Two years later...

I owe Fran Bueno a lot. Noble Causes first existed as a series of mini-series. By the time we got to the third mini, sales were pretty bad and we ended up printing that mini in b&w in an effort to save money. This resulted, of course, in sales going from bad to worse, as most readers weren't crazy about the change. I was all set to close up shop when Image's own Eric Stephenson made an impassioned plea to continue the book as a regular, monthly, color series. He even had an artist all picked out -- a guy named Fran Bueno, who'd sent some samples to Image. I contacted Fran, he agreed to come on-board, and we relaunched Noble Causes as a regular series with a new number one. Fran stayed with the series for 18 straight issues (plus a lead-in story in one of our Extended Family one-shots), and his stuff was just fantastic. When he decided to leave, it was only because he had become exhausted by the monthly grind. He wanted to take some time off, maybe work on some projects in Spain, and then collaborate with me on something else -- preferrably something finite, that he could take his time with. I asked Fran if there was anything in particular he wanted to draw, and he responded by saying he'd like to something with horror, or maybe crime, with some romance. Those three separate elements whirled around in my head for a few minutes before congealing as an idea about a cop whose girlfriend becomes a vampire. Together, they'd have all kinds of adventures. I even had a title: UNDYING LOVE.

Fran loved the idea, and we decided to do it a mini-series and I wrote the first issue. That was two years ago, almost to the day. Fran's been working on that first issue a little at a time, and it's almost done. The results are astounding. He's drawing and coloring the story himself, and it's quite a leap forward from his Noble Causes work.

The reason I know it's been almost exactly two years is because today I opened up the script for the first issue, and noticed it's dated 06/27/06. So I'll be writing the second issue a full two years later. Oddly enough, I don't seem to have any notes for this mini-series. I usually have some sort of rough outline mapped out, but in this case, I don't. So I'm continuing a story I wrote two years ago, with nothing to go on. It's almost like continuing a story written by someone else. At least, I'd like to think I'm a different (as in, better) writer now than I was two years ago. We'll see. It'll be awhile before we get around to soliciting UNDYING LOVE, because we want to have it completely done beforehand. But in the meantime, feast your eyes on the first few pages...