COMIC: 'Stream,' a forgotten short from back when I was just a writer

Read one of my first-ever published comics

Hey fellas!

I’m busy updating my website, and one of my goals is to make sure I have a comprehensive bibliography of every little thing I’ve ever participated in.

So I’m digging through my archives, and I came upon a little gem I wanted to share today.

I’ll present the comic sans-commentary now, but stick around for a few afterthoughts:

This is “Stream,” a short comic that was published in 2016 or 2017 in Memoirs of the Mysterious #2, an excellent campy horror anthology organized by artiste/filmmaker Joe Badon.

Before I became a cowboys and ronins kinda guy, I was in this bleak sci-fi/supernatural lane.

Back then, I was just starting my trajectory toward drawing my own stuff, and it wasn’t guaranteed such a thing would work for me, so, as a writer-only, I worked extra hard at my prose.

The only results from this era are “Stream” above and the short “Tomorrow” published in Caliber Comics Presents (available for readers of rent*space here).

All this, along with my bio for Memoirs of the Mysterious, offers a look at a Renton Hawkey who never figured out how to hack the art side and went in an entirely different genre direction:

“Stream” was inspired by my very real fear of flying.

I originally planned it out as a 3-issue miniseries or graphic novel with entirely different characters.

The premise was that flying through the void requires a powerful psychic pilot. These pilots are kept sedated in the cockpit for sinister reasons I no longer remember.

The story would have followed this dude who is afraid of flying, like in the short above. He gets trapped on a streamflight when one of those pilots escapes and holds everyone hostage for revenge.

It had a very Twilight Zone vibe to it, with a typical early-aughts horror film twist ending that the guy afraid of flying is merely a projection of the escaped pilot (who is working through some stuff).

I can’t really remember exactly how I came to pitch a shorter version to Joe, but, I do remember giving up on the script for the series because it had too many plot holes I couldn’t resolve.

Might have been that I reworked it into the short to A) get a credit into the world and B) salvage some version of the idea I worked on for a year or so.

That book “Eternal” mentioned in the bio, of course, never came out. But it was my main focus as a writer for several years.

It was a tongue-in-cheek-turns-tragic-and-poignant haunted house story featuring a group of ghosts who died in different decades who are now stuck in the same house. The thing is, none of the ghosts ever lived there, and as far as they can tell, have no connection to the house at all.

In the end, it’s revealed that the antagonist ghost died alone in the original 1800s house the current house is built on top of, and has been possessing the current owner and having him exhume bodies from the graveyard to bury them in the basement. All so he doesn’t have to be alone.

It was a fun story with some interesting, quirky characters in it, but the problem with it is and always was that it just never really fit into what I wanted to do in any way.

The rest of my stories at that time were pretty heavy, violent, horror/sci-fi type stuff like I mentioned further up. So this lighthearted indie film-style thing just didn’t really feel right.

But it is a story I liked quite a lot. I might publish my last script draft here at some point, along with some of my other writer-only scripts that are finished, but probably will never be made in any form.

In any case, if you made it this far and have not yet subscribed, please do! Check out my other comics Ronin Digital Express and Fistful of Yen, and if you’re a loyal fella, please feel free to share to bring some more eyeballs this way.

Thanks for reading, and be good!