Now I'd love to say the whole thing came to me in a one big hit but that's not true. Some of the ideas had been floating around in my head for some time. The Rusting Death had been a title that been waiting since the mid 90s when I mistyped the Doc Savage novel The Rustling Death for my book list.
But the story really started on Watchmen's 25th anniversary in around 2011. Like many fans I wondered how things would have went after the events of Moore and Gibbons' story. It's a world now without a superman just people in costumes. Was there a third wave/generation of heroes, did the peace last? What might a third wave look like?
I let myself imagine. Silk Spectre II and Nite-Owl II would have kids The Nite Spectre, Silk and Nite-Owl III. There would be a Rorschach II, the daughter of the original's landlady who believes that Walter Kovacs is her father. There would be original characters like the Cutlass.
I never wrote anything down and at some point reality set in assuming that DC was going to do anything they wouldn't be hiring me anytime soon (and shorly after we got the Before Watchmen collection of miniseries)
As any Watchmen fan worth their salt knows the story was written with the Charlton characters. DC looked at the story and realised that it would render their newly acquired characters unusable. Moore then created new characters who if you squint looked a little like the Charlton Characters,
So I squinted - The third generation Watchmen siblings became The Dingo, Risque and Risk. Rorschach II became The Question Mark II. I left the Cutlass alone. I dropped several characters and created new ones.
One of my new characters was the Aggressor, a veteran of Afghanistan or Iraq and fighting a bloody crusade against organised crime. Then I found the Cutter series by James Hopwood - and also published by Pro Se Press. Hopwood did what I was planning and in all honesty did it better. So I changed tack The Agressor was active in the 1980s and was involved in The Fitzgerald Inquiry into corruption in the Queensland Government and police force, which worked much better for me. So James if you read this - Thank you.
Around the same time, I was looking at myself as an Australian new Pulp writer and what I wanted to write. I discovered a history of Australians creating pulp and pulp adjacent characters and I met several other creators who were crafting new stories in the same vein.
I wanted to write a big Australian pulp story. I had the basis for my story. I pitched the idea to Pro Se as Oz Pulp.
The good news they liked the idea, the bad - they were not so keen on Oz Pulp. I wasn't keen on their suggested replacement Aus Pulp.
I sat brainstorming when I remembered that on old maps Australia was called Terra Australis Incognita - and Australis Incognito was born. (Several Australian horror anthologies have used Terror Australis)
Australis Incognito became more than the title of the story but the collective name of my heroes and would go back to the settlement of New South Wales in 1788 allowing me to weave a backstory that allowed me to reference several characters I had read about. It also gave me a reason that these characters all knew each other.
I had the idea for a villian so big that these characters couldn't battle them alone. I distinctly recall the idea that one of the heroes was suggesting the unknown villian was a Moriarty-type. The mysterious villian lurking over the skyline of Brisbane on the cover.
Around this time I had been invited to contribute to Sherlock Holmes and Dr Was Not (IFWG, 2019) an anthology that paired Sherlock Holmes with a different doctor instead of Watson. I selected Dr Nikola, the villian of five novels by Australian writer Guy Boothby that were just as popular as the Sherlock Holmes stories back in the 1890s. Nikola became a large piece of the this new story and his actions in the past served as a catalyst for this modern day adventure.
I had a great time building a world where modern pulp heroes could operate and link in with other Australian pulp and pulp-adjacant characters.
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