Acme A-List #3: Len Wallace

Len Wallace:  I'm 27 years old, which is past the point of being able to say you're not yet almost 30. I live in Louisville, Kentucky with my brother and his girlfriend.  Honestly, I've always been a pretty lax student... Not for lack of knowledge, I've just always been one of those kids who "didn't apply" themselves to their school work. All through high school, my grades started to take a turn when I bought my first video camera and wanted to write and make movies. Pretty much all the time that I should have been studying was instead devoted to my burgeoning interest in writing scripts and occasionally flirting with girls. It got so bad that I was the second lowest GPA to graduate from my class that year, but I made it out, and the writing bug has never left me.

The urge to make movies has dimmed a bit, because they're so expensive to make, but around the time I briefly tried my hand at film school, I rediscovered my lost love for comic books, and began tailoring Love Buzz, the script in which I'd been working on in one form or another since I was graduating high school, towards the comic book/graphic novel racket. I've been in and out of college several times and have still yet to graduate, because when I'm in school, I've always wanted to find a degree that would be able to keep me afloat if the writing thing never worked out. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any other fields that sparked my interest in the same way that writing has, so now with Love Buzz where it is, I'm hoping that will be something I'll never have to worry about.

MF:  Talk to us for a moment about how Love Buzz came about.  How instrumental was Jinxworld in the process of Love Buzz becoming a reality for you?  Can you talk about how important that community can be for a potential - or even established - creator.  How did your initial pitch come about?

LW:  The story of Love Buzz came about pretty much in the same way it came about in the book itself. I wrote it from a very personal place when my relationship with my "Maggie" came to an end and I needed a way to deal with it. The story of the creative nightmare behind Love Buzz however, is probably longer and more drawn out than the book itself, honestly. Social networking and the Bendis Boards have served me greatly in the process of getting things to where they are. If not for social networking I, in all honesty, would have probably given up on Love Buzz altogether years and years ago. My membership to the forums at Superherohype.com many, many years ago got me in contact with Love Buzz's original intended artist, Pejo Gilliam as well as the guy who acted as our unofficial editor over the years, PJ Kryfko, who briefly went on to be an assistant editor at Viper Comics, and is now doing his own thing as a writer. He's very good. Maybe the best editor not currently working in comics, and a damn fine writer to boot. PJ's been my go-to guy as a sounding board for Love Buzz and all my other writing ideas over the years. From there, I joined the Bendis Boards, of which I've been a happy member of for probably over five years now, and I love everyone there for thier support.

Through the BenBo, I met Lauren Perry, who was at the time the main editor of Silent Devil Productions, who was bored at work one day and told me to email her something I'd written. In that time, I sent her over the original script to Love Buzz, and she blew through it in an afternoon and loved it, telling me she would talk to Silent Devil's head honcho Christian Beranek about seeing if he'd want to pick it up to be published. Long story short, we were picked up at Silent Devil and they were very helpful to us in getting things moving. A problem arose soon after though, when Pejo ended up having to quit the book due to some personal issues, and I had to go on a quick scramble to find a replacement. Enter Michelle Silva, who I found and had been admiring for a long time via MySpace. She jumped onboard and ran with it, cranking out about half of the book before things with Silent Devil began to deteriorate and the company basically had to dissolve for lack of money. We got all our rights back to the book and everybody walked away happy. Christian got his job with Disney, Lauren got another editorial job elsewhere, and even worked to help us find Love Buzz a home with several other publishers that we ultimately said "no" to, because their contracts weren't as agreeable, and there were really no hard feelings.

Anyway, Love Buzz floated on without a publisher for a little over a year and some change, before we got ourselves into position with the guys at Oni. The story of how that happened was yet another bit of social networking serendipity. Oni's managing editor Randall C. Jarrell is also a big talker on the Bendis Boards, and we've talked on several occasions, and I don't remember how exactly it came about, but we were discussing something and I not-so-casually slipped in a joke about how grateful I'd be if Randy could take a look at our book and get his bosses to pick it up at Oni, completely expecting him to just laugh it off and never hear a word of it again. Next thing I know, I get a PM from him wanting to have a look at the pitch, which kinda floored me, but I sent it to him, and now here we are.

As for the guys from Silent Devil, I should probably try and clarify that there really is no ill will held over there, Lauren is one of my best friends, and she and I are working together currently on co-editing a romance comic anthology together that will hopefully see the light of day in the next year or two, and Christian, his brother Adam, and I are working together on a webcomic property that should shock many people. We're all still very good friends after all this

MF:  Can you talk about how you met your fellow creators on the book?  How about artists Michelle Silva and Dave Tuney?  How much input did the team give you regarding the layout and look of the book? How would you describe your rapport with them? 

LW:  The book has had several different looks over the last several years up to where it's gotten today. At one point early on, I was even of the impression I could draw the whole thing myself. (And this was back when the script was close to 300 pages!) Soon after, I realized this idea was insane and got a buddy of mine named Pejo Gilliam on board to draw and color it himself, which would have been great, and it was through him that we got the book picked up by Silent Devil back in '04, but he had to quit soon after for personal issues and I went through a scramble until I found Michelle Silva, who was an absolute revelation and an artist I think will have quite an impressive career of her own ahead of her. The girl schooled under Ryan Kelly, who drew Local, New York Four, and pretty much everything else Brian Wood is currently doing. She knows her stuff very well, and every time I got an email with new pages from her, it was like she'd reached directly into my brain and pulled the images out for all to see. I think she's absolutely brilliant, and she's also become one of my best friends in all this time and heartache of pushing Love Buzz uphill. All that said, maybe the most constant piece of this project besides myself has been Dave Tuney, whose place as Norm's "hands" for the sketchbook sequences have always been as intended. It's just been an additional treat to watch Dave grow into the artist he has over all this time. As much as Michelle's work has been the breakout in this project, I think Dave's going to go on to surprise a lot of people with what we end up doing next. I really can't say enough good things about these guys.

LW:  Tom Mauer has been attached to letter the project since back in '04, well before he became the the Indie and small press typographical "go to guy" he is today. I only found out a few months before the book hit stores that he had never gotten around to reading the script for the book in all this time, until the days he was rushing through to get all the letters down. Every now and then as he read and worked, he'd hit me up on AIM with comments like "Man, Norm was a dick in this scene." and stuff. It was very interesting to hear the take of someone reading it for the first time as they read it, since I've spent about 8 years with it and have felt a little punch drunk from the whole experience. Tom's work in Love Buzz should be nominated for some kind of award, honestly. It really made me take a further look at how much work and effort goes into lettering comics. Not just for the way he trimmed down a lot of my long running schpeels of dialogue to their essence, but for the added effort of creating new fonts by hand to fill Dave's "sketchbook" sequences and make them look that much more different from Michelle's work in the ongoing story.

LW:  Last but not least, there's Jill and Randy, who helped me through the last stretch of the marathon. Keeping artists on task, at one point, they even helped me re-write the book's ending, which while I liked the original at the time, the back and forth that Randy and I had on the subject inspired the idea for the current ending, which I think strengthened the impact of the entire book as a whole. Randy has recently decided to quit his job at Oni in favor of joining the Army Reserves as a field medic. I think it'll suck to not be able to work with him again, but at the same time, I can't think of a more noble reason to go off in service of one's country. Plus, it means a promotion for my other kick-ass editor Jill Beaton. She's been amazing and I hope to work with her more in the future. Pretty much everyone pulled off their parts pitch perfectly and completely made me look way better than I probably should.

LW:  Well, when I originally came up with the idea for it, I'd first discovered my deep love for the John Cusack movie version of High Fidelty. Having just come off a bad break-up when I discovered that flick, I decided to basically just write my own version of that kind of story. It sounds hacky I guess, but that's honestly how it started off, and by the same measure as I built up my page count while writing it, Love Buzz started to become something else entirely. I also on a more recent note went to see (500) Days Of Summer in theaters this past year and I gotta say, it reminded me of every single reason I had for writing Love Buzz in the first place. It was one of my favorite movies this past year, and I'd recommend it to anyone who liked Love Buzz if they promise to recommend Love Buzz to anyone who liked the movie. ;)

MF:  On Jinxworld you announced the arrival of Love Buzz by saying "For Real And For True!" while the book itself says "A True Love Story" on the front cover.  Exactly how true to life is Love Buzz?   Are Norm Raymer and Maggie Gunther real people or are they characters that represent elements of real people?  Can the same be said about Norm's friends Faith and Marc?

MF:  How true to your personal life is this book? Can you talk briefly about how many of the events in this book represent moments from your personal life and how it affects you as a person to have a book about your life on the shelf available for anybody to read? 

LW:  Like I mentioned before, this book came from a pretty personal place, so yes, much of the book represents some very real and intimate moments from not just my life, but the lives of some of the other people I wrote about in whatever round-about way I did. I can't really attest for how weird it is for those people to have it out there as a gift to the ages in the form of a book, but for me... I honestly don't think about it very much. I've always been pretty open with most people. Sometimes to a point where I shouldn't be. I'm not saying I don't have any secrets in my life or anything, but I've written other books like Love Buzz that I'm working on getting in publishing shape. Books I've written from a personal place as a form of therapy for something in my life that was bugging me, and some of them will be far more personal and stark than the issues dealt with in Love Buzz. Writing for me has been better than any therapy I've ever attempted to put myself through, honestly. As for which of the incidents were true or false, I like to keep people guessing about that. You'd really be surprised to find which incidents separate the fact from the fiction.

MF:  For those interested in reading "director's cuts" and scriptbooks do you have anything to offer for Love Buzz? Are there any places on the internet where we can keep up with your professional progress?

LW:  I'm currently in negotiations with Tim Daniels who runs The Comic Book Script Archives to post up the full mammoth almost 300 page script in six parts on the website. Hopefully side by side with the final draft if Oni will clear it, to not only be a good showing of what Love Buzz was and could have been, but also a good example to all up-and-coming writers out there of the wonders a good, hard edit can do. Other than this, I've got my blog and my frequently updated Twitter pages for people to check out, and be on the lookout in the coming months for a couple of different webcomic ventures I'm getting ready to embark upon.

MF:  Switching things up for minute since we're delving into the book - what music do you find yourself listening to? What movies and tv shows do you watch?  How much did these other forms of entertainment filter into Love Buzz?  Do you listen to music or have ambient entertainment while you're working or is it distracting?

LW:  My musical tastes vary quite a bit. I'm into everything from Johnny Cash to Wu-Tang Clan and a little bit of everything in between. I had a playlist I'd come up with as a sort of "unofficial" soundtrack to the book. A collection of songs I'd listened to or had influenced me in the process of writing the book. I was going to compile it for print in the back of the book, but we ran out of time and space, so maybe I'll throw it in a later printing if we keep selling the way we've been. Otherwise, I'll post it up on my blog at some point soon. You can see a lot of how music was influential throughout Love Buzz, in either the quotaion of song lyrics in different scenes, or even the fact that the title of almost every chapter is also a ripped-off song title or lyric from a piece of music. The fact is, I'm highly unoriginal when it comes to creating my own titles, so I take them from music. Especially Grunge era stuff, for some reason. Love Buzz for example, is the title of a song by a band from the 70's called Shocking Blue, which was later covered by Nirvana on their first album "Bleach". I'm also currently working on another book called "The Day I Tried To Live", which is the title to one of my old favorite Soundgarden songs. When in doubt, rip off a title or lyric to a song. Everybody's doing it!

MF:  What comics do you read and which creators do you find yourself following?  How much has their work affected you as a creator? 

LW:  Love Buzz is the creation of  a much, much younger and admittedly less jaded version of myself. I actually have put in many creative nods throughout Love Buzz to some of the comics and creators that have inspired me over the years in the form of Norm's "sketchbook" comics that are littered throughout the book. There are some great little tongue in cheek segments of Norm illustrating out some of his love and pain over things that happen in the book that are pretty much blatantly influenced by the works of Jim Steranko's Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Frank Miller's Sin City, Herge's Tintin, and for good measure, there's even a really fun bit that pays homage to the Adam West/Burt Ward Batman and Robin.

Other than that, I could go on mentioning the guys I follow that everyone else follows through their works for Marvel and DC, (Your Bendis' and Johns' and Brubakers, etc.) but instead, I'll be different and try recommending a few books that people have been less likely to try. Lately, I've been loving Chew and the Popgun anthology series from Image Comics, Fiction Clemens by my buddy Josh Wagner and Joiton from APE Entertainment, Adam Atherton's Zuda winning webcomic "Lily Of The Valley" has some of the most intoxicatingly beautiful art I've ever seen. (Adam, if you're reading this, WORK WITH ME, DAMMIT!) and for good measure, I'll recommend my buddy Steven Walter's  self-published graphic novel "Suburban Folklore", because I think it's criminal that book didn't get more attention. It's brilliant work, and Steven and I will be getting started on a crime book in the coming months after he finishes drawing his second book, which I believe is called "The Sweet Souvenir".

MF:  Have you read Craig Thompson's Blankets?  If so, what were your thoughts on that work and did that have any impact on your script?

LW:  I've read it and am a fan of it. I'd be lying if I said it didn't inspire my interest in turning Love Buzz into a comic book like The Waiting Place did, because until I read and saw the success of Blankets, I just didn't know if a story like this could do well in the comic book market. Although, I will say, Love Buzz is a great bit different from Craig's book. For one thing it's a great deal more humorous than Blankets, because as much as I love bumming people out or tug on their heart strings, I can't hide my sinister pervert sense of humor for long.

MF:  Have you received any guidance or advice from creators currently in the field?  If so, what did that mean on a personal level to you and how did it impact Love Buzz?

LW:  Not really. In fact, I've not really talked to many big creators about the book up until the book got solicited. I mean, I've been talking the thing up for years now  on message boards in every stage of development, and I've gotten a few good emails from other creators I've been friends with, telling me how much they've been looking forward to it, but no one yet that's really shocked and star struck me up until a couple months ago when the book first got solicited. I got a wild hair up my ass to check the Love Buzz Sean McKeever MySpace for the first time in about a year to find a really nice, really cool message from none other than saying he was looking forward to getting his hands on a copy of the book. McKeever's first book, The Waiting Place was not only a MASSIVE inspiration for me to turn Love Buzz into a comic book, but also just one of my favorite comic book experiences of all time. For anyone out there looking for more great slice-of-life stories like Love Buzz would be doing themselves a favor in picking up the recently reprinted massive volume of The Waiting Place that IDW just put out a couple months back. It's even got a whole new 20 odd page epilogue that McKeever and artist Mike Norton put together all these years after the book's run ended. Also over at Jinxworld, Tom Beland, who writes and draws the exceptional "True Story, Swear To God" told me he'd been looking for and having trouble finding a copy of the book at his local stores in Puerto Rico. Both of those experiences thus far have been really cool geek moments for me. I highly recommend TSSTG to the same type of audience who likes Love Buzz and The Waiting Place.

MF:  Do you still have contact with anybody from this period on your life?  How often do you reflect on this particular time and do you think that there is any more autobiographical work from you coming down the road?

LW:  Yeah, the girl on which Maggie was based is still around, and we still talk on occasion. She's been telling everyone she knows about the book, and we even met up in a coffee shop a few days after I got my first copy so she could look the book over again. She's very happy with it, actually. As for more autobiographical work, I've still got a few big events from my life that need to be expelled, including one book that's already been written and has art in progress by friend and fellow JinxWorlder, Aaron Bir.  The book will be called "The Best Of You, The Best Of Me" and I have posted a sample page on my blog that will give people a pretty good idea of what the book's going to be about.  Another book in this vein will hopefully be "The Grieving Process". It's a book from a much darker place and time in my life, which is why I've had to take a lot of breaks from writing it off and on over the years, but I'm looking to get it scripted and hopefully have an artist on it sometime into 2010. Beyond that though, I'm going to take a long break from the "personal" work for a while. It makes for good writing, but it can be very emotionally taxing after a while.

MF:  A natural seque out of the last question involves your future as a creator.  What can fans expect from Len Wallace in the future?  Are there any projects you can speak of or that you would just like to express an interest in doing?

LW:  Things are about to get a whole lot weirder and more depraved...  In the time since I finished writing Love Buzz all those years ago, I've come up with ideas for upwards of 15 different books, ranging from ideas, to actual fully scripted OGNs or mini-series. Without giving too much away about specific projects, here's a list of some of the subjects I'll be tackling in the coming year(s). Life, death, human morality, the porn industry, the coked up and unflattering death of a mall Santa Claus, gerbils, buttocks, the life after the death of Andy Kaufman, transsexuals, detectives, transsexual detectives, cops, cannibals, and a big ass romance comic anthology with a list of creators on board that will surprise and shock many people.

MF:  For the social networker in all of us, can you share any MySpace, Twitter,  Facebook or any other sites - other than the obvious Jinxworld - that can help us keep up with you as a creator? 

LW: I'm finding myself with less and less patience for the whole social networking thing in the last couple of years, although I do use Twitter like a fiend these days since I figured out how to hook it into my phone, and I do blog on occasion. In the coming month, I'm going to be doing several features on the history of Love Buzz from it's beginning to today. It'll include a lot of unseen artwork leading up to the posting of the original 300 page draft of the comic script, and maybe even the original screenplay I wrote back when I was 16 that's pretty much Love Buzz only in name and pretty much in no way in the content.

You can visit Len Wallace on line at his blog, his twitter feed,  his facebook page, or his myspace page devoted to Love Buzz. You can buy your copy of Love Buzz here at Acme Comics - The Triad's Oldest and Largest Comic Shop!