"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air"
--The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1
Gordon here.
I fell a little ass-backwards into writing the script for Captain Tempest -- he's always been Emmett's boy, the subject of a great range of his early work as an artist. One of these days I'll convince him to let me put out some of the archaic pre-Tempest Tempest stuff that so fired his imagination to begin with. I think what's always been so rewarding about working with Emmett, though, is his sheer delight in collaboration, the joy he takes in absorbing the work of others as a springboard for his own creativity. Though Captain Tempest was "his boy," he's never once been precious about him or the world that he inhabits.
Here's a good example. My first experience writing the character was more than ten years ago, for my senior capstone project in high school. I was writing a one-man-show about a failed pulp writer in the early 1940's (don't ask to see it. Read Kavalier & Klay instead). A substantial portion of that show involved the character reading excerpts from his projects over the years -- and on a lark, I decided to do a pulp-novel version of Emmett's pilot superhero character, but invented a quick supporting cast for him: the loyal mechanic MacGoyer, and the ace reporter Pam Pike.
Emmett's vision for Tempest had always been as a lone wolf, a solitary and grim ghost of the WWII skyways forever diving into supernatural cataclysms with only his trusty super-plane to see him through, but from the first moment he heard those brief excerpts, the characters and events therein were canonical. His mind buzzed with possibilities. How did they meet? What sorts of adventures did they go on? Why did they part ways when the war started? Emmett is, first and foremost, an explorer, thrilled at every discovery he makes about a story even as he's crafting it. That may be what I value most about working with him.
It wasn't too long after that when Emmett approached me about collaborating on a newspaper-style adventure daily about the Captain's 1930's adventure, and I quickly drafted a very rough outline of what would become the first three chapters. I wrote about four pages of script, but I just didn't have a handle on the right voice. We petered out before Emmett did pencils on the third page and stuck the whole thing in a drawer. That was the summer of 2018. We wouldn't touch it again until early 2021.
That began very gently: Emmett said he wanted to pick up the project again, but he didn't want to presume on my time. If I could just put together an outline of the first chapter we'd talked about, he'd take care of the rest, with some friend to do the actual script. I rolled my eyes -- I hated revisiting abandoned stories, but more to the point I hated the work to put together a functional adventure story. Still, I liked the setting, and I was intrigued by the chance to play out some of the themes I had in mind over a longer arc. I wasn't committed by this point, mind you. As far as I was concerned, this was all groundwork for someone else to execute on. Then Emmett did the art. And I had to be involved after that. And now it's four years later.
This all has sounded very melancholy and reflective, but I hope I haven't given you the impression that this is the end of anything, except our third chapter of many more to come. Heavens, no. We've scarcely begun to answer all of Emmett's questions, and there's so much room to play around in the in-between spaces, you couldn't stop us now with the whole Austro-Hungarian army! We're just getting started, losers.
Join us right here on Wednesday, March 19th as we follow our heroes into the wild blue yonder, with the first page of...
