Dr. WTF?! 2012 - Page-By-Page Commentary

Over on his blog, Louis Carter has posted a wonderful entry that reveals the creative process behind his art for our Dr. WTF?! 2012 story. I know I'm biased, but his post makes for a bloody good read, and the more I find out about his approach, the more I am blown away by his attention to detail. Anyway, here's a bit about the genesis of the story from my perspective, and a similar page-by-page commentary.

From the outset, despite a creeping residual paranoia that someone out there would think I actually approved of his views, there was never any doubt in my head that this new Doctor would be a Nazi. As such, the story would be one of excess, with everything turned up to 11, featuring insanity on a grand scale. I later came up with the idea that the Doctor liked Nazism so much because it reminded him of Gallifrey - lots of middle-aged men dressing up in fancy costumes and issuing edicts. (Indeed, there was a line in the first draft of the script to that effect, but it got cut for space reasons, and 'cos editor Owen Watts rightly wanted to limit references to 'proper' Who continuity / chronology.) So, if my protagonist was a Nazi, who could his opponents be? There really wasn't much choice - I had to go for the dialectic opposite of Fascism, in the form of Communism. (I think I was also applying 'Battle' comic logic - when they ran 'Hellman of Hammer Force' and 'Death Squad', two strips with German protagonists, the characters generally ended up fighting the Russians, so that readers wouldn't get irate if they saw them triumphing over the British.) Anyway, here's how it all went:

Page 1:

Hauptmann Who is, in a very, very tangential way, kinda sorta based on a guy who taught me Film Studies at university. He wasn't a Nazi (as far as I am aware) but he did want to be seen as pretty rock 'n' roll, despite being a kind of authority-figure, and occupying a not-particularly-rock 'n'roll position in life. He wore a long black leather jacket, jeans (with turn-ups), DM boots and black t-shirts. The t-shirt here is one of many examples where Louis improved on my ideas - I originally wanted an umlaut over a question mark in blackletter font (as used by Motorhead for their logo.) Louis instead shifted it underneath, where it also serves the function of making the whole symbol look... well, slightly rude. I very specifically wanted the character to actually be named 'Who' in the story -A) in tribute to the Amicus Dr. Who movies B) in tribute to the William Hartnell story 'The War Machines' ("Doctor Who is required... bring him here.") and C) 'cos 'Who' is such an intrinsically funny sound.

 Jimi Von Hendricks, the Hauptmann's partner, went through a couple of script incarnations before I was happy with him. He was inspired by a mod for the game 'Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas'. The lead character in said game, CJ, is African-American, but apparently white bigots, keen to enjoy a spot of gang-banging, couldn't tolerate playing as a black man. Therefore, they created a modified version of the game for themselves, in which the main character was white, but everything else was the same. You have to laugh at these people, you really do. That was the original concept  for Jimi - that he literally WAS Jimi Hendrix, but made white by Nazi science, so that racists could enjoy rock 'n' roll without feeling like hypocrites. However, at some level, the idea of visiting such an injustice upon Jimi started to offend me, so instead I decided that the real Jimi's talent had been transplanted into the body of a no-hope, poodle-permed glam-rocker instead (and Jimi disposed of.) Louis took the transplant theme quite literally, hence the stitching on Jimi's forehead. Given rock 'n' roll's undeniably black origins, it seemed suitably ironic that bigots woud want to appropriate it.

I do not know (or can't remember) why I picked the asteroid belt to become Communist. I definitely wanted a celestial body to do so, showing Hauptmann Who found the ideology so insidious that it could literally infect inanimate objects on a massive scale. I discovered there were lots of different types of asteroid, of different chemical composition, and then it all made sense.

The phrase 'reich und roll' was stolen from the band Carnivore's song 'Jesus Hitler' (by the late Peter Steele of Type O Negative). It was about what might happen if Jesus and Hitler both got reincarnated in the same body. It was therefore the trigger for the 'Marley Luther Lenin' idea on Page 3. (More of that when we get there.)

Page 2:

"You are the Masteroid!" is almost my favourite line in the whole thing. As previous blog posts may have indicated, I am easily amused by my own wordplay.

Germania - Many will be aware that Hitler did plan to reconstruct Berlin as Welthauptstadt (World Capital) Germania, designed by architect Albert Speer. A few elements of this reconstruction project were successfully completed, but the fortunes of war pretty much put an end to it. Not here!

World War Minus One and the Forever-Fuhrer: Well, if you had time-travel, why not win wars before they start, therefore preventing them from ever happening, in some ridiculous temporal paradox? (So much for no triumphing over the British then.) Likewise, I could imagine that Hitler would have found some way to exist concurrently in multiple different forms, like some crazy eternal version of the triple-goddess Morrigan from Irish mythology. Of course, the Former-Fuhrer was just a baby, the Flux-Fuhrer was in disarray, and the Future-Fuhrer dead, so every incarnation epitomised a sense of helplessness. Some people don't like Hitler being used as a figure of fun, but personally, I think relentless mockery is probably the best way to demean his memory.

Page 3:

Marley Luther Lenin was originally just Martin Luther Lenin, on the fairly obvious basis that the ultimate enemy of Hauptmann Who would have to be both non-white, pro-equality, and a Communist. Bob Marley was added to the mix for yet another musical angle, to allow me to give the character dreadlocks with impunity, and to bang in some more excess.

"Never wear anything that panics the cat." - This is my favourite line in the story. I originally just wanted to have the Future-Fuhrer give some completely irrelevant fashion advice (I think he's gone senile), and then I stumbled upon this P.J. O'Rourke quote.

Einstein and Laika - Einstein was certainly no fan of Nazism or capitalism, and was accused of being a Communist on more than one occasion. He was definitely a socialist. As for why his head is floating in space, I am convinced this hails from one of my frequent influences, cartoonist Gary Larson, who once drew the crew of the Starship Enterprise trying to cope with the floating head of Zsa Zsa Gabor. As for the canine pilot, well, I like dogs, basically. I am full of nothing but total and utter contempt for those that took a lovely little dog like Laika and shot her into space to die. I'd shoot the bastards into space myself, given the chance. So here she is, salvaged from an alternate timeline and still loyal to a regime that is happy to sacrifice her yet again for their own ends. No matter who's in charge or what the ideology, dogs (and nature in general) always get the short straw (look at Hitler's dog Blondie) - but dogs love us irrespective.

"Now there's a novelty!" is one of comedian Eric Morecambe's less-prominent catchphrases, coined by writer Eddie Braben. I often feel the temptation to slip lines or paraphrased lines from 'Morecambe and Wise' into my scripts.

Page 4:

I sort of think of this as the 'Yellow Submarine' page. (It's Jimi's trousers that do it.) To my eyes it is probably Louis's greatest triumph in the whole story. I think the way he turns panels four and five into a beyond-the-panel-limits free-floating psychedelic experience is so much cleverer and more fitting than anything I'd have come up with. It expertly conveys the nature of existence before the regular rules of existence kicked in. The idea of time-travelling to the Big Bang (and calling it 'Event One') is a direct lift from Dr. Who - 'Castrovalva', one of my favourite Who stories.

"That didn't happen, Jimi!" - The odd things is, because he can time-travel and has created an alternate timeline, it may not have done. But he's probably just in denial.

Page 5:

Too much dialogue as I struggle to cram everything in. And another Motorhead reference! ('Eat the rich!') Well, Lemmy is known for collecting Nazi memorabilia.

The final panels. Yes, quite. I am only partially to be credited (or blamed) for these. Louis took something implicit (the homoerotic friction between the two leads, and the associations implicit in the phrase 'Give free vent to your love for me!') and, well, less ran with it, more hit Mach 3! Here is the script as was originally written (the dialogue is the same):

Hauptmann Who points commandingly at Jimi, who obliges by jamming on his guitar and singing of his devotion to the Hauptmann. Jimi should be throwing some kind of rock god shapes as he does so, while in the background the primal atom throbs away and the kaleidoscopic primordial void creates hallucinogenic patterns, like some atmospheric sound-to-light programme.

You will notice the lack of nudity, quasi-dimensional snogging, stereo-genitalia or singular spherical objects of a non-primal-atom nature. Basically, I wanted 'em to go out on a song, and use the famous Hendrix mondegreen in the process. A private rock'n'roll concert at the dawn of time - what could be more overblown? But Louis... naughty, naughty Louis wanted to show us what 'free vent' really means. As a result, both my Dr. WTF?! scripts now end with the main character about to indulge in acts of carnality. But let's be clear - this is the kind of collaboration I like. Er... not pre-historical misbehaviour, but where the artist takes the writer's script and gives free vent to his own ideas. I take it as a massive compliment that Louis felt the story was worth putting his own stamp on in such a way. Didn't stop my jaw dropping when I read the thing, mind!

And that's your lot. This was one of my favourite comic collaborations, because Louis brought so much to it, and gave it a colourful beauty greater than it probably deserves. A word (or several) also needs to be said for Owen Watts's lettering - I bloody love that man's sound effects! (Oh, and several more words need said for that man's remarkable skill in organising and putting together the whole smashing anthology!) Hope you enjoyed the story, or were at least suitably disturbed.

May Triarchy

"April is the least-blogged month", as T.S. Elliot almost wrote in an early draft of 'The Wasteland'. Well, it was for me anyway. But now May is upon us, and no less than three separate new tales of mine are either already released or on the verge of being so.

The first, and in many ways the most personal to me, is a tale called 'Lay On, Macduff', appearing in Lizzie and Conor Boyle's new small-town themed anthology 'Disconnected'. This fine publication heralds the start of Lizzie and Conor's new publishing venture, Disconnected Press, and I was genuinely honoured to be approached for a script contribution for the first issue. As I type this, 'Disconnected' is making its debut at the Bristol Comic Expo 2012, complete with a cracking, somewhat Ben Templesmith-y cover by comics pro Matt Timson. (Coincidentally, I won his complete 'Impaler' series in one of the 2000AD forum short story competitions a while back - gorgeous stuff.) My artistic  partner for this is Gavin Mitchell, winner of the recent 2000AD pitch-fest, and a rare talent indeed. His work is hugely stylish and atmospheric: we can expect BIG things of this gentleman! Our story is set, as the title implies, in the north-east Scottish fishing town of Macduff, which is where my father and the Meldrum clan in general hail from. Macduff's most famous citizen is a man called Walford Bodie, the 'Electric Wizard of the North', an international stage-magician and hypnotist, who inspired Houdini and was even satirised by Charlie Chaplin. Without spoiling any plot details, Bodie is the star of 'Lay On, Macduff', and during this historical tale he becomes embroiled in eerie events in his home town.

The second tale is very different but also on sale in Bristol - it's my collaboration with Louis Carter for Dr WTF?! 2012. Yup, Nazi timelord Hauptmann Who stars in 'The Reich Stuff', a frankly ridiculous tale of the Infinite Reich, silicon-based communism and gestalt reincarnation, all wrapped up in a decidedly purple haze. I think this might be the oddest thing I've ever written - I'm certainly very happy with the result, in large part due to Louis's unbelievably superb art. His colours in particular were just glorious. Working with Louis was definitely a really great collaboration - as his various blog entries on the subject show, he put an enormous amount of thought into every artistic aspect of the strip, and constantly took my ideas and ran with them, coming up with his own psychedelic or Fortean twists, and at one stage making something implicit in the story decidedly explicit - let's just say that when I saw the last few panels, my jaw dropped. I'll do a full self-indulgent 'director's commentary' on the story, as I did for Dr WTF?! 2011 in due course.

The third tale - well, Paragon #10 looms, and that can only mean a healthy dose of Spencer Nero is imminent. In this one, he attempts to climb the dreaded north face of the Eiger, in a Heinrich Harrer-inspired yarn called 'Spencer Nero and the White Spider'. Art duties this time around go to James Corcoran, who has also blogged extensively on this strip. As is also the case with Louis and Gavin, I count myself really lucky to have been able to collaborate with such a talented artist as James - his work is just remarkable and, to my mind, has captured that tricky balance between ridiculous and sinister that I hoped Spencer Nero might achieve. Not a tale for arachnophobes, I'll say that much: something in James's style really gives things a Lovecraftian edge. More on this one when it's finally released.

Anyway, it's back to work. This collection of Martillo stories I'm intending on publishing won't write itself, y'know...

Falling Towards Apotheosis

So for all my banging on about Spencer Nero like he’s the second coming, it’d be remiss of me not to mention what else appears in Paragon #9. Matthew McLaughlin and James Corcoran contribute a prehistoric Jikan tale with a delightfully Hammer / Amicus sensibility, the art for which is truly lovely, Corcoran’s atmospheric swathes of black being a particular highlight. The same writer also teams up with the mad, bad and dangerous to know Louis Carter (that’s bad in the sense of Byronically wicked, not a critique of the art!) who illuminates this month’s outing with some wonderfully stylised robo-philosophical musings. And explosions. Carter’s art is lovely stuff – I could absolutely see his robots as animated figures in some peculiar cartoon. Meanwhile, Davey Candlish couples (ooer, missus) with Alan Holloway for a violent western outing, ‘No Compromise’. There’s something about the western genre that Davey just seems to excel at – crumpled gunslingers must be one of his favourite subjects. And the strip’s first line, about how a stranger ‘rowed into town’, is a very witty conceit.

And finally, there’s Dirk Van Dom and Stephen Prestwood’s ‘Icarus Dangerous’. There’s a lot to like here, not least the muscular,action-packed art, which plays around with perspective (as is suitable for a flying hero) and which has a real weight and power to it. Gorgeous stuff. Of course, I’m a sucker for mythology too, and the whole ‘Greek myths in space’ thing makes me think of 'Ulysses 31', the best cartoon ever. Meanwhile, little references like Icarus suggesting his dad would enjoy the local architecture give the science-fantastical fusion a charming grounding. And despite the fact that several months pass between issues of Paragon, somehow ‘Icarus Dangerous’ manages to keep up a breackneck pace, rattling along with all the vip and vigour of a weekly-scheduled strip, full of energy, pressure always piling onto the hero.

The strip also made me muse on the likeability of the lead character. One of things I enjoy about this series is that Icarus is a bit hapless. I love characters that screw up or aren’t entirely sure what they’re doing, particularly if it’s their own fault. I find it a trait that’s extremely easy to identify with: indeed, one of my all-time 2000AD favourites is Ace Garp, a past-master in the field of creative balls-ups. In the case of Icarus, he seems, to paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt, to be doing the best he can with what he has where he is, but that clearly comes with a few bumps along the way. So much the better – in my experience, readers love seeing characters on a learning curve. Look at how popular the teenage New Mutants were with Marvel fandom when they debuted in the 80s. For a character so strongly associated with the concept of ‘the fall’, it’s a sharp move by Dirk Van Dom to give Icarus this slightly blundering quality, whilst at the same time reminding us that we fall to rise.

Indeed, the whole notion of haplessness is one that’s going to become more apparent in my own character, Spencer Nero, in forthcoming stories. In his first outing, he’s uber-confident and doesn’t make many mistakes, but as I tease out the darker aspects of his character, you’ll see how his arrogance increasingly makes him put his foot in it. In a script I’m writing at the moment, set in India in the time of the British Raj, I take this to an extreme, and Spencer becomes pretty much sole architect of his own problems.

Anyway - Paragon #9. Go buy. Bye.

Hold Ya, Thrill Ya, Kiss Ya, Vril-Ya

It's brittler, Hitler!

Owen Watts takes a firm grip of Louis Carter’s proud output, and behold! Crazy Fox-o-vision (in conjunction with Carterscope) presents this little teaser for Dr WTF 2012. Yup, it’s your friend and mine, Hauptmann Who, in ‘The Reich Stuff’. (Also by me. And yes, I know it's not an original pun, but I was specifically thinking of the similarly named song by Robert Calvert.)

Anyway, over on Louis’s blog, you will find a brief discussion of the relevance of Bovril to the Third Reich, but does it play a significant role in our story? Or is this merely some uncanny Element X which has bobbed, atavistically, to the surface of Louis’s unfathomable subconscious?

The answer to one of those questions is 'Yes'.

And I was thinking how the world should have cried on the day Jack Kirby died...

A bit of cross-blog fun – over on his corner of the web, the inimitable Louis Carter, my new partner in time-crime for 2012’s Dr WTF?!, has previewed some of his preliminary designs for the ‘good’ Doctor and his sidekick. Louis’s work on ‘Halo and the Gryphon’ in Dirk Van Dom’s excellent Vanguard #1 was recently described on Comics Bulletin as “stunning” – well-earned praise indeed. Anyway, Louis has some kind words for my script, which are much appreciated, as is the chance to see his take on some of my loopy concepts. Got to say, even at this stage, the attention to detail is just lovely – check out the intricate jacket braiding. In fact, in regards to the sidekick, Louis has taken my initial idea and absolutely run with it, adding in a few visual flourishes of his own. Just as with 2011’s Dr WTF?!, I know that no matter how my script goes down, it’s going to look bloody gorgeous. Owen Watts says he paired up Louis and I on the basis of mutual lunacy. From where I’m standing, it’s looking like a marriage made in glorious madness.



Spanish Carter Magic?



And the Kirby reference? Well, it’s an object lesson in how a writer can casually bung a line into a script without thinking about how it might screw with the poor artist’s brain. My script mentions a guitar and sound-system looking like the sort of thing Jack Kirby might have built – but nowhere did I bother to say what that actually meant. Hell, I’m a huge Kirby fan, but if you asked me “What defines Kirby Tech?” I might have struggled once I’d got past “shiny, lots of buttons”. Thankfully, Louis went above and beyond the call of duty and got hold of some rather natty guidelines, the results of which are beautifully evident in this pic I’ve shamelessly ripped off from his site.

May the madness continue!