So the gods have returned to Earth. Cool concept. Now what?

I was invited to contribute to the first two anthologies of ReDeus tales, but my schedule wouldn’t permit it. Asked again to participate in the third volume, and finally having a window of opportunity, I jumped at the chance. I loved the idea of the various pantheons of gods coming back to their ancestral lands and seeking adherents.

When I cast about for my story, I initially struck on the notion of exploring what it would mean to be an atheist in a world populated by actual deities. Interesting idea, right? Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t the only one who thought so: the redoubtable Dave Galanter had already tackled such a story in his “Tricks of the Trade,” which appeared in the first ReDeus collection, Divine Tales. So it was back to the drawing board.

In searching for another tale to tell, I asked myself what it would actually be like living in a world where the gods had made themselves manifest. Would most people interact with them, or would they simply see them on television and read about them on the Internet? The latter seemed more likely to me, but it also made me question what people would think about the gods and how that would make them behave in their everyday lives. Certainly the majority of human beings today are religious, but they generally worship an unseen, unheard god. Would it make a difference if they got to see and hear divine beings, even if from afar. Continue reading

So the other day I was reading the first issue of a new comic book title–I can’t tell you which one since, like too many new comic book titles these days, it was another one of those  derivative post-apocalyptic concepts wrapped up in some flimsy new dressing that slips off my brain almost as soon as I’ve read it. Try to read it. Anyway, I got to the end of the issue (perseverance!) and found that the story was followed by several pages of text by the writer explaining the where and how of the creation of this piece of work.

You’ve read a hundred of them if you’ve read one: “It was a dark and stormy night when, like a thunderbolt, an image came to me. I didn’t know what that image meant until, days later I was talking to Sam Artist or Ann Editor and happened to mention it. They gasped. They cried. They genuflected. Didn’t I know what I had here? Well, let me tell you…!”

Okay, I admit, I’ve written my fair share of these “process pieces” over the years, but in my defense, I wrote ‘em for the bucks. At DC Comics, we got paid for writing text pages and, for a new series, it was either write some sort of blather about how it had come to be or forgo a couple hundred bucks for what was, essentially, a couple hours work. After a book was up and running and receiving mail from readers, it got even easier. Retype some letters, write some snappy responses, turn in your voucher. (And once OCR technology became affordable for the home user, it was just free freakin’ money.) Continue reading

When Bob, Paul, and I first came up with the idea for ReDeus, we started with a single, simple question: “What if it was modern day and all the ancient gods returned all at once?” A simple question with a very big,very complex, very far-ranging answer, to be sure, but that’s where all the fun is, right?

We talked about what would happen to the world and its people when they discovered that the gods were real, that they were physically back, and that they were every bit as powerful as the old myths claimed. We talked about which pantheons we absolutely knew we would have to talk about—the Greeks, the Celts, the Egyptians, the Norse—because everyone knew at least a little about them, and some of the smaller, lesser known ones that would be fun to play with exactly because most people didn’t know about them as much, if at all. We talked about which countries and regions each pantheon would reclaim—or try to—and where the obvious fights for territory would occur (how many pantheons have held sway over England, exactly?). We talked about the rule of monotheism, what would happen to Judaism and Christianity and Islam when all these ancient gods returned—and the One God didn’t. We talked about needing a neutral ground somewhere, and how that should be Manhattan, and how that came about. We talked about a lot of things. Continue reading