“…they pull me back in.” So said Al Pacino’s character Michael Corleone in The Godfather 3—and boy, do I know what he means!
Back in March, I told a story about a comics project called Stan Lee’s Alexa. Published in 2005 by ibooks, inc., it was planned to be a three-issue, prestige-format miniseries plotted by Stan “The Man” Lee (loosely based on a series of novels titled Stan Lee’s Riftworld, published in the 1990s), drawn by a bunch of talented artists, and scripted by me. It told the story of Alexa Moran, a comic book artist who works for the Fantasy Factory, a Marvel-like company run by “Happy” Harry Sturdley. (Any resemblance to Stan The Man was purely intentional.) One day a pair of giants appears at the Empire State Building; it turns out that Alexa brought them over, using her power to open portals to other dimensions—a power she never knew she had…
Unfortunately, issue 1 is as far as the miniseries got. In July 2005 ibooks, inc.’s owner/publisher, Byron Preiss, died in a car accident and the company closed soon after. That didn’t mean the project was completely shut down, though. A couple of years later, I was approached by ibooks’ new owner about restarting the comic. He’d signed a deal with a French publishing house, Organic Comix, to release Alexa #1 in a French-language edition, and Organic’s owner—who works under the pseudonym “Reed Man”—was offering to pay me to write extra pages. Those pages would be drawn by Chris Malgrain, who’d originally been scheduled to take over the art duties with issue 2 of the ibooks miniseries. Sounded good to me! So I wrote ten extra pages, Chris expanded them art-wise to fourteen, and then… nothing. The project was put “on hiatus” (as they say in Hollywood when a TV series stops production).
But now Alexa and “Happy” Harry are back! Last month Chris Malgrain e-mailed me the new cover, along with a heads-up that the issue was now scheduled for release in February 2013. Of course, there’s just one teeny-tiny problem—the same one the project faced back in 2005: there’s only one completed issue in existence. And whether in English or French, it ends with the same three words: To Be Continued.
The hope is that sales will be strong enough to convince ibooks and Organic to put issues 2 and 3 into production. It wouldn’t take much to start the gears turning—I’d completed the first half of Alexa 2’s script before the miniseries halted, and I know how issue 3 ends—so it’s just a matter of picking up where I left off and handing it off to Chris. After I’ve got a contract in place guaranteeing payment for my work, that is. 😉
So: Stan Lee’s Alexa. Coming to France from Organic Comix in February 2013. If you live in France, buy it. If you live elsewhere, tell all your French friends to pick up a copy for themselves, and another for you. You wouldn’t wanna disappoint Stan Lee, now would you?
