In a world where the realms of fiction and reality seamlessly intertwine, Eisner Award-nominated cartoonist Dave Baker takes readers on a captivating journey through the intricacies of his upcoming graphic novel, Mary Tyler MooreHawk. Titled “How I Spent 2 Years Searching For The Reclusive Creator Of Buckaroo Banzai,” Baker’s exclusive essay delves into the mysterious origins of the graphic novel, offering a tantalizing glimpse into the making of this postmodern masterpiece.
MARY TYLER MOOREHAWK is equal parts sweeping action-adventure graphic novel and dystopian detective story that weaves back and forth between worlds, touching on everything from corporate personhood to mutant shark-men to the meaning of fandom and reality itself. It’s a show you don’t remember… and a book you won’t forget. “Half graphic novel, half postmodern prose mystery, this mind-bending book combines multiple formats and multiple dimensions into a retro-futurist palimpsest, crossing the streams between fiction and reality,” – Dave Baker.
How I Spent Two Years Searching For the Reclusive Writer of Buckaroo Banzai
I’m going to be honest with you: I have a lot of favorites. But today? Buckaroo Banzai is my favorite movie. Ask me again tomorrow and you’ll probably get a different answer, but here? Now? Definitely Buckaroo Banzai. All time. Hands down.
From the music to the characters to the bizarre costumes, the movie has an aesthetic that is as exciting to me as it is perplexing. The movie feels like it’s one part genre epic, one part inside joke, and one part community theater production… in the best way. It has an energy surrounding it where it just seems like everyone who was involved making it was having a blast.
For the uninitiated, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension was a feature film released in 1984. It starred Peter Weller, as the eponymous hero, and a virtual who’s who of fascinating artists and performers making up the supporting cast. John Lithgow, Christopher Lloyd, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, and countless other Oh, It’s That Guy faces appear in the film. It was written by Earl Mac Rauch, screenwriter of Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York, and directed by W. D. “Rick” Richter.
I first encountered it, appropriately, in an ad in the back of a Marvel Comic, at some point when I was a kid. It would be years before I would actually see the film, but when I eventually did… it didn’t quite click with me. I didn’t understand the joke of the movie. I knew I liked the energy of it, the characters, and the overall quirky feeling… but the specifics of what was happening befuddled me, as a younger person.
But let me give you a cheat sheet, a head start, or a secret decoder ring.
The film Buckaroo Banzai is a sequel to a film franchise that never existed. Once you know that, everything makes sense. The joke of the movie is that there is no set up, everything is pay off. It’s like having never seen a Marvel Studios film and then going into Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness… but you know, like a solid 30 years before the idea of an interconnected filmic universe was a thing. Once I realized this, around viewing three or four, I couldn’t get enough of the film. It’s a film so deadpan there’s almost nothing else to compare it to. It’s not a film with literal jokes, it’s a film with metatextual jokes and references and homages… to things we’ve never seen. It’s a film that presents its jokes as facts, and its facts as jokes.
It’s utterly brilliant.
The film haunted me for years. Obsession is the coin of the realm in my house, and boy oh boy did Buckaroo Banzai take center stage for an extended period of time. However, there’s honestly not that much info on the internet available about the project. The members of the Blue Blaze Irregulars are few and far between… but we are mighty. So, logically, I became obsessed with attempting to track down the writer of the film and ask him some questions… There’s only one problem… he’s a recluse.
Well, let’s maybe not go that far. Let’s just say the creator of Buckaroo Banzai is as quirky as you’d think he’d be, given the way he writes. In fact, one of the urban legends surrounding the creation of Buckaroo is that Earl Mac Rauch spent years trying to finish drafts of various Buckaroo stories, or as he was originally called Buckaroo Bandy. He would always get like 50 pages in and then lose interest. Therefore, when his buddy W.D. “Rick” Richter came on board to direct the proposed Buckaroo Banzai project, they came up with the idea to just include all these failed false starts as our hero’s previous adventures.
In fact, when they sold the project to Hollywood producer David Begelman, they presented him with a portfolio of excerpts from the various scripts, and he selected the adventure titled Lepers from Saturn, to be the inaugural adventure that the public would witness from everyone’s favorite jet car pilot, musician, and brain surgeon.
Some of the previous titles of Buckaroo adventures included “Find the Jet Car, Said The President – A Buckaroo Banzai Thriller”, “The Strange Case of Mr. Cigars”, and “Against The World Crime League.” Most of these early drafts have since been lost to time, with one of them even being accidentally left in the bottom of a Volvo that Mac sold, when he needed some money. Truly a tragedy.
The rich inner world of both the movie Buckaroo Banzai and its creator spawned a deep desire within me to interact with this person. Most people probably obsess over K Pop idols or movie stars. Me? It usually tends to be individuals on the fringe who have a completely unique approach to life. And, I think it’s pretty hard to say that the person in question has done anything but fulfill that edict.
To make things even weirder, there actually is a literal codex for understanding what Mac and Rick were attempting to get across in Buckaroo Banzai. It’s the novelization of the film’s screenplay, written by Mac himself. The book isn’t a standard “let’s take a screenplay and novelize it” cash grab. It’s a work of art. The book is written from the perspective of Buckaroo’s Dr. Watson, a character named Reno, played by Pepe Serna in the film. It’s a first hand account of the happenings of the movie, from Reno’s perspective, with insight, backstory, exposition, and connective tissue that’s just not in the movie.
In many ways Buckaroo Banzai is like if an adaptation of Doc Savage had made it to the screen, but they’d adapted the 47th novel, quite faithfully, and made no effort to get the audience up to speed. The movie is so steeped in pulp traditions, tropes, and aesthetics that it’s not exactly shocking that it didn’t connect to a wider audience on its initial release. But, here, decades later, it’s my absolute favorite thing.
So, now that you have all the backstory, let’s begin the quest to actually track this dude down. I went through local phone books, did online searches, and it ultimately yielded nothing. What started as a casual, “I wonder if this dude has a Facebook” preoccupation, escalated, appropriately so, into yet another obsession. I asked my fellow Hollywood screenwriter-y weirdos. Nothing. And then, one day, I was trolling the internet, reading an issue of World Watch One, the only and longest running Buckaroo Banzai fan zine and noticed that they had an interview with Mac and Rick.
I reached out to the editor of the zine and inquired if I could have Mac’s contact info because I wanted to interview him. I’ll skip over a long protracted story, but let’s just boil it down to eventually I convinced Mac and Rick to talk to me. But they didn’t want to be interviewed, on the record. So, what does any enterprising boy detective do? I pivoted. “We want to make a Buckaroo Banzai radio play segment at the end of a podcast episode we’re going to do about the movie. Will you write it?” That was my pitch.
Oh, yeah, I guess I skipped over that too. In addition to making comics, I write and co-host a deep dive explainer podcast called Deep Cuts, where we explore weird or bizarre stories. We did a two hour musical episode all about the history of Napster, and we do radio play episodes that take place in the world of the show, sometimes. Within the universe of the show my co-host Andrew Price and I live in a treehouse with a robot, a muppet-demon, and various other creepy crawlies, and so for holidays, or numerical milestones, we do these radio play episodes. And what would be cooler than having us in-universe team up with Buckaroo Banzai… or some of the Hong Kong Cavaliers, right?
Well, shock of all shocks, Mac agreed to write us a script for a ten minute story. We got Pepe Serna and Billy Vera to reprise their roles from the movie, and we recorded it. It went off without a hitch. And I have to be honest: they say never meet your heroes… but where Earl Mac Rauch is concerned? I think it’s ok to meet your heroes.
Despite being nearly impossible to track down, he was a delight to work with. Kind, funny, quirky. Exactly who you wanted the creator of Buckaroo Banzai to be. Weird in the best way. Perfect example: over the process of delivering the script for the narrative sequence he would send notes and revisions to me one word or sentence at a time. Sounds confusing? Let me clarify. He wouldn’t rewrite the script he sent me. He would send additional emails with one or two word changes, but not actually instruct me as to what exactly he wanted changed. He just expected me to know that I was supposed to swap out “radio station” with “K99.3 The Flame”. He ostensibly would be emailing me script notes… in absentia? And that is the perfect email to get from Earl Mac Rauch.
His brain works like a Buckaroo Banzai story. It’s all pay off, no set up. He expects you to keep up. And because everything that’s happening is so unconventional, it’s immediately fascinating. He’s one of a kind.
This experience proved to be a foundational inspiration for my book Mary Tyler MooreHawk. The book is split into two halves. The first half is a comic book story, following the titular character and her family of super-science adventurers as they attempt to track down and stop a super-villain from their past from committing spatio-temporal holocaust. The other half of the book is a prose novel that takes place 100 years in the future, where we follow a journalist named Dave Baker as he’s attempting to track down a reclusive cartoonist who created a TV show named Mary Tyler MooreHawk that only lasted for 9 episodes.
I think you can probably draw some parallels between the book and the story I’ve just told you.
MTMH, as I often refer to her, is my answer to pulp characters and super-science kid adventurers. I wanted to write about someone who was good, and pure, and had altruistic intentions not as a struggle, but as a requirement for being. I wanted to write about how when someone creates an icon like that, something that becomes a vortex for other people’s hopes and dreams, it often has a negative impact on the creators. That somehow there’s an arcane magic that transpires when someone puts something undiluted good out into the universe. Look at what happened to Siegle and Shuster? They sold Superman for like 134 dollars. And were not appropriately compensated for the inarguable good that they’ve done for global culture.
There are many metatextual and literal similarities between Mary Tyler MooreHawk and Buckaroo Banzai, but hopefully the fact that they vibrate at the same frequency is a feature not a bug. If I’ve done my job right, MTMH exceeds her influences, and pushes through to a broader narrative vista that allows the reader into the mind of both a crazed fan, who’s obsessed with something, and a creator, lost in a maze of their own creation.
Buckaroo Banzai might have failed to spawn the massively sprawling franchise that I would have loved it to, upon initial release. But there’s something about the fact that it’s still sustaining interest all these years later. That the conundrums it puts forth are not easily solvable, let alone comprehensible upon first viewing. If I’ve done my job, Mary Tyler MooreHawk will have half the life that Buckaroo Banzai has.
All great things take time, they say. I spent two years trying to track Mac down, and was delighted by the person I eventually met. I’ve spent twice that amount of time building Mary Tyler MooreHawk. And I can only hope you’ll have a similarly positive experience when you meet her. But at the end of the day, all this time was more than well spent… but because the last time I spoke to Mac I asked him if he’d be willing to give me a pull quote for the back of my book… and guess what… he did.
For Immediate Release:
Jonny Quest meets Infinite Jest in Eisner Award-Nominated Cartoonist
Dave Baker’s Mind-Bending Graphic Novel MARY TYLER MOOREHAWK
A Postmodern Mystery And A Thrilling Tribute to Pop Culture Drops in 2024
(June 12, 2023) Top Shelf Productions will publish Eisner Award-nominated cartoonist Dave Baker’s mind-bending graphic novel MARY TYLER MOOREHAWK in 2024. “Half graphic novel, half postmodern prose mystery, this mind-bending book combines multiple formats and multiple dimensions into a retro-futurist palimpsest, crossing the streams between fiction and reality,” said cartoonist Dave Baker. The book will be released in February 2024.
Who Is Mary Tyler MooreHawk? How did she save the world from a dimension-hopping megalomaniac? Why was her TV show canceled after only nine episodes? And what happened to the reclusive genius behind her creation? These are just a few of the questions that young journalist Dave Baker begins to ask himself as he unravels the many mysteries surrounding the obscure comic book Mary Tyler MooreHawk. However, his curiosity grows into an obsession when he discovers that the artist behind his favorite globe-trotting girl detective… is also named Dave Baker.
“Like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, this book playfully and suspensefully uses footnotes to build multiple layers of story and setting,” said Top Shelf Productions Senior Editor Leigh Walton. “While we cheer for our gee-whiz cartoon heroine to beat the bad guys, we’re also piecing together addictive glimpses into how ‘intellectual property’ gets turned into comics and cartoons and the real creators who get hurt in the process. Readers will go nuts exploring this book, then sharing and debating it with friends!”
MARY TYLER MOOREHAWK is equal parts sweeping action-adventure graphic novel and dystopian detective story that weaves back and forth between worlds, touching on everything from corporate personhood to mutant shark-men to the meaning of fandom and reality itself. It’s a show you don’t remember… and a book you won’t forget.
Here’s what people are saying about MARY TYLER MOOREHAWK?
“America has a new sweetheart and media darling, but only Dave Baker has managed to ink her to a long-term deal and capture the Mona Lisa-like enigma that is… Mary Tyler MooreHawk.”— E.M. Rauch, creator of Buckaroo Banzai
Mary Tyler MooreHawk is a uniquely immersive psychedelic odyssey, etched in energetic and detailed linework and bursting with surreal invention and mind-boggling concepts. Strap yourself in and take a deep breath.” — Bryan Talbot, creator of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright
“The book you are about to read offers an unauthorized history of events that cannot be scientifically authenticated. We believe them to be true, but we cannot certify the claims of the individuals involved. On the subject of Mary Tyler MooreHawk, this book is in no way sanctioned or licensed by the owners of the underlying intellectual property. WDN Studios, Antonio Hell-Drone Dearthberg, Connie Harvawitz-Kurt Inc or their parent company, Timeless Entertainment, have not given permission for the publication of this work. However, we feel that it is too important not to be published.” — Xaphood Chestersquire III, legal counsel to Top Shelf Productions
MARY TYLER MOOREHAWK will be available everywhere books & comics are sold on February 13, 2024. For more information, follow Dave Baker on Twitter and Instagram.
About the Creator
Dave Baker is an Eisner-nominated writer and illustrator. His works include Fuck Off Squad (Silver Sprocket), Star Trek Voyager: Seven’s Reckoning (IDW), Night Hunters (Floating World), and Everyone Is Tulip (Dark Horse), which was featured in numerous “Best Comics of 2021” lists. His most recent graphic novel is Forest Hills Bootleg Society (Atheneum/S&S), with frequent collaborator Nicole Goux.
About the Publisher
Top Shelf Productions has published critically acclaimed and popularly beloved graphic novels since 1997. Now an imprint of IDW Publishing, Top Shelf continues to showcase the vanguard of the comics medium, publishing works of literary sophistication, visionary artistry, and personal resonance.
DC Fanboy! Superman is the greatest comic book character of all time. Favorite movies are Man of Steel, Goonies, Back To the Future
