Well, this should be interesting...

LegalDispatch 0.1

Howdy!

Welcome to this, my first foray into newsletters-ness.

Believe it or not, I’ve had more trepidation about, and difficulty with, writing this first “issue” than I’ve had writing anything in a long time. This is largely because I really haven’t known where to begin. So, in what might be an astonishingly narcissistic move, I’ll start with:

ABOUT ME

I write things. Sometimes, they’re comic books. Other times, it’s a TV show or a movie. I’ve written video games, a motion comic, and even a novel. “Jack of all trades, master of none” is a pretty apt description of my writing career.

LEGALDISPATCH

You might be asking yourself, “What the heck is a ‘LegalDispatch’ anyway?” Good question. I had to come up with some kinda title for this thing and the name of my loan-out corporation is “LegalScribe Entertainment” (a nod to my former life as an attorney) so “LegalDispatch” made a kind of sense to me. Would LegalDispatches have made even more sense?

Yeah, probably.

WHY A NEWSLETTER? AND WHY NOW?

Generally speaking, I tend to write things that I’m a fan of and I really enjoy newsletters (I’ll include a list of my faves in a future post) and I’ve thought about publishing my own for quite a while now.

“Quite a while now” became “now” because of the confluence of two events. First, I’ve got my first creator-owned comic in forever coming out next month (shamelessly more on that later) and this week I’ve found myself with a rare bit of free time.

HEY, KIDS (CREATOR-OWNED) COMICS!

One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to write more creator-owned comics. For the past 16 years, I’ve had a blast writing for The Big Two (and hope to continue to do so) but I’ve been jonesing to tell some of my own stories as well. Unfortunately, there’s not much of a market these days for TV shows and movies that aren’t based on a preexisting IP. The place where that’s really happening is the indie comics world, so I resolved to write a few creator-owned books if I could find the time.

Turns out, time found me in the form of a global pandemic. With Hollywood productions shut down, I was suddenly flush with bandwidth and used it to live up to a New Year’s Resolution for the first time in my life.

So, I’ve come up with the following (let’s see if I can figure out how to work the bullet lists here…):

• PROJECT HIGHLAND

• PROJECT ENCORE

• PROJECT CRACKERJACK

• PROJECT SOVEREIGN

• PROJECT WINDOW

Each of these books is in a different stage of development, but they’re all moving along nicely. PROJECT HIGHLAND is the aforementioned book coming out in September. It’s actual title is:

LAST FLIGHT OUT

This is an idea that’s been burning a hole in my notebook for over 10 years and I’m really excited to finally get it out into the world. The fun thing is that we’re already getting some cool ink about it from Bleeding Cool and The Hollywood Reporter.

And ‘cause this is a newsletter and I like it when newsletter folks do this, here’s an exclusive look at some art from upcoming issues by Eduardo Ferigato and Nátalia Marques. Wonderful artists and wonderful human beings. It’s been a true joy to collaborate with them.

Now, this isn’t to say I won’t be using this newsletter to also talk about my Hollywood work, but my intention is for it to be mainly focused on comics. I’ll also try to throw in the occasional preview or something from the Arrow vault just to keep things interesting.

I hope you’ll stick around for the ride. Which seems like a good a place as any to stick this little button in here…

Best,

Marc

Encino, California

8.12.21