But the most important work I have is coming up.  This week my wife and I will experience the birth of our twin boys.  I know it will change everything for us and our family, but we could not be more excited.  We'll have two little ones to raise, educate, and train in our home as we continue to move around the country and the world with my continuing military career.  It's always been an adventure in the Yocum household. 

That means I've got two more in the house soon that I have to get into comics.  I'll keep dreaming up stories, and I hope you'll keep reading.

We've got some work to do to make this dream a reality.  We're about halfway finished with the art, and we've got many more pages to go until we're complete.  But we'll remain committed to the series and making it as quality a comic as possible.  If I had to guess, I would say that it'll come out either late this year or early next year. 

It's been a great year for Hangar 19 and the various projects I've got in the works.  And I hope it continues that way.  If anyone plans to attend the 2012 Heroes Con in Charlotte, NC in June, please stop by my booth and say hi.

Happy reading.

Matt

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.

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

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.

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

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

99 cents?  That sounds crazy at first.  But if someone is browsing for a book and finds interest in my book priced at $4.99 and also finds equal interest in a book priced $.99, they are going to go for the cheaper book every time (unless it's friends and family who are willing to help me out).  The goal for me now is to figure out how to get people I don't know to check the books out, hopefully to write a review, and to recommend it to others.  It's a given that the book first and foremost has to be good.  But it's also important in the electronic world that the book be cheap and an easy buy.

The other thing I need to do, which I have yet to pursue, is expanding where the book is located.  Amazon's Kindle is great, but now there are many other electronic publishing venues out there including Barnes & Noble's Nook and Apple's iBooks. 

For now I'll take it one step at a time, lowering the price point for the Kindle and looking to expand both The Calling and Honor's digital reach.  For those of you who paid "full price," I thank you.  I'm sorry I'm just now learning this point, but it's a new realm of publishing, both for me and all the writing community.

The biggest thing you can do to help me at this point is: 1) buy the book through amazon.com (you can find them here), and 2) write a review on amazon (particularly if you're last name isn't Yocum!). 

Thanks to all of you for your support, and I'll keep writing if you'll keep reading.

When I returned to the States in September, I found out that it fell apart.  It had nothing to do with Tom or Axel and everything to do with financing and the difficult state of the industry right now.  Despite high level backing, it seemed that Marvel's finance office couldn't figure out a way to monetize the project in a way that would be profitable, and so that ended it.  I'm seeing more and more that the Big Two (Marvel and DC) are having to trim any fat off their plate, working only on projects that in their eyes stand the best chance of making the payoff worth the investment. 

It was a good experience working the script.  After all, no writing is bad writing since it still flexes the mental muscles.  And I had the opportunity to meet Axel at the New York Comic Con this Fall, and he was extremely nice and told me that he really did love the idea and wished it had worked out.

In the meantime, I've been hard at work on several independent comics ideas, trying to maximize the numbers of pitches I'm building.  I've got a host of pitches in various stages of development.  The most imminent will be released soon at www.ComicCritique.com.  Keep your eyes open for Redo, one of the most original superhero stories I've ever come up with, and with a hook that I believe everyone will be able to relate to.  I'm also developing several new stories including a military story with a science fiction twist called The Chosen and a fairy tale adventure titled The Forgotten. 

Some good stuff is on the horizon and I hope you'll check back here to see what's coming next.

Have a great Christmas and happy New Year's.  And happy reading.

Matt