Broken Frontier

Rejoice! The powerful, the mighty, the muscular and the brainy Tom Strong makes his return to comics courtesy of original series co-creator Chris Sprouse and writer Peter Hogan. BF talks to both gentlemen about their plans for this pulp hero and his remarkable family as they thrust the Strong gang forward without Alan Moore.

BROKEN FRONTIER: Tom Strong and the Robots of Doom, the six-issue miniseries starting this week, marks the first time you’re jumping back onto Tom Strong after 4 years. How long has the idea for this particular mini been percolating?

CHRIS SPROUSE: Ben Abernathy asked me if I'd be interested in drawing the series shortly after I finished Number of the Beast for Wildstorm a few years ago and I immediately said "yes." I also told him I'd be willing to draw any Tom Strong book ever written from now until the end of my career!

I love these characters and it's been fantastic to tell their story again! I feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be when I work on Tom Strong.

PETER HOGAN: On my end, it was Ben Abernathy asking me one day nearly two years ago how Alan Moore might feel about Tom Strong being revived, if I was the writer. So, I rang Alan, and fortunately for us he was absolutely fine with the idea. After that, it took me a few weeks to come up with a suitably epic plot, and then I suppose it took me about eight months or so to write all the scripts.

BF: Peter, for readers who think Tom Strong is Alan and Chris only, can you go into a bit more detail about how you got to set foot in the world of Tom Strong, writing a few issues of the regular series, as well as the Terra Obscura mini?

HOGAN: I’ve known Alan for over twenty years, so when I started writing comics, he was aware of all the stuff I was doing. A year or so after he started ABC, he did an interview in which he said that he eventually wanted to bring other writers on board, so I asked him to bear me in mind if that ever happened – and he very sweetly told me I was already on his list. It took another year before it came together, and the Many Worlds of Tesla Strong special was the result – which was great for me, since I got to work with a whole load of terrific artists, including Chris.

After that, Alan and I did two series of Terra Obscura together – we plotted each issue out face to face, then I’d go off to write the script. As you can imagine, that was quite an experience, and I learnt more from Alan than I can ever say. Then I did three issues of Tom Strong with Chris, because Alan was getting completely snowed under with his workload.  We could easily have done more, but Scott (Dunbier, Wildstorm editor at the time – ed.) decided to bring in a string of guest writers instead.

BF: How long past the events of Tom Strong #35 does Robots of Doom pick up?

HOGAN: We’re almost in real time. The story’s main action kicks off in September 2009.

BF: I assume all of the main players are back – Tom, Dahlua, Tesla, Pneuman and Solomon. Can you elaborate on their roles in the upcoming story?

HOGAN: Yes, you’ll see them all – but I don’t want to give too much away. After the first issue you’ll be seeing them as they were back in 1939, when they were all very different to how they are today.

SPROUSE: For me, it was great fun drawing these characters again, some of which, like Ingrid, Albrecht and even Solomon, I hadn't drawn much at all since they initially appeared in the original series. I also love that we get to see versions of some of the principal characters that we've never seen before – Tesla and Solomon as infants, for example. We also get to see a different side of Ingrid Weiss as well, but like Peter, I don't want to ruin the fun of seeing these things in the book first...

BF: Tom Strong and his family were known for jumping into one askew, over-the-top adventure after the other. What were some of your favorites?

SPROUSE: My favorite of Alan's stories were probably issues #2 (the Modular Man), #11-12 (the first Terra Obscura storyline) and #16 (the Weird Rider and the beginning of the Giant Space Ant storyline). Peter's Moon story and his two Dr. Permafrost/Greta Gabriel issues are easily my favorite non-Alan stories, and I even think I delivered some of my best work of the entire series on those three comics.

HOGAN: For me, it’s probably most of them. I loved the Aztech empire, and the first Albrecht story, and the giant ants… and Terra Obscura goes without saying!

BF: What was the main reason for having Albrecht be the main villain here?

HOGAN:  He hadn’t been used for a long time, so the time was ripe to bring him back. Plus, you can’t really go wrong with having a Nazi for a villain, can you?

SPROUSE: That, and there was a lot of untapped potential left with Albrecht’s character. 

BF: Did Alan ever discuss doing more Tom Strong material elsewhere, like he did with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was also part of the America’s Best Comics line?

HOGAN:  No, never. For one thing, he doesn’t own the rights to the ABC characters, apart from League. For another, I think once he’d wrapped up all the ABC titles he was done with it. It’s behind him now.

SPROUSE: Indeed. When Alan was finished, he was FINISHED. It was all very depressing for me, since I was ready to draw the series until the end of time!

BF: The series is one of the few modern examples of pulp-fiction done right. Is it a difficult genre to grasp, seeing as there are very little vintage pulp books in the modern comics industry?

SPROUSE: Many people responded to Tom Strong mainly because of the pulp feel, so I suppose we did it well enough. We did start infusing the series with more of a silver age feel somewhere around issue #15 when we started playing up the family aspect of the book and the technology a bit more. It felt like we were doing good fun Fantastic Four stories a few times! Anyway, the pulp feel wasn't hard for me to grasp or run with since I had grown up reading Doc Savage and Burroughs books as well as watching any Tarzan movie I could.

HOGAN: There are obviously a lot of pulp ingredients, but there’s also a kind of Silver Age atmosphere as well. Either way, I think what makes it work is the fact that it has a very modern sensibility. You need that – you can’t just pretend that it’s the 1930s or the 1960s, because it isn’t. We view the world very differently today to how it was generally viewed back then, so you have to make things appeal to a modern readership. 

BF: For fans of Tom Strong – I’ll admit to being a huge one myself – what are the odds of further miniseries, or even a new volume, happening?

SPROUSE: I'm hopeful, but obviously the odds will be much better if this series does well!

HOGAN: And that’s about as much as we can tell right now…