So Chris Sims was going around Twitter asking for people who wanted to interview him about his new comic, Dracula the Unconquered, for which Sims has decided you should all pay actual money to read. And I thought, “well, if Sims wants people to spend money on his comic, then it is only proper that I put him through the gauntlet.” Where the gauntlet is mostly me asking polite questions, basically. So here we go!

BIRD: So I’m here sitting down with Chris Sims (on a virtual basis) and we’re going to talk about his new comic, Dracula the Unconquered.

SIMS: So if I’m Chris, does that mean you have to be “Christopher?”

BIRD: I was going to go with this being a Chris-off. Which sounds dirty. Then again, pretty much the entire internet just calls me MGK anyway.

SIMS: I’m an iconoclast. But only when it comes to referring to people by their online handles.

BIRD: I have no problem with that. Speaking of which, you saw that you now are the “other” Chris Sims, right?

SIMS: I am the non-Nobel Prize-winning Chris Sims, if that’s what you mean. The thing about that is, that guy totally goes by Christopher, but he still gets the Wikipedia page for “Chris.” It’s just not right.

BIRD: I’m more or less in the same boat. When famed science journalist Christopher Bird died back in 1996 I got mail for years from people asking me if I was him.

SIMS: You got mail or him after he died? Did they think they were sending letters to heaven? Because that is adorable.

BIRD: Nah. Once or twice a week having to type out “No, that’s not me, and yes, he really is dead. Sorry.” This was pre-Google, you understand, so we had to rely on AltaVista and shit like that, and nobody actually could find anything on the internet and check things instantly. Also we had to walk uphill both ways to school in the snow.

SIMS: Ah yes. The dark days of the depression, when Alta Vista was king.

BIRD: Anyway. We should probably talk about your comic! Which you’re doing with Steve Downer on art and Josh Krach on letters.

SIMS: That is correct!

BIRD: So, I looked at what you sent me, and my first reaction is: your Dracula seems influenced by the classic Wolfman/Colan Tomb of Dracula Dracula. Tell me I”m wrong!

SIMS: It’s definitely an influence. I’ve written before how I’m a huge fan of that series. If you’ve never read it, check out the first Essential that Marvel put out — it feels like a TV show that would come on today. It’s got that kind of pacing and this ensemble cast that includes the hunky, good-hearted descendant of Dracula. And, of course, that Gene Colan art.

BIRD: Also, Tomb has the classic blue tuxedo outfit for Dracula, which I think most comic fans now default to imagining how Dracula dresses. As opposed to, and I am just saying hypothetically here, red body armor and white albino hair.

SIMS: Ha, yes. But that’s as much from Lugosi and Catstlevania: Symphony of the Night as it is from Colan. I really like the idea of Dracula being a dude who dresses for his role as the king of the vampires, you know? He’s classy. It feeds into this sense of grand arrogance that he puts out. One of the first things you see him do after he’s resurrected in Dracula the Unconquered #1 is that he starts dusting off his sleeves and adjusting his buttons for the best fit. It’s how I think of him — this image that he projects is everything. And that goes back to the original novel, too. There’s a lot of deception and pretension to Dracula when Harker meets him. He wants you to know he’s the man in charge.

BIRD: By “Harker,” are you referring to Cute Human Sidekick Girl? She didn’t get named in the first bunch of pages I read.

SIMS: No, I mean Jonathan Harker from the novel, you worthless illiterate. I was talking about when Jonathan meets him in the novel. That’s whole introduction of Dracula there was what I fixated on, trying to reconcile the way he is there with the way he gets portrayed in pop culture, which is where my version in Drac the Unconquered comes from. The girl that shows up in the comic is Thalia, she’s a brand-new character for the series.

BIRD: I want to get to Thalia a little later, mostly because the comic is named Dracula and not New Girl. Which is good, because less singing. But anyway – one of the big things for me about Tomb – and I don’t want to suggest here that you’re just trying to write Tomb again – is that it went back and forth between “Dracula is a total bastard” and “Dracula is an honorable monster and there’s far worse out there than him.” And I note that given you start the series off with Dracula first threatening Thalia and then arguing with Varney the Vampyre, who has become King of the Vampires in Drac’s absence, that you refer to both modes in the first third of your story.

SIMS: Yeah. If there’s one thing that separates my story from Tomb, it’s that Tomb was a straight-up villain comic. Dracula was unambiguously monstrous in that book, and while the original premise was that it was going to be the Good Guys hunting him down, he’s such a forceful character that he takes over and it starts to be about how Dracula fights things that are worse than he is. There’s definitely that aspect in Unconquered, but I wanted to do Dracula as an adventure hero. I’ve described it before as “Indiana Jones, starring Dracula,” and I really hope that’s how he comes across. But that said, there’s still that monstrous aspect to him, and there’s still a lot of stuff in his past that has to be at least dealt with and acknowledged if you’re going to try to do a story that… Well, it doesn’t necessarily “redeem” him, but it shows him in a different light. The things that he wants now are different from the things that he wanted when he first came to England in Stoker’s Dracula, which were different from what he wanted in the flashbacks where you see him in his full kill-the-humans end-boss Castlevania mode.

BIRD: That sounds like a challenging premise, given that, well, this is Dracula we’re talking about here. Even in Tomb he was still definitively a baddy, and that’s almost as sympathetic as he’s ever been portrayed in comics – witness, for example, Captain Britain and MI-13, where Paul Cornell made him entertainingly and plausibly racist as all get out. And that’s just the Marvel version of Dracula, which is arguably one of the most generous interpretations of the character.

SIMS: Exactly. When there are so many interpretations of a character — and that’s what I love about him, that there’s been so much done with him that he works in any sort of story — the thing that stuck out to me that could set mine apart was doing Dracula the Adventure Hero. Like I said, there’s definitely the idea behind it that there are monsters out there that would be worse than Dracula, but, you know, he’s still Dracula. I’ve written in the teaser at the website that some of the things that happened in the novel didn’t happen that way, which has given some people the idea that Dracula himself was a nicer or less monstrous figure in my take on those events. That’s not it at all — most of the evil stuff that’s attributed to Dracula is all his doing, it’s just that Harker, Van Helsing, Morris and Seward were misinformed or deliberately making themselves look more heroic than they were.

BIRD: So, how else is your Dracula distinguished? Is he a Dracula who can walk in sunlight (a la Francis Ford Coppola or Team Edward)? Or do you find the challenge of having to work around daytime to be more fun?

SIMS: You know how big a Batman fan I am. I am fully comfortable with comics that take place entirely at night for years at a time. But it’s interesting that you bring up the powers. Everyone who does a vampire story has to sort of figure out which version of vampire powers they’re going to use, and sometimes they do it by just having a dude list off what he can and can’t do. Garth Ennis has done it, and God help me, Stephenie Meyer did it too, and I hate it every time I see it. But there’s so much out there that it’s almost unavoidable.

BIRD: Well, if you don’t explicitly say that Dracula can’t shoot rainbow rays from his fingertips, people might assume that’s the case.

SIMS: I don’t do the big list, at least in the first couple of issues, the way it works in my head is that all your standard vampire powers and weaknesses — super-strength, they drink blood, sunlight burns them up — are common traits among all the vampires. But then you have the cool extra powers that are usually attributed to Dracula — being able to summon wolves and turn into a bat and take the form of mist — are King of the Vampires powers. Those powers are like the magical equivalent of a crown and scepter. They’re bestowed on you when you ascend to that level. So it’s stuff that Dracula used to be able to do, but now he can’t. To balance things out, and to explain anything else that’s come up, I have Dracula as a sorcerer as well. I mean, the guy’s a magical creature who was alive for hundreds of years. He’s picked up some tricks. You’ll see a bit of that in the first issue, too. The way I look at magic, and magical beings like Vampires, is that it’s all based in symbolism. Even the idea of the stake through the heart — it’s not because Vampires are magically vulnerable to wood, it’s because you’re literally nailing them to the ground so they can’t rise up from their graves. That’s how I try to think of it and present it, which I think dovetails with the idea of the powers as a symbol of rulership.

BIRD: Doesn’t giving Dracula magic just give you more to explain, though? Comics fans are notorious for bitching about how magic gets used as a deus ex machina (and also misunderstanding what a deus ex machina is, but you follow my point).

SIMS: In a way, yes. But like I said, it’s there from the start, and I think it fits with what I’m doing. The whole book is rooted in magic. Drac himself is a supernatural being, and like I said, the premise is largely influenced by stuff like Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are magical enemies, magical artifacts that he’s looking for, there’s wizards and spirits and ghosts. And once you establish that this is a world where all of that exists, and that your main character is right at the center of it, why not embrace it? Why wouldn’t a cunning warrior who knows there are people out there who want to kill him not figure out a way to bend that to his considerable will? Especially when he’s got decades to do it.

BIRD: Fair enough. I also note that you’re going all League of Extraordinary Gentlemen on us by bringing out Varney as one of Dracula’s antagonists in the very first issue. Are there other public-domain vampires (or monsters) waiting in the wings? Lord Ruthven, the Skeleton Mistress, and so on?

SIMS: Definitely. I mentioned this in another interview, but one of the first things I did when I figured out I wanted to do this was read Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, which is this huge literary mashup about Dracula winning at the end of his story and going on to take over England. I almost didn’t want to read it because I really, really didn’t want to see someone doing what I wanted to do well before the idea even popped into my head. It’s a great book, though, and fortunately for me, it’s a drastically different take on Dracula himself, and all of the other vampires orbit around him in a completely different way that they’d interact with mine. Varney was a logical choice for the villain because I wanted an older vampire that would be just as powerful, and his story predates Dracula. But there are others out there. Carmilla’s a definite — she shows up pretty early in the story, actually — and I have ideas for guys like Count Orlok as well. At the same time, I don’t want to just use those guys, either. A lot of the fun in plotting the series has been figuring out how to blend them into the stories I want to tell.

BIRD: How far have you plotted it out so far?

SIMS: I’m writing the third issue, and I have the first seven pretty thoroughly plotted. I try to write so that there’s a complete adventure in each, but those first seven tell an overarching story. If there’s ever a print version, that’ll be what it is. Beyond that, I have ideas of where I want to go, but as far as things I’ve written, there’s only little pieces in my notebook. “Drac goes to China.” Stuff like that.

BIRD: Dracula versus hopping vampires sounds like a Thing. But I digress. So, earlier you mentioned Thalia. Elaborate.

SIMS: What do you want to know?

BIRD: You’re introducing a brand new character to the Dracula mythos. What wouldn’t one want to know?

SIMS: Thalia’s the viewpoint character of the book. As much as I love Dracula, the guy’s a super-arrogant 500 year-old vampire sorcerer king. He’s hard to relate to, and the story that you tell when it’s just him — like Tomb, for instance — is a much more violent, vicious story than what I wanted to do. When you add someone else to that, it changes the dynamic completely. She’s a motivating factor for what he does to kick off the entire series, and as swaggering and arrogant as he is, she’s seeing him at his lowest point, when he really needs someone there to help him. Plus, she’s just really fun to write. The further I get into it, the easier it is for her to assert her personality, which is handy for me since I have this fully formed, crystalized image of who Dracula is and how forceful he can be as a character. She’s a good counterpoint to him. I can’t lie, one of her primary functions in the story is as a “civilian” so that Dracula can fill us in on his backstory and what he’s doing, but I never, ever, EVER want that to be all she is. A comic that treats a character as nothing more than a prop is a bad comic. So while there is exposition, and there is the fact that she’s a mortal human being occasionally in need of rescue from these dangerous supernatural forces, her real value comes in the interactions that she has with Dracula, and what those interactions force him to confront.

BIRD: Okay, I think we’re near the end here. So: five reasons why people should purchase DRACULA THE UNCONQUERED, other than “It’s good, really.” And… go!

SIMS: 24 pages. Full-Color. All-Ages. Action, adventure, horror, comedy. One American Dollar.

BIRD: Those are some damn terse reasons right there.

SIMS: But good ones! Really, though: It’s a 24-page comic for a buck. If you buy it, you’ve gotten more all-new content than the average mainstream comic for a third for the price, and if you don’t like it, you’re out the price of a cup of coffee. And we didn’t even really talk about my collaborators on this one. I sent you a few pages before the interview that are just Steve’s pencils and inks, but he’s a phenomenal colorist as well.

BIRD: I dunno, Sims. You are asking us to wager a dollar on the expertise of comics creators who are not even ONE TENTH as experienced as Rob Liefeld.

SIMS: I’m an outsider. I’ve got some fresh ideas that’ll shake things up! But I will admit: Dracula has 100% fewer pouches on his outfit than any given member of Youngblood.

BIRD: That seems like a good cutoff point? unless there’s anything we didn’t cover you want to discuss?

SIMS: Hey man, it’s your dime. You want to cut off the interview without getting to the good stuff, that’s your business. FAR BE IT FROM ME A TWO TIME EISNER NOMINATED COMICS JOURNALIST TO TELL YOU WHAT TO DO.

BIRD: Ahem, member of the first and only digital publication to win a Canada National Magazine Award here, buddy.

SIMS: Pffft, whatever. “Canada.”

…the answer to the riddle from the Riddler comic I posted last week.

Art of course by my partner in crime, the dynamite Davinder Brar.

A few years back, I had cause to buy the novelization of ‘Infinite Crisis’, by Greg Cox. (I was working on a book project that has since fallen through on account of being terminally over-ambitious and unfinishable, and it involved reading a lot of crossovers.) I didn’t get around to reading it…see “unfinishable and over-ambitious, terminally”, above…but it’s been sitting on my bookshelf ever since. And because I never get rid of a book I paid money for without reading it, I finally sat down and read the damned thing.

Having read it, let me first say that Greg Cox really does do the best he can with the material he’s given. The prose tends towards functional, but he’s writing the dialogue that was in the original crossover. The plot is labored, with big chunks of the early plot given over to exposition, but that’s unavoidable when you have to write up a single novel that begins where DC had spent two solid years building up to. (The opening prologue, where Martian Manhunter watches the monitors in the Watchtower and recaps the events leading up to IC must have made Cox sweat bullets when he wrote it.) The novel is, I think, the absolute best adaptation of ‘Infinite crisis’ possible.

Sadly, though, reading the story without Phil Jimenez’ wonderful art to distract you, the flaws in the story only become more apparent. Which is a shame, because on paper, the basic idea for ‘Infinite Crisis’ is a wonderful one: All the shit in the DC Universe hits the fan at the exact same time. Every single thing goes wrong at once in a perfect example of the catastrophe curve in action; all the villains in the DC Universe organize into a single gigantic gang, the Spectre goes on a mad rampage, killer cyborgs swarm throughout the world wiping out metahumans, cosmic war threatens to engulf the galaxy, and the three most important heroes can’t stop it because they’ve been pushed to their breaking point. Batman’s lost in his paranoia and has actually helped precipitate events, Wonder Woman has lost the balance between hero and warrior, and Superman no longer knows how to inspire a people lost to despair.

And just when things are at their darkest, these figures from pre-Crisis DC step in and say, “This world is broken. The Crisis created a corrupted, debauched reality. We all know things used to be better. You can feel it. Just let us do what needs doing, and we will create a finer universe, the kind that we used to have.” It feels right, in the middle of all this.

Only then you find out that in fact, they’re the ones who have precipitated all this. The chaos, the darkness, the madness and war are all actually the fault of people so blinded by nostalgia that they’ve become the monsters. They’re so determined to recreate a perfect world that never really existed that they will destroy everything that’s real. The heroes find their way by opposing this madness, and the storm breaks. With the crisis over, Earth can begin to heal.

That’s the idea, of course, but the actual story muddles it. The story insists that no, Luthor did nothing to manipulate the heroes into becoming more brutal, paranoid and anti-heroic (except for the Spectre); Luthor’s statement that this Earth is a fucked-up disaster filled with inferior versions of the real DC heroes goes more or less unchallenged. The reader is left with the distinct feeling that Luthor is entirely right, especially as the Big Three heroes are never really allowed any kind of moment where they overcome their tragic flaws and make things right. (Okay, arguably Batman does, when he blows up Brother Eye. But given that Batman’s decision isn’t just flawed but out-and-out villainous, he needs far more redemption than the other two by that point.) Then, when Luthor actually succeeds at recreating the pre-Crisis multiverse (more or less…ish…kinda…) we’re left with the feeling that he may have been right after all. In the end, it feels like nobody’s right and nothing has been resolved, which is not a good ending to a story even in a comic-book universe where you have to put out another book next month.

As I’ve said before, I really do feel like the story only needs minor changes to make it all work. If the Psycho-Pirate had been revealed to be behind events, manipulating the minds of everyone involved to bring them to the point where he can finally bring back the Multiverse he remembers, I think that it would have taken some of the edge off of the unsympathetic actions of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman in the story. (As well as resolving some of the major plot holes…can someone really explain to me how Luthor “tricks” General Wade Eiling into working with Captain Nazi, or convinces Black Adam to back Captain Light’s self-righteous “they went too far” act? It all makes a lot more sense if Psycho-Pirate was smoothing things over.)

Even then, the story has flaws; the constant deaths of characters Geoff Johns doesn’t feel are popular enough to survive another crossover aren’t shocking anymore, they’re just irritating. And for all that I’d agree that Superboy-Prime really is the kind of villain who succeeds in making you root like hell against him, he needed his actual comeuppance at the end of the story. Saving him for another crossover was a mistake.

On the whole, I repeat my assertion that this was the best possible ‘Infinite Crisis’ adaptation we could hope for. That’s exactly the problem with it.

Why, yes, there is a riddle (and an answer) contained within the strip. I mean, how can you do a Riddler introduction without a riddle?

And let’s make it interesting: the first comment to give the exact answer to Riddler’s challenge (which of course demands that you first figure out what it is) will get a prize. And not some crappy “the respect of your peers” prize, either, but an actual comical book from my bookshelf.

Art provided by the extremely talented team of Adam Prosser and Ryan Howe.

UPDATE: Man, you spend the day in hospital for stuff and people just get INVOLVED.

googum came closest first, so I think he is our winner, and he shall receive a copy of American Flagg! vol. 1 by Howard Chaykin – the fancy deluxe hardcover edition Image put out a while back. I’ll put up an answer key/explanation later this week.

Now let us NEVER SPEAK OF THIS AGAIN.

SUPERMAN #1: Elements of this are interesting, and George Perez both knows how to write dialogue and breakdown a page, and the plot of the book is quite good. But Jesus Merino isn’t George Perez; he’s not even close to being George Perez, and every page with its gorgeous and perfect Perez breakdowns just reinforces for me the fact that Perez isn’t actually drawing the book. Merino is at best competent, and that in turn brings down the book for me. That, plus the stupid Lois/Clark breakup and the stupid Superman de-aging and the stupid stupid stupid new Superman costume, make it hard for me to enjoy this comic: the Superman status quo got fucked up worse than just about every other comic in the nu52 and I find it hard to be enthusiastic.

AQUAMAN #1: This was really quite good – a strong example of what all the #1s should have been. Aquaman gets a dramatic entrance, gets a fight scene, gets some nice character moments, has his powers and backstory introduced efficiently, and the initial threat for the first story arc gets set up. Geoff Johns had to sell Aquaman here, and he managed it expertly. Other than Batman, probably the best of the “Justice League Member” comic #1s. But not the best nu52 of the week.

I, VAMPIRE #1: This is the best nu52 of the week, and I was extremely surprised by that. I wasn’t expecting much out of this, and the epic vampire war comic it in fact turns out to be is goddamn great. It’s moody and bloody and probably completely incapable of coexisting longterm with the DC Universe, what with the fact that the first issue has the evil vampires massacring thousands of people in Boston. But regardless: I enjoyed the hell out of this.

THE SAVAGE HAWKMAN #1: Completely incoherent. I mean, this isn’t just “okay we’re gonna step into the middle of the ongoing run” that some of the other nu52 “no really it’s a reboot” comics like Green Lantern are. This seems to be stepping into the middle of an ongoing comic that didn’t exist before this, and it’s not a good comic either. Hawkman’s new outfit is stupid and ugly. The story is both boring and hard to follow. The dialogue is retarded. The art is confusing. Hawkman is still Hawkman, so I’m not going to pretend that I was coming into this unbiased, because fuck Hawkman, Hawkman sucks. But – I mean, Catwoman and Red Hood may be staggeringly sexist stories, but at least you can sort of read them. The Savage Hawkman, on the other hand, is almost unreadably bad; it’s the Manos, The Hands of Fate of the nu52. It’s so bad, and bad in so many ways that are unexpected, that you just have to kind of stare at it.

VOODOO #1: Now this, on the other hand, is conventionally terrible in the ways we have come to expect from the nu52. Here, I will spoil it for you: ten pages of Voodoo doing sexy stripping, a token action sequence featuring the secret agent lady that isn’t really exciting, and then the other secret agent, for no apparent reason whatsoever, asks Voodoo for a private lapdance and then tells her he is a secret agent keeping an eye on her, so she kills him with alien-shapeshift-claws. There. You now have no reason to read this comic ever. (Wait until Sami Basri illustrates a comic that isn’t a shitburger, because the art shows talent – but still isn’t reason to read this comic.)

JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK #1: Too early to tell. Peter Milligan is going full-bore weird with this book, and when Milligan does that you need to give him two or three issues to figure out what the hell he’s up to. But it’s a nice-looking and readable comic, even with all the weird, so tentative thumbs up.

THE FLASH #1: I remember back when Geoff Johns introduced that Patti character pre-Flashpoint someone complained that he was clearly going to set up a love triangle, and my response was “no, Barry’s married, they have to pull a One More Day to do that,” and then Barry Allen went back in time and annihilated Wally West (or possibly Bart Allen – the jury is still out) from existence so he could have warm fuzzy memories about his dead mother, more or less, and as a result now he and Iris are no longer married so there’s a love triangle. Kudos, guy who said that thing last year! I genuinely could not have called that! Anyway, if you can get past that, this is a perfectly decent superhero comic with gorgeous art from Francis Manapul, but this isn’t anything you’ll remember a year from now.

ALL-STAR WESTERN #1: It’s a Jonah Hex comic by Palmiotti and Gray. You know it’ll do what it says on the tin, and you know it’s gonna be good. Moritat’s art is nice, and a Jonah Hex story set in 1880s Gotham City is an interesting idea. It’s not very Western-y, but eh, whatever. It’s Jonah Hex beating people up and shooting them and stuff. What more do you want, anyway?

THE FURY OF FIRESTORM #1: And Gail Simone goes 0-for-2 with the nu52 so far, which I genuinely could not have guessed would happen, because come on, it’s Gail Simone! But this comic is not very good. The villainous mercenaries (and man, can I just say that the nu52 has so many frigging villainous mercenaries?) are over-the-top, but that is a minor complaint: the problem is that the book goes sharply off the rails at about the two-thirds mark, because before that Ronnie and Jason are normal high school students, but then out of nowhere Jason is privy to the secrets of Firestorm in advance, and then Ronnie and Jason start fighting each other, and the dialogue just starts being not very good (and seriously saying this about a Gail Simone comic is so goddamn weird you guys), and… ugh. This one was a huge disappointment; I was expecting a very good comic and this is not that thing at all.

BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT #1: The cliffhanger of this book is Two-Face demanding that now he be called “One-Face.” (Also he is the Hulk, it looks like.) If you need anything more from me to understand that this is a really bad Batman comic, just ask.

BLACKHAWKS #1: This actually managed to entertain me despite some obvious and glaring problems. It doesn’t identify a lot of its characters clearly (or in some cases at all), and in a book with a large cast that’s important. The art is… not very good, frankly, and there are several points where it simply doesn’t mesh with the writing (like where one character complains that a baddie is biting her two panels before he bites her). And of course, the plot point that someone has managed to take a picture of the super-secret Blackhawks would probably make a lot more sense if the super-secret Blackhawks didn’t have Blackhawk insignias on all their planes. But, even with all of that, the comic has a lot of energy to it, and the idea of “G.I. Joe in the DCU” is a pretty good one, and the dialogue is fun and the story okay. I can’t call this a good comic, because it isn’t really good. But it’s fun in a trashy way, and the potential for it to be good is definitely there.

GREEN LANTERN: NEW GUARDIANS #1: So the first half of this comic is… a retelling of Kyle Rayner’s origin? And then it flashes forward? I think? I’m genuinely not entirely sure; the comic doesn’t do anything crazy like label a flashback sequence as being a flashback sequence, or anything like that. Anyway, it then becomes a sort of rote “get the team together” story where they’re all gonna beat up Kyle, more or less. You can skip this, as Larfleeze does not show up anywhere, and what is the point of having the various spectrums of Lanterns if you’re not going to put Larfleeze in the damn comic, I ask you.

This one was actually quite difficult, more difficult than I originally thought it would be, mostly because after I had the idea I realized that I was trying to write an introduction for a character who would never, ever explain themselves, their motives or their ideals. And on top of that, the character is pretty laconic. But he’s still one of my favourites, so I went back to the slate until I had something.

Art provided by the redoubtable Griffin Castro.