Available now, a new full-colour version of this 1986 mini comic.
If asked, I might sometimes tell you that the five Astorial Stories amount to some form of Christian allegory, an update on The Pilgrim’s Progress, or a retelling of Old Testament myths in a very oblique fashion. If that’s true, then The Roof Runner figure is my version of Lucifer. His convoluted scheme in this story is to confuse and misdirect, thus endangering the lives of a coach-load of tourists who are driving through the Astorial Hotel, a building which for the purposes of this story has become a gigantic endless motorway without any boundaries or signposts. Without a doubt this bus is a “Ship of Fools”, another popular allegorical symbol sometimes used by early modern painters such as Hieronymus Bosch.
The Roof Runner’s diabolical aspects are touched upon in another later story called ‘Filthy Nicholls’, where a misanthropic and anti-social Hotel guest invokes the Devil by reciting a list of his hidden names – as happens on the coach too, suggesting that one of the travellers is either very bored or unrepentant. My favourite such name is “The Black Commando”. The Roof Runner also invades a chapel in the story called ‘The Sect of the Chimera’. Both of these tales appears in my Astorial Compendium published in late 2021, although the stories predate that.
In today’s ship of fools story, The Roof Runner can appear almost sympathetic to a reader, due to his outlaw, maverick tendencies, looking down from his perch on the lowly humans, flying across the ceilings and windows like some comic book superhero, and outwitting his pursuers through stealth, silence, and cunning. This isn’t to say we should try and get inside the head of the Devil, and I think John Milton and William Blake made a much more convincing attempt of doing this in their works.
That aside, the other theme I wanted to convey in this story was the sense of a long journey in the dark on a cold and cheerless bus that never seems to arrive. This was based directly on my experience of a bus journey back to London from Cambridge. I’ve since endured far worse journeys, and on other vehicles, but none have seemed so bleak and forlorn as that one, the sky outside the windows as black as pitch.
