MAY 13TH, 2009

COMING SOON:

"HOW TO BREAK INTO THE COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY AS A WRITER" TELECONFERENCE.

Within the next month, I will be arranging a special teleconference where I will be sharing important insider information about how to break into the comic book scene as a professional writer.

In this conference you will learn:

a) How to develop a viable comic book concept from a basic idea.

b) How to use the internet to find a quality creative team.

c) What kind of contracts to use when hiring freelance artists.

d) How to set up a professional deadline schedule and what to do when those deadlines are missed.

e) What to do when your first three issues are done and why you must not release the book until three issues are completed.

f) How to market your independent comic in the oversaturated comic book marketplace.

g) How to get the attention of game designers, Hollywood folks and other investors to create ancillary streams of revenue.

This teleconference will be at an introductory fee of $19.97 (U.S.) and will be very reasonable compared to the classes offered at the GOTHAM WRITER'S WORKSHOP ($500.00).

If you have questions, feel free to email me at brandon.easton@gmail.com 

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COMIC BOOK WRITER'S WORKSHOP:

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MY OFFICIAL BLOG:

Sorry, it has been a while since I was able to update this site. For some reason, my web-hosting software is not compatible with my home computers. Sucks for me. Anyways, I regularly update my blog, the FOOLS CRUSADE:

http://foolscrusade.blogspot.com/

Feel free to drop me a line there as well.

WHY SONY SUCKS! JULY 19TH, 2006

 I have been playing video games pretty much since the Atari 2600 back in the early 1980's and I have seen all kinds of things come and go. I watched the ascendency of Nintendo, Sega, and even the doomed 3DO systems. Then when Sony decided to get into the home console market, I thought that they might not have a shot at it since they had no recognizable brandings other than what you saw on VCRs and portable cassette tapes.

But when I saw Sony begin to carve out a piece of the market share, I figured that it was capitalism at its finest, free-market competition where the best company won.

Then I saw a disturbing trend... Sony began to take credit for things that other companies had developed and the fickle American video game market began to believe them.

Sony didn't actually CREATE anything in regards to video gaming. Sega and Nintendo DID. Back when Sega and Nintendo were fighting about who had the best versions of MORTAL KOMBAT or the little war between who was the fastest: Sonic or F-Zero? -- this was when games got really innovative and complex.

Sega and Nintendo developed incredible games or pressured developers like CapCom, SquareSoft, and EA to develop games that would force game buyers to make more intelligent decisions in gaming.

What Sony did do was coast along on the strength of the Sony brand name and convince people that the Playstation was the same as any other appliance rather than having to cope with the stigma of a "kiddie" game system. Sony had a massive marketing department behind them to push the system in ways that Sega or Nintendo never thought about.

3-D gaming did not get perfected on the Playstation but rather the Sega Saturn system with early favorites like VIRTUA FIGHTER and VIRTUA COP. But the problem was that Sega had a stranglehold in Japan, not the U.S., so many of the advances of the Saturn went completely unnoticed in North America.

Because of this, and Sony's marketing juggernaut, millions of kids in the U.S. assumed that the PS was the innovative system, and immediately jumped ship declaring that Sony was the best, and only, console worth buying.

I didn't notice how pervasive this was until September 9th, 1999 when the Sega Dreamcast was released. I was working in a Japanese animation store in Boston and we had also sold import video games, and we had tons of Sega stuff from Japan and the states, and a lot of people wouldn't buy it under the impression that the Playstation 2 (unreleased at the time) was going to be "better" than the DreamCast despite the fact that the launch titles on the DC were incredible -- especially Soul Calibur II.

When the PS2 was released, with games like Tekken Tag Tournament (which in itself was a tired ass rehash of previous Tekkens except with marginally better graphics) the results were decidedly underwhelming. Even RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA played and looked better on the DC than the PS2, but for some reason, it was drilled into people's heads that the PS2 was better.

Flashfoward to now, and with the possibility of a $600 PS3 on the horizon and a bunch of launch titles that are nothing but rehashes of previous games... check them out, each one is a variation on Halo, Destiny Warriors, or a slightly upgraded sports title... people are still saying that Sony is the best.

Based on what? The ability to grab all the 3rd party developers to churn out copycat games ad nauseum?

The hype machine is still in effect. It made me go out and buy a fucking PSP when all signs pointed to the Nintendo DS being a far superior handheld in terms of games, innovation, and price.

The PS3 is a big mistake just waiting to happen.

MY RED SOX ROAD TRIP, APRIL 8th -- APRIL 10th, 2006

Much of this won't make sense unless you know something about or actually care about the MLB teams of the Baltimore Orioles or the Boston Red Sox.

But a lot of happened over that weekend that I just had to share with people, so here goes:

I live in NYC, grew up in Baltimore, went to college and left town in 1992, and I am a proud Orioles fan. I have been a fan since 1979 and I have been with them from the highs to the lows and never wavered in my devotion to the Orioles. I am the kind of guy who gets really sentimental whenever I see a photograph of Memorial Stadium and I get super sad when I see pictures of the Memorial Stadium crowd whooping it up in the old days -- even in losing seasons.

I lived in Boston for 5 years and made friends with a bunch of good guys up there, and I even went to Fenway Park a few times -- I don't care what anyone says, Fenway Park sucks. Anyways, my friends, who now also live in NYC, have been wanting to do a road trip to Baltimore for years, and I have wanted to show them how much cooler Baltimore is than Boston (people in Boston seem to have constipation 365 days a year).

Anyways, on Friday, we loaded up the car and got out of NYC like a bat outta hell. We made perfect time and made it to Baltimore right in time for the first pitch on Friday night.

There were four of us, Me, BDB, August, and NoBankAccount. That's my name for them.

BDB = Asian guy who loves Boston almost as much as I love Baltimore. Has a problem understanding how much Boston sucks as a city in terms of personality. BDB stands for Back Down Buddy, in the sense that he is that friend who pulls out of major plans at the last minute because he is afraid of his parents. Mind you, he is in his late 20s.

August = Yuppie guy like those guys from the movie WALL STREET. Loves money. Talks about his conquests with women ad nauseum. Some of these stories are fabricated. I call him "august" because his best woman stories seem to happen in the month of August.

NoBankAccount = Good guy who has no bank account despite being in his mid-20s and this causes him lots of trouble whenever he needs to cash his paycheck. Hanging with him is like hanging out with a 12 year old sometimes.

August came with me last July when the Orioles took 3 out of 4 games from the Red Sox and was angry with me for the rest of the trip as if though I was a member of the Orioles. That was funny.

So we get to the game and NoBankAccount starts making comments about how many Red Sox fans are in attendance. We look at him in awe because a good portion of our trip down was spent discussing that very subject, we even listened to WBAL and had callers say the same thing, but NoBankAccount must have been enthralled by the harbor tunnel tollbooths when that was on the radio.

Of course, the Red Sox won and I had to hear garbage from these guys for hours on end. The crazy thing is that NoBankAccount spent half of his cash on beer and food at OPACY (Oriole Park at Camden Yards). I explained this happens when you have no bank account and you carry your whole paycheck in your pocket wherever you go.

We went out to eat at Phillips and had some crabcakes. Everyone loved the crabcakes except for August because he doesn't seem to share my love of Baltimore for some reason. He believes I make the state of Maryland out to be like Shangri-La when I really don't. I just believe Marylanders are better people than New Yorkers and Massholes.

NoBankAccount has a propensity to order lots of food just because the picture on the menu is nice. The advertising industry loves guys like him. When BDB eats, its like he just drops his head down on the plate and breathes in deeply. Food gets everywhere and he doesn't seem to notice it until someone reminds him of the fact.

SATURDAY:

We get up early and go to Towson Town Center. We go shopping and I order snickerdoodles from Great Cookie. They think thats funny, but I tell them that these are the best damn cookies in the world. They laugh at me until they eat them.

No one else made fun of snickerdoodles except for August, who hates them for no other reason that they were made in Baltimore.

At the game on Saturday, it felt like we were about to watch a football game in December. None of us dressed for football weather so we spent most of the game huddled in a corner I had on my FLOCK shirt but couldn't seem to find a single other person in Flock gear. That made me angry.

Eventually, we had to break out of there because I could no longer feel my feet, nose, hands, ears, chest, or back. We were joined by two friends of mine I grew up with in Baltimore: JailHouseMike and MovieUsher. Those names require more storytelling than I am willing to type. We went over to Pickles Pub where we were greeted by these two skanky girls dressed in black mini-skirt outfits who were doing promotional stuff for Barcardi.

I watched in horror as the Orioles continued lose and I began to swear loudly about Peter Angelos which sent more than a few bewhildered states from Red Sox fans in my direction. Then I started trashing the Red Sox, Fenway Park, and bandwagon jumpers at which point some jerk started explaining that Fenway was an "important piece of American history" and then I said "its an important piece of American history that needs to be knocked down and made a landmark."

I then went on a rant about how stupid it was to build more seats in a ballpark that obviously weren't meant to be there (like on TOP of the green monster) and that Bostonians were too dumb to understand that you don't lose history when you build a new stadium (unlike Baltimoreans who let them tear down Memorial Stadium with no outcry -- UGH).

At our hotel in Timonium, there were a bunch of cheerleaders there. Little did we know that there was a cheerleading competition at the Baltimore Convention Center that weekend and all of our high school fantasies were about to come true -- we hoped. Those dreams ended quickly because we found out that these girls were all in high school. This info might not have stopped BDB if we hadn't been around.

Saturday night as was a lot fun as I spent the night flirting with a waitress who started to get uncomfortable with my advances. Oh well.

SUNDAY:

We were all hung over and tired. We didn't want to leave the hotel. NoBankAccount seemed to be out of money. I wanted to yell at him, but we have had that conversation 365, 765, 322 times over the last 6 years. He wanted to go to Burger King for breakfast but we yelled at him for being broke.

We ended up eating at HarborPlace where another one of the 25,000 Red Sox fans made fun of me for being the only Oriole fan downtown (yawn). I asked him at what point did he become a Red Sox fan: in early October 2004 or late October 2004? He didn't say much after that.

I watched the Orioles lose another game to the Red Sox but I wasn't upset at all. That's not true, I was livid. I cursed and shouted all afternoon. The only thing that calmed me down was that really cool WORLD OF ORIOLES BASEBALL song and video they show on the screen. It made me realize that the Orioles were once something beautiful, great, heavenly, and proud. I looked down from that screen and saw a completely different team than the one that was in my heart.

My anger turned to sadness. BDB and NoBankAccount noticed this, but August (who was born without a soul) refused to even look at the screen during the song.

We left Baltimore that afternoon about 5pm and I left a lot of my heart there in OPACY. With all those Red Sox jerks there I felt like my home had been invaded and stomped on. I yearned for the days in Memorial Stadium when Orioles fans were hardcore and dangerous. Now, fans barely talk.

I am optimistic though, I believe this team needs about two months to gel. Early June is my true barometer for the Orioles but I REALLY don't like it when the Red Sox fans act like OPACY is their ballpark. And I REALLY don't like Peter Angelos.

To quote my friend JailHouseMike, "This really sucks."

Something needs to be done.

As I turned around after exiting the Harbor Tunnel and saw the Baltimore skyline fade into the Sunday afternoon, I could hear that Orioles song in my head and thought to myself:

"Thank God I'm a Country Boy." (The John Denver song they play during the 7th inning stretch at the stadium).

SHADOWLAW -- My Return to the Comics Industry.

January 10th, 2006

*all finished and concept art is owned by the author. copyright 2005.

It's hard to beleive that its been almost 3 years since I have done any work in the comics industry. After the end of "Arkanium" at Dreamwave (that might be coming back with the original creative team of myself and LeSean Thomas -- who is now working for Sony doing the explosive BOONDOCKS animated series) I spent a year hitting comic book companies for more work on an established property.

Because of a series of issues -- namely politics, a shifting market, editors and their narrow preferences, and a lack of patience on my part -- I never did get hired to do anything else. I always knew that rejection was a typical and daily part of a writer's life, but I assumed incorrectly that people would be more open once you broke through the solid steel gates of comic book publishing and made a name for yourself.

Obviously, my name wasn't big enough.

So I went back to my drawing board, which in my case was a trunk full of unused story concepts from my days in film school. Most of my stories were deep lamentations on the nature of love, racism, or global politics, none of which made for a particularly compelling exercise in adventure.

But there was one interesting thing. A treatment for a horror/sci-fi screenplay that I once pitched as a cross between BLADE RUNNER and THE LOST BOYS. A story of vampire hunters in a megaopolis on the hunt for vampires at a prison colony. The basic concept was very strong, but the overall plot and motivations for my characters were threadbare and cliched. Even professional screenwriters who had taken the time to read it told me the same thing. So, I did what any overbearing and arrogant film student would have done at the time: I threw it in a plastic box and totally forgot about it.

In the Fall of 2004, on a particularly boring Saturday afternoon, I was going through my college stuff thinking about some old buddies when I rediscovered the screenplay treatment. I looked closely at the basic idea -- vampies in a future world. I felt that vampires have been done to death, and while I personally hate bloodsucker stories with a passion, there was a part of me that knew that this could be turned into something viable.

And with that, I started the process of retooling my story from a chase adventure into a political thriller that turns into a horror fest: ShadowLaw. I changed the group of characters into one, I made this character a disgrace, and I put him into a concentration camp. It was in this concentration camp that the vampires would be.

But WHY?

Why the hell would vampires be in a concentration camp? And what kind of society would create a situation like this?

That's where the imagination comes in. Without spoiling anything, I had to find a way for this social order to exist with a certain amount of believability. I looked at our current world for inspiration. We are in a bit of mess right now because the majority of our public and economic policy is determined by petroleum (oil) and our current leadership will do anything to get it and make their oil-company peers richer.

How will this evolve and play out over the next 300 years? In that socio-economic framework I created a world overrun by excess and controlled by a political establishment that is, in turn, manipulated by the Vatican. So in essence, I created an evil future that is molded by the Catholic Church.

Before anyone gets offended, relax. I am a lifelong Catholic, and while I do not agree with a great deal of what goes on in the leadership, I do believe that there is a lot of strength, beauty, and moral intelligence being taught through the faith.

Any political establishment with religious authorities pulling the strings is undeniably a dangerous thing. So I grabbed that and ran with it. Ran all the way to the comic book shop.

Well, not yet.

There is the little matter of finding a distributor and creating my own pre-release buzz, but this is all academic. ShadowLaw will be out, and out very soon. I guess I want any and all aspiring talent to think about doing your own thing. Forget about writing Spider-Man, X-men, Superman, or even Green Lantern. The big companies are hiring the same 5 or 6 guys to write just about every book on the market (nothing against those dudes, because they have righteous levels of talent) and the best way to get established is to do-it-yourself and maintain creative ownership of your book.

The money and attention may come later if you have a little talent and know how to properly market yourself.

Time will tell.

"A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing..." -- George Lucas, 1986