Bruce Costa: Tempus Fugitive -- other than the best play on words I've ever heard, what is it and why did you do it?
Ken Steacy: In 25 words or less, Tempus Fugitive is an incredibly exciting, heavily aviation-oriented adventure through time and space that follows our hero right from the dawn of aviation to well into the future.
The reason I did this series was because I had always been really enthralled by the action-adventure-aviation genre which of course was huge back in the '30s, '40s, '50s with Scorchy Smith, Buzz Sawyer, Terry and the Pirates, and various strips like that. That genre had kind of withered by the end of the sixties. I thought this was a tragedy. I felt very strongly that good stories well told with a strong aviation lean would really excite people and spark their imaginations. I think those kinds of stories are intrinsically a lot of fun. That was the genesis of the series -- just a strong desire on my part to revitalize or bring back what I thought was a genre that had languished for far too long.
Costa: I understand you're an Air Force brat...
Steacy: Yup.
Costa: I assume that's where your fascination with flying things comes from.
Steacy: Well, to be honest, I've always had a fascination with what we now laughingly refer to as techno-porn, you know, anything to do with hardware and cool stuff, mecha and jazz like that. But I grew up with the smell of JP-4 jet fuel in my nostrils and, of course, the only thing a fish doesn't know about is water, so I had no objectivity. It really meant nothing to me. That was my life. It was normal to have planes roaring over the house and to dive under desks when the air raid sirens went off (because, you know, the base we were living on was assumed to be targeted by the commies). All this stuff was really normal for me [laughing]. And my Dad was an all-weather interceptor pilot. His job was to stand alert and sleep next to his plane. He'd have to jump into the plane and be in the air in seven minutes or whatever it was. His job was to fly up over the North Pole and blow the bears out of the sky with nuclear weapons. This is all very sort of normal...
Anything with wings is beautiful. I think flying is one of the ultimate expressions of man's desire to conquer the elements. To fly like a bird is something we all dream about. It's a very primal sort of thing.
But initially the series was just an excuse for me to be able to draw all the cool planes I'd always loved. Of course, one of the great ironies of aviation is that the most interesting and beautiful of aircraft are also the most deadly. They are weapons systems made to blow things up and kill people, and yet they are magnificent. So there's also that kind of tension that exists, and I wanted to play off of things. The ideas started percolating... I realized that there are a gajillion stories out there, and I wanted to tell them all! I figured I could have an immortal pilot, somebody who has lived through all the various eras of aviation. But that, to me, would have constituted a very linear story line and I wanted to jump around a lot. So I thought, how about a time-travelling pilot?
Costa: If I had created Tempus Fugitive, I, too, would have tried to hold onto the rights to it. But please tell me your reasoning for doing so.
Steacy: Back when DC published the limited series it got no push -- I think they took out one house ad or something. The first issue sold quite well, something like 43,200 copies -- not bad for a five-dollar book six years ago. I don't even know what the numbers were for books 2, 3, and 4, but it just kind of disappeared. It got very little media attention, as well -- I think I got one review of the first issue. That was it.
But always in the back of my mind was the fact that I could request reversion within a few years of the last issue coming out. So I just sat tight until the last issue reverted. I got back all the rights to it. Then it was one of those serendipitous things with Dark Horse -- I've always been enormously impressed with their approach and the quality of their product. All the creators who work for them are very impressed as well. It was during a visit with my old friends Dave and Rose Scroggy [that he took me into his office at Dark horse and] a few people started saying, "Well, what have you got? What are you working on? What's happening?" You know, I had no intention of going there to flog anything, [but when I] said that I'd just gotten the rights back to Tempus Fugitive a couple of people said, "Ooooh! That was a cool series! Let us look at it!" So absolutely I sent them copies! One thing led to another, and they're gonna publish it! I am absolutely delighted! I can't think of anybody I'd rather have doing the series.
Costa: I'll bet. Just to geek out for a second, I've got to tell you, this is a great read. It cooks, it kicks -- it's lots of fun. You burn through it! I've never read 48 pages so fast in my life! I read it faster than I read Sin City! I'm sure part of that was because, although normally I'm a lingerer, I had to suffer through black and white photocopies of your fully painted art (I'm sure there's an artist in the universe whose work this would be a worse reproduction of, but I can't think of him right now). Whatever the reason, it was so much fun to "fly" through such a fast-paced aviation story!
Steacy: That's what I wanted. And I wanted it to be a dynamic range. Obviously, if everything is happening all the time it becomes really flat. If there's nothing but explosions for the whole 48 pages, who cares? You've got to slow down and take it easy. There have got to be some lulls in there. I hope that I've structured it in such a way that there was time for pause and reflection before we got into the next firefight or whatever. Also [I had hoped] that there would be enough for everybody to look at -- interesting things in interesting eras of aviation. Plus -- and this is something I hope people notice -- everything is absolutely as accurate as I could possibly make it. It has always incensed me how lazy so many artists in this industry are -- just in general terms. Like they have to draw a 747 and you get a cigar with wings stuck on it and a couple of garbage cans glued underneath. How difficult is it to get reference for a 747? The same thing with weaponry. How difficult is it to find a picture of a Beretta or a.45 automatic or whatever it is. I hate it when people draw something that is supposed to be a gun and it's obvious that they've never looked at a gun. So in Tempus Fugitive, I thought, if I'm gonna do an F-105G, it is gonna be an F-105 G: the markings are gonna be as right as I can get them, the call signs, everything. I did that right across the board. Where that got really interesting is that there are a number of aircraft from the future that don't actually exist. So I designed those aircraft, I actually built them, and then photographed them so that I would actually have photographic reference that would match the photographic reference that I would use for the other aircraft.
Costa: Get out!
Steacy: It was weeks I spent designing and building these planes.
Costa: Wow.
Steacy: [laughter]
Costa: So you've got models of these planes.
Steacy: Yeah.
Costa: Totally cool.
Steacy: Yeah, well... totally geeky. [laughter]
Bruce: [laughing] Well, yeah.
Steacy: So that was the kind of dedication I brought to this series. A lot of people have come up to me and said, "I really like the fact that in the World War One sequence the Albatross D IIIs looked like Albatross D IIIs." Whatever it was, people appreciated the fact that I had made the effort.
Costa: Is there any chance that this will become one of Dark Horse's amazing movies?
Steacy: There always exists that chance. Like all comic book artist/writers, I'm a frustrated director/filmmaker, and of course I would love to see it. Though to be honest, if it is optioned, I would like to see a director with the same singular vision that I have take hold of it and work on it. I'm not a director. One of the things I find most satisfying about what I do is that I can sit here with a 10x15 sheet of paper and make anything I want happen on it. When I look at what directors have to go through to make the same things happen that I can make happen in one page... I can spend a day on one page and make the most amazing things happen. That same "page" would take them weeks, if not months, and millions of dollars to have happen. That's the great thing about being a director, I'm sure, but that's not me. That's somebody else. I would surely like to have some creative input, but I would want to have somebody else do it.
Costa: Well one reason I think this would work in other media is that the audio would be just great! If you'll indulge me, I want to read a passage to you. In issue 2, page 17 a spotter plane, Bird Dog, has just called in two armed reinforcement aircraft. As they two planes come into range, one of the pilots contacts the pilot in the spotter plane:
Sandy 7: Sandy 7 and 8 at your service... What's the profile please, Bird Dog?
Bird Dog: Roger, Sandies... What kinda ordnance you two packin'?
Sandy 7: We're fully loaded today, Bird Dog... we got 500 GPs, napes and 20 mike-mike.
Bird Dog: Ah, Roger, Sandy 7... Please drop a few cans of napalm along the west -- I say again, the east side of that karst just above the crash site, ahh, then strafe anything that moves on your next pass.
Sandy 7: Rodger-dodger... rolling in now!
I don't know what the hell they're saying, yet somehow I can understand it! You did a great job of keeping it authentic and yet not losing the layman -- in fact, your script compliments the reader by making him feel like he knows more than he probably does. It's kind of like watching an emergency scene on "E.R."
Steacy: Exactly, and, if I can blow my own horn for a second, I think that that is a quality of a good storyteller. If he gives his audience some credit, he contexturalizes what he's writing or portraying so that the audience can take their experiences, apply them, and come away with meaning.
Costa: Now, look. I can't imagine you got this right on the first draft...
Steacy: The thing is I have built up such an extensive library, I have read so much, the Vietnam era is one that I lived through, and...
Costa: Oh! Don't get me wrong! I'm not suggesting that you needed to work to build up the technospeak! I'm thinking that you would have to write it and then take it to normal humans and ask, "Do you understand what the heck I just said?"
Steacy: Well that's the thing -- trying to get it to that point. For example, the spotting aircraft -- this one is an OV-10A, but they used a number of different aircraft to do spotting -- they were always just referred to as "Bird Dog." Regarding the nomenclature for the ordnance, "500 GPs" is just 500-pound general-purpose explosives, "napes" was short for napalm, and I have no idea where "20 mike-mike" came from, but it means 20 millimeter cannon.
Costa: Yeah -- I knew that!
Steacy: [laughing] But the impression is, okay! They're hauling all kinds of hardware!
Costa: Definitely, but it also gives the reader the impression that he's watching the real thing -- not a script dumbed down for a general audience. Plus, you don't just use the text properly, you use the grammar and the punctuation properly, so that characters go, "ahh..." and "um..."
Steacy: I'm so glad that came across. When I was writing it I thought of how people don't just speak so that there's an exclamation mark at the end of everything they say. People do stutter. People make mistakes, like when the pilot in Bird Dog says, "... drop a few cans of napalm along the west -- I say again, the east side of that karst just above the crash site..." "I say again" is actually... You know, a lot of this comes from growing up with my Dad. I would hear him on the phone and he would actually use that kind of jargon. If somebody asked him a question and he had to look at something, instead of saying, "Just a moment please," he would say, "Ahh, roger, standby one." [laughter]
And also, as you can see on that page in particular, the one pilot has those awful floral appliques that people stuck all over everything in the '60s and the peace symbol... That was par for the course. Most of these pilots were still kids in their early twenties, so I was really trying to nail down those kinds of motifs and to do it right for every era. Also to change the syntax -- people did not use the same speech patterns in the first World War as they did in Vietnam as they will, I suppose, in the future. That, to me, was the real challenge and the fun of the miniseries.
Costa: Well, you've created a fun and interesting read. Best of luck with it in the future.
Steacy: Thanks, Bruce!