The character had to be dead by the end of the book.The character would be based on my life.It couldn’t star the Punisher, but rather a new female character.There was just one catch…OK, there were several catches: This seemed like a dream come true-the best of all possible outcomes. As a literal “consolation prize,” I was offered a Punisher one-shot. Marvel pulled the plug on Cloak & Dagger before it came out. I kept “pushing back” on my own “character”-which then got the other side of the debate angry at me. And I wasn’t smart enough to know how to profit off of it for myself. And others were profiting on it while I fought off the trolls. But I felt shoehorned into this larger… ideological conflict among geeks. Meanwhile, all I wanted to do was write a short story maybe on the Thing or something. Before the term “SJW” even existed, it was pretty much applied to the entire project I had committed a heresy. How does she deal with that? What does she do? Who is she really? Is she “Cloak,” or is she herself?Īs with rebooted versions of “cult” characters, there was a lot of public hostility directed towards this book before it even came out. Sort of like: she was a regular woman, but now she’s had this strange power sort of foisted on her. I tried to add some unique “bits”…Cloak was now not a man but a woman, and she had some identity confusion just based on the transformation. I enjoyed writing C loak & Dagger…but it wasn’t “me.” It wasn’t what I really wanted to do. Finally, I got a go-ahead on a theoretical “women’s” comic-a miniseries based on a rebooted version of the characters Cloak & Dagger, illustrated by Irene Flores. But that wasn’t going to fly: because it wasn’t “true” to my character, my hypersigil. And so: I pitched my Wolverine stuff, my Spider-Man stuff, all this stuff. I was approached by Marvel Comics at this time, and asked to pitch comic ideas. I had only briefly read Morrison’s “POP MAGIC!” before all this went down, but its relevance to my specific situation only came into focus years later. Now, from a metaphysical standpoint this was actually a little bit of a dangerous situation, one I didn’t quite understand until I was about shin-deep in s**t. I had presented myself to the world as a sort of specific character-what Grant Morrison might call a “hypersigil”-but I was not self-aware enough to know how to use that hypersigil to my advantage. The problem, of course, was that writing those characters was not “in-character” for me. But the truth was-I just really wanted to write Wolverine or the Punisher or the Joker, and I didn’t really care if they were “feminist” or not. In the Munden’s Bar story, the two women visualize what it would be like to have these more “feminist” superheroes. I’d try, in my blog, to put in a more “rounded” version of “all of me,” but it often ended in online bullshit and drama because I was “betraying” the character. There was an…”idea” of who I was and what I stood for. I just figured that me being in the story physically as “myself” would suffice, so I just didn’t assert myself on it. To be honest, I didn’t have a lot of input in the story and that was on me, not Martha or ComicMix. This story was illustrated by the late great Batman artist Norm Breyfogle, with whom I had worked at DC. Or rather: appear in the story as Occasional Superheroine. The blog reached a certain notoriety, and I got approached by ComicMix to co-write a short Munden’s Bar story with Dakota North creator Martha Thomases…as well as appear in the issue as myself. It was designed by artist Dan Parent, who would very shortly later become very well-known for his work on the “Archie” line of comic books. I think the artist, working from a snapshot of me, really captured that vibe:įlashforward ten years later-past four years at DC as an assistant (where I was pretty much invisible)-and out the “other side” I created a “character” for my blog in 2007: “Occasional Superheroine”: I was a HUGE comic fan when I had gotten this job & was super-psyched to be working at Acclaim. I was drawn in the “corner box” for an ad I couldn’t have been much more than twenty at the time, literally straight out of college. My first appearance in “comic book form” was in the mid-1990s, when I worked as an assistant at the publisher Acclaim. I used to be a comic book character…and I don’t think I’ve ever fully explained that to you before. The hypersigil is an immensely powerful and sometimes dangerous method for actually altering reality in accordance with intent. My own comic book series The Invisibles was a six-year long sigil in the form of an occult adventure story which consumed and recreated my life during the period of its composition and execution. The hypersigil is a sigil extended through the fourth dimension.
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