92615_RAA_LooseCannon_Text_R1_PROOF

Oftentimes there’d be some mix-up outside the room during a formulation, and we’d be stuck in the clean room until they could sort it out.

Since it was hard to hear because of the air scrubbers, you didn’t talk to others unless you really had to; since particle movement had to be kept to a minimum, if you dropped, say, a clean room pen or other such instru ment, you had to leave it until the end of the shift.

This sort of restriction of movement basically left you with a lot of time to yourself to think.

I would make up little games for myself, like trying to assign famous actors’ voices to food. Like, if chocolate could talk, it’d have the voice of James Earl Jones. Or, how would William Shatner answer the question, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" (Answer: "To… get to… the other… side.")

Stuff like that.

One day in one of these sterile environment reveries, I was thinking about the then upcoming film Apollo 13 , and how many of the films and TV shows I enjoyed as a kid followed the ol’ astronauts-in-trouble theme. Planet of the Apes, Capricorn One, heck, even I Dream of Jeannie. So I fig ured I’d test the comics market a little, and do a 12 page minicomic about a spaceman in jeopardy of some kind. I knew I could write up a compelling story, and that I’d have to draw it myself. The fact that I couldn’t draw very well was deemed not germane to the dis cussion; I was going to figure out the comics industry. So producing the comic was really the least of it; write, draw. Xerox, fold, staple. Tom Fassbender, who was then the comic buyer for the dearly-missed Capital City, came across the mini at the second Alternative Press Expo, and loved it. When I told him I thought they could offer it the same month that Apollo 13 hit the theaters, I swear to God he said, "I like your savvy, kid," with a 1940s curl to his grin. It was pretty well-received, so when we thought to do up the idea as a real series of comics, it only made sense to shoot for another orgy of big movie tie-in borrowed-interest, and we sched uled our launch around 1998’s Armageddon , that year’s astronauts-in-trou ble flick …and we missed that by nine months. Lots of reasons, sure, but it boiled down to the fact that we weren’t going to solicit our first issue until the last was in-house. Starting a new book in those days was crazy; retailers were gun-shy, fans fewer in number than even just a couple of years before…

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