It's Hercules 2007: Unshaven, Bored, Lackadaisical

That’s another pitch for Labor Days. It's the 12 labors of Hercules re-imagined. Set in the present day and featuring a thoroughly confused and unmotivated hero at its center. It's maybe the pitch with the strongest hook, as they say.

There's an essay out there somewhere by a film critic (or maybe you'd call him a theorist) named Thomas Elsaesser (okay, weird, he has a website, complete with, rather odd, picture).

Ahem, anyway... he wrote an essay years ago called "Notes on the Unmotivated Hero" or something like that. It was about the nature of protagonists in '70s American cinema. Specifically, movies like The Conversation, Night Moves, Two-Lane Blacktop, and The Long Goodbye.

They're slacker heroes before slacking became the province of comedies (teen or otherwise). Their motivations are full of a kind of world-weary pathos. And they tend to be inserted in genres where you expect a highly motivated hero (mostly, but not always, they're in detective films).

Our main character, Benton "Bags" Bagswell, is based on the idea of that kind of hero. What if an unmotivated hero found himself in the middle of an adventure of almost Grecian proportions? What if the fate of history hung in the balance?

Once Rick gets up on here, and we can see Bags, I'll tell you more about him.

(on a side note, someday I'd like to push an unmotivated hero into other genres. Fantasy in particular would be fun. In a sense, Barry Windsor-Smith did a bit of this with a section of his Storyteller's comic. Which seems to be, holy crap, now available to buy. Guess I'll be getting that.)

(a second side note, The Dude is an excellent example of a latter day unmotivated hero. And the tone of that film is much closer to Labor Days)

(further, for anyone who really cares about theories of '70s film, I do have some issues with calling those characters "unmotivated." As did Elsaesser, if I remember correctly. But what's important is the idea of an unmotivated hero. Productive brain food, I find).

It's like Repo Man meets James Bond

I'm obsessed with that ridiculous pitching device. "It's like Jurassic Park meets Halloween with a touch of The Piano." "It's like Beetlejuice meets Snatch, with the third act from Ghosts of Mars."

This might come from my last few jobs being film related. It might come because I honestly find it to be a productive brain exercise (yes, I always pause when I hear one to give the combination an honest consideration). Or it might be because they make for easy jokes (see first paragraph of this post).

I also enjoy retro-constructing the pitches for movies already released.

For example: "It's True Lies but they're both leading double lives," or "It's Three Amigos, but in space," or the classics "It's Romeo and Juliet but with werewolves and vampires", or "It's Die Hard on a boat" (or "Die Hard on a plane" or "Die Hard on Alcatraz teamed with an elderly James Bond" or "Die Hard on a plane full of convicts")

So, when writing, I can't help but try to come up with that one perfect, and often utterly ridiculous, pitch.

The best I've come up with for Labor Days is "It's like Repo Man meets James Bond."

That's Otto Maddox (the repo man) meets James Bond (the super spy).

That tells you, if you decode it properly, that it's about a slacker, a mysterious object, a superspy, and international adventure (and possibly punk music and sex appeal).

Smash those things together, bake on high for 40 minutes, season to taste and it won't give you Labor Days, exactly. But it'd give you something similar in taste if not texture.

In other news, if anyone reading this hasn't seen Repo Man, you're hereby uninvited from talking to me about movies (that includes you, Rick).

It's like Indiana Jones… but with "cunt"

Welcome one and all to the Labor Days work blog.

So what is Labor Days? It is, or rather will be, a comic book published in 2008 by Oni Press.

Herein you'll find the behind the scenes ramblings, ravings and reassurances of the Labor Days creative team. That team of lads being principally comprised of myself, Philip Gelatt and my loose tongued and loose cannoned partner, Rick Lacy. I do the writing and shaking of my head in disappointment. Rick does the drawing, drives the clown car and dons the capes.

This space will be a collection of notes, thoughts, drawings and miscellanea. All the basic elements one expects of a work blog and then some.

But what is Labor Days, really? To begin to answer that, I defer to the title of this post.

(That's how we roll here at Labor Days Towers. Minorly offensive, sure, but mostly just bemusing.)

Stay tuned!