11 March 16
OVERLORD was an important milestone for the Jeff Hawke strip as it saw the beginning of the long and fruitful collaboration between Sydney and Willie Patterson , a creative partnership which brought about what many readers regard as the “Golden age “ of the strip which lasted until the spring of 1969 when Willie had to give up his work due to ill health.
But OVERLORD also saw another innovation which was to become a hallmark of the strip, namely the introduction of a prologue to the stories in the form of Mephisto and the troll. Sydney remembers that he had been casting about for some device which would create a break between one story and another and yet would form a smooth transition between the end of one and the start of the next. He and Willie decided that a prologue of some sort was
needed and Mephisto and the little troll came into being. Mephisto himself is suave and sophisticated, Shakespearian in his posture and delivery while the troll is the underdog and is definitely Horatio to Mephisto’s Hamlet. Sydney says that their relationship reflected, in a light-hearted way, that between Willie and himself. Willie, the urbane and sophisticated man of the world, with a refined taste for the good things in life which belied his humble origins, is obviously Mephisto ,while Sydney, in a claim made with a degree of light-hearted disingenuousness , says that he was the downtrodden troll . The Mephisto character in his attitudes owes something to C S Lewis’ devil -Screwtape , while his physical appearance owes more than a little to Doré’s demonic depictions in his illustrations to Dante’s inferno.
These characters developed as the stories unfolded and their prologues and epilogues ( for they served as both) became also a sort of Greek chorus , commenting on the actions which were about to take place. According to Sydney their misty and amorphous abode is none other than the imagination of the writer and the artist and they can conjure up objects from the stories by merely mentioning them. For instance, in their brief appearance after SURVIVAL , Mephisto has but to mention the wondrous lamp from the next story , when it appears in his hand . Theatrically speaking it is as if they live in the wings , surrounded by props and stage furniture while the stories themselves are enacted on the main stage. Skipper Prossitt
