Creature cops: Special varmint unit

Writer: Rob Anderson
Penciler: Fernando Melek
Inker: Novo Malgapo
Colorist: Juan Romera
Cover Colorist: Kevin Volo
Letterer: Marco Della Verde (credited as E.T. Dollman)

In a world where a rhino can be gene-spliced with a dog, freakish animals are everywhere, and the Creature Cops have to deal with them! From vicious gator-snakes to cute panda-dogs, these animal cops think they’ve seen it all... until they discover a nest of illegal hybrids that resemble mythological griffins, and suddenly find themselves on the trail of a death cult with even darker plans!

This was baby’s first editing job! Writer Rob Anderson approached me about providing notes on his script drafts, and I was happy to oblige. Rob was doing something incredibly ambitious, here, building a mythology around this sci-fi reality of genetically altered animals, black-market creature fights and the hideous could leader behind it all. But Rob seeding that mythology in largely through background clues: billboards, graffiti, book titles, the actions of passers-by and so on. Rob compared it to the approach taken by Alan Moore and Gene Ha in Top Ten, which helped me instantly understand what he was going for.

At the same time, a compelling crime story took place in the foreground of this comic, propelled forward by deep and fun character work. It was an intense balancing act that led to dense, meaty scripts, and my notes focused on making sure the script never lost its balance, and set up the art team for success. I was credited in the final product as “story editor.”

After that, I was able to sit back and enjoy the final product as a reader.