After leaving Marvel UK, he was hired as the Senior Editor of Tundra Publishing which was the birthplace of the offbeat
Lords of Misrule as well as a title called Pale Horses. Since Tundra's demise, White has been keeping busy by contributing to 2000 AD, the oversize British comics mag, and, along with co-writer Dan Abnett and artist Gary Erskine, firing up the engines on Pale Horses -- renamed HyperSonic -- now a four-issue series due out in November from Dark Horse Comics.White was gracious enough to reveal the truth about this near-future, military/conspiracy theory thriller to Tom Fassbender one dark and stormy London evening.
Steve White: I've always had this interest in aviation, specifically military aviation -- as a kid I'd always wanted to be a fighter pilot -- and one of the things I've noted was that in the past couple of decades planes were flown to the limit of the aircraft. But now it's getting to the point where planes are becoming structurally stronger, and now they're being flown to the limit of the pilot. And with the rapid development inherent in technology, it's apparent that sooner or later the planes will be hamstrung by having an ordinary pilot.
Tom Fassbender: So, of course, there's a need for pilots to be modified . . .
White: Exactly. Dan [Abnett] and I were on a coach going to the Frankfurt Book Fair at the time of the Gulf War, and I suggested that eventually pilots would probably have to be surgically enhanced to enable them to fly the next generation of aircraft. About the same time, I read a book called The Ravens about a secret group of pilots that flew in Laos during the Vietnam War who were basically laundered from the U.S. Air Force by the CIA to fly under the most stringent of combat conditions. They were regular combat junkies; pilots who flew to the edge and felt very restricted by all the politics of Vietnam. From these, we developed the idea that if you were going to surgically alter pilots you're going to want guys who are combat-addicted who wouldn't mind being surgically altered to fly these incredible aircraft.
Fassbender: In addition to the military, there's an element of the "alien" in HyperSonic. How'd that get in there?
White: There was something missing. We needed a spark to give the story a real kickstart. So I was listening to the radio one night, just sitting in my bedroom, and I heard an interview with a guy who was saying that all of America's "stealth" technology was actually back-engineered from the Roswell crash.
Fassbender: A theory that's quite popular today.
White: Right, but back then -- we started writing this in 1991 -- I didn't know anything about it. I just heard it, something went "Click!", and I thought, "That's it! That's the missing spark!" I told Dan about it and he loved it, so we got together and plotted it out and all the story elements fell quite nicely into place.
Fassbender: So the UFO connection came along as a bit of an accident?
White: Yeah! It wasn't anything that we intentionally set out to do. The tragedy that we feel now is the fact that we prided ourselves on being ahead of our time. But now, the whole UFO thing has become fairly big media news. At the time, the whole thinking behind the Roswell crash was just beginning.
Fassbender: That was right around the time the X-Files came out, too.
White: Right, and I didn't even hear about the X-Files until about 2 years ago. We were initially concerned that we'd be accused of spitting up the X-Files, and we've always hoped to have a forum where we could tell people that we actually did this several years ago.
Fassbender: Would you consider yourself to be a conspiracy theorist?
White: No, not really, no. It's certainly fun to develop conspiracies, but neither Dan nor I particularly believe that American aviation gets all its technology from back-engineered alien technology. Personally I find that very hard to believe.
Fassbender: You set the story of HyperSonic in a second Vietnam War in 2009, and with the current geo-political climate of Southeast Asia, this is another area where you showed keen foresight.
White: It came from an article that I read in an aircraft magazine in 1990. It was written by an Australian defense analyst who was saying that with the end of the Cold War, a lot of the conflicts that had been kept in check would now be free to run their course. And this analyst felt that Southeast Asia could become a real hot spot. I had read that the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979 was part of an ongoing major grudge and -- with Russia out of the picture -- the Chinese would probably come to the fore and they'd be free to act on that again.
Fassbender: This is going to be a four-issue series. Was it always designed that way?
White: Initially -- at Tundra -- it was supposed to be six, but it ended up that there was only room on the schedule for four. Actually, that worked in our favor. We compressed it considerably, thereby giving it an intensity that it wouldn't have had over six issues.
Fassbender: In HyperSonic you use jargon and portray the situations of combat in a very real, believable fashion.
White: Thank you. One of the main questions we had when doing the series was what to do about the jargon. If you read anything related to aviation, it is full of jargon. Both of us are big William Gibson fans, and one of the things we really liked about his Neuromancer was that it made no concessions to the reader in terms of technology and jargon. We decided to go that route, although we did tone it down quite a lot from what we could have written; we didn't want to make it completely inaccessible. In addition, we put a glossary of terms with the comic. Hopefully it won't bamboozle the readers too much.
Fassbender: What about the dogfight scenes? The scenarios were very well laid out.
White: I discussed at length with Gary [Erskine] how we wanted the art to look. When you watch camera footage from any plane, especially one in battle, the main thing you notice is they never fight on one level. The plane is constantly turning and spinning so the horizon is always changing. I told him it would be really great if, when drawing the dogfight scenes, if he could draw the horizon so it seemed realistic, all over the place.
Fassbender: It's apparent that you've done some research on the aviation side, but have you done anything on the other side, the whole Roswell/UFO conspiracy?
White: Sure. It's always something I've had an interest in. I did read the guy who I heard on the radio interview, Timothy Good. -- he's got a number of books. Dan actually bought one of his called Alien Liaison and lent it to me, telling me it had a lot of relevance to what we were doing. And, while a lot of it was perhaps a little too outlandish for my tastes, some of the thinking behind it made sense with what we were doing.
Fassbender: So you went with it, obviously.
White: Despite how I really feel about the whole Area 51 thing we decided that, for the sake of argument, they are developing alien technology for the U.S. Air Force at Area 51. We tried to incorporate much of the modern mythology of UFOs into HyperSonic.
Fassbender: In turn, dispelling some of those myths as well . . .
White: One of the things that we had done -- and who knows, we might get lucky and they'll see print -- was to write four short stories, prequels to HyperSonic that will take the story back further than what we came up with.
Fassbender: Which is a good place for me to ask if there will ever be a sequel to HyperSonic?
White: Actually, we had also come up with another four issue story -- it's just a plot at the moment -- called the Red Riders. It's a sequel to HyperSonic that picks up where the first story leaves off. The intention was that some of the pilots go rogue . . . almost as an Apocalypse Now, with the rogue squadron becoming the Colonel Kurtz character. They disappear into the Southeast Asian jungles and fight the war on their own terms.
Fassbender: Is that still going to happen?
White: I'd certainly love to do it, but first we have to see what happens with HyperSonic. We don't want to tell another story that's far ahead of technology and popular culture only to have them pass us by before it sees print.