The public domain is this rich, ever-expanding galaxy of characters we can all tap into for movies, video games, or even a text-based musical I’m working on. But few people have really leaned into this resource like writer James Aquilone (Kolchak: The Night Stalker – 50th Anniversary) and artist Zac Atkinson (Young Justice, Transformers), who hit up the public domain hard with their crowdfunding comics series, The Omega Eleven.
The five-issue project focuses on the time-traveling adventures of Doctor Omega, a character created in 1906 by French author Arnould Galopin (and who was inspired by the work and heroes in H.G. Wells’ novels like The Time Machine). In The Omega Eleven, the good doctor and his companion, The Artful Dodger, hit the ol’ time-stream to “gather history’s greatest thieves to pull off an impossible heist and save the Omniverse.” That includes a jaunt to “Camelot to steal the Philosopher’s Stone from Merlin” in the first issue.
The Omega Eleven Kickstarter runs through Thursday, March 7 and has already raised $9,000-plus of its original $4,000 goal. (To support the campaign in its final important days, head here.) As part of the lead-up to The Omega Eleven, we spoke to both Aquilone and Atkinson recently via Zoom. There, we discussed their introduction to Doctor Omega, exploring the public domain, other guests across this series, and the book’s own inspirations, among other topics and tidbits.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
AIPT: What’s the elevator pitch for The Omega Eleven?
James Aquilone: I always explain it as a Doctor Who meets Ocean’s Eleven sprinkled with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
AIPT: Really all you need to say.
I am curious, though: I’ve never really heard of Doctor Omega before. What can you tell us about him and writing in that “universe?”
Zac Atkinson: I didn’t know anything about Doctor Omega, either. So I’m happy that everybody else is telling me they’ve never heard of him either, because that would be weird if everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, we knew all this time. Where have you been for 100 years?’ He sounds like a character that we know because of that name.
JA: Zach had found him. And then he came up with the idea for the series. So he brought that to me. And then I looked up Doctor Omega and I was floored that I’d never heard of him. Or I thought, ‘Maybe it’s like the Mandela effect,’ where I thought I knew it but I didn’t. Zac, how did you find him?
ZA: I wanted to do public domain characters and I wanted to do a group of them. And I was just looking around and I think I found an article talking about Doctor Omega and how the alleged connection to Doctor Who, and that he might’ve been the inspiration because he looked like William Hartnell, who was the first Doctor. I think why most people around here have never heard of him because it was mostly a French, old-school public domain character who is very, very influenced by H.G. Wells,
AIPT: Zac, what was the idea of doing characters that were in the public domain?
ZA: I’m a big Alan Moore fan, but have you ever read Warren Ellis’ Planetary?
AIPT: Oh yes.
ZA: He tried to do an old-school Justice League with Doc Savage and The Shadow. That was, like, my favorite thing. I thought, ‘I wish you could really do that. And I was trying to think…as old as those characters are, they’re not public domain now. We could do Sherlock Holmes and Zorro and Robin Hood, but they’re all like hundreds of years apart. So when I found Doctor Omega — I may have been looking for time travelers and H.G. Wells’ Time Machine — I thought I could do a Doctor Who-type [story] that goes around and collects other legends from different times. But it really started with Warren Ellis and Alan Moore playing with those characters and trying to figure out how to bring them together from all different places and time periods.
Courtesy of Monstrous Books.
AIPT: Are there any unique challenges of working with characters in the public domain?
ZA: I think one of the cool things about Doctor Omega, like we were saying, is that people aren’t familiar with him, which is unusual with a public domain character. With most of those characters, especially ones that are 100 years old or more, people have so many different versions of them. There’s so many different versions of Sherlock Holmes. It’s kind of crazy. So it’s pretty rare to find a really cool public domain character like Doctor Omega who hasn’t been used to death. So the interesting thing is that we can do what we want with the character and change him because people don’t come with preconceived notions of who the character is. So I don’t think people will be saying, ‘Oh, you ruined Doctor Omega.’
JA: We might get into trouble in France.
ZA: I think the idea is to try to change him and do a new take. Unlike Doctor Omega, the other public domain characters have been done so many times in so many different versions. Then the challenge really becomes like, ‘How do we make Sherlock Holmes now, the 10,000th version of him, interesting?’
AIPT: Speaking of other characters, the book features the Artful Dodger, who has been done a few times. What’s interesting about that character?
ZA: That was James’ idea. And we kind of turned him into Short Round. And I gave him a trench coat, and that turned him into Data, which is [played by] the same guy [actor Ke Huy Quan]. Now he’s my favorite character.
JA: What we’re trying to do is that Doctor Omega is bringing in and gathering all these different thieves throughout history to pull off this heist. So I was just thinking, ”What cool thieves were out there,’ and so I came on the Artful Dodger and I was thinking they were a sidekick that Omega could have. Dodger is someone who’s maybe a little rough around the edges who would be that wil card who was starting a lot of trouble. So I thought the Artful Dodger would be an interesting character to play with. After we came up with the idea — I think we already started with the series — we heard that there was a new BBC series called [Dodger].
AIPT: I love the idea of — and I don’t want to say people aren’t as well read nowadays — but there’s way more opportunities right now to pull these characters out and do something different.
JA: I like the idea of putting literary characters…and then throwing him into a pulpy world where he doesn’t belong. So when you’re dealing with these characters, you have so many of these works that are now available through public domain. And why not? Why not go into the world of myth or fine literature and, I guess, corrupt them. Now we throw the same in a comic book and get even more people.
Courtesy of Monstrous Books.
ZA: I think what’s funny, and it’s pretty much unintentional, is all the Marvel and DC stuff got these multiverse timelines. And we’re playing with the timeline and we’re riffing off these characters, almost going to make variants of these characters. It feels like we’re doing a little bit of parody of Marvel and DC, and I kind of love that.
JA: It’s not so much intentional, but it makes us seem like we’re more clever than we are maybe.
AIPT: Some of it’s cool, but some of it gets a little tired. But this feels like a multiverse I’m familiar with. People of a certain age probably know Artful Dodger, and even if not a character like that can speak to you. But it’s nice to see, ‘Here’s the Artful Dodger, but he’s a thieving bastard.
JA: I don’t even think Gen Z will get that. Do they know who the Artful Dodger is?
But when I was young, they had the Oliver! movie. There were a couple of versions of Oliver Twist that were around at the time.
ZA: My main exposure was Disney with the little dogs, Oliver & Company. Cheech Marin was a Chihuahua.
AIPT: When I was a kid, I had these illustrated versions of classic novels that were for kids. That’s how I know about Call of the Wild and Oliver Twist. So I have a very specific idea in my head of Artful Dodger.
ZA: Right, and I knew that wasn’t my strength. That’s why I needed someone who’s more knowledgeable about those things. Like, I’m good at Wikipedia knowledge of things, especially with the public culture and old stuff. But I don’t know what makes them tick and what makes them cool. That’s why I thought James was the perfect person because he was doing that stuff a little bit with all his projects…bringing back the classic monsters. Kolchak is a bit of a deep cut for this generation, but it was such a cool property. It was just having that knowledge to find that thing that’s been forgotten about and bringing it out and giving it new exposure and knowing when it would be popular again.
AIPT: James, I’m curious because we hinted at this idea earlier, but how do you relate to these characters? And how do you use them if they’ve already been done before?
JA: Now I keep thinking of this Chihuahua. Now I want to put that somehow in there.
But this is a different thing than when we’re doing Kolchak. When we did Kolchak, it was all about really staying faithful to the TV series. We really wanted to stick to that and we wanted to stick to the spirit of Kolchak. And we didn’t really change anything with that. It was just about like, ‘We want to really pay tribute to Kolchak and make it feel like this is the second season of Kolchak. So we really handled that differently than I would handle something like this, where would even something like the Awful Dodger, I want to know less about him. I don’t really even want to do research it because I want to create a new character.
Courtesy of Monstrous Books.
Even with Doctor Omega, I didn’t even want to read the novel because I didn’t want to be influenced by it. And like I said, it wasn’t that well known of a character. So I don’t think people will really be looking out for certain aspects the way they would for a Kolchak. So I wanted to make it our own character. So we throw in stuff from the novel, like the ship, and the Repulsite, which I thought was cool. But a lot of the other stuff we just threw out. He wasn’t even necessarily a time traveler. I think he traveled to Mars and he just encounters weird stuff. He’s on the ship with just two other dudes, and so I don’t know who they are. So that type of stuff we just throw out. I would rather, with someone like Omega or even Dodge, not get too deep into their actual literary histories and just jump off that and do something different with that. And with Merlin, who has been done so many times, I don’t want to do the same Merlin. We just want to make it something different and something people wouldn’t expect. So I don’t want to get too deep into the research for that. With Kolchek though, it’s totally about making sure everything is right down to his shoes.
ZA: Because you’ll have people who will yell at you if his shoes are way off.
JA: I think [Zac] colored the shoes black, and they’re supposed to be white.
ZA: No one yelled about that, though. And, in my defense, I was watching that series to color it.
AIPT: We mentioned Dodger and Merlin, but are there any other famous or historical characters from the public domain that you can kind of tease that pop up?
JA: Morgan le Fay — that artwork is on the page.
We were just talking about the ending of the first issue, which would have a surprise appearance by two foreign traveling guys. There’s a few time traveling duos out there, but it won’t be them exactly. But at the end, there will be a surprise appearance.
I think there’s going to be a lot of surprises throughout. And then #2 two, we get more into the Omega and the characters. I was thinking that, maybe at the end or toward the end of the campaign, we could share some artwork for at least one of the characters. But it’s driving me crazy because Zac has so much great art for the other characters who aren’t appearing yet in issue #1, and so maybe we’ll show something from some of the other characters later on.
Courtesy of Monstrous Books.
Also, it’s going to be a series of heists, so you can kind of figure out probably get an idea that we’re aiming for thieves and rogues.
ZA: I would love to somehow figure a way to get Hans Gruber. You know, Alan Moore had James Bond in League without naming him. So if we can just find a way of doing that, that would be really cool.
AIPT: Now I’m curious about when Hans Gruber is in the public domain.
JA: I don’t know if Hans Gruber is in the novel that came out in the ’70s…
AIPT: In the next five years, it’s going to be interesting as characters enter the public domain.
ZA: Buck Rogers is already in the public domain.
AIPT: That got me thinking about Steamboat Willie just entering the public domain. You guys are kind of getting the jump on it.
JA: Shazam is in the public domain, but you can’t use Shazam and you can’t use Captain Marvel. But there’s a bunch of other characters, like Captain Future and other things. And I’m all about mashing up two characters and getting a good interpretation of what you’re going for without stepping on anybody’s toes. You basically write all these books with a lawyer to make sure.
ZA: I would love to do Tarzan and that’s technically public domain, right?
JA: The first few books are, but I know there’s a big lawsuit with Dynamite and Edgar Rice Burroughs estate because Dynamite was doing the Tarzan comic, but they weren’t calling it Tarzan. It was Lord of the Jungle or something. I think it’s something similar with Zorro — you you can do Don Diego de la Vega, but you can’t really do Zorro. Buck Rogers is sort of similar with Anthony Rogers.
AIPT: Were there any characters that you wanted to do for this book that didn’t work out maybe because they weren’t quite in the public domain or you just didn’t have time to put them?
ZA: Well, there was a lot that I wanted to do, but when we kind of decided we’re gonna do thieves and rogues and we transitioned from it. So we’re not going to necessarily do Sherlock Holmes right away. He was the most obvious and it’s like, ‘Well, Sherlock Holmes is going to be involved in the heist? Probably not.’ I always wanted to do Commander Cody. There’s one called Sky Marshals From Mars or something like that; I always thought about doing a character and just updating them and calling them Sky Marshal would be fun. But that doesn’t really fit with what we’re doing. Maybe later on, though.
Courtesy of Monstrous Books.
JA: One of the ideas we had is maybe doing a group that’s going after our initial group. And those are more of the authoritative public domain characters or mashups of those types. That’d be kind of cool.
AIPT: Are there any big moments or action you can tease out?
ZA: We’ve mentioned Robin Hood. We’re definitely going to get at least one classic monster in there; we’re still trying to figure out exactly how to do it.
JA: Whatever world they’re going to go to is probably going to be more like a fantasy or literary type world. Then, when they go somewhere else, it might be 1700s England. We have a very cool one set up for issue #2, which actually isn’t a literary world. It’s a movie world, but it’s public domain. It’s a sci-fi movie that’s in the public domain. That’s all I’ll say.
AIPT: Last thing: do you have any final sales pitches about why somebody should care about this book? Why should anyone contribute to the Kickstarter?
ZA: Well, support indie creators. We’re creating our own universe here with characters and trying to come up with an original spin on things. And it’s definitely fun. It’s got comedy. It’s got sci-fi. It’s got a little bit of violence. Just a little. A lot of action. It’s going to be a lot of fun versions, new versions of characters people thought they were familiar with.
JA: We have a lot of surprises, and so a lot of things will be spoiler-y. But in the first issue, Omega’s there in Camelot to steal Merlin’s philosopher’s stone. That basically triggers all the events of the story, and that will lead him to having to gather up all of these thieves throughout history to pull off this impossible heist to save the omniverse, which we can say he almost destroys in the process. In between all that, it’ll be all of the intrigue and going into these different worlds and stuff like that. We’ll have all these different characters and they’ll be the antagonist coming in and and trying to stop them. So it is a lot, but it’s been a lot of fun to work on. I think that people will see that once they start reading the comics. It’s a lot of fun and very interesting.
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