Imagine for a moment arriving at San Diego Comic-Con in a flying car to promote a comic book. The whoosh of the wind, the noise of the turbines, the inevitable shouts of “Look! Up in the sky!”
As a teen, I became infatuated with concept cars and hot rods. Anything vehicular and unusual was fascinating to me. My parents, in an effort to support my interests, bought me one of those subscriptions that were the predecessors to today’s monthly subscription boxes. Every month, a new pack of letter-sized inserts arrived for my Wheels and Wings 3-ring binder. One pack came with a sheet dedicated to a flying car called “the Moller Merlin”. At that time, the prototype looked like a cross between the Mach 5 from Speed Racer and a submarine.
Fast forward to the late 90s. My best friend and I were deep into our pining/planning to launch our shared comic book universe. This was prime Web 1.0 time, and I was just beginning my graphic design career. We had no idea how to fund such a project, but I began to do some research into investing. Along came a friend from church with big ambitions of his own. He convinced us that not only did we need a business plan, but that we needed to go big and swing for the fences. What started as a small goal to raise maybe $10-15k ballooned into a sixty-page business plan looking for about $4.5… million!
Included in there was the thing I still get teased about to this day. We imagined a scenario just like the one at the top. A Legacy-branded (more on that later) flying car that we could use to soar around the country, visiting conventions to promote our soaring dreams of remaking the comic book landscape and challenging the big three.
On the one hand, I deserve the mockery. On the other, I never lost the underlying dream of independent publishing. So while I’m tooling around in a much more modest, grounded vehicle, I still have soaring dreams of independence to tell my stories the way I want to tell them. Because, like Avery Brooks suggested back in 2000, we don’t need flying cars when we can connect to people everywhere via the internet.
Vagabond Creative Entertainment has only started crawling these days, but I’ll never give up trying to fly. Ecclesia!