art by ash collins
Colin, a troubled fantasy-prone teenager living in the North of England, is having nightmares of a talking crow with a startling revelation; he is the son of the Norse God Thor. Can he believe the talking crow?
His divorced parents add to his problems and his best friend, the weird Ten-Oz, seems to be hiding a deep dark secret and keeps getting into trouble.
Colin's love life becomes evermore complex; whilst trying to date the lovely Kelly he ends up entangled with Natasha the Tache (who is unfortunately afflicted with a worrying facial hair problem) and the aggressive, over-planning Trudy McGruder. Can he successfully navigate the trouble paths of love?
Meanwhile strange, disturbing events in the local area hint at an evil presence which seems to be growing more powerful each day; terror and tragedy strike at Colin as his loved ones become the target for evil forces. What has been festering and brewing in the bottle furnaces of the Potteries?
Read his story as he struggles with his problems; Can Colin save his girlfriend from the Evil One, become the first superhero of Stoke and get his homework done?
Where does fantasy end and Stoke begin?
Author's Notes
My first attempt at an original piece and a deliberate attempt to move away from existing characters. It uses the first person narrative, in the form of a blog, and is set in my local area; I wanted to bring my local area into my writing and this piece was the perfect opportunity.
Although this moved away from the earlier comic-based writing, I still had a strong attachment to them and used cyphers of comic characters as disturbing elements in the landscape; Natasha the Tache (Black Widow from The Avengers), Ten-Oz (Thanos the supervillian), Dr Vicky V. Dome (Dr Victor Von Doom from the Fantastic Four) and a few others.
There is a strange interlude where The Simpson's seem to take over; this was an attempt to merge two different pieces and to highlight the fantasy element; what is real and what is imagined. Again a key theme of this piece and one, I believe, which works well in this context.
Very much a stand alone piece, it has tons of local colour and some very good laughs. Great fun writing it.
