They say it takes a big man to admit his mistakes.<\/p>\n
Keep watching. I’m about to become huge.<\/p>\n
The other day, I received a FedEx package from Marvel Comics containing two copies of *The Essential Tomb of Dracula*, Volume 4. The book includes two stories I wrote for the black-and-white *Dracula Lives!* magazine, circa 1973.<\/p>\n
One of these stories, “A Death in the Chapel”, is a truly beautiful art job by Gene Colan. (It suffers a bit in this volume, unfortunately, from being reproduced at a smaller size than intended.) The story has a clever premise, too. Seeking an ancient manuscript that may contain a cure for vampirism, Dracula sneaks into the Vatican library — and then can’t get out, because everywhere he turns there’s a crucifix staring him in the face.<\/p>\n
My other offering in this volume is titled “To Walk Again in Daylight”, with art by Rich Buckler. The art has its moments.<\/p>\n
But from a writing standpoint, both stories blow.<\/p>\n
No, wait — let me rephrase that:<\/p>\n
**THEY *BUH-LOOOOOOOWWWW!!***<\/p>\n
Both scripts are grossly overwritten. The prose is a shade of purple so garish it would embarrass Prince. The dialogue is light years beyond corny; it reeks of ethanol. And such drama as there is consists largely of characters shouting “NOOO!!” in jagged burst balloons.<\/p>\n
Both of these stories were written near the very beginning of my career and fall under the category of on-the-job training. I think — hope, anyway — I was capable of better work than this, even during that awkward learning period.<\/p>\n
It’s too bad that comics as an industry, and too many comics readers, value the novelty of a new name and the raw energy of youth above any other quality a work might possess. It’s equally a shame that other readers are so mired in nostalgia that the progression of a writer’s style becomes irrelevant to them; only the comics of an idealized past are worthy of their attention.<\/p>\n
It’s a shame, because these Dracula stories illustrate one principle rather vividly:<\/p>\n
Writers, at least those with a functioning self-critical faculty, do improve — drastically — with age and experience.<\/p>\n
I’m very happy not to be the writer I was in 1973.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
They say it takes a big man to admit his mistakes. Keep watching. I’m about to become huge. The other day, I received a FedEx package from Marvel Comics containing two copies of *The Essential Tomb of Dracula*, Volume 4. The book includes two stories I wrote for the black-and-white *Dracula Lives!* magazine, circa 1973. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegerber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}