Day-um! Another month, another delay on this poor column. I assure you that, along with giving it an honest-to-goodness name, I’ll be working overtime this month to ensure that it arrives on time in the future. I’m once again blaming my newborn for the delays, although that’s not entirely fair since I sent the questions to Erik and Gavin, and received them back, days ago. At any rate, let’s take a look at Savage Dragon #161, and the fallout from last week’s villain massacre at the hands of Emperor Kurr.

DragonQuestions: The kids at school know that she had a thing with Daredevil? How long can it be before the authorities come asking some very unpleasant questions…?

Erik Larsen: No more than the police show up when any other teenage girl has a picture of a guy hanging in her locker. When I was growing up there was a girl obsessed with Christopher Reeve. She had all kinds of pictures of him in her locker–but nobody thought for a second that her affections were being reciprocated. Same deal here. Other kids know she has a crush on the Golden Age Daredevil because Angel’s locker had pictures of the Golden Age Daredevil and she talked to her friends about Golden Age Daredevil.

DQ: Do we know who the “Toady” is in the armor?

EL: One of Rex Dexter’s many robot assistants. Same guy from an earlier issue, now reconfigured. If it’s not already apparent, Emperor Kurr is a lot more on the ball when it comes to this kind of stuff than Dragon was. Dragon was relatively bright, sure, but he was no rocket scientist.

DQ: Malcolm definitely seems physically larger. Is that just my imagination, or is it a result of the series’ realtime aspect and their having been training with SuperPatriot?

EL: It’s a result of real time. Because I sometimes have a run of issues dovetail one into the next I’ll sometimes have to play catch up. Generally there will be physical changes to help emphasize that. Angel got a haircut between issues at one point, Dragon himself may heal from some terrible wound and, as you pointed out, Malcolm’s been gradually filling out.

DQ: Overlord is certainly a complex figure this issue–in addition to talking the talk about dropping the “Vicious” from the Vicious Circle, he’s beating himself up pretty good about what happened to his Dragons. Will this kind of sense of humanity help him to connect with the general public as he moves his PR initiative forward to rebrand the Circle?

EL: That’s certainly his wish. His real problems will be getting others to follow him. With his Dragon army having crumbled and his closest allies having bought the farm it won’t be a walk in the park keeping other, less committed members in line.

DQ: So last issue’s beat-down was just about exactly as blood-soaked as it looked. Any particular reason that the two survivors we were left with, were chosen as survivors?

EL: Bluntly put, they had the strongest visuals and names. The others were less iconic. I’ve introduced hundreds of characters over the years and I need to do some periodic housecleaning to keep the rogues gallery from getting too unwieldy. What’s left is the best of the best–but not even they are safe necessarily. I mean, both Bud Ugly and LowBlow are in hospital beds fighting for their lives, I can’t imagine that it’s doing them any good to have a building fall on their heads.

DQ: “Had to give Captain Stewart something”…are we to assume that he’s on the take (and if so, is it news or just something that’s slipped my mind)?

EL: Overlord’s supposed to be good now–so kicking over a wanted criminal is part of maintaining that relationship. If he started letting everybody go it wouldn’t help his reputation any.

DQ: Does Kurr have memories of Dragon being obliterated by the new Overlord?

EL: As far as we can tell he does not. He may have seen footage, however, and he was briefed quite a bit before trying to take up his role as a police officer. When it comes to Overlord he’s got a good idea of how to best deal with him.

DQ: Can’t say I didn’t see that particular combat strategy against OpenFace coming. Will he be able to recover or are we short another villain?

EL: His head was ripped in half. He’s dead.

DQ: That asked, will we be seeing new characters introduced to replace some of the dead ones, or was part of the idea to trim the supporting cast to a more manageable size?

EL: There are a ton of new guys waiting to be introduced. Again, this book is set in real time so a lot of the older villains really are getting to be older villains and they’ll need to retire or be otherwise disposed of. New characters will step up as they die off.

DQ: Now–what exactly happened to Daredevil on that last page? Was it his boomerang or a piece of building shrapnel or what?

EL: If you look at the previous page you can see that as he tosses his boomerang that a pipe is hurling straight toward him. Kurr is tearing up the place and DD wasn’t able to avoid all of it.

DQ: Was the defeat of Turf at the hands of Angel and Malcolm to demonstrate that they’ve replaced their parents now and assumed their mantles? It echoed Jennifer and Dragon’s defeat of him back in Savage Dragon #59.

EL: Very much so. The idea was for this to be a similar scene. Angel was there as a witness, years ago, and she’s now in the thick of things. Compositionally, the panel where he’s broken to bits is pretty close to the one from Savage Dragon #59.

DQ: Another echo of the past seemed to be Kurr’s handling of OpenFace and Octopus. OpenFace attacked Kurr the same way that he did back in Savage Dragon #12 but this time he doesn’t have the merciful Dragon to deal with. And Octopus was defeated the same way as he was back in Savage Dragon #19 but this time his skull looks to have been shattered. Octopus could perhaps survived there but OpenFace looks toast… Will you have any villains left in the book by the time Kurr is defeated (assuming he does get beat)?

EL: Well, there are still quite a few left. It’s not as though I’m likely to run out any time soon.

DQ: Following on from your question, a fairly large period of time seems to have passed for Malcolm to have grown more bulky but LowBlow has only just started to grow his hair back. Is that just a case of the real-time aspect having inherent problems?

EL: LowBlow’s hair’s not THAT short–though it should have been thicker, I suppose. I dunno. Real-time is sort of problematic. It’s not easy striking a balance sometimes. I don’t know how long they would, realistically, have to recover from wounds like that or how long they’d be that out of it. If it was really a few months they probably should have been conscious. Maybe they just had a long night. I think there was a Green Acres marathon on.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 20th, 2010 at 4:06 pm and is filed under News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.