With Mario Guevara and Juan Ferreyra

2010, Dark Horse Books, unnumbered pages

Dark Horse has made a comic reader of me and given Baltimore area mass transit users another reason to wonder what is wrong with the old overdressed white dude who does not smell homeless enough to categorize…

The Kane series and the Conan series as well, by Dark Horse, should be used as models for how to adapt pulp characters into modern film. Scott Allie is essentially Robert E. Howard’s posthumous ghost writer. This is the answer to why screenplays of novels and shorts are usually so bad, because it is essentially ghost writing. And I have just recently discovered how difficult that version of the writer’s discipline is. Scott has checked his ego at the door and dedicated his craft to a kind of resurrection of the long dead pulp author who created Solomon Kane.

This comic is built on a fragment left by Howard titled Death’s Black Riders, which is connected with Howard’s story Rattle of Bones, both set in Germany’s Black Forest circa 1600. Unlike the screen writer of Solomon Kane the movie, Scott gets what a puritan was: not a peace loving ‘pilgrim’ but a late medieval Christian jihadist. Solomon Kane is a character who is fun to follow as a reader, but, if a real person would not be someone that you would ever feel comfortable with. Kane is a dark, vengeful, persecutory shadow journeying across a gray world in search of the blackest evil—what a whack-job!

The other thing that all writers should follow with Scott Allie’s work is how he inserts back-story.

This is good gut-wrenching stuff.