Jacob Braddock Must Die

My first experience with comic books was when I was in the third grade. We’d have these book fairs at school every once in a while, and I bought this little paperback X-Men book. It had Wolverine on the cover (imagine that) and the insides were sort of like a coloring book that told about the characters.

Before that, I’d been in to Batman, and I knew who Superman was… but those I knew from the movies, not from the comic books. And from this book, I was hooked. I started collecting comics as well as I could when my only source was the Waldenbooks in Oxford, half an hour from where I grew up.

Now, my little nine-year old mind was going 90 to nothing with ideas. I came up with a character called Thunderbolt. He was really James Thundera, the king of an alien world who came to earth to stop his nemesis. I drew the comics on copy paper and ran off copies, and my friends and I would sit at a card table at the back of my dad’s grocery store and sell them for a dollar.

I became more serious about comics in junior high, writing full issues and drawing them, running off copies and coloring each copy by hand. I still have some of these – I probably put together a total of 10-12 issues and had written dozens more, from probably 4 or 5 different unique series.

Most of the comics from that period actually starred myself and my friends, adventuring with superhuman abilities. Earth was destroyed and alternate universes were created. It was pretty rad.

During high school I naturally developed other interests – girls and cars. Comics went on the backburner. In college I started writing again, but gave up on the art because I just couldn’t put on paper what I wanted. These stories featured new characters who were not real people. The main one was Jacob Braddock, also known as Ultrabolt (Thunderbolt is a DC Comics character so I couldn’t use that name anymore). I wrote dozens of stories, each one “rebooting” the character, but I was never truly happy with what I came up with.

This went on for years. One night when I was drinking with a friend, something popped in to my head – to get myself out of this rut, Jacob Braddock had to die. And thus the idea for this comic was born.

The first idea was very different from the finished product, to the point that only the names of the characters stayed the same. The original artist of the series had other obligations and was unable to work on it, and I found Brad Jones by chance on the forums at SomethingAwful.com. This was the boost I needed and the script started pouring out of me, along with other ideas for future stories.