Harker Issue Twelve - annotations

Page One
We thought it was a bit of a stretch that Critchley would have his phone with him whilst still in his football kit - where did he get it from? Vince did ask the question (and even suggested having Critchley back in his suit, having quickly changed after the match), but I thought the idea of Critchley in his kit was funny and wanted to keep him that way. So we decided he just had time to grab his phone on the way out. Works for me ;)


Page Two
We've been planning this foggy run across the moors (a blatant, shameless steal from The Hound of the Baskervilles) since the start of the story - if you check the various newspapers Vince has been drawing throughout Book Two, you'll catch a number of references to the fog rolling in. And a running gag of Vince's about how bad the Whitby football team is. I have no idea if this is true, and apologise profusely to the local team if they're actually doing rather well. Luckily no-one seems to have told them yet ;)
Those readers who know Whitby well will also know that the moors are actually a couple of miles away from the town. In Harker's world we've changed that, a convenience of fiction.

Page Four
It was Vince's idea that our own monster hound should be really friendly, especially as we'd had him lurking on the sidelines for a few issues. I heartily approved.

Page Eight
"I'm a friend to all animals" is a little personal joke that I often say myself. The truth is that most animals seem to have a complete distrust of me, and I thought it would be funny to have Harker suffering from a similar problem. I think that most dogs would at the very least growl when Harker was close by.
"Maybe Timmy's fallen down a well" is a reference to the Australian children's series 'Skippy', in which the kangaroo of the title seemed to be perpetually telling humans about the latest catastrophe to have befallen his owner.

Page Ten
Critchley in a football kit climbing down a rock face because a dog told him to. I'd like to see the police report on that one too. I love the expression Vince has given the dog here when he's looking up at Harker.

Page Twelve
It's a rule of detective fiction that if you have a chase on the moors, someone has to end up sinking in a mire. Which again dates back to The Hound of the Baskervilles, of course. I remember as a kid that a week never seemed to go by on telly without someone getting stuck in quicksand. It was either that or being threatened by a rattlesnake. You never see either of those these days, drama has become much more sophisticated. It's our pleasure to help redress that balance. *coughs*

Page Seventeen
Another convenience of fiction here, in which we have the moors leading all the way to the clifftops. We're very deliberately riffing on classic detective and romantic fiction here - the clifftop conclusion and the plummet into the unforgiving sea.

Page Nineteen
I forgot to mention it in the script here (and will pick it up in subsequent collected editions) but the lights you can see in the distance in the bottom panel are intended to be the policemen with the dogs that we saw earlier, finally arriving on the scene.