The Silent Jury began back in the early 1990's. I had a group of teenagers who came to my store to buy comic books. They were huge Image fans and loved the artwork of Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee and the rest of the Image artists. They dreamed of drawing their own comics and had grown tired of just doing sketches of Image heroes. So they heard that I had written comics and asked me if I could create some super hero comics for them to draw. I told them that I normally didn't do super hero comics because I felt that Marvel and DC pretty much did everything that could be done with heroes over their history. But they were insistent, so I created two stories. One was The Fury, a violent hero who was bent on revenge. They loved it! The other was The Silent Jury, a super team that put more emphasis on storytelling and character development than fights. They hated it. Nothing ever came of them as they soon realized how much work was involved in doing a comic and soon went back to doing pin-ups of Image heroes.
But the Silent Jury did not die. Instead, I kept working on it as I enjoyed the characters. My original take on the book was to do it differently than your typical super hero team book. In most books, you have a major crisis that draws all these heroes together. They defeat the monster or villain or whatever and decide they work together well as a team and end up creating a team. I did not want to do a typical team book. Instead, I would have a team that slowly developed with a few characters to start off with and others joining and leaving. I thought it would be more interesting to slowly build the team and get to know the characters. I also thought it would be interesting to see how the different characters reacted to each other as new members joined the team.
While it is a common theme in comics, I decided to go with the reluctant hero. Robert finds himself thrust into the world of super heroes when his father dies and his secret is revealed. But he needed some help to push him. This came in the form of Vanessa who is his opposite. It also came from the journal that his father left him and explains the whole development of the Silent Jury. I felt that the journal would be a good way for Robert to understand why his father started The Silent Jury.
The story almost had a second life in comic form. An aspiring artist named John came to my store and showed me his artwork. He was an exceptional artist with alot of talent. He heard that I had some stories and wanted to read them. I let him read The Fury and Silent Jury. He did a few sketches of The Fury but he really loved The Silent Jury story. He loved it so much that he made an offer of paying for half the costs for us to publish it. So we started working on the book. But after a few pages, he found that he did not have enough time in his life to do the book. He was averaging a page a month and it would take nearly three years to do a single issue. So we mutually ended the book and the Silent Jury went back to the mothballs.
But with the creation of the KZ Comics website, I decided to revive my prose stories. I will post them here and continue the stories. The Silent Jury and The Fury will both appear here along with other stories that I started over the years. Maybe one day I will find an artist that wants to do it and has the time. But right now, I just want to tell the stories.