David Hine speaks about his work in Comics

8/21/2019
By Alex Ness

I have been blessed to know David Hine through email and social media, but, perhaps more deeply blessed by the enjoyment of his work.  I sought after an interview with him and this is the result.  Thank you David.

(All images can be made larger by clicking upon them. All rights reserved the publishers or creative artists owning the images.  No infringement intended.)

First, off, regarding your personal “secret origin”, you are from the UK, and obviously have a life that is centered around the UK and Europe. How do you think having a cultural life formed in the UK affects your overall creative life? And, since the US is a great market for comic books, do you experience any extreme disconnects between the audience of the US and yourself?

Dave: When I was a kid I was cut off from most of the world outside of about a ten-mile radius. I lived in a small country village in Somerset and my parents never had a car. So if I couldn’t walk or ride my bicycle there, it was outside of my universe. We also had no television until I was seven years old. One of the first TV shows I saw was the first Dr Who in November of 1963 and that was my first introduction to science fiction. It literally blew my mind. Before TV entered the scene I listened to the radio and read anything I could get my hands on, particularly comics. In the UK the comics were weekly and featured lots of characters in short stories, usually only a couple of pages for each weekly episode. So the storytelling was very compressed.

I don’t think there was a great separation between British and American culture in my mind. Once we had TV I was watching all the American shows, like The Munsters and The Addams Family, The Lucy Show, Bewitched, Land of the Giants, Time Tunnel. Probably the same shows that American kids were seeing back then. By the time I was ten I was also starting to see American comics. We had deliveries every Thursday to our newsagents. The circulation was erratic so we would get Marvel and DC comics from any time from the previous couple of years. I loved those comics because they had a much longer form than those two or three page strips I was used to. And the stories were insane, particularly the DC stuff – Bizzarro Superman and all that crazy shit. I also loved Marvel comics because there was a direct communication between Stan Lee and the fans. He talked about all the people making the comics. That was incredibly important for me. It made me realize that these things were made by real live people and by extension that I could also write and draw comics.

There’s a bigger disconnect with European comics. It was a lot later when I discovered comics like Metal Hurlant and À Suivre, the work of Moebius and Tardi and all those other artists and writers. They really opened my eyes to the possibilities of making comics that were as sophisticated as adult literature and movies. No matter how much I loved Marvel and DC comics they were never much more than comics for kids. By the time I was about 15 I mostly read underground comics and imported French stuff. I still followed a few artists like Steranko, Adams, Wrightson but I was more excited by Vaugn Bodé, Robert Crumb and Richard Corben.

Weirdly I think I’m now regarded mostly as an American comic book creator. In France I’m better known for the Marvel comics and Spawn than I am for my home-grown product like The Man Who Laughs and Lip Hook.

Over almost twenty years of doing interviews, reviews and all sorts of commentary about/for comics, I’ve found that I like many comic book professionals. Having said that, I think that most of the creative people I’ve met are deeply introverted. While some people suggest that art and writing are public centered, obviously they need an audience, and I get that, but would you say your younger years were fed as a creative by public life or your mental inner life? Are you an introvert? How does that play out in the practice of your creative work?

Dave: I’m very much an introvert. I observe rather than become directly involved. Even when I was at punk concerts I preferred to stand on the margins and watch rather than leap into the mosh pit. I liked to be where the action was but not really take part, so, for instance, when the Brixton riots were going on I would go out and wander around, watching the buses and buildings burn but I wouldn’t be throwing rocks myself.

You are right that being involved in comics does mean having to be part of the social network, both online and at conventions. I’m very ambivalent about it. It’s good to meet fans and fellow professionals but I was painfully shy as a kid and still am sometimes. The first few times I was on stage at comic conventions I totally froze up. I hated it. My mind would go blank and I would mumble gibberish. I did persist though and it does get easier. I’m told that I’m quite natural in front of an audience now, though I would still rather be anywhere else but the center of attention. I’m happiest when I’m by myself, reading, thinking or writing. I’ve never worked in a group studio – always alone in a room in my own home.

In the past few years I’ve become even more of a stay-at-home. I like to spend entire days without seeing anyone but my partner, Vikki or my son if he’s at home. I like to spend time with close friends but big noisy crowds of people make me feel claustrophobic and I often have to leave when I feel the walls closing in. I don’t panic. It’s not that extreme but when I stop enjoying myself I exercise my right to go home to bed early.

At what age did you realize you were going to pursue a career as a writer? What works inspired you to love reading and eventually writing as a kid? How important is it, do you think, to read a wide array of works, or do you think that it isn’t about kind of works to read, just read?

Dave: I wrote my first novel when I was 8. It was called The Adventurers Go To The Moon. This was five years before the first manned landing. In my version, when they landed the crew found a mad professor already there making an army of robots to invade earth. I did start on a sequel where the robot invasion began but I ran out of steam and abandoned it. By that time I was pretty much decided that writing was the only thing I really wanted to do. I wrote a western, started on a spy novel, wrote several kids adventure serials in daily episodes in my diary. I also wrote and drew my first comic when I was eight. The first panel had the bad guy in prison. He escaped, was caught by the cops and the last panel was identical to the first. I thought that was really clever stuff.

The books that inspired me were mostly science fiction. I was into Ray Bradbury, Brian Aldiss, JG Ballard as well as the classics like 1984, Jules Verne, HG Welles, John Wyndham, Michael Moorcock. William Burroughs was a revelation when I was sixteen. I didn’t fully understand Naked Lunch but I knew I liked it. His cut-up technique continues to inspire me, as you will see from the cut-up issue of The Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred. My reading broadened later but there was always a fantasy element. Some of the important books are: The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake, Perfume by Patrick Susskind and the short stories of Edogawa Ranpo. In comics the team of Munoz and Sampayo on Alack Sinner was a big inspiration for the style of my breakout graphic novel Strange Embrace.

It’s important to read whatever you feel drawn to, but I do feel that I missed out on a lot by only reading fantasy. In my dotage I’m finally getting around to reading more factual stuff: science, philosophy, history and biographies. So if it’s worth anything, I would advise anyone and everyone to read as diversely as possible, but of course you have to enjoy the reading experience so if you’re getting bored, put it down and read something else.

I am aware of your life as an artist as well, but, is it a talent that you were born with, or, as a writer, you chose to hone skills as an artist to be able to tell the stories you imagine into being? What artists or art movements moved you or inspired you the most over time?

Dave: My drawing skills are average at best. I really wanted to make comics so I forced myself to learn to draw them because writers were barely noticed in comics before the 1980s. A lot of the comics I really liked were works of auteurs so that was where I intended to go. I did win the prize for art at my school for our ‘O’ level exams (taken at 16) so I guess I was making progress, but when I announced my intention to go to Art College and ultimately to be a comics artist my headmaster wrote in my school report “He is unrealistic about his career”. Privately he told me that no one had gone on to Art College from that school since 1960 and that was something he was proud of. What a jerk! Unfortunately when I arrived at Art School I found the tutors were equally contemptuous of comics as an art form. I learned what I could about drawing from the course but mostly it was self-taught. I did use the college printing press to print a couple of comics of my own though, and one of those featured a strip by Shaky Kane, which was his first published comic strip.

When I was at school it was Pop Art and Surrealism that inspired me though I’ve had second thoughts about Pop Art and people like Roy Lichtenstein appropriating the imagery with no real respect or recognition given to comics as anything more than throwaway trash culture. Comics had no greater cultural significance to Warhol and Lichtenstein than the packaging of a soup can. Surrealism and Dada, on the other hand, continue to inspire me. Stylistically I was most influenced by Expressionism, particularly the German Expressionists and above all the Austrian Egon Schiele.

I’ve interviewed numerous writers over the last two decades. I know that there is no common template for all writers, I think that I found a general theme. Many if not all had written poetry, but never thought it an area to work and make a living in. All seemed to write prose. And, of all the writers only a few wrote sequential stories or worked as comic book writers. Do you think most writers are able to write in different forms, or, do you think some are skill centered in ways that make them prose, poetic or comic book writers? How do you think comic book themed movies moved some prose and screen play writers into the comic book industry?

Dave: Hmmm, I certainly think that comics is a very specialized area that many writers from other disciplines do struggle with. You have to have a very strong visual sense. Recently a lot of screenwriters seem to be trying to get into comics and their motivation often seems to be to actually get their work in front of an audience. Most screenwriters have little if any of their work making it through the various production stages and onto the screen and when it’s there it is often in a bastardized form because they have so little control over the final movie. So they often see comics as the easy way to get the work finished in a form that they have control over. There is also perceived to be more recognition for the writer in comics and that is true to a degree. This is a medium that is relatively cheap and easy to put into production. However, most of those screenwriters don’t really know how tough it is to write comics. Screenplays are setting plus dialogue. Everything else is left to the director, cinematographer, actors and so on. In comics there is so much more to writing than just putting the words in the mouths of the actors. There are a few screenwriters who have made the jump, notably Joss Whedon, but they are pretty rare.

There is another group of writers who observe how many big budget movies are based on comics and see a comic book as a way into movies and that does piss me off a bit. The comic should be an end in itself, not just a jumping off point to getting a movie into a theatre and making money. If you don’t love comics for themselves you you shouldn’t be writing comics.

Incidentally there are a few comics writers who have written screenplays and teleplays and they are often godawful at it, so it seems that the skill set is tough to acquire that way round too. Writing good comics isn’t like writing good TV or movies. I’ve recently been working on a screenplay or two, so we’ll see how that goes…

Poetry isn’t something I have done to any extent and, by the way, is probably the toughest of the arts to make a living in. I’ve written a few songs for comics like Poison Candy and I wrote some rap for District X. The songs in Poison Candy were serious attempts at lyrics – the rap not so much. I covered myself by pointing up the rapper character as being rubbish. Poetry at its best can be sublime. It’s the written form where every word has absolute significance – meaning, cadence and rhythm. I did on a few occasions do a bit of translation when I used quotations from Baudelaire. I found at least a half-dozen completely different translations from the French and didn’t like any of them so I wrote my own. I was frankly astonished at how wide an interpretation could be made from the original. I guess the lesson is that you have to read poetry in the original language.

Did you initially think, however much you knew you were good enough to do so, did you believe in yourself enough to think you could succeed as a creative artist? Why do you think that is or isn’t so?

Dave: I was never sure that I was good enough to be considered a professional artist, even after making a living at it for 20 years. I’m more sure of myself as a writer, though I have often felt like a fraud when I describe myself as either an artist or a writer. Apparently that’s very common. It’s called ‘imposter syndrome’. Yes, there is a term for it!

What is your common practice regarding writing? Do you have a certain time of day you find the fire to create, or can you work at any normal time you are awake? Do you need to be “inspired” to write, or are skills and talents so great that you are able to call upon them even if the assigned task is less than inspiring? Do you write or draw every day? How regular is your schedule regarding creative activity?

Having scanned a comic book data base entry of your work, the number of comics done is impressive, but it isn’t the numbers that I found impressive. You’ve written and drawn manga, comics, and other, you write strong villains, heroes and common people, you don’t seem, to me at least, to focus upon a single sort of story, character or even format. Is that a function of aim/purpose, happenstance, or desperate attempts to make money? (I don’t mean to disparage the need to make money, I am known for selling very little of what I write).

Dave: Okay, there are a number of questions there. I’ll take the question of diversity first. I have indeed written or drawn in any number of styles over the years. Partly that’s because I’m reluctant to turn down a job, even when I’m ridiculously busy. I like a very wide range of comics so I’m happy to have a go at all kinds of styles and genres, including the weekly strip, which I did for Record Mirror and for a Woman’s Health magazine; I made educational comics for Oxford University Press among others, illustrated children’s books, inked Care Bears, illustrated Myra Hancock’s soap opera Sticky Fingers for Crisis and then worked with comedian Tony Allen on the documentary style China in Crisis which told the story of the Tiananmen Square massacre one year after the event itself. I have done superhero, horror, and science-fiction comics. I see each project as a challenge and throw myself into each one with all the enthusiasm I have. Sometimes the result isn’t great and there have been a couple of times when I actually tried to withdraw from books, notably at Marvel when I was working on Civil War X-Men, where the story ended up out of my control because of the requirement of fitting in with other books in a crossover series. But mostly I am relatively pleased with the result and the more unlikely the project the greater the satisfaction of successfully getting to grips with it.

Some of those are just jobbing professional writing tasks though. I am, of course, happiest when I’m working on my creator-owned books and that’s when you’ll see my best work. So the books I am most happy with are: Strange Embrace, The Bulletproof Coffin books and Cowboys and Insects with Shaky Kane, Lip Hook, The Bad, Bad Place and The Man Who Laughs with Mark Stafford (and a couple of short strips I have also done with Mark), Storm Dogs with Doug Braithwaite, Poison Candy with Hanzo Steinbach and Second Sight with Alberto Ponticelli. I was also very happy with the Spider-Man Noir series and Daredevil: Redemption, both books that had minimal editorial input and didn’t really relate to closely to the Spider-Man and Daredevil canons. Ironically most of the creator-owned work doesn’t pay well, while the returns for Civil War X-Men were the highest I ever made, page for page. If you want to make a life-long living in comics, you really need to have a balance of work-for-hire and creator-owned work that you can put your heart and soul into.

My writing habits are incredibly varied to the extent that I can hardly call them habits. I write most days but it could be at any time. It’s currently 21:44pm for instance but most days I’ll be done by now and watching TV or reading in bed. I can work in any room in the house, or in the garden when the sun’s out. I once wrote for 3 months in a coffee shop when the neighbours were having building work done and the noise got too much for me. That was very productive as there were no distractions. The gentle buzz of activity in a coffee shop is very conducive to work. I like trains, planes and airports and when I’m on holiday I usually spend a few hours in my hotel room working on scripts.

I don’t have to be inspired to work. I always have projects that are at a stage where there is donkey work to be done, so even if I’m not feeling too bright I can be working on breakdowns or polishing dialogue. The inspiration is when elements of a story spring ready-formed from my imagination and that can happen when I’m walking along in the street or in the shower or staring out of the window. I’ve even dreamed some scenes that were causing me problems when I was awake. That was true of Strange Embrace.

My first encounter with your work was Strange Embrace. Trust me, it made an impact with me. I couldn’t detect certain common tropes, it told a story in a way that I found rather new. It was during a time that I received a number of comps for review from various companies. It struck me as being dark, disturbing and yet, not vulgar, just straight forward dark and odd. What inspired the story, do you look upon it as a successful work, and would you return to such a story/subject, if not this one in particular?

Dave: Strange Embrace was the purest work I did. It wasn’t made with any audience or publisher in mind. It was purely for myself. The story grew over a period of years, beginning when I was a student and living in a house very similar to the one in the story. There was an old man who owned the house but rarely spoke. I would catch glimpses of him but I only spoke with his housekeeper. I rented the attic room with another student. One day the housekeeper told me the old man’s wife had committed suicide. There were some odd events in the house – very odd – involving an axe attack and the smearing of feces on the walls, and originally those events were in the story but the narrative changed over the years and became more about the old guy’s imagined history. The African art became an important element too.

I originally tried showing an outline and a few pages from the book to a couple of editors but they immediately began making suggestion about making the characters more sympathetic and the style more commercial. I realized very quickly that I had to avoid editorial input. I had saved enough money from my inking work for Marvel UK and a few strips for 2000AD to take a year off to concentrate on Strange Embrace. In the end it took 18 months – six solid months of writing and re-writing to get the script right and a year on the art. I thoroughly enjoyed the entire process because no one was looking over my shoulder or putting deadline pressure on me. I remember the writing was mostly done at night. I would begin around 9 or 10 pm (about the time I’m writing this) and I would drink Jack Daniels and coke and smoke while I wrote. I don’t exactly recommend drinking and writing but it worked for me on that book. I used to carry on writing until I was too drunk to keep going and collapse into bed, getting up in the afternoon when I would go through the pages from the night before to make changes and corrections with a clear head. No doubt though, the writing was inspired by booze.

It has been more than 25 years since I completed Strange Embrace. It has faults and some things I would change now, but it’s still the work that feels the most original and honest. I don’t know if I could do anything similar again. It’s hard to get the focus now – too many demands on my time. Happily it was before internet and social media, so it was a lot easier to cut myself off from all the outside influences and distractions and just let the creativity flow. There are a couple of things I would like to get into that would require shutting myself away for a year so. Maybe I will do that one day. I don’t have too many financial demands any more so it could be possible. I wouldn’t do the JD and cokes though.

My next encounter with you was your long run of writing for Spawn. As I mentioned in my commentary regarding the run, it was high quality, consistent over the time with no duds. How did you get the opportunity, what were the limits placed upon you, and how was the experience?

Dave: I had some contact with Brian Haberlin when I worked on District X at Marvel. He was an agent for a number of artists, including David Yardin who was the amazing artist on my first run on that book. Another of his professional hats was that of editor-in-chief at McFarlane Productions. Todd needed a new writer to follow Brian Holguin on the monthly Spawn book, starting with issue #150. Brian had been reading my Marvel scripts and liked what he saw so he suggested me. We had a one-hour conference call where Todd did most of the talking. He was really intense about wanting to make the book more gritty, realistic and horror-based rather than the fantasy, borderline superhero book that it had been - basically darker. After an hour, he still hadn’t mentioned giving me the job. I had been expecting him to ask me some questions about my ideas for the character or the direction for the book but when I said “So, have I got the job?” he said “Sure. Make me look like an asshole.” Those were his exact words. I assume he meant to make the book even better than when he was writing and drawing, rather than to literally make him look like an asshole. He was very hands-off with the book for two-and-a-half years.

My first task was to catch up on the entire run. A box arrived with the first 148 issues, which I read twice – once as a straight run-through, then a second time taking notes and marking key pages with post-its. Even allowing 20 minutes to read each issue, that made a grand total of 100 hours of reading. That was immersive to say the least. What I figured out was that Todd had spent 150 issues building to the Apocalypse but then avoided it. He was vaguely planning it some time in the future, but I felt that Armageddon was coming due. I asked Brian if I could do that. He checked with Todd and he gave the okay so we went ahead with the epic Armageddon storyline, drawn by Philip Tan.

I had a lot of fun with the book and after Armageddon, Brian took over on the art. We had a very close working relationship. I even did layouts on some of the pages. It really was a very good experience and I think we did some pretty classic issues. Some of my favourite issues were the self-contained stories based on previous iterations of the Spawn character: Mandarin Spawn was a one-shot, then Gunslinger Spawn ran over two issues. I did that one after seeing the action figure in a shop. That was the coolest of the action figures and the story was one of the most popular. The First World War Spawn was another successful one and we got to show the Battle of the Somme very realistically. Lots of research went into all three of those historical settings.

Eventually Todd started to have reservations about the stories once we had destroyed the Universe and rebuilt in Spawn’s image. He came back to work on the scripts for the last six months. By then he had essentially sacked me off the book but he graciously allowed me a final six months to wind up the story lines.

As I mentioned in the article about the Spawn run, it was the best of runs, in my mind, due to the solid writing, and the adding of solid hierarchies to the politics of Hell and Heaven, as well giving each character motives that are solid and moving. Does that quality of presentation come from an interest in celestial and hellish characters, or religious beliefs or, simply, having magnificent clay in which to mold?

Dave: Spawn’s longevity is definitely down to the quality of Todd’s character building. Spawn, Sam and Twitch, the Clown – all are really strong characters with huge potential.

I’m an atheist but I do have a lot of interest in religious mythology. God and the Devil had ‘gone missing’ but I planned for a while to reveal them as Cyan’s siblings, the evil twins. It was a lot of fun building to that and we did a lot of foreshadowing. I thought I might have given it away when I had the twins appear with T-shirts labeled “The Boss Man” and “ L’il Devil” with an image of baby Satan, but literally no one guessed until the final reveal.

You’ve written both Batman and Daredevil stories. Does the concept of a lone vigilante move you? How would you argue your conception of the characters differ? Would you say Batman is a bringer of order versus Daredevil one who seeks justice? As the writer of both characters is there a commonality more than simply dudes wearing costumes and going about in the night time hours?

Dave: I actually disapprove strongly of vigilantism and the idea of an individual dispensing violent judgment from behind a mask strikes me as fascistic. So you’ll see that I always portray vigilante ‘heroes’ in a negative light. Batman is actually an instigator of chaos. He becomes a center of violence and that was the key element of the Batman Imposters story. In my stories he is never the solution to the problem. Rather, he is a catalyst for violence and disorder.

In Daredevil: Redemption, the hero is Matt Murdock, when he stands up in a courtroom and tries to achieve justice, rather than retribution. He fails because the American justice system is deeply flawed. He turns to the Daredevil costume out of frustration when the legal system fails.

It has always felt weird that I have written so much in the superhero genre when I dislike so many of the tropes. I always try my best to subvert the concept and point up the absurdities and flaws of the genre. I guess I have been lucky to be given a free hand with most of my books for Marvel and DC. When Joe Quesada first approached me to write for Marvel I did actually say that I didn’t feel like I was the right choice for costumed hero books and he was very generous in suggesting I wrote books like District X and Daredevil: Redemption where I could mostly avoid spandex and superheroes. Gradually though, I was drawn more and more towards the more conventional books and I felt increasingly unable to conform to the kind of stories that were wanted.

I don’t read a lot of mainstream books now but it does look like Marvel and DC are getting a lot more diverse in approach in recent years. That’s reflected in the movies too. The Spider-Verse movie was an absolute triumph.

Is law more important than justice, can there be justice if there is no greater order?

Dave: Justice is universal and unchanging. Laws are made by the current politicians and reflect their interests. My ideas of justice for a civilized society were spelled out in the short Storm Dogs story I wrote for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Annual of 2012. In the words of the character Masika Zenda: “The irrefutable equality of all people, regardless of ethnicity, place and circumstance of birth, gender, religion, ability, intelligence or health, and the freedom to travel and seek employment without let or hindrance. No state shall take the life of any person unless that person threatens the life of others and when all alternative methods of restraint have been exhausted. In no circumstances shall the state take the life of any person, whether its own citizen or the citizen of any other state, for perceived crimes. Imprisonment shall be used as a last resort and only when allowing an individual free movement would endanger the lives and wellbeing of others. One doctrine stands above all others – the freedom of expression, whether political, aesthetic, religious, spiritual or scientific, even when the ideas expressed may be objectionable to others. From this basic right all other freedoms grow.”

I am, however, considering the limits of freedom of expression, for example in the light of armed Nazis walking the streets of Detroit with police protection. I am gradually being persuaded by the growth of extreme right movements across the world that while the freedom to express your views must be protected there should be parameters of context and provocation.

I’d argue that these two characters have a great deal of potential for the concepts and quality of previous stories, is it daunting to approach such characters with new ideas? Or does the high level of quality make that all the more interesting?

Dave: It is daunting and I think there are diminishing returns because these characters, particularly Batman, have been treated so many times by writers of a very high caliber. There are still a lot of great Batman and Daredevil stories to be told but they are going to be fewer and farther between. I think I’m done with most existing characters. I’m currently writing some Dark Judges stories for Rebellion (The Judge Dredd Megazine), featuring Judge Death but everything else on the horizon is all about new characters.

I know you did a substantial run on various x-books. To what extent were you able to tell new stories on the Marvel mutant stage, or, despite your freedom, is it harder to create brand new different works that challenge various orthodox settings and characters? When working on such wrought universes, do editors influence more of what is going on, or, due to the known factors being known, do they have only a proofer and overall quality of effect?

Dave: I’ve covered a lot of that in my answers above. The X-books were most effective when I was working in new territory with brand new characters. District X featured just one existing character – Bishop – and he never put on the spandex. Joe Quesada and my X-book editor Mike Marts were both very generous in allowing me a lot of creative freedom but I was gradually pushed more towards the mainstream of the Marvel Universe. I wasn’t happy working on crossover books where the editorial influence became greater. They wanted to give me bigger-selling and more popular books and I am grateful for that but in the end I literally asked to work on the less popular books and characters so I could go my own way with them. That didn’t really work out. Mike Marts moved to DC and once again offered me work on his titles. At one point I was offered an exclusive contract, which I turned down because I wanted to pursue creator-owned work at Image. My last work for DC was on their two lowest-selling titles - Will Eisner’s The Spirit and Azrael. I had a lot of freedom on both those titles for the very reason that they weren’t big sellers.

Which thematic aspect of the Marvel comics stories work most for you personally? Is it the racism versus the mutants and overcoming? Or is it the impact of how people with powers would affect the world around them? Or even, does your work on the Inhumans have a bit of both and it moves you to delve into that?

Dave: I am most interested in how mutant or super powers would affect individuals in the real world, to what extent it would be a temptation to acquire personal power, how it would impact on you to make you feel like an outsider, those kinds of issues. The Inhumans books were really interesting for me. Son of M and Silent War were intended to be the first two parts of a trilogy. That exemplifies the problem with working for Marvel. I outlined the third series, which was greenlit and I wrote the first issue. Then a writers’ retreat happened and the series was taken away from me. My stories were basically annulled by stating that the characters, including Black Bolt were actually Skrulls. That was deeply disappointing and spelled the beginning of the end for me and Marvel. I did go on to write a couple of series of Spider-Man Noir, which I loved, but I was already on my way out by then.

Do you prefer working on your solely owned characters, or, does writing stories in the sandboxes of others demonstrate your ability enough, and financially reward enough that you enjoy both for different reasons?

Dave: I’ve certainly enjoyed working on all the Marvel and DC characters but always with some reservations. I wouldn’t have a career as a writer without those opportunities and they were financially rewarding but I think I’m done with working on existing characters. There are just too many frustrations.

What established character from some large publisher or talent would you most like a crack at writing, and why? Would that character be your favorite, or do you prefer to let any favorite character you have be the work of others?

Dave: See above. Having said that, there were two characters I always did want to write – Silver Surfer and Dr Strange. I’m interested in cosmic and transcendent settings and narratives. I think I could do something with them.

I confess, SONATA looks a great deal like the comics I find to move me most, Miyazaki’s Nausicaa, Moebius’s Arzach, and more, the visuals look both beautiful and feature lead characters who are smart fascinating women. Is this work going to tell fantasy, steampunk, science fiction ? Tell me more about it?

Dave: Brian came up with the original concept for the book, the idea that two sets of people from two planets come as settlers or conquerors of what appears to be an idyllic world. Sonata is from the Rans who are ecologically responsible and respectful of the indigenous peoples, while the Tayans are a warrior race who are all about conquest and the selfish exploitation of resources. You can read all kinds of links to real-world events into that basic setup, but I won’t be making this a direct commentary on current events. No Trump stand-ins or Brexit-style situations.

Sonata falls for Pau, who is the son of the Tayan leader. So it’s your basic Romeo and Juliette situation. Both of these young people have absent mothers, and fathers who struggle to empathize with their offspring. Together they get into a lot of trouble as they explore the planet of Perdita. There are two sets of indigenous peoples, The Lumani, who seem to be barely civilized, and the mysterious Sleeping Giants who spend most of the time comatose and when they wake behave like dangerously belligerent children – 50 foot tall children, with deadly psychic powers.

Legend has it that these giants are the gods of the Rans and Tayans, though each have a different story of what they represent. We gradually come to realize that nothing is quite what it seems and that also applies to the Rans and Tayans themselves. We are going to be playing a lot of games with people’s expectations. I’ve never liked characters who are all good or all evil. It’s about grey areas and dark secret corners of the soul.

There are elements of fantasy, science-fiction and steampunk. Brian is a huge fan of Moebius so you are right to see elements of Arzach in there and probably Nausicaa too. For me there is some of Dune and Robert Silverberg’s novels. I’m currently about to start reading The Book Of The New Sun by Gene Wolfe for the first time, so elements of that may well feed into the scripts for later arcs of the story. Just about everything I absorb from reading books and watching movies and TV seeps into my work one way or another.

The way we work together is very organic. At the start I had a lot of Brian’s character designs and world-building landscapes and hardware to look at. That kickstarted the story. I would then come up with new characters, send descriptions to Brian and he would turn them into visuals. Seeing the visuals then fed back in to how I understood the characters. So it’s a constant two-way flow of creativity and we make sure to touch base on Skype a couple of times a week so we have some face time, which we never had when we worked on Spawn. It was just emails back then.

What works do you have in development beyond SONATA that you can discuss? What more can the world expect from David Hine?

Dave: I’m working on a number of projects with Brian. There’s a second series from Jim Valentino’s Shadowline books at Image, which will come out in October and we are also developing several other fantasy and science-fiction series for comics and other media. I have a trade paperback collection of The Bad, Bad Place out from Soaring Penguin later this year. That collects the ten episodes from the Meanwhile anthology, with art by Mark Stafford. That’s a kind of mirror publication to Lip Hook, following up on some similar themes. It’s horror in a very dark humorous vein. I’ve just wound up The Torture Garden in the Judge Dredd Megazine, with art from Nick Percival. That will also be collected in a hardback edition from Rebellion. Nick and I are planning a follow-up to that one... further tales of the Dark Judges.

Why Comics?

7/19/2019
By Alex Ness

A rather long time ago I was told by a professor that serious minds need more than comic books to grow. I didn't disagree that we need more than comics, but I absolutely disagreed with the tone that came along with the dismissal of comics, as a whole. The final paper in his class earned me a bad grade.  Over time I've received lots of bad grades, so I don't really care. I've no doubt my intellectual refusal to abandon comics influenced his capricious grading of my work. I might not be a genius, but I had a friend who taught in university at the time, he read my work in question, and said, "There is nothing unscholarly about the piece. You chose a subject matter that challenged the reader, but probably, the reader who gave the grade wasn't interested in going beyond his preconceived ideas, both of your writing and his areas of interest and taste." It was still a class I got a B in, but, in almost all scenarios, the quality was there, it just didn't fit his paradigms. 

When in grad school I suggested to a professor, by using the mechanics of a RPG we might get the students to think like a character during a first contact event. I was told, RPGs or D&D as he referred to it, is for weak minds who need tawdry entertainment.  He then added, people who like them also like comic books, and low brow movies.  Then said, I need to be more serious in my thinking.

Well, I think both professors were/are wrong.  Even if I don't dispute the concept that most comics in the long timeline of their existence, weren't aimed at serious minds, it doesn't mean there have not been any comics created and aimed at them.  Comics are sequential art, paper based films, and might be created to entertain.  But my favorite stories of all time are far from superfluous or silly.  And even those few that could be perceived as silly, every could use a silly laugh now and then.  People who don't like to laugh need to go take a giant shit.

But I think more than just taste differences, people who hate comics, or just don't think they are anything worth reading, don't know how the art form has evolved.  They perhaps don't understand how reading words and pictures are not childish behaviors or mindsets, it is simply the medium's conventions.  I have read a comic with no words, so, if you prefer to think of comics as having art, it is art that tells a story by presenting it all in sequential pictures. I know no one in my present life who hates comics like the professors did, but I have no doubt their outlook is shared still by many.  That's fine.  My mind is as serious as it requires.  Which is more so than most, I am willing to bet.

I might be wrong, but everyone else probably knows what is right

For every inarticulate moron who despises people who are not their own same skin color, not their orientation, not their idea of gender, there are people who are actually worse, they are articulate and have all of those horrible triggers.  I was angered when a retailer who supported my work, and most of the creative work from many if not all of the local talents, fired someone for not sharing the sensitivity towards others that the present societal norms demand.  For me it is about differences in outlook not changing overnight and a need to be sensitive to both ends of the issue in question. To me it was sacrificing a quality person because he was slow to change.  There is a concept that I've been told about. I am not the originator of it. The person was a numbers/stats guru who called it "statistical quickening".  Two quick points, that may have been a word he just invented to explain to the moody illogical poet his concept. And, prior to this what I was made to think quickening was, had to do with a male organ when it is happy.  Apparently when social change happens, it isn't over night, it just feels like that. Imagine that it requires 2/3rds of a public opinion to cause a social change.  If you have a globe and it spins perfectly, it would be a state of opinion to be 50/50.  If you have 100 units, with 50 on each side it spins, there is no great movement, of any sort, there is stasis.  But as events change the topic, more units are added to the side that represents a new idea.  By the time social change has happened, you've shifted little by little, until there is a wobble, and eventually, the wobble leads to the globe upending and an broken circle, where used to be a perfect circle.

Anytime a slow unseen change in itself causes a change, little by little views change, without most people realizing it, and then, in the span of one or two months of time, what took 50 years of effort seems to change in 2 months.  If the change happens in this way, I promise there will be people left behind just by virtue of the speed of change.  There will be people who never change their views.  Those people who are offended by the change either have to leave the social grouping, or they will become hardcore anti change cause warriors.  Some will fight, others speak, but when society has an upheaval and disruption due to a massive wave of social change, you are not dealing with a rebellion, you are dealing with a counter rebellion.  Since the counter rebellion is based upon keeping the society that is changing, the bitter, refuse to change, warriors might be more aggressive and more willing to fight to the end, because if they lose they are lost forever. 

I think we have a world that experienced numerous changes during the years of President Obama.  The first was the ultimate arrival of blacks as being equal to whites with the election of Obama.  Then there would be a variety of change in the realms of LGBTIQ being recognized, acknowledged, even to the extend of gay marriage arriving as being legitimate.  Lastly, there were numerous jobs opened to,  education opportunities for, and equal treatment of women.  All of the change, combined with the potential of greater change upon the horizon, led to two great things.  There was a feeling on the part of those who were in favor of change, that there was momentum, and it could not be stopped.  And there were those who voted for Trump, whatever they might have believed, because he promised to stop most of the momentum.  Momentum is an important concept here.  The quickening makes it feel unstoppable.  I think this partially contributed to the hatred of Trump, beyond the usual product of the divide in America.

How the statistical quickening functions in the changes in Nerd media is that by simple mathematics and changed social movements, no retailer could ever hold the line and keep the old gang in power.  The power of capitalism in regards to social change is really simple.  If you say we are going to ignore the groups who now have momentum, those groups will go to whatever retailer does not ignore them.  And by losing sales, losing their simple math of how to survive, they will change. The grudging but perhaps eventual complete adoption of the momentum groups, will add weight to the power of change, and this change that has happened will feel overnight. But it wasn't.  Gays and Lesbians openly fought for rights since the 1960s. Blacks have struggled for their rightful equality since they were stolen as slaves.  And women have been fighting the inequality since creation/ evolution/ origins sans reason. But fighting for the cause would not have happened without certain firsts, and Obama was the first that meant the most.  Everything changed after him.

A result of change has seen new loud angry people with access to blogs and public airwaves who choose to fight.  Many people, almost all of them bitter about the changes in society, write that Transgenders are freaks, and will write about them and their problems with absolute glee.  Because women are normal.  Blacks, for most people, are normal.  Gays are becoming more normal.  But Transgenders are people who visibly represent the change, and they are hated most of all for that.  They are not the rightful target.  The rightful target for the hatred of transgenders is the concept that humanity has come to a realization that humans are born with certain rights, certain dignity, and certain abilities, and that nothing can be done to stop that natural flow. The dissent from the mainstream happens from many different sources.  These are some examples of the dissent.

Author Germaine Greer is particular virulent in her debate against Transgender people. 

Vox Day speaks about race, is unashamed of the concept of "white culture".  He might be intelligent, he might be able, and he clearly is articulate.  I believe that he wants to hold to the world that once existed, not the one that does now.  I don't see him in the fully evil context others tell me has to be there.  But I am concerned enough, regardless of sincere caveats. 
 
YourRGPisshit was a blogging site that was carried out by someone who clearly hated people who were so called others.  But in gaming this is a more vile issue.  Vox Day is a writer, he fights outside of comics, or games, he is interested in fiction, but speaks about his views.  The writer on YourRpgisShit hid behind anonymous status.  And tried to suggest that Transgenders, LGBTQI, Women and various ethnic people had no right, no idea what real gaming could be.

I've written in a voice here that isn't aimed at emotional support for the mainstream or the counter revolution.  I think there needs to be nuance on all great debates. But ... if we are this great society where democracy allows the best idea to rise up because of the marketplace of ideas works, we need to talk.  We need to accept that some don't change, that some don't want change, they like breaking things... and some believe in change, we need to discuss it. The mantra I heard growing up was that deep down in everyone is the same. Well bullshit. We are nowhere near the same.  But we are all the same in deserving dignity, respect, and fairness.  We don't do that either, but we should.  I always knew gay marriage would break the hold religious values had upon society.  Not because of gays, but because as Americans we tend to want, at least, things to be fair.  And it became clear to me, you could not deny other Americans the right to marry, whatever their gender.  Hell, I was asked if we should then allow polygamy.  What the hell do I care?  I can't make one wife happy, let alone more than that.  So how will we fix things?  I think society, if the cause is right, fixes it.  And while I am not a great big capitalist, there are consequences, financially, from not doing the right thing. We just need to be aware that everyone doesn't change as easily as others do, nor for the same reasons.

And the employee who was slow to change? I've never seen more women and people of color and people of different orientations, genders, and outlooks at the store he was fired from.  I might not always see the big picture.  The big picture is, the employee was making known his refusal to change,  and by doing that people were going to go elsewhere.  I was correct in saying that the person is a moral decent person, and I know he is a good person, and had encyclopedic knowledge of comics, he'll be missed, for those good portions.  He won't be missed for the public face of that store.  He was telling them by his words that everyone wasn't welcome.  That was not something you want for your company.  Anywhere.

Mid Summer Fantasy Readathon

MORE FANTASY

 
Click on all images for original size

It's odd, because it seems that every time I mention getting emails people send me emails saying how hard it was finding my email.  It is kind of the chicken and egg scenario. To make it easier, my email is AlexanderNess63@gmail.com.  I could tell you the email of my partner Kurt Wilcken, but if I did I'd have to kill you thereafter.  So we'll leave that for now.

I received quite a number of emails regarding the last article about fantasy as a genre.  More than anything the emailers asked very specifically, what are some books featuring short stories, limited series or collections as opposed to many volume length sagas, perhaps a response to Game of Thrones or Wheel of Time length series.  However good the Wheel of Time or Game of Thrones are, and I am saying nothing about quality, we live in a world where we seem to be migrating towards 140 character tweets, video clips, texting, and our focus is narrowed. So, this article will show some collected works that are self contained, satisfying, and offer more if you wish to pursue such.  This isn't saying these are the greatest works of fiction in the fantasy genre, just that, if you go to Amazon or Ebay, or a paperback exchange, you can probably find tons of these books, at a reasonable price, and you'll find a reward for your reading of good to great entertainment.Of course your mileage may vary.

One of the common lessons for writers is make the readers love or hate your characters, because they'll see the world through those eyes.  And I think the best of these works shown have great characters.  I also think that in our own lives, which are the source of knowledge and experience,  the best stories might have thoroughly despicable horribly flawed humans who would lead to disgust and disdain, if their story were told.  And yet, it isn't our victories or defeats that reveal our character, I think it is entirely possible to tell a story of epic quality without great characters.  I think we all have potential heroism or evil within us, and any great story will have those qualities.

MARGARET WEIS AND TRACY HICKMAN
THE DRAGONLANCE SAGA and DARK SWORD TRILOGY

This might be the most difficult and expensive of the collections to find, but I've seen all of these books at bookstores, for about $15 each.  Good luck finding them if you decide to try them out!

Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman  are talented authors, their greatest talent, from my reading, is composing a work that has tangible world and with a sense of history, geography, as well as heroism, as well as villainous behavior. More so, while it didn't move me for reasons of such, the DragonLance stories could be viewed in a context of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons statistics, and they can be played using the various game campaigns and manuals to reproduce.  I am not someone who ever tried to play the iconic characters from fiction in role playing adventures, since for me the point is writing your own characters.  DragonLance's world of Krynn possessed unique races, legends, lore, and worth exploring.  While over 150 novels have come out for the series, finding and or buying the three omnibus books would give you a healthy amount of tales.  The Dark Sword trilogy is an interesting story that features a magical world, a magicless man, and the prophecies how the one without magic will change or destroy the world.  It was a fun read.

ELIZABETH MOON
GIRD AND PAKSINARRION

The greatest aspect of the characters of Elizabeth Moon is found in the inner qualities they possess, and the military realism of the setting, wherein the characters are forced to fight and perhaps die for others.  The world she creates here is fully realized, and the characters she creates have motives and reasons for all they do that are consistent, and thorough.  The world of Gird and Paks feels real, so every action that takes place has an impact that is felt by the reader, as if their own world is the one experienced.

DENNIS MCKIERNAN
MITHGAR

I've read numerous snobbish reviews of the Iron Tower trilogy of Dennis McKiernan, and most say nothing more than "this is an epic quest such as Tolkien and others might have composed".  Well, for me, those are false in aim, and are of a sort of review that is unworthy of the work.  In no way did McKiernan suggest the concept was original.  But it was original in adding pure and true emotional energy to the epic clash between good and evil.  The two omnibus suggested for your quest have two distinct, powerful, fun quests. Beyond the two omnibuses suggested McKiernan has many books that fill his world of Mithgar, and while I have not read all of them, all that I have read are fun, and worth the time I'd spent reading them.

URSULA K. LE GUIN  THE EARTHSEA 

As I've shared before, I am a sucker for great cover art. The original art for the EarthSea books moved me, and that artist's work was used for books that were ancillary to the central series.  While I was not immediately excited about the work as much as the art on the outside of the book, I was stunned by the depth of characters, Le Guin's amazing ability to create a setting, and create real feeling events in their life made this series an epic of quality.  There have been attempts to adapt it, but it was never good.  While some books can't be adapted for the idiosyncratic aspects of their totality, Earthsea wasn't about a single character, it wasn't about a water world or medieval fantasy setting.  It was a beautiful 3 book length poem, without rhyme or form.  It was beauty in words.

ANNE MCCAFFREY 
DRAGONS OF PERN

If you are fascinated by dragons, if you like strong women lead characters, and if you like worlds that are similar to our own but composed in an entirely different fashion than our own, Anne McCaffrey's work should inspire you. Although it is rarely spoken of, the commonly held tropes of fantasy are rather limited in Pern.  The writing has been referred to as lyrical and layered in soft, sensuality without it being erotic or sexual.  The world of Pern possesses medieval era towns and fortress cities, anachronistic technology, and four distinct groups of humans.  Dragons are the power, but there are humans who can control them.  There is a complexity of story, where allegiance and control are a dance, and all inhabitants of the world face similar threats, despite the particular sides of conflict.

R.A. SALVATORE
DRIZZT DO'URDEN

I like the work of R.A. Salvatore.  He has a range of skills that allows him to depict action, show emotions, express romance, and creates characters that resonate.  The major character he has created is the lead throughout many of his works is a dark elf, talented and dangerous, from the Underdark Realms where evil and darkness is the constant.  Drizzt Do'Urden is not a hulking beast of a warrior, he is fast, agile, and almost dancer like in his enormous grace.  He also is moral, in an exceedingly immoral world, and from a place where morals are counted as weakness.  There is a lesser dealt with context of how a dark elf exists in a world of prejudice towards those of his kind.  However, the issue there is that the vast majority of dark elves are completely evil.  So, this aspect of the character's story has to be exceptionally nuanced, because if you are the sole exception, or nearly so, it isn't a stereotype held against a race, but a common trait.  The omnibus collections mean you can find a work, read a work that presents a character who inspires, excites, and deserves being in the pantheon of great characters of fantasy.

MICHAEL MOORCOCK
ELRIC AND CORUM

I could tell you how great of a writer Michael Moorcock is, and I think it could be easily proven to be true.  But he writes characters that do not resonate with me.  However, if you are moved by people without those danged morals or haughty high goals, he writes for you.  I do like comic book adaptations of his work, so, I think there is something in his work that is perfectly interesting, and the characters are facing a higher enemy than simply angry men.  Elric is the final monarch of a dying race, and his heart, though he wishes to be more than a member of race of extreme high levels of development in magic and court ritual.  He is unable to move beyond because he is a tragic prince, fated to kill, destroy, and cause the end of an age.  This weighs upon him deeply.  Corum is a member of a hunted people, and he goes through torture and horrors while fighting those who destroyed his people.  All of the characters of Moorcock have a great canvas upon which they are painted.  For me, the stories are great, the characters are very powerfully written, I guess I just like morals and honor. 

LORD DUNSANY
TIME AND GODS

Anyone reading Lord Dunsany and liking it probably loves the English language.  He told stories with a lush language, rich in detail, and concepts that were idealistic in its moral heights, and demonic in the evil when faced or found.  I can say for me, his works are book length poems, with characters that challenge the common hero. They have flaws, but more so, they have flaws that should mean they never are able to rise above and defeat the foe.  Time and Gods is a title that reflects the powers we do not command, that affect every life upon the planet.  His mythic tales move me spiritually, and even when poetry is not able to move my heart, Dunsany tales lift me above the horizon.  As with every author, your mileage might vary.

FRITZ LEIBER
FAFHRD GRAY MOUSER

I included Fritz Leiber's works because they utilize short stories and delightful tales.  But I've read that there are modern readers who think them sexist, and that his women characters are ornaments rather than fully able humans. I can see that. However, I read stories from many eras and think them all products of the era they were written in.  For what they are Leiber's characters are fully wrought, funny, interesting, and worthy of being read.  A giant of a man who has skills more than simply of that of a warrior, and small male friend, a master thief, and charismatic sort, who is a great swordsman.  These two lost souls meet and become strongest of friends and allies. Lankhmar is an ancient city within which they explore, scandal, discovery and adventure.  It is filled with secret cults, undead beasts, and the most dangerous of sorcerers.  If you like great writing and can forgive the limitations, I recommend Leiber's work.

ROBERT E. HOWARD
CONAN AND ASSORTED SHORT STORIES

Robert E. Howard is probably in my top five authors of all time. While I realize his work isn't seen by many high minded critics as great literature, few writers, let alone any of those same critics have created nearly so memorable a group of characters.   There are more than one collections of Conan, while he wrote numerous stories only a few were of Conan.  His short stories are fabulous, cover horror, western, historical, fantasy, and even boxing and big game hunt.  He has a way that is direct, perfect in action descriptions, and resonates I think in ways that we often think are not modern.

RPGs changed your entertainment world

Roleplaying games have a relatively short history, in terms of books, dice, paper and pencils.  While many give people like Gary Gygax of TSR fame most of the credit, that would be wrong.  There were others like Dave Arneson, M.A.R. Barker, Ken St. Andre, who all created worlds and rules to experience them, similar towards, superior to, perhaps they were even independent of contact with Gygax.  I am not attacking Gary Gygax, what he did was absorb all of the ideas he came in contact with and place them in a context that was to become the template for all games thereafter.  However changed, they had an origin, and usually were variations upon his publishing product. *1 (I am fortunate to have interviewed both Gary Gygax and Ken St. Andre.  While the Gygax interview was lost when PopThought was hacked, the St. Andre interview is still on this site.)  From the middle 1970s companies such as TSR, Chaosium, Flying Buffalo, White Wolf, Game Designer's Workshop, Game Workshop, R. Talsorian Games, Steve Jackson Games, Fantasy Games Unlimited, Atlas Games and many more contributed to providing an enormous choice of systems, settings, and games.  Games such Dungeons and Dragons, Tunnels and Trolls, Runequest, Ars Magica, Chivalry and Sorcery, Arduin, Talislanta, Empire of the Petal Throne, Jorune, and many more offered worlds and systems to explore, conquer, build for players of all sorts of interests.

Some will point to an origin of the concepts of fantasy, in the original literature of such, as found with J.R.R. Tolkien, Roger Zelazny, Lord Dunsany, Poul Anderson, Ursula K. LeGuin, C.J. Cherryh, Michael Moorcock, and of course many more.  While these are all great writers, with impact upon the concept of fantasy, they weren't placing their work in a concept of how to play or live or adventure in their worlds.  If you assume all fiction is in various ways open to development and open to being playable, perhaps it might be, it is still not the same as having a game to adapt such fiction for use.

You might ask what is the big deal with this all, it is just a game, right?  Well, no.  It isn't.  The concepts of all these game creators and world designers weren't just one and done, played and left behind.  They inspired much of the fantasy RPGs on computer and video games.  Even if the games have internal algorithms to decide outcomes, they use the same concepts that the original game creators used.  Knowing all this might be simply extra facts to you.  You might have use of it, or probably don't.  That isn't important.  What is important, is that in this throw away society we ignore those who created what we wish to play, read, watch, listen to, and perhaps do so so we won't think about the cost of being a creative talent. *2

I am also pointing this out because society tends to look at things backward.  Examples would be, the movie Andromeda Strain is just like Outbreak.  Or, the Spartans remind me of Nazis.  But that is, of course, backwards.  And yet, it happens all the time.  Even more oddly to me, I've met born again Christians who tell me playing Dungeons and Dragons is evil, or from the devil. Yet, they watch fantasy movies, read fantasy books, and play video games based upon the concepts that Dungeons and Dragons used, and popularized. If you are playing a fantasy adventure game, in video or computer game form, think about the facts of what went into your being able to play it.

Lastly I suggest that without the doors opened by fantasy RPGs to the common person, we might never have had the film series of Lord of the Rings, nor perhaps Game of Thrones.  It bears consideration, what effect the power of creative role playing has had throughout all media.

1- The Interview with Ken St. Andre
2- Mass interview about Gary Friedrich deals with Marvel

WHAT IF War Comics, Updated and Revised edition

I was asked by someone following the release of the recent two articles here featuring comic book dystopias and utopias, if there were comics that asked WHAT IFs about World War Two.  This then is a reprint of an article, but updated to reflect more books to consider.

As a historian I have always had an interest in the conflicts of humankind.  War is savage, brutal, terrible, and it is something that you cannot look away from.  It involves us all, and if we watch as wars happen and have no passion or sorrow, we really have no heart.  One of the ways of measuring the impact of wars, is to demonstrate what would have happened had the event in question not had the result that in reality it did.  What if George Washington had been killed at the battle of Trenton.  What if America never entered the First World War?  What if King Harold was not shot throw the eye and died at the battle of Hastings?  Every change has an effect down the line.  What Ifs, or, Alternative History allows the viewer, from scholar down to casual reader, to see the importance of what actually happened. World War Two was a savage, world wide war, that saw the deaths of more than 60 million humans.

In Storming Paradise by Chuck Dixon and Butch Guice, DC Comics, present a story of enormous change.  First the Manhattan Project fails.  Then the Americans are forced to invade Japan, and find a country that is stubborn and unyielding.  There is no doubt that the atomic bombs were horrific.  But the consequences of failure of the Manhattan Project allows the reader to see how horrible the invasion and result would surely be.

In the Avatar Press series UBER by Kieron Gillen and Canaan White, the end of the war is seen within the grasp of the Allies, when a final wonder weapon is unleashed.  This wonder weapon is not a missile, a giant tank, or new bomb.  It is people who are imbued with super powers, and they are unleashed upon the forces of the Allies, to enormous grievous loss to Allied troops.  The only answer, to the Allies, is that they must develop a similar program and fight fire with fire.

Roy Thomas's Anthem is another superhero story, with a setting of the streets and sewers of America, where the super heroes had to flee at first to escape the Nazi juggernaut as it invaded the US, and succeeded.  Roy Thomas's other comic work often featured WWII, and for my money it was magnificent.  But in this case, sadly, Roy Thomas was given artists who, if talented, were so raw, that much of the time the story was lost for the lack of art skills.  The concept however, and the setting is worthy of being read.  Although I suspect it is hard to find, and won't be expensive, it is a work that leaves the reader both intrigued and frustrated.

Luftwaffe 1946 is by Ted Nomura and Ben Dunn, through Antarctic Press.  The work is somewhat less serious than it should be, but, this work shows the evolution of warfare should the Nazis have held out, and the world not be finished with war, either in Europe or Asia/Pacific.  The fears of how the Nazis might explode, innovating new and deadlier technology is only made worse by the realization that the Holocaust would have been over, not due to liberation, but by completing their endeavor to destroy the Jews.  I liked this series, and rarely had issues with anything technical. 

Ministry of Space from Image Comics, sees the war in Europe end differently than in reality.  This difference, which I do not wish to spoil, save to say, somehow the Nazi scientists are recovered by the British rather than the Americans, and the British use this technological explosion to become the first nation into space, and beyond.  The writing by Warren Ellis is smooth, and very much able to tell a story that is less ingenious as it is seamless.  The art, that of humans in the military and the machinery of the Ministry of Space, is amazingly drawn, by Chris Weston.  With his penchant for knowing how to depict military machinery and detail every aspect of the world, allows the reader to suspend every ounce of disbelief.  While some reviewers found the end of the work somewhat glib and heavy handed, it worked for me, because the verisimilitude that had been created.  All in all, this work is among my favorites of all time.  Your mileage may vary.

Royals: Masters of War was an exciting, if limited story about the super humans who won World War  Two.  It doesn't really break new ground of any sort, but it is entirely worth reading.

World War 2.2 asks a very important question, if Hitler had died at the start of the Second World War would the Germans have stopped the war, would they have gone on to fight essentially the same war, or would the lack of Hitler in fact improve the result for the Germans, and against the well being of the rest of Europe?