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Jeff Nelson: Comically Speaking

Move over Bat Man, Spider Man, and Super Man. Make way in the superhero pantheon for Cedric. Cedric? He’s the protagonist of Jeff Nelson’s new fantasy comic series, Sons of Yellowstone.

The second issue has just come out featuring Cedric, survivor in a futuristic world of a huge eruption in the caldera that makes up the Yellowstone Basin. That’s why Cedric lives in an era dated AY, for After Yellowstone. As a result of the eruption, Cedric absorbed Yellow Mercury, which (come on, you can guess this) gave him superpowers in this post-apocalyptic world.

When he started the series, Jeff, who grew up in Ivoryton, knew what he didn’t want: another zombie comic.

“You see zombies everywhere, they’re unavoidable—on television, movies, books, video games,” he says. “Nothing original about zombies anymore.”

Instead Jeff focused on a sci-fi civilization changed by a volcanic eruption, even doing research on some of history’s most dramatic volcanic disasters, like the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia. In fact, in his first draft of the comic book, Jeff named all the villains after volcanoes. Later he changed it.

“Too cheesy,” he says.

He did leave one villain with a volcanic name, but he won’t say which one and what the name is.

“It’s part of a plot twist,” he explains.

By the time he was in middle school, Jeff knew he wanted to write fantasy literature. In fact, in his 8th grade yearbook, on a page predicting what students would become, Jeff was a bit put out that none of his classmates thought he would be a sci-fi comic book author. He says Blade, a 1998 sci-fi movie starring Wesley Snipes, turned him on to the genre. He now describes the film as a “cheesy vampire slash-up,” but then, he watched it repeatedly at a friend’s house because his own parents were not enthusiastic about him viewing the film.

He wrote what he calls Blade rip offs in the black and white marbled composition books he kept for the purpose. Every time he had a story idea, he jotted it down in one, with more diligence than he applied to his schoolwork.

“I was not the best student. My school notebooks were all full of doodles,” he admits.

Jeff has endowed Cedric with some of the vulnerability he felt in his early years.

“I was an overweight kid with a stammer,” he recalls.

Like Cedric, Jeff says, he wanted to do good, but acted so impulsively that things did not turn out as anticipated. Still, there is one way that Cedric does not resemble Jeff at all. The comic book hero speaks in a variety of languages, English, French, Spanish, and a bit of Dutch, thanks to Jeff’s own language study and a friend in the Netherlands. But bi-lingual skills are not necessary to understand the comic.

“When he’s serious, he speaks English,” Jeff says.

Writing a comic book is one challenge; getting it into print is another. At a comic book convention, Jeff got both some advice on improving Sons of Yellowstone and a lead to publisher Headshrinkers Press that has published the first two installments of the comic series. Jeff has now broken that publishing connection because, with two comics now in print, he would like to find a larger publishing house.

“I feel like I would like more exposure because the first two sold well,’ he says.

It’s good the books are selling, because Jeff has already committed several thousand dollars to the series. He had to hire both the artist and the colorist who have done the illustration. He has met neither of his collaborators; one lives in the Philippines, the other in Australia.

“Social media, Facebook, that’s how we connected,” he explains.

Jeff says positive reaction to Sons of Yellowstone has come from various sources, some unexpected, including an artist at Marvel Comics, the home of some of the most iconic superheroes like Spider Man, as well as a professor from New York City—“A literature professor in his 60s,” Jeff says.

And he adds his parents, Sue and Ron Nelson, are getting excited about what he is doing.

“They were always supportive, but now I think they are really buying into this,” he adds.

Today, Jeff, who graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a degree in history, is no longer a chubby child, but a fitness instructor, freelance journalist, and a full time employee of The Safety Zone in Guilford. This, he believes is a crucial year.

“Four years out of college; this could be the time,” he says.

He envisions more projects, a third comic book to be sure, but also a novel, a television script, even a movie treatment. He has a business card that describes him as a “writer, editor, author.” But he is modest about what those words mean now.

“I don’t want to be pretentious. It’s all in its infancy,” he says, “but I am excited about it.”

The first two issues of Sons of Yellowstone are available at www.headshrinkerspress.com/Sons-Of-Yellowstone.