"Okay, Sean, I gather by your artwork at the side there that this is another post about your Wold Newton rip-off. But what the hell is propaganda of the deed supposed to mean?"I'm glad you asked!
As you may know, I decided on a decent line-up for my team of fictional and real people last week. I was really happy with them as a group -- especially after a little more reading suggested that Joaquin was somewhat bigoted against the Chinese. (That should make for an interesting relationship with Sun Wukong!) But where I was having problems was coming up with a solid justification for WHY they would be together. Alice was something of a loner, Joaquin was keeping a low profile to perpetuate the belief that he was dead, Sun Wukong hadn't effectively been seen for centuries... what could bring them together in the 1870s?
In developing this, I was creating a timeline of real and fictional events to put things into perspective. What were people of the late 1800s actually dealing with? I was effectively giving myself a crash course in a fifty-year period of world history. Interestingly, I soon found that China was in a shambles. There was a plague pandemic, war after war after war, the Yellow River flood killed 200,000 people... plenty of reasons to get a character out of the country. And then I noticed Europe and -- to a lesser extent -- the United States were facing some unusual problems as well. I kept seeing incident after incident where a politician was attacked or killed by an assassin. Queen Victoria had several attacks on her, as did Czar Alexander II, King Adolfo XII and Kaiser Wilhelm I. Presidents Garfield and McKinley were both killed in office as was Nikolai Mezentsov, a member of the State Council of Imperial Russia.
Investigating further led me to an article entitled "Propaganda of the Deed" published in The Bulletin of the Jura Federation in August 1877. The author, Paul Brousse, was an anarchist who promoted the idea that the best way to effect change was through some sort of dramatic catalyst event. Blowing up Scotland Yard, for example, to try to coerce England to give Ireland its independence. (That actually occurred in 1884.)
This is brilliant! Not only does it give me plenty of story fodder to throw against the protagonists, it also has some fairly obvious analogies to the world situation today in 2006! Current social relevance and historical accuracy? Man, this is too good NOT to pass up!
My problem, of course, is that I'm not skilled enough as an artist to draw this myself. As you can see, the imagry I've used thus far for this has been limited to Photoshopping existing images together. I'd like to ask again that if there are any artists out there who would like to help put this together as a bona fide comic book, I'd be very eager to speak with you. I want to develop this as a complete (or nearly complete) package that could be shopped around to different publishers, but I need an artist to help me pull that off.
Admittedly, I am fairly biased here, but I think this is a great idea. I've had ideas in the past that I thought were good and seen others independently develop something similar while I was trying to get the ball rolling. I'd hate for that to happen with this as well, so please give me a buzz if you're interested in pursuing this project with me.
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