Set the Controls, Chapter 1: Cemetery

 

SET THE CONTROLS title page (pen and ink, watercolour, 1982; an obvious Druillet influence)

 "Set The Controls" was written and drawn in 1981 and 1982.  It's over 100 pages long, but the "epic" remains unfinished.  Some of it was drawn during spares in high school, some of it at a friend's house after school.  The first few pages (67-71) of Chapter 4: Swamp were drawn in Toronto in the summer of 1982.  The first few pages (81-88) of Chapter 5: Gaol, as well as the title page, were drawn in high school in 1981during spares, and originally intended as a separate story, but later worked into "Set the Controls".  With the exception of the pages mentioned above, chapters 4 and 5 were drawn at home.  The title pages for each chapter were created while the chapter was in progress.  In case you're wondering, "Set the Controls" was named after the Pink Floyd song, "Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun", which originally appeared on their second album, A SAUCERFUL OF SECRETS (1968).

All of it was drawn on blank sheets of 8 1/2" x 11" paper, using ball point pens (with the exception of pages 81 to 83, which were drawn on ruled paper; page 83 and the top of page 84 were drawn with a black felt tip pen).  An extempore comic, it was written and drawn without any planning or preparation, or the benefit of rough pencils to work over.  I just made it up as I went along.

Unfortunately, scans weren't made until a little over 10 years ago, three decades later.  The ink had already eaten its way through the paper and, as I'd drawn on both sides of the sheet, you can see the other side.

The lettering is just as rough as the drawings, and would be a struggle to decipher, upsetting the flow of the narrative (such as it is), so I've re-lettered it, about the same size and same line arrangement, where possible.  I've corrected a few spelling mistakes and typos (and in the process probably made a few more), but kept the punctuation more or less intact (ellipses, em dashes, exclamation points, etc.).

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Second cover for SET THE CONTROLS (pen and ink, 1982)

Way back in the olden days, in 1980, I began developing a character named Cosmo, a sort of cross between Robert E. Howard's Conan and Jack Kirby's Kamandi: a wild, barbaric, fearless fighter, self-confident, incredibly strong and fast -- a ridiculous spoof of all my heroes rolled up into one, whose slapstick, pie-in-your-face adventures were created for no purpose other than to amuse.

In a post-holocaust earth of the future, the few cities remaining are towering, gigantic fortresses protected from the wastelands and swamps beyond, which are filled with acid rain, scavengers either living or dead, and mutants and monsters, some of whom make their way into the city through the sewers.

Cosmo comes from the north, a country called Ginnungagap, and his people are barbarians.  The son of Snorri, a great warrior, Cosmo leaves his village of Niflheim as a teenager to seek adventure in the south.  Somehow he manages to make his way to the city called Sunspot through hundreds of miles of dangerous forests and swamps, learns the culture, technology and language (English) of the city dwellers, goes by the generic name of Robert Johnson (no, he wasn’t named after the blues guy), and tries to survive the perils of this future world: assassins, gangs, robots, maniacs, monsters, mutants, aliens, and his arch-nemesis Linklok (aka, Ay-Korne).

Cosmo began in October of 1980 as two unrelated characters from two comics: "Mr. Johnson-Bob", a page I just scribbled off on a whim, a total abandonment of my senses, and then expanded into a 10-page story; and "Rose Rednose", a 20-page story (lost, and considered no longer extant) drawn in felt-tip pen, in which our hero battles Ay-Korne, a man with wings for arms.  (Ay-Korne/Linklok, lost his arms in battle with Cosmo at the beginning of Set the Controls, and returned at various times with his arms replaced by chainsaws, swords and hooks.)

Mr. Johnson-Bob, about 40 years of age, made a guest-appearance shortly afterwards in a 10-page comic called "Jack and Jerk: The Off Brothers" and in some other unfinished comics.  Mr. Johnson-Bob ("Robert H. Johnson", according to his gravestone) wore bandages around his skull and strange goggles over his eyes in the first story.  In another, a single page called "The Land of the Land", coloured with pencil crayons, we see that he does have hair -- and it's green, a result of irradiated rain.  The goggles protect his eyes.

As it turns out, Mr. Johnson-Bob was, in fact, Rose Rednose twenty years later, after the already ravaged Earth took a turn for the worse and the big cities were destroyed, leaving only the haunted forests, and that both of these characters were Robert Johnson/Cosmo.

 

 The following is a list of the other completed Cosmo comics:

COSMO
August 31, 1983.  Completed in just a few hours.  Digest-sized, 18 pages plus cover.  This story takes place one year after the events in Set The Controls.

COSMO SWALLOWS HIS HEART
December, 1983.  28 pages.  Another quickie – crude, but loads of laffs!

UNTITLED
1984.  54 pages.  Tells the “origin” of Cosmo.  Cosmo returns to his northern homeland of

Ginnungagap and tells of his adventures.  After being exiled from his country, he goes on to have another adventure.

TO AND FRO
1987.  12 pages.  A self-contained story, meant to segue into another, only it didn't.  This is the last of the Cosmo comics.

There are others, such as a 6-page comic rendered in pen and ink, which I've always regretted not finishing (the second panel of page 7 is the last of it), and a 3-page comic, also rendered in ink and left unfinished.  Additionally, there are comics started and abandoned after the first or second page, a few single illustrations, a few fragments, hardly worth mentioning.

And that is the saga of long-suffering Robert Johnson/Cosmo.

STC title page

STC page 1

STC page 2

STC page 3

STC page 4 (yeah, I know; I spelled cemetery wrong)

STC page 5

STC page 6

STC page 7

STC page 8

STC page 9

STC page 10

STC page 11 (see notes below about the robots' dialogue)

STC page 12

STC page 13, original (see notes below)

STC page 13 (notes below explain the presence of two page thirteens)

STC page 14

STC page 15

STC page 16

STC page 17

STC page 18

STC page 19

STC page 20

*Notes for page 11:

If the individual speeches by the three "robots" (they reveal that they're actually a combination of organic matter and machinery) seem a bit convoluted, it's because they're assembling English sentences as best they can.  What's more, their words are actually a coded message, see, that reads straight across, revealing their true motives.  They would have the people of Earth believe that the New Galactic Parliament, a people's movement, is about to instigate a revolution, putting the robots in power, and humans will be free from disease.  In fact, if you read straight across, they're talking about wiping out all of mankind:

"I am!!  I am an organic robot from Terra 12, containing a complex series of electronics systems, life matter and computer personality, and bio-organics, which are computers, serve as the basis from which we are made.  We are willing to destroy the New Galactic Parliament, to stop organic life form from spreading disease, disrupting survival in the formation of life; I am talking of our life, colonies on Earth.  Our planet is creating a revolution of robots, which will kill your planet's people.  That is, life will be mine!  We will live.  1% of humans will live.  Slavery and movements for you will be in progressive times, under new rules!"

Since people don't live in a comic book where word balloons float above the speaker's head, it's a strange way for the robots to deliver a coded message, especially one that reveals their true motives.

*Notes for page 13:

In high school I kept a binder full of art, stuff I'd draw -- in ballpoint pen, of course -- on the backs of classroom handouts.  The original page 13 of SET THE CONTROLS disappeared from that binder not long after I drew it.  But not before I had the chance to reproduce it on the chalkboard in the dungeon-like lunchroom located in the basement.  I think that chalk mural stayed there for about a week.  Probably the student council needed the space or saw it as a misuse of an educational tool.  Anyway, I drew a replacement for the missing page 13.  A couple of decades later, the original was returned to me, for which I was grateful.  The second panel at the bottom has elements that make up the phrase "Chuck is dead", which was an in-joke with the stoners at the school.