A Brief History of Cold Iron Badge, Part 2

So Patrick and I had agreed that we should work together on a comic without actually knowing what the project was going to be.

Now, I had a bunch of ideas that I thought were pretty solid. Some of them, I'd been waiting to use for years.

None of them was Cold Iron Badge.

They were good ideas. They would have made good comics. I suspect that some of them would have lent themselves better than Cold Iron Badge to monetizing and merchandising.

But they weren't ideas that worked for both of us. No matter how good they were, I couldn't be married to them. We found -- had to find, through a lot of discussion and a lot of give-and-take -- a story that we could both get excited about.

There are a few reasons for this; one is philosophical. I'm not a proponent of applying auteur theory to comics -- even though it's actually possible in comics to be an auteur (unlike, say, film).

But just because something is possible doesn't mean that it's always a good idea. Collaboration is an incredibly powerful creative tool, and a lot of my own best writing has been collaborative. Comics is a medium that lends itself to collaboration. Particularly in my case, since I can't draw, and I am pretty much utterly dependent on having a creative partner in the form of an artist if I want to make comics.

(And even in comics, there are few genuine auteurs. My friend Mark Oakley is one. But even Dave Sim had Gerhard.)

Another reason is practical. In any comics project, the artist is going to be spending a lot more time drawing it than the writer spent writing it, so if there's no money on the table, it damn well better be something they actually want to draw.

(I believe it was Warren Ellis who said that he begins every new collaboration asking the artist he's working with questions like, "What do you love to draw? What do you hate to draw? What have you always wanted to draw and never gotten the chance?" That thought was never far from my mind while Cold Iron Badge was coming together.)

And besides: Patrick is talented. He has good ideas. Why wouldn't I want him involved in creating the story?

This isn't unprecedented for me -- Xeno's Arrow was developed in very much the same way, with Greg Beettam and me discussing the kind of story we wanted to tell, building our characters and world outwards from the initial desire to collaborate. It wasn't the first idea we kicked around, either -- just the best. It beat out, by the way, an idea that we did give a lot of thought too, that even got to the scripting and plotting stage before we decided that we weren't really into it, and which -- conceived, keep in mind, in early 1993 -- was eerily similar in many ways to Harry Potter.

That's a whole 'nother story, but I will say that it's enough to make me wonder if Alan Moore is right about IdeaSpace.

So: Patrick and I were kicking ideas around, mostly by email. And the germ of what became Cold Iron Badge was contained in a phrase he wrote, about being in a "super" mood -- wanting to tell a story that was superheroic, or supernatural. I immediately gravitated to the latter.

More on how that evolved into Cold Iron Badge next time.