JORGE VEGA: WINNER OF THE 2007 COMIC BOOK CHALLENGE

All it takes is a curse and a gun

By JULIA REISCHEL

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Jorge Vega, an IT manager (and occasional sex ed teacher) at the Park School in Brookline, just won the American Idol of comics—the 2007 Comic Book Challenge. The competition culled Vega from 50 comic book creators through an audition process that you can watch, in its entirety, on something called the “AT&T blue room.” As the favorite choice of voters across the world who voted on the blue room website, Vega has won a publishing deal for his comic book idea—and, he hopes, a shot at Hollywood.

The gears turning in the heads of execs at AT&T are obvious: They’re using the buzz about the contest to pimp out their YouTube knockoff website. They might not be above manipulating the rules in order to get more attention, either—the contest’s results were supposed to be announced on the last Monday in August, but then were inexplicably delayed a day. But all such tie-in contests, all the way back to the Miss America pageant, are advertisements for something, so let’s not begrudge AT&T its moment in the sun. Besides, the 2007 Comic Book Challenge, for all its Web 2.0 gimmickry, will no doubt have a serious effect on Vega’s career. The hope of Platinum Studios, its sponsor, is that Vega’s idea will be vivid enough to sustain not just a comic book, but an entire media franchise.

“You can see the influence comics are having on film as of late,” Vega says. “Platinum is trying to out-and-out say, ‘This is a movie waiting to happen; this is a TV show waiting to happen.’ These are the guys who transformed Men In Black from a comic book into a cartoon series. They target properties that they feel can make that transition.”

Vega, a 32-year-old Brockton resident, bet that his pitch—a “supernatural Western” set in 1870 and starring a cursed Buffalo soldier—could do just that. “What you need is a good story, compelling character and a heart to it,” he says. Gunplay is a “vampire story without vampires” whose hero, Abner Meeks, is forced to shoot and kill one person each day. Meeks is also forced to grapple with the irritating presence of a white teenage tagalong, setting up a reverse Huck-and-Jim dynamic.

The explicit racial themes and highbrow literary allusions set Vega apart from his competition. One of the pitches that didn’t make it to the finals was called “I Survived the Bush Administration,” and one of the other finalists was a comic about a superhero who is a banana salesman. Tackling issues of race and war head-on while the white geeks around him served up played-out superhero conspiracy-theorist fare certainly didn’t hurt Vega’s chances.

Gunplay has the added advantage of being set in a classic comic genre. “Before superheroes, there were spacemen,” Vega says. “And before that, all comics were either war comics or Westerns. So what we’ve done with Gunplay is get back to comics’ roots. By setting it in 1870, we’re still on the bleeding end of the Civil War, where we can go out West and explore an era and a time in history that very few people outside of the movie Glory have tapped into. Within comic books, this is largely untouched. It’s dark and very violent, but it’s 1870, and it’s a very dark and violent time in American history.”

Vega’s win is well earned. He’s been trying to hack his way into the profession of creating comic books for years, and has weathered low-prestige jobs and family crises while doggedly coming up with ideas to throw at editors—none of which have stuck until now.

“Prior to this, I’ve done a lot of webcomics stuff, and I’ve come close a couple of times,” he says. “I’ve done things ranging from a comic called Zoo, which was like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but with drunk driving. Another was called The Coat, and was a film-noir-type comic about a dead guy who was investigating the mysterious kidnapping of Death.”

Neither of those ideas took off—both times, Vega explains, because he lost his artist at the last minute. This time around, Dominic Vivona, an illustrator Vega met at a comics convention this spring, was committed. He and Vega have already produced several pages of the finished book, which looks like a post-apocalyptic landscape out of Mad Max.

Now that he’s finally got a foothold in the comics industry, Vega is already thinking about the next step—what Platinum will decide to do with his character. A movie script could soon be in the works, as could a TV show. Vega would prefer a feature film, but he knows the business well enough to be pragmatic.

“As long as Abner doesn’t turn into a white guy, that’s OK,” he says.