Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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5.2.06 The Secret Origin of Agent Boo

If you go to the Tokyopop website and click through to the February issue of their Manga Online magazine (registration required, but it's quick), you can read the first chapter of Kat & Mouse. (You can also read previews of Becky Cloonan's East Coast Rising and George Alexopoulos' beautiful Go With Grace.)

Also, here's Edo's cover draft for Book 1 of Agent Boo:

I love it, it's got just the right Petit Prince-meets-Flash Gordon vibe to it.

I think now can be told the Amazing and Absolutely True Story of How Agent Boo Came About. Back when the Isotope Forums existed (and I had a little corner of it), somebody had posted a thread about the online comic retailer, Khepri. I had always found Khepri's old navigation quite hard to use, and I posted something essentially going "blah blah useability blah clunky, boo Khepri". Larry Young responded in fairly short order, pointing out how incredibly dumb it was for me to criticise a well-known US online comic retailer just as my first comic book was debuting.

Now, there is nothing in life that pains me quite so much as admitting that Larry Young is right, but in this case there was no avoiding it. I wrote a mea culpa to Larry saying I had gone back and, in a burst of Stalinist historical revisionism, deleted my critical post about Khepri: "Commissar Boo has vanished". (The reference is to this wonderful and chilling book, an in-joke I was probably the only one to get. Still, if you can't amuse yourself...)

That night, I can't sleep. I keep turning over in my head that "Commissar Boo" sounds like a really cute character name. As the low blue hours crawl through to dawn, I create this dippy, absurdist sci-fi story in my head about this little girl called Agent Boo, who lives in Space City and fights the evil Queen Misery of Iron City, and her Commissar Noir. I emailed a couple of sentences the next day to my editors, describing the concept. They email back: "Love it! Send more."

Then I added the talking cat. The talking cat has been an in-joke between myself and Tokyopop editor Tim Beedle since about July of 2004. When we were pitching Kat & Mouse, Tokyopop weren't looking for school-drama shoujo as much as they were looking for more wild, fantastic stories. It was a struggle to get Kat & Mouse greenlit. Then-Tokyopop (now, Marvel) editor Mark Paniccia turned to me at lunch, confessed he didn't really like or understand manga, and said about Kat & Mouse, "Oh, just add a vampire or a talking cat to it, and they'll approve it easy." I resisted. There are no talking cats in Kat & Mouse. But oh, the delightful irony of deliberately adding a talking cat to my next Tokyopop pitch... and of course the cat (named Pumpkin, after a stray cat my family rescued when I was a little girl) has run away with the book with his straight-out-of-Brooklyn wisecracks.

Via friends (really, the only way I find artists) we hooked up with Edo Fuijschkot, who just gets the whole concept so well. The pitch zoomed through the approvals process and suddenly, bang! It had a contract and a deadline and I actually had to write the blasted thing.

If Agent Boo were a mathematical equation, it would be: (stupid self-referential in-jokes about Stalin + insomnia) * editors with a sense of humour = series!. Sometimes graphic novel projects are agonisingly hard to get off the ground. And sometimes they're not.

( 6:13 PM )

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