Freedom City

The collected Zoo Force has a wonderful preface by Brian McNeil. But before Jer and I thought to ask him to have a go at it, I wrote up this draft:

It was on a mind-paralyzing day like today that I wrote the first ZOO FORCE story. I was at work (sorry, Don) as a receptionist for a private company with an office deep in the bowels of a major hospital. Because this is the way things are in big hospitals, the reception area was all the way down a long hallway from where the techs worked. We saw patients twice a week, and the rest of the time was walk-ins. Nobody walked in. Three days a week I watched empty chairs in a cavernous room with no windows and zero foot traffic.. The old pneumatic tubes in the ceiling would occasionally knock and bang as a blood sample worked its way up to Pathology. If it happened on my breaks I would try to run down the hall and try to beat the sample before it took off upwards. I had a phone, a chair, and my thoughts.

ZOO FORCE was born either to allay these mind-altering circumstances, or it was a direct result of them. So very alone with my thoughts it seemed more than obvious…the chicken would talk, yes, and claim to be Pythagoras, like in Lucian’s THE COCK…a prairie dog/human mix, yes…six foot tongue…polar bear…what kind of superpower would a polar bear have? Ah yes, the best power of them all—reading.  I wrote the story that comprises the television screen pages in DEAR ENIKO in an afternoon and felt like I had staved off madness in an active way. I had taken charge against the efforts of this room to make me insane.

From there it was a matter of making more. The original story, “Enforcers”, appeared in ED #1 (1997) and that was that. When Candle Light Press started gearing up to make graphic novels, though, Jeremy and I had a powerful urge to revisit the story. We wanted this larger story to more fully introduce readers to the characters and get a better idea of their world, but we wanted to do it by tapping into a line of communication. In the case of DEAR ENIKO it was Snowball’s letter to the human who taught her English.  This way the story was shaped by Snowball’s urge to take what is common to hers and Eniko’s experience and help adjust it to this bizarre place in Texas. This “found” narrative appealed to us a great deal, and offered a lot of fun storytelling ideas. The deal was sealed when we gave space to Captain Cat to tell his version of events. Rather than cast you, the reader, as a perfect witness to all relevant events, we leave you with artifacts and the occasional eyewitness perspective. After all, what sounds more fun—hearing Captain Cat failed to get a Xeric, or to hear him tell the story?

Over the years I’ve watched people pick up ZOO FORCE books, land on one of the Captain’s zine pages and put it back down. A quick explanation usually got them to reinvestigate to see what the deal was, but not always. How do you think a rage-filled cat with robot arms would draw? It would be great if the world (or indeed any comic) looked like Jeremy’s art of the Arctic or of a barbecue in La Tornada, but that’s only one view of things.. Sometimes it looks like Jer drawing like a rage-fueled feline. Sometimes it seems as if it’s all on tv.

This book is called the WE HEART LIBRARIES edition, because we do indeed heart libraries. But there was a conundrum with ZOO FORCE. We really love doing things like coloring pages, puzzles and the like; but libraries as a rule have to think twice about books that invite the reader to write or draw in them. Even after hearing this, we continued to keep these elements in ZOO FORCE; but we promised ourselves that we’d put out an edition for the libraries when it came time to collect the first three books. Anybody could buy it, but the idea was to make this so that libraries could shelve it without worrying that someone would succumb to the coloring section.. So in a flip from other collected editions, we didn’t add something to make previous ZOO FORCE buyers grit their teeth and rebuy a book they mostly own. Nope, there’s less here. If you have DEAR ENIKO, BEAN AND NOTHINGNESS, and BBQ already, then you just read the only new part to this book. If you just picked this up off the library shelf, fun awaits!