OSCAR: The Second Coming

Description

Dan Pearce’s amazing tale of Oscar Wilde in the 21st century

‘It’s delightful! Very, very funny … Anyone with a true sense of him should find it wholly engaging!’

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.

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.

“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.”