[ Monday, May 31, 2004 ]
(The following is the initial proposal for Paradox Kid, a comic series, as sent to some of the major publishers in the comics industry. Content is copyright 2004 Tony Simmons.)
PARADOX KID
A Proposal for an Ongoing Comic Series
By Tony Simmons
Gabriel Street is a dying immortal, a 700-year-old teenager, a time-lost time traveler with only five
years left to live before old age claims him. He has seen it all, but is consistently amazed by the things he discovers in his travels. That this jaded soul can still be overcome by his sense of wonder is part of the kid’s paradox.
Closer to the point, however, is that Gabe was born
in the synchronous city,
Crux, an ancient yet
futuristic metropolis at the core of infinitely diverging time spheres, the absolute beginning of reality. It’s the only place where time stands still and where time touches Gabriel Street. Sent away into the normal streams of time by his father, that empty world’s only living inhabitant, he has spent most of his years in the Flux — the day-in and day-out that the rest of us recognize as passing time, but which has no perceivable effect on Gabriel. While he doesn’t age in the “real world,” death is still quite real for him. He’s seen it catching up to others, and
it could catch him at any moment through accident, illness or treachery. Because he has spent hundreds of short periods in his home with his father, he has aged to about 16 years, and he acts like it — impulsive, emotional, sometimes cruel as only teenagers can be.
But he’s also got seven centuries of experience and
learning in his head. He’s studied under Plato, apprenticed to Leonardo, corrected the spelling in Shakespeare’s notes.
For all that, he’s got only five years left to sigh in, as Bowie sang.
Gabriel Street is dying, and it will take just about that long for it to happen (give or take an epilogue and every fourth tale, which will be a standalone based upon an object in the Museum of Crux). As the story progresses, he will seek cures, make friends and enemies, and traverse worlds strangely familiar to comic readers. At his heels:
The Lady Gabrielle, a female doppelganger from a parallel Crux, who seeks a device embedded in Gabriel’s chest — the OmniChron — which she believes can be used in concert with her own devices to cure her of the syndrome that is killing all of Gabriel’s doubles across the omniverse.
The first three-issue arc establishes the rules of
this world, the multiple branches of reality, the colliding timespheres that bring the doppelgangers to Crux, as well as the
Methuselah Syndrome eating Gabriel from within, like a tree seemingly healthy but dying of rot at its core. Bouncing like a quantum leaper between divergent realities and distant times,Gabe will travel into outer space and into his own body (and out of his mind!) to seek the source of his affliction. He will die and then get better. He will storm the gates of Hell and wrestle angels on the borderlands of Dream.
Gabriel is a time traveler on the bleeding edge of super-heroics, “the Paradox Kid.” As a hired gun in the Old West, he actually can shoot first and ask questions later. In the far-flung future, he walks the dusty surface of Mars and discusses the meaning of life with its last guardian. As a costumed hero in
the 1940s, he stops time and changes outcomes, making him a legend to the costumed heroes of the far-flung future.
His base of operations remains Crux, the ghost town and a conundrum, a world of dinosaurs and incredible technology, of talking cats and disembodied voices in the night. He will return there occasionally, as well as revisit the place in reoccurring flashback segments that reveal more of the mystery of the city and the Paradox Kid.
Haunting him like the shades of Czar Nicholas and his
family — whose murders were the most terrible deeds Gabriel ever committed — is the lost girl, Daisy, who speaks and stops time. She’s a child he raised in a time-frozen world, who sacrificed herself for him — and whose doubles he sometimes meets in other
realities. He loves her deeply and keeps hoping to find her again. Dogging his steps are the hosts of otherwhen, strange variants of himself led by Gabrielle.
The storyline will play with comic book, fantasy and
SF archetypes in ways not dissimilar from Astro City and Planetary. Who better to accompany Gabriel on his “Fantastic Voyage” than a physicist with powers to reduce his size? Who could answer the question “Life on Mars?” better than a surviving manhunter of that race? Who might turn up in “An Occasional Dream” other than the Thin White Duke and his deadly sister,
Lady Grinning Soul? And who but an expatriate American surgeon might surface as the apt pupil of an Ancient One in “Seven Years in Tibet?”
On the following pages are brief descriptions of the
first 40 issues planned — three-part tales followed by an interlude. They lead to a conclusion that also successfully allows for continuation. Also in each issue, as shown in the enclosed script for Chapter One, will be a text page — Father’s research, or Gabrielle’s plans, or stories of those who crossed
paths with a strange young man with ancient eyes.
Read on. Crack this nut from time’s pecan tree and
savor.
(In Days To Come, I'll be posting synopses of each issue as originally planned.)
Unknown [9:18 AM]
