The Adventures of Ace Hoyle

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SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF ACE HOYLE AND HIS LADY FRIEND, DOLLY FINEGOLD, GAMBLING HAS NEVER BEEN SO NOIR AND NEVER BEEN SO MUCH FUN NOR SAFE.

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Check out excerpts from my exclusive interview with Ace Hoyle's creator, Phill Provance, below:

ACE HOYLE

I got into Noir in general, a lot of it has to do with watching old, Golden Age detective films with my step-father.

My step-dad is dyslexic, so since I was a kid his form of reading has always been watching movies, especially old ones. I've spent what must have been thousands of hours watching the classics like the Thin Man series (a personal fave) and Bogie flicks as well as Hitchcock's forays into the genre, euro-Noir... so many movies I can't even remember them all.

I developed a special love for hard-boiled lit as well, and that extended into what I consider Noir's sister genres - things like spy thrillers, police and mafia dramas, mysteries, etc. This, in turn, spilled over into my comics reading list which included things like "The Darkness" and anything by B.M. Bendis.

Also, I've always kind of been a mod, style-wise. Love the 30s/40s style and kind of wish I'd lived in that time period. But I don't feel recent Noir I've seen and read goes far enough to update the genre. Often the feeling of Golden Age Noir transposed on contemporary society comes off cheesy for me because 1930s and '40s America is a certain time and place. I don't feel the characters bend enough in a natural, human way when forced into that mold - which is why I decided to make Ace and Dolly more Gen Y, less serious.

Dolly's the more hard-boiled one with the drinking problem and the one who solves the crime/saves the day. Ace is more of her "buxom blonde" boyfriend, and in a way I hope to make a masculist critique of my generation and maybe even the feminism of my parents' generation, which I feel spurred these shifts in sexual identity. That's the deep literary stuff, so hopefully I can pull it off. I have about 200 episodes to do it in anyhow, so I think I should be able to.

To put it to you a different way, I can imagine a P.I. trying to keep afloat during the Depression on the eve of the World War being one bad motha'. I can't see a pudgy 20-something with three square meals, a college degree and a job that implies sitting all day acting the same (even if he or she IS living with mom and dad because rent has gone up exponentially since the recession started). Theoretically, character traits need motivation and cause to solidify. The cotton-candy world of the 80s and excesses of the 90s just don't give Gen Y that. In my book, we've got two personalities that dominate: A kind of over-social idiot savant and a wise, jaded decadent; those are our strong folks in this generation (in my humble opinion).

I said my character would be a classic Odysseus figure: He’d be slick and able to do just about anything, but fate would always throw him into some mess that he’d have to work his way out of. He wouldn’t be physically strong; maybe he’d even be a bit pudgy and incapable of winning a fistfight. He would have a James Bond feel but in a comical way: He wouldn’t be in control of what was going on, but would always try to come across like he was. His girlfriend would be the real hero. She’d always be getting him out of trouble and wouldn’t just wave her chest and butt around like the usual comic book heroine. It would be funny. The whole thing would be a big joke. Heck, this guy’s arch-rival would be kind of like President Bush….

*****

It made perfect sense economically: During recessions every industry goes flat except for vices like gambling, porn, booze and guns. Booze and guns you can’t really sell online, and it’s a tough moral call between the other two. Frankly, I’ve always seen myself as a pretty upstanding guy. So I felt it was a little selfish to get involved, even as a writer, in a vice industry. Still, I meant to survive the recession, and thinking that gambling was less destructive than porn – nobody, after all, gets AIDS from shuffling cards – I decided it wouldn’t be bad to work for Mike full-time.

“Mike, we’re gonna do a comic series about a professional-gambler-slash-secret-agent.”

“What?”

”Sure. You wanted something nobody else has, this is it: Doyle-Brunson-meets-James-Bond. You’re gonna love it.”

“What’s it called? We need something that works well with Google.”

“That’s easy. Call it ‘Ace Hoyle.’”

”Hoyle like the card company. Ace like a….”

”Like the card.”

“I love it.”

”I know.”

ACE HOYLE: TAKING GAMING TO THE NEXT LEVEL!

As for the art, Ace's visual creator is Tomas Batha. He's Czech and has done a helluva a good job at bringing Ace to life in an dark and edgy way that's also got elements of tongue-in-cheek comedy. Tomas and I work extremely well together and are as close a couple of friends as anyone can expect from co-workers. In fact, just two weeks ago we were roaming around Prague taking photos of the Old City for a later portion of the series and downing absinthe  in a dark hole of a bar called the Chapeau Rouge. I think it's the Eastern European thing that gives the style he developed for Ace it's originality and edge.

What does Ace think of the Noir life, I can pretty much sum it up as a kind of "What the hell's going on, and why is this happening to me?" Dolly's is "I have no clue, but now I've got to figure out how to get you out of it." I think you'll see what I mean as the series progresses.;-) Finally, furthering the cause of Noir? Well, it's a true American genre - that simple. And I think it's important on a more universal level because even if people didn't really act that way 70 or 80 years ago (or even if they did) it's so good at conveying that sense of dogged, driven, stolid American strength - the kind of feeling that can be summed up as "This is one helluva problem, but I'm gonna be the one to fix it." I think culturally we need to get that back in this country, especially now. I'm not much of a nationalist, but I do fancy myself a patriot and we need to get back to that hard-boiled soul that built this country if we all want to be sitting around discussing "genres" 70 years from now. ACE HOYLE

A new online casino information portal has launched at  AceHoyle.com complete with a poker-themed noir comic strip alongside an array of multi-media and Web 2.0 features. The brainchild of Tortola-based web development firm Media Tier Limited, AceHoyle.com features The Adventures Of Ace Hoyle, a comic strip created by writer Phill Provance and artist Tomas Batha. Chronicling the eccentric exploits of professional poker player ‘Ace Hoyle’ and his lady friend, ‘Dolly Finegold’, the series is fashioned in the style of a classic noir comic book with new episodes added weekly.