A Stay of Execution

Or at least, that's how Dustin Hoffman describes a good review. Yes, Paragon #9 gets reviewed over at the Forbidden Planet blog, and I'm pretty happy with the comments on 'Spencer Nero'. The review begins:

• Really liking the cover this time round – good pulp hero feel, and very fitting, as it’s featuring the new strip in Paragon 9, the pulp adventure Spencer Nero. Something of a tongue in cheek Doc Savage style thing, following an old style adventurer, always ready with a quip to take on a thrilling adventure. He travels the world, sorting out all those who need sorting, with a nod, a wink, and a never ending stream of pulp hero clichés. But I like tongue in cheek pulp hero clichés.

There’s two episodes here – Nazi Aztecs in the middle of the ocean first up and then a werehyaena in East Africa. Two artists as well, but I didn’t enjoy David Broughton’s necessarily cartoon-ish style for The Last Laugh anywhere near as much as Dave Candlish’s more stylised moments of the Island Of The Naztecs storyline. But the art serves the stories well, and it’s not a bad intro to a character all concerned may enjoy playing around with.

All told, a decent appraisal, and little to argue with. I'll be honest, I think the script suffers from my frequent crime of excessive dialogue, but though it was only recently published, it was actually written before my first Dogbreath story, during the submission of which I got invaluable advice from the editorial team on paring it all down.

The rest of the review is unfortunately not as enthusiastic about Paragon as a whole, but I do hope Dave C. won't be put off by that. From my perspective, Paragon gets better and better every issue, and, my own contributions aside, I think the run from #7 onwards has seen the comic at its strongest. Onwards and upwards!

Pictures At An Exhibition

Who are these chaps? Well, they're part of a special project Davey Candlish and I are working on, to be published at some future point in Paragon comic. What's the story? Can't say yet... strictly hush hush... suffice to say it has a historical setting, takes place in Europe, and is big on banter. But I can say that this strip marks the first time I've tried to write an extended episodic comic story, rather than a done-in-one. (I've made a conscious decision, for instance, that Spencer Nero stories will always be complete in any given issue, though they'll occasionally and briefly reference previous instalments.) It's definitely a different kind of challenge, making sure each episode has its own quota of action, comedy, plot movement and character development, while maintaining a consistent tone and flavour across the story.

So what can I tell you? Well...

• One of these men is a perfectionist - the other thinks he is perfect.
• One of these men is a heavy sleeper - the other is often up all night.
• One of these men drives people up the wall - the other just drives women crazy.
• One of these men does not wear socks - the other is wearing very well, thank you.

 And without both of these men... polite society may not survive.

Genesis and Catastrophe (Without the Catastrophe.)

Well, by now, Paragon #9's got into the hands of the general public, and while I've yet to read any reviews, those who have commented on my strip have been pretty positive, which is always good for the ol' ego. Here's a few thoughts about the strip's genesis, and that of Nero himself.

The whole thing came out of Chris Cronin's desire to put together a pulp-style comic. Fresh from having written my Dr WTF?! strip and not having been told to go away and never darken the door of comics again, this seemed like a golden opportunity. I suggested writing a Doc Savage-style character, which grabbed Davey Candlish's attention, but in between my suggesting and his being grabbed, I'd changed my mind and wanted to write about a dwarf detective instead. Cheekily, I suggested the Doc Savage type for Paragon instead, and Dave agreed, finding himself also roped into drawing the dwarf detective as well. (More on him in the future.)

As such, I came up with Spencer Nero. His first name derived from both that doyenne of Englishness, Lady Di, but also from Spencer Tracy, who in 'Bad Day At Black Rock' struck me as a pinnacle of the heroic. Likewise, Nero's surname hailed from both the Roman emperor (and was, as such, intended to indicate the character's dark side) but also from Franco Nero, Italian star of 'Django', a wonderfully hapless cowboy hero, sporting cool in bucketloads.

On the surface, Spencer would be the classic 1930s pulp adventurer, but I wanted him to have a really nasty side to give him a bit of an edge. No less an authority than Dredd-scribe John Wagner has said that it's always better if your hero has a bit of range and room to be a bastard. In Spencer's case, the two seemed incongruous, so I decided to make that a plot point - he puts on a mask and behaves differently, afterwards distancing himself entirely from what he's done. This inevitably led to my obsession with the Roman god Janus surfacing, and then everything seemed to come together when I realised that Spencer epitomised British (and Roman) hypocrisy - noble ideals in principle but with a bloody, domineering undercurrent and a 'might makes right' philosophy in practice.

After that, it was just a case of finding a foe for him. Dr. Von Zero was plucked straight out of a WWII role-playing game I'd written and run, whilst the use of a lost Aztec tribe with a mystic stone probably has its roots in an Indiana Jones comic I'd been given as a kid in the 80s, where Indy had to avoid being fried by solar lasers focused through Aztec gemstones embedded in the roof of a prison chamber. As for Mr. Alabaster - I think his name comes from a line in The Police song 'Wrapped Around Your Finger', whilst his tarot obsession seemed a good way of shoehorning in some occult antics of a non-Roman variety. He's become a character I've grown to enjoy writing, particularly once I got a handle on his relationship with Nero - Alabaster in fact exploits him ruthlessly for his own amusement, but uses his matter-of-fact way of dealing with eccentric subject matter to make it all seem necessary.

And there you have it. As Gary Larson once said, after recounting the origins of his career as a cartoonist: I have no idea of how much interest any of that is to you, but it's in your brain now and you're stuck with it.

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.

Nero Unleashed!

Well, he’s broken his bonds and now he’s out there, as Paragon #9 explodes onto the scene! Will the innocent comics-buying public take Spencer Nero’s swaggering, egotistical pulp antics to their collective bosom? My fingers remain crossed – at the very least, Davey Candlish (and, for a special one-page bonus outing, David Broughton) can be guaranteed to make it a rip-roaring artistic ride! More on the genesis of the great man soon – where he came from, where he’s going, why he’s called Spencer Nero, and which fundamental human trait he is supposed to embody. (Hint: it's not a good one.)

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'.

The Lord of Beginnings Opens a Door...



Splatterhouse Blues: Artist Davey Candlish unleashes Janus.



Hold on... what the hell’s going on in this panel from ‘Spencer Nero and the Island of the Naztecs’, due soon in Paragon #9? Who is this creepy, blank-masked psycho? What’s he got to do with jolly 30s adventurer, Spencer Nero? And why is he punching a hole through some poor creature’s skull?

Be warned.

Janus is at the gates.

And, as Caligula used to say, oderint dum metuant.