T. Casey Brennan by Dave Sim The super-hero was rapidly becoming a commodity of the past; crime and horror comics were heading the sales figure sheets; Dr. Fredric Wertham was shaking an accusatory finger at the comic book industry in his book Seduction of the Innocent; Bill Gaines and his EC comic book line were the objects of a Senate investigation into violence in the comics. And T. Casey Brennan, at a one-room school house in Avoca, Michigan, was getting his first taste of what he calls "the more intellectual comic book work." T. Casey Brennan traces his early interest in a comics writing career to the EC new trend comic books in general and a Krigstein classic of 1955 in particular. "The thing that made me want to go into comic books was Impact #1, after reading "Master Race" which I though was really incredible. That was probably one of the finest comic book stories ever written and it just showed me what can be done with this medium. It didn't have to be the kind of story that we'd been reading in Superman and Jimmy Olsen at that time." T. Casey Brennan today maintains a fresh approach to his story-telling method and subject matter. While many other comic book writers tend to be moralists, making judgments on social conditions and portraying these judgments through their characters, T. Casey Brennan never stands between his readers and the story. His tales are allegorical studies of universal human traits and failings such as despair, lust for power, descent into evil or degradation and fear of punishment, recognizable in any locale, be it a road called Agarra-zin, a nowhere world serving as a prison for a young man and a statue, the streets of a cold city of the caverns of Hell, as potential qualities in any person. top Very seldom do Brennan's stories have a positive outcome. His favorite stores, "Carrier of the Serpent" (Eerie #38), "A Stranger in Hell" (Eerie #38) and "On the Wings of a Bird" (Creepy #36), have a common underlying feeling of despair or, more precisely, total elimination of hope for the protagonist which is usually recurrent in the story. In "Carrier of the Serpent," Thogar longs for one reward as he travels Agarra-zin - to be reunited with the woman he loves, Lorana. In the end, as he takes on the appearance of the snake he has carried to Ra-noon, the beautiful city at the end of the road where his beloved waits, he realizes that he can never remain with her and all hope for happiness is gone. Ahzid, the self-pitying youth of "On the Wings of a Bird," wants only to be carried away from the desolate nowhere world astride the great Bird of Hope. When the Bird leaves "quietly in the night" he realizes that there is "no escapeÉnot now, not tomorrow, not ever." Ahzid understands that he will never be free and all hope is lost. "A Stranger in Hell" deals more directly with the subject of the elimination of hope. Brennan's Stranger says, "É long ago, life was the most precious thing of all to me. Not because it itself was precious, but because it offered hope. Now there is no hope left within me." "Dungeons of the Soul" is one of Brennan's favorite stories of 1972. An examination of the good and evil in all men, his personal twist was the theory that the exhibition of love and goodness is characteristic of man only in his youth. In return for King Modrius' hospitality a sorcerer grants him a wish, that wish being to live his life without suffering. Awakening after the spell has been cast, Modrius is informed that a prisoner being led away by the guards must be kept in the dungeons below the castle, forever a prisoner of the king, if the wish is to come true. This he does, but one night a young woman who loves Modrius decides to take food to the prisoner, suspecting that it is he who has caused Modrius to be filled with ill humor. Unwittingly she permits him to escape and a confrontation between Modrius and his captive, whose face he has never seen, ensues. The King, upon discovering Adrianne with the prisoner, accuses her of betraying him to the demon. The mysterious figure answers the charge. "No, Modrious! You have betrayed yourself as does every man! You call me a demon, but do you not know - it is the goodness in our hearts that we lock away from view! "How many times must our trust be betrayed, before we learn not to trust? How many times must our love be rejected before we learn not to love? How many times must our sensitivity and our gentleness be ridiculed and spurned, before we learn to lock these things inside ourselves? So when the days of our youth are past, our idealism passes also, and we become hollow shells of what we were!" top Modrius steps forward and pulls the mask from his one-time captive, stunned by what he sees. "Yes, Modrious! I am you! I am the love that was torn from your heart by the sorcery of Olgor! Only one shining hope kept me alive throughout these many long months - that Adrianne would return and free me! I knew that only she could free the love you sought to imprison!" And then "the prisoner was no more, and there were only two: a man full of love and sadness, and a woman comforting him. But it was enough." The choice of Adrainne to play the role of the initiator of the action in the story might be called Brennanitic. Brennan has great respect for the female and tries, when possible, to depict her in more than her traditional damsel-in-distress role in comic books. Having abandoned his sexist leanings unlike many of the top scripters in the business today, he finds such concepts as Playboy's Playmate of the Month in questionable taste. "These guys pay a phenomenal rate for a photo spread of a girl. It's enough money that is can, in many cases, change the girl's whole life for the better or, if she happens to work for a very puritanical firm, for the worse. It's the same with the movies. I think it is really unfortunate that, for the sake of her paycheck, a girl who might have become a really superb actress has to take off her clothes and play a small part in a blue movie. It's different with the underground's. The pornography may be offensive, but at least it really isn't hurting anyone." At the age of twenty-four, Brennan is a member of the international genius group MENSA, an amateur hypnotist who once almost opened a practice in Port Huron, Michigan, and still has a genuine love for the comic art medium, particularly when it is done in a serious fashion. "I think it is the greatest art form in the world, personally. I think it's perfect. It combines story and art and if you get good art work and a good story, you've got a great product which can't be beat - in any medium." It is this devotion to comic art that leads him occasionally into confrontations with the president and founder of the Warren group, James Warren, often starting with differences he has with Warren's editors. As Brennan says jokingly, whenever he and Warren get together, either he quits or Warren fires him. They are both bound by tremendous pride in their work and principles they try to adhere to. Perhaps the most serious confrontation came after Brennan submitted his last Vampirella script. top "My great Vampirella story was Vampirella #21. A lot of people have commented on my introduction. They kept only the first three pages and said redo the rest - and I quit. On that story I had decided, 'This time I'm going to do a good story. I'm not going to try to please any editor. I'm going to do it the best way I know how.'" Brennan even admits that the appearance of "On the Wings of Bird" was merely a fluke. He had sent it in with a bundle of other scripts and the editor who selected from the pile "didn't know a good script from a bad one." The story was one of desolate atmosphere and setting, and through it Brennan tried to define the real meaning of despair. The principle characters of the story, Ahzid and Great Statue, were idyllic representations of different and diametrically opposed qualities of the human animal. Ahzid, the young man, was rash and self-pitying while the Great Statue represented the wisdom that comes of age and disappointment. "The only thing a I regret in "On the Wings of a Bird" was that I wanted the art to appear like a Dali landscape," Brennan says of artist Jerry Grandenetti's handling of the script. "It was supposed to be like Dali's work where he would draw an orchestra playing in the middle of a desert with a melting clock at another point - these unrelated figures in an unlikely setting. That's why I though up the idea of Ahzid, the young man, the great statue of a Roman centurion - of all things in of all places - and the Bird of Hope. I wanted some long shots of that setting with these unrelated things in the terrain of utter desolation. I'm sorry it didn't turn out that way. Since then, I've tried to go into great detail describing not just what I want done, but exactly how I want it done and why." top T. Casey Brennan feels that he is not suited to the writing of traditional super-hero stories in the Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman vein. However, he does have an amazing grasp of the psychology of the super-hero and its universal appeal. "A super-hero won't let you down. A big part of the super-hero, I guess, is what you imagine his or her to be, as well as what the artist and writer portray him as. If you decide as a child that you are going to admire some real-life hero, some movie star or some sports figure, you can be let down by that person. That person can do something rotten and there's you're here pulled out from under you. It's a lot safer, if you're going to hero-worship anybody, to hero-worship Vampirella or Superman or Batman or somebody:" Brennan also believes that adults in general reject the super-hero concept. A cynical nature perhaps? "It's probably a cynical nature. Then also, I suppose we have to blame ourselves in a way that there were, for too many years, too many people writing too many insipid super-hero stories so that now the whole super-hero concept has come to be associated with children and childish ideas. I'm really not terribly proud of my Vampirella series. However, I did get into some ideas that were pretty good as far as super-heroes go. In one of my Vampirella issues, I got into the idea of karma. I hadn't heard of that being done in a super-hero story before. That kind of thing is important. Denny O'Neil's doing a fine job of uplifting the image of the super-hero. If we continue to strive toward that kind of thing, eventually we may be able to uplift the super-hero's image." T. Casey Brennan is a remarkable writer and tremendous asset to the work of comic art and James Warren's highly distinctive black and white comic magazines. His contributions to the more intellectual comic book stories he enjoys so much are not only appreciably ahead of their time, but also essential to the growth of a medium. Special thanks to Sheri Admans for typing all this into the computer for me. Web Author-Donald Van Horn Page design © 1997 Donald Van Horn