The Series That Wasn't Shadowpact

Not yet, but it was much of what eventually became Shadowpact.

Shadowpact was a comic series created by me, using a number of established DCU characters. It began with the Day of Vengeance six-issue mini series, which was published in 2005. Then it became Shadowpact in its own continuing series, which ran for 25 issues before being cancelled for low sales.

Some of the ideas I put into the Shadowpact series came from a previous series proposal for Vertigo — DC’s imprint for more mature and/or weird books.

The origin of the series that wasn’t

I’d just started Fables for Vertigo. It had been going long enough to be recognized as a hit (as opposed to a miss, which described most of my Vertigo work up until that point). Possibly for that reason, Vertigo top editor Karen Berger asked me if I could come up with some catch-all title to lock in many of the DCU characters that Vertigo had control of at the time.

Back then (for reasons largely unclear to me, except that in any bureaucracy some will strive to build and maintain mini empires within the larger company structure) there was a hard demarcation between those traditional characters that steadfastly belonged in the DCU and those who belonged to Vertigo. The lists were always in flux as various editors and creators tried to use some of DCU’s stable of characters in a Vertigo project and vice versa.

So then, Karen approached me and said (I paraphrase), “We need a book that will keep Vertigo characters within the Vertigo camp. Can you come up with something?”

At the time DC was big on soliciting many comic proposals with no guarantee of publication. Often they’d get many writers to pitch proposals at the same time for the same book. It was a way to get lots of free writing from freelancers, to build up the cache of ideas from which to pick and choose. It wasn’t exactly a reputable practice. Writers should be paid for their work — any work. Eventually enough of us complained that the practice was largely discontinued.¹ But that was a bit down the road at the time.

I took my shot at coming up with a catch-all book that would tie up those characters Vertigo wanted to keep in house and this was the result (in the interests of history, presented here exactly as I produced it so many years ago — even though I dearly wanted to change some things):

Notes Toward an Ongoing Vertigo Series

Title: The Dark Tower

By Bill Willingham (and followed on the document by an obsolete phone number and email)

The High Concept

Several key characters of Vertigo’s corner of the DC Universe find it useful to informally band together from time to time. The mobile dark tower – they cleanse of supernatural creatures in the first story arc – ends up being the central gathering place of Vertigo’s mystic set, and therefore the central setting of this series.

Principal Characters

1) The Phantom Stranger

2) Madam Xanadu

3) Doctor Occult

4) Animal Man

5) Blackhawk. He’ll be as young as he was at the end of WWII, which surprises the other characters, since Madam Xanadu (for instance) recently visited him in the veterans’ hospital where he was ninety years old and dying. How did he regain his youth? It becomes one of the mysteries of the series.

6) Lady Blackhawk. A new character. She’s Blackhawk’s granddaughter.²

7) Ragman. I like the fact that his suit is made up of the souls of evil men who can achieve redemption (their last chance) by lending their life forces to Ragman. He’s a walking Purgatory. I’m looking forward to exploring the myriad implications of that.³

8) Black Orchid

9) Deadman. I want the Neal Adams visual version of this character – not the emaciated version of recent comics.

10) Blue Devil. He predates Hellboy – which is the best Vertigo comic out there (only unfortunately not published by Vertigo) – so let’s get him out of those ridiculous looking trappings someone updated him in and make use of him.⁴

Other characters – I’d like to be able to use on a regular but far less-frequent schedule.

1) The Creeper. The eternal voice in opposition and recurring pest. If you think of Phantom Stranger as the king (if we were doing Ivanhoe, for instance), Creeper would be his fool – the only one who can get away with his constant mocking of the king. If this were the musical Evita, Creeper would be case in the role of Che – the accuser as biographer and narrator.

2) The Demon and Jason Blood. I’ve been wanting to write this character for years, if for no other reason than no one – not Moore nor Gaiman nor Wagner – could write him consistently without having his rhyming speech fall apart (abrupt changes in meter or rhyme scheme, etc.). I can and I’m dying to prove it. So there.⁵

3) Zatana. If for no other reason than a book about all of Vertigo’s magic bunch that never had her appear would be in breach of promise.

The Premise and First Story Arc

And we are here as on a darkling plain,

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

                           From Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach

Blackhawk, looking as young as in his WWII days, steps into Madam Xanadu’s fortune telling parlor. He’s looking for help to round up a few powerful magic types to form an ad hoc posse. He intends to clean out a bunch of dangerous supernatural beasts inhabiting The Dark Tower, which lies in the center of a The Darkling Plain – one of the premier interdimensional crossroads. In fact, the chief reason so many deadly supernatural powers are always appearing on Earth (and raising such a ruckus) is that we are the most convenient detour for those wishing to avoid using the Tower route. Once the Tower is cleansed, most dangerous traffic should return to that route and our Earth would go back to being an out-of-the-way side road, which is how it once was and always should have been.

Xanadu summons the major characters listed above and they set out to the Dark Tower, which they indeed find inhabited by all manner of foul and dangerous creature. After lots of interesting struggle, they clean the place out and even end up freeing one very grateful Sam Turner, who was imprisoned there of late – no doubt fattened up for the slaughter.

In the aftermath of battle our heroes learn many interesting things. First, the tower is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.⁶ It is in fact its own pocket dimension. Second, the tower can be moved. Its exterior, which is the only part that intrudes into other dimensions, can be made to appear literally anywhere – from Times Square to downtown Apokolips. It would make an excellent, mobile home base for Vertigo’s magic hero types to use, and so they decide to use it as such. Unfortunately they also discover – too late – that Sam Turner was actually the evil immortal called Saturnine,⁷ and all of those monsters they just did away with were actually there to keep him imprisoned. The first story arc ends with our heroes’ realization that they’ve just let a most dangerous creature loose on the world.

Future Story Arcs

The Dark Tower is moved out of the crossroads world of the Darkling Plain and appears here and there in the various dark corners of the DCU. It quickly becomes the central gathering place of for most of Vertigo’s supernatural set. It also becomes a place of refuge for all the homeless, freakish, dispossessed and disenfranchised of those who live in the shadows of the DCU. Almost like an infestation, it quickly fills up with all sorts, intending to make this place their new home.

That’s one problem our heroes have to deal with, but more vital is the search for Saturnine. The main thing that binds these characters together, from here on out, is that they are the ones responsible for loosing this terror, and therefore the ones responsible for capturing him again. The Phantom Stranger does some investigating and discovers that the fellow is (in human disguise) the advance man of a race of elder gods – for more ancient than any current Vertigo or DCU pantheon – who want their world back. He’s been sent ahead to make it ready for them – which chiefly means ridding it of (us) all the life that has come to infest it in their long absence. Saturnine – suave and clever, but monstrous through and through – then becomes their chief recurring antagonist – and my far from humble goal is to make him the most popular (meaning villainous) villain in comic books. He doesn’t open up a trendy Bay Area club for Vertigo’s supernatural set. He doesn’t set out to get revenge on those who’ve locked him us so many centuries ago. He doesn’t design elaborate traps and schemes based in abandoned theme parks. He simply sets about building up the power and infrastructure necessary for the systematic depopulation of Earth.

Of course we’ll have other trials and digressions to throw at our characters – smaller tales to amuse us while the other story has time to build – but always returning from time to time to the bigger story of Saturnine, and what gains and losses are made against him. We’ll go back and look at how Blackhawk could be a ninety year old man, dying in a veteran’s hospital, just a few weeks ago, and then walk into Xanadu’s shop, restored to youth and vigor, at the beginning of this new series – I’m flirting with several possible explanations. We’ll see what happens with Doctor Occult’s two personalities fall in love with two different characters – of differing gender. We’ll find out what that amulet was that Phantom Stranger used to wear, and why he hasn’t worn it in a while. We’ll do stories with single characters and some featuring only a few of our central cast, to mix it up with the stories involving the entire cast.

Some Rules and Guiding Principles

1) This isn’t a super team book. I want to name the series after the Dark Tower – the main setting for the book – to avoid any possibility of calling these characters by any group name – such as the Trenchcoat Brigade, or the Sentinels of Magic. They don’t form a team of any kind. They are bound together – when they are – by the past mistake they all made and are mutually trying to correct.

2) This won’t be a repeat of the Fables book. Though there may seem to be some similarities in these notes to what I am doing with Fables, it is only because I tend to work in the same vineyards in all of my better comics efforts. They will not form an underground community with rules against “revealing our true nature to the mundanes.” The only two things binding these disparate characters together is the big unfinished business hanging over their heads (the Saturnine Affair) and the Tower as the new central hangout of most of the Vertigo magic set. The Tower becomes the place to hang out, much the way one bar in every town becomes the designated cops’ bar.

3) Setting the series around the Tower, rather than specific characters, solves several problems. First, characters can move in and out of the series as they become available for use, or are made unavailable. Second, the mobile home base solves the problems of so many Vertigo characters being established as living, or working (or whatever) in so many scattered locations. With the Tower, stories can be set literally anywhere, because the Tower can be moved anywhere. We can follow a story set in San Francisco, with one set in London, with one set in some other universe, without the trouble of working out how to get everyone there. Once established, pages worth of story logistics can be solved in a single panel: They move the Tower to (fill in the blank). Finally, I also like the sinister overtones of the Dark Tower, as it’s been used in poem and story throughout most of our history. It’s an evocative, disturbing image, and in Tarot – which is important to our Xanadu character – the Tower card symbolizes looming disaster. It’s the single worst card in the deck.

4) This series will feature adventure, drama, passion and the occasional bit of dark comedy, all on a grand scale, but none of the overly intellectual, new age mystical, modern lit gobbledygook that unfortunately describes too many past attempts to make use of these characters. One of my recurring themes is that, if magic actually existed, it would be integrated into our lives like any other technology. No modern person would go off on long tangents about “the symbolic meaning of the internal combustion engine in the overall construct of the great mandala of the nine upper spheres,” when his job is to get his ass in a car and get down to the store for a gallon of milk. Well, okay, I know some who would, but I never want to read another story about that sort of fellow. Stories about magic that go off on these types of digressions are boring and tend to shed readers quickly, so we won’t do those.

The results

Okay then, that was the proposal I submitted. Karen hated it. Her two chief complaints:

“I don’t like team books,” she says.

“It’s not really a team,” I reply. “Characters come and go.”

“And I don’t like books about superheroes in a clubhouse,” she says.

“That’s not what this is,” I argue.

Of course Karen was right. It was in fact a book about a team of magical superheroes in a clubhouse, no matter how much I tried to file off the serial numbers and hide the facts. The book was never launched.

Years pass and one day then DC head honcho Dan Didio calls me out of the blue and says, “We’re doing a big crossover event and we want you to write one-quarter of it. You’ll do the DCU supernatural characters.”

“I had an idea once about just such a book,” I say, “but Karen didn’t like it, because it was a superhero team book.”

“This is for the DCU,” says Dan. “We love superhero team books over here!”

“And it basically takes place in and out of a magical clubhouse,” I confess.

“We love super clubhouses in the DCU!” Dan says.

And Shadowpact was born. That’s more or less how much of what was conceived for one book showed up in another.

Are there lessons to be learned here? Maybe one or two. First: Never throw anything out. Hold onto all your notes and ideas, just in case some of them can be repurposed for something else. Second: Ideas come in and out of style. What doesn’t suit the powers-that-be one day might just be the thing they’re after on another day.

1. That was years past. I have no idea if DC has since gone back to commissioning multiple proposals for no money, but at least for a while they stopped doing it. Don’t get me wrong. At the time I was more than willing to take a shot at adding another monthly book to my schedule, even if that required the risk of some free writing. I’d been on the outs with DC for enough years that, once Fables opened the door back wide, I didn’t want to pass on opportunities.

2. Memory is faulty, but I’m pretty sure there was already a Lady Blackhawk by that time, so I’m not sure why I thought I was creating a new character.

3. Which I was eventually able to do in the Shadowpact series.

4. I’d tried out a previous proposal to start a new Blue Devil series years earlier, which I presented to then DC editor Andy Helfer. The premise was, Blue Devil dies and is in line to get into Heaven. But one of Heaven’s administrators spots him in his devil suit and sends him to Hell instead. “But it’s only a suit I got stuck in!” Blue Devil tries to argue, but it’s too late. He goes to Hell and hilarity ensues. I trotted the idea by Dan Mishkin (one of the creators of Blue Devil, who didn’t like that they’d turned him into a real devil) at a San Diego show one year, and he seemed to like it well enough. If only the wishes of the actual creators of a character carried any weight with the company owners.

5. This may sound arrogant of me (it is/was), thinking I could do better than the massively-talented comic writers listed here. Forgive me. A writer has to have confidence, otherwise what are you doing? Writing a story is a bold act. You have to be willing to jump up on a stage and say, “Give me your time, money and attention for as long as I want it and I’ll make sure you aren’t cheated.” It's an arrogant profession.

6. Yeah, I use this “bigger inside than outside” idea a lot. Maybe too much. Let’s call it one of my home-base ideas and move on.

7. Saturnine was eventually used as the name for a villain in my prose novel Hammer of the Gods, because I don’t ever fully throw good ideas away. Okay, sure, it can be argued I also don’t throw bad ideas away, but that’s an argument for another time.