Major Story Arcs

Origin

The emphatically pneumatic and brash Amanda “Mandy” Flynn starts off as a prostitute in Victorian London. As she brings a trick back to her place, she finds an eight-foot-tall yellow alien trying to hang himself. The john runs off and Mandy talks the alien, whom she names Bozz, down.

They become friends. He tells her that he crashed on Earth and desperately wants to return home; his despondency over this is what led him to try to kill himself.

Mandy is immediately taken with him and decides to devote herself to making him happy. They start a detective business, Boswell and Flynn, and specialize in unusual cases, which keep Bozz’s mind occupied and off the idea of suicide.

Hand of Four

One of their first prominent cases involves the group called the Hand of Four. They find that Lord Giles Morgan has seemingly been killed multiple times, and yet is still clearly alive and kicking. One of his secretaries was also been killed by a lightning bolt during a cloudless day. They investigate, with Mandy taking on a variety of false identities to do so. This is a common strategy of hers; in this story alone she pretends to be a reporter, a male Scotland Yard detective, and an inspector from the Ministry of Health. She is often very clever in her investigations, and uses men's sexual condescension towards her to her advantage. For instance she beats a guy in arm wrestling by putting some slippery make-up under his elbow.

However Bozz gets disheartened and considers killing himself again before Mandy (who by now has fallen in love with him) gives him an idea to solve the case. They use his powers to search London for unusual electrical discharges, and find a giant machine hidden in a warehouse. They confront the men inside, include Mr. Peebles, who explains that he is the leader of the Hand of Four, a group of plutocrats who want to take over England. They have built a machine, designed by Dr. Pretorius, that can control electricity in many incredible ways. They are using Lord Morgan as their political operative, and have used their machine to reanimate him twice.

Dr. Pretorius is able to capture Bozz using the machine’s stasis field, but Mandy escapes. She runs across Salem, an American cow-puncher, and he agrees to come back and help. They manage to rescue Bozz, destroy the machine, and defeat the Hand of Four. Their success brings them to the attention of actual male Scotland Yard inspector Colin Fitzroy.

Raising Hell

Salem moves in and the three of them start a happy, if somewhat feisty, life as a group of misfits. Salem often cooks truly terrible food and Mandy is loath to eat it, while Bozz tends to float about the house naked, talking with animals.

Due to their success with the Hand of Four, Inspector Fitzroy asks them to look into some recent demon sightings—many of their cases involve such supernatural or science fiction situations. He also asks Mandy out to dinner, but Salem insists she eats with him.

They trace the supernatural energy to the house of Samantha Townes, but her husband has been locked up in his room for weeks and won’t speak to them. They go to speak to his brother, an antiques dealer, but have no luck there either. On their way home they are attacked by demons, but they escape with the help of Bozz’s abilities. Even with all this excitement, Bozz is lonely, and doesn’t realize how much Mandy is in love with him. They return to the Townes’s house, and break into the husband, Bradley’s, room. It turns out that he is a sorcerer, albeit a bad one, and has turned his head upside-down! His brother Harry comes in and they discover he is the real villain, being jealous of Bradley’s position in the family. He sabotaged Bradley’s spells, and is a much more powerful sorcerer.

They confront him, and Bozz is able to defeat Harry’s supernatural powers with his own alien powers.

The Tomorrow Man

The trio goes out for fun at the carnival, where Bozz meets a street child, Ollie, and goes off with him. Mandy is worried, but can’t find him and instead meets Fitzroy, who starts to really woo her, inciting jealously on Salem’s part. Fitzroy tells them about some dead bodies that have been showing up with strange objects, which we would recognize as technology of the twentieth century. Just then Ollie shows up and tells them that Bozz was hurt in an accident, and he took him to a mysterious doctor who lives in the sewers, but the doctor wouldn’t let him in.

They run off to find Bozz. The doctor, Alfred Paine, has created a giant underground utopia where people dress in togas and act like hippies. He built a time machine, but it doesn’t quite work and keeps killing the people it brings back from the future. They fight, and defeat Dr. Paine. Mandy hires Ollie on as an assistant to their detective agency.

Were-Town

Out of nowhere, Mandy’s father, Egan Thorpe, contacts her about a case. They haven’t talked for 20 years when he abandoned her and her mother. Mandy, Salem, and Bozz take a trip out to the country to see him, although Mandy is not looking forward to it.

Thorpe tells them that a series of occult events have resulted in multiple murders and people are afraid to come out to his bar at night, so he’s losing a lot of money. Mandy is not impressed at his purely pecuniary motives for finally talking with her, and stomps off.

However, they do look into the case and discover a demon terrorizing the town at night. When they chase it, it seems to disappear into a painting of a demon made by the local Squire Blakblud. Once again pretending to be a reporter, they investigate the squire and stay over at his house the next night.

Eventually it turns out that his paintings are coming to life; he made a deal with Satan to let Satan take over the rest of the earth if he spared their village. No one else thinks this is a very good deal, except for Mandy's dissolute father, who tries to save the final painting of Satan himself. Mandy manages to destroy the painting and save the Earth, and then punches out her "dear old dad" for his involvement.

The Cobblestone Jungle

Bozz explains his species’ practice of Nrgling, which is analogous to human sex. Mandy (still in love with him) wants to try it, but he (still ignorant of her interest) explains that she would need a tail to do so, and that she is “only human.”

She gets her mind off things by taking a new case from Inspector Fitzroy about a missing African jewel. This time, Fitzroy manages to get her off on a date with him without Salem interfering. They have a nice time at his fancy restaurant, and end up going back to his place to sleep with each other. When she gets home the next day Salem is jealous but she insists on her independence.

They start to search for the jewel and find that it was taken by an angry explorer, Colonel Carruthers. Carruthers tries to imprison them and destroy the Tower of London with a laser canon using the jewel as its energy source. However Bozz defeats him. Bozz recognizes that the jewel is actually one of his race’s starship energy sources, and they decide to go to Africa to see if any more traces of his kind can be found there.

King Solomon’s Spaceship

Mandy, Salem, Fitzroy, and Bozz go to Africa, led by Chief Baka, whose tribe found the jewel. There, the rivalry between Fitzroy and Salem heats up and they begin to argue and fight over her overtly. Mandy, however, still most in love with Bozz, thinks the two men are acting like children and is turned off by both of them.

They meet another explorer, Jan Kruger, who pretends to want to help them but really wants the jewel for himself. He also tries to impress the curvaceous Mandy but she’s not having any of that, either.

Mandy tries to explain her feelings to Bozz. She doesn’t really want to find the remnants of a spaceship, because she knows he would leave her if he did. He remains oblivious and doesn’t understand her human emotions.

They continue the search regardless, and Mandy accidentally stumbles upon the spaceship they’re looking for. She doesn’t tell Bozz and they continue on. However she eventually has second thoughts and brings Bozz back to the ship.

Meanwhile Salem and Fitzroy box each other over Mandy, with the fight ending in a draw and finally a grudging mutual respect between the men. They hear that Kruger is missing and realize he’s after Mandy himself. They rush off to save her together.

Kruger captures Mandy and Bozz and tries to take the ship, but with Salem and Fitzroy’s help, they defeat him. The ship, unfortunately, is destroyed in the fight, and Bozz is once again stranded on Earth.

In their return to England, Bozz finally realizes what Mandy and Salem mean to him, and that they are all truly friends. Their mutual romantic entanglements, however, remain unresolved.