There’s a comic book project I’ve been wanting to write for a while now, and since a) there aren’t any spoilers involved, and b) I’ll probably never get to write it anyway, I thought I’d share it with everyone. It’s based on a fairly obscure, but interesting piece of comics trivia: In Uncanny X-Men #165, during the Brood saga, Kitty Pryde is described as 14 for the first time. Her birthday, we’re told, passed while she was in space. (So Lockheed? Officially the Coolest Birthday Present Ever.)

Then, in Excalibur #15, we see her celebrating her 15th birthday in the company of Saturnyne. (Who she thinks is Courtney Ross at the time. God, it’s hard explaining Chris Claremont comics.) These two comics were both written by the same author, so there’s no question of continuity mistakes or differences in authorial intent. The span of X-books from January 1983 to late July 1990 are fully intended to take place over roughly one 365-day span of time.

And since this occurred during one of the most crossover-rich periods in comics history, we have plenty of mutual data points to tie the other Marvel books into a cohesive timeline. “January 1983” doesn’t necessarily translate across every title to the exact same moment in Marvel Time, but we know that Secret Wars happened within that span. So Johnny and Alicia started their relationship during that year, Tony Stark lost his company and had his bout with alcoholism, the Hulk turned intelligent, and Spider-Man got his black costume.

Likewise, Secret Wars II happened in that year. Which places Xavier’s mugging and subsequent exile to space, the Hulk’s exile to the dimensional crossroads, Power Pack’s…um, almost their entire career, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves, Thor’s turning into a frog (in fact, the whole Simonson run was during that year), the founding of the West Coast Avengers, Tony Stark’s retaking his company from Stane and Stane’s subsequent suicide, the end of the Dire Wraith Wars, Cyclops’ marriage and leaving of the X-Men, the entire freaking existence of the Beyonder in the Marvel Universe, Kristoff’s becoming Doom and Doom’s war against Kristoff, the return of Jean Grey and the founding of X-Factor…deep breath…all in that year too.

Oh, and the Mutant Massacre hit in that year, and the Fall of the Mutants (which means that by extension, the Armor Wars saga, Captain America being defrocked and replaced by Super-Patriot, and then returning to the role as Super-Patriot became USAgent also all hit in that year…oh, and the deaths of the X-Men and their subsequent resurrection and relocation to Australia…) And Inferno hit in that year, so that meant that Johnny and Alicia’s marriage, the Thing becoming leader of the FF, Quicksilver’s descent into and return from mental illness, the entire career of the Hobgoblin, the first appearance of Venom, the death of Kraven the Hunter, Ms Marvel becoming the She-Thing, the Hulk’s career as a Vegas enforcer, the Thing’s career as a pro wrestler, the Masters of Evil’s assault on Avengers’ Mansion, the Avengers disbanding and subsequent reformation as a team consisting of Mr Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, Gilgamesh, Thor and Cap, the Avengers’ relocation to Hydrobase, Daredevil’s secret identity being discovered by the Kingpin, Storm losing and regaining her powers, the destruction of the X-Mansion, the temporary transformation of New York into a demonic netherworld…and although we can’t be sure, since Excalibur didn’t participate in that particular crossover, it also looks like Acts of Vengeance happened around then. So that adds the founding of the New Warriors, the destruction of Hydrobase…

Basically, it was a busy freaking year. 🙂 (You may feel free to contribute further momentous events in the comments section, but I think you get the idea.) The plan for the series I want to write borrows from DC’s “52”; only instead of telling a “missing” year of continuity in real time, this 52-issue weekly series would go back and retell that 365-day span of Marvel Time in real time. The reverse of decompression, it would try to convey to the readers the sheer chaos that exists in the Marvel Universe, and what it feels like to live in a world moving that fast. A year where snow fell in summer, where gods and more-than-gods walked the earth, a year where Iron Man quit and Captain America got fired, a year of destruction and creation and joy and sorrow…Marvel. One Year.

Anyone interested in reading that?

I have always loved the Rocket Reds, and the reason is simple: they are the Barry Horowitz of the DC Universe.

Barry Horowitz, for those not in the know, was a professional wrestler and probably the last truly great jobber – the designated loser, the one who showed up to get his ass kicked by the up-and-coming star or the veteran needing the easy win to re-establish himself. He jobbed out for twenty years in the WWF before it became the WWE, and he was a master at not only making his opponents look good at kicking his ass, but at getting the crowd to love it when they kicked his ass. Barry Horowitz with his trademark self-pat-on-the-back, always entirely undeserved and always pointedly obnoxious, who always got pinned. Of course, over time the crowds came to love Horowitz, because you had to recognize skill when you see it, which eventually led to the “HOROWITZ WINS!” angle, wherein he finally managed a win and the crowd went nuts.

Which brings me back to the Rocket Reds. It’s worth remembering that the Rocket Reds were, for the most part, not a very pleasant bunch when they first arrived: Rocket Red #7 – the “classic” Rocket Red we all remember from the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League – was an exception to the rule. Most of the Rocket Reds were portrayed as clueless peons of an oppressive regime. And so they remained… until they weren’t that any more, because dammit, there is something likeable about the Rocket Reds. The Rocket Reds somehow have become something like the Russian ideal of a superhero – soldiers rather than vigilantes, sense of duty to the state, predilection for getting their ass kicked but in a stoic, we’ll-wear-you-down-eventually sort of way. In the Villains United special during Infinite Crisis, which was really the high point of the whole misguided exercise, Gail Simone has former Rocket Reds busting into their old armory to suit up in Rocket Red armor to go fight the army of villains, all the while chatting calmly about how this will most likely get them killed, and the humour of the scene just feels very grimly Russian in a way that’s very essential.

Nowadays the Rocket Reds are more or less a required element whenever one does a DC comic that might involve Russia. It’s almost impossible for there not to be Rocket Reds – it would be like going to Gorilla City and not having sentient gorillas. (If and when Batman ever goes to hire the Batman of Moscow, that Russian Batman should be a former Rocket Red.) Because the Rocket Reds might be the guys who get their asses kicked so the real heroes can look good – but they’ve got such a great way of getting their asses kicked that you can’t but help rooting for them.

I mentioned on Twitter recently1 that I liked FF #1, the newest iteration of Jonathan Hickman’s run on Fantastic Four, a hell of a lot. Other comic reviews were busy orgasming over the new issue of Batman Inc., which in fairness is quite good.2 But for me, FF was far and away the best comic of the week3, and then someone emailed and asked me why, and it’s been a long time since I did a proper comics review, so why not?

If I had to boil down FF‘s skill in a pragmatic manner, finding the one key element that I think makes it really work as a comic, it’s that Jonathan Hickman and Steve Epting have together done what the best ongoing superhero comics do: provide change which is mostly illusory but nonetheless existent. That’s the magic level of change you want in a great superhero comic: you can make all the huge sweeping changes you like to a character’s raison d’etre, his supporting cast, his costume, you can make him become The Amazing Rutabaga-Man for six months, but in the end these properties have amazing inertia. For example: if you give a character a Stunning New Costume, at best in fifteen years or so it will become a fondly-remembered artifact4; at worst it will become a source of bad comedy.5 I expect the new costumes in FF #1 will fall into the former category; they’re different enough that they’re honestly interesting, and they look good. But we all know that in a few years time we’ll be back to the blue costumes with big 4s on them, and that doesn’t really bother anybody.

Similarly, we know that in time, Johnny Storm will be revealed to not be dead. Hickman can protest as much as he likes that Johnny Storm is dead, but we all know he’s full of crap even if his intentions are honest (and really, given that he had Johnny die conspicuously off-panel, I don’t believe him for a second). But for the moment Johnny’s dead, and what’s important – and what Hickman and Epting do, note-perfect – is enforce the reality that this would traumatize the fuck out of the remaining members of the Fantastic Four. Again, this is not a new idea for writers of the book to explore; Mark Waid and Mike Weiringo did it when they killed off Ben temporarily during their run and there’s been one or two other times where other writers played with the idea as well. But Hickman and Epting’s work in showing how absolutely devastated the FF are is heartbreaking and lovely. Epting’s work on Ben in mourning – and Ben is always the most visually expressive of the FF – are some of my favorite panels he’s done ever.

Equally lovely is the fact that Spider-Man is the temporary replacement for Johnny, which is again perfect. This is not to knock all the other writers who have had Black Panther or She-Hulk or Ant-Man or Crystal or whoever be the “temporary fourth member of the Fantastic Four” – most of the alternates that have come through at one time or another have made story sense and been entirely decent.6 But Fantastic Four is a comic book about a family more than anything else, and over the past decade Spidey steadily became part of their extended family. It just feels like how, when a family suffers a major loss, your uncle maybe moves in for a while to make sure the place doesn’t fall apart. It feels essentially proper in a way that many other alternate members haven’t, and serves to reinforce the sense of loss that the FF have undergone (and Hickman and Epting use that as well). Really, Peter makes more sense as a member of the FF than he ever has as an Avenger.

(It’s worth noting, incidentally, that all of what I’ve mentioned so far is Hickman doing something he’s not really noted for: he’s writing small-ball here rather than playing with the crazy big ideas he built his rep on, and he’s killing it.)

And while Hickman and Epting give the introduction of the new FF – the “Future Foundation,” complete with the array of weirdly brilliant kids they brought in halfway through their run of Fantastic Four – all the due time they need, they also don’t forget to introduce their chosen antagonist. They’ve gone, it seems, with the Wizard, who is an interesting choice precisely because if you’re going to pick an F4 adversary who’s been in need of some stature-building for a long time, I’m pretty sure you have to pick the Wizard. I think every single major run on F4 over the last ten or fifteen years has used the Wizard alongside the Frightful Four at one point or another, and every single time the Wizard is revealed to be a dorky second-rater in a dorky purple helmet. Hickman and Epting, though, in the course of a few panels, make him genuinely intimidating, which is not a word I have associated with the Wizard in approximately ever, and it’s just good to see.

So you have your illusory change: Johnny’s dead! New costumes! Not even calling themselves “the Fantastic Four” any more! And that’s all exciting, but in five years or less it will be memories. But you also have your persistent change: exploration of the family’s trauma, deepening of Spidey’s relationship with them, what looks like an emphatic effort to finally put the Wizard into top-tier villain status. Those two elements, combined, make for what ongoing superhero comics can and should be. That’s why this is a good comic.

1. I know, I know… [↩]
2. It’s certainly more accessible than at least half of the Batman comics written by Grant Morrison, for a start. [↩]
3. Disclaimer: I have not read the new Xombi yet. That might well beat it, if it is anything as good as the first Xombi series was. [↩]
4. Say, for example, Dr. Strange’s Trenchcoat of Levitation period, or the time when he was wearing a mask. [↩]
5. Say, for example, the Mike Grell-era skin-bearing costume for Cosmic Boy. [↩]
6. Well, maybe not Ant-Man. [↩]

(What I hope is my final bar exam is today, so…)

Many people suspect that death is not the end of things, and some of them are right. Others aren’t. Death, in the Marvel Universe at least, is a capricious thing. Most everything never comes back: the spandex set has gotten so used to the idea of resurrection that they often fail to realize how many of them never come back. (Go look at the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe’s Book of the Dead sometime. I did the math: about three-quarters of them have never been resurrected.) And that’s just costumes. The regular joes of the MU know that dead is dead.

Of course, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, if you listen very carefully, you can hear the dead. Not with your ears, of course. But you hear them nonetheless. If you’ve got the right sort of training, you might be able to make out, on occasion, what they’re saying. If you tried hard enough, that is. And if you have that training, and you are the sort of person who discovered – relatively later in life than one might expect – that you in fact possess a deep wellspring of compassion, then you might try hard enough. And because you had that compassion, you might take action when you realized that they weren’t so much speaking as crying.

What Stephen Strange heard was weeping – fearful weeping. And so he put himself into a state of living death, because how else are you going to visit the nether realms? And he found a professional super-criminal, dead and gone, trapped in a box of their own making: a trial (this particular super-criminal had been through many trials when they were alive) of their entire life. It’s grounded in real-world details – a judge, a jury, bailiffs, a set of scales – but it’s all ever so wrong, and because this person is already scared every detail serves to reinforce their fear. The judge’s eyes don’t appear to exist. The jury is at times twelve people and then one person with twelve faces. Sometimes there are walls, sometimes not. Sometimes there isn’t a floor except for the faces of people the criminal sort of remembers. They’re not friendly faces.

Now, Dr. Strange knows better than most people that we can and usually do influence our own afterlives, but he also knows that just telling someone that doesn’t work – the delusion of our souls is too strong just for one to say “well, no, actually this isn’t happening.” That doesn’t work. You need to guide them through it on their own. So Dr. Strange takes up the role of this super-criminal’s defense attorney in the last trial of their existence. It’s as good an opening as he can manage: by representing the lost soul, he can subtly remind them of why they don’t deserve to be here. He can give them peace, which is, for them, the only gift that endures.

Of course, this is the Marvel Universe, which means there’s a problem: the prosecutor. You see, the prosecutor isn’t a delusion. He’s quite real. He knows when opportunities like this pop up, and he’s always ready to capitalize. He wants this criminal’s soul for reasons of his own – there are always reasons when you’re dealing with this sort of being. He wants the guilty verdict: he wants that super-criminal to want to be punished, unendingly and forever, and to choose it themselves. And he’s not entirely happy that Stephen Strange has come along to muck things up. But fine, he thinks, let the Sorcerer Supreme flail about; Strange doesn’t know the tricks of the courtroom of the soul, but the prosecutor does.

Because Mephisto has done this many, many times before. And his record is perfect.

Mitchell Hundred: The above article was written a while ago about fantasy novels, but a similar trend could also be identified in many forms of contemporary art (increasing gritty realism, morally ambiguous narrative, graphic description of unpleasant events, etc.). What do you make of the accusation made in the above article (that these pieces demean the genre and art as a whole)?

It’s wank, pure and simple. (I know, wank at Big Hollywood? Goodness gracious me!) Just for the sake of argument, let’s rattle off the bestselling fantasy authors of the past decade: Stephanie Meyer, J.K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman, Christopher Paolini, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin… are we seeing a trend here? The overwhelming trend in fantasy isn’t what the writer describes; it’s a push towards moral clarity to appeal to a young-adult audience. (And, in the case of Jordan, braid-tugging.) Even Martin, who’s probably the closest to what the author complains about, has very strongly moral characters in his books: Jon Snow, most of the Starks, many of the Night’s Watch, Davos, Daenerys… you can even make a case for Jaime Lannister.

What the author is complaining about is that the sort of sword-and-sorcery fantasy he likes (which he tokens to become all fantasy writing period) is getting gritty and unpleasant now, to which I respond “where were you when Stephen R. Donaldson started writing books in the late Seventies?” Hell, has he read any old Conan stories? Conan is not a nice person!

Nicodemus: Have you ever read the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher?

No. It’s one of my “get around to it” things. That list just keeps getting longer.

FistFullofFists: On a scale of sad to depressed, how sad are you to see stargate universe canceled?

Not at all. I mean, I’m sorry people who liked Stargate: Whatever lost out on a show, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like The Bachelor where the existence of the show is actively offensive. But I watched the movie and then I watched a few episodes of the first season of SG-1 and then I said, “well, that’s enough for me.”

Skemono: I think everyone would benefit from an essay on why Hawkman is a dick and everybody hates him.

Some people think Hawkman sucks because all he does is fly. This is erroneous. There are plenty of superheroes who “just fly,” and many of them are quite nifty, because flying is honestly pretty cool all by itself, and because it’s a natural progression for flying heroes who just fly to be more skillful fliers (Angel of the X-Men, for example, or Dawnstar in the LSH – yes, I know she has tracking powers too, but big deal) which gives them an additional niche. Hawkman, however, does not do this. What Hawkman does instead is be a dickhead: he’s the Token Conservative to Green Arrow’s Token Liberal (and Green Arrow is just as annoying as fucking Hawkman is) and it’s become his character thing to be a pompous, annoying douche.

On top of that, there are the melee weapons. In a setting where people can blow you up with eye lasers, melee weapons are stupid. More importantly, though, is that because they are stupid, writers have come up with justifications as to why they are not stupid which make them even stupider. I believe this reached its apex in Cry for Justice, wherein it was explained that Hawkman was “unpredictable” and a “berserker” and therefore Prometheus was worried about him for some reason, as if for some reason Prometheus could not just, like, shoot him.

And then there’s his origin story. Hawkman’s origin story has been so mangled that it is beyond belief, mostly because people wanted to “reconcile” Egyptian Hawkman and Space Hawkman into one character, which is stupid because it’s not like there’s some special ability you need to let you put on a flying belt and wings.

So basically everything about Hawkman sucks.

drasnianfrank: What are the best Dr. Strange issues to read (or issues that have Dr. Strange in them)?

Anything from the original Lee/Ditko run is good, but my soft spot is Roy Thomas’s run on the line; just gorgeous cosmic stuff, as you would expect from Thomas. “The Montesi Formula” story is truly excellent writing with mediocre art (and available in trade). Warren Ellis’ brief run on the character towards the end of Dr. Strange: Sorcerer Supreme is well worth reading, as is Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin’s The Oath.

Just go with the Essentials, really: the B&W art actually, I think, improves the comics, since the lack of “hey look we’re otherworldly” colouring makes the book far more readable.

scarecrowprophet: I realised the original text for the first 30 ISWTLegion posts isn’t up, just the pictures and later commentary. Could you post the original text?

The original text largely isn’t worth reproducing. Remember, ISWTL started out as a series of joke posts; only towards the end did I start doing what I did with them later, exploring plot hooks and the like.

Cookie McCool: But then, I had a huge crush on Aquaman back then, too, so what the fuck did I know?

Hey, Aquaman is pretty cool when he’s done right. Which isn’t often (WHERE IS HIS BEARD, DAMMIT? HE LOOKS TEN THOUSAND TIMES MORE AWESOME WITH A BEARD), but hey.

JL: What’s the status of that Novella? I really liked what I read and the hook was golden.

Novel, not novella; it’s on hold while I try to get a lot of other things done. I’m hoping to finish it by the end of the year, but then again I said that last year. (I have a lot of sympathy for George R.R. Martin.)

Thornae: How big are your comic and book collections?

Comics: I have about two large shelves of trades and some overflow. My longboxes are in storage and I’m gradually trading/selling them off (anybody interested in a Green Arrow Grell/Dixon run? The Denny O’Neil Question?) except for my Legion and Dr. Strange collections.

My books – another two large bookshelves’ worth. At least.

Stephen T. Stone: What would your alignment chart for King of the Hill look like?

The problem with King of the Hill, alignment-chart-wise, is that there isn’t anyone who really qualifies as evil. Even Dale is just kind of stupid as opposed to mean or selfish.

PS Bernard: Now that Gates is part of the new “Levitz Legion”, would you re-introduce Kent Shakespeare to the Legion?

Confession: I have absolutely no emotional connection to the current remix edition of the Legion. The book’s readable now (it had a horrible start), and I quite liked the recent Legion of Super-Villains special, but it’s still kind of feels ersatz; I “know” what happened to these characters in v4 and it all seems like alternate history or something to me.

That having been said, Kent Shakespeare was always intended as Yet Another Superman Proxy; if you don’t need someone to play up the Legion’s Superman connection then he’s kind of redundant.

given that Doctor Strange would be your first choice to write that’s not your own original stuff, who or what would be your second?

The Legion, obviously. After that: Runaways, Justice League International, Anarky, and Fantastic Four. (Anybody who wants to write comics and doesn’t want to write Fantastic Four has something wrong with them.)

Steve Timberman: Which handles serialization better – Television or Comics?

TV, because TV by virtue of cost has to have endings.

Desumaytah: Does the idea of a MGK-written “Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu” hold any interest for you?

Not really: anything I would want to do with it has already been done – and probably better – in Immortal Iron Fist.

rbx5: Two questions: if one wanted to get into the Legion, where would one start? And also, after seeing your Akira post (which summed up my thoughts on the movie perfectly, and almost in passing at that), I was wondering what other manga you like?

The recent Great Darkness Saga deluxe hardcover seems to be in remaindered bookstores now all over the place – good job there, DC – and it’s a great starting point because it goes about ten issues on either side of the actual Great Darkness Saga itself and has Legion of Super-Heroes v2 Annual #1, which is a great intro story all in itself. The other good alternative is starting with the reboot Legion post Zero Hour, which is genuinely great superhero comics for about six years before sharply spiraling into mediocrity for a year or so and then rebounding just as dramatically into Big Space Opera when Abnett and Lanning sign on.

Other manga I like: Ranma 1/2, Maison Ikkoku, Oishinbo (despite occasionally being really irritating), Monster and anything by Yoshihiro Tatsumi.

Arthur Robinson: I loved what you did on your “How to start reading comics.” post. Is it possible to make a similar post for television? (“How to start watching TV, perhaps?)

It seems kind of redundant, because unlike comics, TV is a field that is widely criticized and discussed in mainstream media. The point of the “how to start reading comics” post was that comics which are widely critically praised are not necessarily good starting points for someone who has never really read comics (e.g. Watchmen), but honestly, you don’t need any help from anybody to start watching The Wire or find a list of shows telling you how good Larry Sanders is.

If you’re looking for introductions to older television, the AV Club recently did a couple of primers for 70s sitcoms and 80s sitcoms which are a good start.

Disco: What’s your number one board game of 2010?

I finally played Railroad Tycoon/Railways of the World in 2010 and absolutely loved it and bought all the expansions. So let’s go with that. I also played Mr. President, a political campaign game from 1967, for the first time in 2010 and was amazed by how damn good it was as a game; it’s gone seriously under-recognized. (Possibly because 3M made two games called Mr. President and the 1965 version is a crappy roll-and-move.)

chibikonatsu what’s your opinion on Astro City?

The Dark Age killed a lot of the series’ momentum, which is a shame because before that it was one of the best ongoing superhero series period.

rbx5: Is DS9 your favorite Trek, and if so, why?

Yes, and it’s simple: the most engaging ongoing plot, the strongest cast of characters with the most diverse moral spectrum and most character development, and the best overall writing of any Trek. TNG and classic Trek probably have higher peaks than DS9, but DS9 has the most consistency.

Zach: What, in your opinion, are the greatest comic storylines? And conversely, what are the worst?

That’s a post for another time.

Andrew Jeanes: Any thoughts on Chris “Dr.” Hastings getting hired to write Deadpool?

Good for him? And it’s a good match for the character.

KDBryan: Are you reading Secret Six from DC? If so, what would you say to get people to start reading it?

Yes, and I would say that it’s like Suicide Squad except more engaging and generally better than Suicide Squad was. If you don’t know what Suicide Squad is, then how about “it’s what Thunderbolts could have been if Marvel editorial had been brave enough to really do a proper book about villains without turning them into caricatures or ersatz heroes.”

Packerchu: Which alignment is Rex?

Neutral Good. Duh.

Seems to make sense to handle these questions today, so:

Benman: How far ahead have you plotted Al’Rashad?

Ex-roommate Other Chris is correct when he says it was first written as a movie script about ten years ago. I’ve revised it since then, though, to an extent – fixed some beats, changed around the ending a bit – and he’s also correct in saying that I’m revising it for the new medium. (Mostly because I told him that last time we had beers together.)

However, that’s not all of the answer, since Al’Rashad: City of Myths is the first part of a trilogy of stories, to be followed (hopefully, one day) by Ra-Boku: The Topless Towers and Karukomum: Empire Of Walls. Right now, we’re at about the halfway mark of chapter 2 of Al’Rashad, which should have eight chapters if I’m doing the story math right. Al’Rashad is completely plotted out; Ka-Boku‘s plot beats are about three-quarters finished, and Karukomum – well, I know the broad strokes there.

Edgar Allan Poe: What’s the driving idea behind Al’Rashad, other than Viking Prince + Sinbad?

Honestly, it started because I wanted to write a fantasy epic and it seemed like an underused choice of setting at the time. Sometimes you don’t start writing a story with “what’s the philosophy that underlies the entire plot.” That having been said, as I wrote it, I eventually found what I wanted from it. So, yes, there’s something. Saying what would be, at this point, a pretty major spoiler.

Prankster: People sort of already asked this, but I’ll reaffirm: how long is Al’Rashad planned to be, and what’s the “elevator pitch”? Where’s the story going, without spoilers obviously?

Length: dealt with. “Elevator pitch” was always, to me anyway, “what if Lord of the Rings didn’t have fantasy races substituting in for different cultures, wasn’t slightly racist, and also was kind of different from Lord of the Rings,” which really isn’t much of a pitch but if I gave you the real pitch – well, again, spoilers.

As for where it’s going in the near future: well, obviously Halfdar and Kahal have to escape those slave cells, for a start. That’s just getting underway. After that, I can say that you’ll start to see the wider repercussions of Tanquir’s initial attack on Halfdar’s ship, as well as what Halfdar and Kahal do next.

Brendan: Why a “Caliphate” for the Al-Rashad setting, instead of a “Sultanate”? I mean, wouldn’t that be comparable to having Papal states in a traditional European fantasy setting?

Longer version: the Rashadi Caliphate gradually formed as Rashan, the religion that forms its backbone, grew in popularity. The current Caliph is the seventy-seventh in the line, the direct descendant of Rashad himself, the Eighth Seer. (The Ninth Seer, it is said, will arrive only before the end of the world.) By the laws of Rashan, the ruler of the Caliphate must from Rashad’s line, but politics being what they are this traditionally means that the various families who previously held their own sultanates in what is now the Caliphate now advance themselves politically by tying themselves to or advising the line of the Caliphs, or by being so economically powerful that although the Caliph technically is supposed to be able to say “jump this high,” realistically he never will. Dalakhra, whom you’ve only met recently, comes from the most powerful of the group of families calling themselves the Realists, who interpret Rashani scripture to consider slavery (among many other sinful acts) legal. The Realists used to control the Caliph quite efficiently, but this changed about fifty years ago.

Shorter version: It’s a Caliphate because it’s a state deriving its ruling authority through religious power. At least technically, anyway.

xourherox: Would you consider sharing your script for book one of Al’Rashad?

Maybe a bit further down the line, but honestly, you’re not going to get blown away by script pages a lot of the time, not least because Davinder and I work closely beforehand to establish visuals in advance of me writing about them, so panel descriptions end up being things like “and now we see TANQUIR’S SHIP, you know, like we talked about.”

Also, I generally like to give my artists wide berth when it comes to interpretation of what I write. Comics, they is a partnership, you know? I don’t do those giant monologues in the script like Alan Moore does.

googum: You may have already been asked or answered this, but do you work full script for Al-Rashad, or Marvel method (plot then art then script)?

Mostly full script, but I have altered the script a couple of times when I felt Davinder’s art demanded some slightly different dialogue.

SPECIAL “WITH CONTEXT” EDITION

Most people who are familiar with Akira only know it via the movie and “KANEEEEEEDAAAA!” “TETSUUUUUOOOOOO!”, which is a shame because the movie, while visually spectacular, doesn’t do the complex plot of the manga justice: Otomo basically kept in the first third of the book and the final sixth, and tried to glue them together to create a coherent whole, and, bluntly, failed utterly to do so. I mean, the movie doesn’t even really have Akira in it, whereas in the manga he is a terrifying godlike force whose presence drives the story in the second half.

Anyhow, Akira the manga is about the results of scientists trying to cheat their way through human evolution and then the characters having to deal with (or be) the consequences of that. It’s pretty goddamned epic, but one of the reasons it remains great is because Otomo had the good sense to put Kaneda in: as the story progresses to the point where desperate soldiers are fighting demigods with space lasers, Kaneda grounds everything because he has next to no idea what’s really going on, and only gets involved because – at least at first – he’s trying to get with a girl. Watching him gradually become the hero of the piece, while never losing sight of the fact that he’s still kind of a big-mouthed jackass, is one of the reasons Akira’s scale is so effective.

Anyway, this all comes to a head when about three-quarters of the way through, Kei (the aforementioned girl) prepares to sacrifice herself against Tetsuo, taking the powers of the assorted good psychics within herself in an attempt to stop him once and for all – and, because she really does love the jackass, finally suggests to Kaneda that they spend a night together. Kaneda, after a double-take or three, loses it because he can’t accept her willingness to sacrifice her life, and storms off, saying he’ll kill Tetsuo himself (and believe me, he’s completely sincere about committing what you know has to be suicide).

And then this, one of my favorite bits in the entire series, when he storms back a second later: