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(Yes, it’s been months since I wrote the previous installment of my memories of the ‘90s Tekno Comix train wreck. Moving house and urgent deadlines will do that to you. Those generations who have been born since I last posted on the topic will be able to catch up by clicking here, here, here and here.)

Funny thing: Once they’d made it impossible for me to execute any of my plans for the Mr. Hero storyline and forced an ugly and arbitrary redesign of the title character onto artist Ted Slampyak and me, the braintrust at Tekno Comix pretty well left me alone for the rest of my two-year stint with them.

And after turning Kate’s script for Primortals into nonsense behind her back and then firing her so they wouldn’t have to look like the dickweeds they were, they gave her no grief whatsoever on her second project for them.

They even gave us fancy Tekno jackets and pot metal Tekno rings with a secret compartment. (See above.)

I’d like to think that their consciences were bothering them, but that supposes facts not in evidence.

Kate got busy writing Mullkon Empire, a six-issue miniseries based on a concept by novelist John Jakes. Jakes was best known for writing big pulpy family saga novels, but before he’d hit the big time he’d paid the bills by writing all kinds of things, including a couple of dozen science fiction books. His description of the Mullkon story was “I, Claudius meets Dallas five hundred years in the future” – a summary that could have turned into solid cheese in the wrong hands but which sounded tailor-made for Kate, with her longtime interest in science fiction and years of scripting the ongoing Omaha serial.

This was the opposite of the Primortals experience. Instead of clandestinely sabotaging her script and then running like hell when the big name behind the concept objected to what they’d done, Tekno kept their hands completely off Kate’s stuff and Jakes wrote her to say that he loved it – wrote her several times to that effect, in fact.

And it was good work, juggling a bunch of colorful characters and a Byzantine plot with credible speculative storytelling: serious science fiction with the intelligence of a good BBC drama and just a dash of TV trash. (Probably a smaller dash than Jakes had envisioned, but Kate made the characters and their stories so interesting that there wasn’t much need for schlock to keep the wheels greased.)

They also paired her with a wonderful artist whose approach was far more simpatico than the more mainstream talents assembled for the Primortals project. The work turned in by John Watkiss was a knockout – imaginative, idiosyncratic and a thorough departure from the operatic superheroes-in-space approach you mostly saw from DC and Marvel. To me, it evoked those oddball SF comics turned out by Dell in the early ‘60s (particularly Jack Sparling’s work on the smart and consistently gonzo Space Man) while remaining utterly modern and sui generis. Neither a Flash Gordon-type space opera nor a superhero comic, it didn’t make the splash it deserved – though I suspect that it’ll be rediscovered one of these days – but Kate was proud of the way it turned out. After the crap the company had put her through, she deserved to go out on a high note.

But once the job was finished, she put as much distance between herself and the weasels in the Tekno main offices as was humanly possible.

As for me, I was trying to keep the train running after the publisher had insisted that the tracks be made of spaghetti.

After jumping through hoops during the first few issues in order to implement the idiotic changes the Tekno suits had called for, I looked around to see how many workable pieces were left of my original long-term plan. The answer was, “Damned few.”

At this point, I could have started over and found a new way to rebuild things from scratch, but the effect for the reader would have been like turning Betty and Veronica into, say, Transmetropolitan without warning. Readers who’d supported the book so far justifiably would have jumped ship, and the company might well have given me the hook. Besides, I was still stuck with the mandate of featuring the Teknophage character for a couple of pages every issue, which effectively tethered me to the blandified direction I’d been steered into.

There were a couple of things that galled me about the Teknophage link. In the first place, Rick Veitch was doing a hell of a good job writing the actual Teknophage series, turning out warped imaginative scripts that I envied for their obvious lack of company interference (none of the Tekno suits were smart enough to come up with that material), and beautifully drawn by Bryan Talbot and Angus McKie. I have no doubt that his sales were at least as good as those on Mr. Hero, maybe better. Since there was no coordination between the two series, all I could do was cobble up brief self-contained vignettes that had no relation to what Rick was doing, and pretty damned tenuous connection to my own ongoing storylines. Forcing Mr. Hero to be a sales tool for Teknophage not only threw endless stumbling blocks in my way, I found it kind of insulting to Rick as well. He didn’t need my stuff to prop him up, and I doubt that it did.

There was also the fact that I thought the Teknophage was a pretty one-note character to center an entire comic book universe around. Frankly, I had a hard time taking the concept seriously, and was grateful as hell that, if I had to screw with it, it was only for a handful of pages every month. Again, Rick did wonders with it, but he could have done so much more with a more solid concept. (I found it gratifying when, years later, Neil Gaiman expressed his own exasperation with the company’s phageomania. He told me that he’d simply tossed out the character as one potential villain among many. The idea of centering the whole enterprise around the Teknophage, said Neil, was “nonsense.”)

But nonsense was all I had left to work with. When we pick up the thread next time, we’ll have a look at my ongoing attempt to make lemonade out of turnips.