I am frequently asked, “So what have you been up to?” Well, a lot. Over the years I've amassed what might be closets full of various manu- scripts if I actually printed this stuff out on paper. Here, in no particular order, are some of the things I’ve been working on.

PriestStroke

Most notable is the Rebirthed Deathstroke from DC Comics shipping twice monthly. This is a comic book series about “The World’s Greatest Assassin,” who is sublimely efficient in his profession while being perhaps the world’s worst dad ever. Post-Rebirth, DC Comics’ realignment of their creative universe, the Deathstroke series becomes more introspective and character-driven. Slade (Deathstroke) Wilson and his adventures are toned down somewhat to be more in-keeping with the assassin’s core values: stealth, secrecy, invisibility, silence. This may grate some of the series’ current readers who have grown accustomed to Deathstroke leveling city blocks and battling space aliens and fiery demons, so I’m certainly more than nervous about how this new vision of the character—a kind of evil version of Batman—might be received.

In my view, an assassin can’t possibly be effective if he’s behaving more like the Schwarzenegger Terminator than the icy-quiet of the Jean Reno character from the genre-defining Léon The Professional or Vincent, Tom Cruise’s stealthy hit man from the Michael Mann classic Collateral). The Rebirthed Deathstroke is a shadow man, an urban legend, who moves invisibly, silently, strikes without warning, and vanishes. You can read more about the series here.

1999 : The film Crash with superheroes.

1999: Tomorrow Is Yesterday

1999 was originally conceived as a superhero anthology comic consisting of three distinct series written in different genres and set within a shared universe: Crimson, a Manga-influenced martial arts action series about a super-powered Korean American teenage girl hunted across the Korean peninsula; Eddie X, a medical drama about a second-year surgical resident who moonlights as a contract killer; and The Zionist, a political drama about a Will Smith-type college student who inherits a house built in a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip. As with the film Crash, 1999’s three independent series, which have, seemingly, nothing in common, intersect at a common event: a hold-up at a Newark bar.

A fourth series, eponymously titled 1999, is an over-arching police procedural drama about NYPD Detective Evan Dwyer, who was moonlighting off-the-books at that Newark bar and whose job is now in jeopardy because of the robbery. Dwyer is desperate to solve the crime and apprehend the suspects before his review board hearing after the Christmas holiday. His single piece of evidence is a thumb print on a bar glass.

Running the fingerprint through various agencies, Dwyer assembles a list of suspects, most of whom he chalks up to false positives and the crude state of computer print-checking in 1998. What he discovers, however, is a deeper mystery: hundreds of hits—exact matches—to his bar glass fingerprint, ultimately discovering more than a thousand possible suspects, including the protagonists of the other three series.

Realizing no comic publisher would or could guarantee me 37 published issues, and facing the likelihood of the series being cancelled before the entire story could be told, I thought to publish 1999 as a kind of “pulp” revival—a prose magazine with illustrations. That was the format—a serialized novel—we settled on when I developed the series in 2007.

I have published the original novel as an eBook series and begin work on a sequel, 1999: Black And White, now available on Amazon. You can learn more about the series here.

Where No Man Is Going

I will, at some point, post my rewrite of Star Trek: Nemesis, a film so bad I just started fixing the screenplay for fun, but ran out of time. Working on the script, I came up with my one and only original story idea for Star Trek, which I just tossed in a drawer and gave absolutely no thought to until I was approached, for whatever ungodly reason, by IDW, seemingly out of the blue, to develop something for them. We were not talking specifically about Trek, but IDW had the Trek franchise, and I said, “Oh, hey—you guys do Trek, right? Well I only have one idea for Star Trek, but I’d really like to do it.” So I pitched them the idea that later became Star Trek: Inquisition, which was to be a three and then later (at IDW's request) five-part story. But a couple things happened: first, Paramount bounced the story—Worf discovers he is barred from ever making captain’s rank because of a back-room deal the Federation made with the Klingon Empire which forbade them from ever posting a Klingon to command rank of a Federation starship—as too edgy and controversial due to the overly implicit theme of racism (the story echoed my experiences comics). I can’t imagine what’s become of Trek that they shy away from controversy, but IDW approved the story only to have the licensing folk up there (at least, at that time) reject it. They really didn’t seem to get it that Roddenberry’s Trek was all about controversy cached in metaphors of half-black and half-white species. These folks seemed to me as clueless desk jockeys, over-protective corporate types who requested we round all the edges and pull the wings off this particular butterfly.

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IDW seemed willing to go a few rounds with this, but then Abrams Trek came along and re-shaped the landscape. My story is TNG Trek. Once Abrams Trek became a going concern, director J.J. Abrams had the right to approve all Trek-related material, even stuff like my one idea which had absolutely nothing to do with what he was doing. So now we had to appease Paramount and Abrams, and the window for TNG material at IDW narrowed as Abrams Trek’s release date approached. I shopped my story to Pocket Books, who said, “Not enough for a novel,” which perplexed me. I mean, if you like the premise, fleshing it out into a novel would be easy. My writers’ universal translator therefore interpreted “not enough for a novel” as a polite way of saying, “we’re not interested,” though I was invited to do some other Trek stuff for them. But, alas, I only have one Trek idea, which nobody seems to want. I've posted the scripts and more about this doomed project here.