In his frank and provocative “Writing under the Influence” commentary at ComicMix, John Ostrander speaks of imitation as “the starting point for what you eventually become” as a storyteller: “Nothing is created in a vacuum,” John avers.

Writing may often seem the loneliest of professions – and certainly so, if one lacks a reality-check communion with one’s customers and kindred souls in the racket – but who has the time to wallow in loneliness when besieged by the insistent Muses of Narrative Influence? Derivative thinking can make for an ideal springboard, given an ability to narrow the onrush of influences and a willingness to seek new tangents of thought and deed.

I have spent the past several months – with a stretch yet ahead – on a 20-years-after return to a comic-book series called Prowler for ComicMix, starting with a digital-media remastering of the original Eclipse Comics stories (1987-1988), moving into a short-stack file of unproduced scripts and raw-material ideas from that period, and settling in at length with a new novel-length Prowler yarn that will tie up some raveled plot-threads from the Eclipse episodes and then head off in other directions.

The reunion of the primary creative team (Timothy Truman, John K. Snyder III, and Yrs. Trly.) re-summons the influences with which we had sought to develop 4Winds Studios’ 10 Prowler books as a Mulligan Stew of such persistent interests as ancient Hebraic Law and American frontier vigilantism; the Deep Southern blues and gospel-music traditions as a response to repressive social and economic conditions; the now-horrific, now-heroic irrationalities of Depression-era pulp fiction; and the bizarre extravagances of Old Hollywood’s low-budget horror-movie factories.

Tim Truman and John Snyder had defined two vigilante Prowler figures, each representing a distinct generation of indignant humanity, by the time I signed on with the project, late in 1986. While Truman and I were sharing a bookstore tour to promote our respective titles at Eclipse – Tim, with Scout and Airboy, and my ownself with the movie-history book Forgotten Horrors – Tim came up with the idea of twisting the plots of some of those 1930s-period Forgotten Horrors titles to accommodate the early-day exploits of the Prowler. (more…)