The Wild Cards.

Adventures of the Red team.

 

How rude of me, you might be reading my stories and not have a clue to what is going on, allow me to explain a little about how I made and went about creating the series…Wild Cards.

 

 Writing the stories of the Wild Cards was always going to be a huge bag of fun. To try and understand the way I wanted the direction to flow, I decided to sift through my vast collection of manuals and material on military tactics and law enforcement agencies around the world. At the beginning, the series wasn’t going to include any of the main characters from the Archie universe and was going to concentrate fully on some new characters I had been batting around my fluttery head; indeed, this was going to be a completely different ‘kettle of fish’.

 

Halfway through the development and the first stages of this story line, I came across the most unusual inspiration. My brother, who has no interest in this area at all, looked at my previous stories and told me what was wrong with them…apparently I had gone down such a path or ‘morbidness’ so to speak that I was forgetting the main aspect of storytelling, which is to make the reader want to carry on reading. What I needed was a little humour…serious humour that would change the tracks I was barrelling down on a runaway mine cart.

 

Enter Drake, the first of my new characters, a twenty something echidna that’s presently in the middle of an early mid-life crisis. I have a friend called John that’s attitude and sense of humour really makes my stomach ache whenever he tells me anything; he is Drake’s real role model. Drake is a very dangerous character, but in a funny way, he’s the one who always gets in to trouble…does everything wrong and still manages to get the result, regardless of whatever has to be blown up along the way. It was after his development that I realised what he would be perfect for, an Echidna SWAT team. Being a baddy is much more fun that being the predictable good guy, but being a good guy who has a tendency to ‘bend’ is even better. Yes, this was most definitely the way I wanted Drake and his colleagues to be.

 

For the life of me I couldn’t work out what I wanted the teams to be called. S.W.A.T stands for special weapons and tactics and I tried so many different mnemonics to get the desired effect, none of which where to tell the truth, that fantastic. The idea of the Wild Cards came to me when I had just started to write the lead on from the first Dark horizons story line, if any of you have ever watched ‘Space above and Beyond’ you will realise where I got the inspiration. I wanted to really hit home on the attitude between a group of friends that where bound by goals and discipline but nothing else, each completely different in attitude, attire and social life. This would give me enough information to sink my teeth into for a good few story lines, maybe even more.

 

The thought of placing Knuckles and Julie-su into all this commotion really made me cry at first. Id gotten into such a pattern of ‘will they wont they’ syndrome that it was going to kill me to change, but looking back at it now im glad with the result. Relinquishing all of the major ties with the ‘Brotherhood’ left me with a lot of freedom and got me asking questions like, what would Knuckles do with his life if he didn’t have to constantly tread the floating island as a Guardian?. I decided that because of his hot headedness and temperament he would most certainly be suitable for the task. So without further adue I placed him as the ‘patron light’ of the team. He would still be a Guardian and would still be ordered about by the Brotherhood but because of the more disconnected nature, I now had a very capable and loose willed Guardian to play with. Julie-su was a different task completely. Being an ex-legionnaire she would already be extremely disciplined and a capable soldier in her own right. It was only fair that I bestowed upon her a commission, so Julie-su ex bad guy now becomes Lieutenant Su, of the Echidna Security Department and in overall command of the Wild Cards. In the Archie Comics, Jules is a very serious character often portrayed in dark and emotional scenes alone when she realises how hopelessly in love she is with Knuckles, and whilst I believed this to be extremely important in making the ‘pop’ between Knuckles and Julie-su work, I decided to tone it down slightly so that it didn’t become a potential script altering problem. However, the Soul Touch is still very much around.

 

Im going to follow up this short set of notes with some Bio’s of all the characters you are likely to read about in the stories. I hope that you enjoy reading them as much as I have enjoyed writing them and if you have any comments on which way you think they should go or any criticism give me a mail at Knuckles@portentmail.com I look forward to chatting with you. I leave you with a simple message that really sums up what the Wild Cards are all about….

 

“Knuckles…. grab the cat”