04-12-09

After my last blog entry wherein I mentioned that almost every comic writer/creator wants to be associated with at least one super-hero and I was happy to have the Justice Machine--

I was reminded that I actually had created a couple more super-hero concepts...namely Paladin Alpha and R.A.Z.E....the artwork depicting them is by the brilliant Darryl Banks.

They were created to be the flagship titles of a short-lived (and deservedly so) comics company called Firstlight. Only one issue of Paladin Alpha was ever published, but that was okay, since shortly after I left the company it became the subject of a Federal lawsuit and essentially driven out of business.

The character was my take on the Green Lantern model...instead of power ring, ol' Pal Al used a "Q Gauntlet"...Q for Quantum...in so many words, a zero point energy transmitter.

R.A.Z.E. (and I can't remember what the acronym stood for) was a combination of AI and something else...I do remember that I used her as the basic template for TARA, the holographic assassin from my Outlanders novel,  Doomstar Relic.

No idea ever completely dies in a writer's mind...they just take on new forms and are recast.

Speaking of which...

A preview of the Nosferatu: Plague of Terror graphic novel is available at the Transfuzion Publishing site:

http://www.transfuzion.biz/TITLES/Nosferatu.htm

Although I'm not much of a horror reader any more, that's partly due to being so immersed in the stuff when I was growing up. I still love monsters...I never missed an issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland and it goes without saying that Creepy and Eerie magazines were mainstays of my reading habit.

But the monsters I loved so much as a kid took on  less appealing forms as I grew older...I lost the emotional connection, particularly when vampires were refitted as Gap models with fangs.

I mean, c'mon--vampires are corpses, okay? They're the undead not the uncool. They live in dirt and when they can't drink human blood, they suck on rats, toads and bugs. The vampires of legend, of folklore were very primal creatures...inhuman and savage. They looked nasty and  smelled worse. Any woman who would want to have sex with them was probably more frightening than the monsters themselves.

Twilight to the contrary, real vampires--if there are such things--would not make cool prom dates.

The folkloric vampire got pretty short shrift when the coiffed, androgynous blood-suckers came to roost. To me, the Anne Rice class of vampires are posers...kind of like white middle-class kids who adopt the trappings of South Central LA gang-bangers. They're pathetic. 

A folkloric. i.e., "real" vampire is basically a serial killer with fangs...a classic portrayal is Barry Atwater's Janos Skorzeny from the the original The Night Stalker telefilm.

He had about as much sex appeal as John Wayne Gacy.

The genuine folkloric vampire is Baron Graf Orlock AKA Nosferatu.

I wrote the Nosferatu: Plague of Terror graphic novel as something of a protest against the Lestat type.

I'm surprisingly happy with final result...the art for the most part is great and I think did some of my most effective comic writing as well. The new edition will have some interesting features and I hope before the book's release I'll some interesting news about other aspects of Nosferatu: Plague of Terror as well.

Anyway, take a look at the preview pages at http://www.comicspace.com/markaxlerellis/comics.php?action=gallery&comic_id=3778 and let me know what you think. I'll be talking more about it--and other things--over the next little whatever.