Martin Eden is the writer and artist behind the acclaimed superhero comic-book series The O-Men. His latest comic is Spandex, which introduces us to Liberty, Diva, Glitter, Prowler, Butch, Indigo and Mr Muscles: a gay superteam who battle both villains and their own personal dramas. Eden talks to Total Sci-Fi about 50 foot lesbians, the current small press scene and “the world’s first gay fluorescent ninja”…

How does Spandex differ from a typical superhero story?

In general, I think my comics tend to differ from typical superhero stories because the emphasis isn’t on the super-heroics. There are some super-fights but I’m more interested in the characters’ private lives. I like to pitch my comics as ‘Eastenders meets Watchmen’.

Spandex is also very sexy and it’s very adult and it’s very experimental. You will see things that you have never seen in a comic before. I’m really trying to push boundaries, but not in an in-your-face, scary way, so don’t worry.

Oh yes, and of course, you may have heard that the characters in Spandex are all G-A-Y, and you don’t get a lot of that in comics!

How did you come up with the idea for Spandex?

I was working on my other comic, The O Men, which is very complex and epic, and I just fancied a change, and to do something a bit simpler. At the same time, some supporting characters in The O Men were starting to pop out and interest me, and I just had the idea to put them into their own comic, which would be a bit more humorous and standalone than O Men. Then the ‘gay superteam’ idea hit me and I felt like it hadn’t been done before – and it’s very hard to find new and original ideas in any genre these days!

Tell us about the Spandex team.

Liberty is the leader – he is a transvestite superhero who wears a female super-suit. He’s also got a danger sense called his ‘Gaydar’. It’s like Spider Sense but gayer. Prowler has the power to take on the skills and abilities of any gay person in the vicinity – so that could mean taking on someone’s powers or learning new cookery skills. Or if there were 30 gay people in the area, he could take on the combined strength of those 30 people.

Diva is a lesbian Wonder Woman. The idea for her came from a Britney Spears video. Indigo is a cool, sexy, French teleporter who has a very cool ‘Indigo Room’ which she can pop in and out of – stocked with weapons, cool costumes and make-up. Glitter is a male Dazzler. And Butch (a female Luke Cage) and Mr Muscles (her white twin) like to hit things.

There are also lots of supporting characters, including villains Pussy (she’s feline…), Muscle Mary, Bimbo and Mind-Bender, plus Neon, the world’s first gay, fluorescent ninja.


How long did it take you to complete this first issue?

I normally work quite fast, but the first issue, ‘The Attack of the 50-Foot Lesbian’, took me a whole year! (Bear in mind I have a full time job.) I just wanted to spend time on it to get it right, so I would redraw things that weren't working and I did a lot of photo research in Brighton (the team’s head-quarters).

The first story is 23 pages long, but the issue itself has 17 pages of extras, so there’s a lot of work in there. I was also getting to grips with Photoshop and colouring (up till now, I’ve only worked in black and white), plus I computer-lettered all the speech balloons and then decided to re-do it all by hand.

What are your main influences?

Grant Morrison is a huge influence. I like his off-the-wall story-telling, originality and the humanity of his characters – and I like the way his stories always contain twists and turns that you really should see coming, but you never do. You can hopefully find a lot of that in Spandex and O Men.

I am inspired by a lot of the comics I read growing up in the 80s and 90s. The old Marvel ones like Alpha Flight and X-Men, which had great characters, loads of crazy sub-plots and each issue actually had a beginning, middle and an end, which is quite rare these days in comics!

Other than that, music and movies can really inspire me. Artists like Tori Amos, Radiohead and Björk really get my creative mind working. Their music resembles soundtracks, I feel. A really good movie can leave me buzzing and sometimes almost change the direction I’m going in with a comic; for instance, I might suddenly get into a horror or an action frame of mind.

Were there any Spandex characters you created but had to cut?

Not really, because the characters come into my head quite strongly, and even if they aren’t quite right, they’ll filter and adapt into something else. Nothing really gets wasted. And there is certainly no character too risqué to appear in my comic!

It’s more about changes I made. Robot lesbian Ms Fantastic was a member of Spandex, but she seemed to work better as a villain so I put her in ‘Les Girlz’ instead. Prowler evolved a lot over time, because I just couldn’t get him right. He started off as a cheeky monkey man and his name went through so many variations – Origin, Haven, Amalgam – until I finally got to where I am now and I’m really happy with him now (and I love drawing his hair!). To be honest, I put off starting Spandex until I was 100 per cent happy with the team, and Prowler and Indigo took a long time to develop.

Another change I made was that the main villains were originally called ‘The Angry Lesbians’, but I changed it because I didn’t want to upset people too much if they missed the joke.

What’s next for the team?

Loads of varied and off-the-wall adventures. The second story sees them heading to Japan to recruit a new member, and they come up against a whole bunch of Pink Ninjas. That story is called ‘Enter the Dragons’. Then things take a very serious turn when a vicious alien takes over the population of the world and four members of Spandex are the only people left standing. It’s very hardcore sci-fi stuff.

I’m actually working on these two stories at the same time, because the latter story is freaking me out a bit, and the other one is a lot more fun. After that, the team’s main nemeses, ‘Les Girlz’, take out their ultimate revenge.

I’ll also explore the dynamics of the team. For example, to keep the team together, Liberty has to be quite manipulative – and this doesn’t go down well with some of the members. Also, a couple of lesbian and gay team-mates will start to feel attracted to each other, and they need to figure out what the heck is going on… It’s all a lot of fun.


What’s the reception to Spandex been like so far?

It’s been great! Very positive. I was really worried that people might misinterpret the tone of it and maybe get offended, but people seem to ‘get it’ and I’m reaching a lot of people. I really want as varied an audience as possible for this. Gay and straight readers alike can get a kick out of little references to gay culture (such as the villain known as Muscle Mary and a kd Lang punchline) and just hopefully enjoy it as a very intriguing comic story where the characters just happen to sleep with members of the same sex.

It’s a very bright comic, and people seem drawn to it. Unfortunately, kids seem drawn to it too! I was at a comic show recently, and little kids wanted my Glitter stickers, or started to leaf through the comic. I had to try to shoo them away and warn the parents, because Spandex is quite adult in content!

Diva has had a very strong reaction and seems a popular character with pretty much everyone – male, female, gay, straight… She seems to have a certain appeal!

Have you ever drawn for other people’s scripts? Or do you prefer to work on both the story and art?

When I started out in the small press, I drew for other people’s scripts. Drawing comes more naturally to me than writing, even though some people say they prefer my writing to my drawing! For me, writing is a longer and trickier process.

I started out in the small press drawing the art for other people’s scripts, a couple of British comics, Contact and Bulldog. I also got some work published in an independent book about Charles Bukowski.

I really grew to love the small press world, and the feedback and communication you can get, and I then went straight on to launch The O Men, and never looked back. Along the way, I contributed to a few anthologies or did some covers, but O Men was very time-consuming.

I do prefer to write and draw my own comics, rather than letting other artists contribute. I just get excited about certain scenes, so I want to do them myself! Occasionally, I have taken on other artists – I did an anthology issue of The O Men, which worked out well – but really, I do feel it’s my ‘baby’.

What’s the current small press comic scene like? Are there any particular small press comics you’d recommend?

The sheer amount of creativity and talent never ceases to amaze me. It’s changed a bit in terms of things moving more online – I do miss comics popping through my letterbox like they used to!

Regarding recommendations, I don’t know where to start, there are so many. Okay, Google these: Necessary Monsters is a fantastic horror superteam comic; Sergeant Mike Battle is a wonderful satire on comics; Harker is a very professionally put-together detective comic; Outcastes is a fine black and white medieval mystery thriller; Book of Lists and There’s No Time Like the Present by Paul Rainey are hilarious – do check them out if you like Doctor Who; and I’m just discovering Ninja Bunny, which is a lovely little creation.

How do you think gay characters are generally portrayed in comics?

The treatment of gay characters in comics is very mixed. Independent comics tend to have some very well written gay characters here and there – such as Maggie in Love and Rockets. Mature comics, like Vertigo, have some great gay characters scattered around, which is nice to see. Some of the specifically gay indie comics can be fairly puerile, to be honest. Just full of sex and very large body parts.

Mainstream comics seem a bit afraid of the whole thing. Northstar’s ‘coming out’ in the famous Alpha Flight issue was fairly pathetic. There’s now a lesbian Batwoman and a couple of gay guys in X-Factor – they’re being written well but they aren’t particularly rocking the world at the moment.


Who would play the leads in a Spandex movie?

Hmm, well I actually tend to envision my friends as the Spandex characters, so that’s a difficult question, and I also think Spandex would be a cool animated show. But if it was a TV series or movie – which would be equally cool – the stars would have to be very sexy…

Before Spandex, you created The O Men. Are there any plans to return to that series?

Yes definitely. There are a lot of unanswered O Men questions and I can’t leave my loyal readers dangling! I have to be honest, and say that I wanted a complete break from The O Men, as I had been working on it for 10 years – 35 issues. However, I was selling Spandex at a comic show recently and was amazed by the interest in The O Men. I think I had really under-estimated its following and maybe it was unfair of me to shelve O Men the way I did.

I found The O Men quite an intense experience, creatively, so I really had put it to one side – to the extent that one reader was recently speaking to me about an O Men storyline and I really couldn’t remember it!

I will certainly finish off The O Men series at some point – there are only about 8 issues left. That comic show I mentioned earlier, made me realise how much I actually missed the characters myself, and I’m definitely going to work on some new drawings very soon. I’m going to have to re-read the whole series before I start to plot the final few issues though, as I want to get it right and I don’t want to leave anything out.

What’s coming up for you and for Spandex?

The next big step for Spandex is a graphic novel. I’m not doing an Issue Two, I’m going straight into a book. It’ll contain five Spandex adventures, but it won’t be issues 1, 2, 3, etc, it’ll be issues 1, 4, 8, 13 and 15, and you get to see the covers to the missing issues, and you can fill in the blanks of what happened yourself.

That’ll be late next year, hopefully. But to keep the ball rolling, I’ll be releasing my ‘Spandex Shorts’ – mini-comics featuring adventures of the team. Some will be written or drawn by other creators, and some will feature supporting characters, such as the dynamic duo, Bear Man & Twinkle.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Yes – please check out the website at http://spandexcomic.com. Also check out the ‘Spandex Comic’ Facebook page, and if you go over to twitter.com/spandexcomic, you can read what the characters have been getting up to (yes, really!).

And please check out Issue One, if you’re up for something that’s dramatic, funny, sexy and experimental. Hopefully you will like it!

Spandex: Issue One is out now.