The Great Lost Kevin Van Hook-Peter B. Gillis Comic


 


Since my old friend Kevin Van Hook posted in the comments below, I figured I'd post a little bit of unknown comics history--mainly because Just about nobody knows about it, and of the few who do, most have forgotten.

My career at DC Comics was a brief one, occurring as it did just before I left the business. It's quality over quantity, though, because the first series was Tailgunner Jo, which was the longest (and weirdest) collaboration between myself and Tom Artis--a man I can't speak too highly of. We also did a Teen Titans spotlight together starring Cyborg and Beast Boy, featuring (inspired by a Mojo Nixon Rant) A lowest common denominator marketing strategy soap opera sitcom shopping mall from hell, as well as a Rastafarian software developer named Nicholas Bourbaki.

My other ongoing series was Gammarauders, which was actually a gas to write, but suffered in the art department (which dirt I will reserve for a time when I'm feeling more petty than I am now.) I'll just say that if I had been working with the excellent Gordon Purcell on the book from the befinning, we might have actually had a hit. (I still managed to hit a dialogue high point in my career with the phrase 'lumpen-retro cheeseball' and the battle between Elric and Maxwell Smart was also something I remember with fondness--as was the quest for the Kirward Derby and the Ring Around the Collar.)

But I didn't just drop everything comics when I sped away to the land of Macintosh. When Tailgunner and Gammarauders came to an end (btw, there were supposed to be six more issues of Tailgunner Jo), my editor Elliott S! Maggin started working with me on a new project named Jacknife.

It was new territory for me: mean street superhero with a political bite to it. Jack was the son of a three-star general who was enrolled at VMI when the last choppers left Saigon and his father wrapped himself in the American Flag and blew his brains out rather than be witness to America losing a war. He was brought up by a powerful U.S. Senator, graduated top in his class at West Point annd was on the fast track to a star when his superior tried to recruit him into a far-right secret society. He played along with him, then set fire to the man's mansion stole his dog and vanished off the face of the earth.

When next we see him, he's in a homeless shelter, and in the words of Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, "His mind is clear but his soul is mad..."

All right, that's enough of that. No sense giving everything away. They liked it. There was even a nice cheesy tag line to promote it: "The first homeless Super-hero!" which they felt they could run with--but Elliott knew, from the stories I outlined, that I wasn't fooling around, that I wanted to do tough-minded stories on an adult level.

Elliot went out to lunch with me to talk about artists, because he's a good guy and knew I liked to work closely with my artists. My first suggestion was Klaus Janson, whom I knew pretty well and had wanted to work with (but who turned out to be too busy). Elliott mentioned Tim Sale, who had at that point done only one or two stories professionally. I had (mea culpa) some mild misgivings about subtlety of facial expression (hey, what can I say? I'd just come off a book with Brent Anderson!), and so we came to no conclusions.

Elliott later called me up to tell me about this new guy named Kevin Van Hook. I liked his samples, and we got together. We hit it off personally immediately--the fact that he was a serious Mac-head certainly helped. And it was clear he understood what I wanted to do, and had the chops to do it. So we were ready to go.

And then Elliott vanished.

I've long since re-connected with Elliott, but I've never asked him what it was all about. It was clearly personal and serious. But the fact was, he was just suddenly gone. Poof. Nobody knew anything.

There was something true about DC at the time, that it seemed to have sort of a Kafkaesque management structure: or maybe Joseph-Heller-esque. I never figured out how decisions were made up there, and everybody else seemed pretty vague on the concept as well. Nobody seemed to be able to tell me who was taking over Elliott's books--and in fact, nobody seemed to have heard of the Jacknife project. (This didn't seem to weird anybody out, either, however.) I resubmitted the proposal, letting folks know it had been approved and there was an artist on board and everything.

I didn't hear anything: at the San Diego Con that year, Dick Giordano ran into me and asked what I was doing for them, and I told him about Jacknife. He promised to look into it--but it wasn't too long after that that I made my split with comics, and so wasn't around to press the matter further. (The second six issues of Tailgunner Jo suffered a similar fate.)

Kevin went on to Valiant Comics (It was interesting that for a while the two guys managing the art end were good friends of mine (Kevin and Don Perlin) but I was still in voluntary exile.)

So Jacknife is one of those Books That Almost Were. Kevin became another one of my Artist Friends that I've never actually had any stuff published with (Alan Weiss being another). And Jacknife in the Bush II years would be a very very different book from the original Bush I era conception, if I were ever to turn my mind to it again.

Kevin has gone on to actually produce write and direct his own feature film . He's a really talented guy, and I'm proud to have been associated with him--even if our comic book together was published only on Earth-2.

Posted: Sunday - May 07, 2006 at 02:17 AM        

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