CHAPTER SEVEN A lot of things went wrong with XERØ, the Apollo 13 of my career. It's difficult to discuss specifics without inviting reprisals, so about all I can say is I am very disappointed in how this book was treated and regret the entire experience. Doomed from the beginning, XERØ began as a request for "Something new, something edgy— push the envelope. Think outside the box." The original proposal languished for nearly two years before an incoming editor took a liking to it, and the project was green-lighted. Possibly because of the lead character's dual ethnicity, XERØ came to be thought of as a "black" book, which made it, like most other "black" books, seemingly unworthy of the best efforts of everyone involved. We launched in a totally unenergized environment, with very little promotion, and nearly every promise broken. The book's failure was, for me, a capriciously self-fulfilling prophecy. The best thing about Xerø was the energy, dedication and investment of first our editor, Alisande Morales, who worked tirelessly through the early stages of getting the book up to speed, and the phenomenal ChrisCross, whose intuition and storytelling are unparalleled in this industry. I remain extremely grateful for their verve and enthusiasm for the project, and chagrined at how all of it was capriciously beaten out of them as both were run over by the wheels of a bureaucracy which had determined, before the first issue shipped, that Xerø must fail. This was just about the worst time I've had in a quarter century in this business, a beloved and cherished craft left far too often in the hands of weasels. About a month before the first issue shipped, I had a conversation with one of TPTB who told me XERØ was, and I'll never forget these words, "The worst comic I've ever seen." He had absolutely no confidence in the book and didn't intend to invest much energy in it. I was stunned, and suggested we just pull the plug, and give me an opportunity to shop it to Acclaim, Marvel, Image or Wildstorm. But, I was told, no, "Once we promise [in solicitations] a project, we have to deliver." My options were pretty much limited to the Ivory Tower (going over TPTB into the executive level), but that is career suicide. Right from the jump, and right from the mouth of the horse, I was told, pretty much, that the book's demise was preordained before the first issue shipped. The company didn't promote it. XERØ was barely mentioned in the company's big Diamond Preview extravaganza, which pushed John Arcudi's MAJOR BUMMER in big, full-color splashy promos. XERØ was a kind of also-mention, given very little space and only the most generic and clinical tone. Everything about that Previews book fairly screamed Here's The Stuff We're Excited About This Year! MAJOR BUMMER! There was a huge push for Bummer, by the famed creator of The Mask. I have no information about it, but my guess is Bummer didn't come cheap, and the company wholly and tangibly invested in Bummer in a variety of promotional efforts that cast a huge shadow that XERØ got lost in. The near complete lack of enthusiasm for XERØ was a fair warning to retailers. The book ordered low and sales dropped issue after issue until the plug was pulled by issue #12 (Bummer was cancelled with issue #15). Complicating maters, I imagine, was the apparent decision, in the minds of people who really counted, I suppose, that XERØ was a "black" book. It had a black writer (to my continuing horror, somewhere between SPIDER-MAN and STEEL I went from being a writer to being a "black" writer), a black artist, and starred black lead and supporting characters. Black comics, like Black film, are almost always treated as second-class citizens. Not out of racial bias so much as out of economic reality. If comics starring black characters sold well, that's all the major companies would publish. They're trying to publish what sells, and that's not Black comics. I believe this is more because the companies have never been run by blacks, and have no experience at marketing to the black community or penetrating the black community, which supports unique channels of marketing and distribution, borne largely of necessity as we had been otherwise ignored by mass marketers who assume we're all broke and living in the projects. Despite the fact Trane Walker's black face was not allowed to appear on the cover of his own comic book (the cover— the editors— failing, in every conceivable way, to ever convey the series' most basic premise: this is about a black guy who runs around dressed as a white guy), XERØ somehow came to be thought of as a "black" comic, and was subsequently denied access to the reasonable support of the company that published it. In fact, the company's handling of XERØ was ironically evocative of Trane (Xerø) Walker's treatment by the secret spy agency he worked for.
CITIZEN TRANE: Cross
borrows a famous page from Welles' book.
There was some manner of infighting going on between the editors on the book. The exact nature of this conflict escapes me, but, from my limited observation, it seemed XERØ became a kind of hockey puck used in Byzantine fashion by these two people who, from what I could tell, disliked each other intensely. For instance, I became aware one of the editors was refusing to proofread XERØ because, "It's not my job." So if the one didn't proof it, and the other didn't proof it, XERØ would go off to the printer with a raft of egregious production errors, just so one editor could stick it to the other. Yes, it was just that childish. We were promised a certain grade of paper, and then XERØ shipped on the crappiest low grade of paper, in the cheapest format available. The paper grade was in my contract, and when I brought that up, I got the mumble-garble-yadda of fine print about it being their discretion or some such. But, see, ChrisCross had already drawn three issues on drawing paper proportioned to the higher grade paper format. So the art had to be squeezed way down, making letterer Willie Schubert's work vanish. I had "consultation" rights, which, in practice, meant nothing. The editors routinely sent me a black and white copy of the finished book after the book had shipped to the printer, by first class mail, which takes four days to make it out here to Colorado. By the time I saw the finished book, typically finding egregious errors in it, it was far too late to make any changes. I was not shown cover sketches, or colors. The only way I saw penciled pages was by going over letterer Willie Schubert's house and looking at them on his board. I hated the logo. We went around and around with the logo until, ultimately, they just decided to do what they wanted. There was a big fight with TPTB over the big "X" in the logo. We were ordered to not make the "X" stand out in any way, as we didn't want to be confused with one of Marvel's X-books. Perish the thought. I was given this patronizing "boot straps" lecture about how we should stand or fall on our own merits and not by taking cheap shots at the X-Men. It was so incredibly stupid, this process, this thinking, these stupid people, most of which are long gone: if you see any possible advantage to sell product out in this crowded and depressed market, by God, take it. I was surrounded and being drowned by monkeys. The script for issue #1 was not very good. I wrote it in a big hurry while I was doing several other things, so we had a disaster with issue #1, starting with me. I begged, literally, to take another pass at the draft, but was told we had no time (then later, TPTB told me they would have gladly granted us time to make the first issue better; turned out my editors never asked him. In fact, they never asked anybody anything ever. It was like they were living in a vacuum, working for some other version of the company, from a mirror universe, perhaps). So the weak script for #1 was drawn, and then the entire issue was handed to an inker for her very first assignment. She completely ruined Cross' beautiful work and... I can't even describe the devastation. It was so bad, in fact, TPTB decided to actually spend some money on XERØ— they ordered the first issue re-done. Cross and I were well into issue #4 when we received word that #1 was to be re-done, and we were given an extension on the time (which is what I'd wanted in the first place). But, the damage had been done. In the minds of TPTB, XERØ was a write-off. A book they would ship four issues of and then announce the cancellation, which is about the way it went, other than the debacle surrounding BATMAN PLUS XERØ, a project suggested by TPTB during our fateful conversation, who later denied suggesting it. We had battles over the color. Cross and I wanted Trent to be fairly light-skinned, as was Sabrina. This seemed to either confuse the editors ("They don't even look black") or just annoyed them. We were denied the color process we'd been promised, receiving the basic, bare-bones color apropos of the Loony Tunes line. When Cross found a guy willing to color and separate the book for a rock-bottom rate, we were screamed at. Oh, yes, there was screaming. Literal raising of the voice, talking to us like we were children. The notion of light-skinned black people seemed to baffle the editors, but their suggestion that Trent doesn't "look black" is laughable. It was a stupid, dumb argument, and while we were allowed to go our own way with the skin tones, the color separations were bargain basement and erratic, and the editors apparently took to "darkening up" the characters (as can be seen here in the Trent & Sabrina highlights; note the skin tone change between issue #4 and issue #5, pages 6 and 7 here) by changing the color codes on the guides and/or film after the fact. This was, likely, how the big gaffe in issue #4 came to be (see following). Ultimately, our colorist either quit or was fired somewhere around issue #9, and my STEEL colorist brought in. Now everyone was the proper shade of Power Man milk chocolate brown, and Øne, an Asian and Xerø's arch enemy, was now, thankfully, colored the appropriately insulting and racist shade of jaundice yellow. Order had been restored. The fact that no one, absolutely no one, in the company questioned this radical shift, or objected to the clearly racist yellowing of Øne further reinforced our belief we had no friends at the company, and complaining about the book was no longer worth our effort.
Both Cross and I were, literally, screamed at, abusively, and spoken to like children. We were, alternatively, "handled" and branded as "difficult to work with," a wholly untrue stereotype that cost me at least three jobs that I am aware of, and surely others that I am not. We were treated exactly like Trane was treated, kicked and ignored, like uppity farm hands. And my earlier conversation with TPTB left me with the distinct impression Cross and I had no court of appeals, no friends in the company, and no apparent avenues to address these issues that didn't risk our careers. It was a wholly abusive relationship, imbued with perils both real and fictitious; the kinds of psychological barriers that prevent victims from seeking help. In retrospect, a lot of this was my fault. Up in the Ivory Tower, the top execs at the company were both personal friends of mine. Neither of them had any idea of the terrible working relationship developing down the hall from them, and I didn't appeal to them because sailing over your boss's head is just not the professional thing to do. But, years later, I see my mistake now: these editors were either seriously immature or seriously incompetent or, perhaps, both. All anyone could actually see was the book, after it shipped. It really shocked me that, issue after issue, the stories would be wrecked by typos and production errors and nobody at the office ever asked these two gentle geniuses about it. But, it was dawning on me: nobody up there was reading the book, either before or after it shipped. Not even the other editors, TPTB or the folks in the Ivory Tower, who all got free copies of XERØ in their comp packages. Nobody, absolutely nobody, was reading it. The mindset of the typical comic book editor and the typical comic book fan are not that disparate. They read what they like, typically what they've always read as a fan. And, for the most part, they want to perpetuate that; producing more of what they themselves liked as fans. XERØ looked and read nothing like anything these people grew up reading. So, no, it wasn't a big hit around the office and, thus, apparently nobody noticed George Bush's tie appearing and disappearing, or lots of switched pointers on balloons ruining key sequences. I certainly should have appealed to the Ivory Tower folks. I should have let the bosses know these folks down the hall were driving their company straight into the ground. I think everybody I'm pointing a finger at here should therefore be granted clemency because of my own cowardice. I know the chief officers of the company well enough to know they would have been horrified to learn how miserable we were and how dysfunctional this relationship was. Had I spoken to them about this at the time, they would certainly have brought all parties to the table to see how things could have been improved. In spite of all the shin kicking I do here on this page, I think it's only fair to say I could have tried harder to address these problems, and I could have taken legal steps to prevent the company from publishing XERØ once I learned from TPTB that XERØ was, essentially, being set up to fail. So, this is, essentially my deal. Expensive and painful lessons learned from all of this. Mistakes I will never make again.
BATMAN PLUS XERO was borne out of the fateful conversation between myself and TPTB, who suggested the best way to promote my new creator-owned book (which was about to launch in a month or so) was to do some kind of special, perhaps one of the "Plus" books the company was doing at the time. He suggested I pitch a1-shot or a guest shot or something that would bring Xero into the limelight and give fans a good look at him. Figuring TPTB would be predisposed to approving such a project (since it was, after all, his idea), I put calls through to my editor (leaving a message) and actually spoke to the BATMAN editor, a long-time friend. At first blush, the Bat Editor had no problem with a Bats-Xerø special, and was glad to help give the book a push. I spent the weekend hammering out first an outline and then some spec pages for BATMAN PLUS XERØ. I don't usually write spec (speculative) scripts, but I wrote this one on spec because I figured this was a done deal: my editor was looking for ways to promote the book, the Batman editor was on board, and, best of all, the whole shebang was suggested by a powerful guy who absolutely could make this happen. I eMailed the proposal in and, I believe two weeks later I called my Ed to see where we were. The Ed screamed, literally, at me for two full hours, calling me all manner of expletives and accusing me of trying to force the company to publish BPX. Not only had he not read the proposal, he had refused to download the file and forbade his assistant from doing so, either. Moreover he went to the Bat office and apologized for my stupidity and urged them to disregard the pitch. And then this genius apparently chose to vent his anger at me by not calling me for two weeks. It was a stunning, bizarre turn of events. Six years later, I still have absolutely no clue what had upset the Ed, or why he'd reacted that way. But it was clear to me that, at least by some, I was apparently thought of as someone an editor could call up and curse at for two hours without fear of reprimand. I was gum under this guy's shoe, and my value at the company had plummeted from a high (EMERALD DAWN) to being the Designated Black Writer, offered almost exclusively black or minority-themed projects while being passed over for every ongoing series. To date no one from the company has explained or apologized for that bit of nonsense. I was and remain deeply insulted over the entire incident, and this was typical of the overall stewardship of the XERØ book and the company's lack of respect or support for ChrisCross' and my efforts on that series. The story, however, was a fun bit of business: Batman and Xerø cross paths while on two different missions only to discover they've been maneuvered by a Bad Guy into crossing swords. The book would have made an interesting artistic challenge as the early action involves a quiet street in Gotham with nothing going on other than a stray dog scrounging for food. I'm sorry we never got to see this. Click here to download the script (21kb).
I realized nobody up at the office was reading the book when issue #4 came out. There's this scene where Xerø invades the first class section of a transatlantic passenger jet and shoots this Ugandan spy. Now, the gag for that scene was, the Ugandan was easy to spot because he was the only black guy sitting in first class. Or, at least he was, until either the editors or
the separators colored lots of passengers black and brown. I know
it wasn't the colorist, who consulted with us
closely. I just laughed and tossed the comic into the corner of the
room. Nobody at the office actually reads the comic, I said out loud to apparently
no one. It was stupid, all of it. Priest's adventures in the comics trade continue in:
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