I’ve been toying with the idea of some kind of MARDL poster using vintage industrial-style illustrations. Gabriel threw together this great and gritty piece showing that direction. Good on ya’, Gabe!

Note: The following is a post I wrote for a role-play by e-mail group that I (and Storm) have joined, The Liberty Brigade. For the hell of it, I decided to post this flashback, a bit of a Lovecraft / “The Thing” pastiche, here while I continue to work on “Isle Of Blood”. It’s not meant to be too detailed or long, it’s just a role-playing flashback post, but I figure I’d put it here. Enjoy.

“Storm was anxious. He had seen some remarkable things, most of which could be explained through reason or science.

“The direction that he was being led now, however, was those realms that belonged to the things he’d seen that COULDN’T have been explained away.

“He was the lone witness once to something that happened in the antarctic circle. He had been flying supplies to a research station, but upon landing he had found it completely empty. He investigated.

“In a chamber in the bowels of the station was the bodies of the research crew… they’d seemed to have been taken apart and put back together in what appeared to be an unsettling attempt to create a new creature.

“They had still been alive in that state too, crawling pitifully across the floor. They looked at Storm with pleading, agonized eyes, and their moans would reverberate in his memory for the rest of his days.

“So, too, would the tittering sound of the other thing in that room, an abomination that was wearing a skinned human face like it was a mask.

“Cliff had shot the thing with his pistol until the gun’s chamber clicked empty. After the shots’ echoes died away, however, an appalling slithering sound came from beneath the room.

“Cliff had hurried back to his plane, then returned to the room with a Tommy-gun and satchel-charges. These he set at the main support columns in the station, then hurried out to his plane. Something beneath the ground chased him, though… something huge and angry… the ice crackling and buckling behind his running feet. He managed to get the plane airborne, thankfully, and as he banked the big Ford tri-motor “tin goose”, the charges exploded, putting the tangled mass of flesh that had once been men out of their misery. His mind scrambled, trying vainly to put the panic and the crawling fear behind him. His curiosity persisted, however, and he looked down into the pit that had once been the station.

“Through the smoke and vaporized ice, he saw…

“He could never recall what he had witnessed as he looked down. The memory of what he saw refused to come back, leaving a whited-out patch in his continuity.

“He was found several days later, the plane a near-wreck where he’d managed to set it down on a small island. He had never been able to shake that tingling fear whenever he thought of that incident, and had never confided it to anyone, even those closest to him: his secretary, Marie; the former MARDL head-mechanic, Willy Avis; or even his best friend, The Red Phantom.

“The promise now, for another excursion into the unknown, had set upon him the same tingling fear somewhere in his mind, like a nest of spiders…”

In comics, crossovers always fascinated me. The idea of a meeting between two characters who never before interacted, whose universes never before seemed connected at all, appeals to me. It expands their universes, while shrinking them a bit, and opens up new possibilities for both.

The pairing of a high-adventure character with a mystery-vigilante character is one of the most potent and enjoyable versions of a crossover. The Superman-Batman pairing practically dominated my experiences reading The Brave and The Bold when I was growing up, and when The Shadow met with Doc Savage in their late ’80’s DC comics, my world was rocked.

In the world of my characters (the MARDL-verse, if you will), it’s a given that eventually Challenger Storm will cross paths with The Cipher, and eventually the aviation theme will bring Storm and The Black Wing together. But the collaboration between authors, the push pull of like-minded but differently themed creators and creations… that would be a load of fun.

One of my faithful MARDL feedback-crew, Luis-Gabriel Leal is no stranger to pulp styled creations. His creation, The Red Phantom, is an interesting amalgam of The Spirit, The Shadow, and Hellboy: an “occult detective” who investigates the otherworldly and the fortean. He’s generating a lot of interest in his character with a site blog similar to this one (but HE gets FAN LETTERS and COMMENTS… I’m not bitter, I’m just saying). He also shares a very similar view as I do regarding the comeback of pulps and their place in the world of entertainment.

The Red Phantom takes on a recurring foe, the assassin known as The Quiet Man, by artist Mike Wood.

Of course, over multiple email and IM conversations, a crossover began a ‘brewin’.

Here’s a bit about their first meeting, a story hammered out by Gabe and myself:

“Storm and his associates were returning from a mission in Greece. The others had gone back via a tramp-steamer of Storm’s employ, while Cliff himself was going to fly his supply plane back. An unexpected detour landed him in Italy, where he was contacted by a mysterious message that persuaded him to take on a passenger… a disguised Red Phantom. Mistaken identities landed the two at the opposite sides of bullets and fists, but the two were sidetracked from their struggle by Mussolini’s forces, whereby they realized they were on the same side.