Battle Royalle #1

(Subsequently published with additional material as the The Pacifist Convention Special)

The unfortunately named Battle Royalle anthology was originally intended as a vehicle for myself and 3 friends to do some short Canadian oriented super-hero stories, interspersed with Who's Who style entries for heroes and villains. The original package (now out of print) was a fun collection of tales including Reg Stacey's first installment of his Group of Seven comic, Duane Wiggins' The Sidekick, and Ed Morton's World Destroyer.

My entry was called The Pacifist. The original idea was inspired by the back cover to Mick Foley's book, "Have a Nice Day" where, if memory serves, he provides a veritable shopping list of injuries he had suffered during the now famous Hell in the Cell match with the Undertaker. Anyway, I just loved the effect of reading off this huge list of injuries, and it sort of just snowballed from there.

While its a pretty short piece at 4 pages, I think it says everything it needed to. While I really enjoy reading action oriented comics, my own work tends towards a lack of action, and in this case, I think I described it to a friend as having taken a normal superhero/supervillain fight scene and replaced all the action with violence. Part of it is, I think there are a lot of people out there who do action really well, so in a way I feel like I can leave it up to people who have a passion for it. It basically frees me up to experiment with my storytelling a little by trying to use a minimum of action while still focusing on creating a dramatically satisfying story,

As for the unfortunate name for the anthology, let's just say I really enjoyed the movie, and then completely forgot about it when it came time to name the book. In my defence, everyone else really liked the title. Still my hipster Japanese movie/manga cred took a big hit. Oh well, the memory loss is probably just a sign of my getting old.

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Last updated: Jan 19/09