Back in 2000 I came up with the idea of drawing and writing a comic strip for Channel 4s motoring website. It featured a private eye from 1973 who got into a scrap and was thrown into a freezer only be revived 27 years later. Five panels appeared each week on the website for several months and it got a cult following - a small one. However, plenty of people agreed with me that taking a hard living no-nonsense bloke from the 70s and pitching him into the noughties was a good idea. He had the dress sense of Jason King, but the no-nonsense approach of Jack Regan. Add classic cars and music into the mix and you have a winner.

Now because I was writing this for a motoring website everything was aimed at the car enthusiast. Even so I wanted to make the reader think a bit, so Spencer Haze had been put in a freezer for a reason and once defrosted had scores to settle and conspiracies to unravel. That is why I gave Spencer a female guide (Saffron) to this new planet he has landed on, and that is a phrase used in the first few frames of the story. Add into the mix our hero being talked at by a TV and drifting back to 1973 to make sense of the story it is not surprising that I started to see parallels between this story and the BBCs Life on Mars. I had turned my cartoon strip into a TV script an submitted it to the BBC in 2001. When the show appeared in 2006, I had several people ask me if it had anything to do with me as the themes were so similar.

Soon to be a major motion EBook and also visit the website www.spencerhaze.com

Also click the trailer below