Karkaeology: Enter the Simian

 

Time for a cutaway! Or is it a flashback? A retcon? 'Enter the Simian' was published in Reverse The Polarity! issue 26, which itself came out in March 2008 - a clear seven-ish years after the last Karkus strip (TSV 64, December 2001 for those of you playing at home.) Why RTP? Because that's where I was doing most of my Dr Who work, outside of my own interest, Zeus Blog - of which more later. Why return to the Karkus? Because this was a story I wanted to tell, and uniquely - until now, of course - this was a Karkus story I wanted to tell. A handful of Erato characters earned a post-TSV return, but this was the only one which was meant to fit into the established chronology. The yborg chimpanzee jet Simian appeared in the last Karkus story, but I wanted to give him an origin tale. I had my own blog, Jetsam, going at the same time, so the Jet Simian name itself was out there. Maybe he just stuck in my head. The idea of a Clone superhero was, I think, sparked by David Ronayne, who proposed something along the lines of a Sensorite working with a mask, which he was kind enough to clarify for me on Facebook:

"From hazy memory that would be "The Lone Sensorite" - the gag being that in human terms the hero wears a mask to hide their identity, with a Sensorite hero they wear the mask to define their identity (and conversly they remove the mask to "hide").
The other upshot was that any Sensorite could become the Lone Sensorite by taking up the mask... which may have predated the idea being reused by a certain dystopian hero film shortly after..."

Thanks, Dave! Other than that, this is a simple, fun story with no particular agenda to push (coughs.) Something's up with the Borad, though - can you tell what it is?