Welcome to part 5, of my new book And Where Will It All End? The Secret History of Comics, where I take you behind the scenes to show you how your favourite subversive characters were created.
I published the intro a couple of weeks ago, available to everyone. Chapter 1, Part 1 went up on Nov 23, and you can read a decent chunk of that for free: the rest of it is for paying subscribers only, so if you’d like access to ALL of my Secret History of Comics as I release it every week (plus other benefits, check them out here), please consider subscribing: it’s £5 per month or £50 per year. I’m offering a free seven-day trial on Iconoblast, so you can try it out. You will need to select a subscription plan and provide your payment details to do this.
The Crossovers
We kept Law alive after Dark Horse with crossovers: Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon and Arcudi & Mahnke’s The Mask. After Kevin’s recent death, Erik Larsen said I could publish Savage Dragon for free, which is very generous of him.
If you consider how diverse those characters are, it demonstrates how Law can turn up anywhere, in any time, surely the hallmark of a classic hero. The Cenobite named Pinhead was originally Captain Elliott Spencer, an officer in World War One who had fought on the Western Front, so I was able to draw on my Charley’s War research there. Law and Pinhead/Spencer have both had similar experiences of war, both bear physical signs of self-mutilation, and this provides a kind of bond between them
The character of Super Nova, Marshal Law’s girlfriend, was inspired by Hildi, my own German, New Age girlfriend at the time. Hence why she takes Law to a Super Hero Therapy Party – which was absolutely perfect for the Californian world of San Futuro’s elite. There we see Law’s sneering reaction to drinking urine therapy, colonics and rebirth, which undoubtedly reflected my own scepticism. And that’s even before we get Kevin’s opinion of New Agers. In fact, my depiction of Super Nova was so closely modelled on Hildi, that Tony Skinner, my writing partner on Accident Man, and a big fan of Law – but no fan of Hildi’s – said, ‘I’m sorry, mate, I can’t read this one. It’s too close to Hildi. It’s making me feel ill.’ Such are the hazards of creative writing!
‘A writer is a thief. He steals people’s lives.’
I might supplement my story-building by reading Star Lust, Hollywood Babylon and even the autobiography of Nancy Reagan (for a Diceman story entitled You Are Ronald Reagan) but it’s no substitute for engaging with people in real life. I’m envious but also a little suspicious of writers who claim their characters are all just shards of their own personality. As a script-writing guru announced on one of the first writing guides I consulted: ‘A writer is a thief. He steals people’s lives.’
I recall enjoying writing the Pinhead crossover – I think I liked working with whoever the editorial was at Marvel at the time. But not the two crossovers that followed. It was nobody’s fault, but there were too many delays, restrictions and impositions on my writing style and self-expression. I’m being deliberately non-specific here, but I just don’t look back on them with any affection. On the contrary. The whole purpose of a creator-owned book is not to put up with the restrictions and requirements we get so used to by selling all rights on 2000AD or elsewhere. The two stories work well enough and had good reviews, and I think that’s because I would have done a professional job on them, internalising my reservations and my feelings about them, which were very far from happy.
It may also be something to do with the nature of some crossovers. When I worked on Punisher 2099 and was invited to New York for a crossover conference, attended by various important script writers like Peter David and Stan Lee, I think I actually fell asleep in the meeting. I rather like key characters appearing in other stories, but when it’s somewhat artificial, purely for commercial purposes, some part of me strongly resists. I thought I could silence that inner critic, but I was wrong.
Arguably Law was originally conceived as a long-running saga with big, epic stories told from a multiple narrative point of view. Because of force of circumstances, it had moved away from its origins and turned into a more pragmatic product, responding to outside publishing forces. Consequently, I was losing writer control, and that’s never a good thing for a story. So I was kind of relieved when the crossovers came to an end.
If you’re a free subscriber, you’re just about to hit the paywall, which is a bit of a bummer – but you can sign up for a free, seven-day trial!
My paying readers get access to all my Secret History of Comics chapters, and will get a free ebook copy when I complete the book next year, and an ebook copy of Pageturners.
And there’s another perk for paying subscribers, which I’m launching this evening: my first Substack Chat! All you need to do to take part is download the Substack App – Chat isn’t available yet on the browser version. Chat is a private space for a real-time text chat: find out more about it here.
I’ll be on the App from 7pm GMT and I’m really looking forward to a lively debate, so I hope you’ll be there!
Here’s my topic to kick off the chat:
All my fictional characters evolve. I can’t stop them! But - especially from a comic perspective - that may not always be a good thing. Like many readers, I like James Bond, Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, etc. because they DON’T evolve and remain reassuringly the same. So was that Marshal Law fan right in hating the end of the Savage Dragon story? Love to hear your thoughts.
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