John McNichol, author of the steampunk series Young Chesterton Chronicles, is moving into comic book writing and production. The announcement came on the heels of finishing the trilogy’s final volume.n
The series first made its mark in the mid-2000s when Sophia Institute Press published the opening volume, The Tripods Attack. McNichol built the Chronicles around a real historical figure: G.K. Chesterton, the prolific British author, reimagined as a teenager in a steampunk adventure.
The idea for the series came out of frustration with what McNichol was seeing in his own classroom.
“I was teaching in the Portland, Oregon area,” McNichol said in a recent discussion. “I’d seen my students handing in book reports where ultra-liberals were the kind, compassionate, open-minded good guys, and conservatives and religious people were the evil, awful villains out to wreck everyone’s joy. The thing is, in my experience and with very few exceptions, the exact opposite was true. I wanted there to be books for the YA to adult readership, and there was nothing recently published, but there was nothing I could point to.”
So McNichol wrote the books himself. “I loved the concept of Steampunk, the elegance and sometimes the absurdity of it all. And it hit me one day while driving to work: Why not take a great author like GK Chesterton and make a steampunk series about him, set in his teenage years?”
Turning a real author into a teenage steampunk hero wasn’t without pushback. “I had some older fans of the original GKC who were confused about the choices I made,” McNichol said. “But younger fans of the teen-to-30s age group seemed to really ‘get’ the series and have enjoyed it a great deal. Young male readers in particular enjoy reading a series that reinforces their worldview without a lot of high poetry and puffed sleeves getting in the way.”
Asked about the reference, McNichol explained: “It’s a line from Anne of Green Gables. A lot of fiction with values today is written by women for home schooling-mom types; one publisher I knew called it ‘the granny market,’ old grandmas in Christian bookstores who are looking for a nice, tame thing to buy their grandkids. Me? I write adventure stories with giant robots, blood-sucking aliens, things blowing up and people throwing up. And it won’t turn your sons into liberals- wins all around!”
That same sensibility carries into his new comic, EXTRAordinary Heroes.
“A lot of the more ‘woke’ comics today either want to preach leftist politics at you, or make the heroes out to be messed-up psychopaths, or both,” McNichol said. “I wanted to make a story where a regular person ends up in the lives of the superheroes of his day. What happens? Well… “In the first issue of EXTRAordinary heroes, the main character is a single dad working two jobs to make ends meet who ends up in the mansion of the A-List supers of his day. He realizes that while these are still ‘the good guys,’ a number of them have the kinds of issues you’d imagine 40-somethings would have if they’d been saving the world over and over again since their teen years. They can stop an alien invasion and wreck a giant robot, but they’ve never had a serious relationship, raised kids, had to make and stick to a budget, or develop a number of other skills that most ‘norms’ take for granted. He learns from them, and they learn from him. The most important thing they learn is something everyone ought to know: That in an age where truth gets sneered at, practicing ordinary virtue is its own super power. In a time when irresponsible, perpetual adolescence is a life goal, the people who keep a job, provide for their families, are present for their kids and keep relationships together- these are today’s superheroes. Ordinary virtue makes you an EXTRAordinary hero. It was a lot of fun to write, and I’ve had great help from editors and my amazing artist, Grayson Bowling.”
McNichol is aiming for a Christmas release, and the campaign at FundMyComic.com is live now. He’s also bypassing the traditional comic shop model entirely.
“For a long time now, woke cancel-culture had so permeated the industry that creators who weren’t lock-step-lefties found themselves in the midst of a firey twitter campaign,” McNichol said. “Distributors, shops and fundraising platforms were lobbied and/or bullied out of carrying books by conservatives, libertarians, or even liberals who weren’t liberal enough for these people.
“The good news is that now there are outlets and platforms that don’t give a darn who you voted for. We’ve gotten a good chunk of funding from fundmycomic.com, and if necessary we’ll be bypassing the comic-shop model completely through outlets like Ka-blam.com, who will print and mail out your books for a reasonable slice of the price. Creators can see their vision made real, get their books out to their readers, and the bad guys can’t stop anything, no matter how many tantrums they throw.”
With more independent creators routing around the traditional distribution model, is the direct-to-fan approach becoming the default path for conservative comics, or just the workaround until the industry changes?
Readers can back the campaign and pre-order EXTRAordinary Heroes at FundMyComic.com.
This project sounds promising.
I love that they're white.