Indestructible!

"Hapless", "vengeful", "ruthless", "snapped"... That was the vocabulary of those British comics stories I grew up with. Kelly's Eye ran in the UK weekly comic Valiant. Tim Kelly stole the jeweled eye of the idol of the Inca god Zoltec, which turned out to be a handy accessory for an adventurer, seeing as how it made the wearer invulnerable.

Kids today might have iPhones and videogames, but they never got to thrill to the likes of Kelly's Eye and The Steel Claw and giant robot ape Mytek the Mighty. There was something in the UK drinking water back then, and those strips were masterpieces of focused fantasy storytelling that skated on the fine line between brilliant and barmy.

Many years after following the adventures of Tim Kelly, I got the job of writing stories about another indestructible man: Captain Scarlet. It wasn’t easy. Captain Scarlet got blown up, he just came back to life. The only time I managed to inject a bit of tension was when he was shot in the chest but people were in danger so he couldn't afford the luxury of dying and coming back to life again.

Tim Kelly's invulnerability was something quite different. Because it depended on him having hold of the Eye of Zoltec, there was plenty of drama to be squeezed from situations where he'd lost the Eye or had to give it to somebody else.

My enjoyment of those British comics of the '60s will never approach the all-consuming and utterly obsessive ardor I have for Marvel Comics of the time. But with hindsight I can see that they were little gems of imaginative fantasy that fully deserve that cherished place in my heart. Hope you like this glimpse into the past.

Where do ideas come from?

It was a dream. Or a daydream, perhaps – hard to say. I had been writing the Captain Scarlet books and struggling with how to find the drama when you have an indestructible hero. What came to me out of the blue wasn’t of any use in the book I was actually writing. Where the Muse is involved, you can never order what you want, only what you need. 

A man lies on a slab. In voiceover: “I always wonder if it’s going to work this time. If the eyes will open and let in the light. Will I feel the rush of blood coming back? Will I manage to take that first breath?”

(Yeah, it’s too much, but this is the stuff as it comes straight out of the depths. The craft of writing is to refine it.)

I realize it’s not a slab. He’s on a couch and this voiceover is presumably what he’s saying to his psychiatrist. And just as I think that, it's like a cut to a body floating in murky water. I'm looking at the body from below as it drifts up towards a patch of greenish daylight and is hooked by gaffs. Indistinct noises turn to shouts as it breaks the surface.

On Westminster Bridge, a sullen crowd has gathered. In the daydream, as it dropped into my mind, I know that the war against the Mysterons has dragged on for years and drained Earth’s resources. People live in poverty and fear, resenting the military types who descend – literally - from the clouds. The Thames is filled with dozens of corpses drifting by. Colonel White watches from the bridge as one of those bodies is hauled up onto the Embankment by his men.

An angry voice in the crowd: “Can’t you leave the poor devils in peace?”

Colonel White replies, almost to himself: “One of those ‘poor devils’ has a dinner date at the Savoy.”

The Spectrum agents have put up a tent beside the river. Inside, doctors work on the dead body they’ve fished up. Pumping the river water out of the lungs, washing down the body. A soldier starts to clothe the corpse in full evening dress. As White enters, a doctor is reading from the instruments they’ve wired up: “Biotoxin levels dropping. Cellular activity at eighty percent, ninety…”

And just as the soldier finishes knotting the bow tie, Captain Scarlet gives a gasp and sits up. He blinks, shows no emotion. He’s used to this; it happens all the time. It's one of the things that is edging him away from being human.

White puts an invitation card into his hand. “There’s a car waiting. Come on, Scarlet, no lying down on this job…”

Now, I didn’t “invent” any of that. Not in the way that, when designing a videogame, I identify a problem and then devise different ways to solve it. It’s not even like storyboarding a scene. That too is creative, but it’s creativity with a target. You’re using the tools of the craft to make something work. But in the beginning, faced with the blank page, creativity merely consists of making yourself a conduit. In storytelling, fragments like this just arrive. They’re only half-formed, but I don’t know who it is who has worked them even to that stage. The Muse, I guess. “The boys in the basement” as Stephen King calls them.

You hope for something you’ve never seen before. And when those fragments arrive, it makes the job as fresh for you as for your readers. Of course, that’s just the one percent. Then comes the perspiration.