Part 3 of 3 articles on the background to this project and The Human Fly

By Jason Franks

Let me be honest with you: I never saw the Human Fly on TV and I’ve never read the Marvel comics series. The first I learned of the character was when writer Chris Sequeira and artist Paul Mason—both good friends of mine—were working on a short comic featuring the character for the Human Fly International license holders, about a decade ago. But I was immediately intrigued. A real life 1970s motorcycle stuntman with a secret identity, who whose oeuvre extended to… riding jetliners? The 70s, motorcycles, aeroplanes… that hits me right in the childhood. I was very intrigued. 

Jump forward a few years. IPI Comics was born and Chris, now editor-in-chief, was helming a new Human Fly miniseries. I was writing a couple of IPI titles and Chris and publisher Gerry Huntman brought me on to help out with the edits for the issue #0, which at that point was mostly written. They were at that stage starting to flesh out the miniseries to follow. 

The 1990s DC comics series Starman, written by James Robinson, is one of my favourite books and, in my opinion, sets the benchmark for multi-generational superhero stories, bringing contemporary concerns and attitudes to a genre that was very focused on past glories. I was very interested to see what we could do with Human Fly. Of course this isn’t the 1990s, much less the 1970s, so it felt like we had a great opportunity to bring something fresh to the idea. What does the age of global communication bring to the genre of the masked stuntman/do-gooder? Where social media drives politics to the extremes and grifting ‘influencers’ of dubious provenance are incentivized to outrage and sometimes violence? This seemed like fertile ground. We fleshed out the Fly’s supporting cast with technical specialists and support crew, and we reimagined the Fly’s assistant Mercury as both an apprentice and a rival with a murky past of her own.

I came back to edit the second issue of the miniseries, and I scripted issue #3 and 4. We strove to make these books as not only contemporary and relevant, but also fun, full of action and suspense and good humour. And clues. Because, as we see in the new volume, the legacy of the Human Fly goes back even longer than at first thought, and the Fly’s greatest enemy is a villain with an epic pedigree: Count Dracula, who is himself a fictionalized version of a real-life monster: Vlad Tzepes. Vlad the Impaler. Jim Krueger, the writer of the new Human Fly versus Dracula series, also has an epic pedigree in the comics business, and artist Peter Lawson’s pages speak for themselves. Come into my Kickstarter, said the vampire to the Fly.

Jason Franks
Senior Editor, IPI Comics

Our Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ipicomic/human-fly-and-dracula-conflict-across-centuries