Okay - if you can all tear your eyes away from watching the reanimated corpse of Wall Street I will tell you a secret little story of a real reanimated corpse: THE FRANKENSTEIN MOBSTER!

Besides, the headlines in Monstros City have other important events to follow.

There is one single question I get asked over and over by anyone who has just learned that I'm a comic book creator, a.k.a. a graphic novelist. And the question is, "How do you get your ideas?"  There are a lot of answers to that question.  I've gotten ideas from life, reading, injury, arguments, disasters and successes.  They have arrived full blown in great detail and as fragments that refused to connect.  I have had dreams where I lived out the smallest details of a character and their world.  But all the ideas have one thing in common.  To get them ready to present as a comic book, or a screenplay, or anything that could remotely be termed as "entertainment" takes a lot of time and work.  For every story you see in print - I have a file bulging full of plots and characters for others that won't ever see the light of day.  And the reason they won't has nothing to do with quality - I just did all that work as a way to create the sense that the characters and their world existed before page one, panel one.  They have to convey the feeling to a reader that there is a life extending backward to the moment of birth.

If I can get the readers to believe the back story - then it is far easier to have them believe the stories I am telling.

Look - I made the world of FRANKENSTEIN MOBSTER so real I even developed ad campaigns for products unique to that world.  See?

And beyond that, here is an example of how I built the foundation for FRANKENSTEIN MOBSTER...

The Time:  Now.

The World: A familiar place with one exception: MONSTERS ARE REAL!

The Place: A city that is run by Mobsters and is home to Monsters.

The Setting: Monstros City

From the beginning, I spent a great deal of time planning the background of Monstros City. Not only did this place need to justify its strange history, but it also had to offer enough conflict and mystery to support a long-running series of stories. So I made it a coastal, seaport city of commerce.  Monstros City became a real melting pot of races, including longtime natives, immigrants fresh off the boat (flesh off the boat?) and every kind of spook and monster. This is a place where the lower classes are mostly monsters; zombies, mummies, the unwashed and undead. The living human population has it pretty good with the extensive resource of monsters for a labor force. The lower class of the living is a bit pissed that monsters are taking their jobs and this has precipitated a number of clashes between the poor and the undead. It has gotten to the point where most cab drivers are either mummies or zombies. The sanitation engineers are largely ghouls and the few remaining living humans in that line are really disgusted by the ghoulish habit of snacking on the garbage. The monsters live in a rundown section once known as Druid Hill but now uniformly referred to as the Dead End of town.

This didn't just happen.  Monstros City has a long history of spooks and goblins.  Goes way back to pre-revolutionary days.  While Salem gets all the reputation for witches, that's only because those New Englanders killed their magic makers.  Around Monstros City the magic crowd managed to play it smart and stayed alive.  At the inception of Druid Hill there was an organized league of Druids who helped settle Monstros.  They came over on the ships like the Pilgrims did. Searching for religious freedom. But the way this worked out, they ended up on one side of the Sticks River and the good Christian souls took the other side.  It was really two separate towns until a little before the Civil War. Druid Hill on one side of the river and Hydes on the other. But everyone pulled together during the War Between the States. As might be imagined, Druids were real helpful in the fighting.

The problem came from the Pirates. The folks of the town of Hydes made a deal with these Pirates. Druid Hill and Hydes were big on shipping, their shared bay is a natural sea port. So Hydes decided to offer a pardon to any Pirates who would help form a navy and defend the harbor from the Yankee ships. The guy who was heading the Pirates at that time was Lucas Monstros.  Funny how people can remember a name but forget just where it came from.

 The good news was, Lucas Monstros was a natural leader of men.  And his outsider status gave him an unusual sympathy for the magic crowd and the monsters. After he successfully defended the two towns, he quickly put these places back on their feet. After the war he was able to bring the towns together under one city government.  Folks around there were so grateful.  They had seen what the Yankees and their carpet baggers were doing to the rest of the South.  So grateful that they not only elected Lucas Monstros as the first mayor of the combined burg, but they also voted to name the place Monstros City.

By the time of the first World War, Monstros City was a bustling seaport of entry for the mid-Atlantic states. The city was an "off the books" kind of place.  Essentially a mob-run town.  And while the Hydes family currently runs the Mobs and the city, they are acting out the legacy of Lucas Monstros. No one should have been surprised. Elect a crook and a crooked government is what you get.

Monstros City is an American town, located on the East Coast just slightly south of Ocean City in Maryland. Today the place is still run by the mobs. And the mobsters have a nasty dislike for the monsters.  Like East St. Louis, Monstros City has managed to survive as an isolated capsule of crime into the new century.  But unlike East St. Louis, Monstros City doesn't look like it will be making changes any time soon. The reason most of us have managed to go through life without hearing about the place is the work of a magic spell that has wiped the memory and knowledge of Monstros City from the world. The spell has also had some interesting effect on the city itself. There is very little modern technology.  Monstros City is stalled somewhere between the late 1940s and early 1950s in its fashions and gear. You won't be seeing any computers or cell phones here. And when you do see a family well off enough to afford a black-and-white television set, the TV shows are all somehow warped versions of what we know in the rest of the world.  Apparently, the magic spell takes a modern show like Dawson's Creek and turns it into a match for Peyton Place.

Okay - so after I worked all these details out I sat down at my drawing board and drew a short introduction to the series.  I really never intended it to be seen by anyone by myself.  It was another exercise in getting a handle on how I wanted to approach the art style, the tone of the writing, many small factors that would go into tthe final take on the series.  And a lot changed by the time I started work on FRANKENSTEIN MOBSTER #0.  Take a look and see for yourself.

Let's take a break there and I'll be back next week with a rare look at what some of the FRANKENSTEIN MOBSTER characters were doing moments before they arrived on stage in the comic book series.

Mark Wheatley holds the Eisner, Inkpot, Mucker, Gem and Speakeasy awards and nominations for the Harvey Award and the Ignatz Award.  His work has been repeatedly included in the annual Spectrum selection of fantastic art and has appeared in private gallery shows, The Norman Rockwell Museum and the Library of Congress--where several of his originals are in the LoC permanent collection.  His comic book creations include Ez Street, Lone Justice, Mars, Breathtaker, Black Hood, Prince Nightmare, Hammer of the Gods, Blood of the Innocent, Frankenstein Mobster, Miles the Monster and Titanic Tales.  His interpretations of established characters such as Tarzan the Warrior, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Jonny Quest, Dr. Strange, The Flash, Argus and The Spider have brought them to life for a new generation of readers.  He has written for TV, illustrated books, designed cutting-edge role-playing games and was an early innovator of the on-line daily comic strip form.