Usually Weekly Up-Dave posts are my warm-up before writing a script, pitch, or email. This week it’s a cool down after turning in the first script on a project that I am proud of, and one I definitely threw all my energy at. Exhaustion is setting in, but it’s the good kind. The kind you feel after a successful workout, or a game well played.

These scripts deserve as much of my energy as I can provide. This script had a lot more prep work done ahead of the writing than most of my other ones have had, but even with that taken into consideration…the artist is going to live with this script, the remaining scripts on the series, and the project as a whole longer than I will. They deserve scripts that I crossed every “t'“ and dotted every “i” on diligently.

It will be another two weeks before I dive into the second script. I considered three but I realized after this first one these scripts need two full weeks dedicated to them. Time in my schedule I can very much afford to give right now.

What am I going to do for those two weeks? It’s time to kick off the development cycle once again. Making new pitches for new projects I hope that I can get off the ground this year. The project I am working on right now is getting a lot of my time, but now that it’s officially kicked off, that also means it’s closer to being over (at least on my part of the lifting) so I need to prepare what I am going to show publishers I want to make after that has concluded.

The development process is fun. It usually involves a lot of long walks, talking to my brother on the phone about things we like, watching more movies and tv, reading more comics and books, there’s a lot of collecting energy. Kind of like Goku’s spirit bomb in Dragon Ball Z. Bright, beautiful, imposing, the pieces of it coming from many disparate but passionate places, and something that could easily be knocked back at me only to send me soaring through the air, beaten by it’s might.

There’s a few unsold pitches I want to revisit, but…I think this is going to be a clean break. There is a project title that I maybe want to take and see if I can put it on something else. (I do fall in love with titles sometime and see if something organically can grow from them, sometimes they do, a good amount of the time they don’t.) I also still have a few pitches that I think are pretty full and solid I’m waiting to hear back about.

A reminder that next week DC’s Supergirl Next Door will be in store. It has a Green Arrow story written by me, pencilled by Dylan Dietrich, inked by Wade Von Grawbadger, colored by Ivan Plascencia, lettered by Wes Abbott, and edited by Andrew Marino. Next week I will be interviewing Dylan Dietrich about the story, and I will be interviewing fellow contributor Dorado Quick who wrote a great Jay Garrick story for the issue that was drawn by Laura Braga.

Do I let people who love each other get together? Do they kiss? Or do they have a long conversation about how they cannot kiss despite really wanting to in classic Dave Wielgosz fashion? Well, you’re going to have to read the story and see if I have made any emotional or romantic progress. I am rooting for me.

Old Comic: The Defenders (2016) Written by Brian Michael Bendis, Art by David Marquez, and Colors by Justin Ponsor.

In the fall Marvel released the long awaited New Avengers Omnibus Vol 2 collecting the backhalf of the best-selling New Avengers series that started in 2004 written by Brian Michael Bendis and this half of the run drawn by Leinil Francis Yu, Jim Cheung, Billy Tan, Chris Bachalo, and others. This book was the north star of the Marvel line when I was a reader, Bendis was and continues to be a big influence on me, and it was really nice to revisit the material. So nice that I was like “I feel like there’s a little more of this that wasn’t called Avengers that I want to revisit…” And that brings me to 2016’s Defenders.

Coming out around the time of the Netflix TV show, starring four of Bendis’s favorite characters to write: Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage who dive head first into Marvel’s rapidly changing underworld after Kingpin has gone legit and the Luke Cage villain Diamondback has returned to fill the vacuum. This was the last book Bendis launched before he came over to DC and man…this book rules. It’s a delight to read Bendis write these four characters together, you really feel Marvel’s underworld growing in an interesting direction and you really feel like you are traveling through the Marvel New York City night encountering all kinds of different characters like Black Cat, Spider-Man (Miles Morales), Blade, The Punisher, Black Cat, Elektra, and more.

But the book’s greatest draw? Pun intended here. The astounding lineart of David Marquez colored by the late great Justin Ponsor. A lot of books about the “underground” of a super hero universe are bleak, devoid of color, not easy to make out, and definitely missing a lot of super hero flare. Not this book. Marquez is one of the best super hero comic artists of his generation, he brings these characters to life with joy and stages some phenomenal action sequences. Ponsor’s colors are a combination of the highest aspiration of super hero coloring, mixed with the neon palette of a movie like Drive. It’s stunning work.

One of the biggest highlights is a fight between Iron Fist and Elektra that is perfectly choreographed and stunning colored. I will let you in on an industry secret, when artists do sample pages for their portfolio they are often working off a sample script and at some point the script for fight sequence got into a lot of artists hands. I have seen ten different artists draw this fight scene and seeing the original version by Marquez and Ponsor again…it’s a masterclass. I could’ve read this book for another thirty issues, but I’ll happily take the ten we got.

Movies I Have Watched: The Rip, Directed by Joe Carnahan

Look, I am a lifelong fan of Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and crime movies. So it was going to take a lot for this movie not to work. This movie is smart, efficient, tense, and has a spectacular cast. It is better than I thought the best possible version of this could be. Shout out to filmmaker Joe Carnahan writing the perfect two-hander script for Affleck and Damon to star in, and then an even bigger shout out to Affleck and Damon with their company’s Artist Equity Company making this movie exactly the way it should and letting Carnahan’s skills as a writer/director shine. I love, love, loved this movie and wish we got five of these crime thrillers a year.

Is This Thing On? Directed by Bradley Cooper

Bradley Cooper is a wildly talented creative person. He’s also a painfully endearing guy from the North East who is interested in people who make art, how it impacts the people around them, and how it may or may not fix the parts of those people that are lacking. That’s the through line I’ve drawn between the three movie’s he’s directed: 2016’s A Star is Born, Maestro, and now Is This Thing On?

Maestro, Cooper’s previous film outing as a director, while ambitious and having some things I like was a bit of a miss, and with this film he does one of the smartest things a creative person can do: go smaller, go more intimate, but keep your interests as an artist. And by that I mean…he could’ve gone and done a total 180 and made a futuristic submarine war movie. No. With this movie he makes his smallest movie yet and dives deeper into all of the things he’s interested in.

Will Arnett, who co-wrote the script, delivers a phenomenal lead performance that he always had in him. If you watched Bojack Horseman and followed the Netflix portion of Arnett’s career it’s been clear for a long time he’s wanted to be in a live-action project where he could lay more of himself out bare, and here he has the best vehicle to do that. One that is still funny, allows him to be a fully realized person, but never becomes punishingly naval gazing. Laura Dern reminds us why she’s an American treasure, one of our finest actors, and Bradley Cooper is also an actor in this movie delivering his most funny performance in many years. A winner through and through.

Podcast I Am Listening To: The First Ever Podcast Hosted by Jeremy Bolm

Jeremy Bolm is the lead singer of the LA hardcore band Touché Amore, a band I love. He also hosts this podcast where he interviews other musicians and creative people close to the world of music. One of my New Year’s resolutions was that I was going to connect more to my hobbies that had nothing to do with my own professional aspirations. I have long made peace with the fact that I will never be in a punk band of any kind, but it’s nice to hear people from bands I love talk about their stories and how they make their music. Bolm is so friendly, gentle, and asks thoughtful questions from a creative person’s perspective and it’s a joy to listen to, I always walk away feeling good after listening. I’m happy to have it in the podcast rotation.

TV Show I Am Watching: LET’S GO PATRIOTS! LET’S GO CELTICS! Boy…it’s feeling real nice to be a Boston Sports fan again. And I just tempted the gods to send a lightning bolt right at my heart. …Bring it on.

That’s it for this week!

Come back next week for DC’s Supergirl Next Door interview week.

Until then?

Stay safe!

—Dave Wielgosz