Do You Believe In Magic?

I love magic. I love stage magic, I love folklore and mythology, and I love roleplaying games and all things nerdy. I grew up in the 70s, watching TV shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Bill Bixby's The Magician and flipping through issues of Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella at the newstand in Montgomery Wards. For these reasons and more, I decided I wanted magic in my comic book, but I have to admit another big reason was, oddly enough, logic. Well, kind of logic.

I knew very early on that the main character was a shapeshifter, since identity is one of the primary themes of the book. But shapeshifters in comics have always been a bit problematic, especially in books where the powers are supposed to have a 'believable' source, something like the ubiquitous mutation paradigm. Where trouble starts is when you try to use a scientific explanation for something that's clearly impossible. How would you change your race, age or gender? Where did those new clothes come from? What happened to the purse she was carrying? Some writers have tried to dance around this by talking about 'muscle control' and whatnot, imposing limits to the ability to make it seem realistic, but I knew I didn't want to limit Grim's ability to move fluidily through the various strata of society, since again this is something I saw as a signiture of the character, the ability to effortlessly navigate a world as complex as our own. Early versions of the character concept were mutant based, but somehow it didn't seem elegant enough.

Then I thought back to two of my favorite fantasy authors, namely Jack Vance and L. Frank Baum; in Vance's Lyonesse trilogy and Baum's Oz books, magic is both mundane and mysterious, as much a part of everyday life as sex and tooth decay. A similar approach was used by Neil Gaiman and Matt Wagner in their comics, and I love the way these two artists handle the mystical world. The world operates much as it normally does, but to those who wield magic, there's a hidden world that lies just below the surface.

So I decided that Grim would be a magical entity (as to exactly what kind, you'll have to wait and see!); this is not some sort of 'a wizard did it' cop-out (well maybe just a little), but a way of opening up a whole new sort of storytelling. Grim may walk in the brightly-colored world of superheroes, but one foot is always firmly planted in the shadowy world of monsters and myth. Horror, mythology and whimsy will have as much a place in my comic as capes, fists and lasers.

And aliens...

Next time: "Did he say 'aliens'?"