Nov 20, 2009
I’ve written many stories before and since, but when I was 20-years-old I wrote “The Firefly Brigade”. The story was about a group of prisoners at the Treblinka Concentration Camp during World War II. The group discovers a crashed alien rocket ship, repair it, and blast off for adventures far away from the planet Earth! All very emotional and fantastical, but of course, that was where the fun part ended; the Firefly Brigade would encounter something far-flung from the FLASH GORDON ray guns and rocket ships. It turned out that the universe wasn’t a much simpler place than back home. I outlined about fifteen stories, each more tragic and epic than the last. I had it all figured out. “The Firefly Brigade” would end with the group of former prisoners returning to Earth one last time to find that their fellow captive (who had been too afraid and stayed behind) had survived the Holocaust. They all run off together to the stars again, into an epic I would leave the reader to imagine for themselves…
“The Firefly Brigade” didn’t end there. Years later I re-imagined the story as a children’s novel series featuring a collection of JACK KIRBY’S NEWSBOY LEGION-esque kids discovering a crashed rocket ship. The ship had by this point become at least semi-sentient and insectoid and would quickly be revealed to be just one in a billion such ships sent throughout the galaxy to bring together an army in response to some tremendous, tragic, and yes, epic, nemesis or threat. The Holocaust era survivors would be part of the story too, in a discovered series of diary entries showing that the Fireflies had a legacy and that this “war” was an ancient one.
Someday I’ll probably write that version. Or maybe I never will. Looking back, writing and rewriting and rewriting again for “The Firefly Brigade” was what taught me how to tell a story. Since writing that story, I graduated with my creative writing degree and published a few issues of an anthology magazine dedicated to my love of genre storytelling. I edited and co-edited comics like FAMILY GUY, LOST SQUAD, and DUNGEONS & DRAGONS as well as a prose series of “How To” nonfiction books. I jumped into a boutique startup creative and interactive services firm and, with an excellent team of talented innovators and kid-visionaries, turned that startup into a flourishing idea house sought by industry leaders. I’ve written, ideated and provided creative direction for some of the most well known brands in television, film, video games, toys, and comics like TRANSFORMERS, SPIDER-MAN, G.I. JOE, and STAR WARS. Along with some very open-minded clients, I’ve helped pioneer the frontiers of digital and traditional entertainment marketing.
Through it all, there has been a single refrain. A single skill and understanding has returned again and again like fireflies blinking in the dark periphery. Storytelling. It’s all about storytelling.
I mean, cosmically it really is all about storytelling. Our lives are these miniscule things in the grand scheme, but even a fruit fly’s life has a rise and fall in action. Under the right microscope, even the fruit fly lives a tragedy and a comedy both. Cave drawings and action script, dead languages and four-color comic books. Everything around us is filled with beginnings and endings.
And people love stories. It’s what we live for. Secret diaries, gossip text messages, family photo albums, Facebook profiles, LOONY TOONS, family sitcoms, popcorn flicks, Shakespeare, romance paperbacks, TV commercials, HARRY POTTER, sporting events, bedtime stories… Humanity never can seem to get over the need for entertainment, for stories. We’re all hunkered around the campfire.
Twenty years ago, NEW YORK TIMES Bestselling novelist Neil Gaiman brought DC Comics / Vertigo THE SANDMAN. It was a revolutionary comic book even if Gaiman wanted desperately to be Alan Moore for at least the first three or four issues. Gaiman’s Sandman was the Lord of Stories, a Dream King and the source of all storytelling inspiration. I’m not sure that the Sandman truly exists, but I do know that those who tell stories, and tell them well, do rule the Earth. They have every ear and steady voices with which to speak.
Maybe that’s what “The Firefly Brigade” is all about today. This blog brings together a group not unlike that bunch of “Newsboy Legion” kids or those Holocaust survivors I wrote about, visionaries daring to believe and endeavoring to tell about it… Storytellers… every one of them.
There was a vision that started it all, listening to a song by the Moody Blues, thinking about the glimmer of a new story and how that glimmer becomes a glow. There was a field full of unmarked graves –all untold stories– where the fireflies played, blinking and blinking in the twilight. And a shooting star and a “once upon a time” and all that nonsense.
Every good story should start like that.
