Eruditorum Press

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fiction

The Rising of the Moon

1

I. 

Fuck this. Fuck waiting for this bastard. Does he think I’m his plaything?

What does he think he’s doing, leaving me in a shithole of a pub, with its corny decorations and stench of old men’s farts? I get enough funny looks as it is. There’s no such thing as a danger-free day in my line but today, in particular, is a bad one.

No, I’m not having this. I’m going to slam this glass onto the bar and get out of here. My nerves are jangling inside me. Above my head are hung flags from all over the world. I manage not to sneer. I pull my heavy jacket on and go outside to the South London street.

There’s traffic noise, and off-licences, and corner shops with rotting fruit sitting in bowls on rain-battered tables outside. Grey and lifeless. I want to go home. I lean up against the sick-yellow exterior of the pub and wish I could light a fag. I settle for re-applying my lipstick. I look up. They’ve only decorated the outside of this place with a ridiculous Guinness themed clock, with the pints looking like blushing, happy faces. I swear to God. I could puke.

There’s a man on the other side of the road, resting his bulk against the black pole which holds up the traffic light. He’s watching me; and not casually. He isn’t looking through or around me, but intently at me, to see what I do next. I feel the hair on my arms stand up. I feel an urge to run across the road, weave around the speeding cars, and rip the bastard’s throat out. But no. No. This is not a time to be drawing any attention to myself. It’s cold. I put on my hat and slope over to the side street.

The paranoia, or sixth sense, or whatever it is, that I’ve been wearing all day as surely as I’m wearing this jacket, starts to lift – but just a little bit. I feel the solidness of the pub’s pebble dashed wall as I lean back. Alright. This has all gone wrong somewhere. That’s fine. Cut our losses, report back to the bosses, reconvene for another day.

The bin, a big, blue, plastic rectangle, to my left moves. The man’s there, the expression on his moustached face showing me he’s got something to say. He sidles closer to me trying to keep the eye contact I’m avoiding. He smells like the police.

He says my name. He’s got a voice like a strangled Goose and an accent from what my old man, til his dying day, called Persia. The cunt says my name again.

“Fuck off.” I say and turn to walk away.

Self importance is filling his voice as he asks, out loud, for the third time, if I’m me.

“Never heard of the bitch.” I say, moving on. I can hear his pace quicken behind me. The tension in me is turning to anger, irrational, uncontrollable.…

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A Ghost Story for Samhainn

, 16

Calder’s Room

(Amended with new draft 12/11/21.)

 

Thomas Calder, a lieutenant in the 1st Surreys, was sent back to England in autumn 1917 after being injured during the Battle of the Somme.  He spent a week or so in a conventional military hospital in France, but his wounds were primarily psychic rather than physical, so he was sent back to England, and to Sandilands.

Sandilands had by that time come under the directorship of Dr. K. J. Ravichandra.  Ravichandra was marked out by his universally acknowledged skill, and by his advanced and humane ideas.  Before his advent, Sandilands had effectively been a torture chamber for men who were considered weak and cowardly, in need of being shocked or bullied back to obedience.  Whatever our modern opinion of Ravichandra’s approach, there can be little doubt that his informal and conversational style represented an improvement on treatment through freezing cold water, or electric shock, or cigarette burn.  The men who came under Ravichandra’s care at Sandilands – an Elizabethan manor in East Anglia, bought by the government and converted for use as an Army psychiatric hospital – generally showed great improvement.  Calder, it must be said, turned out to be something of an exception.

One of the things Ravichandra insisted upon was that all patients should have single rooms, or at least share with only one other person.  Accordingly, the old system of shared bunks (officers excepted, naturally) was abolished, and the large rooms of the old house were converted into a great number of small but pleasant single and double cubicles.  This not only increased the comfort of the patients but also expanded the hospital’s capacity, so the Army was inclined to be pleased despite the expense.  Ravichandra had made a rod for his own back in that he immediately found that he was being sent a great many more patients.

Not only did Ravichandra find his staff and budget severely stretched, he soon found that space was running out.  Calder was literally the last man to be sent to Sandilands before Ravichandra was forced to tell the Army that he could not possibly accept any more patients.  Consequently, Calder was not put into a cubicle like the vast majority of the patients, but was billeted in a small attic room.  It was the last remaining scrap of space usable for habitation.

By the account of Lumsden, the orderly who showed Calder up to his room via a narrow, cramped, and creaking old spiral staircase, the new arrival was pleased when he saw the room.  He seemed to like its privacy and remoteness – though he certainly remarked upon its peculiarities, as nobody could help doing.

Its walls, floor, and angled ceiling were of dark, old wood.  Even the loam between the tarred black beams was dark.  At some point, probably during the early nineteenth century, the room had been refurbished with new panelling and floorboards. but even then the dark colour scheme had been retained.  The wood of the panels and floorboards was stained so dark as to be almost black.…

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Appeals to Authority

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Following the stoically mute Karkus, Felix and the Doctor found themselves in a seemingly endless grey corridor.  It felt like miles of the same tiny patch of space, extruded into infinity. 

“Why do we spend so much of our time in corridors?” asked Felix.

“Because we spend so much of our time fighting institutionalised hierarchies,” said the Doctor, “and institutionalised hierarchies depend upon armed force and bureaucracy.  Both of which require staff, and therefore also functional premises in which staff can operate.”

“Oh,” said Felix, “yes, I see.”

He didn’t pursue it.  Things had gotten quite socratic enough today already.

*

At the Doctor’s command, the Karkus had demanded admittance to the castle.  The great door had swung open for him, a grudging note in the creaking of its iron hinges.  The Doctor had wanted to have a few words with whatever jobsworth owned the voice from behind the door, but there was nobody there when she looked.

“Obviously such a minor character he never even got a physical description,” she said, “which explains the insecurity.”

Then she had turned to the Karkus and demanded that he tell her about the prison.  He had tried to deny knowledge, but so half-heartedly and guiltily that it was almost funny.  It took little more than a sigh of irritation from his new Mistress to make him crack.

“Lead us there,” the Doctor had commanded.

So the strange little band had made their way into the dark corridors of the castle.  They passed through a lazily-planned labyrinth, past cells in which razor sharp pendula depended menacingly over tables with shackles at each corner, past a courtyard in which a pair of feet stuck out from beneath a gigantic plumed helmet…

“How did you know he was involved in the prison?” Felix asked the Doctor.

“Just the sort of thing he’d be involved in… until the heroine turns up and makes him come over to the goodies.”

“Do these fictional people not have free will?” asked Felix.

“Well, that’s a tricky one,” said the Doctor.  “It could be argued we only have free will because all possible choices come true in some world or another.  Brigadiers and Brigade-Leaders, you know.”  (Felix didn’t, but he let it pass.)  “The people of the Land of Fiction have their variant iterations, just as we have ours.  But they also have creators.”

“So do we have a Creator,” said Felix.

“That’s debateable,” said the Doctor, “but I think a nice Catholic boy like you would want to say that our notional Creator gives us free will, yes?”

“That’s what the Church tells us,” said Felix.

“Is that an appeal to authority?” asked the Doctor.

“No,” said Felix, slightly stung, “I’m simply citing wisdom with which I happen to agree.”

“Well, in any case, the creators of fictional people definitely don’t allow them free will.  They make them do as they’re told.  They leave them no choice.  But then there are those variant iterations.  Re-interpreptations.  Reboots.  And then there’s fan-fic, of course. …

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Variant Iterations

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“I can’t think why you would want to spend so much time here Doctor,” said Felix, “it seems a very odd place to choose as a regular holiday destination.”

“I think it’s rather pleasant,” said the Doctor brightly, “especially since we cleared out the former management.”

“The former management?” asked Felix.

“Oh, Drumlins Westmore tried to enclose this place a little while ago,” said the Doctor.

“Drumlins Westmore?  Sounds like a British general.  General Sir George Drumlins-Westmore OBE.”

“Ha!  No, it’s a corporation.  The Drumlins Westmore Interplanetary News and Entertainment Media Group.  Or something like that.  There’s probably an Inc in there too somewhere.  They set up a department on one of their office worlds devoted entirely to fiction.  Hired loads of struggling wannabe authors.  Lured them in with promises of agents and publishing contracts and regular meals.”

“You mean they started publishing novels?  They created a sort of novel factory?”

“No, they didn’t publish anything.  They got the writers to spend all day writing stories featuring brilliant, dynamic, hyper-capable, unbeatable employees of the Drumlins Westmore Corporation.  Heroic corporate accountants and lawyers and lobbyists and marketing executives.   Capitalist atlases who never faltered in their noble determination to cure all of society’s ills by privatising everything… into the hands of Drumlins Westmore, naturally.  The writers took to it with depressing ease and speed.  As a rule, the more principled a writer, the quicker they accomodated themselves to the work.  You should’ve heard the byzantine self-justifications I had to listen to.  Anyway, the fictional Drumlins Westmore employees from the stories all appeared here as a matter of course.  And, also as a matter of course, they immediately set about taking over.  It worked too.  Effectively, Drumlins Westmore pulled off a hostile takeover of the Land of Fiction.”

“But that’s all over now?” asked Felix.

“Oh yes,” laughed the Doctor, grinning so widely Felix thought her head was about to split in two, “we couldn’t be having that sort of thing now could we?”

They walked and the Doctor expounded.

“It’s the people you meet here, you see.  That’s why I keep coming back.  That and a strange feeling I get… a feeling of coming home.  But in a good way.”

“It doesn’t seem entirely safe here,” said Felix, “even without those Drumlins and Westmore gentlemen.”

Felix looked around warily, as if expecting a corporate accountant or a marketing executive to leap out at him and attack.

He was still somewhat on edge after half an hour of hiding behind a rock from a platoon of huge robotic tripods.  He and the Doctor had spied them in the far distance.  The Doctor had insisted they duck out of sight, just in case.  Even so, she had leaned around the rocks and spied on the things with her telescope.  Felix had taken a turn.  Through the telescope he saw them, metallic tendrils flailing from the bulbous bodies suspended at the tops of their tall and jointed legs.  They were lumbering towards a far-off cluster of settlements connected by rivers, backed by gorges, and interspersed with farmland filled with grazing sheep.…

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Lost Post

3

“Twenty-eight minutes past,” said Felix, looking at his watch.  “Nothing.”

The Doctor consulted the black plastic Casio with a broken strap that she kept in her pocket.

“I make it 3.26,” she said.  “Any moment now.”

They were standing behind some empty flower tubs at the centre of a roundabout.  Every now and then a car would swoop past, but essentially they were alone.  A spray of chilly drizzle floated all around them.  It was almost frozen, and felt curiously oily.  Each droplet turned as bright gold as a cinder as it flew under the beams of the street lamps.

They’d left the TARDIS stuck half-way out of an Off Licence several streets away.

“How do you know there’s a roundabout around here?” Felix had asked.

“If we walk far enough in any direction,” the Doctor had replied, “we’re bound to come across one.  Roads need to diverge, you know.”

And, sure enough, a roundabout had eventually presented itself.  It was deserted, so they had strolled across the broad ring of tarmac to the little grassy hill at its centre.

And there they stood, side by side, like strangers waiting for a bus.  They did not speak for quite some time.

“Are you sure you’ve got this right, Doctor?” asked Felix at last, who was feeling wet and sick and cold, and increasingly sure that the Doctor was playing some kind of game, the aim of which was to fob him off.

“The instructions were quite clear,” she replied tersely.

“But I thought one had to wait at a crossroads at midnight,” said Felix.

“That’s if you’re waiting for the Devil.  We’re not.”

“I don’t think we’re waiting for anyone,” said Felix sulkily.  “I think you have been misleading me.  Again.”

It was a little while after this that they checked the time.  As they did so, a figure appeared on the other side of the roundabout, riding a bicycle.  The bicycle and its rider emerged from a patch of darkness between street lamps, without having entered it first.  The pedaling figure seemed simply to have formed itself from the darkness.  It began rolling slowly around the roundabout in what looked like a cloud of mist.  It had swerved into view and trundled up onto the centre of the roundabout almost before Felix and the Doctor had realised what was happening.

The Doctor consulted her Casio again.

“Twenty-seven minutes past three in the morning,” she announced, waggling her Casio in Felix’s face, and sounding more smug than Felix had ever imagined possible.

Felix did not respond.  His attention was fixed on the thing that had just appeared in front of them.

One cloven hoof remained upon a still pedal.  The other rested on the ground.  It made the wet grass sizzle and steam and char.

“Shall we finish the argument later?” asked Felix in a hoarse whisper.

“Just because you’re losing…” muttered the Doctor.

The creature stepped off its bike and leaned it against a flower tub.  It was short – though still taller than Felix – and stocky.…

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Once

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The Doctor and Felix came to the village of Once on New Years’ Eve.  Or rather, they came to where the village of Once had once been.

“Where is it?” asked Felix in his lilting German accent, staring into the empty valley beyond the copse in which they stood.

The Doctor tipped her head forwards slightly, to let accumulated snow tumble from the crown and brim of her battered, crumpled old top hat.

“Exactly,” she said.

The village had disappeared years ago, she told him.

“Well,” she continued, her words turning to steam in the cold air, “nobody knows exactly when it happened… or should I say when it, the village I mean, stopped happening.”

It had taken a few months of accumulated surprises and puzzlements and disappointments and silences and ominous remarks before the conscious realisation had gradually dawned upon the people in the surrounding villages that the village of Once was no longer there.

“The government realised pretty quickly of course,” continued the Doctor, “because the people in Once stopped paying their taxes.  But the government kept quiet about it, in case it gave any other villages ideas.  As best as anyone can make out, the village vanished from existence somewhere between Christmas and New Years, 1849.”

“I suppose it has become one of those perennial mysteries,” suggested Felix in his perfect schoolboy English, “like the Mary Celeste? “

“Umm, not really,” said the Doctor, “You see, hierarchical cultures actually have a very low tolerance for mysteries that are genuinely mysterious.  They prefer prosaic mysteries.  The Mary Celeste, for instance.  I mean it’s odd certainly, but the broad outlines of it aren’t all that challenging to any common sense ideas about how the world works.  The ship was discovered with the crew and passengers gone.  Obviously, then, they left.  The reason why they left may be obscure, but the essential mechanism of the event is comprehensible enough.  They left.  People can, and will, do that.  But an entire village physically vanishing, structures and roads and farm animals and all…” she smiled wryly “…that’s a bit different.  That sort of thing just doesn’t happen.  Or rather, it does happen, but it’s – if you’ll pardon me – vanishingly rare.  When it happens, people get very nervous.  It undermines their sense of reality.  Human beings disappearing, that’s one thing.  But property?  That’s another.  Especially in England.”

Felix chuckled.  “So this is one of those mysteries that polite English people do not talk about.”

(The Doctor, by the way, genuinely doesn’t know what happened on board the Mary Celeste.  It’s one of the strange things about the Doctor’s life: we know a lot more about some of the events in it than she does.)

They left the shelter of the copse and walked until they reached the bottom of the empty valley.  Their feet crunched in the snow, and ice-blue moonlight pooled in the caverns of their footprints.

Felix began to have a very strange sense that he was following a road that he could not see, passing houses that were almost – but not quite – visible.…

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The Real Problem With Stories (The Last War in Albion Part 10: Starblazer, Aristotle)

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This is the final installment of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. You can still grab the ebook single of Chapters One and Two at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. Barring a deadline catastrophe, Chapter Three will begin next week.
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Grant Morrison’s action-packed work for Starblazer evoked both the legacy of pulp magazines and the steady rise in popularity of the “fantastic” genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, including superheroes. This, in turn, raised the question of genre fusion, and what genre means in the first place…
“She’s realized the real problem with stories – if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.” – Neil Gaiman, Sandman #6
So in the late 1970s, as this tide began in film with things like Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Alien, major filmmakers in the genre like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Ridley Scott were inspired by the pulp fiction of their childhoods – 1950s America for George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and late 40s/early 50s Britain for Ridley Scott. All of this took place in the context of other historical shifts, of course, but it was the trend that Moore and Morrison were swept up in, and, eventually, came to find themselves appearing to steer. Film and serialized print, after all, had always been bedfellows. Film adapted popular serialized print stories and genres – the films that were popular in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s were still action-adventure stories derived from the pulps, but they were war stories and westerns that lacked sci-fi/fantasy elements.
Figure 77: The more or less realist Luck of the Legion shared space in
Eagle with the sci-fi adventures of Dan Dare.
But the lines between these pulp genres often blur, much as the line between superheroes and the pulps blurs. Starblazer was the sci-fi/fantasy sister title to the straight war digest Commando, also published by DC Thomson. The American comics industry of the 40s-60s had superheroes, but also had westerns, crime comics, horror, and other genres. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote sci-fi when he did the Barsoom stories, but more straight adventure when he did Tarzan. Grant Morrison can feature a noirish private eye in what is essentially a Flash Gordon story. Eagle ran Dan Dare alongside stories of the French Foreign Legion. Adventure stories taken from the pulps have always been a subset of film, and sci-fi/fantasy has always been a subset of adventure stories. It is both crucial and obvious to point out that the pulps and film are, however, very different media. Further, it is important to point out that they have very different narrative forms. 
Figure 78: Ancient Greece has numerous subtle treatments
in comics, the bulk of which are impeccably researched.
This is best explained in terms of ancient Greece.
Virtually all thought about narrative structure is a reaction to Aristotle’s Poetics, and, to a lesser extent, his Rhetoric.
…

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Wiping Moscow From The Face of the Earth Would Be Fine (The Last War in Albion Part 9: Starblazer, the Pulps, Russian Structuralism)

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This is the fourth of five installments of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. You can still grab the ebook single of chapters one and two at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. 
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Grant Morrison’s contributions to Starblazer consisted of action-packed adventure stories that always came back with the editorial note “more space combat.” This style of writing owes much to the cheap populist fiction of the American pulps and British penny dreadfuls, which favored a dynamic and breathless prose style… 
“Wiping Moscow from the face of the earth would be fine.” – Warren Ellis recounting editorial guidance from Hasbro, 2008
Indeed, the absence of this hypnotic prose in favor of banal action set pieces provides at least part of the explanation for why the John Carter film was so singularly unable to replicate the narrative magic of its source text. Their text was a sort of verbal spectacle, doing the same thing to language that Siegel and Shuster did for the comics page. 
Figure 68: “The thing was about the size of a Shetland pony,
but its head bore a slight resemblance to that of a frog, except
that the jaws were equipped with three rows of long, sharp
tusks.” – Edgar Rice Burroughs, describing a calot in A
Princess of Mars (image from John Carter, 2012)
But the chief engine of the narrative was the cliffhanger. A story’s job was to be exciting for a certain number of words, then to end on a big cliffhanger so the reader would want to see what happens next week. Their cryptic introductions serve as replacements for the lead-ins from previous installments, and the stories quickly get into their own distinctive rhythms. Chapter Four of A Princess of Mars ends with the revelation of a creature described as “about the size of a Shetland pony, but its head bore a slight resemblance to that of a frog, except that the jaws were equipped with three rows of long, sharp tusks.” The chapter then leaves off, more questions than answers.
Figure 69: Cover of the tenth issue of Eagle,
featuring a page of Dan Dare: Pilot of the
Future (Frank Hampson, 1950)
This structure survived the pulps’ gradual evolution into comics. In the UK the successors were things like The Beano and The Dandy, but also titles like Eagle, Marcus Morris’s 1950 comics magazine headlined by two brightly coloured pages of Frank Hampson and his studio’s Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. Dan Dare is one of the most iconic figures in British comics, and will appear several times in the course of the War. A square-jawed pilot meant to evoke the heroism of the RAF in the still-vividly remembered Battle of Britain, Dan Dare fought the villainous Treens, coded blatantly as space Nazis and led by the fiendish Mekon. Dare was in the tradition of action heroes like Flash Gordon, Alex Raymond’s 1930s newspaper comic.
…

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Believe in the Stars (The Last War in Albion Part 8: Starblazer, the Pulps)

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This is the third of five installments of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. The entirety of chapters one and two are available as an ebook single at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. 

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Grant Morrison’s superhero strip Captain Clyde came to an ignoble end in 1981, but in many ways what was most unusual was that it existed at all, given that superheroes were not particularly popular within British comics, where you were likely to find a wider variety of comics… 

“Believe in the stars.” – Alan Moore, Dodgem Logic #4, 2010
The superhero is thus best used to describe a type of pulp hero story that emerged out of 1930s American comic books. Not all superheroes have their origins in comic books, but enough do that it is a reasonably entertaining game to identify ones who first appeared in another medium, particularly ones that have any degree of popularity today. They are defined primarily by a visual intensity and a sense of heritage tracing back to Action Comics #1. And they are worth fighting over because pulp heroes of that sort are a large part of contemporary culture, and have come to almost completely dominate the American comic book industry, in which large swaths of the War are fought. 
Figure 58: Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future traded on
the fantastic and brightly colored art of Frank
Hampson (From Eagle v3 #12, 1952)
But the War starts in Britain and remains, in the end, fought in Albion. And in British comics culture superheroes never gained the absolute dominance over the comics industry that they did in America. In British comics the first massively popular instance of highly visual pulp storytelling was Eagle, an anthology comic featuring stories in several genres headlined by the colourful adventures of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, and, crucially, dating to 1950, not 1938. And 1950 was squarely in the dead period of superhero comics between their World War II popularity and their Silver Age revivals. This meant that the British comics industry had several years in which to develop its own styles of highly visual pulp storytelling without any influence from American superheroes. 
Figure 59: All-Star Superman #1 cropped
to digest size.

Which meant, in turn, that in 1979 Grant Morrison could submit a story to Starblazer, a comic that simply would not have ever existed in the late 70s American comic book industry. Starblazer debuted in April of 1979, and became a twice-monthly title in July of the same year. Its concept is simple – single issue sci-fi stories (later broadened to include fantasy as well) sold in what’s known as “digest” format. Measuring at 13.5 x 17.5 centimeters (or roughly 5 x 7 inches), digests were about the height of a mass market paperback, but slightly wider at the base – similar to the formats used for science fiction magazines like Galaxy and New Worlds, as well as to American “digest” comics, the most famous of which were Gold Key’s efforts.

…

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Superhuman Effort to Keep Things The Way They Are (The Last War in Albion Part 7: Captain Clyde, Superheroes)

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This is the second of five installments of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. The entirety of chapters one and two are available as an ebook single at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. 
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: In 1979, Grant Morrison began writing and drawing Captain Clyde for The Govan Press, a small local paper of a district in Glasgow. The comic attempted to depict a quasi-realistic local superhero, named after the River Clyde upon which Glasgow sits, who, like Morrison, was just an unemployed Glaswegian trying to get by. Installments of Captain Clyde are extremely difficult to locate, but several strips are publicly available…
“A society where nothing can change because it takes superhuman effort to keep things the way they are.” – Warren Ellis, 1999

Figure 48: The goddess Elen offers Chris Melville superpowers
in an early installment of Captain Clyde (c. 1979)
The first strip appears to be from the earliest days of the strip – a plot that O’Donnell describes summarises as Melville being “offered the powers of Earth and Fire by the earth goddess Elen – If he could defeat her champion, Magna.” This, Morrison explains in response, is because of “an interest in ley lines and earth magic and all that pseudo mystical, hippy shit,” marking the first documented instance of Morrison’s fascination with magic and the occult. Morrison reiterates this in Supergods, using the story of his uncle giving him the Aleister Crowley/Frieda Harris Thoth Tarot for his nineteenth birthday, which got him into magic as a bridge between his discussion of Chris Claremont’s run on the X-Men and his own Captain Clyde work. The anecdote culminates with him performing what he describes as “a traditional ritual” resulting in “a blazing, angelic lion 
Figure 49: Lady Frieda Harris’s design
for The Magus (aka The Magician) in
Crowley’s Thoth Tarot
head… growling out the words “I am neither North nor South.” The second strip at least somewhat continues on that theme, showing Captain Clyde collapsed at the center of a stone circle before being renewed by some mystical power. This strip does not seem to immediately follow from the first, as Melville is identified by the caption box as Captain Clyde, suggesting it is not the origin story. Instead it appears to illustrate a feature of Captain Clyde, who, as Morrison puts it, “periodically has to recharge his powers by drawing earth energy from standing stones and other sacred sites.” The interest in Scotland’s otherness and pagan roots reinforces the initial sense of Captain Clyde as a sort of dissident superhero strip – an attempt to recreate the concept from the outsider perspective of an unemployed Glaswegian. 
The other two strips are consecutive, and feature a battle between Captain Clyde and a villain named Quasar, who is described in Supergods as “a tweed-jacketed headmasterly villain” who turns into a “star-powered monster.” The chronology given in Supergods suggests this too is from the earlier portion of the strip, before its turn towards excess.
…

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