PART OF THE IMPETUS for the Reverbstorm series was to bring Lord Horror's character out of the wartime period and into the present/near future, in a more intelligent and powerfully realised manner than had been attempted in the first two Lord Horror comics; works which should be regarded as little more than sketches for an evolving character. Having been promoted to main artist (Kris Guidio providing spot illustrations of Horror and Jessie), David Britton encouraged me to take the cue from the work I had done in Hard Core Horror No. 5 and broaden the landscape the characters were situated in.

Although not a specific intention at the outset, Reverbstorm has by accident filled a gap left by one of the Savoy projects which fell by the wayside during the company's bankruptcy in the early Eighties. After The Savoy Book and The Savoy Reader (which mutated into Savoy Dreams), a third anthology had been planned. New Wave Sword and Sorcery ('a breakthrough anthology of general weirdness') was announced with the intention of revitalising the most despised of the fantasy sub-genres in the same spirit as the Moorcock/Ellison/Merrill revitalisation of SF in the Sixties. Although the project collapsed, some of the proposed contributions found a life elsewhere, most notably M John Harrison's marvellous novel, In Viriconium. (the original work David Britton had commissioned Harrison to produce was By Gas Mask And Fire Hydrant, a title which combines elements of wartime England, old New York and the shadow of sexual bondage; themes which eventually emerge together in the extraordinary 'Frogmen' sequence of the Lord Horror novel).

The Sword and Sorcery and Weird Tales fantasy lineage in Reverbstorm is fairly self-evident: Horror's character has been acknowledged as owing a debt to Moorcock's Elric (in Reverbstorm #1 Horror is seen briefly as Sexton Blake's Zenith the Albino, one of Elric's precursors); the depiction of the Souls comes out of my Lovecraft comics work, as does the massive scale of Torenbürgen; the collection of beasts and Swine-things rampaging through William Hope Hodgson's books (especially The Night Land, a major influence on Dave and myself) and the metamorphoses of characters and landscape in David Lindsay's A Voyage To Arcturus (to which Reverbstorm is in part dedicated) have many parallels in the series, especially in #4—the Ether Jumpers, present from #2 onwards have analogues in the Blue Giants of The Night Land ; finally, the whole series owes a huge debt to Burne Hogarth's Tarzan strips, both those from the 1940s and his graphic novels of the 1970s. Tarzan was the first international mass media fantasy hero of the Twentieth Century and remains an enduring figure, an influence, with Burroughs other hero, John Carter of Mars, on much that follows—Moorcock's heroic fantasy comes after his teenage editorship of Tarzan Adventures in the Fifties; as 'E P Bradbury' he penned a number of John Carter-style Martian adventures.

In Reverbstorm these myriad influences are blended with material they have rarely encountered before, namely the historical period they were born in. Most Sword and Sorcery and heroic fantasy runs away from the present time (or to other planets) into a variety of simpler, quasi-Medieval worlds, whose antecedents are usually the Arthurian Legends and the books of William Morris and Lord Dunsany. Rarely, if ever, is this determinedly escapist sub-genre allowed to stray from what has become, post-Tolkien, an ever tighter straitjacket of acceptable landscapes, characters and scenarios. The aims of a New Wave Sword and Sorcery would (presumably) have been to break these bonds for good and bring in some real intelligence and imagination (the dour nature of Harrison's Viriconium books achieves this).

Although the intention was not in our minds at the outset, Reverbstorm seems to have taken this course by providing one answer to the question "What would a Twentieth (or Twenty-First) Century Sword and Sorcery narrative look like?". Any such narrative has to take account of a number of questions raised by updating an often reactionary genre, particularly the consideration of bringing into our time characters used to solving problems with weapons. Lord Horror fits the bill easily—the broad-sword replaced by slashing razors—- whilst at the same time seeming monstrously aberrant. In a savage fantasy world like Barsoom or Pelucidar, Horror might seem like a saviour (at least until he turned on his fellows) but closer to home the psychopathic shadow of all Romantic heroes becomes clear. Even the usually stainless Tarzan can be viewed in this light (despite the vociferous protestations of Burne Hogarth, a tireless champion of Tarzan's noble character) when one recalls how Burroughs' books and Karl May's Westerns fuelled Hitler's power fantasies. After the passage of nearly a century, the Savage Noble lording it over the Noble Savages can't help but seem an awkward reminder of past imperialism, and all Burne Hogarth's efforts to create a Renaissance Superman can't disguise the violent atmosphere of doom, hysteria and paranoia in his own work. These parallels become self-referential when Britton reveals Horror to be a pulp novelist of some note, as in the scene in Reverbstorm #6 where James Joyce looks over some of his brother's works: Swords Of The Necronomicon, The Apes Of Zion, Horror In The Sun, Two Blades For Hitler, The Weird Of Spring-Heeled Jack and Baptised In The Blood Of Millions.

During the Second World War, Tarzan, Doc Savage and a host of others (even Sherlock Holmes) were forced into service to aid America's war effort against the Axis powers. The Nazis commandeered Baron Munchhausen, Siegfried and the whole of Norse Mythology (via Wagner's operas) to their cause. As Philip José Farmer has shown, it's unreasonable to assume any more that these powerful, violent characters would be immune from the sexual drives or worst impulses of the rest of humanity. The world has grown more complicated than it was fifty years ago when they could stand four-square against the Forces of Evil. It is a more honest, and ultimately more interesting, narrative that acknowledges this fact. •