"Josh & Imp" was originally written in late 2004 into early 2005 as a story for a superhero anthology that, like most comics collections born out of "why the hell not" instead of a profit mandate backed up with a publishing and distribution operation, went belly-up before any serious steps had been taken towards getting the assorted short works together. At the time I was a tender eighteen years old and blissfully unaware of the horrible track record of projects like this, and so I wrote four stories for the anthology, all of them focusing around the same group of characters: the masked vigilante "Guardian Devil" and his two "Imps," James and Chelsea. Two of the others actually got drawn by artists other than Diana — "Family Reunion" by Robert Jones and "Legacy" by J.C. Grande are both pencilled, inked, lettered, and in Rob's case colored, on some harddrives somewhere — but Diana's dedication to the story above and beyond any rational duty she had to what was, admittedly, the best of the four scripts I wrote for these characters make "Josh & Imp" something special.
The story's about two kids in love — Josh, a high-schooler with a rocky home life and a job bagging groceries after school, and Imp, a teenaged costumed crimefighter chafing under the tutelage of Guardian Devil. Their lives are radically different, their dates are logistical nightmares, and their own neuroses, insecurities, and suspicions undermine the tentative closeness they share; Imp thinks Josh is only seeing her because of the novelty value of dating a superhero, and Josh, besides being overwhelmed and humbled by her stories of thwarting plans for apocalypse and world domination, is embarrassed that he doesn't even know Imp's real name. They've got issues they need to settle, to be sure, but most of the time they can just forget about that, because of all the fun they're having together.
Anyone with a passing knowledge of the business of superhero comics can instantly see the problems this story, and the others in the series, run into when removed from the context of that anthology. The close resemblance of Guardian Devil, Imp, and all the costumed characters in the stories to properties owned by DC Comics is entirely intentional; Imp, for example, isn't Robin, but she is a useful thematic shorthand: everyone knows who Robin is and what his or her general situation is — teenaged apprentice to an overbearing creep of a vigilante; talented and enthusiastic, but raw — and by creating those associations right off the bat, both Diana and I were able to in our separate ways riff off of those themes, and comment on the genre and its conventions without having to spend a lot of time setting up a whole new, unfamiliar cast of characters that might just get in the way of what we were really trying to say.
This fits perfectly in a third-party superhero anthology. It works much less well as a stand-alone piece, or even as part of a collection of stories solely starring the Guardian Devil cast. As publishers have informed us, and perhaps I should have known from the start, there's really not much room on the market for 24 pages of slice-of-life semi-satirical tinkering with the underlying themes of the Batman mythos unless, well, you're writing Batman. So we decided to cut our losses — and you can tell with just a look how much time Diana sacrificed on the art — put this in the desk drawer for later, and move on to other projects.
A note for when you're reading it: as I said, I wrote this when I was eighteen and extremely inexperienced in writing for sequential art, and it shows through explicitly in the dialogue, the volume and quality of which I take full responsibility for. What you're not seeing is the usually boneheaded, occasionally completely insane panel layouts I had cooked up for Diana to use. She was able to take my terrible ideas about layout and the accompanying river of dialogue and turn them into art with dynamic, interesting, and engaging direction. And at one point, when she was unable to save me from myself, she fixed it by adding two pages. Just about all praise for "Josh & Imp" should go to her for the professionalism she brought to the project, and all criticism to me for writing characters that can't shut up for even one damn minute.
Then again, I think that's part of the charm of Imp and Josh. And who knows? Maybe one day, they'll find a home in another anthology somewhere. Until then, the story will be available here to read for free.
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