The Night Force

In the night, I feel every dream is suffused with nightmare. At least for me, I can't speak of others. If you've watched someone sleeping, waiting for them to awaken perhaps, and notice you there, watching, and fearful they will see you, then you can understand what I'm saying. Since I've only watched women sleeping, not children or men, with the kind of fascination only a once-crushingly-lonely man can manage, it is often then, in the night, where the greatest fear of losing another settles in.

Horror is personal, but terror is communal. At least that's the message sent by a media which shrieks TERROR TERROR TERROR while images of bearded zealots and amputated soldiers floods our consciousness. So we find ourselves looking at the woman, in the night, perceiving a weakness of fear, of inability to stave off the snaking terror, of inescapable reality. This woman will die some day, no matter how much you love her. Whether it is a car accident, or cancer, or a slipping away into a night recognizable as the nothingness from which we came, and to which we return, she will die. This is personal horror, while personal terror is merely in how we will awaken the next morning after our loved ones are gone from this world. No one wants to arrive cold and shivering into that new world of loss.

In the end, there is little a man, even a watchful man, can do to stop such a thing. He can love her, and the way her hair falls, and the sheet where it clings to her lower back, but no one can escape their shadow, the final shadow.

NIGHT FORCE, or Germination of an Idea

I hesitate to speak about My Work. You see, My Work is kind of like a sasquatch. It might exist. It might have a smelly ape ass. It might stride like a man. But My Work is pretty much an unproven myth, a grainy photo of something lumbering out of view.

But I've been thinking a lot about NIGHT FORCE, the DC comic from 1982 by writer/artist combo Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan. These two men produced probably the best comic series of the 1970s, certainly the most consistently excellent, in TOMB OF DRACULA. They rejoined to create Baron Winters, a mysterious and powerful man in a cloak accompanied by a spotted panther named Merlin. Baron Winters spends the bulk of the series inside his dark mansion, while he uses "agents" in the outside world, ordinary people, to fulfill missions against evil forces.

NIGHT FORCE didn't live terribly long, just over a year, but it was some well-done stuff full of Wolfman/Colan magic. Like most off-beat comics that defy generalization, even the fan's good will didn't keep NIGHT FORCE going.

What stuck with me was how Baron Winters basically impresses people into service for him, whether they like it or not. Winters plucks fairly ordinary people out of their lives and thrusts them against extraordinary circumstances. Even, it should be said, against impossible odds.

This seems somehow in line with the Pulp. When I say Pulp, in this context, I mean a pulp hero from the old magazines like the Shadow or Doc Savage. One of those Pulps who assemble a group of agents from random sources, and send them on missions for their mysterious benefactor. Partially this was a result of pulp readers needing an "identifier" into the action of these crazed plots. Even Sherlock Holmes does not narrate his own tales, as it's left to Doctor Watson to be the "witness" to Holmes' feats.

So I've struggled over and over with the idea, of a Pulp "master" manipulating random people to become agents of his. To perform suicidal tasks, to endure horrors to rip apart the mind, in order to stop a greater evil in the world.

And that's also the point: this Pulp master is a mysterious, almost supernatural presence, like the Shadow, like Fu Manchu. The men and women impressed into service will see this Pulp as dangerous, they'll be at odds with him, but they'll also perform their tasks. Because whatever the Pulp battles is big enough to take away our lives, our loved ones, our souls even.

I like the staging of it, and it creates better balance than attempting to justify yet another novel with a Pulp protagonist who is unstoppable, unkillable, unflappable, and yet more than mere style, more than our impressions of the form made of light and shadow. I don't have the great Phillip Jose Farmer's internal understanding of Tarzan, say, as a superhuman presence but also very human. The balance must be right, and I haven't hit on it with my limited mental faculties.

Though I'm usually loathe to admit that "witnesses" are necessary in adventure fiction (they seem extraneous and boring to me most times...see the young FBI agent in the movie version of HELLBOY from a few years back), it stands to reason that Marv Wolfman displayed very plainly in both TOMB OF DRACULA and NIGHT FORCE that the secondary players, the non-star characters, were in fact the most important part of the resonance of the works. The human beings and the Pulp, in the most iconic case the Lord of Vampires...Dracula, share the same basic desires: to survive in a world of their choosing.

Really it's about choices, and I'm interested in how a man, an ordinary schlub approached by some fantastic, almost other-worldly being, would react to what is asked of him. What if, say, this man despised Mankind, wished for nothing more than the destruction of his species...and yet still, the Pulp must force him, demand his loyalty, and most likely the man's mortal life, to stop it.

Stay tuned.