Covering Me...Is A Great Artist!

Last week I got an email from good ol' Captain Ron Fortier, mastermind of Airship 27 and the man who'll be publishing the Shadow Legion's adventures, as I continued to slave away on the stories that will comprise the follow-up to New Roads To Hell....and he brought some good news.

It seems that Ron has located the cover artist for the book that'll introduce The Shadow Legion to the world...the one, the only Mike Fyles!

If you're not familiar with Fyles, you're missing out. He's one of the premiere artists in the field of New Pulp, having provided gorgeous fully-painted covers for loads of magazines and books...but don't take my word for it, check out this interview and ogle some of the work he's done previously!

There's more to come her at the Agency, including another great 'Elsewhere In The Multiverse' interview with Project: Alpha author Lee Houston, Jr. and more previews and goodies to get you up to speed on The City of Nocturne!

Elsewhere In The Multiverse Part Three: Meet Tommy Hancock

Far too often, the phrase 'years in the making' is used in a reflexive way.

Not when it comes to Tommy Hancock's Yesteryear. This is a book that Tommy started working on way back in his fandom days, posting nascent version of his epic super-hero story/conspiracy thriller on his website to little fanfare. Now that he's the head man of Pro Se Press, one of the leading lights in the New Pulp movement, he's managed to perfect this story of a young man who may hold the secrets of the super-heroic world and put it out into the world. And it's not hard to see why it took so long, as Yesteryear is an essential work for fans interested in super-hero prose fiction, as he's managed to fabricate an entire history for a world where the presence of super-heros and villains threaten to warp the very fabric of morality.

Of course, being a busy man, Tommy Hancock's done a whole lot more. He's spearheaded the Pulp Obscura imprint, where modern writers are invited to revive little known characters from the golden age of pulps. And he's also one of the masterminds behind The Sovereign City Project, a shared universe revolving around a fictitious city and the heroes that operate within.

(And if things go well, The Nocturne Travel Agency will soon offer trips to Sovereign City....but you'll learn more about that in the coming months).

So let's learn more about the man who knows where all the paranormal bodies are...Tommy Hancock!

Tommy, thanks for visiting The Agency.

You've worked on Yesteryear for....well, years. How did this novel develop in your head?

Very paradoxically actually. In a lot of ways it swirled out a whole lot of chaotic images, snippets of stories, and general plot lines. But, and here's where the paradox comes in, it also arose out of one simple goal, something a lot of fanpeople have before they grow (I almost said mature, but then again, not sure if I've done that) up and become creators themselves. And that goal was to create my own take on the era of characters I absolutely adored. The Golden Age. And at the time I came up with this initially, the only concept that had really explored the effects of the Golden Age on the modern Era of comics was Roy Thomas' Infinity Inc. So I theorized...what if I went a step further...what it there were heroes....what if there was consistency and even growth of that population over decades..... Using that concept, it became obvious that, unlike the Golden Age of Comics, I couldn't start with spandex and capes. I had to go back a bit farther...The roots of this complex universe had to be in Pulps.

And that's one of the things I've really enjoyed about reading the book, is the sense that this is a fully realized world that was thoroughly changed that one day in 1929. I imagine you had countless stories in this continuum you could have told. How did you end up picking and choosing the stories to highlight in those excerpts from Ramsey Long's manuscript?

I'm glad you enjoyed it...and that's a good question that I've gotten before....but to be honest...there was no other way to tell this other than the stories that Ramsey Long wanted to tell. This whole concept....the novel, the trilogy, the stories that come out of it and grow around it, they all revolve around Ramsey Long and to a large degree his modern counterpoint. This the story of one man....a man who was there at the beginning of quite literally the birth of a brand new era and who fought through his own childhood wonder and amazement and saw the underbelly, yet kept enough of the golden feeling these heroes gave him to actually become one. So the stories that are in Yesteryear and will appear in the future volumes definitely have to be the ones told.

There seems to be this tendency in mainstream comics to deny the richness of The Golden Age--look at how DC has obliterated their heritage with their last reboot, for example. What is it about the Golden Age of Comics that appeals to you?

It's not just the Golden Age of Comics..... It's that era of creativity period. And it actually starts long before the late 20s, it reaches back to the first time Ned Buntline put a pen to paper about the adventures Buffalo Bill never had. There's a period in American culture from about 1870 to 1954 that gave birth to the strongest representations of genre literature, to the best concepts of hero and villain, good and evil, conflict and resolution. If you list the characters that people remember, the ones that inspire the creations of others.... most come from that era. Shelock Holmes (although not American) is a great example of the vibrancy of this period that gave birth to so many homages and even pastiches that still influence creators today. Before Doc Savage there was Wylie's Gladiator and even the near superhuman Nick Carter (who exhibited abilities beyond those of mortal men long before he was ever Killmaster or whatever travesty they turned him into in the 1960s).

So you approached this all as one flowing continuum, as a single entity and opposed to how some people would approach it by separating the mediums (i.e. keeping pulp characters and comic characters as their own separate 'timelines')?

Well sure, because look at how they developed. Pulps didn't give birth to comics, then just simply fade away. Yes, it's true that comics likely contributed to the death of Pulps, but it was a slow death indeed, the final breath escaping long after comic books originally debuted. So these mediums and the characters they ushered in coexisted, fed off each other, and continually reinvented themselves due to the existence of other mediums. Yesteryear deals with all these concepts, not just Pulp and Comics, but it also hints at the influence of Hollywood on the society and particularly the Heroes and Villains of the Era. These characters weren't created to live in separate continuities ever, they never have.

So are there stories that predate 1929 that might be told in future volumes?

Not necessarily. In Yesteryear, it's very clearly stated. Everything changes one day in 1929. Having said that, though, there will be connections to the past, even centuries in the past that that one day in 1929 will bring to the forefront and will have effects on the modern day, particularly of later volumes. But no, almost all, if not all the stories will be firmly centered in the post 1929 era.

When working on Yesteryear, did you have a master document, a timeline or concordance so you could keep what amounts to almost a century of history straight?

I usually don't work with an outline. In the case of Yesteryear, what I did was actually write Who's Who/Handbook type entries. I had a half page to a page on every character (most of who did not even make it into Yesteryear) and of course the entries intertwined and tangled together...but that was really it, no true timeline. I think, for me anyway, plotting out things so specifically hampers what I do as a writer, it takes away from the surprise of the process for me.

Were these Who's Who entries just prose pieces, or did you sketch out some of the characters?

Me...sketch? Uh...no.

There does seem to be a theme of how the nature of super-heroics have changed in the modern era, how they've become less idealized....why do you think this has happened in the comic industry? Do you think a yearning for that more idealistic, moral sort of storytelling is what is causing the interest in New Pulp as a genre and a movement?

Again, this isn't about the comics industry alone. Post modernism has taken ahold of all mediums, particularly since the 1960s, and suddenly every villain has to have something heroic and every hero must really be a dastardly crumbum deep inside. I deal with this in Yesteryear, not because that sort of story appeals to me, because it actually doesn't at all...but it's a part of the timeline that I'm writing within. And yes, there's quite a bit of truth to the idea that New Pulp and other things, like family themed movies and kiddie comics, are seeing a resurgence because some people really do want things to be more clearly defined, more black and white. But there's also an interest in New Pulp and similar things because there are creators who want to push the envelope, who want to take that concept of black and white and push it even farther.

One of the results of the journey we go on in Yesteryear is a character taking on a 'legacy identity.' Legacy identities used to be a big part of mainstream comics--it wasn't that long ago one of the comic houses defined themselves as 'the home of the legacy character'....what is the appeal of a legacy character, of the same identity being handed down from generation to generation?

Hm...I'm not sure that it has anything to do with appeal for me. Legacy characters are in Yesteryear because that is a major aspect of human nature. We pass things on, on to our children, on to those who come after, even on to those who don't want them. Legacy is part of existence and any universe, be it full of super heroes or angsty 1990s stereotypes drinking their lives away at a coffee shop, will have a component of legacy within it.

One of the more modern touches is the conspiracy angle that acts as the MacGuffin that drives much of the novel's plot...conspiracies have always been around in media, but they seem to have exploded in the last twenty years or so, infusing all of our entertainment. Why do you think people are attracted to the idea of conspiracies?

Oh, I think the interest in conspiracies has been around since the first time a caveman saw two of his cavepeers talking in hushed whispers across the cave from him. We are curious creatures, which is not unique to the human race, but combine that with our unique intelligence and suddenly we are curious with purpose. And it's not just to know...it's to know all the angles. Now take that concept and combine it with the growth and personalization of media and communication in the last twenty to forty years and that's why there is such an interest in conspiracies. We know more faster and therefore we can concoct our theories of who done what why and when even quicker than before.

And we can get them out into the aether a whole lot quicker to a whole lot more people than we ever did!

So you're planning this story to be carried into a trilogy at this point?

Actually, it will go far beyond a trilogy. The initial three books, Yesteryear being the first, are setting the stage for what will follow and that will be a combination of tales from the rich vibrant Heroic Era told free and independently of Long's viewpoint as well as a totally new direction for the modern era of this universe that many creators, though they say they want to go there, won't do so in a modern setting. But I intend to.

Now you used real-life cities in constructing the world of Yesteryear...in another project you've been concocting over at Pro Se Press, The Sovereign City Project, you've created a fictitious city for the heroes to operate in. What prompted you to create this new background from whole cloth? What are the strengths and/or weakenesses of coming up with your own city?

I don't see any weaknesses with it at all. The joy in creating your own city is that it can have everything a real city has in it or doesn't have to have any of it. Sovereign City has the Statue of Liberty in its history, even though it may or may not be there now....And as for the prompt for Sovereign City... it basically came from the concept of having one city that in some way or another has every aspect that a city would need to have for storytelling purposes. It's got mountains on one side, a rich green countryside on the other, a Harbor, a few lakes in and about the area, a bowery, a rich section of town, etc. and so on and so forth. If a city has it, then it's a part of Sovereign.

And hopefully, it'll have a chinatown soon...chuckles

It does already. There's...two actually....and that's all I'll say about that.

That's the thing about Sovereign City...these attributes of the city aren't simply thrown in there because we want them there. There's a reason there's two Chinatowns in the city. There's a reason that Barry can write about the dark dreary streets of Sovereign in Lazarus Gray while I focus on some of the shinier parts of the city in my upcoming Doc Daye tales.

How did you decide upon this mosaic nature, with each author you've invited being asked to donate a character to the ciity?

You won't like this answer, but I just did.... It came to me that way and I asked the two writers who fit that concept the best at that point.

Can you tell us a bit about Doc Daye? Some fun facts to know and tell?

Nope.

Can you tell us what to expect from the sequel to Yesteryear? From Pro Se Press in general?

The sequel to Yesteryear is entitled Nomorrow and it literally picks up within days of the end of Yesteryear. There'll be a whole slew of new characters introduced, but also quite a bit of what was set up in the first one will be built on and even resolved in some way.

As far as what to expect from Pro Se, that's hard to do and it has nothing to do with being mysterious. We set out with Pro Se Press to literally put the monthly back into Pulp and we've done that in spades. We have so much coming soon, including continuations of a lot of the great work done in the last two years as well as some stunning new things....like Pulse Fiction.... Black Pulp.... A Savage Western... and so much more.

Any last words you'd like to share with the deinizens of The Agency?

I write to tell stories. I write to see the characters in my head become more than errant voices and walk around and do their thing. I write because people read. For those who have read Yesteryear, other things I've written, or books and magazines I've published, a tip of the fedora and a whole tommy gun of thanks.

Tommy, thank you to spending time with us here at the Agency...hopefully, you can come visit us again when Nomorrow reaches fruition!

Most definitely!

To purchase Yesteryear, The Sovereign City books or any Pro Se Press product, visit the Pro Se Press site!

The Periodic Update Post

Sorry for the delay, guys. I know I've been away for a while. One of the things I did was take a quick trip to Philadelphia to meet with Michelle Scuito and look at the layouts for 'Bad Faith Healer,' the eight page Domino Lady comic story we've done for All Star Pulp Comics. They look fantastic, and they'll be speeding Airship 27's way by the end of the month for publication! When we get closer to release, I'll maybe tease you with a page or two!

I've been told that the release of New Roads To Hell, the first Shadow Legion novel, will occur most likely early next year.

Right now, my focus has been fully on writing the stories for what I've been tentatively been calling The Shadow Legion Casebook Volume One: Four For Danger. This will be four 15,000 word solo stories for the quartet of heroes you'll be meeting in the first novel, all taking place in the twenty-five years between the first novel and the second, The Devil's Toybox. I can reveal the names of two of them--and the first person to connect the name with the hero will get a special mention in an upcoming post--'A Waltz In Scarlet' and 'The Ascension of Indio Blaque.'

You'll notice, incidentally, that 'The Tick Tock Men' is not up there. I've decided there's a more immediate story for the Nightbreaker that needs to be told. That doesn't mean you won't see that story; I fully intend to write it, and it will see light of day. It's just that the story I realize I need to tell with our Man Who Wasn't There is an integral one that I wanted to touch on in New Roads To Hell, but didn't get a chance to!

(And yes, I promise that there will be a Shadow Legion story in an upcoming volume of Mystery Men and Women...I just won't tell you which one...yet.)

The Sinbad story is in slow mode; I want to watch some more Harryhausen and see what other people have done with the set-up before I get deep into it--but 'Sinbad And The Frozen City of Shazarehbad' should be a kick!

And there's a new thing I'm developing on the back burner...something connected to the next guest in my 'Elsewhere In The Multiverse' series....but you might learn more about that when I sit down with the writer of Yesteryear, a great story about super-heroes, legacies and conspiracies that's available right now through Pro Se Press  and one of the architects of one of New Pulp's most exciting new setting, Tommy Hancock! Check out the cover art for Yesteryear, and join me here soon for my conversation with Tommy and what he's got cooking...and I'll keep you up to date on more New Pulp goodness in the coming weeks!

Michelle Scuito's New Site!

My partner in the Shadow Legion, Michelle Scuito, just opened up a site to sell prints of her artwork.  Just go to her Big Cartel Store and check out what she has to offer!  It's beautiful stuff.

And incidentally, I just received the page layouts for 'Bad Faith Healer,' our upcoming Domino Lady story...and may I say that boy, are you guys going to enjoy this lil' ditty.

More soon....

Meet The Shadow Legion Part Four: Ferryman

So while I'm now in this strange limbo where New Roads To Hell is now delivered and being hammered into shape for release, I've started slowing getting into the mindset for the follow-up to the debut novel in The Shadow Legion series....

No, it's not The Devil's Toybox, the second part of my initial trilogy set in the City of Nocturne. It's something I'm thinking of as the first Shadow Legion 'Casebook', a quartet of short stories focusing on the individual heroes who are sworn to protect The City That Lives By Night. Each of our four heroes will get a tale all their own, each set at key points in the twenty five years between the two novels. I'm hoping that reading these tales won't be necessary...but if you do read them, you'll have a better insight into who these guys are and what makes them tick.

Of the four, the one that I'm finding the most intriguing to write is 'A Waltz In Scarlet,' the story showcasing the next member of The Shadow Legion I'd like to introduce to you....Alan Dennings, the mysterious Ferryman!

This is a preliminary sketch my wonderful partner in this venture, Michelle Scuito, made while we were talking about the characters. She's hard at work on, among other things, our Domino Lady story for All Star Pulp Comics #2, but we'll have more new artwork soon!

Ferryman, like Nightbreaker (who we met here), is the other hero whose origin takes place in New Roads To Hell. He also has a connection with Nightbreaker even before the fateful Halloween night you're going to witness in the first novel. Alan is a friend and patron to Isaiah Copper, a man whose position in Nocturne society allows him to do so much good....until he loses his sight.

There are tons of literature about how the shutting down of one sense opens up access to other ones. One of my favorite comic book characters, Daredevil, uses this concept as the basis for his super-power. Many films, like Blink and both the Asian and American version of The Eye, posit that the restoration of sight attracts the attention of the other side. Ferryman represents my take on this concept.

When Alan's eyes are burned out as a result of an act of courage, he finds himself blind, but with the ability to perceive magical energies....and it has not gone unnoticed by a certain type of denizen of the other side. He finds himself a receptacle for the newly dead, and is compelled to act as their agent in the real world to gain them the rest they deserve. Of course, as his transformation continues, Alan Dennings may find there's something else he lost...

Ferryman is shaping up to be the darkest of the founding members of The Shadow Legion. He may be the one hero in the first novel who may not end up being on the side of virtue when we get to the third. And I hope that the readers may be repelled by him and his actions, but will find him too compelling to abandon.

(Oh, and one other thing....remember how I mentioned that all four of the heroes started out as DC characters I reworked as part of a fanfic 'DC New 52' event? Of all of them, this is the character closest to the DC character I started out with. A clue for when I announce the upcoming contest!)

As always, please feel free to ask me any questions you may have about Alan or any of the other denizens of Nocturne...and join me next week for another episode of 'Elsewhere In The Multiverse'!

Elsewhere In The Multiverse Part Two: Meet Ian Watson!

Ian Watson is a very, very busy man. Working out of his home in Yorkshire, England, he's managed to contribute to a number of legacies--not the least of which are Robin Hood through a trilogy of novels and Sherlock Holmes in a series of short stories in collections available from Airship 27. He's revived obscure pulp characters like Armless O'Niel and Richard Knight, and has contributed to the tapestry of our previous guest Van Allen Plexico's Sentinels Universe through the anthology Alternate Visions.

And now he's about to carve out a little slice of Mars for himself as two novels set in the Blackthorn Universe debut this week. Watson contributed to the original anthology of stories about an American soldier transported to a far future, post-apocalyptic Mars, Blackthorn: Thunder on Mars, and his two new contributions seek to expand the world of Blackthorn and his allies even further. Spires of Mars is set to be a serialized novel available three days a week online designed to expand the world and add a touch of the cosmic to the Burroughs-by-way-of-Kirby adventures, whereas Dynasty of Mars will focus on Aria, the Princess of Mars--and promises to span over a thousand years of this exciting franchise's history. So let's learn more about the man Van Allen Plexico call 'the most prolific man in England'...Ian A. Watson!

Thank you for taking time out to talk to me, Ian.

It's a delight to travel with Nocturne.

So you've been part of the Blackthorne project pretty much from Day One. What is it, do you think, about these Jack Kirby super-hero/pulp post apocalyptic mash-ups that's so appealing?

Kirby had that rare ability to catch a zeitgeist and make it come vibrantly alive. He could fold in ideas that were so diverse, so wild, and yet made them all seem like a natural roller-coaster adventure. When it comes to weird landscapes, weirder beasties, and the weirdest plotlines you can't beat the King.

So if you want to reach to the further edges of science fiction and fantasy and polish off old tropes like Burrough's Mars you can't really go wrong with Kirby as a route guide. Also, Kirby's art and storytelling are very stylised, primal things. They go right for the big reaction. That's a very big help when you have a broad story framework to work off.

And I always loved the fact that Kirby was so selfless about encouraging others to go and create like he did. He loved inspiring other people.

I think Kirby loved to go to that place of imagination and to take others with him--or meet them there.

So how did you get involved with the initial Blackthorn anthology--I know you contributed to Van's two Assembled anthologies of non-fiction about The Avengers.

Van invited me to contribute a story to his guest-writers Sentinels anthology, Alternate Visions. That fits between his first two Sentinels trilogies. So I offered a really tiny tale based on what a Ditko Strange Tales backup might have been to a Sentinels comic-book. We'd already corresponded about the Assembled books by then. He kindly included a huge chunk of ther material I dumped on him for those projects.

Then he hauled me in to do some of the work on the Gideon Cain anthology, about a Puritan demon-hunter who is in no way affiliated with any property owned by the Howard estate. So by the time we'd decided through mailing list chat thaste there was an urgent need for a futuristic SF adventure series on Mars I was on his call-sheet.

Steve Ditko--another great contributor to the tapestry of comic book fans' dreams...

Ditko, I think that sense of the weird breaking into the everyday that he mastered is also somewhere in the DNA of the Blackthorn series. And if we're really digging out old comics comparisons, I think we owe a debt to Don McGregor's Killraven too.

To me, the toughest thing about developing a property like this is in creating a world that's totally believable, yet also totally alien to the reader. How do you approach building that world, its history and its features so the reader will be sucked right in?

In this case we wanted to echo and homage some previous, quite famous work; but we didn't want to do a rip-off that had nothing new to say. So we start with the familiar, the sort of stories and settings that won't seem to strange to readers of Burroughs or Kommandi, or viewers of Thundarr, and then we use that as a platform to launch off into newer and more original realms.

I like to be able to figure out how things work in a world, even if they don't make it into the story. So if Mars is now habitable by humans, how and why? Why is there apparently magic as well as science there? Why are there ruins, and monsters? So we had to work out a whole backstory, about how humans came to be on a now-Earth-like Mars, about why there are no humans on Earth any more, about how civilisation fragmented into a feudal barbaric remnant, about how the four main villains of the series rose to power. That in turn inspired a lot of the material in the two books I've just completed.

I have found sometimes that working on one aspect somehow creates an insight into another aspect of either the world or the characters who inhabit it...there's a sort of, I dunno, synchronous serendipity when you're properly emersed in the project that allows connections to be made...

I also like little details. The Martian year is 687 days long. What does that do to the agricultural calender? There are ongoing millennium long wars. Who supplies the weapons?

And the great thing about little details is how they sometimes give you new story hooks you otherwise hadn't considered!

One of the fun parts of working with a collectively-written universe is that other writers throw in flavours I'd never have thought of. While that can sometimes mean one has to reign in ego about control it also means there's a whole bunch of raw potential to mine later on.

For example, at the end of the first Blackthorn anthology, "Thunder on Mars", Van thought we needed a kind of epilogue that moved the plot on to the next phase of the story, from wandering adventures to organised rebellion. So he threw in a meeting with a bunch of characters who he only named. Didn't even describe them In the two novels I've just turned in, the soon-in-the-shops Dynasty of Mars and the special project Spires of Mars, every one of them gets an origin and a story.

So when you and the other writers were developing the world of Blackthorn, how did you keep everything straight--was there a central site that you ended up using as a repository, did you use a mailing list of board...?

First time round we flew by the seat of our pants. Van came up with a "bible" that had some basic information. Then he had to do a lot of editorial reconciliation. We got away with it that time, I hope--barely. Future collaborations will need to be much tighter now we've got much more established continuity.

Fortunately now we're about to launch the Blackthorn website. That includes some fan-generated reference material. A Who's Who with bios, a Where's Where, a Glossary of Martian terms, plants, weapons, monsters, foods, etc. So that can help in future. My suggestion that Van host a planning weekend in Hawaii was unfairly dismissed, I feel.

You seem to be firmly in the driver's seat for this next phase, with these two novels--how did they develop?

Van and I discussed how to develop the franchise. The thinking had been to put out a companion set of stories to those of Van's very popular Sentinels series. They cover high action and even cosmic adventure in the present day. This would fit as different niche in a dystopian future. We'd got one try-it-and-see anthology under our belts, but things had ground to a hiatus.

Van was pretty busy having a life and stuff. So when I busted his chops about our grand marketing plan to get regular Blackthorn product out to feed a fanbase he threw it back at me since I don't have a life. I agreed to write a novel as the next bit of the storyline, to flesh out and bring together various concepts we'd discussed or touched on in previous stories. That turned into Dynasty of Mars, which covers a thousand plus years of backstory and details the first days of Blackthorn's revolution against the tyrant-sorcerers of Mars. It was also thought a good idea to do an free online, three-times-a-week episodic story to feed the interest of potential readers. So I agreed to pen a short series that could be used to drum up some attention. Unfortunately thast escalated to a full-length other novel. It'll still go out online free though.

See--the idea that you're taking it on yourself to cover a thousand years of Martian history floors me! I've been struggling telling fifty years of history for one lil' city, let alone an entire planet.

Probably the second-most important character of the series is Aria, Princess of Mars. She's the sorceress who supports, argues with, and sometimes is the romance interest of our big hero. Dynasty is from her point of view. Since she was born eight hundred years back (and has spent all but 22 of those years in suspended animation) she's ideal to explore the Martian backstory with. She is the rightful heir of Mars' original royalty. She has a mystic link with the people who made Mars what it is. So she's our key into the deeper mysteries of Mars. Our anthology, Thunder, more or less keeps Blackthorn as our point of view. An Earthman from today ends up on far future fantasy Mars. Dynasty reverses that. A Princess of Mars meets a strange hero from a legendary time. We see Blackthorn from her perspective. He's Captain America or King Arthur, returned at the time he's needed most.

We want our series to have deep roots, nuances, themes, developing plotlines; all the things that transcend the various elements we mixed in for our original pastiche.

How do you find writing from a feminine point of view? I've enjoyed doing it in the past, but I know some male writers who blanche at the prospect.

I have an eighteen year old daughter who wants to be an editor. She has strong views on female characters in fantasy, and good instincts. She's been watching Princess Aria very carefully--and me.

Aria's interesting to me, though. SF and fantasy are littered with princesses who need help reclaiming their throne. But Aria is also the daughter of one of our main villains, so she's not just Star Wars' Leia, she's Flash Gordon's Aura. And hopefully herself. I'm interested in what having a supervillain as a father must do to you. An unusual childhood, to say the least.

I wanted to ask you about the serialized form of Spires. Have you had to adjust your writing mindset to create a story that the reader will be experiencing not at his/her own pace, but in small chunks over time? Have you had to make allowances in terms of pace and exposition?

It's written very much with that in mind. Readers might be familiar with the previous stories or might come entirely new to it, so it has to offer all the right information as well as engage people in a good plot. In some ways we're going back to old-style comic book roots, with a serial story for which every issue is someone's first. In the days before comics were written for the trade paperback there was a real skill in making sure every issue offered a proper complete story while linking in to a larger narrative. Even the stories ending in cliffhangers felt like there was a start, middle and end there. I've tried to keep that in mind as I structure Spires of Mars. Each section pushes things on, but each should read like a mini-story in itself. Each one gently reminds readers of what they knew last time they read a bit of this. Each one adds on what's gone before to reward sequential reading. I hope.

I didn't want the tale to feel disposable or throwaway though. The first few chapters are nice simple adventure, but then we find that's all part of a much larger plot, and in the end we get a world-shaking revelation that changes everything in volumes to come.

Now I'm hyping like Stan Lee, true believer.

Don't worry about hyping--that's the reason the Travel Agency is opened, not just for my world, but the other worlds in the Multiverse of comic book style adventure in prose form!

Do you think that the success of the Blackthorn franchise arises from the fact that you're feeding a need for this sort of swashbuckling in uncharted territory style story in a comic book climate that just doesn't feel like giving to the reader?

Mainstream superhero comics of recent years tend to have become a bit incestuous in terms of recycling characters and plots. When you look at the wild innovation of the first 50 issues of FF, the volume of new ideas that came out of them, compared to all the issues since, you realise that there's a difficulty moving on to the new. Our main comics universes are fifty-odd and seventy-odd years old respectively, and the main elements of them have been in place for nearly that long.

You can take that first hundred issues of FF and see the entirely groundwork for the Marvel Universe to this day....

On the other hand, new creations like Hellboy and his universe, of Astro City, have done very well. I think there's a reader taste for discovery, for first-time world mapping, and then for interactions following from that.The adventure gets more intense when that terrible villain returns, but its better yet when he returns in some new fresh way. With Blackthorn, as with some other exciting literary superhero worlds, we're able to catch that vibe, both the new and the doing-stuff-with-what-we've-established. Because its prose, we can explore some nuances in ways that comic books can't.

Prose is really the only place you can get deep in the inner life of super-heroes, I find.

One of the great things about super-heroes as a genre is that, like westerns or detective stories, you can tell all kinds of different stories about them. Superhero mysteries, superhero romances, superhero horror, social commentary, rite-of-passage, group bonding, war tales, all kinds of stuff. But to get away with the "super" element you need to ground that in the everyday. Remember when Lee and Kirby's Thor stopped in for a milk-shake? Prose writing allows for that grounding very well. People are quite willing to accept a man can fly as long as when he's landed he behaves in ways we can understand and identify with. The characters and their reactions need to be real so the fantastic elements don't seem too much. That's why I was happy to be given novel-lengths to work with for Blackthorn. It allows for the "down-time" stuff as well as the high action. It allows for more team-building, character-based development. It's easier to offer personal arcs for characters, even the villains.

One of the favourite sports of superhero fans is blogging things like "Character X would never do that!" That's because we get to know our favourite heroes at least as well as some of the folks now writing them, and we develop that sense of how they are and how they'd react. If we can get readers to that place with Blackthorn then we've done our job.

So...what do you have in store for your readers after the Blackthorn novels are out in the world?

The third part of my Robin Hood trilogy, Robin Hood: Freedom's Outlaw, will be out before Christmas. I've just published a couple of short stories in the latest online fantasy magazine Wonderlust. Just this week I've been asked to develop another novel I've been puttering with, a murder mystery set in the Biblical Tower of Babel! And sometime I need to package off a final draft of a World War 2 action adventure novel called Sir Mumphrey Wilton and the Lost City of Mystery.

I'll also be reviving another classic pulp character for Pro-Se's Pulp Obscura line. There's a new female jungle superheroine I wrote a pilot story for due to appear in an anthology sometime, There's a novella and three more anthology stories sitting in the Airship 27 coming soon pile.

I think you'll have to visit the Agency again when Sir Mumphrey comes out, as you gave me a little high-concept about that book and it sounds right up my alley!

Yeah, I think you'd like the Mumph stuff. It's weird, and every chapter ends with a narrator asking questions of the audience and telling them not to miss the next chapter.

Holy moly!

Ian, thank you for taking time to visit The Agency.

The Spires Of Mars will become available a chapter at a time starting today, July 9th, here.  You can find Blackthorn: Thunder on Mars and Dynasty of Mars through White Rocket Books.

Some Updates

Since my planned update this weekend for The Agency--another 'Elsewhere In The Multiverse' where I talk Jack Kirby, world building and writing the opposite sex with Ian A. Watson--is going to be delayed until Monday for reasons that will become apparant when you read it, I wanted to update you on the progress of The Shadow Legion and other things.

The manuscript for New Roads To Hell has been delivered and edited, and it's now being enhanced with ten new illustration by my partner on this journey, Michelle Scuito. A new teaser for the book has started to surface on blogs around the internet....to wit:

There has always been something strange about Nocturne, Florida.

Built over some of the most dangerous swamp land in the 18th century, Nocturne has become known as The City That Lives By Night due to its multitude of night clubs, music venues and other sources of entertainment. But it has another reputation, one spoke of whispers in places the revelers and tourists don't go. That reputation is one of dark doings, of violence and hate and eldritch evil.

Luckily, The City That Lives By Night....has a darker shade of protector.

Nightbreaker

He spent his life hiding who he was...and now he fights to prove that he exists!

Dreamcatcher

There is magic all around us....and she can bend it all to her will!

Ferryman

He's the conduit to the other side...and its instrument of revenge!

Black Talon

He is the embodiment of the unfettered fury of the African Veldt...stalking a jungle of concrete and glass!

Together they are The Shadow Legion, a secret alliance of mystery men who battle the fantastic threats that can tear apart the metropolis they call home--and beyond!

The saga of The Shadow Legion begins with New Roads To Hell, which reveals the secret origins of Nightbreaker and Ferrymen, and features the menace of Rose Red, the crimson tressed devil with a magical talent for murder--available soon from Airship 27 (airship27.com) and the mind of Thomas Deja!

For further information, including exclusive artwork from Michelle Scuito (character designer for the series) please visit the Nocturne Travel Agency at welcometonocturne.blogspot.com.

Now New Roads is not the end of The Shadow Legion's story. I'm already over a third of the way done with "The Tick Tock Men," a Nightbreaker story that will appear in a future volume of Airship 27's Mystery Men And Women. The present plan is for this story to act as one fourth of a collection I'm working on. Each story will showcase each of our initial quartet of Legionnaires, helping to fill in more about each character and serve as the bridge between New Roads and Book Two, The Devil's Toybox.

In addition to the Shadow Legion stuff, there are two other items I'm involved with for Airship 27. The script for Bad Faith Healer, the Domino Lady comic book adventure destined for All Star Pulp Comics #2, has been turned in...and I've been asked to work on a new adventure for the Greatest Sailor Of All--no, not Popeye, but Sinbad--for an upcoming volume of Sinbad: The New Voyages.

As all these projects continue to progress, I will let you know. Until then, join me in a few days for my talk with Ian Watson!