At first, we decided to shop the book around and go for the traditional color format. The first company we approached was Comico, of course. Unfortunately, their money was tied up with JONNY QUEST and GRENDEL and there wasn’t anything left for untried projects. While this was discouraging at first since we had been with them from the beginning and did not want to go elsewhere, it was the deciding factor in publishing our own book.
With the loving support of our wives, the help of others too numerous to mention, a few dollars in our pockets and lots of determination, we decided to buck the odds and enter the already overcrowded black & white & market.
April 1986…This is when things started coming together. Neil & I began updating EAGLE and bringing him more into line with what we thought he should be (it needs to be said here that it was my own growing obsession with martial arts films, including samurai epics like Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO and 7 SAMURAI, that drove my wanting our character to kick ass like Bruce Lee and sword fight like Mifune or Tomisaburo Wakayama-it’s also important-very telling even-that the cult film HIGHLANDER was released at this time-those of you who are familiar with the film-and my passion for it-will appreciate the evolution of Eagle even more-Neil)
The first sketch of Richard Eagle...Psychic Detective!
We conceived him as an action oriented character rooted in the martial arts, but also as very mysterious with one foot planted firmly in the supernatural. It was this combination that we felt made Eagle unique and gave him just the right mix we were looking for. This way, he would not be just another ninja, samurai or Bruce Lee clone.
We then proceeded to write up the initial plot lines for the first five issues. We knew that supporting characters were going to be very important to Eagle’s existence in order to keep the story lines interesting. At the very heart of this were the villains. Interesting villains were a must, as every fan of Jack Kirby knows. Without a good villain to fight, what good are heroes?
After all the characters were assembled, we decided to make the first story as action packed as possible and complete in one issue (A lost art now days-Neil). We knew that issue #2 wouldn’t be out for at least 3 months after that, and maybe never if you fans didn’t like it. Why start off with a continuing story that you can never finish? We also didn’t want to start with a boring origin issue. We thought it was better to get right into the action and reveal Eagle’s origin as we go along (not to mention, even we didn’t know everything about our character yet-the beauty of Eagle was that he grew as a character with each successive issue-he virtually told US his story-Neil) We didn’t want to bog anyone down with too many details in the beginning, and besides, everyone loves a mystery, right? So what better subject to base the first issue on than…ninja!!! But we didn’t want to do just any ninja story. Everyone was doing ninja stories at that time so we wanted ours to take a different approach. What if we packed as many ninja into one issue as humanly possible and then killed them all off?!
Neil and I had high hopes, of course, that EAGLE would sell pretty well. We had no idea, however, of just how well it would do. Our orders were up to 30,000 copies, and we had only talked to about half the distributors! By the time all the orders were in, we were over 50,000 copies!!!
We began to make calls to different retailers around the country and were hearing similar comments. In fact, many stores were selling out in one day! The full realization of how well the book was doing didn’t hit us until a few days later when the re-orders began pouring in. Within just seven days, our entire print run of 55,000 was sold out and re-orders were still coming in. At final count, we had orders for some 75,000 books!
2 comments:
My cherubic face is smiling as my devil hands write-thanks,Z...;o)
I am ashamed to admit that within the various remembrances of Rich's and mine,I failed to give due credit to two very important dudes: Jack Herman and Gary Fields-without these two gents,Eagle would most certainly have been less than what he became-Gary's distinctive lettering gave our character and the world around him it's "voice"- his style gave the book a "sound" like no other-and it became another "character" in the series!
And there aren't enough words to describe how invaluable Jack was to Eagle-he came into the 1st ish without ANY preparation,save what Rich and i told him and hit the ground running!
-we became two halves of one creator,Jack and I(I truly miss him) -over the course of the series he breathed life into the words our characters spoke-he also slowly expanded the depth of the book as well with ideas of his own (and some wonderful text pieces) I think that the only true ressurection of Eagle in my heart would be if Jack returned to it (which nearly happened) this is NOT to lessen Bob's and Z's recent contributions,for they are legendary-it's just that,like Lennon and McCartney or Scorcese and De Niro,we were an unbeatable team-that team made Eagle what it was back then-what we are doing now is informed by 15 years more experiance on my part and the enviable talents of Z and Bob-a NEW eagle,to be sure...;o)
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