26 — Friday, October 3, 1997 ~ North Shore News

Technopolis:

comic

ADRIE Van Viersen has been drawing comics since he was 12.

He is now 27. The first comic was a GI Joe rip-off. Then there was a Night ’ Rider rip-off. Then there was Computer Force. The one after that he did he called Spy Stalker, It was a serial- ization he ran in his high school paper at Vancouver College. The comic book after thar was a three-year project called the Blade Enforcers. It wasn’t a take off on anything really, just an adventure guy and his team of people. And then there was the first version of what would even- tually become Technopolis, a comic book he’s since had published by Caliber Comics ‘out of the U.S. When he first took a crack at it in 1988 he called Time City. He did it and did it again and self- published the - ‘project in 1992 from a studio in North Vancouver. Van Viersen tried to sell the project at a big comic book convention down in San Diego.. His adventure was featured on CBC TV’s Venture program. “I went For editor to editor to editor pitching Time City and it didn’t sell,” he remembers. It was a good learning expe- rience, but a lot of peo le told him quite blunily ¢ his work was crap. Van Viersen took

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“Twas a little bit too cocky then, bur if I wasn’t, | would have been squished in San Diego. Some people are destroyed there.” When he came home, he immediately changed his style. He went from something a “bit eartoony” to some- thing as reality based as he can get it. He had models pose for him, dif- ferent actors, friends. As he pours over the Technopolis Issue 1 at his studio work table he points our the faces, his father, some of the guys he works with at Studio B in Vancouver, his accountant. After San Diego he revamped the project one more time, a third version. Ir remained unpublished, but it did lead to a job in 1993 at Sanctuary Woods, a CD ROM firm in Victoria. Van Viersen produced back- grounds and animation for educational CD ROMs. Meanwhile, he reworked his project a fourth time. Time City turned Technopolis. He took the time travel ele- ment out of the book to make the story simpler and the characters more impor- tant. The basic concept: It’s 1949, 17 years after aliens — the Collarian race — have land- ed. The aliens arrived on earth when their colony ship crash- es on a mountain much like Grouse Mountain. First contact is made in North Vancouver City, although it’s never named that in the comic book. said Van Viersen, “I used the

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geography. I wanted it to be on the West Coast, | wanted an inlet.”

Imagine a massive ship crashing on the mountain. It’s almost as wide as greater North Vancouver and it slides down the slope, taking half the mountain down with it. The ship settles right on the waterfront.

They can’t clean it up, so they build a city from within the hull.

To cement the sense of ioca- tion in the book, Van Viersen uses West Coast critters, bald eagles and squirrels, and indigenous foliage.

The story, a very moody and stylistic collision of technolo- gy and ideals, revolves around two human charac- ters, Vienna Darlington and Madison James.

There’s a definite tension between them, very Kate Hepburn and = Spencer Tracey.

The protagonists zoom through the air in a flying Buick Roadmaster.

The car is pretty much like the one Van Viersen drives, a peppermint green 1950 vin- tage vehicle. “I know it so weil I could draw it in my

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ADRIE Van Viersen spins a stylish tale of alien culture collision in Technopolis.

sleep, although mine isn’t a convertible.”

Madison James is a reporter and Vienna Darlington was raised by the aliens. Her par- ents were anthropologists in the 1930s, studying the effects of the alien landing on humans.

The parents die in a -freak accident. She is the only human on the planet well versed in the ways of the aliens.

With the growing animosity resulting from the Second World War, inn which alien technology is inadvertently

introduced to the conflict, she makes the perfect haison officer.

The Second World War has left the world bitter about the aliens. There’s a lot of animosity. There’s a lot of racial tension. The aliens are very friendly, but there was a mistake.

Somebody gave alien tech- nology to the Nazis in a warped neutrality gesture. Whar do the aliens look like? “Somebody in a comic mag- azine did a review on me and said they looked like stunt men in rubber masks. I guess

that’s true, said Van Viersen. Their skin is allergic to the nitrogen content in our atmosphere so they have lots of boils and they stink. Technopolis publisher Calibre Comics is based in Plymouth, Michigan. Calibre is most well-known for origi- nally publishing The Crow. It’s a popular independent in America, But Van Viersen finds himself having to push hard to get his comic into stores locally. Of thel4 titles Calibre pub-

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