Rebuilding The Time Rogues from Strip to Prose

[Perpetual Man]

At some point the idea of the term Time Cops seemed to be a bit to 'easy' so this was changed to Temporal Enforcers.

As I was writing the early parts out, I saw that there was a potential for an over-arcing storyline, rather than individual ones, and that is the direction things started to go in.

The basic idea of the characters though was that there were certain types of people that were suited to being able to travel in time, and these were selected on that basis. Initially they all wore a standardised body armour that helped them while travelling. However over time the effect of travelling through the timestream on a regular basis was to release eccentricities, these included individualised armour and personal appearance.

Paul, ironically kept his armour fairly close to the original design.

The other thing was that it was not unusual for the timestream to cut and scar individuals - a lot like paper cuts, so most of the Enforcers had a series of scars on their face and hands. Although the option was there to have them healed, very few did, wearing them as a badge of honour.

 

[Perpetual Man]

Anyway with the plotting done I wrote a script, although unlike a traditional comic book script, I just wrote the captions and dialogue down, with the freedom of placing them where I thought they would fit as I drew the strip.

 

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And then came the art. I'm not sure whether I ever drew more than the first two pages, but if I did they no longer exist and have not done so for a long time.

 

[Perpetual Man]

It was about this time that Charles contacted me and diplomatically (and correctly) told me that he felt the artwork was not really good enough for what he had in mind.

When I look at the art now I have to agree, it is rudimentary and basic. There is nothing wrong with any of the pictures but there is nothing exceptional about them either. The first splash page is okay, but despite everything looking right, Paul looks stiff, the position he is in is unnatural. If someone was sitting alone in a room in deep thought, they would probably not be sitting like that.

So when Charles told me he had an artist who was looking to draw a strip who had replied to the same ad I had, I was amenable to letting him come on board and take a shot at drawing it.

 

[Perpetual Man]

The artist was a great guy called Tim Rees. In one of those weird coincidences he lived quite close to me, and on paper we hit it off quite well. (Most of what we did was done by post - e-mail was still an up and coming thing, the idea of sending huge amount of data over dial up - never!)

Tim took what I had done and ran with it, working from my designs and turning them into something rather incredible. As a comic artist he had a few edges that needed smoothing, but he was well on his way and infinitely superior to me, as the following posts will show.

 

[Perpetual Man]

Tim with a pin up style picture showing the character of Paul, here still very much a police type character

 

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Tim's early sketches of the main characters, by then having the names of Paul Redgrave, Kara, Pariah, DeValois and M'Garth

 

[Perpetual Man]

What happens next is a lot of backwards and forwards, mostly between myself, Tim and Charles. I've got a number of notes and alterations that I was going to include, but don't think it's that necessary. I might add them at a later time if people show an interest (which I doubt).

So there we have it.

Until Charles announced that his plans were bigger than he intended and that he was going to let go of his project for the time being.

Of course he was an absolute gentleman about it, and did not want to see the work go to waste so put me in contact with an near anarchic little group called North London Comics.

 

[Perpetual Man]

North London Comics were a small operation run from a back bedroom and an old photocopier, it's principle output was MONDO the brainchild of Lee Davis ably assisted by Mark Yarwood and Paul Wheatcroft.

If Davis could be compared to anyone, it would be Stan Lee (well the small press version of the man). He could come out with all kinds of ideas and just keep throwing them at the board and going with those that stuck and reworking or dropping those that didn't. MONDO might have been Small Press on the thrifty and low production side of things, but it had more heart than half the other small press comics combined. It was nothing for Davis and Yarwood to put out a 50+ page issue in one month simply because they could.

It was filled with all kind of stuff, from the bizarre to the wonderful and always, always fun.

Davis was in the process of putting together a new title, Union Jack and he felt that this, with a slightly more rigid format would be the home for the Time Rogues.

They appeared in issue 1, and ran through to the end of issue 6, which was the full run of Prelude and Prologue. Tim and I were afforded a lot more freedom, so that Time Rogues was pretty much what I intended.

Both Tim and I got pulled in different directions when we with NLC, writing and drawing quite a few different stories, I wrote Negative Man, Greywing, Project Knight, Force Europe... while Tim went on to draw any number of strips. Together we worked our way through the first major Time Rogue story, The Gods of Sand and Stone.

I finished writing it, but Tim got half way through before committing to another project. The plan was to always come back to it.

Life moved on. We were briefly brought back together to work on a strip called Spitfire, before life really got in the way. Tim had problems with his fulltime job, and then got ill, while Lee went off to college.

We all stay in contact, and the five odd years I was part of their fun little group was a magic one. From actually working on the comics, through to meeting up at conventions and getting uh tipsy with them.

But it was this point that the Time Rogues sank into the filing cabinet and drifted away...

 

[Perpetual Man]

So now I have reached the point where I should really have started this thread.

Not really having got the time to concentrate on new material, or to really put the effort into the stuff that really needs the work, I did think I needed something to play with, just to keep my hand in, as it were. Obviously doing the monthly challenges around here are an excellent way of doing this, but I felt I needed something else, something a bit deeper, that I could just throw my hand into when I had a bit of time.

It was then I realised I had the Time Rogues sitting in the drawer and I thought it would be fun being able to transform it from strip to prose.

The idea would be straight forward, I mean describe each frame, put the dialogue in the right place and the job would be done.

First up would be Prelude, an introduction to the ongoing story that stands alone.

There is no dialogue in it, other than one word of speech and a single word right at the end. Easy.

Well no...

 

[Perpetual Man]

The two actual attempts have been put up in critiques: The initial version and the rewrite

The first version includes the original strip as well...

I'm not sure where it came from but as I was contemplating the idea of converting the strip, as I often do, I was running ideas through my head and had a fairly good idea where I was going to start. It was literally as I sat down to work that a sudden idea hit me and I decided to write it in the present tense.

I do not really know why, perhaps I thought it would set it apart from the main story, perhaps I felt it would just be different and have more impact at the end. I think it is safe to say that it did not really work.

 

[Perpetual Man]

A quick aside on writing comic books. Although there is no real correct way of writing a comic, there are two main ways, that are broad enough to cover everything.

The first is full script. This sees the page broken down into panels by the writer, describing the content of each panel, any speech that will occur there and any captions. The descriptions can be anything from sparse, giving the artist complete freedom, to fully detailed, where any little bit might be important.

The other is often referred to as the Marvel Method. This was basically developed by Stan Lee back in his heyday, when he was churning out countless comics month after month. He would write a brief overview of the issue, a plot, and then the classic artists like Jack Kirby and John Romita would draw the strip from that and then Lee would go back through scripting from the pictures provided.

The Prelude script was very much a mix of both. The first draft with words was written in the traditional manner, wile the second was pretty much the Marvel method. I gave the information needed, the artist knew it needed to fill 8 pages and did the rest.

As can be seen from the version above it reads an awful lot like my first prose attempt.

And this is where the conversion fell apart.

All I was doing was not converting as such but reversing the process, in turning a comic strip into words I was describing each panel.

And there was no way that was going to read as well as the comic, because there is a different way of reading pictures and words.

 

[Perpetual Man]

The latest (and so far last) draft is written in a style a lot more suited to prose. It is a lot easier to read and does what it needs to in a lot less words.

Prelude was a nice trial run, but in many ways it was rather straightforward and simple despite the initial hiccup.

What was to follow was not going to be so easy.

 

[Perpetual Man]

Prologue was a five part story that followed on from Prelude and really formed the foundation for what was to follow. The way it was planned was purely for comic strip and until I recently started toying with the notion of converting it to prose I did not really consider how different the two forms could be, both in terms of style and structure.

Prologue was originally broken into five parts:

1. Inception - Paul Redgrave is a young man working in a dead-end job in the early 1990's. His life is turned upside down when an older woman turns up, initially offering him a job, but introducing him to a group of Time Travellers and claiming to be his wife from the future.

2&3. History in Reverse (2 Parts) The Time Travellers tell him all about their history (and his).

4. Meeting Yourself - Paul mulls over what he has learned and faces down his future self as he comes to terms with things and decides what he is going to do.

5. Into Time - Paul joins the others and they decide to take a test jaunt through time.

 

[Perpetual Man]

I feel that I was being quite naive in thinking that the transition would have been an easy one.

There is a lot you can get away with in a comic strip that does not apply to text. When you have mix of words and picture it is easier to read things that might be considered boring in prose. When you are kicking off a story you need that hook to keep people reading, and that does not have to be the same with comic strip format.

The first page of Inception is an opening third of a page of oversized text, followed by three frames that show a young Paul Regrave working as a mechanic in a garage.

In strip format it flies by quite easily, but if you were going to write the story as prose, you realise that you have to describe those pictures, prhaps put a bit of detail into what he is doing. It might work well later in a novel but as an effective opening it is not that engaging. Even taking into account you have Prelude preceding it that might serve as a hook, the complete disparity of older Paul shooting himself might not be enough to hold the attention of casual reader.

And then there is instinct it was the gut feeling that it did not start well. I had to find a new way in.

 

[Perpetual Man]

I went back over and over the first part trying how to make it work as prose, but the more I thought about it the more I could not make it work.

The thing is with writing a time travel story is that there is no definitive start point. Although the story always started with Paul in the early 1990's it did not have to.

The 2nd and 3rd Parts of the Prologue story, History in Reverse 1&2 are pretty much exposition. In brief the various members of the Time Rogues tell the story of what the Temporal Enforcers were, how the system worked, what went wrong and how Paul fits into it all. They then explain what happened after the TE's were disbanded and how they ended up there with Paul, determined to find out what is going on.

It was while I was flicking through this that I noticed that one of the shortest asides were the four members of the Rogues explaining how they got back together.

That gave me a glimmer of a new starting point. It still took a couple more weeks and reworking various scenarios in my head, but I eventually sketched out a story for the character Pariah, which would see his story told as opposed to Paul.

Complicated as the time travel things are, although set in the future, it is technically before Paul is pulled out of work.

 

[Perpetual Man]

And a little break from this as I actually try and find time to work on it - and open another thread or two it has inspired.