I am lost in a forest of the night in a lucid nation. I awake, feeling uprooted. I find myself in a country deluded by surfaces.
Dawn offers its mechanical chorus. If I peel off the bark of the night it reveals a stark, blank-eyed whiteness.
Nothing is apparent of the frenzy within.
There was a crucial dream. It came when my life was at a junction, at University. I had nurtured a childhood fantasy: to be a writer; more specifically, of comics.
Yet, since then, the world's sicknesses had been displayed to me. Dismayed, I thought I ought to lend my life to healing them.
Torn by the thorns of this dilemma I took myself away, to Paris. I sought answers in its galleries.
In one, I witnessed, as if in another universe, a film of Max Ernst's surrealist collage novel, Une Semaine de Bonté.
I am not sure whether this is the version I saw, but the Schoenberg soundtrack is entirely appropriate (thanks, Helen). Originally published as a book, it can be argued that this is an early example of a graphic novel, and has influenced later comics writers, for example Grant Morrison, in particular his Doom Patrol
, as best exemplified by the story The Painting That Ate Paris.
Nothing could have seemed more shocking and disturbing. I was an intruder in another reality, feeling as one transported to ours from a foreign culture might feel.
I fell under its spell. Its alien logic, after a while, became as normal.
That night, under canvas on the hard ground of the Bois de Boulogne, I returned to my origin nation.
There, in a dust bowl, I met a famine-shrunken African boy:
...wrapped in torn pages from
Strange Tales 118.
![Strange Tales 118 cover](http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20051114171518/marveldatabase/images/8/89/Strange_Tales_Vol_1_118.jpg) |
Stan Lee wrote both stories; Jack Kirby's dramatic pencils illustrated the first, where the Human Torch fought the Wizard with his anti-gravity discs. Steve Ditko's surreal line work on Dr Strange showed how, beneath surface reality, something sinister lurks. |
This was the first Marvel comic I ever read, as potent as a first cigarette.
I woke, convinced that the message conveyed was that: if I were to write comics, then, should one child's life be changed for the better from reading one of my stories, it would be worth my while.
Eight years later I found myself writing for Marvel comics.
![Captain Britain by David Thorpe and Alan Davies](http://www.davidthorpe.info/im/CAPTAIN-BRITAIN-1980s.png) |
Taken from a recent issue of SFX magazine, containing an article on Captain Britain, including my stint on the title. |
Nowadays I find myself writing prosaic tips for combating climate change.
Yet nightly, I still bathe in the radiation from hidden worlds.
![Europe After The Rain by Max Ernst](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KwbfgHI_A1E/UTNNenVHReI/AAAAAAAAAuU/UFxOL6ejkV0/s320/Europe-after-the-rain-Ernst.jpg) |
Max Ernst's Europe After The Rain |
I plan to lose myself in those forests soon.
At Omnivoracious, we're no strangers to writer Rick Remender's work. We covered his creator-owned series Fear Agent all the way back in 2008 and followed his ascent to Marvel hit-maker on The Punisher. Now, he's writing arguably the best X-Men comic around, Uncanny X-Force, and he was recently named writer for another flagship title: Secret Avengers. A lot has changed since we last spoke with Remender at Emerald City Comicon 2009, and it was great to catch up with him on all of the aforementioned books, how his fandom influences his characters, and more at this year's ECCC 2012.
Omnivoracious.com: Let’s start with the finale of Fear Agent. When we spoke in 2009, you were just beginning the penultimate arc, I Against I, and now the last volume, Out of Step, will release this month. What’s it like to say goodbye to Heath Huston?
Rick Remender: It was nice to get to the end we wanted to. It’s sad not to write Heath anymore. He’s obviously a character that I love writing, and since Tony [Moore] and I created him, it’s been my favorite book to write (at least it was while it was still running). It’s bittersweet: I’m very happy with the ending, but when I see it on the bookshelf there are moments of wishing I were still writing the book.
Omni: How did you arrive at that last scene?
Rick Remender: That’s been the plan since the beginning. I had a couple of potential chapters that could have extended it, but I realized that the end result was still the end result. We hit all the important beats—I don’t think there was any fat on it—and the end result was what I put in that initial document when I cooked the thing up.
Omni: And now you’re onto Uncanny X-Force. You’re writing characters that immediately connect with fans because you’re writing them as characters, with dimension and real motivations. Psylocke’s backstory is so convoluted that it’s made her bland, yet here she’s someone who readers can finally understand. What about her appealed to you?
Rick Remender: It probably has a lot to do with my history with the character. I was a big X-Men fan in the 1980s/early 1990s, and when she started appearing was at the peak of my interest in the series: the Mutant Massacre. That led me to