The celebrated British sci-fi anothology 2000AD has been experimenting with a new business model as of late – releasing entire story arcs from their weekly comic book (which are typically five page installments spanning over ten weeks) as collected ‘one-shot’ issues in the United States. The trend began with the collected editions of Dredd: Underbelly, in the wake of Dredd 3D‘s cult success, and continued with the release of Ian Edington and INJ Culbard’s majestic Brass Sun earlier this year. Rebellion Publishing have chosen Gordon Rennie (writer), Simon Coleby (artist) and Len O’Grady’s (colourist) Rouge Trooper spin-off Jaegir as their next strip to unleash on the US.
“In the endless war between the Southers and the Norts, scarred war veteran Jaegir of the Nordland State Security Police hunts down escaped war criminals and roots out corruption; she’s an uncompromising and fearsome female character in a dark series that does not pull any punches.”
Flickering Myth were lucky enough to talk to writer Rennie about the comic…
Oliver Davis: Jaegir reads like an extraordinarily rich tapestry – its references to past events are like the tantalising glimpses of the fictional history in Game of Thrones. How on (Nu) Earth do you plot and organise such a background and timeline before you begin writing?
Gordon Rennie: I wish there was some great and elaborate secret to it, but there isn’t, I’m afraid. There’s some things that I know where they’re going, and other things that just occur to me as I’m writing, and some of those spontaneous ideas sometimes send a whole work spinning off in a different direction than I might have originally intended. I’ve got a pretty strong sense of the world the story is set in, and, as long as the story stays true to that, I don’t worry too much about where new elements might take it.
OD: Developing that question, how do you approach a character’s past – particularly using Atalia as an example? The way she hides it from other characters, but reveals to the reader in first-person narration/flashsbacks is tremendous.
GR: I know what her backstory is – her relationship with her father, what happened to her mother, her motivations for doing what she does, and what psychologically drives her – and it’ll be drip-fed into the story. It’s just about filling out the main character at the same time as filling out the world she lives in. As for the first person narration, it seems appropriate to the tone of the story, not just because it’s a traditional thing in many detective stories – and this is a detective story, as well as being a war strip – but because Nort society isn’t the kind of place where it’s safe to speak the truth out loud, so she tends to keep the truth to herself, in her inner monologues.
OD: Atalia is an incredibly rich character – monsters filling her past, present and probable future. I imagine writing her so in depthly makes her feel almost like a real-life acquaintance. How do you feel towards her as a person?
GR: I think she’s the most in-depth character I’ve ever created. She just seems so right for the world she’s in; damaged but ruthless, trying to do the right thing but serving a horribly oppressive regime. I don’t know if I’d like to meet her, and I certainly wouldn’t want to live in her world, but I do want to keep going back to visit her and see where her journey ends up.
OD: I first learnt the word ‘strigoi’ when reading Guillermo del Toro’s Strain trilogy, and Jaegir’s monsters share those books’ obsession with its vampires tracking down their families. How do other works feed into your own writing?
GR: The Strigoi thing I just knew, from Eastern European folklore. I haven’t read The Strain, or really know anything about it, because…..y’know….vampire fiction – yawn.
OD: Del Toro burn…but – if any – what other works fed into Jaeger (from pop culture to historical research)?
GR: I was inspired particularly by Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland, which is set in an alternative 1960s where Nazi Germany won World War Two, and by Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkaday Renko series of novels, and Philip Kerr’s series of books about his character Bernie Gunther. All these are detective stories set in totalitarian regimes – Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia – and are about how a detective goes about uncovering the truth in worlds where the truth is rarely something that those in power want to be revealed. I loved the idea of the detective who serves a regime but tries to uncover its crimes, and that’s where Atalia Jaegir came from; a war crimes investigator serving a military dictatorship engaged in an all-out war for survival where war atrocities are carried out almost routinely.
Added into that was a fair bit of historical research and stuff that I already knew, mostly about the Soviet and Nazi regimes, but there’s a knowing element in there too about the War on Terror and Homelands Security stuff, how we surrender our freedoms to a government when we’re told we’re under threat, and how it’s in a totalitarian government’s interest to keep its population obedient and afraid by the use of fear or external enemies and appeals to patriotism that are basically propaganda by any other name.
OD: Jaeger reads very indebted to the two World Wars. How do you use the past to comment on the present/future?
GR: The Norts did start basically as Space Nazis in the original Rogue Trooper stories, but there’s definitely more of a Soviet Block vibe to my Norts. I did look at books like The Black Angels – about the history of the SS – or a history of wartime Berlin, to help me think more about what it was like to serve in these regimes, or try to live an ordinary life under them – but I wanted to move away from the straight Nazi analogies, so that’s where the Soviet angle started to come in more and more. The appeals to a really robust kind of patriotism – Russians still call WW2 the Great Patriotic War, for example – and a whole society transforming itself for the purposes of surviving this all-consuming war. Nazi Germany wasn’t a particularly successful totalitarian state – it only lasted 12 years – while Soviet Russia lasted for most of the 20th century, so it was a much better model to base the Nort system on.
OD: There is a wonderful moment in Jaeger, when Atalia walks in on the vision of her father hitting her younger self, where the flashback blends seamlessley with the present day. Do you include images like this in your writing, or is it something Simon Coleby surpirsed you with?
GR: The flashback scene with Jaegir and her father and the way it was supposed to transpose between the past and the present was very much in the script. Simon did a great job on bringing that scene to life, especially in the transition panel where we see the adult Jaegir ‘seeing’ her younger self in the past.
Jaegir is out in comic book stores now, with its second story arc currently appearing in the weekly pages of 2000AD.
Oliver Davis is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors. You can follow him on Twitter (@OliDavis)