STACK FURY AND NEEDLESS ACTION / A TOWN CALLED BIG CITY

Here is where Greg Twait enters the picture. Greg and I had known each other for years, we went to the same Catholic grade/middle school. Greg's brother even spent a lot of time beating me up in school (a funny fact, I'm long since over it…).  He and I moved around each other in the same circles for a long while. Greg and I never really became very pally until one night in 1992 after a local community theater show. We just happened to strike up a conversation and decided to do some writing together. We spent the next 7 months attached at the hip, writing everything from comedy sketches to comic books to noir screenplay treatments.

During this golden era we spent a lot of time rolling around in my 1980 Toyota Celica (dubbed Fred). During a bout with unemployment I took a job serving legal process for a lawyer. That was about as close to being a detective as two kids could get. Greg and I, with nothing else to do in a summer when I had no real job and he was killing time before going into the military, would go to serve these people with court summons. We would dress in trench coats and ties and say things like "let's roll" and slide across the hood of my car. We knew we were being idiots, but it was fun. I adopted the name Stack Fury and Greg became Needless Action.

We turned these two names into a failed (and badly drawn) comic book. They were cops! Deep undercover!! No Badges! No Guns! No Way!  If captured, the city would deny all knowledge.
Here are 4 notebook pages of the comic:  1   2   3   4  You will notice that Stack and Needless' arch enemy in the comic was...Doodles Pasketti...a hold-over from Smiles Johnson.

In the beginning they were just two goofy characters that two teenagers thought were really funny. Later I began writing some short stories (and not getting much passed the beginning) involving the two. During this I began to, again, make the characters less comic-booky and more real. Stack was the serious investigator, Needless the trigger happy kid. But with no real way to deliver these stories to anybody, it again died...and Greg went into the military.

Excerpt from "Enemy Moon" (1994)
This was eventually turned into Episode #5: Autumn


About that same time Greg and I also created a comic character named LEVI, who was a talking blob with a blue sailor cap. The background of that story isn't important, except that Levi and his friend Dan move out of the house and move to BIG CITY. We laughed for literal minutes at having a city called Big City.


AND SO IT BEGINS…

In 1993 I began writing notes on a series. I wasn't sure what it would be. From what I remember, it was a fantasy detective story. (Unfortunately all my notes have since disappeared.) It was set in the 50's in LA. It involved a ring, either ripping off or paying homage to Lord of the Rings. It also borrowed from Dune because the ring was hidden out on THE BLACK FLATS (which comes from an even earlier story...don't ask me to explain) and protected by giant Ring-Worms. HAHAHAHA RING WORM!!! (Sigh)Nevermind.

That's all I remember. There were a lot of Tolkien jokes floating around my circle of friends at the time, we were all watching movies like Miller's Crossing and Bad Day at Black Rock and it all made some sort of sense.  Nothing ever came of this, but it was sitting in my head at the time and bits of the idea resurfaced before long.

At the end of 1993 I conceived of a noir detective story involving Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Obviously a parody on the genre. As the idea formulated I realized that this would be the perfect time to bring back Smiles Johnson and Charlie. With a little help from my father (on some of the more "technical" aspects of the plot) I planned out my Magnum P.I. Opus (Christ. I'm cracking myself up tonight). Here is the original plot summary of the movie:

A NOIR CHRISTMAS


The summary was as far as I got, but I kept working on it. I finally decided that it wasn't right as a movie. It was a little too quirky to get made, and what I envisioned would be too expensive for an independent film. That's when I decided it would really work best as a book.

Here is the original prologue to the novel I started...I am still very proud of this and sad that I will never use it. I am also including the first chapter and a bit:

ANC PROLOGUE
ANC Chapter 1 & 2 (coming soon)

You will notice that in Chapter 2 Laura Medrano makes her debut. She was going to be the character through the audience meets the characters through and that would be a love interest for Charlie. (I used the same device later, except for the Charlie part, in Avatar with the Welp character.) I really had no interest in giving Smiles a love intest. I think that's part of the "hero" archetype. But that all changes in time "wink".

One thing that became very important to the story was the satire of the Elves being pissed off at Santa's labor policies. So I began thinking that this needed to be a world in which elves and flying reindeer were accepted and possible. This was when I began moving this from being based in Los Angeles (which, frankly, I knew nothing about) to putting it somewhere else. Someplace where I made up ALL the rules. An all encompassing universe with its own realities and possibilities. A Gotham City. A Metropolis. A Springfield...A BIG CITY.

I then realized that, in my head, Stack and Needless, lived in Big City as well. So I now had the place. The environment.  This meant that I had to scrap what I had written so far and start over.  It also meant that I had more characters to focus on and more stories I could tell.  I had my first two stories: A Noir Christmas and Enemy Moon (which, plot wise, minus some details, was pretty much how it turned out in Autumn). I began writing the second version, keeping the prologue. Of course I wrote the ending early. Here is the Epilogue:

ANC EPILOGUE



The next bit literally took 7 years and a some jobs where I had a lot of "think time"; maid, auto wreck yard, pizza delivery.  In those 7 years those first two books expanded out to 9. I completely plotted a 9 book arc following the exploits of Smiles, Stack, Needless, Charlie and Laura. The whole thing had moved from being satirical to being more mystery/thriller based. I layed out the destinies of all the characters (which, again, I can't get in to). I came up with WHY they had such goofy names. Needless was easy, Stack, Smiles and Doodles (which has fallen by the wayside in the series)...took a little more work.

I felt like George Lucas...or Joss Whedon. King of my dominion. Plotting the fates and destinies of a group of characters and a city.

CONTINUE