In college I was tasked with coming up with a new film idea every week and writing it out on a note card. It was really just a creativity exercise, and most of my ideas were pretty poor. I still have the stack of cards, and it’s full of oddities like “a webcam comedy about an opera singing plant” and documentary ideas like “how to make swords.” One idea I had involved a character named the Vigilante Hunter who hunted down superheroes for the government.
The story was set in a grimy, Frank Miller-esque world filled with shadows and bullets, based mostly on my love for The Dark Knight Returns comic and possibly my generation’s biggest visual influence: Sin City, even though I detested its story. When ideas for my senior thesis film came due I wrote a short script based on this idea and submitted it with a couple others. Needless to say it was not approved by my professors, weary of the universal tendency of film students to use guns as a shortcut to dramatic conflict–although to be fair, my hero’s gun used rubber bullets. The script rested in obscurity on my laptop’s hard drive for the next couple years.
David Lompe was one of my best friends in college and a fine art major. While I was editing film projects about werewolves he was painting robots. We used to hang out in our dorm rooms for hours, discussing the merits of Star Wars films and H. P. Lovecraft stories, or blasting epic movie soundtracks as loud as we could down dorm hallways until we were begged to stop. We moved to different states after school but we always stayed in touch, and two years ago David surprised me with a question: he asked me if I had any ideas for a comic book. My mind went directly to The Vigilante Hunter.
A couple months later issue one was finished. It was a weird sensation because I felt like I had done next to nothing. All I did was drag out an old script, dust it off, revise it a bit and email it off to David, who then had to draw every panel from scratch. It was very humbling but also hugely exciting. One of the joys of the creative process was seeing how David visually interpreted my vaguely written world. Where I saw futuristic body armor and helmets he saw trench coats and fedoras. Where I saw a white woman he saw a black woman. There were a couple things we both saw the same way, and we had plenty of long phone conversations cementing the history and politics of the comic’s world. Vigilante Hunter is about authority and how people deal with it, and we had to be on the same page concerning the future of the comic’s narrative.
I just finished writing issue two, issue three is in the works, and everything has become a lot harder. I’m no longer just dusting off a goofy film school idea; I’m working from scratch now. That’s not to say the process isn’t fun. The comic book world David and I are creating borrows heavily from things we love: caped crusaders, vintage fashion and technology, fantasy and science fiction novels, H.P. Lovecraft, dystopian literature, etc. Working on this comic has been a dream come true for me, and I’ve learned a lot about visual storytelling and collaboration. Though I’m still a filmmaker at heart, creating comics is a great way to flex my creative muscles and I’m so thankful to have a friend like David to create them with.