OSCAR: THE SECOND COMING

The cover of Oscar: The Second Coming by Dan Pearce

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Dan Pearce’s Tale of Oscar Wilde Transported to the 21st century

by Paul Halas

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What would Oscar Wilde make of modern day Britain? And what would modern day Britain make of a latter day Oscar Wilde?

In this beautifully illustrated graphic novel, Dan Pearce brings the celebrated and notorious Victorian wit a century into the future, with great humour and a Wildean sense of mischief in his own right. When asked how Oscar – the Second Coming was created, Dan recounts:

“My first introduction to Oscar Wilde was a performance of The Importance of Being Ernest by a local repertory company in my early teens, followed later by reading The Portrait of Dorian Gray and other works, but it was reading Richard Ellman’s biography that really brought the man to life. He seemed to me to be what we needed: a man for the new century, a millennium man.

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During 1996-7 I wrote and drew a comic strip for Punch – the celebrated humour magazine: Men Behaving Badly, about John Major, the Conservative Prime Minister and his cabinet, and the strip ended when Tony Blair and the Labour Party won the election. I was ready to continue the strip with the new government but the magazine editor said no– he wanted something new from me: did I have any ideas? Well, he had already seen some early pages of an accurate biography of Oscar Wilde that I’d created – his early childhood and family, etc – and had liked them, but he wondered if I could somehow make the comic contemporary. Completely off the top of my head I suggested that Oscar could be abducted by aliens and returned 100 years later… and thus the seed for Oscar – the Second Coming was sown.

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“After ringing family and friends with the happy news – this was a big project, for a generous fee – returned to the Punch offices the next day to sign the contracts for the strip, only to find that the editor had been sacked and replaced the previous evening and all his projects cancelled. This was dreadful shock, as you can imagine, but I knew the idea was a good one and persevered with it in my own time.”

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Dan is an artist-illustrator who has always gone his own way. From an early age he was always drawing and painting, and took an interest in graphic novels when introduced at the age of seven to Herge’s Tintin books. The fact that they were in French only made them more intriguing. Fast forward ten years and he discovered the iconic Zap Magazine, and the bizarre and mind-blowing comix of such artists as Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton and Stephen Clay-Wilson… This brave new world played a major part in Dan to becoming both a freelance illustrator and fine artist.

Dan has led a nomadic existence, having lived and worked in England, Wales, Spain, Morocco, Italy and finally in England again, in a fine Victorian house, filled with artworks, in St Leonard’s on Sea. He is currently working on a new graphic novel, Depression, which we fully expect will also be published by AN Editions in due course.

Although Dan was well aware that very few artists ever make a living wage, the direction of his life was set. His output over the years has included editorial work, magazine illustration, book and record covers, and cartoons and strips in a variety of publications.

He also worked with an anti-nuclear power group, with whom he produced an anti-nuclear puppet show, after which he came up with his first graphic novel in 1982, Critical Mess, starring the infamous Drain Pig – a wonderful, anti-heroic creation. Although not in print now, this book earned several several glowing reviews (very apt for an anti-nuclear stance), and can still be obtained secondhand. All the while, Dan painted too, eschewing trends and producing a variety of works that are both distinctive and personal.