things here bend that way — now you know why!
Folks seem to like the comic book adventures I’ve written, so if you haven’t checked one out — please do. Many are now available in fab collected editions.
For the moments between newsletters…