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FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: LIVEWIRE (ill-fated 80s-era cyberpunk SF comic)
🕑 Added 2020-07-03 13:00:04 +0000 UTCWelcome to another installment of FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY, folks! (First one in quite a few months, I'm afraid.)
I'm going way the hell back for this one; I was working on this project at the same time that I was cranking out my first bunch of (unpublished) Dirty Pair stories, back in my second and third years at the Joe Kubert School circa1987-88. The project's failure was no great loss, but I hope it will serve as an object lesson re: how a failed project can be cannibalized to facilitate other projects, and also re: how it's often helpful to keep one's project goals concrete and well-defined.
The project was a decidedly "cyberpunk" SF comic called Livewire. (Note that this was Livewire singular, as opposed to Livewires plural.) The title was supposed to be a slang term for a rogue AI, in this case a rogue AI with a hidden agenda that covertly downloads a copy of itself into the medium of experimental bioware injected into a hapless young student's brain-- Ah, screw it, I won't even bother to even attempt to fully explain Livewire's overheated, violently-late-80s fever dream of a story. Short version: badass, cyber-enhanced, jacked-up chica tries to bodyguard a hapless male student, who's carrying a headful of bioware housing a rapidly mutating and self-evolving AI, as hordes of rival badasses pursue them across the earth and into space. Ooh, ah.
While the "rogue AI" element sounds rather Gibsonian, the project itself—and my later interpretation of Dirty Pair—was primarily influenced by the tragically underrated work of SF author Walter Jon Williams, who wrote far more action-packed, suspenseful, and character-driven stories than any of the other, better-known "cyberpunk" writers of the mid- to late-80s (some of whom were rather better at self-promotion than at actually writing, IMHO). At the time, his novels Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind, with their adroit combos of big-time action, relentless pacing and bold, often slyly amusing feats of world-building, both loomed very large over the development of both Livewire and Dirty Pair.
BELATEDLY RECALLED UPDATE: Long-time Dirty Pair readers might recall that Walter Jon Williams wrote the forward to the TPB collection for the third DP miniseries, A Plague of Angels.
Anyhoo. As was the case with many anime geeks of the late-80s day, I was a big fan of Pop Chaser, Hiroyuki (Project A-Ko) Kitakubo's bizarre but colorful installment in the Cream Lemon series of anime porn videos. In a truly inexplicable decision on my part, I decided to pay an homage to Pop Chaser's rocket-launching, airbike-riding protagonist, "Rio," by using her name (and likeness, to a degree) as the basis for Livewire's cyber-enhanced, gun-toting, kung-fu-fighting "badass chica" heroine. I have no earthly idea why I didn't notice that this was a deeply, deeply stupid idea; you can see a side-by-side comparison between the characters in the thumbnail below. (Have to admit, I didn't remember that "my" Rio wore high heels. Hmm.)
In retrospect, the project's failure was no particular tragedy, as Livewire was quite thoroughly bogged down in the cyberpunk tropes and anime clichés of its time. Moreover, I have absolutely no idea how the hell the comic would've been done. The total story was split into three separate "books," but I've no idea how long each book's arc would've been. Twelve issues? Twenty? Was I supposed to crank out twenty monthly issues back to back? Unlikely, to say the least.
This is a recurring problem with grandiose, epic projects of this sort, a problem that's afflicted me since, as well as other professionals I know: When you come up with a Big, Sprawling Story like Livewire, such properties often become so damn BIG and SPRAWLING that there's essentially no way that they could practically be carried out. Either that, or you waste months and years of work planning and preparing and designing and plotting and replotting and revising ad nauseum, to the point that you don't actually accomplish much of anything in terms of finished work.
In general, particularly in regards to comics projects, you're better off working towards a discrete, easily accomplished goal (an individual issue or short story, say, or a brief miniseries) now, rather than wasting time in development of some Grandiose, Sweeping Project that, if you really think about it, may have little chance of ever actually getting off the ground. Better to work on something that can be feasibly carried out in bite-sized pieces (as with, say, Empowered), than metaphorically choke on a project far too rambling and unwieldy to be realistically undertaken (as with the long-defunct Livewire).
However, in the end Livewire's well-deserved demise served to aid a number of other, more promising projects down the line:
*Most obviously, I used a plural variation of the Livewire title as the name for a project I later developed for Marvel, Livewire. (Original title for that one, by the way? Mannites. Ouch.) I should note for you 80s metalheads out there that, yes indeedy, the title Livewire was a direct reference to the Motley Crue song of the same name. Ouch, again.
*My Kubert-School friend Matt, a very talented letterer and nascent logo designer, developed a number of damned fine logos for Livewire; I used his typeface from one of those as the basis for the English logo of my Bubblegum Crisis: Grand Mal miniseries in 1994.
*The main bad guy from Livewire was, believe it or not, ported over from an extremely violent comic I did as a joke "modern update" of—brace yourselves, folks—Scooby Doo(!). No, really! This "reboot" featured a violent, direly unhinged version of Shaggy, returned from some ill-defined Central American warzone with Special Forces skills and a plan for revenge on the Scooby-gang members who betrayed him (AND a series of wardrug-induced hallucinations that his long-dead dog Scooby was egging him on).
I repurposed badass, wardrug-crazed Shaggy into the badass, wardrug-crazed antagonist, Kevin "Doc" Shock, in Livewire. Years later, that character's design (if not his actual characterization) would wind up being used for Kevin J. Sleet, the Dirty Pair's misogynistic foe from Sim Hell (and, indirectly, Fatal But Not Serious).
*Another major character from Livewire was an embittered, sardonic Russian mercenary who at first aids our heroine but later turns on her (as he works for the rogue AI, but let's not get into that crap). Years later, he would be ported over quite directly into the previously mentioned miniseries Bubblegum Crisis: Grand Mal as the Knight Sabers' erroneously named antagonist "Peter Vashnevskaya" (his family name should've used the patronymic "Vashnevski," I'm told).
On a gun-nuttery note, the piece above was drawn in 1988, at a time when artists were pretty much required by law to insert the ubiquitous Franchi SPAS-12 in every g-d thing. A year or two later this fairly infamous shotgun made another appearance in the second Dirty Pair miniseries, Dangerous Acquaintances.
I did, in fact, draw quite a few more illos and design roughs for this project back in the Kubert School day, as well as at least 8-10 comic pages; alas, the Livewire material I posted today is the only scanned artwork presently lurking on my hard drive. Someday down the road, once I start scraping the bottom of the barrel for Patreon content, I'll scan the other pages and show 'em here in a follow-up post or two.
NEXT MONDAY ON THIS HERE PATREON: The usual double dose of life drawings, as you'd expect by now.
Comments
Karlos
Now I have to find a copy of Pop Chaser..!
Michael Favila
This was a great story, thanks for laying it all out.
Strypgia
I can definitely see the same style for your hand here as in the first Dirty Pair English series you did.
Mike Powers
Walter Jon Williams never got the credit he deserved; "Hardwired" invented most of the style tropes we now use to define "cyberpunk". I'm still waiting for the third "Metropolitan" book but I doubt that's gonna happen, because he just doesn't seem excited about going back to that.
A Patreon of the Ahts
That gun is crazy illegal and it's just a gas operated shotgun.
Jack Hallows
classic
