A number of years ago, my friend Jake and I embarked on a rather ambitious plan to create a comic book in the same mold as some of the great DC horror/fantasy comics from the 1980’s, in a style that I would refer to as “old Vertigo.” I mentioned yesterday that Jake and I decided to kill it. But I suppose there’s more to it than that.

One, we were overly ambitious — a 36 issue series produced on a micro indie budget just isn’t feasible. Jake and I put together 72 pages of “The Alberic Heresies” (including the preview mini-comic, “The Lock,” and the finished, but never released second issue), and although I’m proud of the work, I realize it was far too much of a long-term commitment and incapable of attracting any sort of audience.

That sort of comic, as much as I love it, is dead. In a dying comic book industry, one more pseudo-fantasy comic with super hero elements just isn’t going to cut it.

I’ve known this for quite awhile, even tried to deny it back when we did SPX last year, but the truth of it is that no one but us cares. And for a project like Alberic, you can’t just do it for fun. And honestly, Alberic has been percolating in the back of my mind since the 1990’s. I’m not there anymore — as a writer, as a reader. I’ve grown up and moved on.

Depression overtook me after SPX, and I curled up inside myself and stopped thinking about Alberic, writing in general, or anything that had to do with the humiliation of that show. Although I consider my fiction work to be very modern, a part of me knew that I was chasing nostalgia with Alberic, and that I wasn’t being true to who I am now.

But that dark period is, I think, well behind me. After half a year of locking that part of my life away, I’m ready to move forward, again. “The Purple Girl” needs to be polished re-written, as does my “Zombie” play. And Jake and I have a new idea for a graphic novel, one that’s a lot more realistic for us to succeed in doing. Expectations are low this time, and excitement is high. Grand ideas for anthologies have been put on hold in favor of more doable projects.

I’ve walked through that initial humiliation of a first attempt at presenting my work to the people, and for awhile I nearly set aside what I cared about most because of it. But I’m finding my creative instincts are returning, my synapses flash ideas back and forth inside the wet muck of my gray matter with curious regularity. And that is an exciting thing. Alberic is dead, but our next project will be much, much better. I suppose that’s the greatest lesson of all of this.