I love Oscar Wilde.
As a student, I studied his works at university; as a
teacher, I've taught his works to senior pupils. My first ever published comic even
featured Wilde's lover, Bosie, as the time-travelling companion of a particularly
rum Doctor. I've always admired his insight, humanity and sometimes misguided
courage, not to mention, of course, his revelatory wit. But it wasn't until The Psychedelic Journal of the Wild West that I finally attempted to write the man
himself.
When the Journal moved from being solely about time-travel
to focusing on a different genre per issue, I was intrigued. I hadn't written
anything for at least a couple of issues of the comic - I'm not sure I had
anything else to say about time travel at that point - but the Wild West
brought fresh inspiration. At the time, I was fully immersed in the world of
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (not as many middle names as Picasso from
'Martillo', but pretty memorable nonetheless) as I'd recently been teaching his
plays to an Advanced Higher class. I knew Wilde had toured America in 1882,
somewhat quixotically attempting to make the aesthetic movement the basis for
this fresh civilisation's development, so he seemed a perfect fit. Thus 'Wilde Wild West' - its name a nod, of course, to the 60s spy-fi show - was born.
From the off, I wanted to get away from the idea of the
laconic Eastwood-y cowboy type: Wilde's verbose nature was a perfect fit for my
notoriously dialogue-heavy yarns. Indeed, much of Wilde's dialogue in the story
is either a direct quote from one of his works, or at least a modified version
thereof. I wasn't going to kid myself I could write with Wilde's incomparable talent,
so it seemed best to hew closely to his actual words if I were to do him any
justice.
I of course wanted Wilde to deal with something derived from
Native American mythology - there's nothing I like more than delving into the
folklore of a specific region and borrowing its monstrous denizens for my
nefarious purposes. My first thought was to put Wilde up against the horrible
Baykok, a foul emaciated Chippewa demon, that shoots men with invisible arrows,
beats them to death with a club, and then eats their liver (not necessarily in
that order.) I've always wanted to get the Baykok into something, every since I
first read of the awful thing as a child, in Tom McGowen's 'Encyclopaedia of
Legendary Creatures'. (See similar remarks on the phantom black dog from a
recent Spencer Nero tale.) But this wasn't the right place, and I didn't want
to diminish the creature's horror by having it fall victim to Wilde's wit.
Besides, as a man and a writer, Wilde was firmly on the side of redemption, and
the Baykok seemed rather hard to redeem.
Unlike the Rolling Head.
Coming upon this Cheyenne tale of a discombobulated fallen
woman (slain by her husband for an affair with a river spirit, served up to her
children for dinner, and then subsequently reanimated as a vengeful cranium),
it struck me how easy it would be to shape her into a Wildean figure. Wilde
loved women (well, to write about, anyway) and women with a past particularly fascinated
him. Mrs. Erlynne from 'Lady Windermere's Fan' and Mrs. Cheveley from the
brilliant 'An Ideal Husband' are two perfect examples of Wildean femmes who
successfully reinvent themselves and find different ways to regain a place in
the world of respectability. Therefore it struck me that Wilde's solution to
the problem of the Rolling Head had to follow similar lines - he had to find a
way to reintroduce her to society. In 'An Ideal Husband', Wilde wrote that "Sooner
or later, we shall all have to pay for what we do," but also noted that
"No one should be entirely judged by their past." I like to think my
story follows this logic to the letter.
This was the first story of mine Scott Twells ever worked
on, and he was a revelation. I was immediately drawn to the way that his panels
are all framed within the expanse of a larger one. His art here is a mixture of
rustic and cartoonish, his scratchy linework and expert grasp of perspective making
him the perfect fit for the tale. Since then he's drawn many other stories I've
written, and there'll hopefully be more to come in the future. A shout-out goes also to Andrew Scaife for his sterling job on the lettering.
Here's a few page-by-page comments:
Page 1:
- Wilde is wearing an artificially-coloured verdigris carnation throughout the story: he loved the idea of the artificial, and believed nature should imitate art. When I wrote this story, I didn't know if it would be illustrated in colour, but in retrospect, I'd have quite liked if the green carnation had been the only piece of colour in the story.
Page 2:
- Wilde really did go to Leadville to lecture on the early Florentines - this is memorably depicted in the film 'Wilde', starring Stephen Fry, where he gets a very positive reception from the miners. In real life, Wilde was particularly tickled when he saw a sign reading "Please don't shoot the pianist" - he loved the idea of bad art meriting death!
- I'm not sure exactly what the Head lady does with that snake, but Scott has certainly given it a smug look. Almost as characterful as the profoundly demented gleam in the husband's eyes.
Page 3:
- I like the fact that Jerome, the younger cowboy, is remarkably ineffectual, and when the Head arrives, he goes into a flap and runs around waving his arms about. You could argue that while this subverts the stereotype of the capable cowboy, it plays into another one about the effete gay man. (His behaviour's in a similar vein to the chap who gets the spark in his hair in The Simpsons' gay steel mill.) The thing is, I'm pretty sure Wilde would have liked to play the role of hero to that sort of chap: he saw protecting the vulnerable but beautiful as his duty.
Page 4:
- There's a fair bit of 'Pygmalion' in Wilde's attempts to re-educate the Rolling Head: fitting, as Wilde was good friends with George Bernard Shaw (Shaw sensibly encouraged Wilde not to pursue a court case against the Marquess of Queensberry: Wilde, of course, didn't listen, it all backfired, and Wilde was jailed for homosexuality.)
And with that, I shall leave you with the words of Oscar
himself.
"Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest
importance, apart from buying a print copy of the Journal here, or a digital one here."
