I’ve known Barry for about 20 years. I met him at San Diego ComiCon when he was sharing a booth with my buddy Steve Butler. When I started publishing my comics Barry became my printer. When I heard that Gallant Comics was coming back I was very excited.
First Comics News: Let’s cover some history for readers who may not have seen Gallant Universe 1.0. When did you start publishing Gallant Comics?
Barry Gregory: 2011. Though I’d pitched the idea to Steven Butler about four years before that. The first comic published was actually titled “Gallant Comics #1”, but it wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be so I completely re-scripted it, recolored some pages, had Steven add a new scene, and then I rebranded it and published it as “John Aman Amazing Man #1” with Gallant Comics as the publisher name.
So for the new series, I kind of went back to the future.
1st: Back in 2011, what were your goals for the company?
Barry: I didn’t really have any long-term plans. I just had this idea and I was hoping a few people would read it and like it.
1st: You used public domain characters, which caused interest in these characters.
Barry: I wanted characters that the audience might already have some familiarity with. I kicked around a lot of ideas. I thought about doing superheroes based on Arthurian mythology, Greek and Roman mythology, Norse mythology, and even the signs of the Zodiac. I knew there were some heroes in the public domain but I had no idea just how many until I really got serious about lapsed copyright characters as a possibility.
1st: Which characters are part of the Gallant Universe?
Barry: Pretty much any character in the public domain I see as fair game. However, I intentionally avoided really well-known characters – like Captain Marvel or the Blackhawks – or characters whose PD status was questionable, or PD characters created by someone who was still alive. Steve Ditko was alive when I started Gallant and there are a few of his characters in the public domain but, to me, using those would have felt disrespectful.
I have softened a bit on the well-known character front, though. I used the Blue Beetle in the John Aman series and I’m including the original Daredevil in the new series.
1st: You have 48 pages and 4 stories, are they all 12-page stories?
Barry: In this first issue, yes. Though I don’t know that it’ll always be that way.
1st: Who is Firehair?
Barry: I’ve taken some liberties with the PD characters and Firehair is one I’ve taken a lot of liberties with. The original was a Western hero but my take has a contemporary setting with her as a neo-western character. She’s a former agent of the X-Bureau (the government agency overseeing superhuman affairs in the Gallant universe) who is now the Sheriff of a small county in eastern Utah.
1st: Typically Lynn Cabot had two arms. What happened to her arm?
Barry: We cover how she lost her arm in the second issue, actually. I’ve had this story idea for a character with a cybernetic arm for years and years and I’m finally getting around to telling it.
1st: Who is Jet Powers?
Barry: Jet Powers was a ’50s-era sci-fi character. He appeared briefly in the John Aman series as a science advisor to the X-Bureau.
1st: Is Jet Powers his actual name? Does he have a secret identity?
Barry: That’s his actual name and he has no secret identity. He’s a time-traveling super genius in the mold of Reed Richards or Tony Stark.
1st: Who are the Chrononauts?
Barry: The Chrononauts are a team of heroes that Jet Powers has assembled from different eras of time. They’re kind of like the Suicide Squad only instead of criminals from Belle Reeve, they are characters Jet plucked from their timeline seconds before they would have died.
1st: That brings us to Silver Streak, Would it be fair to say he is the Lev Gleason version of the Flash?
Barry: I think it’s fair to say the Lev Gleason version of this character was one of the weirdest, wackiest characters of the Golden Age. But I’m not doing him as a Gallant version of the Flash. I try not to do direct analog characters. I do indirect analogs or I suppose it would be more precise to say I do thematic analogs. For example, Funnyman might look like “What if the Joker was a good guy?” but he’s actually my take on The Incredible Hulk… a guy who physically transforms into a rampaging alter ego that he has no control over.
Silver Streak is more my take on Captain America and the Falcon. It’ll make sense when you read it. Trust me.
1st: Is Black Terror also in this story?
Barry: Yes. When I was kicking around the idea of Gallant Comics way back when I commissioned Steven Butler to design a whole bunch of updated PD characters. One of them was a gender-swapped version of the Black Terror and I loved it. I’ve been wanting to use her ever since.
1st: The last story is Daredevil, the Lev Gleason one. Tell us about Daredevil.
Barry: I took a lot of liberties with him as well. My take is a lot closer to the Spectre than he is to Marvel’s Daredevil. I also steeped him in Australian Aboriginal mythology.
1st: Gallant flagship character had been Amazing Man, is he in any of the stories?
Barry: Only on the cover of the Kickstarter Exclusive edition. I’m still looking for the right moment to bring him back.
1st: What is the minimum pledge for a digital edition?
Barry: Five bucks.
1st: What is the minimum pledge for a print edition?
Barry: Ten bucks.
1st: What is the URL for the Kickstarter?
Barry: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ka-blam/gallant-comics-1
1st: What makes this anthology so cool no true comic fan should ever miss it.
Barry: Well, it’s technically an anthology, but like all the stories I’ve written for Gallant Comics, these are interconnected. There’s a broader story happening in the background and these are all chapters in that story.
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