The Savage Dragon

In the modern maelstrom of comicbook movies (comicbook as one word, as Stan Lee tells us to write it), there is a plethora of characters that the general public is getting to know that, previously, they were totally unaware of.  Iron Man was nothing to the average bloke before RDJ Jr., took on the role.  Well, except for the occasional Ozzy Osbourne fan who knew it as the opening to one of rock's greatest metal pieces.  Captain America and Thor were somewhat known, but were generally thought of as cheesy.

But now even the likes of Ant-Man and Wasp are getting their own cinematic incarnations, and movie fans are drooling to find out who these characters are.  They've moved from the shadows, and into the limelight.  I, a lifelong reader and writer, and a fanatic over comics since I was seven, am sure glad about this transcendence.  And now, with a version of The Dark Knight Returns about to get its own treatment in Batman v. Superman, DC is poised to launch its own cinematic universe.

So you'd think I'd be happy with these developments.

However, there's a part of me that feels someone's been left out.  Image Comics, which easily constitutes a great and important portion of my geek training in the 90's and eartly 00's, put out a single film years ago that starred one of its flagship characters, Spawn.  It didn't do so well.  As a result, no sequel, and no other talks (as far as I know) to make another Image property into a film.

I'm sure the ball gets kicked around sometimes, thoughts of "How could we make Youngblood work?" or "What about a Spawn remake?"  That type of stuff.  But there's one character, and one mythology, that I always wanted to see on the big screen.  His name is the Savage Dragon, and here's why I'm writing about him.

First of all, I don't know if it matters a hill o' beans to Savage Dragon creator Erik Larsen if there's ever a movie made about his creation.  That's not the point.  Second of all, I don't think a comicbook character's ultimate goal should be to have a movie made out of them--I might partially agree with the writer who said that "film is where all good books go to die"--so that's not the point, either.

So what is the point?

The point is I love the Savage Dragon, and always have, ever since I picked up the first issue.  I've been following this big green fin-headed crimefighter since he first materialized in a ball of fire in a parking lot in Chicago.  I have every single issue (not the collected graphic novels, mind you, but the individual issues) and I'm still counting them.

For those that don't know (probably most of you), the Savage Dragon, or simply "Dragon" as his friends call him, woke up one day in a parking lot with no memory of who he is, where he comes from, or why he looks the way he does.  He's big, muscular, and bald except for a single mohawk-shaped fin on his head.  The twist is not only that he HAS NO origin, but also that he refrains from superheroing--he joined the Chicago Police Department, and fights crime as a cop.  He goes up against other freaks like himself, as well as your standard bad guys, organized syndicates, alien forces, sorcerers, you name it.

It's a well-written funnybook series that I can't recommend highly enough.  It's even had lots of spinoffs, such as Freak Force, which I also collected.  Larsen created a world absolutely teeming with lore, with everything from deepsea adventures to journeys into parallel dimensions, from "baby's mama drama" to cataclysmic collisions with creatures from another realm.  Whenever I've asked comicbook writers and artists what they're reading, or what they've found influential, they frequently list off the standards (Neil Gaiman's Sandman, or 100 Bullets, or whatever), but it's surprising how many of them drop the ol' Dragon's name.

So I guess my only point is...how come Dragon never got huge like the others?  I mean, before 2005-ish, you might've had an argument for the lack of CGI, but now?  Now, with all mo-cap technology they've got?  Now, with comicbook characters allowing movie production companies to practically print money?

Savage Dragon has a great deal of comicbook history woven into its DNA.  It was one of the flagship characters that Image rolled out with more than two decades ago.  It holds a record for the longest run of a single writer and artist on a single title, Mr. Larsen having that prestige.  It's long been epic in the ways that modern TV series like The Walking Dead (also adapted from an Image comicbook series) and Game of Thrones, in that characters die unexpectedly, even uneventfully sometimes.  There's romance, action, world-changing events that tie into our own.  And Dragon himself is extremely flawed at times.  He's a beer-drinking average joe, who just happens to be extremely hard to kill.

Don't get the wrong impression, I'm not angry that not everyone loves this series the way that I do.  It just sometimes causes a bout of curiosity, something I can't quite leave alone--like how your tongue keeps returning to an empty tooth socket--and I wonder why some things gather steam, catch on like wildfire, and others don't.  That's all.

For me, the Savage Dragon came along in a time in my life when I was deeply confused.  My mother died from breast cancer when I was twelve years old, she was extremely sick and out of her mind those last difficult days, and after she was gone, it was just me, my brother, and my dad in our house.  No female presence.  That was...strange, to say the least.  I got into reading because of a book I found, quite by accident, called Sphere, by Michael Crichton.  I was in remedial reading back then, didn't care for books at all.

Sphere changed all that, I read it three times in a month, couldn't stop talking about it to anyone.  People wanted me to shut up about it.  I thought to myself, "It would be cool to write stuff like this." I didn't even think about doing it for a living, just wanted to do it for the hell of it, for the sheer joy of it.  In a couple years, I was no longer in remedial, but advanced English.

Then I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and decided I'd be a writer.

Then I revisited old issues of Savage Dragon, started buying the new ones, and realized writing isn't just a single-lane road.  There's a variegated assortment of avenues you can take to create stories, from comics to short stories to novels, and now ebooks and "flash fiction."  Back then, I read and re-read everything Dragon.  Withdrawn as I was, mournful as I was, and the loner that I was becoming...well, it all brought me closer to reading.  I yearned for time alone.  I lost friends during that time, I just couldn't connect with them.  Not at the time, I wasn't ready yet.

So the Dragon became my pal.

The written word and its myriad uses revealed new worlds to me.  I also became riveted to the art, and started writing spec scripts of my own.  Again, just for fun, no money or celebrity sought.  I wrote books, screenplays, comicbook scripts, novellas, short stories...I'm thirty-five now and I just sold the film rights to my novel, Psycho Save Us (the cover art of which was drawn by Marvel Comics artist Axel Torvenius, in fact).  I've worked as an indie most of my life, but I've started to make a career at it, appearing at cons here and there.  The farther I get away from those years, the harder it is to remember my mother's voice--I remember her laugh a bit, her face certainly, but I've now lived longer without her than I ever did with her.

She's part of my childhood.  Dragon is, too.  Hell, I'm writing this piece right here because of Dragon.  He's up there in the pantheon of stories and characters that brought me to this place.  So I'm sure I'm biased when I say the guy should get more respect.

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