I've been in a small, informal regular writing group since 2001, meeting once every two weeks in Somerville. People have come and gone from the group, but it's just kept on going for a decade now.
The great thing about the group, aside from the feedback and commentary, is that it forces you to have a deadline. When your turn comes up, you need to pass something in. Often you turn towards things you've done in the past, either revising or reimagining it over and over.
The following is one such story idea, which was to imagine a comic book universe in which the superheroes become aware that they are in a fictional universe. Of course, since some superheroes are geniuses, they figure out a way to cross over into the real world, with unforeseen consequences. This idea was one I had in 2003, and I'm now working on the third iteration of it.
Continuity - A Short Story
This was the first iteration of the idea, a self contained short story which hearkened back to company-wide crossover events that you'd see at Marvel or DC that shook up the status quo of the entire universe. Like Kurt Busiek in the Astro City comic book series, I had fun with creating an entire superhero universe for the sole purpose of having a complete seeming background for the story to play in front of.
That led to the next version of the story, the novel.
Chapter 1 of Big Crossover, the novel
While the original story stopped at the point where some of the characters crossed into the real world, I started working on a novel version that would use that as the starting point, sending one character into the real world some time after the original exodus. That character, Ricochet, would follow in the footsteps of the first wave and find out what happened to them, from the first chaotic moments when the laws of real world physics played havoc on some of them to the heroes' eventual adjustment to anonymity and normality. He stumbles into a noir-like investigation with secrets and lies and all that good stuff.
I structured each chapter like it's own comic book, with a "splash page" type of introduction and a little bit of a cliffhanger at the end, as if they were being published monthly. Every chapter could introduce the reader to a different aspect of the world by the main character interacting with a different person while the plot slowly unfolded. (Too slowly for some readers... I'll have to work on that.) I even put in a section in the middle which was drawn like a comic book, even with my crappy artwork.
I worked on this for around two years, if I remember right, starting and stopping here and there. I did get to the end of the novel, but with a caveat. After a while I figured out I had two stories that needed to be told. One was the adjustment of the Ricochet character into the real world. That was one I feel that I handled well enough. The other was the story of the comic book company and it's transformation over the years from a family business to an overblown, bankrupt bargaining chip to a mill from which blockbuster movies are made from the characters. To be told correctly, I'd have to restart from the beginning and edit the whole thing with a new outlook. Hopefully, I'll get back to that, but it's on the back burner in favor of...
First part of The Big Crossover screenplay
This, the screenplay version. I recently decided that I didn't have a full length screenplay of original material that I'm comfortable with, say, sending to contests and such, and that I needed to write one. So, I looked at what I had written and decided that The Big Crossover was the one that was the most promising candidate. Instead of the sprawling cast of characters I used in the novel, I pared down the heroes who've crossed over into a small superhero team with Ricochet following in their footsteps. I have the advantage of not needing to hew to the original, since I'm in control of both, and can only choose the parts of the novel what I think will be good for a movie.
If I finish this screenplay and it sells, the next logical step would be a novelization of the movie. I definitely have ideas for that...
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