In this series of blogs, I chronicle my path bringing The Singularity to life as a rock album, graphic novel, and concert experience. My previous blogs can be found here: “Discovering Metal,” “Writing the Record,” “Variety of Voices,” “Instrumentalists,” “Boingo Boys” and “Mixing the Madness.”
I have attended the world famous San Diego Comic Con nearly every summer for the past twenty years. While I am usually there, in part, to discuss nerdy projects that I am fortunate to work on, I always carve out time to wander the booths of comic book artists and writers, in search of inspiration. In 2024, I once again found myself weaving through the jam-packed convention floor, emerging at the towering Image Comics booth. Beneath an imposing image of the publisher’s de facto mascot, Spawn, I saw, placed prominently on a shelf of some of the publisher’s hottest titles, the burning cover of The Singularity. I could still hardly believe it – I was here as a first-time comics creator, there to sign copies of my new metal-infused science fiction graphic novel, recently published by Image Comics.
I was led to the signing table, before a stack of comics, and a line of fans clutching my books, vinyls and CDs. I glanced to my right and gasped to see none other than Todd McFarlane himself, creator of Spawn and co-founder of Image Comics, finishing his own signing. I jumped to speak with him, grateful for the opportunity to tell him how much I admired both his creative works and his inspiring self-determination.
So, how did I go from being a soundtrack collecting music nerd who loved comic books to signing my own book next to one of my comics heroes at Comic Con? Let me take a step back.
A STORY FIT TO MUSIC
After sketching some of the songs as early as age fifteen, I began co-writing songs for what would become my album The Singularity with my brother Brendan McCreary in the summer of 2019. As our demos came together, I realized a narrative was shaping up within the arc of the music, and I pondered how to push it further. These songs felt like they were connected by a communal sense of narrative – each felt like a chapter from a grander story. Having grown up immersed in the comic book pages of DC, Marvel and Image Comics, I was excited to craft a story for The Singularity in a graphic novel format. By the end of 2019, I began to take this notion seriously, as I then had a solid grasp on the order and lyrical content of the album’s songs. Having spent the last twenty years of my career writing music to fit other people’s stories, I felt it was time to flip the script – I yearned to work with a writer to fit a story around my music.
I called my friend Kyle Higgins, a filmmaker and comic book creator who had drawn from his experience writing for every major comic book publisher to form his own creative collective, Black Market Narrative, from which he wrote or oversaw the creation of exciting new comic books and graphic novels. Kyle and I had been friends for over a decade, ever since he thrust a DVD of his superhero-themed thesis film into my hand when we met in a crowd at San Diego Comic Con. Kyle recognized my project’s potential to produce a companion graphic novel.
I discussed with him that my hopes were that our story would be emotionally compelling, but connected directly to the music. Importantly, I wanted to avoid an anthology approach because it felt too simple and obvious. However, my album presented a unique challenge in adapting it to a single story because the vocalist changes nearly every song. Singers appear with a variety of genders, races, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. The album does not sound like it is told from the perspective of a single protagonist. The biggest challenge was finding a writer who could discern the implied narrative in my music and lyrics, address my concerns, and translate it into the graphic novel medium.
CRAFTING THE STORY
Kyle recommended a talented writer named Mat Groom based in Australia and we had a preliminary videocall in April, 2021. With his long beard and piercing eyes, Mat looked like a Viking, but I was struck by his gentle manner of speaking that revealed a thoughtful and deliberate approach to the craft of storytelling.
I was immediately intrigued by Mat’s clever solution to the story’s core challenge. To mirror an album that changes lead singers every song, Mat envisioned a story where the protagonist changes form in each chapter. In his treatment, the main character leapt from universe to universe, resulting in changes in genders, species, and physical traits. Recognizable each time by their iconic blue eyes, he referred to the character as Blue Eyes, or simply Blue. Throughout the story, Blue pursues a woman with yellow eyes as she seems to taunt him before his every transformation. He suspects she has answers about his mysterious condition.
In his first pass, Mat laid out the framework for a story I knew I could shape into what I hoped for with The Singularity. I brought him on to the project officially. Kyle and his partner Michael Busuttil at Black Market Narrative also joined and agreed to produce the book and shop it to publishers, eventually landing us at my dream publisher for the project: Image Comics.
I developed the treatment with Mat for nearly a year before I felt comfortable moving forward with the script. While Mat’s treatment burst with astonishing visual imagery, including alien vistas, spaceships, robots, magic, advanced technology, and monsters, I felt their presence cluttered my ability to track the core story. I asked Mat to rewrite it with all those fun elements temporarily removed, so I might read a treatment that focusing solely on the character relationships. I wanted to read it as if it were a dramatic stage play intended for a cramped, black box theater, so we could better understand and discuss the relationship between Blue and Yellow. I trusted that once we got the emotional story arc right, the graphic novel would soar when we threw all the aliens and spaceships back in. Mat and I worked on clarifying the core character relationships for months, and yet Mat’s enthusiasm never waned. Blue became more relatable, as we built out a “first life” for him to struggle to return to, making each new life a tragic step further away from a family he longs for. Yellow’s stern demeanor evolved, as we developed her motivations in ways that we thought would surprise the reader.
In further development, each of Blue’s lives ends with not only his death, but the complete destruction of an entire universe around him in a blaze of red energy. This introduced a third major character, Red Eyes. Red became the personification of the inevitable cosmic carnage of entropy. The inclusion of Red gave Blue further layers of mystery to unravel. At last, near the end of 2021, I gave Mat the greenlight to write the full script for The Singularity.
WRITING THE SCRIPT
Mat’s first draft script hit my inbox in December, 2021. Nervously, I began to read, taking a moment to listen to each song again before each chapter. As I had hoped, the newly implemented imaginative settings, advanced technology, fantasy beasts and alien species burst off the page into my mind, and yet the arcs of Blue, Yellow, and Red, were emotionally relatable.
I read, riveted as Blue was reborn again and again, living a different life in each chapter, but cursed to carry with him the memories of his previous lives, compounding his pain with each rebirth. At the end of each life, he was visited by a mysterious woman with yellow eyes, who seemed to taunt and judge him. As if she were a harbinger of doom, his universe came to a crushing end in a blaze of mysterious red energy before he awoke in another. After enduring many lifetimes of loss, and reliving the apocalypse hundreds of times, Blue took matters into his own hands, and pursued Yellow. He sought answers, but would settle for vengeance. Yellow was always a step ahead of him and more powerful than he had ever guessed. Blue gradually learned there is more to his existence, more to his relationship with Yellow than he imagined.
I had encouraged Mat to start our fast-paced story with a pastoral chapter, “The First Life.” Mat envisioned we meet Blue as a gentle man “in his mid-60s, neat gray hair, light gray stubble on his kind face,” sitting “on the end of a wooden pier, feet dangling off the end, watching the sun rise over an immense lake.” A surprisingly calm start for a bombastic metal album! The serene string phrases in “Overture” reflect this image.
Some songs translated directly to their graphic novel counterparts. “Midnight Sun,” for example, appears in the book. When I wrote the lyrics, I wanted to transport the listener to a strange tribal ceremony at the center of a village in the glacial north. While keeping the focus on the dynamic relationship between Blue and Yellow, Mat brought them into a setting that matches this description. In the graphic novel, a crowd in the background literally sings the song’s chorus.
Other songs were adapted more loosely. On the album, “The Automaton’s Heart” tells a story about a Victorian era automaton in a shop window who magically comes to life, falls in love with a girl he sees every day and tries to profess his love to her. Like many love stories, it doesn’t end well. The graphic novel does not tell this particular story, but draws elements from it for its setting and arc. In the graphic novel, Blue awakens in the body of an automaton working in a steampunk city who pursues a woman he believes to be Yellow Eyes. The emotional core of the song, along with many visual trappings, has been preserved.
The chapter “Type III” shares a similar connection to its musical inspiration. The story implicit in the lyrics makes reference to a society so advanced that its civilization would appear magical. Mat wrote a pivotal confrontation between Blue and Yellow and set it against the backdrop of such an environment. Emotionally, the chapter shares the song’s determination and yearning.
Many songs are connected to their album counterparts in ways that are less narratively literal. While few specific details carried over when we adapted these songs, the music’s emotional core translated perfectly. The chapter “Incinerator” has only fleeting connections to the song’s lyrical imagery, including “bleeding out in a dying spiral” and burning gardens. However, the raging core of the song perfectly matches the intense, violent clash depicted between Blue and Yellow in their forms of vivid lava monsters.
Drawing from Raya Yarbrough’s gorgeous lyrical imagery in “Antikythera Mechanism,” Mat cleverly set this chapter in a fantastic aquatic environment, “An endless series of orbs of water, floating in light-filled nothingness, each with a smattering of sea life.” Here, Yellow begins to address Blue’s burning questions about his reality, reciting back to him Raya’s lyric “You’ve come for the answer” in a new context.
The music even influenced the creation of characters. Towards the end of the story, Mat and I discussed that Blue might encounter an ally. This narrative thread begins around “Rallying Cry,” a song I co-wrote with Faorese singer Eivør Pálsdóttir, in which I wanted to feature her signature percussive grunting, thudding frame drums, and soaring lead vocal style. While composing the music and lyrics, she and I envisioned a lone female warrior witnessing an invading horde crossing the icy tundra towards her village, who then rallies her people to defend themselves. Drawing from this lyrical story, Mat created a supporting character that Blue encounters that we nicknamed Eivør (who in real life looks something like a Nordic warrior herself!).
Perhaps the most personally satisfying chapter was “Escape from the Machines.” I had originally written this song when I was sixteen. The song’s title suggests a cue from a soundtrack, as I had written it, imagining a cinematic scene in which a lone soldier fends off waves of flying killer robot drones in a dystopian future war. Mat adapted this concept into a chapter where Blue desperately pilots a scrappy flying car away from pursuing police drones through a futuristic city choked by smog. The pages crackle with intense action, almost as if the searing progressive rock guitar line were woven into the words. Nearly three decades after writing this music as if it were a narrative, I felt a surreal rush reading a narrative that had been perfectly crafted to fit it.
I read the first complete draft of his script with tears welling in my eyes and my skin tingling. The narrative swept across dazzling science fiction and fantasy settings on a cosmic scale, and yet the emotional character arcs worked better than I had dared hope. While Mat and I would continue to revise the script for eighteen months, we had reached a crucial milestone: artists could begin drafting pages.
—Bear
