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PRT 1

12th June 03

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of mutterings about the best way to create a sure-fire 2000 AD hit. Okay, so most of these mutterings come from the voices in my head (Presley, Bogart, the guy who invented cardboard, Professor Xavier... the usual bunch), and the last time the voices were this sure I somehow found myself outside HMV with their entire stock of Justin Timberlake CDs and a can of petrol, but I have a good feeling that this time they might be on to something...

First, some background. My favourite superhero comic of all time has got to be Marvel’s New Warriors. A comic barely-remembered by most these days, but I loved it. You see, what Marvel did was take a few forgotten characters and form them into a team... And it worked! In true Marvel style, we had superheroes with real angst and real personalities, beating the poo out of bad guys, saving the world, falling in love, losing their powers, et cetera; it was a true “super-opera”. But why did it work? Well, I believe it worked precisely because no one at Marvel cared about the characters; the creators could do whatever they wanted with them.

So that’s what I think Tharg should do: gather a bunch of forgotten characters and stick them all into the one series. Let’s say, just for the heck of it, that such a brief was given to Your Friendly Neighbourhood Sprout... Which characters would I take?

First, they have to be characters in which the readers have no real interest, so that we can surprise the heck out of everyone when it turns out to be the Best Thing Ever. Second, there should be a good non-cheaty method of getting them together – no mucking about with time-lines or alternative universes. Third, no mixing of comedy and serious characters – so Dash Decent is out.

With those reasons in mind, here are the characters I’ve chosen:

Wolfie Smith
Originating in the now yellowing, tattered pages of Tornado, Wolfie was a teenager who discovered that he had psychic powers. His best mates were a geek called Kenny and a hardcase called Speed. (No, wait a second, that was a different Wolfie Smith.)

Angel
A rare gem, this one (well, maybe not a gem, more like an interesting shiny stone you found on the beach and brought home only to discover that it looked perfectly ordinary and dull in the confines of your sitting room). Harry Angel was a fighter pilot whose aircraft’s computer was accidentally grafted onto his body in a way that somehow made him extra strong and fast, and not dead.

Anteater
The hero of Ant Wars, which was about giant ants, and us having a war with them. Anteater was a weird kid with a pudding-bowl haircut who was pretty handy with a machete. Okay, I know it looked like he was killed by one of the mutated ants in the last episode, but he actually survived. I promise.

But that’s only four characters: we really need a couple more to make this work. The most obvious forgotten character is Dan Dare, except that he’s not really as forgotten as the others. In Dare’s case, it’s more like he was put into a weighted sack and heaved into the nearest reservoir. Besides, Dare’s been back in different forms a few times since he disappeared from 2000 AD.

Well, I guess four characters is enough: with the New Warriors, Marvel created new characters to add to the group, so maybe that’s what I should do for my group, which I shall call...

Here’s the pitch: Bonjella Howitzer is an unscrupulous postal worker who has no qualms about opening other people’s mail, until the fateful day she chooses to steal a package addressed to a mysterious old man who lives in a big creepy house. The old man turns out to be a three-thousand-year-old wizard called Matthew Seller (hint: this name is a clever pun – in the 1970s comic writers lived for this sort of thing), and the package contains an ancient relic that will help Seller in his fight against evil. Unfortunately, Bonjella destroys the artefact, considering it to be worthless, and as a consequence Seller tracks her down and recruits her to help him fight the mysterious and powerful bad guys that I haven’t invented yet.

Wolfie Smith is now a grown man living in self-imposed exile because many years ago he used his powers on an innocent person and accidentally killed him. Anteater has also grown up, but he’s a broken-down drunk in a tiny South American border town, where they refer to him as “El Dude Loco” or somesuch, because no-one believes his tales of giant ants (it was all covered up by the government, you see). Zero’s body has been in a freezer for the past two decades, but a mysterious explosion of some kind has shut down the power... And now he’s awake and really pissed off. Only Angel has fared well: he changed his identity and become a multi-bazillionaire by using his computer at the gaming table. He now spends most of his time plugged directly into the Internet and amuses himself by making last-second bids on eBay in order to annoy as many people as possible.

This will of course all be revealed in the double-length opening episode, which will also introduce the bad guys and present us with a credible reason for gathering the characters together.

As is the way of such things, Book One of The Retaliators will run for eight issues (first and last parts will be double-length), and will end with all the heroes recruited (a couple of them reluctantly) and a minor victory over the baddies. The series will be drawn in black and white line art – by a new artist who will go on to do much better things and in years to come will be mightily embarrassed about The Retaliators when interviewers ask him about it.

Book Two will be announced as “Coming Soon” and will never appear. Twenty years later, fans will speculate on whatever happened to The Retaliators and wonder if they’re ever going to come back. By this time, Sprout will be well into his fifties and still hoping to make his big break into comics “any day now.”