What if the one that got away kept coming back?

About a year ago, our pal Len N. Wallace dropped his OGN, LOVE BUZZ through Oni Comics. Clocking in at nearly 200 pages, LOVE BUZZ is an impressive book and quickly became a critical hit. Pseudo-Autobiographical in nature, and with a ten year gestation period, Len descibes the origins of the book:

LNW: It started back when I was in high school, actually. I’d gotten dumped by this girl who now I’m pretty sure I’d only dated a couple times, but had gotten dumped by and figured it was the end of the world. Being 16 and a huge film nerd with an eye to try and make movies, I wrote a screenplay about my getting dumped, then finding this other, totally awesome, TOTALLY FICTIONAL girl that didn’t exist, but was the answer to my teenage heartache … It was pretty bad, but I called it “Love Buzz.”

Then high school went on and I actually did end up meeting and falling for a girl in what turned into a series of on again, off again relationships that lasted for years after we’d graduated. So around the time I was 19 and things in the relationship had ended for like the umpteenth time, I decided that now I’d known a thing or two about the ups and downs of love. With this in mind, I set around to writing a completely new version of Love Buzz from the ground up.

I wrote and wrote and wrote for months, and what I ended up with was a literal 300 page tome of a screenplay that would have made Oliver Stone choke to death. Needless to say, a film version of my epic love story would never see the light of day in such a state, and I’d gotten back into reading comics again, so I decided “Why not try and adapt the book for the comic audience? How hard could that be?”

As it turns out, probably a little harder than Len thought. Nearly 8 years of script re-writes, and flirtations with three different publishers (that didn’t work out for one reason or another,) LOVE BUZZ is a testament to an impressive DIY/GTD (Do it yourself/Get Things Done) attitude that has fuel any indie title.

Teaming up with artist Michelle Silva (and artist Dave Tuney, who provides around 30 pages of art throughout the book) and rounding out with letterer extraordinaire, Thomas Mauer (see Killer of Demons for more of Thomas’ work) LOVE BUZZ made contact with Oni Press via, (of all places) The Brian Michael Bendis forums:

LNW: I didn’t think we’d had a shot in hell of doing it. Randy Jarrell, (Oni’s managing editor) posts on the Bendis Boards a lot, and the way I remember it, we had gotten to talking in a thread about … something of which I can’t really recall, but this was about a month after the second company let us go, I remember saying something to the effect of “Y’know Randy, you could do me a solid and get your boys to publish my book.” Totally joking in saying this, and kind of expecting him to probably be annoyed, because he probably gets that kind of crap all the time …. Then about 5 minutes later, I get a PM on the boards from him, saying the guys at Oni were fans of Michelle’s work, (She’d done a pin-up in an issue of Local and was taught a lot of what she knows about art by Ryan Kelly) and said they’d take a look at our pitch. The rest as they say was history, and while I wouldn’t recommend this method to many other creators in getting their books picked up, stranger things have happened.

Even though the book had been offically “Picked up”, Len still faced another round of rewrites– If anything, this part of the Love Buzz saga truly represents a side of the job that most aspiring writers never think of–

LNW: They wanted me to change my ending. Around the last 20 pages of the book. Without going into spoilers, they said it was kind of anti-climactic and it left things a little too open with whether or not the characters had or hadn’t grown by the end of the book. Initially, this was heartbreaking to hear, but not really because I was in love with, or married to the ending I’d written. It was more that I’d finished writing Love Buzz about four years before. In my mind, I was done with it and the more time I spent thinking about it, or trying to tinker with it, the more I started to resent the project. Not because I thought it was a terrible book, (although the stuff I’m currently writing will blow Love Buzz out of the water.) but because was exhausted with it to the point that the more it sat in limbo, not getting out into the world for people to see and judge, I was becoming almost physically ill. I would compare it to being pregnant perpetually for seven years. Not trying to say I know what being pregnant is like, or even could know, but it’s how it felt and will feel until May finally comes.

Anyway, Randy gave me a week to think on ideas for a new ending with something to say, and after getting over being pissed about having to rewrite it, I thought back on the relationship I’d based it on and what I’d learned. I drank a couple of Red Bulls, and sat down in front of my computer for a couple days until the new ending was done. Then I sent it to Randy and told them I didn’t want to look at it again for a week. I came back a week later, read the script for the book the whole way through with the new ending attached, and I fell in love with it all over again. The characters, the scenery, all of it. The new ending gave it meaning deeper than I’d ever thought I was capable of.

Len swung over the first chapter of his LOVE BUZZ script, and I was immediately struck by his very cool Script Format. Open up the doc to see how he treats his dialouge with the Word Cell function– undoubtedly making it much easier on Thomas’ lettering.

Also worth noting is Len’s terse panel descriptions– Personally, I feel a great number of young comic writers choke their artists with overly descriptive panel direction. Try to have some faith in your artists to do their job.

If you’d like to take Len’s script out for a comparison run to the final book, Oni has a 22-page preview of Love Buzz available here–
As Len mentioned to me, it’s an interesting look at how much things can change in the editioral process:

LNW: To give yourself a little perspective on what you read in that script as opposed to what got printed in the actual book all those years later, here’s the 22 page preview Oni put up for the book. Read and compare. These old scripts should at very least be a good example of the lengths of the editorial process for creators starting out.

Here’s the script:

LOVE BUZZ (Book 1: The First Time I Saw Your Face) by Len N. Wallace

Please consider supporting Indie comics by picking up a copy of  LOVE BUZZ through Amazon–

Len N. Wallace can be found at his website or via Twitter @LenNWallace

Portions of this writeup were culled from an interview with Len at The Pulse. The full interview can be found here.

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