Re-reading old work
One of the great things about doing new projects with old material is that you stop and look at all the old material that’s been settling in a cardboard box for the last five or fifteen years.
The worst trade paperback I have ever seen was a hundred fifty page epic about a superhero using the bathroom. Some hopeful artist had pieced it together on what I can only hope were paper napkins. My review letter went something like, “We are sorry, but our schedule does not have an opening for a project of this type at this time. Thank you for your interest in (insert comic publisher here).” I had wanted to draft a ten thousand word response in the same style and tone as the ashcan I had just read. I didn’t, because I could not bring myself to torture another human being as cruelly as the hopeful author would have inflicted on the world. If you are a UN Weapons inspector, you can find the most powerful psychology based weapon of mass destruction ever devised locked in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in an office in Quincy. Be careful, though, I rigged it with a fire bomb set to incinerate the manuscript should anyone attempt to publish it.
The second worst trade paperback I have ever read was the one I wrote and later confined to a dark brown cardboard box. The art was terrible, the story reads like instructions for a pack of toothpicks, and every copy of the twenty five unit print run was colored by hand. If I were to receive it in the mail today, I would have written a rejection letter that reads something like, “We are sorry, but our schedule does not have an opening for a project of this type at this time. Thank you for your interest in (insert comic publisher here)… PS What the hell were you thinking?”
I imagine my past self’s answer to my present self would have been “you just don’t know how brilliant I am!”
I am serious, though. It sucked worse than the movie version of Sum of All Fears.
