At long last, HEROES NOW: PATRIOT is here! So let’s take a few minutes to talk about it.
You can look at the book through two lenses — the characters and the story are obvious, but the personal backstory is less so. I’ll try to navigate both for you.
Patriot and his sidekick, Jeff, made their first appearance in Patriot #1 as part of Matt Kanaracus’ Synapse Comics in 1987. Written by yours truly and drawn by Donald Tenney with inks by Dale Martin, the story tells the tale of P & J making a Cold War propaganda video. Patriot, weary of the fight, grouses about having to prop up covert wars in Nicaragua to his director and his Department of Defense liaison, General Roberts. Russian super-spy Andrei Kolomov’s secret message to the Kremlin about the video is intercepted, and Patriot barges in on Jeff. A fight ensues. Patriot says all the right patriotic things, punches Kolomov into next week and the hero buddies share a laugh about it. End scene.
That was 1987. A lot of time has passed. (But there was an unfinished Patriot #2, which I publish for the first time ever in HEROIC: HEROES PAST. You can order the book, which also contains Patriot #1, here.) What’s happened since, and where are our country’s heroes now? That’s the premise of the revived Phoenix Productions label — to pick up those pieces and see our 1980’s heroes today.
HEROES NOW: PATRIOT is a 33-page story written and lettered by me and drawn by two small press legends — interiors by Tony Lorenz and cover by Larry Johnson. In the story, we attempt to fill in those gaps and tell the tale of Patriot from 1987 (actually going even farther back) to 2021. It’s a fast-paced book that I found myself comparing to Robert Zemeckis’ “Forrest Gump” film because our heroes find themselves in pretty much every major geopolitical hotspot over this timeframe. Gdansk, Berlin, Afghanistan and more…and we tell the tales along the way.
But as that 1987 tale told us, Patriot is not a character without internal conflict. He has an ideal of what America is and should be, and sometimes those around him don’t live up to that ideal. The story has lots to work through.
Oh yeah, and we get into his buddy Jeff as well. “Just a little bit.”
Personally, this was my first script in deciding to come back to small press comics. I wrote it while playing hall monitor while my poor kids struggled through virtual learning in the first year of the COVID pandemic. I learned a lot writing it…learned about how to better myself with the craft of writing comics, but also about the power of using my fantasy characters as proxies in reflecting on myself, my life and the history that I lived through.
The latter part of the Cold War was a strange time to grow up. The Americans were ascendant while ballooning the deficit and compromising our ethics to get there, and the Soviet Bloc was slowly bankrupting itself in trying to keep up. Ours was the era of “The Day After” and “Red Dawn,” but also of “Morning in America” and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was complicated, and I try to express those mixed feelings throughout the book.
Tony Lorenz was a delight to work with. I threw the kitchen sink at him – everything from the quiet conversations to gunfights to locale after locale after locale. The amount of visual referencing for these 33 pages was incredible. He was looking up scene photos, weaponry, military vehicles and more. But he did it, and he did it right. The effort shows. I’m partial, but it’s some of his best work ever.
Larry Johnson had the unenviable task of trying to distill the many layers, locales and emotions of the story into one perfect image to tell the story of HEROES NOW: PATRIOT…and I think he did it. He places our heroes into the proverbial world on fire, each with their own reactions to what they see. It’s great.
You can order HEROES NOW: PATRIOT here. I hope you like it!
Phoenix Productions 