Spencer Nero and the Trouble with Blogs

The Ace of Cups. Art by Scott Twells, letters by Filippo.

Is it true? Am I down to only one blog post per year? Blimey! 2018 wasn’t a particularly productive year for me, from a comics-related perspective: indeed, by no standards was it an ordinary year, with too much else work-related going on, sapping time and energy for the creative process. However, a few stories managed to escape into the wild – a couple of Spencer Nero yarns and Something Else. Possibly. Here’s a few words on ‘em:

“I like men who have a future and women who have a past.”

-        - Oscar Wilde

In ‘Spencer Nero and the Trouble with Girls’, from PARAGON #22, an iconic British hero faces a gender-swap, and anyone who has concerns about this is accused of being a Nazi (in one case by an actual Nazi.) What, you may ask, could possibly have inspired this story? Who, I reply, knows? The mind of the small-press writer is sometimes best left unexplored. (As is the mind of his editor, who managed to schedule this story for September 2018, perfectly coinciding with a certain high-profile media event.)

But, this being a blog, we’d better at least have a gentle rummage.

The basic idea for this had been sitting around for a while – to gather up some of Spencer’s former female foes into a Sisterhood of Sirens, and derive some humour out of Spencer’s mistaken inability to take them seriously. (As a nod of the head to the original title for ‘The Pack’, and to suggest Spencer’s dismissive attitude, I’d considered calling it ‘A Few Bints and Spencer’, though I knew I’d never get away with it!) At one point, there was going to be an entire page of Spencer just laughing at the idea of women being a threat to him. In the end, the story went off in a different direction, as a comment on contemporary pop-culture, though Spencer’s off-hand sexism slipped through in a few panels. I’m not sure any of the characters come out of the story particularly well – as is my wont, everyone’s opinion and perspective, including my own, is thoroughly mocked.

It’s also a pretty continuity-heavy tale, featuring, as it does, the skull of Ekhidna from ‘Spencer Nero Goes South’ and ‘The Paragon Paradox’, Veleda the Druidess from ‘The Hour of the Heron’, Mrs. Simpson from ‘Spencer Nero and Mrs. Simpson’ and Dr. Von Zero from ‘The Island of the Naztecs’ and ‘The Hidden Olympics’. The story also features Spencer making greater use of the Janus Mask’s abilities, first unveiled in the aforementioned ‘Paragon Paradox’: technically, there should be a story in between, ‘The Spencer Nero Club’, which really flags this up properly, but I gather it’s still being drawn. Nonetheless, I like it when a series has been running long enough that you’re able to include various callbacks and links to previous continuity – hopefully this wasn’t too disorientating for any new readers.

Simpson attack! Art by Scott Twells, letters by Filippo.

However, the story is a tour de force for Mr. Scott Twells, a gentleman who, of late, has been saddled with the onerous chore of rendering umpteen of my scripts into a wholly undeserved and vivid life. Scott’s got it all, artistically-speaking – a unique and distinctive style, a stunning grasp of action sequences and the uncanny ability to capture characters’ mood, emotion and personality. I think this is probably his strongest Spencer Nero work to date – I particularly love the contrast between his finely-defined characters and his more impressionistic take on the Irish landscape of County Kerry.

You can pick up PARAGON #22 here:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=EBAHA8S3HV2E8

A French ‘Phant! See?

‘Spencer Nero and the Elephant in the Room’ was written in a matter of hours to provide an elephant-themed story for this year’s Ganesh-centric PARAGON Winter Special. As stories go, there’s not much to it – editor Davey Candlish originally suggested Spencer and Oswald tangling with a haunted African tribal mask, but somehow I ended up thinking about fictional elephants from children’s books instead. A quick check, and yes – it turned out Babar was indeed from the 1930s, and therefore the best fit. Somehow, Scott Twells (there’s that man again) managed to use my pretty thin premise to conjure up some typically glorious art. I don’t know if tarot cards were involved. In retrospect, the title of this story bothers me – it needs to work on another level, as well as being literal, and it doesn’t. Unless the elephant in the room is the British class system, and Spencer’s subordinate status to Alabaster. All right, that’ll have to do.

Art by Scott Twells, letters by Filippo

 You can get your copy of annual here:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=9M3DVT9FZUTP6

Rocket Man

Now, the third thing this year has, improbably enough, also featured Scott Twells, but I’m not sure if it’s been officially released. The Psychedelic Journal, to which I’ve contributed in the past, has done tales of Time Travel and the Wild West, but has subsequently moved on to the theme of Wizardry. As such, I concocted a story about a real-life sorcerer, the remarkable 1930s Thelemic sex-wizard and rocket engineer Jack Parsons. Now, I’ve seen the completed comic, but I haven’t seen it for sale on Comicsy, so I don’t know if 'Babalon Working' was fully unleashed to the general public. For the moment, here’s a random panel.

A bit phallic, innit? Art by Scott Twells, letters by Chris Mole

Happy new year!

Go Wilde in the Country

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."