The aim of Ariel Press’ new series, Harker is to create a compelling detective TV series on paper. The English duo of writer Roger Gibson and artist Vince Danks have certainly achieved that. Stripping away all the CSI-like pretension and replacing it with a couple of likely lads in the form of Detectives Harker and Critchley, the new series is engrossing. Plus, black humour, detailed visuals and the odd bit of mad violence helps. Harker and Critchley have very distinct voices. Are they based on yourself, or people around you? Roger: Yes, Harker and Critchley are myself and Vince, for the most part - seems a little unfair inflicting us both on the comic reading public, so I can only apologise. Friends would definitely recognise Harker as a slightly more monstrous version of me, and would recognise Critchley as a slightly more shallow version of Vince, which is kind of accentuated by them looking like us too, I suppose. Harker is actually about ten years older than me with more hair, and Critchley about ten years younger than Vince and with less hair, so they’re not carbon copies - but if Vince and I were detectives, I don’t think we’d be a great deal different to Harker and Critchley. I’m a little bit more approachable than Harker, and Vince is definitely nowhere near as vain as Critchley, but we both have our moments. Most of their more peculiar personality traits come from me, which is a little worrying: Harker is the side of me that’s impatient, a little shy, grumpy, shabby and scruffy, slightly odd, easily distracted by shiny things, outrageously egotistical, intensely passionate... so he has most of my bad traits, with a couple of good ones thrown in for good measure, as we didn’t want him to be too much of a monster. Critchley, on the other hand, is the side of me that’s outgoing, flirtatious, vain, shallow, geeky, a dreamer - with that little bit of Vince in him as well here and there, in his mannerisms, his friendliness and his general ease around people. Which makes the series rather autobiographical, I suppose certainly in the relationship between the two detectives - which is something I hadn’t really thought about before. I’ll treat it as therapy or something... How would you best describe what the series is all about? Roger: Harker is fundamentally a mainstream telly detective show done as a comic. Our aim, the thing we’ve been trying to achieve for years (and not quite hitting the mark until now), is to produce the kind of comic that would work as a drama on telly on a Saturday evening - not a fantasy series like Doctor Who or Merlin, but a straight forward, no nonsense Saturday night detective series, as a comic. Not because we want Harker on the telly (though of course it would be nice), but just because we think comics should cater to the mass market in the same way as TV does. We want to capture that audience, we want our comic to be read by everyone, not just comic fans. We’re as mainstream as you can get. We’re ultra-mainstream. If you could inject Harker directly into your bloodstream, you could give up telly for life, it’s all going to be in there. Think of the time you’d save. Harker is also a joyful celebration of the detective genre - as the series progresses, you’re going to see us playing around with all of the archetypes and icons of such stories. Even just in issue one you’ve got the buddy cops, the classic car, the grim autopsy scenes, the banter - and we’ll be pushing further with all that iconography as we go along, playing with it, sometimes breaking it spitefully, biting the hand that feeds us. Oh! I’ve just thought of a good way to put it: Harker is what would be the result if the TV shows Morse, Columbo and Waking The Dead all had greedy monkey sex together, with Starsky and Hutch as the stepdads and Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie as the grandparents. There we go. It seems like Harker has touches of cop shows, thrillers and possibly the supernatural. Was it hard to work those influences into a coherent narrative?
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