Erica Schultz Erica Schultz pushes her sunglasses up on top of her head to keep her dark hair out of her face and leans back against the black leather jacket draped over her chair.
While nearby customers with venti caramel macchiatos in hand browse the titles on the shelves, Schultz is spending this Sunday morning reflecting on her dream of someday writing the Great American Graphic Novel.
As a female professional comic book writer, she is as rare as a chunk of red kryptonite. The comic book business has a reputation as an all-boys club — consider that when DC, which outsells all other comic book publishers combined except for rival Marvel, launched 52 comics last year, it was criticized for employing just one female writer and one female artist.
So Schultz realizes that since she looks nothing like the pot-bellied Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons,” she’s bound to raise some eyebrows when she appears at conventions and shows.
“I’m confusing to people,” said Schultz, 34, who has lived in Edison, Middlesex County, since 2007.
“I enjoy mixing it up. I wouldn’t say I like making people feel uncomfortable, but I like making people think. People don’t want to be shaken up. People like comfort and preconceived notions. I walk into a room and I blow a lot of the stereotypes out of the water.”
Fanboys better get used to Schultz, if her first foray into writing comics is any indication.
“M3” is a gripping espionage thriller that explores corruption and greed — themes seemingly ripped from the headlines.
In the first three issues of the book, which is being published by Long Islandbased Hound Comics, we have come to meet Machiavella Maria Marcona, an assassin for-hire with a list of aliases as long as the blade of her knife. In the upcoming fourth issue, the plot thickens like a pool of blood, and M3 realizes that she’s being set up.
Schultz took great care to add some personal touches to “M3” — Machiavella has a scar on her left cheek; Schultz has a smaller one she received in a car accident in 2008. Machiavella is mixed up with the Irish Republican Army; Schultz’s grandparents fled Ireland and the IRA.
But look deeper and you’ll see that Schultz has focused on the characters’ motivations in lieu of gratuitous violence. More double crosses, less right crosses.
“I read a lot of superhero comics and I love superhero comics,” Schultz said. “What I notice a lot is the same thing you see in action films. They’re like, ‘Don’t pay attention to the fact there are huge plot holes, but look at these big explosions.’”
“M3” artist Vicente Alcazar, who has penciled hundreds of comics since his groundbreaking run on DC’s “Jonah Hex” in the 1970s, finds a woman’s approach refreshing. “From the beginning I noticed another pace at telling the story, another care for details that made me think of the difference between women and men in general in the way we each look at common day events,” he said.
“Although we may share the same difficulties in our day-to-day survival, the difference in sense of time, which is the essence of life itself, marks the difference in approaching those difficulties. What we learn about it from one another will no doubt enrich our lives.”
Schultz will also have two comic book projects out in the spring through Washington based Bluewater Productions. She has written a four-issue miniseries called “Judo Girl” and a “Venus & Valkyrie” one-shot.
She got the work after a short phone conversation with Bluewater President Darren G. Davis, who explained, “There are times when I meet someone and we click. Erica was one of those people, and I read some samples of her work. They were really well written, so naturally we had to bring her on. What I love about her is her passion for the industry.”
Her passion doesn‘t have an off switch. Plot threads will sometimes come to her during her hour-long train rides to New York City, where she works as a graphic artist and animator.
So, Schultz lugs around a 300-page leather-bound notebook filled with snippets of ideas, random notes, even fully realized scripts written in ink that runs from black to green to pink. She’s cut out pictures of actors from magazines and glued them into the book to serve as character references. On other pages, she’s clipped panels from her favorite comics, such as “Hellboy,” and pasted them into the book.
But you realize this tome is also a window into her mind. For instance, one entry is a bit of dialogue in which a character is saying, “I know three people in New York and two of them want to kill me.” However, Schultz crossed the last part of the sentence out and changed it to “… and two of them want me dead.” After work, she holes herself up in the 10-by-10 home office she shares with her husbandA.J. and writes comics late into the night. Her side of the converted spare bedroom is littered with long boxes of comics. Some “Captain America” action figures stand vigilantly on a nearby shelf.
A.J. is a willing sounding board, but mostly he tries to give her moral support.
Rejection can be as crushing as a Hulk uppercut. There are moments — like the time a fellow comic pro assumed she was Alcazar’s literary agent and not his colleague — when Schultz needs to be as hard as red kryptonite.
“Some people will come up to her at conventions, and her book may not be their thing,” A.J. said. “They may not be tactful when they don’t like something. When that happens, I try to remind her about the guy who was here 10 minutes ago who said he loved your book.”
For more about Erica Schultz and “M3,” log on to houndcomics.com or facebook.com/M3Comic.