I wrote this for a small but well-respected comics zine,
It’s a Fanzine, published out of Des Moines, Iowa, from 1980 to 1995. Writing for the zine was always enjoyable, even when I was pounding through a third draft at 2 a.m., days after we were supposed to go to press. A note on style: In my early twenties my enthusiasm eclipsed my writing skills and sometimes my good judgment, but that’s youth and untreated Bipolar Disorder for you. I’ve cleaned up more than a few things to make the piece smoother and more coherent. Hope you enjoy this.
Seven Seconds and Counting
As I recall, it began with a DC coming releases sheet. There, hidden in shadow, was a character with bulky legs who looked to me as if he might be a cyborg or something. The caption said it was a Trevor von Eeden illo from the coming deluxe-format series,
Thriller. I didn’t know it then, but the “cyborg” was a man called Salvo. We would become fast friends over the course of the first eight issues, then I’d watch him fall apart in agonies of bad characterization. But that was all to come much later. At the start all I saw was an enigmatic, riveting shadow. So I waited.
Soon it was out, that first issue with the beguiling cover ... rough, crude even, but entrancing: a man standing high atop a bridge, whipped by the wind, and above him a beautiful woman’s face filling the night sky. Robert Loren Fleming? Never heard of him. I read the book. What was going on?
In the 2030s, TV news photographer Daniel Grove was working with his twin brother Ken, a reporter. They were captured by the Molluskan terrorist Scabbard (who sheathed his sword in his back). As Dan continued to send a live video feed, Scabbard decapitated Ken on national television. Back in the USA, alone for the first time in his life, Dan stood atop the bridge from the bridge. “Ken!” he cried. “I don’t know how to stay behind.” A voice called to him. “Daniel?” “Huh?” he replied. “Oh my God!” Above the bridge, formed from the mists and smoke of New York City, a beautiful woman’s face filled the sky.
“My name is Thriller,” she said. “I see pieces of the future. You, Daniel, are part of
my future. There will be no time for tantrums or for cowardly acts of self-destruction. A car is on the way for you. It’s time you grew up.”
A Rolls-Royce limousine pulled to the curb. Dan was yanked inside by Data, Thriller’s Information Specialist, and hijacked across the city, tumbling through a series of encounters with other operatives: White Satin, who disabled men with a touch; Beaker Parish, a nine-foot tall, chopper-flying product of genetic engineering gone awry and a Catholic priest;
and Salvo.
His “bulky” legs, like the rest of him, were covered with holstered guns. Provoked by Dan, Salvo blew Dan’s jacket off him without drawing a drop of blood. “Only flesh wounds!” he barked. “Only out-patients! I won’t kill a fly.” “So don’t ask me,” he finished, quietly. At the Trinity building, Dan would meet the remaining "seconds": Proxy (who welcomed Dan to the Six Seconds), Crackerjack, and Edward Thriller himself, the husband -- and the living embodiment -- of the mysterious energy being named Angie Thriller.
I didn't know what was happening, but I loved every page of it; I hadn't had to read this carefully or think this hard about a comic since ... hell, since never. There had never been a story like this in mainstream comics. This was almost a dream on paper. The art -- choppy, crazy, bold colors, raw lines, everything drawn in the starkest, meanest possible terms. No slickness to the people, the city, the action. The blades of Beaker Parish's helicopter slicing the page into shreds.
It wasn't a dream, it was a nightmare -- Dan Grove's nightmare. And it worked. The first issue closed with a group of falling leaves appearing to coalesce into a man with white hair -- except at the temples, where it was
black -- who stepped forward, offered his hand in greeting, and introduced himself as Edward Thriller. "Welcome to our family," he said.
Some of this was explained in #2.
Angie's body had been destroyed (as had Edward's) in a laboratory accident. When Edward's body returned to normal, Angie's life force was inside him. He could discorporate at will, leaving Angie present in her energy state. While they shared a form, they could not speak to one another. "I'm just the body," Edward told Dan. "She's my soul." Angie could manipulate inorganic matter, sometimes creating faces with which to communicate with others.
Tony Salvotini, following a military tragedy, had trained to be the ultimate marksman, one who could always disable without killing. Angie, his twin, could manipulate Salvo’s body to a limited extent, such as growing an eye in his palm to let him see around a corner.
Data, or Freddie, directed his limousine mentally via a brain implant, and lived there. “I have all the comforts -- open access to all information retrieval systems and the storage capacity of several 647 K-byte computers ... in
my head1. So ask me a question ... [b]any[/i] question.” [Remember, it was 1983.]
Proxy, Robert Furillo, was believed dead. He’d burned himself horribly while freebasing cocaine and covered his wounds with an experimental synthetic skin. Until it fell apart he could be anyone. (This was 1983, years before
DarkmanCrackerjack, or Jack, was a Honduran pre-teen -- Edward’s ward, Freddie’s close friend and a self-taught safecracker.
Beaker Parish was just what he presented -- a priest, honest and open, regardless of his origins.
White Satin's mysterious touch was a form of prana bindu. Lots of things remained unexplained, and I liked it. I read both issues several times over and waited anxiously for the next.
Other plot points remained obscure. Dans's reliving, in #3, of the circumstances that led to his father's death -- was it a dream, or reality? How did Dan get to the train station on the last page? Where did he fit into the newly constituted
Seven Seconds who, as the ad copy told us, had to save the world? By the end of #3, the story was only less clear.
It would become clearer as time passed, but not clear enough for most readers; sales were down already. I worried for
Thriller. Sure, i was willing to put a little intellectual and creative effort into reading a comic, but what of the masses who weren't? And what of the art? von Eeden continued in his raw style, inked on #6 by Dick Girodano, who often smoothed out the lines a bit while adding nothing to the impact of the work. They even used a different cover artist for #7. People won't buy this, I thought. It's too different from anything else that's out there. Hell, this is weirder than
Ronin.
I was right; the editor revealed a lack of mail on the book and begged for letters. People weren't reading
Thriller. Why? It was too mysterious and too familiar. Good wasn't all good, bad wasn't all bad. Salvo was plainly crazy, but he wouldn't kill, even in self-defense. No one knew how trustworthy Edward was, or could fully divine Angie's motivations. Adventure, while important, was secondary to the personal lives of the ensemble.
At heart, the book was a story about a group of damaged people constructing a family from the wreckage of their lives (Fleming described Angie as a cross between his mom and Jesus). This soon meant more than the Seven Seconds and the Thriller/Salvotini family. Who was this Elvis Presley guy running around robbing banks? Or the older guy who looked like Elvis? He turned out to be the younger man's "father," except that both were clones of the original "Kane Creole," who clearly was meant to be Elvis.
I was still having fun. Fleming and von Eeden clearly were having some fun. Why wasn't the rest of the audience having fun? I stuck out the storm, hoping it would pass.
Then, disaster. Fleming was leaving the book after #7. Creative differences with the editors and with von Eeden, he said, and he wanted to work on a mini-series he'd been developing. Was it the low sales that bothered him, the slow death of his child? What of "Down Time," the 12-issue story he had only half completed? What of his plans, sketched out in an interview, for the first 25 issues? And what would the book be like under Bill Dubay? He'd done a workmanlike job as an editor/writer for the Warren horror and sf titles, and some passable superhero work for Red Circle/Archie, but he'd never shown a flair for the sort of character work that defined
Thriller.Issue #8 wasn't awful. Not good, but not awful. The script lacked the humor and atmosphere Fleming brought to the book. But, I thought, Dubay was new to the characters. He deserved a few issues to settle in. Then von Eeden announced he was leaving after #8. DC brought in Alex Niño, one of the many Filipino artists who'd worked on mystery and horror titles through the '70s. The quick descent began.
Dubay used captions -- scrupulously avoided by Fleming except for first-person narration -- long, wordy, superfluous, overbearing captions. He ended most declarative sentences with exclamation points, an old comics practice Fleming had abandoned. Humor came from naming characters "Glorioski" and lines like, "And if you believe, that, I've got a nifty little bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to show you!" -- spoken in English to a band of Russian-speaking soldiers. Speaking of the Russians, suddenly they were the root of all evil, except for Fleming's mysterious START corporation, which now seemed to want to blow up the entire world, Russians and all. Where were the Creoles, whom Fleming had established as new members of the Trinity family? Where were the Mollusks, the bank robbers from #2 who had seemed so important and possibly tied to Scabbard? Where were the characters I had grown to love? It was all gone.
I couldn't recognize the characters as Dubay wrote them. His plots were filled with immense science fiction and metaphysical schemes in which the characters were more like machine parts than people. (In #10 he obliterated a city of 20 million people with a nuclear weapon so that two enigmatic, cosmic characters, Faith and Quo, "The Balancer," could revive them with their memories of having died -- creating a short-lived enlightenment, we were told.) Dubay mostly ignored the family stories central to Fleming's book. I couldn't recognize the characters' faces, either; Niño drew like a drunken Milton Caniff. Technically he was proficient, but his art lacked emotion. von Eeden had infused his art with the passion of a creator and designer proudly displaying his work. Nino made it clear he was drawing the book because he was paid to.
(Typical Niño art, from #12.)
Thriller had become just another ugly comic on good paper, just another
Omega Men. The end was near. Niño and Dubay cranked out a misbegotten ending to "Down Time," and DC cancelled
Thriller with its twelfth issue.
When the end came it was something of a relief, as if a once vibrant but now sick and confused friend was at peace. I hadn't expected
Thriller to last six issues, but it had. I hadn't thought I could care so much about a comic. I did. In its first seven issues,
Thriller raised my hopes for the cinematic comics style Rich Buckler and Neal Adams had started developing in the seventies. But it was over, at least for DC.
What killed
Thriller? Personal conflicts among the creative team, for certain, but I think there was more. Had the sales remained strong, editor Alan Gold might have been able to moderate the differences between Fleming and von Eeden. Readers killed the book, and I think prejudice drove away the readers. They'd bought other von Eeden material that was nearly as raw, including a
Batman Annual that blew critics away. It might have been the layouts, tied as they were to Fleming’s less-than-linear storytelling. Still, I can’t help but feel the failure was more conceptual.
DC readers were not ready, in 1983, for a comic that required as much attention as
Thriller. They were unwilling to give as much time to a DC “hero” comic as they would to Howard Chaykin’s
American Flagg! And
Thriller required that reading time, that thought. The two books really were much alike. Both used humor at odds moments and in strange ways. Both created confusing, dense worlds that were only slowly explained -- closed realities into which other comics conventions could not intrude without causing harm. Both were unable to exist or function properly without their creators at the helm. But only one of the two died: the poor relation, stuck at the “mainstream” publisher.
Forget that
Thriller was the only comic on the stands that even attempted to deal with current politics and international relations, even in a sideways fashion. Forget that Fleming created some of the most realistic and idiosyncratic characters of the day, characters who were easy to dislike because of their flaws but easy to love for their virtues. Forget that it tried to create a family unit in comics that acted like a real family. Forget the humor. Forget the action. Forget von Eeden’s stunning covers.
Remember that Fleming and von Eeden had guts enough to try something like
Thriller at DC, when all of the truly unusual work was coming out of the “independent publishers.” Remember the noble experiment. Remember the art, because you’ll never quite see its like again. And remember the Seven Seconds, unmourned except by those few who cared. Goodbye, kids. I loved you people. I tried to keep the dream alive. I really did.
I just couldn’t read you fast enough.
*****
Following
Thriller’s cancellation, Bob Fleming continued to work for DC, frequently with Keith Giffen. Their most popular work was the first
Ambush Bug miniseries. There was talk of a
Thriller limited series, but nothing came of it. At that point, Giffen had started drawing in a style heavily influenced by Argentinian artist F. Solano Lopez. The stark compositions and shadowy figures, as evidenced in the Fleming/Giffen graphic novel
Hell on Earth, would have served a new
Thriller well. Fleming has written very few comics since the early 1990s.
Trevor von Eeden also worked for DC. Through the ‘80s and ‘90s he penciled
The Outsiders,
Black Canary and other DC Universe titles, though sometimes under heavy inks that disguised his jagged style. His fate was the same at a number of other publishers, and at times he was relegated to layouts, with heavy finishes over his page designs.
DC's "Deluxe" format comics were part of the change in printing comics, beginning in the early 1980s. At that point, most comics were on a cheap, newsprint-type paper, printed directly from metal plates. DC introduced "Mando" books, printed on a higher-grade paper called Mando, and Deluxe books, with offset printing on a whiter, sturdier paper than Mando. Unfortunately, they continued to color the comics as if they were to be printed on the old, cheap paper, Before they learned how to adjust the separations, many comics were ugly and garish.
Thriller's colors were not the most subtle, but the book benefited from the involvement of Tom Ziuko, one of the more talented colorists of the day.
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." -- Noam Chomsky
