What the Hell am I doing this for?

I’m a bit of a non-entity. Ask anyone who knows me, although there are fewer people every day who’ll own up to that. I write stories, but whenever I think about mentioning that, I just remember Peter Cook’s answer whenever someone told him they were writing a book: “Me neither!” Whatever stories I might have to tell are currently of interest to nobody but editors, who simply haven’t time enough to give them more than a quick skim and a form response. Editing is a thankless job in a shrinking industry and it doesn’t pay so well. I get it.

If I want to reach anyone I have to do something that might interest some people, however few. Fulfil a want.

Boo hoo. So what?

When I was a precocious nine-year-old (as opposed to a merely disappointing 48-year-old) I was an avid reader of 2000AD, and had been for three years or so. Having been weaned off of superheroes, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, they had a superhero strip, of sorts. It was called Zenith and I loved it. It had a cocky, self-absorbed, rude protagonist; a mastermind who wasn’t just a telepath but a genius; despicable occult Nazis; people killing each other horrifically, Lovecraftian eldritch stuff; all the stuff a fat little pre-pubescent ghoul like me could want. Even though I wasn’t familiar with Lovecraft, plenty of works had primed me for it, but that’s neither here nor there. That’s another story.

Of course, it wasn’t all of a sudden. It didn’t come out of nowhere. And as the rest of the books (or ‘phases’) of Zenith came out, and I read and re-read the comics again as an adolescent, and an adult, then an increasingly old and irrelevant adult, I started to notice the various references and homages and outright lifts. Not all of them, of course, but enough to know there was a lot I wasn’t seeing. Sites like Seizing the Fire and International Hero helped fill in a lot of gaps.

Get to the point.

Which brings us up to the late spring / early summer of 2026, when, needing something to do, I realised that nobody had actually had a go at a full set of annotations for Zenith. Why not? It’s been nearly forty years. All I’d have to do is sit on my fat arse, read comics, look stuff up, and take notes. Three months and 200,000 words later I had a bunch of documents which will form the core of this site: Pugmarks.

The plan is to update the site once a week, every week, with a set of annotations for an episode of Zenith, starting with the prologuue for Phase I, all the way to zzzzenith.com, the finale.

This is also an attempt to exercise my technical skills: not just to bring my knowledge of HTML and CSS up to date, but also to develop a working knowledge of microformats. And since Neocities is a static host and thus I don't have access to PHP or databases, I have to write Python scripts to help update multiple pages at once. Every piece of work should be an opportunity to learn something.

Why Pugmarks?

A pugmark is the pawprint or footprint of an animal. It’s derived from the Hindi word pag, meaning ‘foot’ and is typically used to refer to the tracks of tigers and other big cats. Dr Peyne conceived of his superhumans as tigers, after the William Blake poem ‘the Tyger’.

So at least you've learned one interesting fact from this page.