23 Months Later With CHUCK MILLER

It’s been awhile since the original Kickin’ The Willy Bobo Interview with Chuck so I thought it way past time we caught up with what he’s all about and what he’s doing 23 MONTHS LATER…

Derrick Ferguson: Have there been any major changes in your life personally and professionally since we last talked?

Chuck Miller: Nothing major, though I have been a little busier in both areas. I've been branching out and doing some different things, like Sherlock Holmes, and a character called Zero that I've done some stories about for Moonstone. I had a few health issues recently that slowed me down a little, but I'm getting back on track now.

DF: How do you feel your writing has developed since we last talked?

CM: I think it's gotten a little smoother. I'm starting to develop a better sense of what should be left in and what should be cut out. I'm slightly less neurotic about it. Usually. If I'm having a good day.

DF: The universe of The Black Centipede has certainly expanded and grown larger since CREEPING DAWN: RISE OF THE BLACK CENTIPEDE. Was this by design or has the character’s popularity added fuel to your creative fires?

CM: Most of the characters I've been introducing have been around (in my head and notebooks) as long as The Black Centipede has. I came up with them for a comic book I wanted to do back in the 80s and 90s that never got off the ground. Vionna Valis comes from that, as do Jack Christian and Dana Unknown. Jack, Dana and Vionna are the main characters in "The Optimist," a novel I wrote five or six years ago. Nothing much happened with that either, but I decided to use some of the supporting cast in solo short stories, and thus The Black Centipede developed into whatever he is now. I've been planning to rewrite "The Optimist" to bring it in line with the continuity changes I've made. I need to do that because the events in that story are constantly being referred back to in my new stuff. Jack was originally supposed to be the central character in my little universe, but The Centipede has stolen his spot. Still, he is going to be more of a presence in future stories. He is the narrator and central character in The Return of Little Precious, and that story leads into other things.

Aside from that, I knew that The Centipede would need a supporting cast. I came up with Percival Doiley and Stan Bartowski. I have also made William Randolph Hearst and Amelia Earhart into regulars, though that wasn't my original intention. But the character needs to be grounded a little bit, and the supporting characters do that, and they also give him different personalities to play off of. He has a particular kind of relationship with Percy, another kind with Hearst, yet another with Stanley, and so on. There is a lot of potential for humor in all of these interactions, and humor is an essential component. Really, the inspirations for the way most of my characters interact are old sitcoms and comics like Little Lulu. You have characters with well-defined personality quirks, and they play off of one another in ways that are predictable in a good way.

DF: Didn’t I read some time ago that Hollywood was interested in The Black Centipede? Or is that just an unfounded rumor?

CM: I hope it isn't unfounded, but it's difficult to know who is serious about what. I think The Centipede would make a great TV series, something along the lines of "Boardwalk Empire," a period piece with lots of real people showing up.

DF: Tell us about THE BAY PHANTOM

CM: He started out as the subject of a humorous short story I wrote a while back called "The Return of Doctor Piranha." Set in the present day, in my old hometown of Mobile, Alabama, it was about a down-and-out pulp adventure hero from the 1930s. The magazine I wrote it for ended up never being published, so I just posted it online for free and forgot about it for a while. Later on, I started thinking about doing a new series, something totally separate from the world of The Black Centipede, and I remembered The Bay Phantom. So I took him back to the 30s, came up with some backstory, and introduced a cast of supporting characters.

He's a different kind of character from any of my others, and I use him to tell different kinds of stories. He's actually a rather complex character. He is competent and can be ruthless when he has to, but he is also rather naive, and even innocent in a strange way. He has inner conflicts, but he doesn't let them get in the way of what he's doing, though he goes to great lengths to understand or resolve them. We'll see more of him grappling with his "dark side" in the second book, The Feast of the Cannibal Guild. That is still a work in progress, but I'm hoping to finish it up before the end of October, or at least by Thanksgiving, if not Christmas or Groundhog Day. In it, he will be separated from Mirabelle for a while; she is off on a "secret mission" of her own, which is basically the other half of the story. I like the way they work together, but I wanted to see how they would fare as solo acts. Mirabelle is also a complex character, and we'll get into more about her past and what motivates her.

DF: Tell us about VIONNA AND THE VAMPIRES

CM: It started out as a simple little novella in which Vionna Valis and Mary Jane Kelly encounter Professor James Moriarty, who has for many years now been Lord of the Vampires. It seems he was "rescued" by Dracula after he took his plunge off the Reichenbach Falls and turned into a vampire. Vionna and Mary encounter him when he starts bedeviling a young man named Scudder Moran, a descendant of Moriarty's old lieutenant, Colonel Sebastian Moran. With a little help from the ghost of Sherlock Holmes, the girls deal with him. When I decided to make an official novel out of it, I needed a lot more material to fill it out.

Since the main story was complete, I decided to do some background stuff, showing how Moriarty got mixed up with Dracula in the first place. What I came up with was a middle section in which Vionna finds herself transported to London in the year 1888-- a sort of telepathic time-travel dream thing of an uncertain nature, induced by the ghost of Holmes, who has been trapped in Vionna's head. She takes the place of Watson as Holmes is engaged by the still-human Moriarty to track down Jack the Ripper. The Ripper being one of the main villains in The Black Centipede saga, I took the opportunity to fill out a little bit of history there, and it builds on some of the events in Blood of the Centipede.

DF: Do you think you have found an audience or has your audience found you?

CM: A little of both, I guess. But I'm hearing more and more from people I don't know and don't have any connection to, which is good. I do a lot of self-publicizing on social media, and I sometimes sell books one at a time to people I come into contact with. I really need to start getting out to conventions and things.

DF: Where do you see Chuck Miller in five years?

CM: Wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, more popular than the Beatles, able to bend steel in my bare hands. Either that, or the same place I was five years ago, which is basically right here. But five years older than now.

DF: How do you see the New Pulp community these days? Is it a community?

CM: I think it is. Maybe not as much of one as it seemed to be for a while. Whatever the definition of New Pulp is, it is nebulous enough to accommodate all manner of things, and certain writers and certain kinds of stories which could fit within those boundaries are not identified as such. There are lots of gray areas around the edges, and any number of things could fit in.

That being the case, it isn't as much of a community as, say, Star Wars fans or Batman fans or anything that has a very clear-cut definition. I don't hear the term New Pulp used as often as I used to. But there are still these core people who identify with it, so it is a community, albeit a rather small one. Maybe some sort of big event is needed to draw more people in and generate more interest. I don't know what form it would take, though.

DF: Do you think that New Pulp will ever have respectability?

CM: It might! I mean, it's respectable already, but in terms of gaining a wider audience-- which we'd all like to see-- I think the potential is there. The popularity of the superhero genre is ongoing, and may hold out for a few more years. Since that is closely related to what we're doing, a little door is standing open. The question is, how do we get through it? I don't have an answer for that. I don't know a lot about marketing. It may come down to dumb luck on somebody's part. The right book making its way into the right hands at the right time. I don't know of any way to force that to happen. 

We're not really tapping into even the comic book/sci-fi community the way we ought to be, but I don't know what the solution is. That would certainly be the first step, before trying to break into any kind of mainstream recognition. But there are a lot of talented people working in the New Pulp field, and if their work could find its way into the hands of enough people, I think it would really take off. After all, the most popular book series in recent memory is Harry Potter, and those stories could easily fit under the pulp umbrella.

DF: What are you working on now?

CM: I've got several things coming out over the next few months. As I mentioned earlier, the next installment of The Black Centipede and his pals' adventures, The Return of Little Precious, is coming from Pro Se Press. This one stars Doctor Unknown Junior, and it wraps up the Moriarty trilogy. There's also the return of a villain from one of the early Centipede books. That's already done, and it's in the editing stage now. I'm currently working on the second Bay Phantom novel, Feast of the Cannibal Guild, the next Vionna and Mary, Into the Void, and sort of tentatively sketching out the next Black Centipede. I'm also doing things for Pro Se's Single Shot line, including new Centipede and Vionna short stories, and a new character called the Red Dagger. He is a sort of spinoff from Blood of the Centipede. Lancelot Cromwell, the hedonistic actor who played The Black Centipede in the movie decides to become a masked crime-fighter for real. It does not go smoothly.

Derrick Ferguson: Anything else we should know?

Chuck Miller: Well, a couple of "bucket list" projects have been done and are working their way toward publication. One of them is a Sherlock Holmes novel I've done for Airship 27. Sherlock Holmes: The Picture of Innocence is a reworking of The Sign of the Four and A Scandal in Bohemia. It guest stars Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde, and was also inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The other one is something I've been wanting to do for a very long time. My absolute favorite TV show ever is Kolchak: The Night Stalker. I recently had the opportunity to do two Kolchak novelettes for Moonstone Books, and those are set to be released in February of 2016. Penny Dreadful and The Time Stalker are going to be published in a single volume. I don't want to give too much away, but I'll tell you that one of them features the return of a monster from the small screen, while the other deals with Carl Kolchak's encounter with one of the most notorious real-life psychopaths of all time.

Kickin' The Willy Bobo With: CHUCK MILLER

Derrick Ferguson: Who is Chuck Miller?

Chuck Miller: Someone who can make the best of a bad situation, and the worst of a good one.

DF: Where do you live and what do you do to keep yourself in cheese and crackers?

CM: I live in Norman, Oklahoma, and I have worked as a paralegal and in various capacities with a couple of different newspapers.

DF: Give us as much about your background as you’re legally able to tell us.

CM: Let me think a minute and see what isn't prohibited by the court order...

I was born in Ohio, and moved to Alabama when I was 10. I've got a BA in creative writing from the University of South Alabama, the only one that's ever been awarded from there. It was when I graduated, anyhow, and it may still be. They didn't offer creative writing as a degree major, but the chair of the English department decided that since I had been there for 11 years and none of us were getting any younger, they could go ahead and make an exception.

A few years ago, I was in a serious accident-- several broken bones, a collapsed lung, and other things. My recuperation was slow. That left me with a lot of time on my hands, and a glaring reminder of my own mortality to go with it. I decided that if I was ever going to get serious about writing, it was time to do it. That's sort of what brought this whole thing on.

DF: What is your philosophy about writing?

CM: The narrative voice is the most important thing. Whatever I might have to say, nobody's going to know about, unless I give them reason to enjoy it and engage with it.

DF: I describe your style of writing as what I imagine David Lynch would be writing if he were a New Pulp writer. How would you describe it?

CM: That's pretty good. I don't really know what I'd call it. I knew I wanted to do something different, something that hadn't been seen before, so I just kind of let my imagination wander. I bring a lot of different influences into it, and I can't name any particular one that stands out above the others. I draw on pulps, comics, and classic mysteries, as well as a few things you don't usually see in this genre, I think. Lots of movies. Writers like William S. Burroughs, Flannery O'Connor, Hunter S. Thompson, Joe Lansdale, Walter Mosley, Rex Stout, and quite a few more. "Kolchak: The Night Stalker," various sitcoms, and Little Lulu comics. I'm serious about that. The influence of John Stanley's Lulu stories is profound, particularly in the Vionna Valis & Mary Jane Kelly stories, but it's present with the Centipede as well, in the way some of the characters interact with one another.

DF: I first came across your website featuring THE BLACK CENTIPEDE a couple of years before your brought the character to Pro Se. When did you first create The Black Centipede and his universe?

CM: The whole thing started about twenty years ago. Some friends of mine and I wanted to do our own comic books, and I came up with several characters and situations. That whole thing never got off the ground. A few years later, I revived the idea and wrote a script. That was The Optimist, the story of Jack Christian, a former kid sidekick to a deceased superhero. That never went anywhere, either, but I held on to all the notes I made about the characters. The Black Centipede was originally conceived as a minor character in that series, a weird holdover from the age of the pulp heroes. What I had in mind was a sort of cross between William S. Burroughs and the Shadow.

More time passed, and when I finally decided to get serious about the writing, I naturally wondered what the heck I was going to write about. So I dug into my old notes and turned The Optimist into a short novel. I had no idea what to do with it, so I just posted it online for anybody to read for free. Very few did. A friend of mine suggested that people might be more likely to read a short story online than a whole novel, so I decided to give that a try. The main character didn't really lend himself to that, though, so I picked one of the supporting cast-- The Black Centipede. I did a short story called "Wisconsin Death Trip," in which our hero becomes embroiled in some bizarre events surrounding a peculiar little man named Ed Gein.

I was pleased with it, so I did some more, and posted them as well. The next one I did was a Black Centipede novella called Gasp, Choke, Good Lord! It's a tribute to the old EC horror comics, and the historical guest stars are Dr. Frederic Wertham and William M. Gaines. That one is still free and can be seen here:

http://theblackcentipede.blogspot.com/2013/12/hey-kids-whole-free-black-centipede.html

Then I did one featuring Vionna Valis and Mary Kelly. The stuff accumulated on my blog and people started paying attention to it. One of them was Tommy Hancock at Pro Se. He asked me if I thought I was ready to do a whole novel for them. I wasn't sure, but I said I was, and I did. That was Creeping Dawn: The Rise of the Black Centipede.

It was well-received, as was the follow-up, Blood of the Centipede. Both of them garnered a lot of positive reviews and comments, and I am now striving to bring The Centipede to the attention of even more readers in the wider world. I know there is a vast potential audience out there, and I'd love to connect with them and take a little of their money now and again. I think it's a good deal for both parties. Of course, it's always been more about ego than money with me, but money can do an ego a powerful lot of good. It's a tangible expression of admiration. I am working on totally revamping The Optimist for Pro Se.

DF: Who is The Black Centipede?

CM: The way I really see him is that he is me, if all restraints were removed. He behaves the way I would if I could get away with it. In some ways, he's kind of a shallow character-- he never indulges in self-doubt or self-recrimination. He is absolutely certain of himself at all times, and if he does make a mistake, he quickly corrects it and dismisses it from his mind.  He would rather die than pass up an opportunity to make a smart remark to someone. Frankly, he's more than a little unbalanced, but through sheer moxie he forces the world to accept him on his own terms. The former is certainly true of me, though the latter has been very problematical. So the Centipede is my fantasy-fulfillment in that regard. All of my major characters have been cobbled together out of bits and pieces I found lying around in my psyche. Jack Christian is closer to me as I actually am, while Vionna Valis could be called the "inner child," if you use terms like that. It's all psycho-drama, to a degree.

DF: The universe of The Black Centipede is populated with many colorful characters. Tell us about them.

CM: I have two other series that are part of my work for Pro Se Press, and both of them splinter off of The Optimist. Doctor Unknown Junior, the daughter of the Centipede's old sorcerer pal Doctor Unknown, has appeared in an issue of Pro Se Presents, and a novel is in the works. The first installment of The Incredible Adventures of Vionna Valis and Mary Jane Kelly will be out in the near future. I've seen the cover art, and I'm impressed. "Vionna and the Vampires" is also the first part of the "Moriarty, Lord of the Vampires" trilogy, which will continue in Black Centipede Confidential and the first Doctor Unknown Junior novel, The Return of Little Precious.

Vionna is a quirky and eccentric young woman whose past is something of a mystery. Mary Jane Kelly was, as some people will be aware, the last known victim of Jack the Ripper in 1888. She was resurrected in The Optimist, and ended up forming a partnership with Vionna. Together, they are the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee Psychic Detective Agency, specializing in unusual investigations involving paranormal phenomena.

Dr. Dana Marie Laveau Unknown, PhD, a/k/a Doctor Unknown Junior is a very powerful and nearsighted sorceress. She functions in the same capacity as pretty much any good-guy magic-user in the comics, defending the earth against all manner of supernatural threats. During the events recounted in The Optimist, she sustains a serious psychic injury and finds herself seriously de-powered. Jack Christian has become her assistant for the duration, and serves as her "Watson," producing first-person accounts of her adventures. Actually, he's more like Archie Goodwin than Watson. There are some personality clashes that go on between them, but they're working those out.

DF: What are your future plans for The Black Centipede?

CM: I'd like to keep him going for as long as I can. I have more than enough ideas to last for the remainder of my life and then some. He's been active for more than 80 years, so there's a lot to work with. I've been doing the novels in chronological order, and the third one only goes up to the end of 1933. I have a rather sketchy history worked out for him from then until the present day, and I may start skipping forward a lot more in the books. A major turning point in his life comes in 1972, when he falls from grace with a huge thud, and ends up becoming a wanted criminal once again. His long-standing feud with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover reaches a crisis point when the Centipede is accused of murdering him. Nixon is also an antagonist, and the Centipede goes underground to wage a covert war, which culminates in the Watergate scandal. That's all I have for that at present. At the rate I'm going, I won't have to worry about it until I'm 100.

DF: You seem to get a real kick out of mixing historical figures in with your fiction. Where does that come from?

CM: I've always been interested in history, and I really got a big kick out of Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld novels, in which everyone who ever lived was transported to this mysterious alien world. Various historical figures mix freely and have adventures as they try to unravel the riddle of the Riverworld. I also enjoyed Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series, where  "real" history is usurped and overlaid with this alien invasion scenario. So I thought about the kind of people someone like The Black Centipede would be likely to come into contact with.

I figured he'd have to have some excellent PR in order to avoid being arrested any time he showed himself in public, so I hooked him up with newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Hearst is a rather shady character anyhow, and through a liberal application of bribes and wildly distorted news stories, he has made The Centipede into one of America's most beloved heroes. I also put him together with Amelia Earhart, whom I've always admired. She tries to act as a sort of moral compass for The Centipede, dissuading him from giving in to his more violent impulses-- sometimes through reasoning or nagging, sometimes at gunpoint, as she does during their first encounter in Blood of the Centipede. They form a sort of unofficial partnership. 

Amelia returns in the next book, Black Centipede Confidential, along with two new supporting cast members that I snatched out of the Public Domain: Gregor Samsa, the giant verminous protagonist from Franz Kafka's “The Metamorphosis”, and J. Alfred Prufrock, from the poem by T.S. Eliot. These two actually show up in the ongoing web serial, The Return of Doctor Reverso, as does another major new character, the faceless Russian assassin called Anonymoushka. She has quite a history, including some very interesting parentage, which is revealed in Confidential.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is the main historical guest star in the next novel, along with his wife, Zelda. Frank Nitti, who was a major character in Creeping Dawn, returns, as does Hearst. Lester Dent and Walter B. Gibson are also on hand, helping The Centipede bring down Professor James Moriarty, Lord of the Vampires. A certain beekeeper who lives on the Sussex Downs also plays a part in the proceedings. I won't give away any of the plot, except to mention that Moriarty's nefarious organization, the Order of the Sunless Circle, includes such luminaries as John Dillinger, Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow, Dr. Hawley Crippen, Stagger Lee, Pretty Boy Floyd, Doctor Herbert West, the Bell Witch and the Loch Ness Monster.

I'm also interested in crime history, so there's a lot of that. The Centipede's origin involves Lizzie Borden, and Jack the Ripper is a recurring character in the series. In fact, his arch-enemy (I call her that, though I've never shown them fighting-- usually quite the opposite), "Bloody" Mary Jane Gallows is the supernaturally-generated daughter of Lizzie and the Ripper. Mary Jane has become a much more sympathetic character than I originally intended for her to be, and appears as more friend than foe. But I've come up with a gimmick in Confidential that will give us the best of both worlds, and allow her to realize her full potential in both directions. That's all I'll say about that for now.

DF: You’ve recently introduced a new character, The Bay Phantom. What’s his deal?

CM: A couple years ago, I wrote a short story for a magazine that ended up never being published. It involved a 94-year-old former masked hero called The Bay Phantom, and what happens to him when his arch-nemesis, the 98-year-old Doctor Piranha, is released after spending 75 years in prison. It was a comedy with a fairly heartwarming ending. The publication I was writing it for had a sort of nautical theme, so I put the Phantom in a seaport town-- Mobile, Alabama, where I lived for many years. Janie Colson is an original character I salvaged from a fan fiction thing I did years ago. (The father whose name she never mentions is Carl Kolchak) It's too bad I can't use her in the current project, because I'm very fond of her. Of course, there's always time travel... As I say, that fell through, and the story languished. Eventually, I got the idea to do the same thing I did with The Black Centipede--go back in time to the character's heyday and present tales of some of his early experiences.

If you're interested, the original story can be enjoyed (or not) for free at this link:

http://theblackcentipede.blogspot.com/2013/03/introducing-bay-phantom.html

I'm working now on the first novel. I don't have a title yet. This is completely separate from The Black Centipede's world, and I'm working with a different publisher. The Phantom is almost the polar opposite of The Centipede, in fact-- very prim and strait-laced, he doesn't even say "damn" or "hell," and he gets rather pedantic at times, but he has an extremely dry sense of humor. I've been putting together a supporting cast, and it has four members so far, individuals who aid The Phantom in one way or another. 

The most important of these is Mirabelle Darcy, one of the nine most intelligent human beings in the world. I don't really know what that means, or who the other eight are-- the phrase just popped into my head and I liked the way it sounded. Her early years were not easy for her. Growing up black in the Deep South of the 1920s and 30s, she had to hide her light under a bushel to avoid trouble. But Joe Perrone-- The Bay Phantom-- had enough sense to appreciate her potential. By day, she is Perrone's housekeeper; by night, she is The Bay Phantom's most trusted confidante-- his "Alfred," and sometimes his "Kato" as well. In her spare time, she builds electron microscopes and helps Sigmund Freud fine-tune the science of psychoanalysis.

The Phantom has an excruciatingly strict moral code, and is a little bit naive about how the world really works. Mirabelle and his other helpers often do underhanded and illegal things behind his back to help him solve his cases. While there are not many overtly occult elements in the story, The Phantom does have a keen interest in unexplained phenomena, and is good friends with Charles Fort. The house he buys in Mobile to use as a headquarters is haunted by at least four ghosts, one of whom claims to be the emperor Caligula. In the first novel, The Bay Phantom faces a couple of bizarre criminals called the Werewolf and the Black Embalmer-- and the shadowy mastermind who pulls their strings. One thing this series has in common with The Black Centipede is the fact that virtually nothing is what it seems to be, and anything can happen.

DF: What’s A Day In The Life of Chuck Miller like?

CM: I usually rise at about one in the afternoon-- or later, depending on the extent of the previous night's hedonistic excesses-- and breakfast on caviar and champagne. Then it's off to the links for a few holes of golf and a few more martinis. After a late lunch at the Drones Club, I may take in an opera or a Broadway show.

Derrick Ferguson: Anything else we need to know?

Chuck Miller: I just had a Sherlock Holmes story published in Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective Vol. 5 from Airship 27, and I was very pleased about that, because it's been an ambition of mine for a while.

Just stay tuned, because I've got a lot going on in the coming year. I would like to encourage everyone to visit my blog or connect with me on Facebook:

http://theblackcentipede.blogspot.com/

https://www.facebook.com/chuckmillerauthor?ref=hl--

My Favorite New Pulp Heroes

Daggone that Barry Reese. You may recall that awhile back Barry posted over at his blog a list of his 10 Favorite Classic Pulp Heroes. Me being a blatant copycat I quickly followed suit with my own list.

Well, now he's done it again but this time it's a list of his 10 Favorite New Pulp Heroes. And quite naturally I again have followed in his illustrious footsteps and done the same.

Some of you might nitpick about my placing Captain Hazzard on this list as he was created back in 1937. My argument for that is this: there was only one story published and with his four Captain Hazzard novels, I consider Ron Fortier to have sufficiently re-imagined the character enough for him to qualify as a New Pulp hero. If you think I'm wrong, feel free to let me know and we'll jaw about it. Okay? Okay.

And I also have a special shout out of my own to Joel Jenkins who made my list twice. So without further delay here's my list of my Favorite New Pulp Heroes:


10: The Imposter (Created by Richard Lee Byers)
9: The Merkabah Rider (Created by Ed Erdelac)
8: Captain Hazzard (Re-Imagined by Ron Fortier)
7: The Pulptress (Created by Tommy Hancock)
6: Damage, Inc. (Created by Joel Jenkins)
5: The Gantlet Brothers (Created by Joel Jenkins)
4: Elisa Hill (Created by Percival Constantine)
3: The Black Centipede (Created by Chuck Miller)
2: Lazarus Gray (Created by Barry Reese)
1: Mr. Brass (Created by Joshua Reynolds)

More information about Mr. Brass can be found here and if you haven't yet read any of his adventures, I heartily suggest you do so.