Just got some great “work in progress” panels of the newest HvB from Mike and it got me to thinking about the creative process we go through. So since it is topical, what with the contest and all, I’d like to share a little insight as to how we came up with our Associate bios.
First, the bio format.
Growing up both Mike and I were huge fans of GI Joe. We read the comics, watched the cartoon, and of course played with the toys. For those who aren’t familiar with the packaging the toys came in there was a “file card” which gave a quick personal history of the character, summarized their abilities, and listed their favored weapons/vehicals. Seems all of the Joes were a qualified expert in all NATO and Warsaw Pact arms as I recall…anyway, from there the idea mutated. As I was re-writing the bios I thought it’d be cool to have them displayed in a variety of media ranging from webpages and blogs to old classified documents. Since I needn’t worry about drawing these buggers up I, of course, thought it was a great idea. Fortunately so did Mike, and he did a goddamned awesome job on all of them…well most, the handwritten page of notes was done by me. This may be a startling revelation to anyone who has had the misfortune of reading my handwriting, but its true. The page took about four or five tries before I ended up with the final product; it still has a few errors in it, but we just decided to leave them in. (read: I wasn’t re-re-re-rewriting the bastard)
While on the subject of my poor grasp of spelling and punctuation, (se this post for proof} we’d like to extend a big time thanks to our good friend Jenny R-T for proofing our work.
Thanks again Jenny!
As a token of our appreciation we’ll be mailing her a vintage and highly collectable “No-Prize” I received after writing a letter to Stan “the man” Lee in the mid-80’s. Enjoy!
Back to the bios…Mike went way above and beyond what I had in mind for the pages. He even went so far as to come up with his own collection of seals, emblems, and even a unique system for designing sigils. All of it combined with the great character sketches really blew me away.
Sadly I cannot go into much detail about the bios themselves without giving away the story. What I can say is that most of the characters’ backrounds didn’t exist until I sat down to write them. That process took about a week during which I worked on about one character a day. Sadly, my writing process isn’t all that interesting to talk about, much like the bulk of this post… Anyway,for the most part my “process” consists of long stretches of listening to Bitches Brew while sipping scotch and staring off into space which is occasionally broken up by short bursts of scrawling in my notebook. After a few hours of this I either type and retype it up, or get mad and go to bed. There was no mention of this kind of buisness in Stephen King’s book on writing…
Well that is about it for now, keep your eyes peeled for a new HvB and keep voting!