Secrets Of the Endless Night
I generally like to let my comics and stories speak for themselves rather than talking about them too much; it’s easy to get wanky and self obsessive, and deep down I know that my work isn’t really worthy of the same sort of critical dissection as say, War and Peace or the works of Shakespeare.
But anyway, I decided that I might as well try writing a bit about Secrets of the Endless Night, one of my more complex comics, and see if people find it interesting. After all, when I look at other people’s pages, the little comments are always interesting. I’ll also try to explain some of the more obscure references.
The Basics
Secrets of the Endless Night is a comic created specifically for Tharunka, one of the two uni magazines of the University of New South Wales, where I study (Destination Space appears in the other one, Blitz). That’s why the format is less showy that most of my online only comics- black and white, 3 A4 pages- and also why the standard is sometimes patchy, since the comic is often drawn in intense all-night sessions before the deadline expires.
After starting to read Hellboy, I really wanted to write a horror comic of my own, and my original idea was to write some short stories based on some weird dreams I had. Somewhere along the line, I decided that it should be an ongoing series presented in a Crypt keeper-fashion by Pir-Tek, a character I had originally intended to appear in Sontag. A lot of the characters, or aspects of them from these comics were originally intended for stories I never got round to writing. Although I haven’t yet written either of those episodes based on my dreams, they’re still on my list of ideas, which I sporadically update, and desperately scan for inspiration whenever Mansha (the editor of Tharunka) emails me asking for the next comic.
Secrets of the Endless Night, like most of my recent comics, is drawn in Photoshop, using a Wacom tablet. If you want more specific details of how I draw it, email me and I can let you know… if there’s enough interest I can post a little step-by-step guide.
Because it’s easy and almost obligatory, here’s a list of some of the main influences on SoTEN (geddit?). : H.P. Lovecraft, Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Hellboy, Charles Burns, Doctor Who, Daniel Clowes, The Twilight Zone, and Jim Henson’s The Storyteller.
Look them up if you like this comic.
The first story in Secrets of the Endless Night, Genevieve, is still one of the best, I think. I originally wanted to draw it in a style somewhere between old European woodcuts and 70s underground art, but me being the artist I am it kind of defaulted to a dark, semi-realistic style. The speech bubbles are deliberately unusual; I wanted them to resemble the odd, spidery looking thing that appear in late 19th century Punch comics; the ones that always appear early on as examples in books on the history of comics. You can probably see the similarity best in the last panel of page 1.
The plot is a fairly straightforward, slightly twisted tale of heart-warming filial love, so needs little commentary. Genevieve herself is a homunculus (or technically homuncula I guess)… Wikipedia gives a good explanation of the term. Looking at Genevieve now, I’m slightly blown away by how open the panels are, and how big. How did I let the later stories get so long and convoluted?
Artistically speaking, I’d say Beyond Evil is the best looking story of the lot. This is mainly because I planned my time better than I had with Genevieve, and drew it at a leisurely pace, using a lot of photo references, and taking breaks so that my hand didn’t cramp up (literally!).
Again, the plot is fairly straightforward. The title is a reference to a quote by Nietzsche, which relates to the themes. The Devil’s appearance is meant to make him look somewhat like an ancient Middle Eastern emperor. The picture in the background in the last panel is of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, establishing the story in 1914.
I’m not too happy with the story of Beyond Evil- I think it’s too heavy-handed. I have a vague idea for a future comic which will bring back Blaise, and investigate some of the ideas more thoroughly.
The biggest change you’ll notice reading this one is that there are way more panels, and they are all smaller. This came about when I realised that the story I wanted to tell was far too long for 27 panels. I originally thought about doing it in 2 parts, but since it would be published in Tharunka 3 to 4 weeks apart, I didn’t think anyone would wait, and I hate having to wait for the next part of a story myself. So I put 16 panels on each page instead of 9, and didn’t look back. This was still a bit too short for the story I had planned however, which is why it jumps around quite a lot. Sorry.
I’m reluctant to give away the identity of Biz yet, but if I tell you that he’s wearing a Balearic shirt you might figure it out, if you do some detective work.
What really made the story was my discovery of a book of 50s All-American ads during the writing process. Setting the story in the 50s- a time of paranoia, consumerism and conformity- made the ideas much more vivid. I’m also proud of the inclusion of the ads, which are authentic, although altered slightly to fit into the panels. I wish I’d had more time to research 50s slang…did they really say “A-Okay”?
Again, the title comes from a quote, this time from Euripides- "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."
Alienated was an idea I’d had in my head for a long time. It specifically came from a scene in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in the Dark which I found terrifying (am I the only person who found Lovecraft genuinely scary?). I won’t tell you which scene, since it would spoil it, but the aliens in Alienated are probably from Yuggoth, or somewhere like it.
Pir Tek doesn’t appear in this story, or the next one, due to the fact that, well, I didn’t have enough space for him, and he seemed unnecessary. He may come back, either as a narrator or a character in a story, but then again, he may not.
What made the story, for me, was the inclusion of the love story, to give what could have been a dry exercise in horror a human feel. Alienated was due to appear in was the Queer special issueof Tharunka, so adding the gay element, without making it one of the main ‘issues’ seemed to be a good decision.
The underlying idea of Alienated- people being replaced by robotic doubles, isn’t original. Similar stories have appeared in The Stepford Wives, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Faculty, The 10 O’ Clock People, and I’m sure many others. What I hopefully did in Alienated though was link the archetype to a different idea- whereas the other stories had linked it with female oppression, fear of AIDs, communism or nuclear war, I wanted to use it to explore the idea of alienation, in a sort of Marxist sense; the alienation we experience in modern society, the alienation experienced by people working in McJobs and call centres.
The World Systems logo was inspired by a joke a friend made about Octopus of Evil logos- the abstract, vaguely menacing logos used by some companies. The one he was talking about was Canberra’s ACTION Buses, but other companies with Octopus of Evil logos include both of Scotland’s banks, the Royal Bank and the Bank of Scotland. Let me know if you find any others!
As far as I can tell, no company called World Systems really exists.
Black and White is another story influenced very much by H.P. Lovecraft, this time mainly the Call of Cthulhu and At the Mountains of Madness, although the main influence in terms of theme and setting was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The basic outline for the story- the expedition, the murders, Cha’u and the monster companion, came very early. The Black City, very loosely based on R'lyeh, didn’t really play much of a part originally, but I decided that including it more would explain Eric’s motivations, as well as allow me to include more Lovecraftian themes. The pictures of the God of the City (which is what the thing in panel 4 of page 3 is, in case you didn’t realise) and the city itself, are two of my favourite parts of this comic.
Making the main characters Nazis was a decision I made fairly late, and am still not sure about. As I did more research into the Nazis to write the comic I saw that some of the things that went on in Germany in the 30s and 40s are horrible beyond belief, and worried that I might seem overly sympathetic towards them. But I went on anyway, and tried to tell the story as best I could.
The origin of the Nazi element was the discovery, when I was reading up on Antarctic history, that the Germans had briefly established a (very half-assed) colony there in 1939. I wanted at first to make a reference to this, as a little Hellboy tribute, but after researching H.P. Lovecraft himself I decided to make it a larger part of the comic. Lovecraft, for those that don’t know, was a pulp horror writer early last century, whose relatively few works have been hugely influential. Although I’ve read a fair few of his stories, it wasn’t til I saw it pointed out in a biography that I realised he was a pretty racist guy. Ideas of eugenics and racial hierarchy were very common at the time he lived, so I don’t mention it so much as a judgement of him, but as a factor that influenced his writing. A lot of his work uses as the catalyst for horror the fears of otherness, of other races and cultures, and of loss of racial purity, which also obsessed the Nazis. Making the lead character, John Kaufmann, a scientist of the Third Reich also allowed me to bring up a major theme of Frankenstein, Science Gone Bad, and the causes of said badness.
The name Kaufmann, I guess, sounds Jewish, but the internet tells me that Kaufmann simply means ‘Merchant’- although I had originally planned to give John a dirty secret- he was to have been a quarter Jewish. Lukas Bauer, the half-Japanese linguist, is a tribute the comic Adolf by Osamu Tezuka, which also featured a half-Japanese Nazi. Which is weird considering I haven’t managed to read it, but Tezuka is an artist close to my heart.
The script used on the monolith, and the main characters of the story (I’ll leave it to you to decide who they are) will probably appear later in a later story, when I start to draw some of the threads from the different episodes together.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF AGLOVALE
Mid September, pretty much in the middle of my uni holidays and not long after finishing Black and White, I realised I would need to start working on the next story. For a while, I planned to do a comic in which Lord Howard and Cha’u (from Black and White) would go on a sort of ghost-busting quest through a cursed house. I decided about two weeks before it was due that the idea sucked, and while I kept Lord Howard’s involvement, I decided to go back to one of my very first ideas for Secrets of the Endless Night.
Ages ago, I had a dream in which this spirit possessed various people in a Victorian household, and started various sexual intrigues, and generally bringing out their repressed desires. It was quite a weird, cool dream and when I originally decided to draw a comic for Tharunka, I planned to do it as a sort of Chis Ware-esque comedy tale. But since I couldn’t get the story right in my head, I decided to do Genevieve instead. However, with the addition of Chastity Aglovale, the deformed scion of the house of Aglovale, based on the story of the Monster of Glamis, and Loki Howard, the story started to make sense.
The character of Loki Howard comes from another story again; a long comedy/horror comic I still plan to do called Eurydice; but I think he’s pretty cool, and makes a good, mysterious hero. He’ll definitely be back in SoTEN before long, and I’ll start to reveal more about his dark past.
The references to Oscar Wilde (there were more originally, which got cut) came from the fact that to prepare to write Aglovale, I read The Importance of Being Earnest, to get a sense of the language and manners of the time.
The title is an obvious reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, although the story itself has little relationship. I read some of Poe as another part of my research, but although I liked his writing, I didn’t find so much inspiration as I did in H.P. Lovecraft. However, as a little tribute, the appearance of Earl Victor Aglovale is based on Poe (in case nobody noticed, Dr John Kaufmann from Black and White’s appearance was based on ole Lovecraft).
There was another influence in the film Gosford Park, which I loved. The manor location in Scotland, the pheasant shoot and the dark secret are all shared with this film. Incidentally, there are twelve people in total in the party (excluding servants)- a site I read on Victorian dinner ettiquette advised this as the ideal number for a dinner!
Obviously, this comic is different from the previous ones in a few different ways; the colour pages (which I’m very pleased with) and longer page length were kindly given to me by the Tharunka editors, resulting in a much better looking and less squashed story. It would be cool to go back and colourise all the pages, but I don’t expect it to happen anytime soon.
I drew this comic over 3 days to make the Tharunka deadline, and kept a blog to record my progress and let friends and fans leave comments to encourage me in my mammoth effort (it took over 30 hours of drawing). You can read it here; there’s some self-criticism, a deleted scene, and if you want you can leave a comment.
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So there
you go. Secrets of the Endless Night will continue as long as there
are stories to tell and Tharunkas to print them. If you like it, or
want to make a comment or criticism or ask a question, please email
me- I’d really appreciate it!