Omega Men #1: The Script

The end is here. But here's the beginning.

Time for some Omega Men!

Omega Men was the first comic series I wrote solo. I was on Grayson with the great Tim Seeley, and that was going well, and I got the offer to do something on my own, which was one of the happiest days in my comic career. I remember literally jumping on a bed and realizing that this was it! I had a series! I was a comic book writer!

It was canceled after three issues.

And then it was miraculously renewed.

But that’s a story for another day.

Today’s story is Omega Man number 1, whose script I am posting below for the first time. It was written for the great Barnaby Bagenda, whom I found when my buddy, inker Juan Castro sent me a link to Barnaby’s Deviantart page. One of the few times where I got to search for an artist for a specific project.

The weird thing about my scripts for Omega Men is that I was doing the page layouts in the script, something I haven’t really done since. Now this was all on the 9 panel grid, so it’s not the most dynamic layouts ever. I was just indicating ways to break and combine the 9 panels into their various possibilities. You’ll find a description of how I communicated this to Barnaby on the first page of the script below. The first issue is mostly all 9 panels. Subsequently I got more experimental. A little bit more experimental at least.

The reason I was doing this was this quixotic attempt to make the whole comic mirror itself both thematically and formally. So that, panel layout wise, each issue mirrored itself (pages 1-10 mirrored 11-20; with 1 having the same layout at as 20 etc.); AND, panel layout wise, the issues mirrored each other (issues 1-6 mirrored issues 7-12; with 1 being the same layout as 12 etc.). Just like an Omega symbol is a mirrored symbol and the alpha mirrors the omega and…I had thoughts is what I’m saying.

Anyway, I was obviously very influenced by Alan Moore at the time, so much so that I would joke with my wife while I was writing that the series should be subtitled, “Who Omegas the Omega Men!” A joke I don’t think she got in retrospect, probably cause it was both very nerdy and very nonsensical.

I didn’t quite pull off the mirroring in the end. During the cancelation I got sloppy with a few panels in issue 5, and there are 3-4 other panels I just missed. And then the fill-in issue actually mirrors the countdown issue and I’m not sure that works exactly…But! There are hundreds of panels that work the right way, which is not so bad for this bizarre ambition!

Regardless, I’m insanely proud of this series and still think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. Now I just got to figure out a sequel.

In the meantime here’s the first issue.

Like all these scripts, it is available as a bonus for paying subscribers. If you’d like to join that level, we’d be grateful, and you can do it here: