Barry Windsor Smith: Adastra and the Young Gods
Dec 8, 2018 11:32:01 GMT -5
Roquefort Raider likes this
Post by rberman on Dec 8, 2018 11:32:01 GMT -5
Barry Windsor-Smith: Young Gods & Friends (2003 collection)
This 2003 hardback is not an anthology. It is an autopsy. It recontextualizes comic book art that Barry Windsor-Smith produced in the 1990s, crafting a new story about the death of a dream. It presents the corpse of a comic book and asks, “What went wrong?” and “What happened to the bereaved?” It partly succeeds at its task, where its source material failed.
First, the background. Smith might be thought of as the vanguard of the wave of British creators who revitalized mainstream American comic books in the late 1980s. He started with Kirby-esque work in X-Men #53 and Avengers #66-67 (all in 1969) and became a regular on The Savage Sword of Conan in the 1970s, adopting a distinctive style of "long faces divided into light side/dark side.” Chafing under the artistic limitations and limited remuneration of comic books, he pursued a career in fantasy fine art, returning to comic books sporadically throughout the 1980s.
He was the victim of drunk driver while working on Weapon X in 1990, and “When I returned to work with Chapter 7, Logan’s story became my own; the surgery, the doctor’s cavalier responses to his physical and emotional pain. My drawings became bolder, the inking more dramatic.”
Smith’s dissatisfaction with the creative and financial arrangements of the American comic industry continued through the 1990s, when he was chief creative officer of Jim Shooter’s nascent Valiant Comics. In 1995 he sought a different solution through Dark Horse Comics. Nine issues of Barry Windsor Smith: Storyteller were published. As the name implies, he controlled every aspect of the product, an oversized (12.5x9 inches), overlong (40 pages each with a cardboard cover), overpriced ($4.95) monthly series that aspired to elevate the tastes of the buying public. Each issue contained three distinct ongoing stories: The Conan-like “The Freebooters,” the sci-fi “Paradoxman,” and the cosmic Kirby homage “Young Gods.”
But BWS:Storyteller didn’t fit the shelves of the local comic stores or the budgets and longboxes of the buying public. The grueling demands of complete creative control on a double-sized monthly book wore on the creator. Even Smith admitted that the art, his perennial selling point, was not up to his usual standard. After nine under-performing issues, Dark Horse insisted on changes to a more standard comic book format.
Enraged at what he saw as a poor promotional effort by Dark Horse, Smith balked at the changes and canceled the project instead, leaving pages unfinished on the drawing table. Multiple subsequent attempts failed to bring the stories into some state of completion; the storyteller had lost the plot, unable to get past his feelings of betrayal to finish what was to have been his magnum opus in the genre. Young Gods & Friends, an oversized hardback published by Fantagraphics in 2003, chronicles the story of that failure, from the early promise to the crushing disappointment.
Let’s start with the interior front cover, which reproduces “A Word from the Publisher” apparently included in the first issue of BWS:Storyteller. “The Publisher” is Oregon native Mike Richardson, who operated a series of Things From Another World nerd culture storefronts along the West Coast. He founded Dark Horse Comics to provide a haven for creator-owned product such as Sin City and Hellboy as well as manga imports like Akira. This seems about as inviting a home as Smith could hope for, and Richardson’s foreword speaks glowingly of Smith’s past achievements and bright future. But something is wrong from the start. The print is muddy. The layout is incomplete, the author’s signature just a place-holding scrawl.
The next page is even more of a contrast, an ominous page-long missive from Smith, published in the ninth and final issue of Storyteller, announcing that the series was in dire financial straits. “Remember this—when all else fails, raise your standards,” writes Smith in a hopeful closing. Smith says that monthly publication will be disrupted so that he can retool it to continue at least for another three issues. It’s too short a time to finish the stories in their intended fashion. But hey, it will be better than nothing, right? But in actuality, “nothing” is what happened. There were no “final three issues.” This page too has an elaborate but incomplete layout, signifying ambition and failure at the same time. A quotation in the upper right corner (from British architect J.D. Sedding) reads “There is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.” A defensive posture, preempting criticism, assuring us that the author has already learned from his mistake and does not need us to bring it up.
Next come forewords written by Dave Sim, Rob Vollmar, Alan David Doane, Bruce Costa, and the mysterious “Seriously pissed off Joe.” (Straczynski? Quesada?) Sections of text from each of these five authors have been color-coded, then mixed and matched haphazardly.
Paragraphs begin mid-sentence, alternately praising Smith’s brilliance and accusing him of cowardice for failing to finish what he began. An epigraph from Don Imus kicks it all off: “Every promise they made to me, they lied.”
Then follows an original 2003 story, 22 pages in color. It depicts the alien princess Adastra, one of the protagonists of the “Young Gods” story which appeared in BSW:Storyteller. She’s living in Manhattan, running a pizza home delivery service in which she is cook, receptionist, deliverywoman, and chief bottle-washer. Running another business out of the same apartment, she is also a plumber. A busy princess, reduced by circumstances to very unglamorous work.
This is all an allegory for Smith’s experience trying to manage every aspect of BWS:Storyteller for himself. (He didn’t literally do all the inking, coloring, and lettering himself, but enough to count.) In case you might miss the allegory, a huge mural on the wall of Adastra’s cluttered apartment identifies the whole place as “Barry Windsor-Smith: Storyteller.” All of this explains the cover of Young Gods & Friends, which depicts Adastra riding on a bike through heavy Manhattan traffic, delivering pizza and flipping off a cab driver.
In this 2003 story, Adastra is preparing for a party. This party was a story that Smith wrote in response to the imminent end of the series; it gathered the characters from all three series (Freebooters, Paradoxman, and New Gods) to stand around and have a bittersweet commemoration for the untimely demise of their own publication. The party story was never published until this current volume.
As Adastra prepares for the party, a young man named Aran Kashan arrives to help write the invitations to the party. His task is to change her vulgar pottymouth into something more appropriate for the intended audience. But he is flummoxed by her loose bathrobe and natural endowments. Adastra assumes he is one of her worshipers and obliges him with a full show. Nope; he actually is devoted to another goddess, and her uninhibited display has embarrassed both of them. Grown wrathful, Adastra displays her backside to him, and he falls unconscious at this display of her glories.
Message: The audience was simply not ready for the divine pleasures which the artist puts on display. This is Smith comforting himself that the failure of Storyteller lay with others, with his only fault being the throwing of pearls before swine. But in showing this excuse to us so boldly, he surely intends us to question whether this is accurate. Adastra (Smith) is erratic, demands tiresome adulation, and sets herself up for failure.
Next comes a one page note from Smith dated December 1997, expressing his grudging intention to transform Storyteller from three parallel narratives into one consolidated story, grounding all of the characters in Manhattan, working menial jobs, barely remembering their glorious pasts. This note seems to have been a communication between Smith and Dark Horse rather than anything published in Storyteller. The allegorical nature of this proposed new story should be obvious. A few pages of it appear later in this volume.
Finally we get to the actual “Young Gods” reprint material from Storyteller. Let’s start with the logo. The word “young” is rendered in the font of Jack Kirby’s Young Romance comics, while the word “God” is rendered in a block font reminiscent of Jack Kirby’s New Gods title. A caption recurring in many chapters tells us “The Young Gods saga is dedicated to the everlasting memory of Jack Kirby (1917-1994).” Also, the title page of this 2003 edition bears a dedication: “For Jack.” The basic format of “Young Gods” is a story containing cosmic Kirby characters, inspired by Thor, Eternals, and the New Gods, mixed up in a romance triangle plot straight out of Young Romance. That’s the main conceit of this series, and the appeal of “Young Gods” stands or fall based on whether you get the joke, and find it funny enough to sustain a “saga.”
The story opens in black and white art. Adastra is a modern woman, sitting in a Manhattan restaurant, eating a burger and drinking endless Chardonnay. The meal is a mix of high and low culinary art- a difficult and weird combination, symbolizing the tensions inherent in Smith's comic book aspirations as well. Soon Adastra is spirited away to an Asgard-like setting in full color, where she reclaims her rightful role as Princess Adastra Organa of the planet Orgazma. Again, her full name suggests an uneasy tension between Star Wars' lofty mythology and Barbarella's lowbrow romp. "Ad Astra" is Latin for "to the stars," used since the days of Virgil to symbolize lofty aspirations, such as those which Smith has for Young Gods.
Heros (Thor), son of Otan (an Odin-like king), will marry her sister Celestra tomorrow, and Adastra’s presence is required for the festivities, so her banishment on Earth has been lifted. The marriage is one of dynastic necessity rather than love, so if you guessed that the presence of bawdy, voluptuous Adastra throws the nuptials far off course, you would be correct. The Loki-like royal Grand Vizier has his own reasons for trying to derail the wedding that will bring peace between two warring cosmic kingdoms. Soon enough, Adastra and Heros are off with Heros' buddy Strangehands on one of those “night-before-your-wedding dragon hunts” that people do.
At this point (Chapter 5) the narrative stalls so severely (Smith threw out pages of finished art late in the production schedule) that Barry Windsor-Smith appears in frame to suggest alternative plot lines to spice things up. Maybe Heros’ companion Strangehand should proposition Adastra?
Eventually, Heros goes streaking nude across the cosmos in pursuit of a dragon, while Adastra falls in with Aragon, a former lover—no, scratch that; a former date rapist. Their previous tryst was the immediate cause of Adastra being stripped of her super-powers and banished to Earth. This explains both her bitterness and her decidedly Earthy and earthy speech patterns.
Heros for his part finds himself in an analogue of Olympus, in the company of Zeus-like Destiny and his granddaughters: Brunhild-like Delphi, bookworm Gaea, and loinclothed, shirtless sexpot Aria. The latter tries to seduce him, while her sisters try to return him home in time for the wedding which will bring peace to the cosmos.
Here in chapter twelve (but only chapters 1-9 were published in Storyteller), the story of “Young Gods” fades away literally. The penultimate published page is black and white; the final page is only a pencil sketch in blue and grey. “I received a fax from the OP (original publisher Dark Horse) that contradicted their every previous promise of support,” said Smith in a two-page afterword, and he found himself unable to complete the work due to surges of anger and despair that neither psychotherapy nor hypnosis could alleviate. The remaining five chapters of the story were to have seen Heros seduced by Aria then rescued by Adastra and Strangehands and delivered to his wedding while the members of the Greek pantheon discuss the differences between the ancient and modern world.
In 2001, Fantagraphics sought to collect “Young Gods” and contracted Smith to produce additional pages. Rather than pick up the unfinished pages in chapter 12 (which remains unfinished today) and complete the previously envisioned story, Smith produced a meta-commentary in which Destiny, Gaea, Delpha, Strangehands, and Heros float in the cosmos and discuss a letter they have received from Adastra about going on “hiatus.” Generating only five pages in four months’ labor, Smith abandoned this new unfinished project with an apologetic letter to Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth.
Another sequence in this volume collects 18 pages depicting the going-away party uniting the characters of all three stories running in Storyteller. Smith intended to run this art interspersed with excerpts from correspondence between himself and Dark Horse. Would the publisher have even allowed this? It seems unlikely, but the point is moot since Smith never submitted it for publication.
The final section of art collects finished pages which were cut from the stories earlier in the book. Unwilling to just chalk errors up to experience and do better next time, Smith’s editorial prerogative to veto his own penciled, inked, colored, lettered work at the last minute proved hazardous to his frame of mind and productivity. In one telling abandoned fragment from early in the process, a despairing writer throws his work out the window and contemplates throwing himself out too.
What’s left? A one page editorial in which Smith laments that Marvel either refuses to reprint his old work (Archer & Armstrong, Rune) or prints it on inappropriately shiny paper that changes the colors in such an upsetting manner that he refuses to sign the trade paperback versions (Weapon X). “I love comics as an art form, but as a business it fills me with disgust,” he concludes. The inside back cover reproduces letters pages from Storyteller filled with glowing admiration from fans.
What to make of it all? I’m one of many who admires Smith’s combination of drawn and tinted art. I’m less sanguine concerning his skill as a storyteller. The narrative is clear but not particularly inspiring. Early chapters contain details that don’t fit with later revelations. Not uncommon in serialized fiction, I know. The distinctively funereal tone of the narratives and essays accompanying the art is striking, but it fits with the uneasy relationship between Smith and comic books since his Conan days. It’s a world that he can’t live in but also can’t seem to leave behind. At least as of 2003, he was unprepared to say, “I thought my name on the cover would be worth more, and I loved what I did, but Storyteller failed because I was trying to sell something that nobody wanted to buy.”
Smith originally envisioned the milquetoast hero, a Thor knockoff, as the protagonist, but it wasn’t long before he realized that bad girls are more fun, and he quickly elevated Adastra from mischievous foil to leading lady. It’s not such a surprising turn of events; see also Mystique, Emma Frost, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, etc. The mohawked Adastra seems to have taken her visual cues from Chris Claremont’s punk incarnation of Storm in X-Men. The next post will cover the time that Adastra actually became Storm, or vice versa.
This 2003 hardback is not an anthology. It is an autopsy. It recontextualizes comic book art that Barry Windsor-Smith produced in the 1990s, crafting a new story about the death of a dream. It presents the corpse of a comic book and asks, “What went wrong?” and “What happened to the bereaved?” It partly succeeds at its task, where its source material failed.
First, the background. Smith might be thought of as the vanguard of the wave of British creators who revitalized mainstream American comic books in the late 1980s. He started with Kirby-esque work in X-Men #53 and Avengers #66-67 (all in 1969) and became a regular on The Savage Sword of Conan in the 1970s, adopting a distinctive style of "long faces divided into light side/dark side.” Chafing under the artistic limitations and limited remuneration of comic books, he pursued a career in fantasy fine art, returning to comic books sporadically throughout the 1980s.
He was the victim of drunk driver while working on Weapon X in 1990, and “When I returned to work with Chapter 7, Logan’s story became my own; the surgery, the doctor’s cavalier responses to his physical and emotional pain. My drawings became bolder, the inking more dramatic.”
Smith’s dissatisfaction with the creative and financial arrangements of the American comic industry continued through the 1990s, when he was chief creative officer of Jim Shooter’s nascent Valiant Comics. In 1995 he sought a different solution through Dark Horse Comics. Nine issues of Barry Windsor Smith: Storyteller were published. As the name implies, he controlled every aspect of the product, an oversized (12.5x9 inches), overlong (40 pages each with a cardboard cover), overpriced ($4.95) monthly series that aspired to elevate the tastes of the buying public. Each issue contained three distinct ongoing stories: The Conan-like “The Freebooters,” the sci-fi “Paradoxman,” and the cosmic Kirby homage “Young Gods.”
But BWS:Storyteller didn’t fit the shelves of the local comic stores or the budgets and longboxes of the buying public. The grueling demands of complete creative control on a double-sized monthly book wore on the creator. Even Smith admitted that the art, his perennial selling point, was not up to his usual standard. After nine under-performing issues, Dark Horse insisted on changes to a more standard comic book format.
Enraged at what he saw as a poor promotional effort by Dark Horse, Smith balked at the changes and canceled the project instead, leaving pages unfinished on the drawing table. Multiple subsequent attempts failed to bring the stories into some state of completion; the storyteller had lost the plot, unable to get past his feelings of betrayal to finish what was to have been his magnum opus in the genre. Young Gods & Friends, an oversized hardback published by Fantagraphics in 2003, chronicles the story of that failure, from the early promise to the crushing disappointment.
Let’s start with the interior front cover, which reproduces “A Word from the Publisher” apparently included in the first issue of BWS:Storyteller. “The Publisher” is Oregon native Mike Richardson, who operated a series of Things From Another World nerd culture storefronts along the West Coast. He founded Dark Horse Comics to provide a haven for creator-owned product such as Sin City and Hellboy as well as manga imports like Akira. This seems about as inviting a home as Smith could hope for, and Richardson’s foreword speaks glowingly of Smith’s past achievements and bright future. But something is wrong from the start. The print is muddy. The layout is incomplete, the author’s signature just a place-holding scrawl.
The next page is even more of a contrast, an ominous page-long missive from Smith, published in the ninth and final issue of Storyteller, announcing that the series was in dire financial straits. “Remember this—when all else fails, raise your standards,” writes Smith in a hopeful closing. Smith says that monthly publication will be disrupted so that he can retool it to continue at least for another three issues. It’s too short a time to finish the stories in their intended fashion. But hey, it will be better than nothing, right? But in actuality, “nothing” is what happened. There were no “final three issues.” This page too has an elaborate but incomplete layout, signifying ambition and failure at the same time. A quotation in the upper right corner (from British architect J.D. Sedding) reads “There is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.” A defensive posture, preempting criticism, assuring us that the author has already learned from his mistake and does not need us to bring it up.
Next come forewords written by Dave Sim, Rob Vollmar, Alan David Doane, Bruce Costa, and the mysterious “Seriously pissed off Joe.” (Straczynski? Quesada?) Sections of text from each of these five authors have been color-coded, then mixed and matched haphazardly.
Paragraphs begin mid-sentence, alternately praising Smith’s brilliance and accusing him of cowardice for failing to finish what he began. An epigraph from Don Imus kicks it all off: “Every promise they made to me, they lied.”
Then follows an original 2003 story, 22 pages in color. It depicts the alien princess Adastra, one of the protagonists of the “Young Gods” story which appeared in BSW:Storyteller. She’s living in Manhattan, running a pizza home delivery service in which she is cook, receptionist, deliverywoman, and chief bottle-washer. Running another business out of the same apartment, she is also a plumber. A busy princess, reduced by circumstances to very unglamorous work.
This is all an allegory for Smith’s experience trying to manage every aspect of BWS:Storyteller for himself. (He didn’t literally do all the inking, coloring, and lettering himself, but enough to count.) In case you might miss the allegory, a huge mural on the wall of Adastra’s cluttered apartment identifies the whole place as “Barry Windsor-Smith: Storyteller.” All of this explains the cover of Young Gods & Friends, which depicts Adastra riding on a bike through heavy Manhattan traffic, delivering pizza and flipping off a cab driver.
In this 2003 story, Adastra is preparing for a party. This party was a story that Smith wrote in response to the imminent end of the series; it gathered the characters from all three series (Freebooters, Paradoxman, and New Gods) to stand around and have a bittersweet commemoration for the untimely demise of their own publication. The party story was never published until this current volume.
As Adastra prepares for the party, a young man named Aran Kashan arrives to help write the invitations to the party. His task is to change her vulgar pottymouth into something more appropriate for the intended audience. But he is flummoxed by her loose bathrobe and natural endowments. Adastra assumes he is one of her worshipers and obliges him with a full show. Nope; he actually is devoted to another goddess, and her uninhibited display has embarrassed both of them. Grown wrathful, Adastra displays her backside to him, and he falls unconscious at this display of her glories.
Message: The audience was simply not ready for the divine pleasures which the artist puts on display. This is Smith comforting himself that the failure of Storyteller lay with others, with his only fault being the throwing of pearls before swine. But in showing this excuse to us so boldly, he surely intends us to question whether this is accurate. Adastra (Smith) is erratic, demands tiresome adulation, and sets herself up for failure.
Next comes a one page note from Smith dated December 1997, expressing his grudging intention to transform Storyteller from three parallel narratives into one consolidated story, grounding all of the characters in Manhattan, working menial jobs, barely remembering their glorious pasts. This note seems to have been a communication between Smith and Dark Horse rather than anything published in Storyteller. The allegorical nature of this proposed new story should be obvious. A few pages of it appear later in this volume.
Finally we get to the actual “Young Gods” reprint material from Storyteller. Let’s start with the logo. The word “young” is rendered in the font of Jack Kirby’s Young Romance comics, while the word “God” is rendered in a block font reminiscent of Jack Kirby’s New Gods title. A caption recurring in many chapters tells us “The Young Gods saga is dedicated to the everlasting memory of Jack Kirby (1917-1994).” Also, the title page of this 2003 edition bears a dedication: “For Jack.” The basic format of “Young Gods” is a story containing cosmic Kirby characters, inspired by Thor, Eternals, and the New Gods, mixed up in a romance triangle plot straight out of Young Romance. That’s the main conceit of this series, and the appeal of “Young Gods” stands or fall based on whether you get the joke, and find it funny enough to sustain a “saga.”
The story opens in black and white art. Adastra is a modern woman, sitting in a Manhattan restaurant, eating a burger and drinking endless Chardonnay. The meal is a mix of high and low culinary art- a difficult and weird combination, symbolizing the tensions inherent in Smith's comic book aspirations as well. Soon Adastra is spirited away to an Asgard-like setting in full color, where she reclaims her rightful role as Princess Adastra Organa of the planet Orgazma. Again, her full name suggests an uneasy tension between Star Wars' lofty mythology and Barbarella's lowbrow romp. "Ad Astra" is Latin for "to the stars," used since the days of Virgil to symbolize lofty aspirations, such as those which Smith has for Young Gods.
Heros (Thor), son of Otan (an Odin-like king), will marry her sister Celestra tomorrow, and Adastra’s presence is required for the festivities, so her banishment on Earth has been lifted. The marriage is one of dynastic necessity rather than love, so if you guessed that the presence of bawdy, voluptuous Adastra throws the nuptials far off course, you would be correct. The Loki-like royal Grand Vizier has his own reasons for trying to derail the wedding that will bring peace between two warring cosmic kingdoms. Soon enough, Adastra and Heros are off with Heros' buddy Strangehands on one of those “night-before-your-wedding dragon hunts” that people do.
At this point (Chapter 5) the narrative stalls so severely (Smith threw out pages of finished art late in the production schedule) that Barry Windsor-Smith appears in frame to suggest alternative plot lines to spice things up. Maybe Heros’ companion Strangehand should proposition Adastra?
Eventually, Heros goes streaking nude across the cosmos in pursuit of a dragon, while Adastra falls in with Aragon, a former lover—no, scratch that; a former date rapist. Their previous tryst was the immediate cause of Adastra being stripped of her super-powers and banished to Earth. This explains both her bitterness and her decidedly Earthy and earthy speech patterns.
Heros for his part finds himself in an analogue of Olympus, in the company of Zeus-like Destiny and his granddaughters: Brunhild-like Delphi, bookworm Gaea, and loinclothed, shirtless sexpot Aria. The latter tries to seduce him, while her sisters try to return him home in time for the wedding which will bring peace to the cosmos.
Here in chapter twelve (but only chapters 1-9 were published in Storyteller), the story of “Young Gods” fades away literally. The penultimate published page is black and white; the final page is only a pencil sketch in blue and grey. “I received a fax from the OP (original publisher Dark Horse) that contradicted their every previous promise of support,” said Smith in a two-page afterword, and he found himself unable to complete the work due to surges of anger and despair that neither psychotherapy nor hypnosis could alleviate. The remaining five chapters of the story were to have seen Heros seduced by Aria then rescued by Adastra and Strangehands and delivered to his wedding while the members of the Greek pantheon discuss the differences between the ancient and modern world.
In 2001, Fantagraphics sought to collect “Young Gods” and contracted Smith to produce additional pages. Rather than pick up the unfinished pages in chapter 12 (which remains unfinished today) and complete the previously envisioned story, Smith produced a meta-commentary in which Destiny, Gaea, Delpha, Strangehands, and Heros float in the cosmos and discuss a letter they have received from Adastra about going on “hiatus.” Generating only five pages in four months’ labor, Smith abandoned this new unfinished project with an apologetic letter to Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth.
Another sequence in this volume collects 18 pages depicting the going-away party uniting the characters of all three stories running in Storyteller. Smith intended to run this art interspersed with excerpts from correspondence between himself and Dark Horse. Would the publisher have even allowed this? It seems unlikely, but the point is moot since Smith never submitted it for publication.
The final section of art collects finished pages which were cut from the stories earlier in the book. Unwilling to just chalk errors up to experience and do better next time, Smith’s editorial prerogative to veto his own penciled, inked, colored, lettered work at the last minute proved hazardous to his frame of mind and productivity. In one telling abandoned fragment from early in the process, a despairing writer throws his work out the window and contemplates throwing himself out too.
What’s left? A one page editorial in which Smith laments that Marvel either refuses to reprint his old work (Archer & Armstrong, Rune) or prints it on inappropriately shiny paper that changes the colors in such an upsetting manner that he refuses to sign the trade paperback versions (Weapon X). “I love comics as an art form, but as a business it fills me with disgust,” he concludes. The inside back cover reproduces letters pages from Storyteller filled with glowing admiration from fans.
What to make of it all? I’m one of many who admires Smith’s combination of drawn and tinted art. I’m less sanguine concerning his skill as a storyteller. The narrative is clear but not particularly inspiring. Early chapters contain details that don’t fit with later revelations. Not uncommon in serialized fiction, I know. The distinctively funereal tone of the narratives and essays accompanying the art is striking, but it fits with the uneasy relationship between Smith and comic books since his Conan days. It’s a world that he can’t live in but also can’t seem to leave behind. At least as of 2003, he was unprepared to say, “I thought my name on the cover would be worth more, and I loved what I did, but Storyteller failed because I was trying to sell something that nobody wanted to buy.”
Smith originally envisioned the milquetoast hero, a Thor knockoff, as the protagonist, but it wasn’t long before he realized that bad girls are more fun, and he quickly elevated Adastra from mischievous foil to leading lady. It’s not such a surprising turn of events; see also Mystique, Emma Frost, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, etc. The mohawked Adastra seems to have taken her visual cues from Chris Claremont’s punk incarnation of Storm in X-Men. The next post will cover the time that Adastra actually became Storm, or vice versa.
