Happy Victoria Day!

NEIL GAIMAN'S MR. HERO, THE NEWMATIC MAN #1, Tekno Comix, March 1995
It's Victoria Day here in Canada, so I wanted to do a little Victoriana in its honor (because we otherwise don't celebrate it), and here it is.

Mr. Hero is a Victorian boxing automaton woken up in modern day America. And look! It's got Neil Gaiman's name on it. Yes, the guy who wrote the wonderful Sandman! Well, he didn't write Mr. Hero, unfortunately. You know how it goes: They find some doodles in a popular guy's trash can and they make a tv series out of it, and sell it with said popular guy's name on it - even if he had very little to do with the actual execution. Let's call it the Roddenberry Principle.

Well, this Principle was one of Tekno Comix's trademarks (another was bad spelling, apparently). They would have somebody popular create a bunch of concepts then would hand over those concepts to someone less popular. Neil Gaiman, Leonard Nimoy, Jessica Simpson, whoever. (Ok, maybe not Jessica Simpson, but can you imagine one of her comics?)

And Neil Gaiman has some great ideas. Aside from the pugilistic clockwork robot, there's a hell run on steam where this nice little mobile fortress runs amok:
Or how about these ninjas camouflaged for brickwork?
And you know this guy's evil, because he golfs with a balled hamster (oooh, that didn't sound right. AT. ALL.)
Well, it's hard to know who to give credit to, really. Jack Vance who wrote the story, or Gaiman who handed him a bunch of notes? Doesn't really matter because I think Mr. Hero is something of a bust. Having the automaton run around in the present is less interesting to me than having him in some steampunk version of Victorian London. To think Gaiman could have beat Alan Moore to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Ah well.

Tekno Comix had a lot of ambition. When they started out, they claimed that they'd take their comics to other media. But I've never seen a Mr. Hero tv show or video game or teen magazine or podcast. The series lasted 17 issues and that was it. A series created by Jessica Simpson, now THAT would've gotten on tv! (Because clearly, there is no God.)