Hi, folks. David Michelinie here.

Bob tells me that a number of rabid Future Comics fans have been asking about what would have happened in the Futureverse had fate been kinder and allowed us to continue publishing. As you probably know, we were working to establish an interwoven background for all of our characters, where key events in each separate series could be subtly reflected in the stories taking place in other books. We wanted each series to stand alone, but be part of a cohesive whole so that readers could feel that everything was happening in the same world. In order to accomplish this, it was absolutely vital for us to plan ahead, sometimes way ahead. What follows is my attempt to present in a hopefully coherent fashion just what some of those plans were.
 

It may surprise some of you to learn that the linchpin of the Future Universe, the one thing that linked all characters and events and gave us a basis for virtually everything that followed, was (insert trumpet fanfare here): the deathmask. That’s right, in subtle ways this mystic artifact touched all four series that Future produced, and made each of them possible. The most obvious effects were seen, of course, in the Deathmask series itself. So let’s start with that one.

Our key protagonist and antagonist in Deathmask were, respectively, Jacob Nakai and Adonis DuLac. The reason for the enmity between these two was explained in Deathmask #4--which, like issue #5, was completed but unfortunately never saw print. So here’s a capsule rundown: Jacob was a Native American who sought to escape the limitations of reservation life by becoming an entertainer. He honed natural intelligence and a flair for the dramatic into a fledgling career as a magician. Early on he met and married a chorus girl named Lylah Dare, and together they created a stage persona known as The Sensational St. Synn. As St. Synn, Jacob became wildly popular--and just a little arrogant. When mob boss Adonis DuLac requested a private performance, Jacob turned him down. In an act of sadistic payback, DuLac sabotaged Jacob’s newest illusion: an escape
from a glass coffin submerged in acid. The result was that Jacob was horribly scarred by the acid as Lylah watched in horror. The young woman’s mind couldn’t cope with such a shock and she retreated into a vegetative state from which there is no apparent return. Seeking vengeance, Jacob attempted to summon a native American demon. As a result, the mysteriously silent being known as Mwerta appeared to him, and Jacob knew that revenge could be his--if he stole a
certain gold mask. So Jacob took that mask, but when he tried to kill DuLac he discovered that he couldn’t touch the man, that an unexpected energy shield protected him. Thus Jacob dedicated his life to destroying DuLac’s world, taking away everything that mattered to him.

There’s more to this odd relationship than meets the eye, and we actually dropped hints about it in a couple of places. In issue #2 DuLac says to Deathmask, “There’s a terrible price for killing you...” Then in issue #3 Deathmask wonders, “Has DuLac made another bargain?” All of this was to lead to the

last page of the unpublished issue #5, where we see Adonis DuLac speaking to someone in the shadows, complaining that things are taking too long and that he’s suffering too much at the hands of Deathmask. He reminds the shadowy visitor that they have a bargain--at which point we see that the man he’s talking to is none other than...Mwerta! Yes, we learn that the sneaky little fella is playing both ends against each other.

So how was this accomplished? That, too, was hinted at in both published and unpublished stories. In issue #3, we learned that the deathmask couldn’t have been Native American after all, since chemical tests had dated it to a time before the Indian race appeared in North America. Then, in issue #5, we were to find that newly-introduced character Severn Ashe had discovered a tablet in Angkor Wat, a real city in the Cambodian jungle that was abandoned by its people for unknown reasons. This tablet showed the deathmask surrounded by glyphs in a strange language. Only one of the symbols had ever been deciphered: “Orocco,” which apparently translates as “power.”

And what does all this mean? Well, our plan was to show that the Orocco mask was a conduit for power from another plane of existence. In the Future Universe there was to be no magic, nothing supernatural. What appeared to be mystical would merely be science that we didn’t understand. So Deathmask’s powers came from energy being channeled from another dimension. Unfortunately, something else was being channeled as well: influence. Readers may have noticed that
Jacob Nakai’s speech patterns altered considerably when he wore the deathmask.
This wasn’t simply because I like to write corny dialogue (well, that too), but because something else was riding the power stream from the other dimension into Jacob’s mind--and that something was very nasty. Over a period of time, Jacob would have found that he had more and more difficulty controlling his savage urges while wearing the deathmask--sort of like the relationship in Michael Moorcock’s fantasy tales between Elric and the haunted sword, Stormbringer.
There would have come a point where he would have had to face the possibility that he was becoming more dangerous than the villains he sought to punish.

And that’s pretty much as far as we’d taken those ideas. We knew more stuff, of course (there was a mind-blowing surprise in DuLac’s past that would have made headlines), but now you know the general background we were working from, and where we wanted to go with it.

Next month: Metallix!