R.P.M.

It was a deliberate decision by the creative team to get the show on the road — pardon the pun — as soon as possible. There’s a trade-off here, of action versus clarity: we could have taken eight or nine pages to explain who these people are, what NORTRAK and GEARS are, where they’re headed, what has happened to Daniel’s hand, and what the stakes of his decision to accompany Mr. Mystery (not his real name) in the car are.

But where’s the fun in that?

We’ve opted to put excitement first, and trust the reader to trust us in turn. All will be explained!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this tantalizing taste of things to come with RPM — it’s been a blast to work on this series to date, and as we lurch into the beginning of RPM01 and our core story next week, things are going to get a lot faster, a lot stranger, and a lot more fun!

No pilots-racing-vehicles-that-turn-into-battlesuites-fuelled-by-alien-technology series would be complete without a touch of humour.

A shout out to David Hedgecock here, who really reworked the dialogue on the last panel of this page to illustrate the fact that the battlesuits don’t normally float that well — something that I started to stress about far too late, as I was in Atlanta for my wedding and couldn’t really script at the time.

The balance is always tricky, and I’ve always hated intro stories that wind up being a series of pages with dialogue like “I’m JERRY! I hate CRIME! I can FLY and shoot MONKEYS OUT OF MY BUTT!”* and then laboriously run through the whole team, having each conveniently mention their special ability or super-power en route.

This is a lot more fun: middle of the action, kind of confusing but hopefully kind of thrilling at the same time. We don’t know who these people are exactly, or what the deal is, but there’s a lot going on, and you can already tell the good ‘uns from the bad’uns.

One more page, and then we’re onto official new stuff with RPM01! I can’t wait!

*although that is a pretty cool superpower.

Transforming speedboats! Alien weapons!

One of the things I loved about comics as a kid was that you’d just get dropped in the middle of stuff. Spider-Man is swinging down the street and suddenly BAM! this guy dressed as a pastry is blasting him with tasty cream filling or something. Maybe there’s a one-page flashback in which we see a crook get bombarded by radioactive Jos Louis snack treats and become The Radioactive Jos, and is now trying to kill Spider-Man with his creamy filling.

This is starting to sound a bit like a Tijuana Bible.

At any rate: in today’s comic world, there’d be a six-issue mini-series dedicated to the introduction of this character, starting with some deep, dark tie to Peter Parker’s past, and future, and cosmic significance, and philosophizing about the True Nature of Crime and the Insufferable Lightness of Snack Cakes, and then finally we get some excitement.

Not so with RPM! One thing everyone on this project is committed to is the jump-in-with-both-feet approach. From this race-in-progress intro in our FCBD story, we’re moving right to our upcoming RPM01 book — riding next to our main character, sharing his confusion and getting just as overwhelmed as he is.

It’s an approach rooted in two things: first, we trust the reader. We can throw things at you. You’ll catch the ball. It doesn’t take a six-page “introduction story” to tell you where a toaster came from. It’s there, it makes toast. ‘Nuff said.

Second, we don’t believe in padding. The day we need to stretch a one-page story element into six pages of reaction shots and pictures of clocks ticking, just go ahead and throw RPM off a building. This is a series about action and speed, and our goal is to make sure it never stops moving.

Buckle up! We’re almost through the FCBD story, and then the new adventures begin…

Third page of our first published RPM work! It’s fantastic seeing this, especially with scripts written for the first several issues and watching pages come in for RPM02 even as we speak.

As an aside, naming conventions in the Internet age are kind of interesting. Once upon a time, when comics were published in pamphlet form only and dinosaurs roamed the earth, breathing fire and leaving devastation in their wake, there would have been issues of RPM: RPM #1, RPM #2, and so on. In these heady days of integrated media, though, things aren’t that clean. This, for instance, is the first appearance of RPM online, but was written as an add-on to the series for FCBD, and happens before the series proper begins. As the series continues, we may have some value-added “asides” and bonus materials online that don’t appear in the print edition. So are they part of the first “issue” or do they stand separate? What about bonus material — sketches, behind-the-scenes stories, etc. — that might make its way into a print issue but never gets displayed online? How does that fit in?

So for RPM, we’ve adapted a more flexible naming convention: what used to be an issue is now just a two-digit number, and offshoots and appendages amend the number in a more-or-less logical way. You’re currently reading RPM00.1, and once this is over, RPM01 will begin, followed 28 pages later by RPM02. Offshoots will become decimal places — if we have a story branching off from what happens to Shrike after his assault on RPM’s newest assets (just wait!), it might be tangentially accessible as RPM01.1. But — this being the Internet and not a fixed print format — something might happen that stems from THAT. Then we get RPM01.1.1. And so on.

Just a passing note on how conventional print comics folks are discovering, even in minor ways, that the conventional comics form takes a bit of gerrymandering to make sense online. It’s a fun exploration, and a worthwhile one.