Inspiration at the movies

Inspiration comes to me from many sources - music, books, comics, movies, conversations.  Sometimes I'm extremely surprised from the source, and last night I saw a movie that greatly surprised me.  It was called Warrior, and it stars Tom Hardy (Inception, Star Trek: Nemesis, The Dark Knight Rises), Joel Edgerton, and Nick Nolte, all of who did an amazing job.

The thing that inspired me about this movie is it used the trappings of an intense, violent world (in this case Mixed Martial Arts, MMA, and the sport of Ultimate Fighting), but the entire movie really focused on a broken family and grieving that came years too late.  Two brothers end up in a MMA tournament called Sparta, both for very different reasons (one revealed early on, one much later).  This collision of sports, violence, anger, and family all came together in an emotional ending that was one of the best I've seen in a long time.

The reason for the inspiration is that it speaks very much to my own literary themes.  I find m writing revolving around themes of family, loss, grieving, and how that comes in different ways for different people.  As much as my horror series Devolution is about a zombie attack on a married couple inside their Tennessee house, it's really about a couple's broken marriage and the grief over the loss of their son.  It's about how they grieved in different ways, at different times, and what it did to their family.

Great fiction opens the lense on our own experiences, allows us to share in those moments and relate to them.  It's what makes AMC's The Walking Dead TV series (and the Image comic for many years) work so well.  We see ourseves in these characters, no matter how fantastic the situation. 

If I do my job well enough, you'll see yourself, or your family, or your friends, in these characters and these worlds.  And maybe you'll learn a little bit about myself as well.

Redo to premiere soon

My new independent superhero comic, Redo, will be released soon at www.ComicCritique.com.  Owner/editor Louis Vitela at ComicCritique has done a masterful job of maintaining a quality comics site these last couple years, and he's always been gracious to host any independent comic I've put together. 

I don't want to give away too many details at this point about the new series, but I will tell you it explores a very simple theme - what if you had the chance to live your life all over again.  Mixing new concepts in a unique way with fantastic art by William Allan Reyes and Ivan Plascencia, I'm excited at all that's to come for our main character and the people in his life. 

I'll announce the debut installment soon, once the ComicCritique site gets a few modifications done to it and it gets posted.  I have the first two issues plotted out, and we're into the art on issue 2.  Can't wait to show you the latest offering from Hangar 19.  Happy reading.

Matt

Hangar 19

I've been mulling the idea of creating an imprint name, something that would go with all my written work, for some time now.  This would be for comics, novels, nonfiction, basically anything that has the byline, "by Matt Yocum."  Some of the more successful brand and imprint names include: Marvel, Image, Skybound, Dynamite, Boom!, and many others. 

I posed this question to the gang at ChristianComicArts.com, and I got some great feedback on what did and did not work.  Martin Murtonen did a great job deconstructing several of my suggestions, and several others pitched in and voiced their thoughts and opinions.  Possibilities included: Otherwhere, Front Porch Entertainment, Hyperion Entertainment, Perpetual Motion, Sons of Thunder, Complete Geek Entertainment, and SDG Entertainment (Soli Deo Gloria), and many more.  The one that won out and lodged itself in my brain was...

...Hangar 19.

So, starting now I'll be writing under the banner of Hangar 19.  The idea behind it is this - you think you knows what's in Hangar 18.  You have no idea what's behind the doors to Hangar 19.  Let me open those doors and show you what's inside.  Come inside the Hangar. 

Next up is designing a logo.  I'll work on that with some artists over the coming weeks, and I'll be sure to unveil that logo here. 

Happy reading.

Explaining the world of The Chosen

As I mentioned before, I'm currently working on a pitch titled The Chosen.  It follows a team of US special operations forces and CIA analysts who have discovered and are using alien weapons technology.  On their first mission, the team has to track down a set of the alien weaponry that's made its way to less-than-friendly foreign government hands. 

One of the literary devices I use in the series is to have a POV (point of view) character who is not from the military side.  Rather, the main character is a behavioral scientist from the CIA who has a military liaison assigned to her.  The reason for this is that as the military liaison is explaining stuff to her, it allows the audience to also learn how the military special operators work. 

I was recently watching the movie Inception starring Leonardo DiCaprio.  In this movie, they use much the same technique by introducing the character Ariadne played by Ellen Page.  She's new to the team and hired as an "architect," someone who "builds" the elaborate dream worlds they all visit.  Because she's new, DiCaprio spends a good amount of time explaining how the dream realm works and, consequently, the structure of the story itself.  This allows us as the audience to learn right along with her. 

If this technique is done well, it flows organically and doesn't open the curtain to show the hand of the writer behind the dialogue.  It can be a tricky balance.  You want to make sure the audience is tracking, but you don't want to spend page after page, or panel after panel, doing nothing but explaining.  You have to make sure you're advancing the action and keeping the reader, and the characters, moving forward. 

We'll see if the technique works in my case, but I think I've got a good blend of action and expository dialogue.  And in this case, since I'm only creating 9 pages of completely produced art along with a synopsis, I have a short amount of space to balance both action and expository dialogue/explanation.  We'll find out if we pulled it off as well as I hope. 

If you can know of other techniques to keep the action moving while allowing the audience to learn about the world you've created, I'd love to hear it.

Matt

Writing abounds in 2012

Greetings all.  Hope you had a fantastic New Year's Day for 2012.  My last week has been tremendous with a lot of time mapping out all the various projects I've got for the coming year.  I thought it might help to go over a few, if not for your interest then my own as an exercise in keeping track of it all.

First, I've completed several edits of a screenplay based on my horror comic Devolution.  The 94-page script expands a bit on the 4-issue comic, and I think it filled in some key gaps that I couldn't squeeze in the comic.  My plan now is to submit it to a variety of screenwriting contests as well as agents and see if I can generate interest in it.  It's a good year for zombie-related stories with AMC's The Walking Dead going strong and the upcoming movie World War Z starring Brad Pitt due in December 2012.

As for comics, I've got several independent projects in the works along with new pitches.  These include:

Redo - what if an aged superhero on his deathbed in the future is sent back in time to today to re-live his entire life over again, remembering everything that happened to him the first time.  That's the premise behind this action/adventure that asks, "How would you redo your life?"  Art is being handled by the amazing William Allan Reyes.

ClosetWorld - issue 1 has generated fantastic reader response, and we're well on our way through issue 2 pages with the same great team of artist John Amor, colorist Thomas Bonvillain, and letterer Chris Studabaker.  Once we're further ahead on pages, I'll start to release the installments on ComicCritique.com.  I also continue to look for an independent publisher to release this one in print, as I know it would be a hit.

The Chosen - an indy pitch I'm developing with artist Sedat Oezgen.  Imagine a special ops military team armed with alien technology going on covert missions, only to find out this highly destructive technology has found its way to less friendly governments.  That's the premise behind this pitch.  Our plan is to produce 9 pages along with a breakdown of the story to show prospective publishers.

The Forgotten - this fairy tale adventure follows Lucy, a young girl who lives in the dream realm of the Forgotten, a place for those dreams who have been forgotten by their dreamers.  Little Lucy joins her dreamers' other forgotten dreams to find a way to travel back to the realm of the Remembered.  This pitch is currently in the early stages of development, and the plan is to produce 5 to 7 pages of art along with a synopsis.

I'm also talking with an artist about possible Christian comics pitches including one called Joseph, that would follow the life of Joseph in the book of Genesis, but place his adventures in a science fiction universe.  The other is a story called Omega, following a group of Christian special operations soldiers who make up "Omega Force," a team dedicated to tracking down terrorist events aimed at destroying Christianity worldwide.  The team's first mission would be to stop a plot aimed at sending suicide bombers to various American megachurches all on the same Sunday.  In the vein of Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness novels, this story would follow the action both in the physical and spiritual realms.  I tagged it as "where modern warfare meets spiritual warfare." 

Despite not being to work on the Captain America project for Marvel Comics, I still have a few possible projects in the works.  I'm talking to a couple editors, and although they have to tighten their financial belts along with the rest of the country, there's still a possibility I could be doing some work for them.

It dosn't stop there. I'm chipping away at the early stages of a nonfiction book called Alive that I won't go into detail here (yet). I can't wait to get together a book proposal and send it out to possible agents and publishers. This is one story that simply MUST be told.

Finally there are my novels, The Calling and HONOR, both at amazon.com.  They are now discounted to $.99, so I hope everyone out there orders them and checks them out and shares this with everyone else.  And even more importantly for those of you who have read it, PLEASE PLEASE review it on amazon for me (particuarly if your last name is not Yocum!).  For me, amazon reviews go a long way when I'm browsing for a new novel, and I'd love to see more reviews on the site.  I have a lot of people who have written me telling me how much they liked both books, and I'm hoping to see those comments in public for everyone else to see.

That's what is on the writing plate for 2012.  You can see that it's going to be a busy year, but that's just the way I like it.  As always, I'll keep writing and I hope you'll keep reading.

Matt