Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, frank frazetta, thun da

Frank Frazetta's Thun'Da #1: A Writers Commentary by Robert Napton

Robert Napton writes for Bleeding Cool. Thun'Da is published by Dynamite Entertainment;

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I wanted to start us in mid-action, much like the original Frank Frazetta/Gardner Fox story did. There's a fascinating serial adaptation of Thun'da from 1952 staring the great Buster Crabbe called KING OF THE CONGO, which was incidentally Buster Crabbe's very last serial, and it also has a faithful recreation of Thun'da's origin, including the plane crash and the subsequent amnesia.

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The amnesia aspect of our protagonist Roger Drum/Thun'da established in the original by Frazetta was the thing that really hooked me into this character when considering a reboot. I wanted to take it a step further into Jason Bourne territory and imagine the fear and fragmentation this man would experience. I went for something pretty stylized with the writing of the captions and even asked our letterer Marshall Dillon to create caps that would be at odd angles like a scattered jigsaw puzzle and slowly settle down as his mind started working again.

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Here we are paying homage to Frazetta's original which had Roger Drum almost immediately confronted with the Lost World aspects of his new reality. I love the art here by Cliff Richards. A great looking T-REX. I've always wanted to work with Cliff. I put his name forth on a Battlestar project years ago, but he wasn't available and this time it worked out, so it's great to be working with him.

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I wanted our Roger Drum to be fearful at the beginning – that's a conscious choice I made. He's disoriented enough from having lost his identity and now he's confronting unimaginable peril. Anyone would be terrified in that situation, so I wanted to play that note and as he settles into his new world, you'll see how his emotions evolve. Also, I think thematically in the 50s and before, pulp heroes tended to excel rather quickly when they were thrust into the fish out of water situations that they find themselves in. They fall in line and often take over the situation due to their superior physical prowess or intelligence, but I think a great inverse of this notion began in the 60s with Planet of the Apes, where the Taylor character, a would-be conquering Jungle Lord, is looking at the primitive humans and saying "We'll be running this place in 6 months" and then the Apes spend the entire movie proving who's in charge, so I wanted to take a page from Apes and have our Roger Drum more the underdog even though he has highly specialized survival skills that give him an edge that you or I wouldn't have if we found ourselves in a Lost World.

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Instincts and muscle memory come into play. Drum knows there's items on the downed Copter that can help him survive and he also falls back into his military reflex of destroying the copter so the "enemy" can't study it. His behavior is robotic – he's doing things he's not really sure he knows how to do and he's not sure why he's doing them. The training is so ingrained.

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Again, here he's functioning almost outside himself. He's doing or saying things out of reflex and instinct. He remembers what his weapons are – what to do with communications, yet he doesn't know who he is. To me, he's not consciously in control of himself here – he's saying things and not even aware of their meaning, which is why I have the dual track of what he's saying versus what he's thinking. His brain is very short-circuited at the moment.

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Unlike the original Roger Drum, I wanted to get into fragments of his past and give clues as to who this man was before he crashed. I can't really comment on what he's dreaming about here without spoiling it, so I'll just have to leave it at that for now ;)

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I think Drum – or anyone – would question whether or not any of what he was seeing was real – has his sanity given way? Is he dead? These are question left unanswered.

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Drum is a survivor and his marksmanship is put on display for the first time. The idea of a military man being in a Lost World was a great notion when Frazetta created the original character. A military man, as I mentioned before, would have such an advantage over someone with no training. Drum has killed before and he'll have to kill again if he's going to survive.

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The Sabretooth companion was another character from the original Thun'da comic from the 50s but I wanted him introduced sooner. I didn't really want the internal narrative to carry on indefinitely as the only source for Roger's voice, so I wanted Roger Drum to have someone to converse with even if they don't talk back to him – a bit like "Wilson" in Castaway, so he's about to adopt a cat.

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I wanted to spend some time on this stand off and show the doubt and fear Roger is experiencing – again, he's the underdog, not the all powerful conqueror, so these situations play a bit differently than they did in the original. Having a hero who is not above fear to me makes the character more relatable and grounded, so that's what I wanted for the new incarnation of Roger Drum.

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Here I wanted to show another side of Roger that maybe he didn't even know he had. He feels remorse for orphaning the cat and feels a strange kinship with the beast who is suddenly alone – much like Roger himself.

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One of the things that I regretted about the original Thun'da is after and even before Frazetta left the book – the prehistoric/Lost World elements started to get dialed down a bit in favor of more traditional Jungle Lord turf, but for this version I want to keep the dinosaurs coming and again, another amazing illustration here by Cliff to bring us to our conclusion and leave wanting to see what happens next, like the serials of old.

Working on Thun'da has been great. It's an honor to take on a property created by the beloved Frank Frazetta. I think we approached it with love and respect and also a modern sensibility. There was a lot of set-up in Issue #1 and there's a lot more to come – the return of the Cliff People, the Shareen, the Monkey Men, more dinosaurs, and mysteries about Roger Drum's past yet to be relieved, so please check out the rest of the series and I look forward to another opportunity to chat about Thun'da!

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