At first look, James Robinson’s Firearm appeared to be nothing more than a British version of Marvel’s Punisher; a tough guy with a bad attitude and a big gun. But first impressions can be deceiving.

Published by Malibu Comics for their Ultraverse imprint, Firearm wasn’t the typical “shoot-em up” comic that pandered to the speculator mindset of the early ‘90s. It was instead a very character-driven book, where the story mattered as much as the action – and Firearm certainly wasn’t short on action.

Robinson’s Firearm was Alec Swan, an ex-operative for a covert branch of the British secret service, called the Lodge. Sent primarily on missions against “Ultras” (the Ultraverse term for superhumans) that posed a threat against the British crown, Swan eventually left both the Lodge and England after some “unpleasant business,” which led to his taking up residence in Pasadena, CA as a private investigator. Yet even as a P.I., Swan found most of his cases dealt with Ultras, thus bringing him right back to where he started.

In a writing style similar to his critically-acclaimed Starman series over at DC, Robinson presented Swan’s story in a way that readers could get bits and pieces of his and the Lodge’s pasts throughout the short-lived series. And though it was never released, the Firearm Annual would have continued that trip down memory lane.

“I was writing a story that, and this was the perfect plan, was going to be done by two artists,” Robinson said. “Half of it was going to be done by Cully Hamner, and the other half was going to be done by Gary Erskine. And the way parts were going to intercut with each other.

“The first half, which would’ve been drawn by Cully, was going to be about one of the Hardcase villains, a big rampaging guy who was going to be running rampant through Pasadena,” he continued. “And with all the cops on full alert to deal with this guy, Alec Swan’s detective friend Ben Travers asks Swan if he’d look after his daughter, Sarah, while he’s away. So Swan agrees, since he’s not a superhero and has no reason to go out and fight this guy himself.”

With his action hero playing babysitter, Robinson takes this opportunity to clue the reader into who Travers is, what kind of relationship he has with Sarah, while at the same time exploring a more personal side of his Swan character.

“Travers is a widower, and his daughter, who’s like 14, is going through a bad period at school where she’s getting rebellious and doesn’t respect her father,” he said. “She resents him for being a black policeman in LA and all of that. So part of the story was going to be Alec Swan discussing his friendship with Travers to Sarah, as well as Swan’s own perceptions of how Travers feels about being a black cop in LA, and basically, what a really good guy Travers ultimately is and how she should give her father a second chance. And since Sarah’s always liked Swan and can talk to him like a big brother or uncle, she listens to what he has to say.”

Always aw are of keeping things lively for the reader, though, as Swan is busy explaining to Sarah what a great guy her father is, Robinson brings the reader back to the action.

“What that was going to lead up to is that this big train line runs right through Pasadena Old Town. The villain sees this train come rumbling through, and since things aren’t going his way, decides to jump the train and skip town,” Robinson said. “Seeing this, Travers jumps on the train after him, running along the train while blasting his gun at this guy; doing the whole Alec Swan thing. Meanwhile, Alec is safe at home watching this on the TV with Sarah, going, ‘Oh my god, what are you doing?!’ And that’s when we finally see how much she cares about her father, when she suddenly becomes hysterical over this brave, foolish act he’s doing.”

This part of the story was then going to end with Alec handing the kid back over to Travers.

“They joke and Alec ends up saying, ‘What the hell were you thinking,’ and he just sort of shrugs and leaves,” Robinson said. “Then we’d cut to a repeat of an earlier image of Travers running along the train firing his gun, while thinking, ‘I got to be like Alec! I got to be like Alec!’ That’s what Travers was thinking at the time he’s doing this crazy, brave thing.”

This relationship, between the former spy Swan and his friend Travers, becomes the key to Robinson revealing more about Swan’s past with the Lodge. As he explained it, Alec could be “talking about himself in a way of elucidating how he feels about Travers, as well as telling the history of the Lodge.” Here, the reader would finally learn about the highly-secretive Lodge, from its formation during WWII, to the mission where Alec is betrayed and forced to leave the shadow world that this organization was built around.

“This story was going to list all the original British Ultras that the Lodge fought and all that went on back then,” Robinson said. “One of them took over running the Lodge and one defected to Russia, like Burgess and Philby. It was going to be the Lodge’s history told in a very sort of documentational way, but showing the flaws and the weird, interesting dynamics within this bizarre cell of the British secret service.”

Robinson was also going to use the Annual to set up future stories ripe for further exploration in the monthly book.

“When I first wrote it, I had no intention of leaving the book, so it was also going to highlight one time when Swan was in the Special Boat Service, and he was sent to Gibraltar to take out a group of IRA terrorists,” he said. “It ends up that Swan eventually takes out all but one of them, but then, after one thing or another, he and the surviving terrorist get caught up in this supernatural menace while they’re trying to kill each other.”

What results is that the surviving IRA terrorist ends up saving Swan’s life, forcing Swan to let the man go with the knowledge that Swan is indebted to the Irishman.

“In the monthly comic, I intended that the debt would finally come in and Swan would have to go and help this guy in a bad situation” Robinson said. “What I was then going to try and do was spend a few issues with Alec Swan and this guy arguing and debating the various sides of the whole Irish problem; the trouble within Ireland. So anyway, the Gibraltar affair was in a little flashback as part of what Alec is going to tell the daughter, and that would have been a set up for another story arc in the future.”

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much of a future left for Firearm. Although Robinson came back to Malibu to write a three-part backup story in the Codename: Firearm limited series, he ended the regular book with issue #18.

“The contracts that we wall originally signed were only for 12 issues,” he said. “After that, it was kind of at our discretion. I don’t know what it was, but I just had this bad feeling about Malibu when I was setting up the whole ‘Rafferty Saga’ at the time, so I just decided that would be it. that would be where it ended.”

This article originally appeared in Overstreet’s FAN #15, September 1996.