Way back when I had “semi-professional comic book writer” on my CV, I was hired to write an adaptation of the 1922 novel Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini — a friend just pointed out that the first issue is free on Comixology! There’s also a second issue “of five” — it turns out the public’s appetite for a comic book adaptation of a 100-year-old pirate novel with increasingly complex sea battles was a bit less than the publisher was hoping for.
I dug out the scripts, over a decade later — they hold up pretty well, with the latter issues featuring very elaborate stagings of five-way naval battles that Mike never got to draw, and a surprisingly complex system of using various shaped parentheses to keep track of who was speaking French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and English in the word balloons. Good times!