Insect Asides, Part Twelve ~~ A "Comical Wednesday" Post

Hey, gang, guess what? Do you remember "Insect Asides" Part Ten? That's the one where I told you, at great length, about my plans for a far-reaching, epic storyline very loosely inspired by DC Comics' Crisis on Infinite Earths. I ended that post by saying "As for what happened to all these magnificent plans... well... See you next Wednesday!"

Well, that "next Wednesday" came and went, but I skipped my "Comical Wednesday" post that week. And last week, in Part Eleven, I jumped right into my post without ever telling the reason why I was forced to drastically reduce the number of chapters in what became known as "The Funnel Effect."

Oops.

Actually, it's fairly simple. As I've mentioned a few times before, Insect Man and Insect Man's Weird Tales were amateur comic books, eight-page (well, usually), photocopied, 5" x 8" comic books printed in black & white. No one made any money from them. They were written and drawn just for the fun of it. Even their publisher, Paul Howley, owner of the That's Entertainment comics and collectibles stores in Massachusetts, didn't make any profit from the sale of the comic. Sales of the books just covered its printing costs, if they even did that!

Well, fellow babies, there is absolutely no way to impose a deadline on work that's done on a volunteer basis. I mean, you can say "I need this by the end of the month" or whatever, but in the end, you can't really enforce that. What are you going to do, threaten not to pay the creator who's already not being paid?

Add to that the little fact that writing a comic takes a lot less time than penciling it or inking it. That's why the professional companies pay their writers much less per page than they pay their artists.

I remember when my former collaborator Skip Simpson and I were working on The Bird #1 (shown above). One day Skip approached me rather hesitantly and said that he'd been talking to his then-wife -- something he often did, oddly enough -- and they were discussing the expected revenue he and I would receive for The Bird's publication. He and Linda assumed that Skip and I would each receive 50% of whatever the publisher would pay the Simpson/Lynch team... and considering that his job as penciler, inker, and letterer was a lot more time-consuming than my job as a scripter, the 50-50 split didn't seem fair. I quickly pointed out that although we hadn't discussed our pay rates until that very day, it was never my intention to get half of the proceeds. That's just not the way professional comic book companies did things!

So, back to Insect Man.

It didn't really matter how quickly I could plot and script all the Insect Man stories (and spin-off series) that were floating around in my head. There was absolutely no way to make Ken Carson (or whoever else we could have found) churn out artwork at the same rapid pace. It's one thing to have an artist do an entire comic book of twenty pages or more every month, when you're paying him or her to do nothing else but that during an eight-hour day.

But the Insect Man stories were just a hobby, and not an occupation, for all of us.

So that's the reason my original, lengthy, convoluted plotline for "The Funnel Effect", as described in "Insect Asides" Part Ten, had to be condensed so very much before ever seeing print.

I had also had to make many other adjustments along the way. I had envisioned various sub-plots, and most of them would have taken place over a span of several issues, but I just didn't have the luxury of doing that.

To list only one example, I decided at the very start of my run on Insect Man's Weird Tales (Number 95, remember?) that I wanted to introduce a son for Rex "Insect Man" Mason.

I laid the groundwork slowly and not-so-surely. In issue #97, Greg "Mr. Secret" Nile supposedly learns for the first time that Rex had been very briefly married around the time of his high school graduation over twenty years earlier, but the marriage had been annulled due to their lying about the wife's age, and Rex hadn't seen her since then. Greg, citing TV soap operas and other similar forms of entertainment, suggests that Rex could have a hitherto-unknown offspring somewhere on the planet.

At the very end of Insect Man #101, a young man is shown, about to take a bus from Worcester, Massachusetts, to  Cirrus City (the fictional town in which Rex and Greg grew up). The man signs a traveler's check with the name "Alexander Mason."

In Insect Man #102, an unofficial "meeting" was arranged at the home of Rex's parents. Both Rex and Greg were invited... but due to the unplanned arrival of Scythe and the "Baby-Faced Ninjas," the purpose for said meeting was never revealed, either to Rex, or to Insect Man's readers!

In my mind, and unfortunately, my mind alone, here's what happened behind the scenes. ALLLLL of it:

• Soon after their marriage was annulled, his former wife discovered she was pregnant. At about the same time, she somehow learned that her former husband had a new hobby, that of dressing up in a weird costume, changing into bugs and fighting crime.
• Alexander Mason, Rex's son, had been told by his mother that his father had died in Vietnam during the 1960s. She figured that was preferable to revealing Rex's costume/bugs/crimefighting hobby mentioned previously!
• Sometime after Alex had reached adulthood in the mid-1980s, his mom told him the truth, that his dad was actually still alive.
• Not knowing how to get in touch with Rex, Alex instead contacted his grandparents, Richard and Betty Mason, who still lived in Cirrus City, where Rex had been raised.
• Rex's parents didn't want to spring Alex's existence on Rex, especially while Rex (as Insect Man) was so busy trying to defeat SKULL once and for all.
• Mr. and Mrs. Mason ended up contacting Greg Nile (sometime before the events told in Insect Man's Weird Tales #97), who was in the process of re-joining Counter-SKULL, and got him to begin warming up Rex to the idea of Alex or some other child being around somewhere.
• Meanwhile, Alex himself arrived in Cirrus City, and presumably stayed indefinitely at some hotel.
• Rex's parents and Greg finally decided to confront Rex directly. That was the unofficial meeting mentioned above, the one which went awry.

The sad part is, I was only able to show about 10% of all that! As a writer, I always try to tell the readers everything they need to know! But here, I just couldn't manage it. I finally threw my hands in the air (well, figuratively) and decided to deal with it in issue #105.

That meant that issue #105 was going to be a long, dialogue-filled issue. So I wrote it, Holly Basiner  (Scythe's co-creator, along with Frank Hunt) penciled it, and Ken Carson inked it (under the pseudonym of "Ethan K. Conners"). The cover, which was actually page one of the story, was penciled by Ken (again, as Ethan K. Conners) and inked by Holly.

As the conversation begins, Rex offers Scythe a drink. Non-alcoholic, of course. That leaves ginger ale (Rex's usual choice) or milk. Scythe teases him, asking if he also has any apple pie.

The conversation resumes. Scythe explains that she's been trying to actually sit down and talk with Rex for a while. (And finally, I get to deal with both the "son" thing and the "Rex/Michael Mason" thing! Well, part of that second one, anyway.)

Did you see that? "Next Issue -- It Finally Begins! "The Funnel Effect!"

Ohhh, if only my life went that smoothly!

To Be Continued.

Thanks for your time.

Insect Man, Insect Man's Weird Tales, and all related characters and titles are copyright © Paul B. Howley.
Scythe is copyright © Holly Basiner and Frank Hunt.