New to the comic? Read the story so far

1 Way Ticket is written by Chris Arrant and illustrated by Dan Warner

What Came Before: One | Two | And now, Page Three:

Please return next Tuesday, October 17, for Page Four…

In the meantime, Hyeondo and I will be at SPX in Bethesda, MD, along with such luminaries as Tony Millionaire, Jules Feiffer, Scott McCloud, Kevin Huizenga and more! Be there, or be square…

Previously in STUCK *
Page 13; Page 14; Page 15
*****

*****
Please leave a comment and come back next Monday.

Vito & Tom
*NOTE - As mentioned last week, Tom and I are trying to figure out the best way to show completed chapters, and we hope to have something in the next few weeks. We just might have it ready next week, but we’re still working out the kinks. Until then, you can find Chapter One by clicking here. From there, follow the links. Again, we’re working on this, so please be patient. Thanks.

TODT HILL, an adventure strip by Kleid and Colden, updates here every
Friday. Meet Gil Tompkins — only eleven and he sees things the world
ignores.

View the Hunt Thus Far

Join the Crew at

So there I was at the New York Comic Con, standing in front of some booth running one of those “spin the wheel, get a prize” promotions of the kind that WIZARD used to feature at San Diego before my good friend Doug “Mr. WIZARD” Goldstein ran off to Hollywood to write crazy sketches of animated toys. I belly up to the wheel and off to the side of the table there’s this book, and from its most arresting cover I know immediately that it’s… it’s… a comics-infused young adult novel.

Back the heck up. Am I looking at what I think I’m looking at? I peek at the back cover copy. Yeah. I have to have that.

“Hey, can I have that?” I ask the lady holding court, trying to be all casual so she won’t say no.

“No,” she says.

Three months later, I see the book behind the table at a comics convention (MoCCA) yet again. This time, I make no pretense.

“PLEASE!” I beg the Houghton-Mifflin lady.

“Oh, jeez,” she says. “Here.”

Score!!

Barry Lyga’s debut novel, THE ASTONISHING ADVENTURES OF FANBOY AND GOTH GIRL, is a true original: a touching and funny coming of age story with an affection for comics culture so seemlessly woven in that readers won’t know what hit them. Evidence: The anonymous narrator (let’s call him Fanboy) is a fledgling creator, and nothing will stand in the way of that once-in-a-lifetime chance: a portfolio review from Brian Michael Bendis. Sound dorky? Admit it, you’ve been there. One thing is certain: the comics love just pours out of this book, and in the eyes of a woman who really wishes that more teenagers would fall in love with comics despite the hurdles to, oh, I don’t know, buying them, that’s a real value-add.

Of course, my next goal was to find out who the heck Barry Lyga is and where he’s been hiding all this time. My searches yielded few hits. But while the Internet is a fickle mistress, she does give us the superpower of the Myspace message. So I contacted Barry, who patiently listened to my raving and agreed to an interview.

Most folks probably aren’t aware that you were in the comic book business for a long time. You used to work for Diamond, right? What did you do there?

Yeah, I worked at Diamond for a little over ten years. Basically, anything in Diamond Marketing that wasn’t Previews, I handled it! Web sites, retailer publications, Free Comic Book Day, book market publicity stuff, etc.

The lead in your debut novel pines away for, among other things, “a copy of Giant-Size X-Men #1 in mint condition.” Rumor has it that you have a sizable comic collection yourself. What are some of the notables in your collection? What books do you scour the longboxes for at cons?

My collection is a LOT smaller these days, thank God. It was starting to take over the basement. I’ve really pruned it down to the stuff that A) I love to read over and over, and B) will probably never be collected. I have VERY few notable books because I’ve always collected what I loved, not what I thought I SHOULD collect. The one exception is a pretty decent copy of Adventure Comics #247. I sort of pined for one all during my adolescence and a few months after I graduated from college, my local comic book store suddenly acquired one. I had to have it… and I did!

Amen to that. “Comics are for reading” has always been my motto. To that end, “notable” can of course include the comics for love, as ’twere. What favorites did you track down?

That Adventure #247 was my Holy Grail, really. There were also some obscure Legion appearances — in Justice League, for example — that took me a while to hunt down. I was very pleased to track down a run of Secret Society of Super-Villains because I had never read those and I’d always wanted to. Oh! And just recently I came across an issue of Supergirl (the eighties series, not the Peter David one) which was the second part of a story from Superman. I’d never seen it before and I’d always wondered how that Superman story ended!

At cons, my longbox-scouring tends to be very whimsical. Last time I went crazy at a con, a buddy of mine and I decided that we had to hunt down every appearance of Tyroc. Never mind that we already OWNED all of them at home - we needed them at that very moment, that very weekend, in our possession. That was a lot of fun. (Especially just to see the look on a dealer’s face when two manic guys rush up and say, “You got any Tyroc comics?”)

I have no idea who Tyroc is. Clearly this is where my nerd cred gets called into question…

He was the first black Legionnaire, created in the seventies at the height of the blaxploitation craze. No one involved was particularly proud of him and he was rather deliberately written out of the series later. Definitely one of those embarrassing “white guys trying to be uber-hip black guys” creations.

Ah, yes. I do remember this guy now. A certain someone used to fill me in on all this stuff…

All right. I have to ask: was Bendis briefed about his rather substantial role in your novel? Did you call him up one day or shoot him an email and say, “You know, dude, time with you at a con is kind of like the Macguffin around which my book revolves?”

Believe it or not, I don’t even KNOW Bendis!

I wanted the book to feel real, especially since I knew comic book fans would end up reading it, so I decided to use real creators and titles instead of designing some alternate universe of the comic book industry. When I decided to shop the book around, I e-mailed Bendis, just to let him know about his role, but I never heard back from him. (Just because I worked at Diamond didn’t mean I had a magic Rolodex with creator phone numbers on it!)

That kind of floors me, simply because whole Bendis subplot just feels like one of those things that comics people would know about, and THAT’S because one can’t keep anything a secret from comics people. There’s a perception, and it’s not *entirely* wrong, that the “walls” between comic book creators and… the rest of us are wafer-thin.

You’d think! I sort of thought for a while there that the phone would, inevitably, ring and someone would be calling about precisely that. But the book is in a whole different universe from comics — I think most comic book people aren’t even completely aware of it. Now that it’s out in stores, that may change.

And those walls may be wafer-thin, but they’re still there.

I did hear recently - through a friend at Marvel - that he’s aware of the book and is OK with it. I would totally understand if he never actually sat down and read it, though - that might be a little strange for him. But hey - if one of the Hollywood calls I’ve been getting pans out, maybe he would want to have a cameo in the movie!

I think a movie of this book would be delightful. And I really couldn’t imagine anyone playing Bendis except… Bendis!

Same here, though if he wasn’t interested I think I’d change it to a made-up creator — it just seems WRONG to have a movie where a living, breathing person is played by someone else.

In your book, you get the details of comics conventions just right. Have you ever dressed up at a convention?

Nope! Never had that particular urge. When I see someone with a really cool costume, I can admire the craft and the dedication, but I just never had the desire to dress up.

You have a degree in English from Yale and a taste for classical literature as well as comics. You read a lot. You write a lot. Name five of your favorite words.

Coruscate. Pleonasm (never get to use that one). Lyrical. Surreal. Solipsistic.

New to the comic? Read the story so far

NEXT WEEK: Things take a turn for the worse…

1 Way Ticket is written by Chris Arrant and illustrated by Dan Warner

What Came Before: One

Please come back next Tuesday, October 10, for Page Three…

Previously in STUCK *
Page 13; Page 14

*****

*****

Please leave a comment and come back next Monday.
Vito & Tom

*NOTE - This week, and from here on, we’re just going to post the previous installments for the current chapter. We’re trying to figure out the best way to show completed chapters, and we hope to have something in the next few weeks. Until then, you can find Chapter One by clicking here. From there, follow the links. Again, we’re working on this, so please be patient. Thanks.