The Ballad of Lise and Drake: A Taboo Space Opera

How a Marvel Freelance Assignment Inspired a Notorious Anton Drek Character

Elsewhere, I posted scans of a freelance assignment I illustrated in 1990, "Home is a Hard Place," from a script by Will Shetterly, for the Marvel Graphics anthology Open Space.

Open Space, as I discuss, was an experiment in a shared universe separate from the mainline Marvel superhero universe. Whether it was the shared universe idea, the science fiction genre, or the anthology format, or perhaps the editorial unwieldiness of finding appropriate creative teams for multiple short stories per issue, Open Space did not prove successful, and Marvel canceled the experiment before a second assignment I illustrated for them could appear in print.

Like most freelance assignments I undertook at the time, I was doing it primarily to pay my rent. But unlike most freelance assignments, illustrating this story triggered in me a theme that would play a minor but significant role in my subsequent career.

First, although I like the art I did on it very much, I don't think the story is successful as a story, and I have a few thoughts as to why.

"The Ballad of Lise and Drake," as I have come to call it, concerns Drake, an inventor of some technology that's had a widespread impact on interstellar society, and various supply chain problems among diverse planetary systems (this aspect of the story allowed me the opportunity to draw outer space hardware, for which I was known from my series Border Worlds).

From this perspective, Drake's personal life is merely a subplot to the main action of the story. That's why I think it doesn't succeed on a satisfying, artistic, imaginative level.

The subplot, which also frames the larger story, concerns Drake's relationship with Lise, his wife. Only, Lise is not an adult.

Lise, it turns out, was killed some years before; a clone of her was grown, and her adult brain transplanted into the new body. As a result, there is quite an age disparity between Lise and Drake.

A backstory dump occurs on page 15, three-quarters of the way through the story, when Drake offers more or less a soliloquy:

Lise isn’t my daughter; she’s my wife. [...]

We transferred her brain to a clone body when it was seven, when the skull was large enough. We could’ve sped her growth with hormone treatments, but that would’ve shortened the body’s life.

So we decided to be patient. Our physical relationship is on hold for about ten more years ... seems like the best thing to do.

He later confesses to his host,

She thinks I need to get laid. Christ.

The problem is resolved when Drake subsequently beds his host, the adult woman Zora Kekana.

Of course, we never hear Lise's side of the story; their discussion of their relationship dilemma would have been far more interesting than the mineral mining storyline. We only have Drake's representation of what Lise thought or said; the woman herself has no agency. Surely an adult mind would have a much more sophisticated view of the situation than simple abstinence and celibacy - and euphemism.

Having long since lost my copy of the script, I can no longer recall what my instructions were concerning the character of Lise. Clearly, the manner in which I drew her throughout the story would not suggest she was still a decade away from an active adult sex life.

I don't know what transpired between the writer and the editors, but the entirety of page 15 always struck me as a patch, a sop, a euphemistic, Puritanical dive from the ethical issues the story itself raises and wants to explore.

Whatever the case, my art sought to subvert the chaste exegesis page 15 wants to assert in every possible way, primarily through the figure of Lise. The illustrations emphasize her ass, her arched back, her budding breasts, her tendency to sit with her knees open (offering a view of her crotch), etc., at every opportunity. (She's also shown cartwheeling, a girlish activity, and stroking Drake's head, a wifely gesture). But the girl-woman herself is never allowed the opportunity to reconcile these polarities for herself.

At the story's outset, she is seen topless on the beach and all but completely nude, wearing only a revealing thong (which was redrawn to be more modest but is still quite revealing as published), and posing for Drake, who has painted and drawn her nude figure obsessively, judging from the canvases arrayed on the beach. (A coffee-table book on the art of Paul Gauguin, notorious for screwing the native Tahitian models of his fantasy-world paintings, is clearly visible.) The story ends with Lise, topless once again, frolicking with a seashell in the surf (the impossibly tiny place they cohabit, Gauguin's grass hut, is in the background).

The story raises a taboo subject but fails to air the issue ethically. My art strives to subvert this self-censorship or blockage, but the result is only an increase in titillation. If science fiction cannot address such taboos, what good is it?

Whatever the case, I take The Ballad of Lise and Drake as emblematic of the larger Open Space series, and a major clue as to why it failed: it wasn't very good science fiction (and perhaps because voyeuristic comics aren't very good for discussing philosophical issues). When you simply cut out the most interesting themes raised by a story to concentrate on hardware and continuity and consistency for its own sake, you don't have much left, except titillating artwork.

What is noteworthy is that, in terms of my subsequent career, the figure of Lise clearly recurs in the work of Anton Drek, specifically as the unnamed cover model to Anton's Drekbook and as the "Child Bride" in Forbidden Frankenstein #1 and #2. In those subsequent works (all appearing in 1991), the themes raised by the Open Space story are explored in an even more prurient fashion, if that were possible.

Lise proved such a potent figure, in my imagination and in the oeuvre of Anton Drek, that her American Drekbook cover was repurposed the French collection of the entirety of Anton's work in 2005, beating out even the iconic Wendy Whitebread, Undercover slut for the honor.

"Lise" in America, 1991.

"Lise" en français, dans 2005.

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