Project Update: Fiends of Nashville

So I hope to post periodic updates on the statuses of all my current projects here, and the one that's starting to emerge as the most realized and tangible at this point is a little comic my friend Josh Richter and I are putting together called "Fiends of Nashville." Alternatively you'll be able to view progress on "Fiends" on a separate blog Josh made a while back dedicated entirely to the comic. That blog can be accessed in my list of links to the right. There's not much there right now but a badass logo and a bunch of preliminary templates that Josh made. The concept has taken a near 180-degree turn since then, so I'll try to fill you in on the basics of what Josh and I have been cooking up recently.

So. Where the hell to begin?

"Fiends of Nashville" is the story of Joshua Danton, and I suppose there's no better way to introduce the comic than to begin with him. Joshua is a pretty interesting guy. For starters, he's a little rough around the edges. He's got a complicated, mostly estranged relationship with both his brother and father, who are each living exemplary pictures of the classic American hero. They worked hard and earned their stations in life; Joshua is a taker. He split home at a young age and carved out his own life first as a biker, then as a gangster. In the eighties he took a wife, settled down, had a kid. Lived the American dream.

In 1989 he died.

That's where "Fiends of Nashville" gets a little complicated. Because that's where it starts.

Not in 1989, in the shallow bayou out back behind a Louisiana motorcycle bar where he was beaten to death by the Cowboy Boot Man. Not even in 2009 when a fully-conscious Joshua Danton "wakes up" in a hospital bed in a young man's body.

And I guess it doesn't really begin in purgatory, either, where Joshua Danton spends an entire eternity, since the concept of "eternity" implies a place without time, implies a scenario where stories cannot take place in a chronological fashion. No, the story of "Fiends of Nashville" doesn't properly begin anywhere, but it takes place largely in the life beyond this one, theoretically anyway.

By now you're utterly confused. Don't worry about it.

"Fiends" is basically about consciousness. Well, it's about a lot of things right now, a clusterfuck of ideas and themes inspired by a semester of western film studies, long late-night talks about heaven, hell, and Dante's Inferno, shared accounts of broken relationships, the eighties, and George Carlin. Did I say it was about consciousness? I guess I was referring to the fact that it's about what life after death would be like. Not just shooting-the-shit philosophically, but scientifically. What if your consciousness could be "saved" after your physical body dies? What if it could be encoded digitally? Stored as 0's and 1's on some huge server? Could that data still be considered a person? What if that data was moved into the dormant body of a new individual? A vegetative coma patient, say? Well, that's essentially the question "Fiends" examines, but it goes deeper than that. What does your consciousness experience in the state between bodies? What kind of dreams take place in this electronic purgatory, so to speak?

That's where the western element comes in. "Fiends" is also about the American frontier. What is it? Has it vanished? And where has it gone?

At the heart of Joshua's character, he is simply a man without fear. He has no fear because in his mind is the frontier of the old American west. He goes where he likes, he does what he wants, and the only one who can stop him is the man who's a faster draw. He chooses not to acknowledge the boundaries and restrictions that would threaten to hinder him from living his life the way he decides. The western frontier doesn't just exist in his head and in his dreams; he acknowledges it all around him. And if some pissant little guy with a uniform and a superiority complex tries to get in his way, Joshua tells him plainly to fuck off.

So "Fiends of Nashville" is a western. It's about what would happen if a kick-ass-the-old-fashioned-way American hero with a bad attitude and a bad mouth were to be plucked out of the west and dropped into bleeding-heart-liberal, politically-correct, paranoid 2009. It's about the clash of two different Americas, the old and the new. The reality and the myth. It's about fear. A man with none surrounded by a society with too much. The conflict between a man who lives life the way he wants to, and those for whom life isn't real, for whom life takes place only on the other side of a television or computer screen, the consequences of which are dealt to imaginary characters or digital avatars. It's about a lot of the problems I struggle with as an individual and it's about everything I think is fucked up about my generation and this great society we live in.

I realize I've been talking a lot and painting only a broad picture of this comic. Probably because my mind has been caged without a proper outlet for way too long now, cause if you know me in person you know I don't talk a lot. The only time I rant is when I write. And I'm finally coming back to writing after too long an absence.

Bear with me.

So what kind of fears does a man without fear have? Joshua may be unhindered, unchecked, and unfazed by the systems that keep us locked down in a state of fear on a day-to-day basis, but underneath all that ruggedness lurks more than a fair share of demons. Joshua takes what he wants, when he wants, how he wants. But why?

He's afraid of death. He's afraid of age, and he's afraid of time. He's afraid of working hard to attain so little. He's afraid of being a slave. (This thought process, and a lot of this idea in general, was born two summers ago when I was working ten-hour days under the hot sun, pitching tents for a rental company called Grand Rental Station. Long days of pure physical labor afforded me plenty of time to think about cool story ideas. I remember heaving huge iron stakes out of the hard ground with a sledgehammer, literally drenched with sweat, and seeing a vision of a character trapped in hell, doing the same thing, taking a brief repose to wipe the sweat out of his eyes and look up to regard the thousands of stakes sticking up at odd angles for miles of desert scrubland all around, then returning back to work, robbed of the mental faculty that might have allowed him to reason with this reality, conscious only of his own heat exhaustion.)

But these fears only explain the kind of person Joshua is before he "dies"--depending on what your perception of consciousness, or a soul, is. What happens when this person goes through purgatory--eternity--itself? What happens when this person is suddenly confronted with a world of people who take no responsibility for their actions, who think they're entitled to cheap and easy rewards, to money without honest work? With an society that believes every child is a winner? With an America that is swift to medicate its problems instead of dealing with them head-on?

Joshua is a crusader against BULLSHIT.

Against pretentiousness, cockiness, hipness to the mainstream. Against bureacracy, false idols, and the illusion of safety.

Oh yeah, and did I mention he listens to Genesis? Don't complain if he switches the radio to eighties pop, or he'll crack you in the face.

There's a lot of other cool stuff at work in "Fiends of Nashville," and I haven't even managed to get around to the plot yet, but I'm running out of steam. Consider this a teaser, with a promise of more once I've shocked myself into a new mode of awareness. I'm getting tired, so I'll sign off here, but I'll be back. Tomorrow I'm going to write up Issue #1. Or is it Issue #0 in the comics business? I don't know.

Peace out.