The origin story

The most basic identity of the Dystopia setting was two-fold: 1. It was a place that everyone at Fifth Panel Comics could play around in. 2. It was a way to compile a ton of random ideas that I’d built up over the years and do something interesting with them. That’s pretty much it. I didn’t really come to it with any kind of grand vision. In fact, I didn’t have any vision until one moment while I was sitting on a couch in my mother’s place in Arizona after returning from the San Diego Comic Con.

Jeff and I had met at the Chicago Comicon in 1991. He had Fifth Panel Comics, a small indie studio, up and running by then, having rounded up a passel of interested artists on the old Prodigy network. Having failed to get any attention from the major companies (Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, etc.) with either my stories about their characters or with the two major projects I’d been working on (a couple books called Doomsayer and Therapy, which I might talk about somewhere down the road), I started moving through the small press area at the Rosemont Convention center, seeing if I could find other people of like mind who might be interested in ideas that I was pitching. Jeff and artist Dave Witt were those people. I was attending the con with my friend, artist Will Kliber, and Jeff said: “Pitch me a story.” Will and I had been working on a couple horror story ideas; one of them centered around the character that would later become The Gargoyle, so we decided to offer that one up and Jeff suggested a deadline for the finished pencils and we agreed. That was the beginning.

A few weeks later, I was in San Diego, again trying to pitch my “big” story ideas and again meeting with no luck. At one point, Jim Shooter told me that I was wasting my time without an artist walking around with me (despite Jim having started in a similar fashion to what I was attempting, at the age of 14.) So, I left the con still frustrated that I couldn’t get anyone to listen, but was communicating with Will about progress on the work we were doing for Fifth Panel. I had brought my “ideas” notebook with me to San Diego, because at that time barely a couple hours could pass without me jotting down a story, character, or premise that could be something I’d want to pursue at some later date. I was listening to The Doors’ L. A. Woman album, when this song came on:

That was the trigger moment. I started imagining the concept of American urban decay taken to the nth degree; where societal collapse had become so advanced that a city had, in fact, physically collapsed and become a kind of Dante’s Inferno, with different levels having a different atmosphere or identity, which would be different genres of story. That way, not only could it incorporate a number of the ideas in that notebook, but it would also invite the other creators at Fifth Panel to participate with their own stories so that we could generate something of an esprit de corps at the studio. Socialist that I am, I wanted something on which everyone would work together. I jotted down the general premise, adding to it a couple characters that I’d had sitting around, like The Mime, and then just let it sit.

A week later, I was at the studio talking to Jeff and suggested the idea to him. He looked at me with an expression of mild disconcern and said: “Write me a proposal.” He later told me that he’d expected me to come back to him with a single-page proposal that would talk about the grand scheme, but leave the future details kind of hazy, as something to be filled in later, almost literally. Instead, I went home and sat down for a couple hours and churned out the first version of the “bible”, which was 20+ pages of setting, character details, and notes about the environment. I brought that back to him the following week and he started reading it. He stopped to call one of our local artists and said: “Hey. You should stop by and check out this cool thing that Marc just handed me.” He read some more and called someone else: “You should really come by and check out this awesome thing that Marc did for that shared world idea.” He read more and called a third person: “Hey. You really need to come see this amazing thing that Marc wrote-!”

Of course, the funny thing was that I considered the whole setting to be just a side effort. My main efforts were still to try to sell Doomsayer and Therapy, but I wanted to contribute something to 5th Panel so that, when I made my main sales and went off to hit it big as the next Neil Gaiman, there’d be something that I’d given to Jeff and the studio that could last and grow into something. In the end, I’ve written vastly more material for Dystopia than I ever have for the other two projects, both of which I had fully scripted for their first six issues. And, of course, Dystopia has actually had artwork created and books published. I later realized that, in the end, it was probably a better idea overall than either of the other two, anyway. And, of course, here we are trying to push it forward again.