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Spearpunk

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Howard Chaykin once said that Cody Starbuck included all the things he wanted to draw as a kid--spacesphips, guys dashing around with swords, and so forth. I more or less made that my guiding prnciple in conceiving Athra. Athra is a world I wanted to draw, a world of mountains and valleys, dense forest, great streams pouring down hillsides to join rivers, and so on.

Athra was also decisively shaped by the fact that I thought through most of the story on long walks with my dogs. According, the characters, except for those involved in a possible cabal against our protagonist, shun the indoors.

Moving from general influences to more specific ones, I should admit that Athra and Thialfi, lugging pigs back to their rightful owners, is a less that subtle nod to Fritz Leiber'S Fafhred and the Gray Mouser, and necessarily all the other fictional pairings of the towering and the diminutive--Steinbeck's George and Lenny, Asterix and Obelix, Thor and Loki, and all the rest.

As far as Hild is concerned, I owe a certain perpetually blonde woman who resides in Riverdale, not to mention Gwen Stacy, and all the other literary good girls my thanks for the inspiration.

Needless to say, Veronica is scheduled to enter stage second issue.

I should also confess that I shamelessly appropriated, or stole if you like, the basic idea for the initial story from Beowulf, a killer that comes in the night, a hero lying in wait.

Finally, I should add that the spare, harsh world of forest and mountains Athra roams was inspired, if not driven, by all the works of Knut Hamsun and Bjorn Bjornson I've woldfed down over the years. As silly as it sounds, and it sounds deeply silly, Athra came about in part because I idly wondered what a Hamsun or Bjornson would have down with eleven by seventeen sheets of illustration board and pencils and pens.

Many thanks,