Talk:Stephen Colbert's Tek Jansen Adventures (Series)

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First Look: 'Stephen Colbert's Tek Jansen'

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Stephen Colbert has branded a Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavor, a minor-league hockey team mascot, and (nearly) a bridge in Hungary. Now, the host of Comedy Central's Colbert Report is flying his geek flag with the Oni Press comic book series Stephen Colbert's Tek Jansen.

Tek Jansen, in case you're not a member of the Colbert Nation, is the hero of the sci-fi novel Stephen Colbert claims to have written, Stephen Colbert's Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure. The real Colbert's credit on the comic is Galactic Overlord, which translates roughly to co-creator.

Each of the five issues — the first of which hits shelves July 11 — features two tales. The main serialized story, written by Scarface's John Layman and Hourman's Tom Peyer with art by Scott Chantler (Northwest Passage), follows the intergalactic war Tek sets off when he assassinates a leader of a benevolent alien race called Optiklons. They've offered to give the citizens of Alphalon-7 stupefyingly sophisticated technology, capable of permanently eradicating hunger, greed, suffering and unhappiness — if the Aphalons agree to donate one micro-percentage of their surplus energy reserves to a less fortunate planet. It's easy to understand why Tek doesn't trust the Optiklon: Think about it. In a world where everybody's cared for, how could you be treated better than the next guy?

If that sounds like a Colbert-ian zinger, it should: Colbert went through the script line by line. Says Layman, We'd get notes, like 'Oh, you know, I was rereading this on my porch Saturday...' I've had editors who don't pay that close attention. There's quite a bit of back-and-forth because I think Stephen Colbert is a geek.

Though the serious Report fan admits that he and Peyer initially went in the wrong direction — We wrote it as if it was Stephen Colbert in space, so he had a robot eagle sidekick and he was going after alien bears — they ultimately found the sweet spot. Tek's got a radioactive robotic monkey sidekick, Layman says. He's got an evil pet named Meangarr, this giant energy void, that has vowed to kill him if he ever escapes. And then he has girlfriend after girlfriend after girlfriend. Tek Jansen fans will be happy to hear that the sci-fi sex god even winds up nude for the first story's final three pages. We had him wake up to a ['hot Skeletahn'] alien and he's late and running off to assassinate the Optiklon leader, Layman says. The artist decided to keep him naked because we never said 'He stops and puts on his clothes.' Suddenly we're getting pages, and here's Tek Jansen's butt — and it's funny. (Colbert must've agreed; he signs off on the art as well.)

Each issue's secondary tale, written by Jim Massey with art by his Maintenance collaborator Robbi Rodriguez, is an independent, self-contained case file that forces Tek to go undercover. We phoned Massey for the skinny on his first installment, Horn Like Me!, the line that cracked Colbert up the most, and why he's yet to meet the man in person.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did you get involved with Tek Jansen? JIM MASSEY: I'm a really big Colbert fan, and as soon as I saw that [Oni Press] got the deal, I IM'd [editor in chief James Lucas Jones] probably once or twice a day for a good month: Hey, who's gonna do Tek Jansen? I think I should do Tek Jansen. Have you got anybody for Tek Jansen? I can do Tek Jansen. I basically just bothered him until he crumbled and gave up, and said, Okay, why not?

Why so eager? It's wacky science fiction, which opens up limitless possibilities for goofball scenarios and crazy alien characters. But I also thought it offered a really interesting challenge: It's a fictional character based on a fictional Tek Jansen book, which is supposedly written by Stephen Colbert, who is actually Stephen Colbert playing a character named Stephen Colbert. So there's like four or five layers of fictionalizing going on there. Trying to figure out where, in all those layers, you start building the character is fun.

Tell us about Horn Like Me! Tek travels to the planet Rombaron, where the Horn-headed race has been oppressing the Plain-headed race for centuries. Tek is sent undercover to infiltrate the Horn-heads and establish an opposing political party. I was just looking for some physical characteristic that I could apply to this alien race that had no intrinsic worth to the value of a person, but was just an excuse for bias and prejudice. Originally, it was gonna be Green Like Me!, and it was going to be like green skin versus blue skin. And my editor and I talked about it, and we felt like it was a little too on the nose. So we took it away from skin color, and just made it the horns. And honestly, the inspiration for the story itself is Dr. Seuss' Sneetches book, where they've got the Star-Belly Sneetches and the Plain-Belly Sneetches and they hate other because one has stars and the other doesn't. One of the shops in the background of a scene [in Horn Like Me!] is even named Sneetch & Sons. The title Horn Like Me! is lifted from the famous Black Like Me book, where the white journalist [John Howard Griffin] goes undercover in the South as a black man and gets a firsthand experience of racism. I wanted to echo that in the title, just to point out the ridiculousness of it all.

You send off a draft to Colbert's people, and they send back his notes. What kind of stuff does he say? He mostly addresses individual lines and jokes, but he did provide some direction to help clarify things for me. The note that had the most impact was his desire that Tek Jansen not have any reference to the reality of our Earth. I think he realized that the fact that the Tek character exists in the context of the Colbert show means that it has some echoes of the real world no matter what you put in — so it's almost too on-the-nose to make jokes that reference real-world goings on. So if, say, I would make a joke based on mad cow disease, that wasn't appropriate.

Did he give you any notes on this line, from when Tek meets Doris the Plain-head waitress: But I remembered my mission. If I was successful, it would be like making love to her entire race, metaphorically, especially with regard to the males. I can hear him saying that. That's all mine, baby. He seemed to really like the line [that set it up]: Beneath her sadness, she was beautiful. For a moment, I considered making love to her, to boost her self-esteem. He was a big fan of that line, so that won me a lot of points.

Have you met Stephen Colbert in person? I haven't. I had the opportunity to meet him at the New York comic convention earlier this year, but that happened to be the same weekend as the national dog agility competition. My wife and I have five dogs that we take to agility competitions every weekend. Dogs took the priority...

Did they take home a medal or a ribbon or something? Well, not really. But they did a great job, and they had fun.

[Note: Layman did meet Colbert at the New York Comic Con, where he watched Colbert and a science fiction expert spend 20 minutes talking about obscure sci-fi short stories as they tried to remember the name of one from the 1950s. Yes, Colbert is a geek.]