March 1980

TOPIC 1 He knows the names of all the dinosaurs

TERM 2 The birth of the 1980s - Blake’s 7, Blondie and battles in space

< Giant Karza

Waen Shepherd 2 Waen’s heroic antics in the far-flung future of 2007 AD!

The Flame in the Desert An evil fire threatens the safety of the world

The Origin of Electro

After a few pages of silly pictures and rubbish mazes, it’s quite strange to be suddenly greeted by a wall of text, but that’s how Topic’s going to be from now on, violently lurching from form to form at my junior whim. Paradoxically, I’m consistently writing stories from the baddie’s point of view now - Supersilver and Giant Karza both feature baddies as protagonists, while Captain Carnivore can hardly be said to be a hero. So it looks like I always wanted to tell dark stories - I just didn’t necessarily know how I wanted to tell them. The subject of this one is a character called Electro, who I’ve basically just nicked from Marvel Comics. Fans of the Spider-Man films might recognise the name from the second one with Andrew Garfield, except there he’s played by Jamie Foxx and here he’s played by me. No - not just played by. Electro is me. In fact, I’m doing both - playing Electro in a film and being him in real life. In many ways, this is an accurate prediction of the kind of actor I would turn out to be - at least with reference to Gary Le Strange, the part I played for longest, who took up so much time I basically became him for five whole years. But Jamie Foxx is still way cooler. So this is me dancing around the idea of creating my own superhero universe, but failing to create any characters of my own. No matter what secret identity I give him, I didn’t invent Electro. I didn’t even make him look any different. Obviously, that didn’t bother me when I wrote this, but a year or so later, I thought it sullied my brand and, in an effort to distance myself from my earlier plagiarism, slightly changed his name to Electrico. I don’t think it would stand up in court. But I lied. Because I did create a character of my own - Captain Starlight (here hyphenated as ‘Star- Light’), who appears here for the first time. Well, sort of. Mentioned in passing and shows up at the end, but we don’t actually get to ‘see’ him. Sadly, I never wrote a second part for this, so we’ll never find out who won the fight, but both characters will return. So I’ll save talking about Starlight till the next time he turns up. You’ll also be glad to know that, as a real live grown up adult, I did actually manage to be on TV and in a film, though I think describing me as a “TV Star” would be a bit of a stretch, and I still haven’t realised my embarrassing ambition to turn very evil and drain all the power from a city. But I’m working on it.

Optical Illusions >

Super Jesus A special pin-up of your favourite Nazarene webslinger

Captain Starlight Know your Starlight superheroes with this amazing fact file!