“We should have gotten flight schedules,” Scott Morse quipped as another jet roared overhead on its approach to San Jose Airport. He and I were sitting on the steps outside the hall where Dan Vado was hosting the 1998 Alternative Press Expo, breathing the chilly February air and talking comics.

I smiled and paused my recorder. I figured this sort of no-frills interview experience only adds to the do-it-yourself attitude which everyone sweats through their pores at a show like this. Morse’s Marvelwhore shirt with its “Filtered Creativity” slogan, made to look like a certain cigarette box, deftly completed the by-any-means-necessary image cultivated by so many self-publishers in Parkside Hall.

While he isn’t a self-publisher in the strictest sense of the term, Morse has been on the convention circuit for the past few years, self-promoting Soulwind and other projects such as *Little Grey Man* both before and after Image picked him up in the beginning of 1997. As of April, however, Soulwind was on hiatus after Image co-founder Jim Valentino decided to pull the plug on his “non-line” (also known as “alternative images,” since the array of titles was not the superhero fare which readers have come to expect from the company).

“I think it’s a good thing,” Morse says of Valentino’s action. “It may not seem like a good thing to a lot of the people who were going to do books through [Image], but in the long run - if they were doing a continuing series - I think it would be better for them to be either self-publishing or going through a smaller company, simply because I don’t think they were finding the audience they were looking for through Image. Retailers like carrying the usual superhero books, but if you come out with a black-and-white alternative Image book, they don’t know where to put it.

“Soulwind is not dead; it’s just taking a hiatus for a little while,” he explains. In the meantime, he is in talks with other publishers to continue the saga, as well as possibly re-issue his graphic novels Little Grey Man and Visitations, which Valentino also published.

When it picks up where it left off, Soulwind’s story will involve “everything,” according to Morse, “on every single level; it’s turning into a big amalgam-type book of history and different theological beliefs.” The first four-issue story arc (the whole tale will be 24 issues by the time it’s done) revolved around a small boy named Nick and his adventures on another planet, while the arc which ended with number eight is a 1930s-era story about his parents. Strange creatures and even stranger events abound in every installment, but Morse promises that all will make sense in the end.

The title refers to a magical sword, and the first four issues featured Nick’s arrival on a strange planet - via alien abduction - and his adventures with an otter-like creature named Poke who travels with a sentient robot called 7829. An evil smuggling ring known as the Dynasty and a couple freelance bounty hunters are the heavies, and a group of primate-like creatures who inhabit the planet peacefully are the keepers of the sword.

A tale about a Chinese boy living with a group of monks bookends Nick’s arc. Rendered with heavy brush strokes, the boy’s story is about him finding Soulwind and experiencing Nick’s adventures by touching the sword. Morse has said that this part of the story, as incongruous as it seems, will make sense in the overall picture as the series progresses.

The comic is what he describes as “practice for doing bigger projects later on ... I figure if I’m going to be doing big projects later, I might as well practice with a big project. So this is kind of my first jump at it to see what I can get to work, what I can’t get to work.” It reads almost like a series of storyboards, with the story unfolding at the slow, methodical pace one often finds in most Japanese comics. Along with such disparate influences as Frank Capra and Akira Kurasowa films, he admits that there is quite a bit of manga influence in Soulwind and his other works.

“Yeah, manga in general has been a big influence on the way I’ve been doing things,” he says. “Storytelling-wise, good manga won’t narrate anything. It will let the reader figure things out for themselves, and it will pace things in an exciting way. It will kind of arrest the reader and trick them into reading it at a certain rate of speed that they normally wouldn’t be into, if they sit down and concentrate reading the book right.

“So that’s a big trick with what I’m trying to do. With film, you’re forced to sit there for a certain amount of time and the images are fed to you at a certain rate of speed. With comics, a reader can read it at any rate, so the trick is to arrest them to read it at a rate you want them to read it at.”

While Frank Capra may seem like a strange influence on a work with a definite science-fiction/fantasy slant, Morse says that “he was a character guy [who emphasized] acting and sentiment, and I think there’s a lot of that missing in comics, just in the feel of them in general. There’s always a fight scene or something.

“I’m trying to pace Soulwind like a film,” he continues, “and I’m trying to cut out any extraneous dialogue or narration, simpy because I think that comics should be 50-50. A lot of it can really be told through the visuals, and I don’t think that’s being utilized enough in comics right now. There’s a lot of writing just for the sake of writing, and it turns into an illustrated prose piece.

“That’s fine, but that isn’t what I want to do with Soulwind. I want to be able to tell a story through the visuals, and a lot of that is through the acting on the characters’ faces, their gestures. Things that you see in every day life that tells you a thousand things words couldn’t ever tell you. That’s what I’m trying to get across.”

Besides storytelling, Morse’s film influences have also helped him create the look of the comic, since it’s black-and-white. This choice was made in the beginning for monetary reasons since he originally considered self-publishing Soulwind, but he chose to stick with it even after signing with Image.

“It’s been good for me artistically because it’s been forcing me to think in terms of black-and-white,” he explains, “ and that helps me with staging, with the placement of shadows, things like that you don’t normally think as heavily about when you’re doing color. Since I knew I would have to do the comics in black-and-white for money reasons, I decided to go with heavy graphic shapes and really exploit black-and-white as far as I could push it.”

Morse made another major decision recently which will have an impact on the way readers digest Soulwind. Instead of releasing the story one 24-page issue at a time, he will release trade paperbacks containing all four issues on a quarterly basis. Not only will the story read a little more smoothly, it will also give the comic a chance to be “looked at as a book form,” according to him.

With a background in animation as the art director for Hanna Barbera’s Cow and Chicken cartoon and aspirations to direct a screenplay which he recently wrote, he has considered translating Soulwind to the screen, possibly as a series of animated films. He feels that a cable network could give him the leeway to include some of the story’s violent content and the chance to faithfully recreate the comic’s episodes as they follow a non-linear path.

Since he has worked in animation, however, he knows how it hard to can be to get the kind of control he thinks he would need, which is one of the reasons he’s sticking with telling his stories in comics right now. “Visually and story-wise, I can do exactly what I want to do,” he says. “I can take opinions from whomever I want to take them from, and disregard whatever opinions aren’t pertinent. Everybody’s pretty hands-off with it. If it wasn’t that way, I could do it myself, but a lot of [comic book] companies are opening up to creator-controlled projects, because they know that if you have a creator with a vision, you’re going to get out a better product than a team of people.”

And even if he could get enough control to bring Soulwind to the little (or big) screen his way, he concedes with a laugh that “you can’t ever get complete and utter control of anything. There’s always going to be someone putting in their two cents that’s going to affect you one way or the other. It’s just a matter of finding the right people and pitching the project right and geting your vision across to the people that are going to help you. That’s what would make a good storyteller in general: communicating the ideas you have so that everybody can see the little movie playing in your head.”

While he waits for a publisher to put Soulwind in the starting gate for another run, Bob Schrek and Kevin Smith’s Oni Press will feature one of Morse’s short pieces in Oni Double Feature #7. He also has several other projects in various states of production, including a possible series based on the two-part Anubis Squadron story which Michael Cohen published in Mythography numbers four and five.

The Oni and Mythography stories really showcase Morse’s versatility. The former is a character-driven story about an Italian baker living in the 1920s who also counterfeits money for the Mafia, while the latter is a fantasy-based story based on what were called “foo fighters” during World War 2: balls of light which used to buzz planes and which were some of the early UFO sightings. In Morse’s take, the pilots are actually fairy dog-fighters who enjoy wreaking havoc with the lives of humans.

While many comics creators prefer to mine the same genres over and over, Morse would prefer to work on a variety of stories. One project he will be working on soon is a Hunter Rose story for Matt Wagner’s Grendel: Black, White and Red, which will be written by Wagner and geared toward Morse’s versatile abilities. He is capable of almost any style, from Chinese brush paintings to cartoon-like illustrations. He employs both for Soulwind and throws in a more moderate style between the two as a balance; a different look dominates each story arc.

In addition to his short stories, Morse hopes to take the plunge into a color project or two sometime soon, and he’s working on a western called Hanging a Man with Every Day. He’a also trying to line up financing for his screenplay, an independent film called The Lyrical Whales. It’s a drama about a woman with Alzheimer’s disease and her family’s struggles with her affliction. If he can’t pull together the funds, he may take the money he’s made from comics “and pull off a Robert Rodriguez and do it for 10 or 20 thousand.”

As for the future of his career, don’t expect him to settle down in one place anytime soon. “It’s just kind of fun to jump around and try different media,” he says, “ and see if I can tell stories different ways. That’s the next frontier, I guess.”