October 30, 5:08 PM

Latest From the Scribblers As is the norm in the world of Heroes we have a lot of pots on the stove, so here I go trying to fill you in on all the delicious dishes we're cooking.

STAFF WRITER

The first bit of news is about me (go figure). Starting Monday I will officially join the Heroes writing staff. I wrote an episode last year but have continued to primarily function as the "writers assistant" -- taking notes while we break story and writing rough drafts of the outlines etc. Now that I am (officially) making the move to "staff writer" I'll work primarily on breaking story. In fact, I'm writing my second episode as we speak -- what we're calling episode 416, but I believe will appear on air as "Chapter 15". I'll let you know as I get more specifics but it should air in mid-to-late January.

SCRIBBLERS

The writers have had a busy couple of weeks breaking the final episodes of the season. Our schedule is getting pretty packed as we prepare for "double-up" episodes -- filming two episodes at once. Which for us means we need to write two scripts at once. Let's just say it's kept us busy. The incredible thing is that we're almost done with this season. I can't believe it. 

Why do we need to film two episodes at once? It's all thanks to the Olympics. We need to finish filming these episodes before Christmas so that post-production has enough time to edit and create the necessary special effects to have the episodes all finished and ready to air before the Olympics begin in February. If that sounds hectic to you, multiply it by a number between 100 and 200 and you're in the ballpark. Needless to say, I continue to be impressed by the tireless dedication from our amazing crew. Heroes is a very ambitious show and they are the ones that really make it possible.

GRAPHIC NOVELS

Erin Fitzgerald has written her first graphic novel "Smoke & Mirrors" which will go online this Monday/Tuesday. And I've teamed up for the first time (finally!) with artist Dennis Calero for the following weeks novel entitled "The Painted Lady". Dennis has created a really fantastic mood for that novel and I can't wait for you to see it.

November 16th kicks off a three part graphic novel which is focused on one of the shows major characters and I can't wait for you to see it. Unfortunately I can't tell you anything else right now for fear of spoiling something. But I think you'll dig it.

SLOW BURN

The Tagged Media episodes continue to circle the fascinating world of the carnival as we tell the story of Amanda and her rocky reunion with her mother, Lydia. You can find them all here. Now that you've met Amanda, played by the amazing Sasha Pieterse, I can share some more pictures with you. See below.

TWITTER

Heroes has developed an incredibly strong presence on Twitter and I for one love the interaction it gives us with the fans. The Heroes homepage on NBC now has a place for you to see many of the twitter accounts affiliated with the show. Check it out, you may find someone you didn't know. Two of the newest accounts I want to bring your attention to are official character accounts - @DetMattParkman and the @Sullivan_Bros carnival. The Sullivan Bros will keep you updated with the latest from Samuel, Edgar, Lydia and others while Detective Matt Parkman keeps you appraised of life with Janice and his fight with Sylar aka his "inner demon". Last Monday, Matt interacted live with his followers during his epic (and somewhat drunken) battle with Sylar (during the West Coast feed of the show). It sounds like people had a blast and this sort of thing will hopefully happen again the next time we see Matt, depending of course on who is in control of poor Matt...

And now, on to the pictures:

Look familiar? These giant letters were originally used on the Paris rooftop for episode 321 "Cold Snap". They have since been re-purposed and are part of the carnival now. 


The inside of Lydia's trailer:

October 16, 3:43 PM

Slow Burn: Episodes 1-3 Yet again apologies for the lack of updates. I was asked in an interview the other day what super power I'd most like to have and I said Hiro's time freezing so that I could do more of the things I don't always have time for. Like writing this blog.

What's been keeping me very busy this time is that I've begun work on writing my next episode of Heroes. Episode 416 which should air in late January. I'm very excited to be writing again and I love the stories I'm getting to tell. Some big things happen! If you're not already, you should follow me on twitter and I'll keep you updated on what's going on with my script and all the different stages it goes through (no spoilers, I promise!)

SLOW BURN

I hope you've been enjoying the tagged media episodes "Slow Burn". They were a joy to write and work on. Some folks have been asking who wrote which ones and though overall it was a huge group effort, here's the breakdown on who wrote the specific episodes.

1. Jim Martin
2. Zach Craley
3. Harrison Wilcox
4. Foz McDermott
5. Jim Martin
6. Jim Martin
7. Zach Craley
8. Foz McDermott
9. Oliver Grigsby
10. Oliver Grigsby


For reasons that are beyond my comprehension, the episodes aren't always the easiest to find. If you want to watch the latest episode of Slow Burn, you can find it on the latest iStory page. Just click on the "Slow Burn" link at the top. You can then dive deeper into the world of the carnival and follow the iStory from there if you wish.

If you're looking to catch up on all of the tagged media episodes that are available, check out the Heroes video library category: "Sprint Now". Just keep in mind that sometimes the most recent one is only available through the iStory.

And now, since you're such awesome people, I have some behind the scenes pictures to share with you from when we filmed "Slow Burn". I'll have more to come in a few weeks time.


Dawn Olivieri (Lydia), Robert Knepper (Samuel) and Ray Park (Edgar) rehearse for a scene:

photo by Zach Wilson.

September 23, 2:30 PM

Season 4 New Media Episodes
Sorry for the lack of posting of late, but I'm here with exclusive news that I hope will make it up to you. Part of the reason for the lack of updates (other than getting married three weeks ago) is that I've been hard at work co-writing what are being called "Sprint New Media Episodes". What exactly is that you ask? In short, it's one story told in different mediums, integrated like never before.

The spine of our story will be told in ten 90 second "episodes" (aka "tagged media") that will air concurrently with the weekly airing of the show. The first 30 seconds will actually appear on-air during the show's commercial break and lead into the following 60 seconds which can be found online. However, my understanding is that you'll be able to view all 90 seconds online if you wish. The first episode airs (and goes online) this Monday, 9/28!
 

The story takes place in the world of the Carnival and will focus on the characters of Lydia (Dawn Olivieri) Edgar (Ray Park) and Samuel (Robert Knepper). We'll also be introducing some exciting new characters who will appear on the show. While of course you don't *have* to watch the new media episodes to follow the story told in the show, I can tell you that it will enrich what you're seeing on Monday nights more than ever before. Some scenes will even tie directly into what you're seeing on the show.

The episodes are being directed by Retrofit Films' Chris Hanada & Tanner Kling (Nowhere Man) and have been written by a team of us here at Heroes including myself, Jim Martin (Nowhere Man, The Recruit) and Heroes graphic novel veterans Harrison Wilcox, Zach Craley and Foz McDermott.

But That's Not All...

The on-air and online video component is just the spine of the story we're telling. The graphic novels, iStory and Heroes: Survival game will all combine to integrate and enrich the story. For me, it's exactly how new media storytelling should be done. It's definitely been an ambitious undertaking and my hat goes off to all the talented people who are working their asses off and going the extra mile to collaborate with us and make sure all the aspects of the story track correctly. I'm really proud of what we're setting out to do and of everything we've achieved so far. I can't wait for you all to see what we've come up with.

You met Samuel, Edgar and Lydia in the Season Premiere and if you haven't already, be sure to check out the graphic novel "Stolen Fate" written by Zach Craley for more details on Lydia and Edgar's relationship. Things kick into high gear on Monday with the first "tagged media" episode -- look for it during the commercials and then hit the web to keep watching!

I'll post more updates as the story gets underway and tweet you from the set while we're filming today, tomorrow and Friday -- make sure you're following me so that you don't miss out!

August 23, 7:17 PM

Rebellion Wrap Up
The seventh (and final) part of Rebellion is now online -- written by Jim Martin and drawn by Jason Badower. If you missed any of the Rebellion graphic novels, be sure to go back and check them out -- NBC's graphic novel library has them all available to view online or download as a PDF.

We've had several different writers take this through its stages but I'd like to give a special thanks to Jason Badower and Dennis Calero who were the only two artists on the project. They did some truly outstanding work. If you liked what you saw, please be sure to let them know -- Dennis Calero (twitter, website), Jason Badower (blog, facebook - be sure to tell him you're a heroes fan if you send a friend request).

In an ideal world I would have liked to tell an epilogue of sorts for Rebellion but with volume 5 rapidly approaching, it became more essential to set that up instead. Harrison Wilcox has constructed an excellent story, drawn by Robert Atkins, that bridges volumes 4 and 5 nicely. I'll update soon with when exactly "Ice Queen" is scheduled to appear online.

"So what happened to the Rebellion team?" you might be asking. Well, I can't say exactly as you might see one member pop up in an upcoming story, but in short -- they returned to their lives. Their superhero lives that is. As you know from the end of volume 4 the government threat has ended and thus, so has much of the threat to Rebellion. I imagine that from here on out they were able to go on living their lives, both "normal" and "heroic". And to me that's a pretty good place to leave them... for now.


I apologize for the lack of updates of late but big things have been happening in both work and personal life. On the personal front: in less than a week from now I'll be a married man. So in light of that I hope you'll forgive me as updates are a little sporadic over the next few weeks.

On the work front, I'm excited to announce that I'm heavily involved (along with Jim Martin) in creating this seasons "webisodes" (for lack of a better word). The reason I'm not entirely sure what to call them, and why I can't say much more, is that they're going to integrate with the various "new media" aspects of the show like never before. I've probably already said too much, but there you go, now you can (probably) say you heard it here first.

Speaking of places to "hear things first". Please follow me on twitter if you're not already doing so. I do try to read and respond to everything I can. That's it for now, the next time I post I'll likely have a ring on my finger!

July 21, 10:55 AM

Heroes Comic Con News
Apologies for the double-post if you read my personal blog but I want to make sure this information gets out to as many people as possible...

There are a bunch of things I can now happily announce about Heroes presence at Comic Con this year. I'll save the best for last so keep reading, but let's start with our "booths". Yes booths, plural.

And full disclosure, some of this is speculation/rumor/hearsay and schedules/plans etc. do change last minute so I apologize if any of this turns out to be incorrect. The reason I don't know for sure is that most of the comic-con planning is done by NBC promo department and the information gets filtered back through to us in bits and pieces. That said, I do work on Heroes so I must have some idea right? Let's hope so...

BOOTHS
I'm told that inside the convention hall will be a Heroes themed Nissan booth. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I am told that's if you're trying to get your hands on this year's Heroes Limited Edition graphic novel, that's where you'll want to go. The comic is one you've already seen, "Rebellion part 3: Family" written by myself and art by Jason Badower. See below for details on where to find me and Jason if you want to get that or (almost) anything else signed. The exhibitors list has "Heroes" down for booth #5312. I can't confirm for sure that's us, but it sure looks like it. edit: Oops, that's not us. Heroes/Nissan booth will be *somewhere* on the floor.

Now what is this other "booth" I speak of? I'm told that across the street from the convention center, in front of the Hilton Gaslamp Quarter Hotel (at K & 4th street) will be a Heroes "tent". It's being sponsored by Sprint and I've heard rumors that they'll have some pretty awesome giveaways (possibly even a Palm Pre!) Now you may asking why "tent"? Well, if you attend our panel on Saturday I'm sure you'll find out, but I'll give you a one word hint: Carnival.

FRIDAY - HEROES ALL ACCESS PARTY
On Friday the 24th from 3-5pm, Heroes All Access is hosting a meet & greet and signing at the House of Blues with a bunch of great Heroes people including myself, Jason Badower, David Lawrence XVII and now I'm hearing possibly James Clark (aka @JamesProps on twitter) amongst others. You can see the full details here.

SATURDAY - HEROES PANEL
By now you probably know that Heroes will be having its panel on Saturday from 3:15-4:15 in the Indigo Ballroom at the Hilton Bayfront. Please note that this is a *different* Hilton than the one where the tent will be setup. The Bayfront is on Harbor Drive and 8th ave, at the South-East end of the convention center (same side of the street).

What you probably don't know is that the panel will be hosted/moderated by Attack of the Show's Blair Butler. She came into the office to view the season premiere and from what I hear is a Heroes fan and total geek in the best possible way (I love how geek and nerd are now terms of affection). Anyway, if Blair's recent "comic con dark secret" tweets are any indication, it should be a lot of fun.

Oh, and did I mention one late addition to the Heroes panel? I'm told that someone named "Hayden Panettiere" WILL be at the Heroes panel on Saturday. Did you need another reason to attend?

IN CONCLUSION
*phew* I think that's everything. For more Heroes Comic Con details, stop by Heroes ARG who are doing a good job trying to wrangle all of the information together.

The Heroes All Access Party is definitely the best place to catch me if you'd like to get something signed but I will be at the Heroes panel and I'll try to stop by the line outside the Hilton, provided no-one kicks me out. I'll be at other places throughout the day Friday and Saturday and if you follow me on twitter, I'll try to post my movements. If you're getting desperate (during the weekend) you can always try to message me on twitter or shoot me an email. I'll do my best to try and meet everyone who wants to meet up.

July 07, 10:03 AM

Rebellion Part 2 - Providence in the Fall of a Sparrow A quick reminder that Part 6 of Rebellion, "Lost and Found" written by Timm Keppler and drawn by Dennis Calero goes online next Tuesday 7/14.

Today, I'm going back to talk about part 2 of Rebellion "Providence in the Fall of a Sparrow" which was done by the same writer/artist team as part 1 -- Zach Craley and Dennis Calero. I really liked Zach's decision to break from Micah's POV at the start of this story and take the time to introduce Sparrow in a very cool way. It feels like you're in a different story until at the bottom of page 3 Micah arrives and you realize "of course, he was tracking the plane".

When creating a new character in the graphic novels it often helps to give the artist a real life reference to draw from. Some artists, like Jason Badower, even like to take photo reference themselves, to make sure they capture the angles and poses they like. In this case, Zach asked if Dennis wouldn't mind basing Sparrow on his girlfriend, actress Kat Purgal.

Kat's look worked perfectly for Sparrow, and I know that when it came time for parts 3 and 4, Jason was very happy to have a bonafide actress to work with.  

As she explains to Micah, Sparrow is of Native American descent but we made the conscious choice here to try and not make her a stereotypical Native American character. She's simply someone who is in touch with her own ancestry. You can catch a glimpse of the tattoo on her back which is of a Zuni sunface (in honor of her mother).
 
The other tattoo Sparrow has that I think Dennis made look super cool, are the sparrows on her forearm:

June 25, 9:01 AM

Rebellion Part 1 - Rebel Yell Alas, no new comic this week, but hopefully you're all up-to-date and have read Part 5 "Wanted" written by Harrison Wilcox and drawn by Jason Badower. If you've lost track of what you've read you can find all of the graphic novels on NBC's website in the extremely useful novels library. If you're suffering from heroes withdrawl this summer I strongly recommend checking out the "animated adventure" links for the novels. They're extremely cool. I'm also happy to announce that Dennis Calero will be returning to the Rebellion arc to draw part 6 "Lost and Found" written by Timm Keppler. This 8 page graphic novel will go online 7/14.

So since there's no new comic to talk about, I figured I'd take the next few weeks to go back and talk about the first five parts of Rebellion, starting naturally with...

Part One: Rebel Yell

After we broke the basic story for the whole summer (see my last post) Zach Craley was given the unenviable task of launching the Rebellion arc. I say "unenviable" because there was a lot of story to setup and not a lot of space to do it -- We're back at the time of episode 314, government agents are hunting specials, Monica  & family are kidnapped, Micah evades capture, learns of the plane crash... you get the picture. I was initially nervous of spending valuable page time with Monica as "St. Joan" but Zach absolutely made the right call as it was a very exciting entry into the story and judging from the boards, fans definitely got a kick out of seeing Monica do her superhero thing.

Dennis Calero did the art and colors for this and part two. Dennis is quickly rising the ranks of Marvel and has been receiving a lot of praise for his latest work on X-Men Noir. As such, we're very lucky that he was able to squeeze in the time to do some absolutely stellar work for us at Heroes. I particularly love the last page with Micah's face reflected in the plane debris. It was written in the script by Zach and Dennis knocked it out of the park. 

My hats off to both Zach and Dennis on this page for finding a visually compelling and dynamic way to show Micah's ability. It's not always easy, especially in the format of a graphic novel. By the time you reach the last panel of this novel, I think they've really sold you on the anguish of this kid and shown you exactly why he's about to go to incredible lengths to try and save his family.

Comments should be in full working order now, so please feel free to leave your thoughts. Next week I'll dive into part two and the creation of Sparrow.

June 03, 8:18 AM

Rebellion
Hi Everyone! Thanks for stopping by. For those who don't know me, my name is Oliver Grigsby, I'm a writer for Heroes (Shades of Gray) and I'm also a writer and editor for the Heroes Graphic Novels. Each week I'll post here to talk about the latest graphic novel and the creation process behind it.

First let me go over a few logistics. The graphic novels typically go online once a week sometime in the early hours of Tuesday morning (PST). But for the summer we've slowed things down a little bit. Here's the current schedule, though please be aware it could change:


Parts 5, 6 and 7 will be 8 pages each. In September, we'll return to our regular weekly schedule leading up to the premiere of Volume 5.

Today I'll talk about how we came up with the idea for Rebellion. In the following weeks I'll spend some time delving into the details of each part.

COMING UP WITH THE STORY
Though we've only done it a couple of times now, coming up with a story for the summer arc is always tricky because we don't know exactly which direction the next volume of the show is headed in. I've always felt that the best graphic novels are the ones that fill in some piece of the story that we only caught a glimpse of in the actual show. So to that end, we came up with the idea to explore what Rebel was up to between all those moments he popped up in the show. The idea of creating a team that Rebel was working with came naturally out of that.

Harrison Wilcox, Zach Craley and I spent some time batting ideas around and formed a framework for the Rebellion arc -- teaming up with other specials with his primary goal being to rescue Monica. Originally we had planned for weekly comics and had imagined that we could see team Rebel off doing some side missions, saving people that were being hunted etc. When word came down that we would only be producing one graphic novel in June, July and August we had to adjust a little and ended up only being able to hit the major storyline points. While I'd certainly like to be telling more stories, what I like about this approach is that it forced us to focus the story much more.

One thing that the show tries to stay true to is the "ordinary people" aspect and not become a show solely about "superheroes" and their powers. My opinion has always been that the graphic novels allow us to explore the "superhero" side of things a little bit. Have some fun with abilities and situations. However, we didn't want to stray too far so we decided to keep the Rebellion team young. Only idealistic youth would be crazy enough to believe that they could team up and stand up to the government. And of course there's a natural tendency for kids to "rebel" against authority.

Thus began the discussion of who to include on the team. West was a choice largely because it allowed the team to become mobile and get to lots of interesting places. We chose Sparrow because we wanted to have a new character with a fun offensive power. Naturally we talked about Molly and Alex but we ruled out Molly because (hint) we have other plans for her, and chose not to go with Alex because the breathing underwater ability isn't very dynamic or useful when it comes to facing government agents. We ended up with Abigail because we felt that forcefields would be an interesting ability to work with (and useful for our team). At one point we had thoughts about creating a love interest/complication for Abby and West but simply didn't have enough pages to do it.

From there we divided up the scripts and let the individual writers go to work. Zach knew his chapters would be about the abduction of Monica (to setup the series) and then the introduction of Sparrow. I knew my two chapters would be about Micah forming the team and their first foray as a group.

The next three parts are being written by Harrison Wilcox, Timm Keppler and Jim Martin respectively so look for their issues coming up. And if for some inexplicable reason you haven't been keeping up with the graphic novels, go catch up right now!

Next week I'll go into more detail about Rebellion parts 1 and 2 and the creation of Sparrow. Please hit up the comments below, I look forward to hearing from you!