Greetings Loyal Airmen, in today’s Flight Log we are going to share a story with you that started, at least for us in 1989 and has just come to publishing life at long last. It is how a comic we wrote way back then was chopped up by idiot licensors, ended up in our files collecting dust for several decades and then was resurrected in a whole new way. But hey, let’s start from the beginning.
Thriller writer David Morrell wrote a small suspense novel called, “First Blood.” It told the story of John Rambo, an ex-Special Forces veteran who had served with honor in Vietnam and now back home in the states was trying to readjust to civilian life. In a small town along the Pacific northwest, he runs afoul of a redneck Sheriff and before too long has been pushed into starting a mini-war against this Sheriff and the local militia. At the end of the book, Rambo is cornered and dies leaving us with a tragic morality tale about a government that teaches its soldiers to become killers and then simply cuts them loose. Of course this was all before we began to understand Post Traumatic Stress. The book itself was a minor success until it was picked up by a film studio to be made into the a movie. The actor behind the project was just reaching his pinnacle of fame and stardom; Sylvester Stallone. The thing is, Stallone saw lots of potential in the character of John Rambo and purposely altered the ending so that at the movie’s finale, he is not dead, but turns himself in to be sent to a federal prison.
As for Morrell, he had little to complain about when in 1984 Stallone and the film people came to him saying they were going to do a sequel to “First Blood,” to which he would eventually do the novelization. In “Rambo – First Blood Part II,” our hero is released from prison upon agreeing to go back into North Vietnam on a top secret mission to locate missing POWs that the government believes might still be held in captivity. Rambo’s mission is to simply gather data. But when he actually does find such a camp, he proceeds to become a one-man-army again and frees the POWs much to the embarrassment of the CIA. Thus ended the first sequel.
By now the character of Rambo had swelled into something larger than life and by the time 1988 rolled around and “Rambo Part III” debut, he was more a superhero than a credible human with special skills. This time he ends up in Afghanistan helping the natives fight off the Russian invaders. Ironic that some twenty years later, these so called freedom-fighters would evolve into the barbaric Taliban and be responsible for attacking the U.S. on 9-11.
It was about the time of this third Rambo flick that we learned a comic company in California named Blackthorne had obtained the rights to the character and was going to launch a comic book series about him. Having served in Vietnam (1977-78) we’d had the occasion to meet many Green Berets and had always admired and respected these amazing men. They were true patriotic warriors and unlike the grunting caricature Stallone portrayed them to be in the movies. It was our thought that if we could land this writing gig, we could finally show John Rambo as a real, intelligent American warrior and accurately show what Special Forces fighters were all about. On a slim hope we sent author Morrell a letter telling him of our intent and asked his help in putting us in touch with Blackthorne.
A few weeks later, Morrell, much to our stunned surprise, replied and gave us the name and telephone number of Editor John Stephenson; the fellow in charge of the comic project. We immediately called Stephenson and the two of us hit if off. He appreciated our being a veteran and liked our wanting to approach the project with a more down to earth, realistic look at the character. We signed on to write a four issue mini-series which takes place after the events in the last Rambo movie. At the same time, during the primary plot which would pit the hero against terrorist operating a secret base in the Canadian Rockies, we took the opportunity to weave in Rambo’s background, where he came from, who is parents were; in other words his origin tale. Again fleshing out the action stuff with real characterization.
As we were finishing the final script, Stephenson called to tell us they had found a talented young artist to draw the series; a fellow name Aaron Lopresti. Yeah, that Lopresti who went on to much bigger and better things. Trusting in Stephenson’s know-how, we proceeded to finish and submit the fourth and final script. As Lopresti began work on illustrating the first script, copies of all four were sent to the film company, the owners of the property. It was part of the contract that they approve all scripts.
And that’s where the train jumped the tracks. A few weeks later Stephenson called to tell us the bad news. The film people hated our scripts…because there wasn’t enough blood and guts action and too much humanizing of the hero. This wasn’t their half-caveman character they argued. Fans wouldn’t recognized him as we had written him. In no uncertain terms, Stephenson was told told to cut out ALL the motivational stuff and steam-line the scripts to showcase only the action.
And so they gutted our first two scripts and from them created one….which in this fashion makes absolutely no sense at all. The book was solicited and released. See cover above. Even with Lopresti’s wonderful art, the cannibalized book was a piece of crap and it flopped big time. Shortly thereafter Stephenson called us to tell us they were cancelling the series and there would be no second issue. To which we breathed a “Thank God.” And that was that. The epilogue to all this is a few weeks later we received a postcard from Morrell that read, “Sorry, kid, you wrote him too good.”
One of the things any writer learns is that you don’t waste a whole lot of time on projects that fail. In this case, as disappointed as the Air Chief was, we realized it was best to put the whole thing behind us and move on to our next project. And so those four original Rambo comic scripts were filed away. Still, we never completely forgot them and many were the times the Air Chief would reflect on those languishing scripts and wonder if there was a way they could someday be salvaged.
Thus, about ten years ago, during a slow period in our writing schedule, we retrieved all four scripts and changed the name of the hero to Richard Lyon with the intent that maybe someday we’d find another artist and get the project relaunched as Black Lion, the code name for our ex-military hero. As no one had ever seen the actual scripts, we would be putting out an entirely new, creator own series. Alas, no sooner were those changes made then we got busy again and they went back into the files. Apparently it still wasn’t the time to make them work.
Jump ahead to ahead to 2010 and we packed up and moved out here to beautiful Fort Collins, CO. Somewhere in that time frame, we’d given more thought to the old “Rambo” scripts and what with all the wars and conflicts that has transpired in those intervening years, we decided that our hero would become an African American Ex-Navy Seal named Jamal Lyon, still code name Black Lion, but now a veteran of the Iraq war. Modernizing things seemed a more plausible approach as Vietnam was all too rapidly becoming “old history.” Oh, yeah, Loyal Airmen. Time waits for no man….or comic book writer. One of our artist pals, Brian Level, did up a few color sketches of this “new” hero. Sadly he was unable to commit to drawing the comic.
Then in the Fall of 2013 we were invited to be a guest at the Rocky Mountain Con put on by Tim Moret. It was a charity show with all the proceeds going to the survivors of the tragic Aurora Movie shooting of the previous year. We we only too honored to be a part of this two day week-end show.
On the first day of the show, we met by an affable fellow named Kevin Johnson and soon learned he was a career Army Sergeant who had just retired after a twenty-year hitch serving his country. Kevin is a great guy and we’re friends in a matter of minutes. He asked if he could stop by the next day and show me his portfolio. Now out of the Army, Ken was hoping to go to college to study art, his one true passion. Thus Sunday rolls around and Kevin arrives with his portfolio filled with lots of great sketches…and among these were comic pages. Those caught our attention instantly. They’d been done over twenty years earlier and were damn good! Enough so that we asked if he would be interested in working with us on a very special project we’d had laying dormant for far too long. He wanted to hear more and over the next half hour we told him about the history of our aborted Rambo comic and its evolution into a proposed Black Lion project. Before we parted company that day, Kevin had agreed to take it. Kevin Johnson was going to be the penciler on the revived Black Lion project!
Still, in the coming days after the that agreement, we realized this would be his first professional comic gig and it would be wise to recruit a top-notch inker to embellish his line work; an inker with a long resume of top-notch work. Our writing amigo, Mike Baron, put us on to the amazing Mark Stegbauer, who to our delight, agreed to join the team after we sent him our pitch. The final pieces of the puzzle would be a letterer and colorist. We’d already done several projects with letterer Warren Montgomery of Oregon, enough to know he’s one of the best. But we were happily surprised when Warren informed us he was getting into coloring as well and would take on both positions, if we were willing. Ha, it didn’t take us more than a few seconds to accept that offer.
Thus the team was in place and it was time to get the ball rolling. Whereas Kevin started turning pages in slowly…ever so slowly. Again, do understand, not only was this his first such gig, but he also has a family to take care of and then college courses to deal with. Time moved and the weeks turned into months and the months into two full years before…issue # 1 was completed.
The book was released officially at (www.IndyPlanet.com) two weeks ago and of course people will be able to pick up copies from both Kevin and the Air Chief at our con appearances this year. The moral of this story is an easy one for all you writers out there, never ever give up on your scripts. Even if it means waiting almost twenty years to see them published. A tip of the pulp fedora goes out to our team here, from Kevin, who is already doing pages for issue # 2 and Mark and Warren. They did an amazing job. For the Air Chief, seeing my scripts realized as we intended is vindication enough and hopefully as the rest of the story unfolds people will finally get to see what we really imagined so long ago. We can’t ask for any more than that.
Ron – Over & Out!
