When my son had a very bad burn and had to have surgery, I bought him a couple TPBs to occupy his rehab time, when his school work was finished. Mice Templar volume 1 became his favorite comic ever, and it was an excellent work in my view as well. My son is now 23, and he still has a great love for Mice Templar. And I've appreciated Bryan and Mike, for many qualities, and personal kindness and professional traits.
In this interview with Bryan Glass I ask mostly creativity questions, but pay attention, as he shares the direction of his creative work currently, and it is an exciting journey to go upon.
Thank you Bryan for your time and excellent answers.
How did you come upon your career path of writer? What factors allow a writer to birth, to flourish, and to be aware, even, of the need to write? Is any person able to become a writer? If so, what skills need to be polished especially to become one?
I certainly don’t consider my path to be typical. Following an assortment of childish declarations of wanting to be a Paramedic, then Architect, and even Chiropractor, I’d stated the career path of Film Director by the time I graduated Elementary School with 6th grade (having been allowed to direct my first school production in my fifth year).
My blue-collar working parents bought me a Super 8 camera but had no clue on how to guide me toward my desired career goal. My Arts-based high school had offered photography and video production when I applied to their visual arts curriculum, yet upon actually attending, there were no classes, which made my initial year quite challenging. When I transferred to drama for my second year, that’s where I discovered the video production equipment! I soon flourished in the environment and graduated with honors. Then, in an odd quirk of timing and logistical complexity, I received a university film education while only at a college. It was enough to pursue a film career by picking up odd production jobs and began building my resumé…
But I soon discovered I was unhappy. By my late twenties, I realized my obsession wasn’t film-making after all—I had simply chosen it as a medium, when what I really desired to be was a storyteller! Yet I’d taken no Literature or Creative Writing classes. I’d written some screenplays which embraced the various disciplines of film, but I didn’t believe I had any worthwhile prose in my skill-set for either a novel or even short stories—I’ve always preferred long form storytelling anyway. So, I opted to pursue comics where my bad timing continued to hound me when I chose the 1990s to break in as a B&W Indy self-publisher (this was the decade of the Distributor Wars and Marvel’s bankruptcy—both costing me thousands of dollars in unrecouped sales as most distributors went bankrupt themselves).
With over 50+ comics produced in five years, the latter 90s saw my transition into religious theater ministry, writing/producing/directing, which soon dominated my life nearly full time for the next 14 years. I sincerely believed I was never returning to comics, until my friend and frequent collaborator Michael Avon Oeming pulled me back in…
It was 2002, and Mike Oeming talked me into converting one of our unsuccessful 90s comics pitches into a novel he would illustrate. That is how Quixote: A Novel came to be, published by Image Comics. Mike had three basic concepts he wanted to see when he brought the idea of a modern-day Don Quixote to me in ’96, from which I then created characters and a narrative to fill a six-issue miniseries. By 2003, the first draft was a literal translation of the intended comic. As I’d dived into the deep end, I was teaching myself the craft of prose with each subsequent draft ushering in new characters and subplots, nuancing the main narrative in ways I never expected; and when the book came out in 2005, I was a novelist. Subsequent prose works were ultimately delayed by my formal return to comics, The Mice Templar, a pair of Harvey Awards, working at Marvel, Dark Horse & DC, as well as a seemingly never-ending merry-go-round of comic pitches to practically every substantive publisher.
It finally took the full corporate takeover of the comics industry and the multitude of media properties and licensed characters dominating the market to force me back into novel-length prose, which is where I’m at post-pandemic, finally returning to my life-long work: BJLG’s Dark Spaces!
As for conducive factors, and if anybody can write, I can only speak for myself. Long before I considered myself capable of “writing” anything anybody would have ever wanted to read, I was telling stories, conjuring them first from established inspirations (as all children do) but soon expanding upon those ideas until new concepts formed as if from the ether. Nothing was written as a narrative to follow, but I could verbally spin potential narratives out of the ideas in my head.
But even writing comes in many forms: creative, journalistic, technical. The craft of writing is not necessarily that same as the craft of storytelling. I know many excellent writers who simply have no stories to tell; as well as a plethora of idea-people who don’t know how to coalesce their incredible concepts into an entertaining narrative.
I truly don’t know how anyone not internally driven by the need to tell their tale can simply write both a grammatically correct and entertainingly compelling narrative. I had to teach myself the former, aided and abetted by every editor I’ve ever worked with whose wisdom and instruction I soaked up like a sponge. The latter has always been with me, only needing to be refined through both personal exercise and analyzing the works of others I’ve admired!
Foundational skills to master are primarily grammar & spelling, yet so many writing programs and apps today can practically teach one by default if you open yourself to the lessons conveyed. Storytelling always benefits from an understanding of personality types and basic psychological principles. Styles, genres, cultural settings and characters, all come down to personal interests; but at the heart of every great story is a kernel of truth buried in its core.
Is the creative path a fire burning inside, i.e. it is an organic, natural flowing or spiritual thing, or is it purely about determination, a training of a talents, and craft? Or is it both? Do you find yourself struck by ideas, out of the blue, or do you find in doing research that exposure of information plants a seed, and that from your training and talents, you harvest as a result of the seed?
In my own experience, creativity has always been a passion, a driving force within that keeps piquing the mind. However, I also believe that anything can be taught and learned. But for me it marks the difference between an artist and an artisan. Artisans learn skills and create works I could never replicate without also having put in the study and years of labor to master the craft. But the artisan typically crafts an existing form and can mass produce a functioning replica with astounding results, often based upon the complexity and the patience required to produce it. The artist masters the existing forms and then expounds from them something new.
The term “journeyman” writer is typically attributed to those professionals so adept at the varying forms, they can plunge into any entertainment medium and fashion an adequate and acceptable tale to suit any genre. Yet those journeymen who truly shine are typically at their best when crafting an original work born of their own creativity, and not merely following a client’s request.
Many of my own creations have simmered within me, sometimes for years, before coming to a boil. Or they’ve been aided by the long form approach that allows for the passage of time: between when one starts the story and when that tale reaches its end. I’m a firm believer in knowing the goal before anything is first produced, yet always allow for new inspirations which the telling of the tale itself inspires; the idea should always be allowed to grow!
Only twice in my life has an idea arrived fully formed, beginning to end, in the span of an hour or less. The first was in my theater days, a production entitled Perfect Justice, which coalesced in the span of a public transport commute; I got home and immediately began typing. The production that was ultimately performed before the public remained remarkably faithful to its original inspiration.
The second was CarrierZ, a zombie tale which manifested over the length of a shower. I got out and immediately phoned my wife Judy, even before drying off, so I could cement the thoughts in my head by relaying them verbally to another. The irony is that I’d long told myself I’d never write a zombie story, as I had nothing original to add to the genre… until something original hit my consciousness like a runaway freight train in between the soap and the lather. As a comic, it almost went into production three times, each with an editor who clued into its unique take, only to be arbitrarily overruled by publishers who remained adamant on their no new zombie books stance.
I’m rarely inspired by research, as I liken it to a handyman’s necessity; I research this or that because I need to, just as when I need to screw in that fresh lightbulb or tighten that wobbly leg on a chair. I like to jump into and out of formal research as quickly as possible, instead of losing myself in it as I’ve seen many others do; never getting to their own creation because they’re endlessly researching, akin to Ash in Alien perpetually claiming he was “still collating.”
Beyond whatever prompted the original spark of an idea, I’ve always been far more open and fascinated by the evolution of the tale itself as it works its way through multiple drafts. Those moments when you realize you’ve crafted a character who is now making their own decisions based upon the logic you bequeathed them with. Suddenly, they don’t want to follow the path you initially set them on because you’ve given them a rationale and drive that would take them elsewhere if they had the freedom to do so. Taking the risk of pondering their rabbit hole can inspire concept-shaking additions; as well as when creatively plugging that hole in your character’s motivations that led them to rebel in the first place, that stuffing or patch can itself inspire evolution in the narrative. I have found these various scenarios to be the most fulfilling in all of my work…
When I scripted the first issue of The Mice Templar, where the young hero Karic is chosen for a great destiny, he responds “Why me?” It’s either the most unspoken or ignored question in nearly all heroic fiction. Why is the Chosen One the Chosen One? In most fantasy, it often comes down to lineage, as with Harry Potter’s letter arriving at the closet under the stairs or Vader’s grand revelation to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back. I had no answer to Karic’s query when I scripted those words into his mouth, his word balloon. It just seemed like a concern he would raise. I already knew the finale, and what his destiny was already going to be. But I still scripted it without an answer, and even instructed the letterer to make his words small type within a large balloon. It was the awkward question that needed to be raised. And because he’d raised it once, it then evolved into a haunting doubt that followed him throughout his 7-volume adventure: why was he the focal point? He had no special skills, no extraordinary lineage. If anything, he inspires by his choices across the series because he has nothing to back them up; he simply commits himself to doing what he believes is the right thing to do, and it’s nearly always selfless because he’s so small and the stakes are always so much larger, beyond anything he believes he can muster to counter them.
The answer came halfway through the larger telling: a two-word question that evoked a four-word answer in the epilogue with implications that sent shockwaves back through the rest of the series that preceded it…
“Why me?”
“Because you said yes.”
I can only wish I’d been insightful enough to have conceived that from the beginning. Instead, it evolved through the telling, and while it didn’t change the substance of the intended ending, it added a meaningful Epilogue I hadn’t foreseen.
Karic wasn’t a hero because he possessed skills you and I will never have; never stemmed from a lineage our own mundane heritage could never aspire to. Karic became the biggest hero of the series because he was asked to do the impossible and he simply said yes, then committed himself to trying; and that is something every one of us can do when the dark times come, without or within.
I have an acting friend who has long been fond of invoking the “shadow of the knife and fork.” It’s what compelled him to take on some roles he’d have rather avoided because, well, we all have to eat. There are definitely financial concerns that prevent most of us from living lives of artistic purity, so there’s something to be said for achieving fame and fortune. For a writer, the biggest bucks come from successfully transitioning one’s work into larger media, typically film or tv. While nothing I’ve created has come to such media fruition as of yet, I have certainly benefited from the numerous attempts that have been made to bring my work to the screen.
But the shorter answer is no, I’ve never been compelled to create for the allure of fame and/or fortune; those are simply the benefits that can come from attaining particular levels within the creative arts. I’ve had the occasional repugnant family members who ask at infrequent gatherings if I’m “famous yet,” which immediately tells me their only interest in my work is in how they might exploit their relationship to me, while not giving a damn about the substance of what I’ve done to generate the notoriety. I tend to ignore them.
But most genuine creators that I know, I call them “creatives,” simply want their work to be appreciated by those to whom their work speaks. A writer typically just wants someone to read and appreciate their tale; the painter wants someone to hang their work on a wall for how it moves them. The performer wants an audience. We all want our creation to engage something in another.
Having been in and around the arts for most of my life, I came to realize how anybody can get a degree in the arts, yet an artist isn’t determined by their level of education. For certain, you want a doctor whose graduated operating on you, and not someone who picked up surgery on the side and has a gift for medicine. You don’t want to live or work in a building erected by one with an uneducated hobby, however talented. One isn’t going to fly to the moon or Mars by shooting guesstimates at the math. But artists aren’t solely designated as such because of their degree—although I’m all for getting as much education in one’s field as possible. It’s just that I learned to recognize the highly educated poseurs who then use their education to place a superior artist beneath them…
The equivalent of, I’ve never painted anything outside of a classroom, but I’m inherently a better painter than generic artist because I have a doctorate in the finer arts. No disrespect for all who’ve studied and worked so hard, often for years, who go onto the achievement of a masters or doctorate, but the degree doesn’t tell me you can paint anything aesthetically compelling; your own paintings will showcase what you’re capable of, your portfolio. The formal degree may qualify one to teach or professionally criticize, but it is insufficient in itself to prove someone can create.
The same can be said for all the arts. Thus, it could be extrapolated that if one chooses a degree in the arts, in literature, then one is seeking a form of living from either the art produced or the knowledge of art hovering around the edges of the work in progress.
As for goals, I can easily choose not to write, be distracted from writing, find myself too emotionally overwhelmed to write (as I did for the six months following 9/11), but what I can’t stop or prevent myself from doing is thinking creatively as a storyteller. The physical act of drafting text is the follow through; it’s the labor required to erect the house after all of the design work has gone into the plans. Writing is the physical task that takes time, falls prey to diversion, and is the most susceptible to our moods, whims, foibles, and self-inflicted rituals, i.e. I can’t write unless the room is precisely 70˚ with the keyboard inclined at a 15˚ angle, I’m wearing my fuzzy slippers, a specific beverage of choice on my left side, and absolute silence save for the thunderous crash of previously recorded thunderstorms: such doom their efforts before they’ve barely begun.
But creativity doesn’t stop. I can’t count how many times I’ve paused movies or television so as to jot down the story or character idea that just flashed into my head while another’s narrative unfolded on the screen; or grabbed that pen & paper sitting next to the toilet; or awoken from a dream to jot down the one element relevant to a plot I’ve been tinkering with.
I’ve also discovered that heeding creativity only begets more creativity, like a faucet leak one cannot fix. The drip is both pervasive and relentless. I often feel there aren’t enough hours in the day to keep pace with the perpetual inspiration.
But while monetary checks are great to cash, especially when they’ve sprung from one’s creative energies, nothing beats the heartfelt tale from a reader for whom your story was the thing they needed at the time they encountered it. If success could be measured by such impact upon a responsive audience, then that’s the fame I would embrace.
Are comics easier for people to understand than prose, and if so, does that make prose a higher calling since it is harder to make it work, or does the easier ground level entry in comics make them limited by the expectations of people coming into them? Is your approach to both media the same, ultimately you don't change due to the format?
For me, comics and prose are simply two mediums in which to tell a story, both equally valid, as one can do different things within the constrictions or the liberation that each provide, just as the stage play, film and audio drama are each separate and distinct.
The exact same story could be told in every one of those mediums and a different experience would be had with each.
While pondering if comics is a more accessible medium to embrace—easy to understand, as an argument can be made for comics visuals being just a step above a children’s picture book—I’ve encountered many adults for whom the rhythm of a comics page’s flow, panel to panel, caption to balloon—to balloon then back to caption then balloon again—is a comprehension skill they never nurtured through a youth consumed by reading comics; a practiced skill comics readers take for granted. Then add in storytelling elements within the art itself, from static details conveyed by an artist, to angles, the mood of coloring, framing, the effect of diverse emotional lettering, as well as motifs of silence when the sequential action takes over the art narrative with nary a word. Such are all the elements available to the comics storyteller, and all the nuances lost upon the otherwise uninitiated.
While I would consider prose to be the most adept medium for winding its narrative way through the maze of a character’s mind, leaping chasms of time and space following the tangents of a thought without ever losing the reader (particularly when scribed by one with the talent to perpetrate it successfully).
I find those who rank the mediums of various arts for which is the superior expression of any idea do so in ignorance, while ironically for the purpose of elevating their own ego. The adage The book is always better is not only tired and worn out but false as well. Cinema is infamous for trashing its literary inspirations, sometimes through the sheer act of condensing 4-600 pages into two hours, but there are also many films for which the wildly divergent movie adaptation is not only beloved by generations of film fans but could even arguably be considered more famous than the source novel it veered so askew of: The Wizard of Oz, The Shining; I’m even of the view that the utterly faithful adaptation of Silence of the Lambs is a superior storytelling experience than the Harris novel it is adapted from, the story’s suspense benefiting from the taut pacing of the film.
My own approach is only altered by the constraints of each medium; I love the introspection of a novel, and yet the adage of a picture worth a thousand words is never more accurate than when describing an environment in a comics script or screenplay, wherein my audience for those descriptors is literally only the artist or the director. They are technical descriptions at best. Yet when placed within prose, they must become nearly poetic in their language while avoiding the form. Nothing brings a driving narrative to a halt more than overwrought descriptions of environment or socio-political historic significance (I’m looking at you, Victor Hugo!). To spend half a page describing the important atmospheric nuances of an environment that the human eye and mind would comprehend in an instant of screen time can be agony for the writer at the keyboard. The prose audience is totally reliant upon what you tell them, and the most critical if it isn’t told with efficiency.
The only thing that should never change is the foundation of storytelling itself, characters sufficient to shape the narrative (and never the other way around—even a tale about those suffering from the varied horrors of war or natural disaster should never be about what was done to a people, but in how the characters who represent those peoples respond; their choices become the story, guiding the narrative within the setting or event being chronicled, or otherwise, you’re only crafting a documentary and/or producing propaganda. Execution of the story thereafter is often dictated by the form of the various mediums in which it is being told!
What are your current projects, and what social media and personal websites do you utilize to share your work? Where do you hope the current project will take you and readers? That is, what is your desired trajectory of the work?
I’ve written Thor and Valkyrie for Marvel Comics, as well as adapted Raymond E. Feist’s Magician & Riftwar Saga, Adventures of Superman at DC, created Furious at Dark Horse, The Mice Templar, 86 Voltz and Quixote at Image Comics, Ships of Fools first at Caliber Comics then Image, as well as the consummately silly Spandex Tights in the 1990s…
Yet my latest project is also my oldest, having existed in one form or another since 1978: Bryan J.L. Glass's Dark Spaces.
My name in the title is to distinguish my “Dark Spaces” from other usages of the title, from a psychological anthology published in England, to the space combat simulation game system called Dark Space, which, while both are sci-fi, they couldn’t be farther apart in substance and execution.
BJLG’s Dark Spaces is an intended multi-volume sci-fi series set in a unique universe called the Strata: 7 replicated frequencies of existence, three vibrating faster, three slower than the Prime plane that anchors the other six.
The Strata has thousands of years of history I’ve chronicled, quite a bit directly related to the main narrative that unfolds with the start of book one. The current governing body unifying the Strata is a bureaucratic tyranny called ComFED (short for The Union of the Combined Federations).
The story follows six diverse individuals who find their paths cross upon a frozen mining world called Desolation: each has a secret to preserve (although two of them don’t even realize their own as yet), and are soon drawn together in a common cause…
The crash landing of a flight pod has brought a genuine monster to Desolation, a flesh-eating abomination seemingly born of a forgotten mythology whose physical existence also serves as a metaphysical gateway to a darker realm for those with the ability to discern it.
The tale begins with civil employee Talitha, who discovers she’s inadvertently recorded something she shouldn’t have. Marked for literal termination, her efforts to flee the planet are hampered by a declaration of Martial Law, the monster, and the imminent mobilization of the ComFED military.
She seeks the aid of former freighter captain Veslyn Traasken, grounded by alcoholism consumed to bury her bitter past. Only the flight pod that brought the beast to Desolation was ejected from Veslyn’s own freighter The Lucky Strike, reported lost with all hands aboard, including her lover Danté.
“Tif” is the child prodigy engineer of The Lucky Strike, left behind from its last run due to criminal cartel involvement in the salvage operation Danté had accepted on their behalf. Those criminal elements are now after Veslyn and Tif for whatever secrets Danté took to his death.
The mysterious Merin has found his own purpose on Desolation equally thwarted by the ravenous creature’s arrival, and the assassination of the only man with knowledge of its mythological origins.
The elderly Merin is soon joined in his new quest to understand the beast by a naïve young technician named Dirk, whose been so profoundly impacted by the old man’s extraordinary altruism, he seems ready to abandon his own career and future.
The enigmatic Ráiszh completes the impromptu sextet for curious reasons of his own. Never seen without his flight suit and identity-shielding helmet, he promises to be both friend and foe, coldly efficient and deadly, but to reveal anything further might cost your life.
In their attempt to escape the Frozen Hell of Desolation, these six characters launch an epic saga of multi-dimensional space opera, clandestine politics, military authoritarianism, corrupt religions, secret societies, and hidden histories, before all humanity itself is to be brought face-to-face with the metaphysical horrors of Dark Space!
BJLG’s Dark Spaces only starts with the trilogy Stratan Dreams: Desolation’s Tears, By Hellspun Entangled, and The Noct’fel of Pelstar. The series does not have a publisher as yet, but the first third of Desolation’s Tears is available as Audio Readings with music and limited sound effects on YouTube. I intend to release the second act come September 2022.
It is my hope to see this saga, decades in development, finally secure its audience, and come to its intended epic conclusion!
I can be found online at my personal website: BryanJLGlass.com (which links to my online store, Facebook, Twitter & Instagram accounts, as well as to “Bryan J.L. Glass’s Dark Spaces™Audio” on YouTube)
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