In Memorium: Mark Sherman

Mark's memoir about the creation of Strange Attractors

I give you Strange Attractors: a product of revelation.

Further I introduce Michael Cohen (the now-Italian ex-pat, the owner of an olive grove and apartment purchased with childhood comics salted carefully away in plastic bags until the day of his need) who came to his moment of revelation—not like Paul of blessed memory on a road to Damascus—but on a solitary bus journey in Mexico during long hours bumping southward over dusty roads winding like cigarette smoke with his ass riding the rock hard un-cushioned seat of a rickety bus. There: Michael had seeming ages to eat dust, inhale gas fumes, and think.

And plan.

“We need to create a comic,” he told his friend Mark. He had returned to Bellingham, a small college town in the Pacific Northwest, and he was keen to deliver his message to his friend. His latest plan.

Wild plan. But plans for adventures were not a new thing for these two confederates. Almost from the first, making speculative proposals was a form of recreation for these comrades, who were always hatching plans, collaborations, projects. Forever planning. Most plans were preposterous: the vision of a mustached, vest-wearing Ernest Hemingway bearing a high-caliber weapon of futuristic super-science at the conclusion of a wild-beast hunt for some huge tentacled alien monstrosity on a distant planet. A Western swing band playing the time-obscured stylings of Milton Brown and His Brownies. A jug band called The Writhing Rhythm Matzo Balls of Jive. A computer adventure called Theivesworld. Scads of plans. But this one—the plan for the two of them to create and publish a comic—this was a plan of rare device.

So: Strange Attractors.

The work began, the two of them sitting cross-legged on the green lawn of Elizabeth park near Michael’s second floor apartment in Bellingham, ping-ponging the first script ideas featuring heroes Sophie and Widow. The tale started in The Museum of Lost Things where Sophie curated entire worlds of weird. The comic managed to hit its wave at just the right time. These were the heady days that birthed the Indy Comic movement. The freak success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that had eluded the mainstream distributors had (seemingly) opened up a new market for original creations of every kind. If a creator could come up with an idea and accompany that idea with corresponding graphics—they could get the distributors (there were only two) to bring their comic to shops all over a comic obsessed U.S. of A.

So that was it. Michael and Mark combined that years tax returns together and created the first run of Strange Attractors. The fledgling creation received enough returns to reinvest and publish the next issue.

And the next.

Plans. There were always plans. Eventually Sophie and Widow would find themselves drawn back to Old Earth where—in some fantastically distant super-future—the end of this epic would come to pass. It never happened of course. No—the world and time intervened. Like scads of independents, they found the comic unable to manage enough success to overcome the gravity well that was the indy world. For all its qualities, Strange Attractors was not a tale espousing anything like mainstream values or tropes. It was, well, different. Like the Folk Boom of the early ‘60s, the New Wave, Foreign movie houses, black and white independent comics made a splash, created currents, enjoyed a brief day in the sun.

And then . . . faded.

Away.

But there is still some (I think) powerful energy, some satisfyingly weird vibrations that can be experienced in the following pages—that is, if you possess the nerdish sensory apparatus to sense the mighty retro vibrations of The Rangerettes, of Sophie and her robot-sidekick Roshi, of Nurse Nebula, and the whole strange crew you will locate in these pages.

At the 1993 Comic-Con Michael and Mark and the other indies like Batton Lash and (what was her name? Finder?) shared the excitement of what they were doing, the future they hoped was on its ways. They received fan-boy thrills when Neil Gaiman chanced to happen by the Strange Attractors booth and told them he liked their comic and that it was “warped in all the right ways.”

Heady days.

Onwards, Gentle Reader. Do you hear the Rangerettes calling? Can you beware the presence of the arch-evil Vaad? Can you share Sophie’s coming revelation?

Then, proceed

!