Today I’m talking to Greg Beettam and Stephen Geigen-Miller, creators of Xeno’s Arrow, which launched this week on Modern Tales Longplay. Xeno’s Arrow is a longtime favorite of mine, and I’m thrilled to get to talk to Greg and Stephen about their work.

Shaenon Garrity: What was the inspiration for Xeno’s Arrow?

Stephen Geigen-Miller: I’m tempted to pull a writerly cop-out and say that the short answer is: everything. A longer, and more honest answer would be something like this…

It started with me reading Greg a story.

Now, that sounds a little weird, especially considering that we met in University, but it’s true.

It was 1993, and Greg and I were sharing a basement apartment. Greg was feeling tired and frustrated of the art chores he was facing on a mini-comics project he was working on at the time. He thought it might make the whole process easier, faster and more fun to have the verbal, word-processing part of his brain engaged at the same time as the visual, picture-making part. And he was bored of all his CDs. And I needed to practice the skills I was learning in my voice and speech class – I was a Theatre major at the time.

So he pulled out one of his favourite books from his childhood: one of Tove Jansson’s wonderful Moomin books, The Exploits of Moominpapa. And I read it aloud. It’s the story of an idealistic and very naive young hero who escapes a dreary and confining existence to find adventure with the help of a group of eccentric friends.

Readers who are already familiar with Xeno’s Arrow will be seeing some points of congruity, here.

That story was our touchstone when we decided to work together on a comics project. It provided the aesthetic that our other shared passions–elaborate world-building, comedy, social and political commentary, using science fiction to up the stakes and provide the biggest possible backdrop for a story–could be attached to.

Greg Beettam: I think one of the oddball things about Xeno’s Arrow (and the thing that has always made it kind of hard to categorize when promoting it!) is that it takes its inspiration from both classic children’s fantasy and sophisticated science fiction. That’s a weird paring, but it all made some kind of sense to us at the time. I think in the beginning we intended it to be just this wide-open, Wizard of Oz-like romp through outer space, nothing too complicated, just very silly and whimsical, full of childlike wonder and eccentric alien characters with goofy-looking designs.

And then the politics started creeping in. “How does their political system work?” one of us would ask. And then the other would answer, “I think it works like this.” Or… “What kind of food do they eat?” Or…”What was the belief system on this planet before the Lizards showed up?” Eventually, we had this really complicated world and the whole thing had grown totally out of control. So while it still owes a lot in tone to authors like Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and Tove Janson, you could say it’s just as equally the godchild of Ursula LeGuin and J. Michael Strazinski.

SG: What made you decide to start self-publishing a comic?

SGM: Wanting to be masters of our own destines. Ha! We really didn’t understand what it meant to be self-employed.

GB: Speaking for myself, I always hated the idea of having to put together a proposal and pitch something to an editor, because I never expected someone in that position to understand my ideas or want to bank on them. (This is me back in my early twenties–the 35-year-old I am now probably wouldn’t find it quite so daunting.) So, although I had been a total comics junkie since the age of twelve and basically lived and breathed the medium, by the end of high school I had begun to doubt the idea that I could actually break into comics. I just didn’t fancy the idea of writing or drawing Iron Man, or whatever, for five years while hoping vaguely for the chance to do my own material, and even then somebody other than me would own the characters, under the terms of a work-for-hire contract. Then one day somebody plopped a copy of Cerebus into my hands and explained, “This guy publishes his own comic. He owns and controls the whole thing.” I just blinked and said, “…you can DO that?” I think from there on the course was pretty much set.

I did a little monkeying around in the minicomic format over my first couple of years in university, but it wasn’t until I had been rooming with Stephen for about a year that one of us said, “we should write a comic together.” It just made sense–we knew that we had very similar sensibilities and influences, and I had already been using Stephen as a sounding board for my own writing ideas for some time, so we knew that a good working chemistry existed there. From there it was just a matter of cooking up the basic concept and running with it.

SG: How did you divide the writing and art chores on the series?

SGM: Xeno’s Arrow was entirely co-created, co-plotted, and co-written, to the degree that neither of us remembers who came up with 90% of any of it. Greg handled all the art.

GB: We went through several iterations of the writing process. For the first six years, we employed a method I call “shouting at the typewriter,” where basically two people crowd around a keyboard arguing about what happens next, and someone is always saying, “You type too slow, let ME have the keyboard!” …and yet somehow it all finally gets written down in script form. Years later, we realized that it was much less stressful to just brainstorm the plot outline together, take turns writing the actual scenes in private, and then take turns revising what each other had written.

The art was all me. Stephen doesn’t draw. I suppose that entitles him to be both jealous and relieved, and he’d be right on both counts. Our issue-to-issue cycle would generally start with a really frenetic weekend where one of us would crash at the other’s place for the whole weekend and by the end of it we’d have a working script for the issue. Then Stephen would have to spend the next two months being as patient as he could, periodically calling me up and asking, “So, uh…how’s it coming along?” This would be met with a series of grumbles and vague reassurances, followed by, “Gotta go–the Boss says I have to get back to work.” (When you work for yourself, I find it helps to pretend there’s an invisible Boss in the room–one armed with a shotgun and an electric cattle-prod.) Then, at the end of the two-month process, Stephen would finally get to see the pages, and I would get to bask in his “ooohs” and “ahhs,” and be all cool and give nonchalant, breezy responses like, “Oh, do you really think so?” and “That’s nice of you to say,” and things like that.

SG: Why did you stop self-publishing?

SGM: Exhaustion. Financial exhaustion, personal exhaustion–especially on Greg’s part; it’s very hard to have any kind of life while drawing and self-publishing a comic that isn’t breaking even. And that led to creative exhaustion too.

GB: Money. We ran out of it. The book was always poised just on the knife-edge of breaking even but never quite made it there. So eventually we packed up our tent and headed down to the San Diego ComicCon (this was in 2000) and spent a good portion of the show running around trying to chat up potential publishers. This was almost a complete flop as tactical operations go, but luckily Wayne Markley of FM took pity on us and introduced us to the folks at Radio Comics, who it turns out were already Xeno’s Arrow fans. They adopted the book and gave it another year of life. Unfortunately, this still didn’t boost our sales, so after 6 issues they had to let us go. Then the book just kind of languished in limbo for about–geez, has it been five years already? I feel old.

SG: Why have you decided to run Xeno’s Arrow as a webcomic?

SGM: Well, it’s been about 5 years–that’s a long time to be letting something as important to both of us as Xeno’s Arrow is lie fallow. We had all this story, and it was just sitting there!

We felt it was time to use the new opportunities that the web provides to get the story out in front of readers again, to reach a new audience. That’s why we’re so excited to be joining the Modern Tales family.

GB: Well, you see, the web, as I understand it, is very, very well-populated. We hope to introduce Xeno to a whole bunch of readers who never encountered him the last time around. And one of the nice things about web publishing is that there is really no one else standing between you and the reader. There’s no retailer you have to convince that this will sell and that’s why they should order your book, for instance. No offense to the retailers, they’ve had a lot to contend with over the last 10 years, but part and parcel of that big implosion that happened in the 90’s was that the willingness to experiment and try out independent books–especially oddball books like ours that don’t really fit a particular niche–really took a nosedive. So naturally we’re very interested in a venue where it’s really just up to the reader to decide what they want to read. We’re curious to see what the web can do for Xeno’s visibility and exposure. ( Psst! Everybody! Tell all your friends! Post links everywhere! Paint a mural on your van!!!)

SG: In addition to reprinting the archives, are you planning to create any new chapters of Xeno’s Arrow?

SGM: Absolutely. The material we’re reprinting on MT Longplay will comprise the 16 issues that made up Book One (10 issues) and Book Two (6 issues).

Book Two has a clear and I think dramatically satisfying conclusion, but was always intended to be open-ended. The Known Galaxy is a big place–there are many more adventures in store for Xeno and his friends.

As our storytelling skills have evolved over the years, our sense of how long the overall story of Xeno’s Arrow will be has changed dramatically, so I can’t predict exactly how many more “books” are to come, or how long they’d be. Those stories have yet to be written, although we’ve had at least a vague sense for some time now of how they’ll unfold.

As to when new chapters will be created? That’s going to depend on a few things, including the response we receive to the existing material through Modern Tales.

GB: Oh yes. Not this year. But yes.

Our sort of rough plan is to reprint the archived material on a monthly schedule, running approximately half an issue’s worth for each installment–which will mean we’re really publishing the material on the same schedule it originally followed as a bi-monthly comic. I mean, we could put it up there a lot faster, but after being out of circulation for five years we really need a bit of lead time before we can get the Xeno production machine up and running again, for a variety of reasons–financial, personal, and otherwise.

We also want to rebuild our own website again, after having allowed it to langish and then go offline as our doman name expired — and even, apparently, allowing some thrice-cursed domain squatter to snatch up xenosarrow.com and add it to his stash. (You’re not getting a penny from us, do you hear? We’ll be xenosarrow.ca, so there!)

We also have some, ah…other plans for the material, if certain things work out…but which I don’t think we’re quite at liberty to talk about yet. Keep watching the skies.

SG: Any final thoughts?

GB: Yes, remember wash your hands before you read our comics. Even if we ARE online!

SGM: For the first time in a long time, I can say no. I’m going to let the work speak for itself!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Modern Tales News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.