Bastard Squad: Tomboy (Patreon)

One of the characters for the Bastard Squad pitch I put together years ago. I only pitched it to Dark Horse, they weren't interested. I didn't feel up to pursuing it further because the story ideas were growing to a point where if the porject did get picked up, it would impact on the already miserable Beasts of Burden schedule. I gotta finish something other than Eltingville before I kick.

Most of the characters never got designed, but I was happy with the basic idea for Tomboy and reached a final design fairly quickly. At some point someone else used a character named Tomboy and that also bummed me out, although I could always use the character anyway, as long as there's no comic called "Tomboy". Like why there's a Marvel/DC Scarecrow. Unless things have changed, legally-speaking. Anyway, it doesn't matter because Bastard Squad won't ever happen. If you've seen Fight-Man, it would have basically been a lot like that, only weirder, and with everything created from the ground up. I worked up a core group of characters and a lot of villains and rivals. But there's not a real hook for the series, beyond, "superheroes, done the way I do them", and that only works if you're already a sure thing (or whatever looks like a sure thing in comics).

Folks like Gerard Way, Garth Ennis, Mark Millar, Jeff Lemire and Patton Oswalt can launch a superhero series/universe, but it's folly to try it without already having a huge mainstream following. I'm not whining, I'm just being honest. The only mainstream hit I've ever had was the first Predator book and -- if it counts as mainstream, which I think it does -- the first Beasts of Burden collection. Predator sold despite my work, anyone drawing that series in 1991 would have banked some money. It was still a big deal tie-in and the market was doing well. The first Beasts of Burden collection had extremely solid sales, unfortunately we killed that off with a messy schedule and a huge gap between books.

Truthfully, Bastard Squad was a lark for me to play around with, owing a lot to nostalgia about being a fan, playing Champions and just wanting to create a host of oddball charactersto play with. I love creating characters, it's something I think I'm good at. I like large casts and gradual, even offhand worldbuilding. I wouldn't have been doing Justice League analogs or making my superheros be vicious assholes or commenting on the stupidity of superhero tropes, it would have just been...superheroes. And stuff. Written by me. That's not enough without a lead-in audience or an artist with a lead-in audience. The meta was not earth-shattering. There was an angle I was developing about escapism, there was the matter of found families (which is in practically all of my work already, but here I was going to lean hard on it). In the end it was just an exercise. I shelved the pitch before sending it to any other publishers. We already have too many goddam superhero universes in this business as it is, we need fewer of them, if you ask me. I realized adding another one in my middle age (now old age) wasn't the best use of my time.

I still love the idea of superheroes, even though I've lost the desire to work on them that I had as a young person. And the interest in reading any of them, except the old stuff. Luckily there's more to comics than superheroes.