True Brit: A Celebration of the Great Comic Book Artists of the UK by TwoMorrows Publishing

LEO BAXENDALE FRANK BELLAMY BRIAN BOLLAND MARK BUCKINGHAM JOHN M BURNS A L A N D AV I S RON EMBLETON HUNT EMERSON D AV E G I B B O N S FRANK HAMPSON B R YA N H I T C H SYD JORDAN D O N L AW R E N C E D AV I D L L O Y D D AV E M C K E A N MIKE NOBLE K E V I N O’N E I L L F R A N K Q U I T E LY KEN REID B R YA N TA L B O T BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH

A CELEBRATION OF THE GREAT COMIC BOOK ARTISTS OF THE UK

ABOUT THE ORIGINAL COVER TO TRUE BRIT BY BRIAN BOLLAND 2004 The guy on the front of the newspaper is Frazer Irving, esteemed 2000 AD artist. The quote next to him wasn’t said by him – I just made it up – and doesn’t, as far as I know, reflect his views. His was the only photo I happened to have to hand. I asked his permission and he said it was okay. Other photos are of other 2000 AD artists whose names I didn’t note down. Apologies to them. To people from Argentina (does that include José Luis Gárcia-Lopéz, whose work I’ve always greatly admired)? I hope they’ll realize that the reference to “Argies” was meant to reflect the moronic and xenophobic tone of the popular newspapers we have to suffer in this country, particularly at the time I was drawing ‘Judge Dredd’ back in the ’80s. I hope they’ll let me come and visit their country sometime. As for the topless bimbo inkers... where are they when you need them?

LEO BAXENDALE FRANK BELLAMY BRIAN BOLLAND MARK BUCKINGHAM JOHN M. BURNS A L A N DAV I S RON EMBLETON HUNT EMERSON DAV E G I B B O N S FRANK HAMPSON B R YA N H I T C H SYD JORDAN DON LAWRENCE

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edited by George Khoury

TRUE BRIT Dedicated to my publisher and friend John Morrow, for his first successful ten years of publishing

DAV E M C K E A N MIKE NOBLE KEVIN O'NEILL F R A N K Q U I T E LY KEN REID B R YA N TA L B O T BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH

THE DIGITAL EDITION

DAV I D L L OY D

Edited by George Khoury Editorial assist by David A. Roach Book design/artwork original and digital version by Paul Holder Email: p.holder@ntlworld.com Proofreading and production assist by Eric Nolen-Weathington CONTRIBUTORS Brian ‘Duke’ Boyanski, Norman Boyd, Jon B. Cooke, Peter Hansen, Paul Holder, George Khoury, Eric Nolen-Weathington, David A. Roach SPECIAL THANKS Richard Ashford, Alex Bialy, Rich DeDominicis, Jamie Grant, Paul Gravett, Lis Lawrence, Garry Leach, Craig Lemon, Marc McKenzie, Ian Robson, Matt Smith, Greg Strohecker and the staff at 2000 AD TwoMorrows Publishing 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh,North Carolina 27614 www.twomorrows.com email: twomorrow@aol.com All DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Rebellion A/S Comics, and other material, illustrations, titles, characters, related logos and other distinguishing marks remain copyright and trademark of their respective copyright holders and are reproduced here for the purposes of historical study. First print edition July 2004 Digital Edition created September 2011

Preface

Leo

BAXENDALE 42 Frank

BELLAMY 52 Brian

BOLLAND 70 Mark

BUCKINGHAM 90 John M

BURNS 93 Alan

DAVIS 105

by George Khoury 5

Ron

EMBLETON 116 Hunt

EMERSON 128 THE HISTORY OF BRITISH COMIC ART

by David Roach 6

Dave

GIBBONS 140 Frank

HAMPSON 146

Bryan

HITCH 156 Sydney

JORDAN 174 Don

LAWRENCE 180 David

LLOYD 193 Dave

McKEAN 204 Mike

NOBLE 212 Kevin

O’NEILL 224

Contributors’ Biographies 280

Frank

QUITELY 234 Ken

REID 251 Bryan

TALBOT 262 Barry

WINDSOR-SMITH 269

true brit the history of british comic art

THE GRIT IN DIGITAL TRUE BRIT

E C FA

PRE by Khoury e org e G

Over the last 30 years, British comic book creators have had a tremendous impact over how comic are crafted today. British writers, like Alan Moore, Garth Ennis, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, and Warren Ellis, have entirely changed the dynamics of how we perceived stories in these four-color books, each of them re-energizing a form that had been stagnant for too long. For their written work, these men have received loads of much-deserved accolades and recognition, but the artistic counterparts were remaining a bit under-looked. Don’t know about you, but I find the artwork by Windsor-Smith, Gibbons, and Bolland as alluring and as important to comics today as when I was a 13-year old schoolboy, discovering their works for the first time. These artists are very much storytellers and pioneers in their own right, they’re the ones whose art heralded those issues of Conan the Barbarian, Watchmen, Batman, and so many other fondly-remembered titles. So it was my privilege to have had the opportunity to spearhead True Brit, a book exactly as the subtitle indicates: “A Celebration of the Great Comic Book Artists of the U.K.,” and the last of my sort-of trilogy of books on British comics that started with Kimota! and continued with The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore.

True Brit was an idea which had been brewing in my head for a bloody long time. There have been various articles and occasional magazine issues, here and there, devoted to comics’ “British Invasion,” but I wanted to paint a more complete picture, one that was inviting, attractive and accessible to comics readers, both new and old. This is an in-depth book that studies the roots of British comics. We look at the work of classic artists like Ken Reid, as important as the contributions made by young guns like Frank Quitely to the entire picture. Within this book are interviews and profiles of, in my opinion, the very best British artists ever to have drawn a comic book. Each and every one of the 21 artists is someone of quality and someone I respect, for who they are and the work they’ve done throughout each respective career. Without any hesitation, I can say this is easily the most important book of the few that I’ve produced. Here in America, very little is known of the British creators prior to Barry Windsor-Smith. Artists like Frank Bellamy, Leo Baxendale, and Sydney Jordan are far from household names; a tragedy, really, because when you see their art, it will seduce you. Adding to the tragedy is the fact that not much of the U.K.’s most important comics prior to mid-‘70s has not been reprinted or imported into the States. There’s also a growing concern in the U.K. that, as British comic readers grow older, new readers are not discovering the richness of the nation’s history in comics. Long gone are the “golden age” days of U.K.’s very active comics fandom in the ’70s and ‘80s, when great magazines about comics, like Arken Sword, Fantasy Express, Speakeasy, and Escape were commonplace in comic shops. My hope is that this book will provoke people to search for the work of artists they are less familiar with, to appreciate even more the ones they know. If you’re feeling that American comics are becoming somewhat redundant, search those great U.K. titles that feature strips ‘Garth,’ ‘Jeff Hawke,’ ‘Charley’s War,’ ‘Dan Dare,’ and ‘Modesty Blaise.’ You won’t be disappointed in how entertaining and beautiful these serials are. It’s hard for me to believe that this 200-page book was completed in less than a year, because of the great many people and sheer research involved. I pitched the idea to my publisher, John Morrow, on August 13, 2003, and the completed tome was in stores roughly around the same date, one year later. If there was a difficult decision, it was narrowing down a list of artists to interview and profile from what seemed like hundreds of greats; so I decided to cover the gamut of the artists who I decreed most important, and best represented this history we were writing about. Along with the other contributors of this book, I made an effort to interview as many living artists as possible, to capture each one’s story and feelings regarding their heritage (and for those deceased, feature profiles filled with the appropriate respect and sincere admiration). Above all, I enjoy working with my friends – and everyone who made a contribution in this book is a friend. I don’t think I could have done True Brit if that wasn’t the case. It’s important for me to know who I’m working with, and I’ve toiled with good people, people of substance, so I’m very proud of everyone who lent a hand. Those appendages belong to old friends like Jon B. Cooke and Eric Nolen-Weathington, as well as newer friends from “across the pond”: Brian “Duke” Boyanksi, Norman Boyd, Paul Holder (also the brilliant designer of this project) and Peter Hansen. David A. Roach was my Yoda, my spiritual encyclopedia of the entire 100-plus-year history of British comics, and has been one of the top artists in U.K. funnybooks for close to 30 years. David spoke to me for many hours over the last year, and wrote the important – and exhaustive – historical exposition that opens this volume. No one was more important in making this book than Mr. Roach, who always – and unerringly – pointed me in the right direction. So, in closing, why would a Yank like me, one from the armpit of the United States (that’s New Jersey), write and edit a book on comic creators from the British Isles? Because I wondered why there were so many great artists coming from the same place, and I think, with this book, we discovered a beautiful kinship that crosses different artists. As I said in the original preface of the book, “This tome is recognition for every British artist (past, present, and future) for a rich heritage that I hope will never be forgotten.” I trust these sentiments are apparent whether you’re just browsing or doing us the courtesy of actually buying this book.”

Judge Dredd Megazine cover art by Patrick Goddard & Dylan Teague. © Rebellion A/S

THE HISTORY OF BRITISH COMIC ART by

David Roach

the history of british comic art true brit

The story of British comics is a long, rich, diverse, frustrating and largely untold one. Britain was one of the first countries of the world to develop the comic strip as we know it today, predating American strips by several years. Indeed, some believe it to be the true home of the comic strip. For the first few decades of its existence, from the 1890s to at least the 1930s, the British strip evolved largely in isolation from developments, traditions and innovations from elsewhere, creating its own idiosyncratic language. While both British and American strips share a common root in such Victorian humorous titles as Punch and Puck, they emerged in different formats. British strips initially appeared in comic books, only establishing a significant presence in newspapers in the 1920s, while in the States the opposite is true; there, newspaper strips inspired a comic book counterpart in the mid-’30s. In fact, in most critical ways it is Britain that led the world in creating the comic strip as we know it today, from the comic strips in the first regularly published comic book (Comic Cuts in 1890) to the first significant recurring characters (‘Weary Willie and Tired Tim’, in Illustrated Chips in 1896) and the first adventure strip (‘Rob the Rover’, in 1920).

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influences. Strangely, UK comics historians have largely been fans of the humour comics and have regarded the nation’s Golden Age of comics as being in the ’20s and ’30s. Consequently, what has been written about the country’s comics (and there has been surprisingly little) has been grotesquely unbalanced, partial and misleading. This has extended to the perception of comics as a whole in the UK; for a long time, they have been seen as a juvenile, disposable and somewhat tawdry medium, with little of substance or depth to it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rob The Rover

strips – short, comic narratives told over the course of several linked illustrations with accompanying captions and even the occasional word balloon. However, although publications such as Funny Folks (1874) and Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday (1884) regularly featured these proto-strips, each issue was dominated by captioned single illustrations and short text pieces. The British comic strip as we know it really emerged in Comic Cuts, first published by Alfred Harmsworth in 1890, which featured many short strips and set the pattern of British comics for the following few decades. It was cheaply priced (at a half-penny), was printed in a black-andwhite tabloid format, and was published weekly.

From the late ’40s onward, the British adventure strip really came into its own, partly inspired by America’s comic strips, and this caused a schism in the marketplace and among fans which persists to this day. So it is probably true to say that there are two distinct traditions of British comics: humour comics that have their origins in Tom Browne’s ‘Weary Willie and Tired Tim’, and post-war adventure comics, which combined British and American

In America, Britain, and mainland Europe, sophisticated society throughout the Victorian era was entertained by humorous publications which combined comic verse with satirical illustrations and cartoons. In Britain, publications such as Punch & Judy and Comic News often featured comic illustrations and even rudimentary

Weary Willie and Tired Tim Art by Tom Browne. © AP/Fleetway Other images ©respective holder.

Comic Cuts was soon joined by competitors such as Funny Cuts as well as companion titles from Harmsworth itself, such as Illustrated Chips and Funny Wonder. All were published weekly and all ran at a miserly eight pages! Visually, they shared the broadly realistic, highly rendered and somewhat fussy styling of most Victorian publications, but all that changed dramatically with the arrival of the ‘father’ of British comic illustration, Tom Browne. Browne was something of a Renaissance man, entering comics in 1895 at

true brit the history of british comic art

the age of 23, working for two years in the United States for the leading New York and Chicago dailies, and travelling across Europe and the Far East as an artist for The Graphic. On his return to London, he helped found the Sketch Club, exhibited at the Royal Academy and became a member of many leading artistic societies, including the Royal Institute, before dying at the tragically early age of 38. What Browne brought to comics, particularly in the form of his first significant strip work, ‘Weary Willie and Tired Tim’ (which first appeared in Illustrated Chips #298 in May, 1896), was a dynamic, pared-down, linear style that did away with Victorian over-rendering at a stroke. Browne was inspired by the elegant minimalism of Punch magazine’s leading cartoonist, Phil May, but he combined May’s precision of line with a wicked eye for caricature and exaggeration. The result was the modern comic strip as we recognise it today. Interestingly, R.F. Outcault’s first ‘Yellow Kid’ strip appeared some six months later, which puts the lie to the notion that he pioneered the form. Admittedly, the Browne strip rarely used speech balloons in its early years, preferring the standard British approach of a printed caption beneath each panel. However, the captioned panel was a ubiquitous feature of British comics right up to the second world war, and is indeed still common in comics for the very young to this day – it is simply a quirk of the nation’s comics. It is also worth noting that, whereas Outcault’s early strips had little plot, background or dialogue, Browne’s strips were witty narratives with fully realised settings, a roving visual viewpoint and a keen ear for dialogue. Visually, Browne’s economy of line was years ahead of Outcault and his fellow pioneers,

F. Opper, Jimmy Swinnerton, and even Rudolf Dirks, creator of the Katzenjammer Kids. ‘The Adventures of Weary Willie and Tired Tim’, two work-shy tramps prone to endless mishaps and pratfalls, quickly propelled Illustrated Chips to sales of 600,000 copies per week – an astonishing figure for the 1890s – and helped make Harmsworth into the country’s leading publisher. Through mergers and name changes over the years, Harmsworth became first the Amalgamated Press, then Fleetway, IPC and Fleetway again before being bought by Egmont/Methuen in the 1990s. For most of its 100-year existence, the company was the country’s most prolific and successful comic publishing house and enjoyed a virtual monopoly until the late ’30s. In the early years of the twentieth century, Harmsworth/AP released a steady stream of titles, including The Rainbow, Puck, The Butterfly, Comic Life, Merry and Bright, Tip Top, Sparkler, and The Jolly Comic. These were aimed at a predominantly young readership and featured strips about children, anthropomorphic funny animals (such as Julius Stafford Baker’s ‘Tiger Tim’ in The Rainbow) or disaster-prone adults in the Weary Willie-Tired Tim mould. Such artists as H.S. Foxwell, Frank Minnitt, Brian White, Percy Cocking, and Albert Pease found great success by working broadly in the Browne style, which remained largely unchallenged for decades. Whereas in the United States the comic strip originated in newspapers before spreading to

comic books some 40 years later, in Britain the reverse was true. Aware of AP’s success, many of the country’s leading newspapers adopted their own strips, including (in 1919) A.B. Payne’s whimsical ‘Pip, Squeak and Wilfred’, which ran for 36 years in the Daily Mirror. The strip described the gentle highjinks of a dog, a rabbit, and a penguin, and it attracted a loyal following (known as the Wilfredian League of Gugnuncs) numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Other important strips included J.F. Horrabin’s ‘Dot and Carrie’, Roland Davies’ ‘Come on Steve’, and Charles Folkard’s ‘Teddy Tail’, which first appeared in the Daily Mail in 1915. However, the most successful British newspaper strip of that or any other era was undoubtedly ‘Rupert the Bear’, created by Mary Tourtel for the Daily Express in 1920. Tourtel’s elegant, simple line was both charming and sophisticated, and the little bear’s whimsical adventures in the village of Nutwood immediately struck a chord with the paper’s readership. Collections of Rupert strips appeared as early as 1921, and the first hardbacked annual collection made its debut in 1930, initiating a publishing sensation that continues to this day. Tourtel retired in 1935 and was succeeded by Alfred Bestall, who was in his 40s and already a distinguished and successful illustrator for Punch and The Tatler. Bestall soon became one of the most important comic artists that the country has ever produced, and under his brilliant stewardship the strip became a British

Rupert the Bear Art by Alfred Bestal and Mary Tourtell. © Express Newspaper

the history of british comic art true brit

institution, delighting generations of readers and inspiring a mountain of merchandise. The wonderfully eccentric strip invariably featured young Rupert encountering a strange array of characters, from pirates and Gypsies to pixies, dragons, talking birds, magicians, inventors and cannibals. Another eccentricity was the strip’s unique format. In the annuals, each page displayed four identically sized panels, below each of which were two lines of rhyming narrative, while two further paragraphs of text appeared at the bottom of the page. This meant that each story was effectively related three times: first in pictures, then in rhyming couplets and finally, in expanded form, in prose. Happily, the annuals still maintain that strange convention to this day. Bestall’s visual style flourished in the strip’s rigid conformity, displaying virtuoso drawing and a remarkable sophistication – imagine a cross between Arthur Rackham’s fairy tale illustrations and Hergé’s minimalist Tintin artwork, and you will get some idea of Bestall’s style. For the covers and endpapers of the annuals, Bestall would create achingly beautiful, character-filled panoramas, fully painted in subtle washes of watercolour which would have made Rackham proud. Bestall also appeared to have an unusual interest in the Orient; he often filled his strips with Chinese dragons, pagodas and conjurors, as well as regularly providing readers with origami puzzles. Under his tenure, sales of the annuals grew to one-and-a-half million copies per issue at peak, and they still sell over 250,000 today. The great man began to scale down his ‘Rupert’ work in the early ’70s and drew his final strip in 1982; he died four years later, soon after receiving an MBE from the Queen. In his later years he had starred in a TV special written by Monty Python’s Terry Jones, and his biography had been written by George Perry. Among Rupert’s almost uncountable

media tie-ins can be found comics, toys, several animated cartoon series, confectionery, books, hit records (including the ‘Frog Chorus’ single by Paul McCartney, which reached number three in the British charts in 1984), and even shops devoted to the character. Artists Alex Cubie and John Harrold have kept the strip alive since Bestall’s retirement, and right up to the present day each new generation of young British readers is raised on Rupert. Another notable early newspaper strip boasted an artist who, like Bestall, had come from the illustration field. This Daily Sketch strip was called simply ‘Pop’, and his artist was the extraordinary J. Millar Watt. ‘Pop’ – effectively a British version of George Macmanus’ legendary US strip ‘Bringing up Father’– centred on the pratfalls of a put-upon, portly dad and his demanding family. Like ‘Bringing up Father’, the strip was often visually quite stark, but Millar Watt had the

expressive, loose line of a painter rather than Macmanus’ Deco-minimalism. A quirk of the ‘Pop’ feature was Millar Watt’s way with a joke: in each four-paned installment, panels one and two set up the gag, panel three had the pay-off, and the final panel usually contained a wordless reaction shot. Millar Watt was an outstanding draughtsman and imbued his linework with an expressive vitality and a sense of space and drama that bordered on the poetic. With its visual sophistication married to a more conventional – though invariably funny – storyline, ‘Pop’ appealed to both intellectuals and the masses, and it ran from 1921 to 1960. Miller Watt retired from the strip in 1949 to concentrate on his illustration work (Gordon Hogg took over ‘Pop’ in his absence) but in the mid-’50s he was recruited into AP’s burgeoning comics line, where he enjoyed a third career change as a comic book artist. For the rest of the decade he drew incredibly dense and detailed strips such as ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘The Three Musketeers’ while also painting a series of outstanding covers. In the ’60s he moved on to full-colour, glossy AP/Fleetway prestige comic titles such as Ranger, where he drew his final major strip work in 1965: an atmospheric adaptation of Treasure Island. With that exception, however, from 1962 until his death at the age of 80, Millar Watt concentrated primarily on illustrations for Look & Learn, Princess and Once Upon A Time – illustrations which rival the likes

Tiger Tim © AP/Fleetway

Happy Days by Roy Wilson. © AP/Fleetway Pop by J. Millar Watt. ©Daily Sketch.

Pop

true brit the history of british comic art

of Rackham, Dulac, Heath Robinson, and Russell Flint in their beauty. Millar Watt’s paintings married an effortless, elegant drawing ability with sumptuous washes of colour, over which he added incredibly detailed rendering to produce dazzling, jewel-like imagery. Incredibly, his work is barely remembered today by either strip collectors or fans of classic illustration, and he remains a hidden giant of the comics world. Returning now to comic books, the ’20s and ’30s were dominated by AP’s tabloid comics aimed primarily at young readers, and the star artist of this period was undoubtedly Roy Wilson. Working in all three of the main genres of the era – adults (often tramps or

celebrities) doing silly things, plucky kids having fun, and cute animals – Wilson had a style very much in the tradition of Tom Browne. What he brought to comics, however, was a unique compositional sense and a fantastic feeling of energy. His figures moved with more life and vigour than those of anyone else, and his animals were dynamic, lively and full of personality; he was in many ways Britain’s Walt Kelly. The apogee of Wilson’s work – and, indeed, of the presecond World War era – was the short-lived colour weekly Happy Days, which was first published in 1938.

As cover artist, Wilson excelled each week in marshalling seemingly hundreds of funny animals in a series of energetic tableaux, ranging from circus scenes to a packed fairground and riotous Christmas parties. In contrast, Wilson’s post-war output was prolific and polished but perhaps lacked his earlier vitality, and AP’s children’s comics were similarly lethargic by comparison with those of the company’s first real competitor: DC Thomson from far-off Dundee in Scotland. DC Thomson was already a major publishing house, with a reputation for independence and innovation, by the time the company decided to venture into comics in late 1937, and their first effort – The Dandy – revolutionised the market.

Oor Wullie

Art by Dudley D. Watkins. Desperate Dan, Oor Wullie ©DC Thomson.

the history of british comic art true brit

anarchic and working-class. Their subsequent dominance of the comic marketplace is best demonstrated by the fact that, to this day, over 60 years after their births, for most British people the very word ‘comic’ stands for The Beano and Dandy, in much the same way that comic books are personified by Superman and Batman in the United States. This is all the more remarkable when one remembers that, for the 40 years before those two Thomson comics appeared, Harmsworth’s titles had enjoyed a virtual monopoly of comics in the UK. The first of Thomson’s star artists was Dudley D. Watkins, whose enormous productivity encompassed the Scottish newspaper strips ‘The Broons’ and ‘Oor Wullie’, ‘Desperate Dan’ in The Dandy, ‘Lord Snooty’ in The Beano (both latter strips still running to this day), and even a series of proto-graphic novels in the ’50s. Watkins had a very controlled, tight style – somewhere between out-and-out humorous illustration and ‘straight’, realistic drawing – for which he owed a debt to Tom Browne (as did so many others). Another significant Thomson artist was Davy Law, whose ‘Dennis the Menace’ (created in 1951 for The Beano) perhaps best exemplified the publisher’s new approach. Dennis’ sole raison d’être is to cause trouble wherever he goes, acting as an unstoppable, utterly amoral force of nature. Law’s seemingly basic, crude art style perfectly captured his creation’s unthinking, joyous trail of disaster, and ‘Dennis’ quickly became Thomson’s star attraction – which he remains to this day. A young Leo Baxendale was inspired by the freshness of Law’s artistry to join Thomson himself in the 1950s, creating ‘Beryl the Peril’, ‘The Bash Street Kids’, and ‘Little Plum’.

The Dandy and its two later companions, The Beano (1938) and Magic (1939), were the first British comics to abandon the tradition of running captions under each panel. More significantly, they were resolutely, gloriously

anti-establishment. Where Alfred Harmsworth’s AP empire was founded on well-crafted, safe, polite and essentially middle-class weeklies, the new Thomson titles were cruder, louder, more brash,

Dennis the Menace by Dewey Law, and Desperate Dan. ©DC Thomson.

true brit the history of british comic art

Baxendale’s drawing took Law’s anarchic line to even greater extremes, pushing caricature just about as far as it could go and creating strips of enormous vitality. He did not just write funny stories; he simply drew funny. It is a testament to the power of his vision that, for the past 50 years, not just Thomson but almost the entire British comics-publishing industry has drawn humour comics in his style. The other Thomson star was Ken Reid who, like Baxendale, was a master of comic invention. He created his own memorable Thomson strips, ‘Roger the Dodger’ (in 1953) and ‘Jonah’ (’59). Like his US counterpart Basil Wolverton, Reid had a taste for the grotesque and could produce pages of extraordinary detail.

precise figures. However, the company’s independent spirit (not to say bloodymindedness) rarely extended to caring for its creative workforce, and the publisher has long had an unenviable reputation for pennypinching and for providing miserly wages. Legend has it that Thomson was always on the lookout for left-handed artists who could sit close enough to right-handed colleagues to share the same inkpot! Indeed, at one point Thomson issued metal pencil-holders to their artists, to help eke out the last few millimetres of lead from their minuscule pencil stubs. In the mid-’60s, Baxendale and Reid fled their treadmill for the friendlier and more lucrative environs of Odhams in London, to create a ‘super-Beano’ called Wham. This ran for just

breaking publication: Mickey Mouse Weekly. This boasted full-colour, photogravure printing and beautiful artwork from Wilfred Haughton, Basil Reynolds and William Ward. Odhams published the comic successfully until 1957 (almost 1000 issues) without building a significant comic empire around it. Perhaps its most significant achievement was the inclusion of Reg Perrott’s adventure strip, ‘The Road to Rome’, in 1936. This was by no means the first true British adventure strip; that had been Walter Booth’s ‘Rob the Rover’ (which ran from 1920 to 1940 in Puck – so preceding, it should be noted, all American adventure strips), but Booth’s work was an uninspiring, rather staid affair, distinctly lacking in visual élan in comparison with this new strip by

four years before being gobbled up by Fleetway/IPC. Watkins died in 1969, at the age of 62, and Law followed two years later at the similarly early age of 63. Both could be considered to have been drained dry by the pressures of their employment; at his peak, for example, Watkins was writing, drawing and inking more than ten pages a week. Even without their original creators, the Beano and Dandy still sell over 200,000 copies a week, both have run continually for over 3000 issues, and they must be considered outstanding successes by any standards, but the intense creativity of Thomson’s pioneers has perhaps gone forever.

Perrott. Reg Perrott had drawn a series of adventure strips in the Dumas tradition for several regional newspapers in the early ’30s before joining the team at Mickey Mouse Weekly, where he drew such swashbuckling features as ‘Sons of the Sword’ and ‘Golden Arrow’. World War II and ill health (he died in his early 30s) conspired to cut tragically short what should have been a successful career, even though by today’s standards Perrott’s strips appear extremely old-fashioned.

Jane art by Michael Hubbard. ©Mirror Group Newspapers/Syndication Intl.

Jane

With a creative force of Watkins, Law, Baxendale, Reid, and others behind them, the Beano and Dandy sold in colossal numbers, though Thomson has always jealously guarded

Just before the debut of Thomson’s Dandy, Odhams launched their own ground-

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In 1937, Jack Monk started the long-running detective strip ‘Buck Ryan’ for the Daily Mirror newspaper. This was punchy and energetic but, as with other contemporary attempts at establishing a uniquely British adventure strip tradition, it was relatively crude. In the event,

the history of british comic art true brit

all these adventure-strip experiments were savagely curtailed by the arrival of war in 1939, which threw the whole industry into turmoil. Whereas in the United States the war acted as a vigorous stimulant to the nascent comicbook scene, in Britain the onset of paper rationing cut a swathe through the output of comics publishers. AP cancelled many of its titles, including Happy Days, while Thomson killed off Magic and the publication frequency of most other comics was drastically reduced, for example from weekly to fortnightly. American comics, which had begun to enter the country in some numbers, were suddenly missing from newsagents’ shelves (their importation having been effectively banned until 1959), except at some port towns and,

Another winner was Norman Pett’s Daily Mirror newspaper strip, ‘Jane’, which came to encapsulate the country’s struggle against the Nazis. Jane had originally been a ditzy socialite when the strip started in 1932, but her adventures soon became little more than an excuse to show her in various states of undress. In what was effectively the world’s first pinup strip, Pett delighted in thinking up ever more inventive ways of showing the poor girl wearing as little as possible, finally drawing her au naturel in the war’s darkest days. By most standards, Pett’s art itself was more functional than ground-breaking but Jane’s importance as a morale-booster to the troops cannot be overstated; legend has it that the more clothing she removed, the more

more serious fare. Among its highlights were straight adventure strips such as ‘Sexton Blake’ (1939-53), ‘Buffalo Bill’, and ‘Treasure Island’ – all by Hubbard. Knockout also began using artists from the world of illustration, including such talents as H.M. Brock, Eric Parker, Septimus Scott, and pinup artist Reginald Heade. In the late ’40s, AP also began to look actively for a new generation of creators who could work in the adventure field, as the company believed that genre was about to explode. To that end, AP in 1948 acquired Sun and Comet, a pair of hitherto undistinguished children’s weeklies, and introduced new adventure strips mostly in the classics and western genres. Among the artists enticed into the company in the late

later, American air bases. Some enterprising companies – notably T.V. Boardman and L. Miller – circumvented the loss by reprinting strips from such US companies as Quality and Fawcett. This practice grew exponentially in the ’50s but it occurred sporadically at best during the war years.

enthusiastically they fought! From 1948 until its demise in 1959, the strip was drawn by the highly talented Michael Hubbard, a classicist in the Alex Raymond mould whose draughtsmanship was an immense improvement over that of Pett.

’40s and early ’50s to support the new strategy were Mike Western,

The winners in what amounted to the sudden imposition of comics rationing were what comics historian Steve Holland has called ‘pirate publishers’. These were fly-by-night operations and small provisional presses with a precious paper quota who could print on demand. Quality was not their primary concern, since they reasoned that practically anything would suffice for readers otherwise starved of their favourite entertainment.

Michael Hubbard had earlier worked on AP’s Knockout, which first appeared in 1939 and was one of their few titles to survive the war. Knockout was to be the bridge between AP’s prewar humour line and its emerging adventure comics. Like Thomson’s titles, it dispensed with captions and mixed cartoon features with

The Beano, The Beezer, The Dandy, The Topper ©DC Thomson.

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/Fleetw

Geoff Campion, Reg Bunn, Colin Merritt, Bill Lacey, Selby Donnison, Pat Nicolle, Ted Kearon, Joe Colquhon, Graham Cotton, D.C. Eyles, and Eric Bradbury. What this new intake of talent exhibited were strong draughtsmanship and a grasp of storytelling and dynamics that showed the influence of American comic artists, particularly Alex Raymond. Raymond’s ‘Flash Gordon’ had been reprinted in 3 and, when the Daily Mail began printing his ‘Rip Kirby’ strip in 1947, it was a revelation – literally a how-to-draw-comics primer for a whole generation of would-be comic artists. AP’s young artists would go on to become the backbone of the company’s comics line for the next 25 years, an era which was in many ways the true Golden Age of British comics. In retrospect, 1950 proved to be a pivotal year for comics in Britain, a year in which the market split into several distinct streams and comics output began to expand enormously. Prior to the war, comics had been aimed primarily at a young, mixed-sex readership and, from 1920 onwards, even pre-school children had been catered for by their own nursery titles such as

nursery title called Robin (1952-69), and a sort of junior Eagle called Swift (1954-63).

Chicks’ Own and Tiny Tots. For much of this period, teenage boys and girls had gravitated towards ‘story p a p e r s ’ – effectively the British equivalent of American pulps, albeit infinitely more polite and restrained. These publications included the Rover, Hotspur, Schoolgirls’ Own, The Magnet and Adventure. They were densely written titles, presenting a mixture of tales of derring-do in far-off places, school stories (invariably set in a boarding-school), sporting adventures, and wild flights of fancy. The fate of these textbased story papers was sealed for ever in 1950, when both AP and a new publisher called Hulton Press released the first of their ranges of new-style comics, some of which were aimed squarely at this older readership.

The concept of a comic aimed specifically at girls had, in fact, been established the year before Girl appeared, when AP released the first issue of School Friend (actually reviving the name of one of their old-style story papers). This reached the newsagents just a month before Eagle #1, but was in the same magazine-sized format as their longestablished Knockout rather than tabloid. Its strips were mostly double-paged and, despite its black-and-white and rather pedestrian artwork, School Friend was soon selling over a million copies a week. It was soon joined by Girl’s Crystal and Bunty, as well as Girl and several others, so establishing what became one of the strongest areas of British comics for the following 40 years. In the ’60s and ’70s in particular, AP/Fleetway and DC Thomson released title after title, with such names as Tammy, Diana, Mandy, June, Jackie, Judy, Debbie, and Sally – 54 different comics in total! Their tales of blind ballerinas, desperate orphans, terrifying boarding schools and amusing pets remained largely unchanged until the ’90s, and they were drawn not only by such British talents as Bill Baker, Jim Baikie, and John Armstrong, but also by European artists such as Eduardo Feito, Mario Capaldi, Jesus Redondo, Federico Comos, Purita Campos, and Carlos Freixas.

Hulton entered the comic market in April 1950 with the first issue of the Eagle, a glossy, photogravure-printed colour tabloid aimed at teenaged boys, and caused an immediate sensation. Edited by the Reverend Marcus Morris, the Eagle was an intelligent, resolutely middle-class combination of strips, articles and text stories which were meant to entertain and educate at the same time. Among its several, well crafted, single- and doublepaged strips were a pair of radio show adaptations, ‘Riders of the Range’ and ‘P.C. 49’, and the long-running ‘Luck of the Legion’ foreign legion strip. But what really captivated over 800,000 boys every week was the comic’s cover star, ‘Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future’, the UK’s first significant science-fiction strip, which was brilliantly drawn and painted by Frank Hampson. With his large studio of assistants, Hampson crafted a superbly rendered series of fully painted adventures over the following decade, and ‘Dan Dare’ became one of the icons of British comics. Hulton soon expanded its output to include a girls’ comic named – appropriately – Girl (1951-64), a

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‘Doctor Who’ by Harry Lindfield in Countdown Dr. Who ©Polystyle/BBC.

cover

The third of 1950’s great innovations, appearing concurrently with AP’s School Friend, was another AP title, Cowboy Comics. This was a digest-sized, 64-page black-andwhite title. The small ‘library’ format had been a fixture of British publishing since Victorian times, but Cowboy Comics was its first use for strips. Cowboy Comics (later retitled Cowboy Picture Library) soon inspired other digestsized launches: Thriller, in 1951 (initially a sort of British version of Classics Illustrated), Love Story Picture Library in ’52 (the first UK romance comic)

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and Super Detective in ’53 (a mix of ‘Rip Kirby’ and ‘Buck Ryan’ reprints with new detective strips). The picture library format gave British creators their first opportunity to work on longer strips, with at most two or three stories per issue or, often, just one, full 64-page epic. With gorgeous, fully painted covers, increasingly intelligent writing by the likes of Syd J. Bounds, John Whitford, Carney Allen, and Donne Avenall, along with future SF stars Michael Moorcock, Ken Bulmer, E.C. Tubb, and Harry Harrison, the picture library soon became established as the preferred format for older readers.

Don Lawrence started out on ‘Marvelman’ before coming into his own on western strips for Swift and swords-and-sandals strips (‘Karl the Viking’, ‘Orlac’, and ‘Maroc’) for Fleetway’s Tiger and Lion. In 1965 he started work on the fully-painted ‘Trigan Empire’, written by Michael Butterworth, for Ranger and, later, for Look and Learn. ‘Trigan Empire’ ran for over a decade and was widely collected into album form across Europe, inspiring Lawrence to create his self-owned feature, ‘Storm’, for the Dutch comic Eppo. Ron Embleton had occasionally filled in for Lawrence on ‘Trigan Empire’ in the ’60s, but even then was an established star in his own right, having entered comics in 1948 at the age of 17. Strips

exciting, but perhaps his most extraordinary talent was his speed. He had a masterful, seemingly effortless grasp of anatomy, and appeared to be able to turn pages out at an amazing rate, augmenting his vast comics output with numerous children’s books, historical illustrations and mass-market prints. In the 1970s, Embleton was enticed over to Bob Guccione’s Penthouse magazine, where he painted the beautifully realised ‘Oh, Wicked Wanda’ and ‘Sweet Chastity’. Of course, he still found time for many illustration commissions and the gorgeous newspaper strip, ‘Terry and Son’ (for the Daily Express), which offered the reader tips on fishing! Sadly, this tremendous output came at a price, and Embleton died in 1988 at the tragically young age of 57.

Art by Jim Holdaway. ©Evening Standard

Meanwhile, in the wake of Eagle, School Friend, and Cowboy, the British comics market experienced an extraordinary expansion, particularly from 1955 to 1970, covering a wide

were strikingly innovative, and his death at the age of 59 was a tragedy for British comics.

variety of formats, genres and publishers. Eagle, Girl, et al., inspired other glossy, colour weeklies such as Express Weekly (’56-’62), Boys’ World (’63-’64), Diana (’63-’76), and TV 21 (’65’71). These publications allowed a new generation of artists to become masters of both line and colour, the so-called ‘big four’ of whom were Frank Hampson, Frank Bellamy, Don Lawrence, and Ron Embleton. Frank Bellamy rose through the ranks in Mickey Mouse Magazine and Swift in the ’50s before emerging in Eagle as a major talent and succeeding Hampson on ‘Dan Dare’. His reputation as possibly the nation’s finest comics artist was cemented by other Eagle strips (‘Fraser of Africa’ and ‘Heros the Spartan’), a lengthy run on ‘Thunderbirds’ (in TV 21) and the ‘Garth’ newspaper strip (in the Daily Mirror). Bellamy managed to combine the strong draughtsmanship of Hampson with the dynamics and excitement of American comics. His compositional skill and sense of design

signed distinctively ‘Ron’ appeared in many titles from Swan, Scion, and AP, and for the latter publisher he was soon a regular on cowboy comics. By the late ’50s Embleton was already a fantastically talented line artist, but it was his work for Express Weekly on ‘Wulf the Briton’ – an early, fully-painted sword-andsorcery epic – that really confirmed his talent. In the following years he went on to work for a succession of the top weeklies, including Eagle, TV 21, Look and Learn, and Princess, as well as numerous annuals and books. For TV 21, he excelled on ‘Stingray’ and ‘Captain Scarlet’, and was commissioned to paint the end-credit illustrations for the ‘Captain Scarlet‘ TV series. E m b l e t o n ’s painting style was slick, detailed, realistic and

‘UFO’ by Gerry Haylock in Countdown UFO ©Polystyle.

A second ‘big four’ (the ‘little four?’) emerged from the Doris White studio in the late ’50s to take advantage of the colour weeklies: Harry Lindfield, Gerry Haylock, John M. Burns, and Barrie Mitchell. Lindfield and Haylock

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‘UFO’ by Gerry Haylock in Countdown UFO ©Polystyle.

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‘Doctor Who’ by Harry Lindfield in Countdown ©Polystyle. ‘Doctor Who’ © BBC

the history of british comic art true brit

true brit the history of british comic art Captain Hurricane © Rebellion A/S

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Back in the ’60s, Burns had co-created (with writer Les Lilley) the beautifully drawn ‘Seekers’ newspaper strip (’64-’72), and he later contributed to ‘Modesty Blaise’ and ‘Danielle’. In fact, just as adventure strips were blossoming in comic books, so too a number of fine adventure strips had joined ‘Garth’ in the newspapers.

Other significant newspaper strips include the humour features ‘Fred Bassett’ (’63-present) by Graham, ‘Andy Capp’ (’57-present) by Reg Smythe, and the soap opera fashion strip ‘Tiffany Jones’ (’64-’72) by Jenny Butterworth and artist Pat Tourret. Tourret and Butterworth were both veterans of romance comics, and the strip reflected the surprising sophistication and modernity of the romance weeklies. While AP’s Love Story Picture Library established the genre in 1952, it was not until the late ’ 5 0 s

In addition to sport and romance, another comics genre which established a significant presence were war comics. These came to dominate the picture library format in the ’60s and ’70s. Fleetway titles such as War (195884), Battle (’61-’84) and Air Ace (’60-’70), along with Thomson’s Commando (’61-present), provided endless retreads of the second World War, time and again. At its height, War was appearing twelve times a month, while Commando has printed eight issues per month since the ’70s. With such a colossal page count to fill (remember, each picture library was a mammoth 64 pages long), Fleetway, Thomson and the rest scoured the world to find their workforce, and throughout this era they boasted some of the globe’s finest talents. Among the war strips, weeklies, glossies and others could be found the likes of Alberto Brecia, José Ortiz, Hugo Pratt, Dino Battaglia, Luis Bermejo, Victor De La Fuente, Horacio Altuna, Alberto Del Castillio, Gino D’Antonio, Jordi Bernet, Martin Salvador, Juan Gonzalez Alacrejo, Jorge Moliterni, and literally hundreds of others. Between them, these artists produced

ando,

John M. Burns is the last of the great comic artists to be still working today, thereby providing a bridge between the Golden Age and the contemporary scene. A master of both line and colour, Burns produced an immense body of work on titles such as Eagle, TV 21, Diana, Countdown, Look-in and 2000 AD. For Boy’s World in 1964, he took over the reigns from Ron Embleton on his masterpiece, the Michael Moorcroft-scripted ‘Wrath of the Gods’, maintaining Embleton’s high standards. For Countdown in 1971, Burns created the eponymous pop-art splendour of ‘Countdown’, using wild layouts and day-glo colours to great effect. In recent years, he has created fully painted strips for European publications (‘Zetari’, ‘El Capitan Trueno’), newspaper strips (‘Jane’, ‘George and Lynne’, ‘Lilli’), US comics (‘James Bond’, ‘ESPers’, ‘Penthouse Comix’) and, for 2000 AD, some of the best art ‘Judge Dredd’ has ever been granted. Unusually for a creator with over 40 years in the business, Burns is still very much at the top of his game, and his work for 2000 AD is as vital and innovative as any of his many past glories.

Notable strips included Syd Jordan’s SF feature ‘Jeff Hawke’ (1954-76), David Wright’s ‘Carol Day’ (’56-’67), Tony Weare’s ‘Matt Marriott’ (’55-’77), ‘Gun Law’ by Harry Bishop (’60-’78), and ‘James Bond’ by John McClusky and Laroslav Horak (’58-’77). ‘Modesty Blaise’ (1963-2001), written by Peter O’Donnell, has boasted a succession of fine artists, including Enrique Badia Romero, John M. Burns, Pat Wright, and Neville Colvin, but the feature’s first delineator, Jim Holdaway, remains its definitive artist. Holdaway and O’Donnell had first found fame with the light-hearted newspaper strip, ‘Romeo Brown’ (’56-’62), but for ‘Modesty Blaise’ Holdaway developed a new, moody and meticulously detailed style that was equally suited to hardboiled action, exotic locales and Modesty’s own deadly glamour. Holdaway fought off none other than Frank Hampson to get the strip, and his atmospheric art made Modesty one of the great comic icons; his death at the age of 43 was a severe loss to the genre.

and early ’60s that a significant number of titles appeared. In those years, a flood of weekly comics such as Valentine, Romeo, Mirabelle, and Roxy poured from AP/Fleetway, Thomson, Pearson and others; over a period of 25 years, some 63 titles were published. Homegrown talents including Pat Tourret and her sister Gwen, Frank Langford, and Shirley Bellwood were soon augmented by an army of stylish foreign artists, mostly from Spain’s SI agency. They included José Gonzalez, Jordi Longaron, Jordi Francl, Felix Mas, José Miralles, Angel Badia Camps, Ivis Garcia and Cousins, Enrique Badia Romêro and Jorge Badia Galvez.

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shared a similar, effortless, realistic approach and contributed sterling work to Girl, Valentine, Eagle and Countdown. Haylock’s ‘Dr Who’ strip in TV Action in 1972/73 was a particular treat, and remains a textbook example of how to approach a television or film adaptation. Barrie Mitchell also had his share of TV adaptations in the ’70s Look-in comic, but he specialised in that most peculiarly British institution, the football (or, to be precise, ‘soccer’) strip. Sports strips had long been a staple of numerous UK comics, e.g. Tiger and The Victor, and the most famous of them was ‘Roy of the Rovers’. Roy captained Melchester Rovers for years in Fleetway’s Tiger, before being promoted to his own, long-running title in 1976; it was in ‘Roy of the Rovers’ that Mitchell’s energetic art attained its definitive expression.

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Robot Archie. Art by Ted Kearon. ©AP/Fleetway.

Galaxus. Art by F. Solano Lopez. ©AP/Fleetway.

Beautiful as the educational titles were to look at, it was the smaller (9"x11", 36-page) blackand-white weeklies that really ruled the newsagents’ shelves in the ’60s and ’70s. Fleetway’s Lion (’52-’74), Tiger (’54-’85) and Valiant (’62-’76), with such later arrivals as Hurricane and Thunder, fought for space with already-established Thomson titles such as Victor, Hotspur, and Wizard. Between them,

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The educational comics were large magazines – about the size of the old Saturday Evening Post – printed on glossy stock and filled with colour. Look and Learn featured articles and

short strips on history, literature, geography, The Bible and other earnest subjects, all beautifully illustrated. The Ranger was 40 pages long, with more of an emphasis on strips, most notably the Michael Butterworth/Don Lawrence epic ‘Trigan Empire’, which migrated over to Look and Learn when Ranger was cancelled. Look and Learn was often ordered by schools, and throughout the ’60s and ’70s copies would be dragged out of cupboards to entertain pupils stuck in their classrooms on rainy afternoons. Typically, they would go straight to the ‘Trigan Empire’ and ignore the rest. While Look and Learn was aimed at both sexes, Princess was effectively a Look and Learn for girls, with lots of text features and such strips as ‘The Daughter of Lorna Doone’ (by Embleton), the domestic ‘Happy Days’ (by Andrew Wilson), and ‘Alona the Wild One’ (by Jean Sidobre). A short-lived companion to Princess, called Tina, appeared in 1967 and was a phenomenally ambitious attempt at a pan-European girls’ adventure comic, which could be syndicated all over the continent. It was a massive success in Holland but, curiously, failed at home and was soon incorporated into Princess (as Princess Tina). Once Upon A Time was aimed at younger readers and featured lavishly painted strips retelling nursery rhymes and fairy tales.

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If the war genre came to dominate the picture library format in the ’60s, throughout the 1950s it was Thriller Picture Library that was the leading title. Under AP/Fleetway supremo Leonard Matthews, Thriller produced a succession of lavishly illustrated classic book adaptations before turning to an alternating roster of dashing boy heroes. Among these were ‘Battler Britain’ (World War II adventures), ‘John Steel’ (Bond-like spy yarns), ‘Dick Daring’ (of the Canadian Mounties), and ‘Jet Ace Logan’ (in outer space). Thriller was cancelled in 1963, but by that point Matthews’ search for respectability had led him to launch a new type of comic. This was what, for want of a better term, could be called the educational comic: the slick, classy weeklies Princess (’60-’73), Look and Learn (’62-’82), Ranger (’65-’66), and Once Upon A Time (’69-’70). To produce these new titles, Matthews gathered together the pick of his Thriller creators, such as Geoff Campion, Sep E. Scott and J. Millar Watt; British stars such as Ron Embleton, and Don Lawrence; the illustrators Neville Lea, James McConnell and Fortunino Matania; and top Europeans such as Ferdinando Tacconi, Franco Caprioli, and Ruggerio Giovanini.

produced an endless stream of weird heroes, football stars, SF epics, war features and humour strips, all mixed together in two- or three-page episodes. Among the many memorable features in the Fleetway titles were ‘Robot Archie’ (in Lion, ’57-’74) drawn by Ted Kearon, ‘Captain Hurricane’ (in Valiant, ’62-76)

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many thousands of war strip pages throughout the ’60s. Fleetway’s picture libraries boasted beautifully painted covers by Giorgio Di Gaspari, Jordi Penalva, and Graham Coton, while Commando luxuriated in covers by Ken Barr (before he found fame in the US), Penalva, and Ian Kennedy. Commando has recently become something of a cult comic in the UK, with its own fanzine (Achtung Commando) and a fervid fan-base willing to pay serious money for its now very rare early issues. In its over 3500 (and rising) issues, Commando has featured art from the British Cam Kennedy, John Ridgway and Patrick Wright, the Argentinian master José Jorgé, and a host of Spanish and South American creators. Incredibly, the title’s most popular artist with fans, Gordon Livingstone, first drew for the comic in Issue 4, and over 40 years later he is still drawing for the same comic – in fact, Commando is the only comic he has ever drawn for!

Janus Stark Art by F. Solano Lopez. ©AP/Fleetway.

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by R. Roylance, and ‘Roy of the Rovers’ (in Tiger) written by Frank S.Pepper and drawn by many famous hands, including Joe Colquhon. ‘The Spider’ (in Lion, ’65-’69) was notable for two reasons: the starring role was taken – uniquely – by a villain, and the character was created by none other than Superman’s Jerry Siegel. ‘The Spider’ looked fantastic, with his all-black cat-suit, demonic, Spock-like features, flying helicar and web-spinning gun, all drawn with incredible detail by Reg Bunn. With all that British talent on display, it was ironic that two foreign artists came to dominate the boys’ weeklies: Argentina’s Francisco Solano Lopez and the Spanish master Jesus Blasco. Blasco was already Spain’s top artist when he started to work for the UK in the mid-’50s, and he soon appeared across a wide range of comics, including Comet, Cowboy Picture Library, and Ranger. But it is for his work on Valiant’s ‘Steel Claw’ (written by Ken Bulmer) between 1962 and 1973 that he is best remembered today. ‘The Steel Claw’ was originally a villain who could become invisible when his metal hand touched electricity, but he soon reformed to become a sort of super secret agent. Though Blasco was incredibly prolific, his magnificent art was extremely realistic and invariably draped with atmospheric shadows; imagine a cross between Alex Raymond, John Buscema, and Nestor Redondo. Solano Lopez had long been a successful artist in Argentina, with the legendary ’50s SF strip ‘L’Eternauta’, and was even more prolific than Blasco. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, he churned out as many as 30 different features a week through his studio, which included the future European star José Muñoz among others. Lopez had a slightly cartoony but very detailed and dark style, which was extremely dynamic and full of character. Among his many well known features were the timetravelling ‘Adam Eterno’ (in Lion and Valiant), the invulnerable ‘Kelly’s Eye’ (in Knockout and Valiant), the SF strip ‘Galaxus’ (Buster), the footballing Gypsy ‘Raven on the Wing’ (Valiant), and ‘The Incredible Janus Stark’ (Smash). Lopez left British comics in the mid-’70s and went on to re-establish his career in Latin America with such series as ‘Evaristo’, ‘Ana’, and the notorious ‘Young Witches’. Despite the vast output of Fleetway and Thomson, other companies made

significant inroads into the market in the ’60s and ’70s, including Hulton, Odhams, Polystyle World Distributors, Thorpe & Porter, Top Sellers, and late-comers City Publications. City covered a wide range of genres, from the romance comic Boy Friend to the Adventures of Huckleberry Hound, but they are best remembered for their beautifully produced Gerry Anderson line of comics. Britain had long embraced media tie-in titles such as Radio Fun (which premièred in 1938), TV Fun, TV Comic, and Kinema Comic, but City’s flagship comic TV Century 21 (’65-’69) owed more to the glossy production values of Eagle than to its lowly black-and-white forbears. TV Century 21 and its later companion titles Lady Penelope (’66-’69) and Joe 90 (’69) adapted various Anderson TV shows, such as ‘Stingray’, ‘Thunderbirds’, ‘Captain Scarlet’, and ‘Fireball XL5’, into a succession of dynamic, exciting strips which made the most of colour gravure printing and large, tabloid pages. City’s great coup was in recruiting all of the ‘big four’ (and several ‘little four’ artists to boot) and letting them loose. Anderson shows may have starred puppets, but they also featured great science-fiction settings and fantastic designs, which the artists revelled in. Frank Bellamy’s long run on ‘Thunderbirds’ in particular made extraordinary use of the TV show’s futuristic hardware. Journeyman artist Mike Noble was a fixture of TV Century 21 from its inception and delivered the work of his life on the title. Another notable regular was Ron Turner (previously a stalwart of Fleetway’s ‘Rick Random’ feature in Super Detective comics, written by Harry Harrison), who drew a large number of annuals for City and shone on the ‘Dalek’ strip (a rare nonAnderson source). By the turn of the decade, some of the Anderson TV shows were on their second or even third runs, and City cut their losses by selling out to Fleetway. Polystyle picked up the licence and created the last of the great glossies, Countdown (’71-’72) and TV Action (’72-’73), again using many of the City artists but widening their remit to include other TV shows, such as ‘Dr Who’ (brilliantly drawn by Gerry Haylock), ‘Mission Impossible’, ‘Cannon’, and ‘Alias Smith and Jones’. At the time of the launch of TV Century 21 in 1965, the British comics industry was in rude health, boasting of just under 100 regularly published titles, most of which were weeklies or picture libraries (which also invariably

City.

TV21 ©

Art by Jesus Blasco. Steel Claw © Rebellion A/S

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‘The Daleks’ by Richard Jennings in TV Century 21 ©City Magazines.

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‘The Daleks’ by Ron Turner in TV Century 21 ©City Magazines.

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‘Doctor Who’ by Gerry Haylock in Countdown ©Polystyle. ‘Doctor Who’ © BBC

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came out four times a month). While precise figures are difficult to come by (since new discoveries are still coming to light), a conservative estimate of the year’s total output must add up to over 4000 individual issues, the majority of which were of either 36 or 64 largely ad-free pages length. To put that figure into perspective, the peak of comic production in the US (according to historians Michelle Nolan and Dan Stevenson) was a ‘mere’ 3161 issues in 1952. This means that, in a typical year in the ’60s, Britain was producing more comics than America at its time of greatest output – and that for a population barely a quarter the size of its transatlantic cousin.

In 1969 the unthinkable happened when Eagle (by then gobbled up by Fleetway) was cancelled. The following decade saw a faster turnround of titles and more cancellations. Such industry mainstays as Lion, Valiant, Diana, Princess and almost the entire romance line threw in the towel, as, indeed, did several publishers, including Odhams, City, and Polystyle. The remaining publishers responded to the downturn with brasher, more controversial weeklies with a shorter life expectancy, which could be merged with other titles once their novelty wore off. DC

Art by F. Solano Lopez. Kelly’s Eye ©Rebellion/AS.

A closer examination of the year’s output reveals 44 different titles aimed principally at boys, 28 designed for girls (of which eleven were romance comics intended for an older, teenage market), nine ‘nursery’ comics for the very young, and eight humour titles. Among the many genres on show were twelve different war comics, westerns, spies, plucky girls, nurses, educational comics, animated cartoon adaptations, TV shows, US reprints (primarily of 1950s mystery strips) and a solitary super-hero (the short-lived ‘Miracleman’– no relation to the ’80s star!) Buoyed up by the postwar baby boom, the UK comic market was enormously productive right through to the 1980s, but signs of a slow decline were evident even in the late ’60s.

Thomson’s girls’ comic Jackie, a favourite since 1964, became larger and glossier, and increasingly sacrificed strips in favour of articles on pop stars, fashion and dating, while other girls’ magazines (e.g., Pink, Mates, and Oh Boy) switched to photo-romance strips (‘fumetti’ as the Italians christened them), so that by the late ’80s the teenage girl market had effectively abandoned comics for good. An interesting but sadly short-lived sub-genre that emerged fleetingly in this period of

2000AD cover by Brian Bolland. ©Rebellion/AS.

experimentation was that of girls’ horror. Thomson’s Spellbound (’76-’78) and Fleetway’s Misty (’78-’80) were well crafted and occasionally genuinely disturbing titles, which have inspired something of a cult following, Misty in particular deserved a longer run; its Carrie-inspired ‘Moonchild’, by Pat Mills and John Armstrong, and ‘Black Widow’, drawn by Honiero, were especially worthy of a wider readership. By the mid-’70s, Fleetway and Thomson began a concerted campaign to revitalise their boys’ lines, launching a succession of new titles backed up by TV adverts which played on the comics’ various free gifts: stickers, medals, toy guns, iron-on transfers, and so on. The first and most influential of this new generation was Thomson’s Warlord (’74-’86), which stunned the industry – and particularly Fleetway. Warlord featured predominantly World War II tales, with the emphasis on action scenes and dynamic artwork which

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Drawing his inspiration from the nihilistic cinema, TV, and tabloid headlines of the day, Pat Mills’ Action was unremittingly violent, downbeat, nasty, and controversial. It became a cause celèbre for the media, inspiring outraged TV news items and a media campaign not seen since the ’50s. Naturally, its teenaged readers adored it. If Eagle was the embodiment of an affluent post-war middle class, then Action reflected a country ravaged by strikes, civil unrest, and a discontented underclass. Even the comic’s art, by such British stalwarts as Mike Dorey, Barrie Mitchell and Mike White, supported by foreign talents Horacio Lalia, Ramon Sola, and Altuna (who was simultaneously moonlighting on Warlord and Bullet), was gritty, savage, and unremittingly dark.

Art by Mike White. Kids Rule OK ©Rebellion/AS.

Pat Mills and editor Geoff Kemp ennisaged a comic peopled with losers and misfits, such as ‘Helman of Hammer Force’ (a German tank commander), ‘Black Jack’ (a black boxer from the ghetto, battling the onset of blindness), and ‘The Running Man’ (a British athlete on the run from the police in America after having been mistaken for a mobster). The kids’ favourites, however, proved to be the most violent features: ‘Dredger’ (modelled on Dirty Harry) and the Jaws-

sometimes ‘exploded’ out of its panels. The comic’s centrepiece each week was a lengthy (up to nine pages) espionage strip, ‘Codename Warlord’, drawn by Horatio Altuna among others, and starring the elegantly ruthless Lord Peter Flint. Fleetway’s response was Battle Picture Weekly (’75-’86), a transparent copy of Warlord put together by Pat Mills and John Wagner, who were beginning to make names for themselves at the company. Battle even had its own intrepid spy – Mike Nelson, drawn by Pat Wright – but its highlights were a couple of strips drawn by the young Spanish artist Carlos Sanchez Ezquerra: ‘The Rat Pack’ and ‘Major Eazy’. Ezquerra imbued both features with a stylish yet supremely gritty approach and his grizzled, laconic Major Eazy became the inspiration for a later, better-known sciencefiction strip.

When both Warlord and Battle proved to be massive successes, the two companies launched a pair of follow-ups on the same day in February 1976. Thomson’s Bullet (’76-’78) extended the Warlord blueprint to a more contemporary milieu, with yet another spy – ‘Code-name Fireball’ – taking the lead spot, but Fleetway’s Action (’76-’77) was something entirely different.

Mike McMahon Judge Dredd ©Rebellion/AS.

‘Dragon Hunter’ by Garry Leach

true brit the history of british comic art

clamour, it is thought that Action’s main distributors approached Fleetway and effectively demanded that the comic be toned down or cancelled altogether. The publisher capitulated, and in late 1976 a revamped, neutered Action was presented to a disillusioned readership, with ‘Kids Rule OK’ and ‘Probationer’ cancelled and the other strips cleaned up.

inspired ‘Hookjaw’ (a colossal Great White Shark with a vicious harpoon point protruding from its jaw). ‘Hookjaw’ was the comic’s number one attraction for its first year, thanks to its relentless diet of carnage, blood, severed limbs and decapitations. Later strips became even more controversial: ‘Look out for Lefty’ was a grim, working-class football series, peopled by skinheads and football hooligans; ‘Death Game 1999’ was based on the movie Rollerball and matched ‘Dredger’ and ‘Hookjaw’ for bone-crunching destruction; while ‘Probationer’ was a strip centred on a young ex-con, just released from Borstal, which inadvertently supplied tips for would-be burglars on breaking-and-entering!

Hook Jaw by Ramon Sola. © Rebellion A/S

Ultimately, the feature which caused Action’s downfall was probably ‘Kids Rule OK’, a Lord of the Flies-inspired post-apocalyptic strip which imagined a world where everyone over the age of 20 had been wiped out by pollution, leaving the children in charge. Writer Jack Adrian and artist Mike White created a nightmare vision of the near-future, picturing a country ruled by rival gangs of thugs, Hell’s Angels, and psychotic police cadets, endlessly

fighting each other in increasingly vicious displays of wanton aggression. The combination of horrific imagery and the strip’s violently anti-authoritarian tone (topped off with a savage Ezquerra cover showing a cyclechain-wielding teen about to attack an injured policeman) incurred the revulsion of a host of newspapers, pressure groups and broadcasters. One group of concerned parents took to placing stickers on the comics, declaring them unfit for children. Amid this

Despite (or because of?) the surrounding opprobrium, Action’s sales had been growing until its revamp, and Pat Mills could see that there was clearly a market for a more challenging boys’ weekly. His next launch, in early 1977, was to be his most successful yet and one which was to prove a landmark in British publishing: 2000 AD. In many ways, the early 2000 AD was essentially a science-fiction version of Action; the savage dinosaurs of its ‘Flesh’ strip were clearly modelled on ‘Hookjaw’; ‘Mach 1’ (a violent reworking of ‘Six Million Dollar Man’) resembled ‘Dredger’; ‘Harlem Heroes’ was a futuristic sports strip à la ‘Death Game 1999’; and ‘Invasion’ was another dystopean vision in the ‘Kids Rule OK’ mode. Mills even threw in an updated ‘Dan Dare’, but the comic’s trump card, held over until issue #2, was of course ‘Judge Dredd’, created by Mills, written by John Wagner, designed by Carlos Ezquerra and drawn (for the most part) by Mike McMahon. ‘Dredd’ carried on Action’s tradition of thumbing its nose at the establishment by being the very embodiment of untrammelled, fascistic authority – a policeman of the future unrestrained by emotion, compassion or regret. Yes, Dredd was an absurd storm-trooper with a police badge, but that was the point: by pushing the notion of a police state (in this case the vast, sprawling Mega City One) to the point of absurdity, Mills and Wagner were satirising the very idea of authority. It was heady stuff, hidden in the guise of a science fiction strip, and the feature took a while to catch on. However, within a few months it had become the comic’s most popular strip, a position it has held for the most part to this day. In its first few years, 2000 AD employed several writers from Action – Jack Adrian, Gerry Finlay Day, Kelvin Gosnell and Steve McManus (who would go on to become the comic’s longest-serving editor) – as well as some of its artists. However, from the comic’s inception the policy was to begin assembling a team of fresh talents, bringing with them new influences and new approaches. Pat Mills, John Wagner, and Alan Grant (an early associate editor) gradually emerged as the principal writers, sharing a subversive sense of humour, wild imagination, and a talent for inventive and innovative plotting. British comics had often

the history of british comic art true brit

featured extraordinary artwork in the past, but this was almost invariably tethered to one-dimensional characterisation and formulaic (not to say archaic) storylines, and perhaps 2000 AD’s greatest achievement has been to introduce genuinely challenging, accomplished writing to the country. Mills, Wagner, and Grant created an environment in which later 2000 AD stars (such as Grant Morrison, Garth Ennis, Pete Millligan—and a gentleman named Alan Moore!) could flourish. Visually, the comic was an exciting mix of styles, which at its best combined the draughtsmanship of the great British classicists, the grit of European comics (personified by Ezquerra, whose early work informed much of the title’s orientation), and the dynamism of American comic books. Many of 2000 AD’s new discoveries had come up through a comics fandom which emerged in the UK in the late 1960s and flourished through the ’70s via such titles as Fantasy Advertiser, Bem, Comics Unlimited, Orpheus, and Comics Media News. This new movement was focussed almost exclusively on the US superhero comics of Marvel and DC, which had been widely distributed throughout the UK since 1959. Fans of these comics were inspired by their exciting, colourful appearance, their seemingly more mature subject matter, and their dynamic art, and those influences began to seep into the published output of the new generation of artists. It is extraordinary to note that, despite the UK’s colossal output of titles throughout the ’60s and ’70s, barely a handful of new British artists emerged; most publishers were seemingly content to rely on foreign labour procured through a network of agencies. 2000 AD, on the other hand, not only discovered new talent but encouraged it by its very existence. For most aspiring newcomers, the prospect of ever working

House of Hammer by Brian Lewis © Top Sellers

‘Supercar’ by Brian Lewis © Polystyle

for the major US companies seemed totally out of reach, notwithstanding the early successes of Barry Smith at Marvel and Paul Neary at Warren, and so 2000 AD was a haven in which new British artists could express themselves and thrive. The comic discovered and nurtured the first significant new generation of talents for two decades. Within its first few years, the comic could boast an astonishing line-up of future stars and creative giants: Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Mike McMahon, Kevin O’Neill, Ian Gibson, Garry Leach, and Brendan McCarthy. Alongside such European artists as Ezquerra,

true brit the history of british comic art

‘Supercar’ by Brian Lewis © Polystyle

the history of british comic art true brit

true brit the history of british comic art ‘Dracula’ by Paul Neary © Top Sellers

Jesus Redondo and Massimo Belardinelli, and established talents Cam Kennedy, Ron Smith, and Jim Baikie, the 2000 AD artists genuinely transformed the way comics were drawn in the UK, simultaneously building on the old order while overthrowing it. 2000 AD’s success did not go unnoticed, and the serendipitous release of the first ‘Star Wars’ film later in 1977 inspired a mini-boom in SF and fantasy comics. Fleetway was the first off the blocks, effectively copying their own success with the lavish Starlord (1978), which introduced the popular ‘Ro-Busters’ and ‘Strontium Dog’ strips, but this comic inexplicably failed to find a readership. Another Fleetway title, Tornado (1979), which mixed 2000 AD style with the venerable approach of Valiant, was equally short-lived. So, too, were DC Thomson’s Crunch (’79-’80) and Spike (’83’84), though the company did enjoy a hit with Starblazer (’79-’90). The digest-sized, picturelibrary formatted Starblazer mixed one-off SF tales with the occasional recurring characters, and featured some of the earliest writing (and drawing!) of Grant Morrison, along with many

‘Bojeffries’ by Steve Parkhouse © Steve Parkhouse & Alan Moore

extraordinarily imaginative strips drawn by the Argentinian fantasist, Enrique Alcatena. In 1982, encouraged by the popularity of the reincarnated ‘Dan Dare’ in 2000 AD, Fleetway gambled on a controversial revival of the Eagle comic itself, initially adopting the photo-strip format in an attempt to repeat the success that they had attained with that medium with teenaged girls. Sadly, teenaged boys were not impressed, and the comic reverted to a more traditional line-drawn format. While being largely unappreciated then and now, it was nevertheless a hit and ran for over 500 issues until 1994. More significantly, the revived Eagle has been, to date, the last truly successful new boys’ comic which did not rely on licensing of some sort. While 2000 AD and its mimics were busily revolutionising comics, elsewhere a parallel

strand of publishing was emerging, centred on the colourful and controversial figure of Dez Skinn. One of the founding fathers of British fandom, Skinn edited Buster for Fleetway in the early ’70s before moving over to Williams/Top Sellers to help revamp that company’s moribund comics section. In addition to work on the British edition of Mad, Skinn also created the much-loved House of Hammer (’76-’78), which combined horror-movie articles and reviews with comic-strip adaptations of classic horror films – much in the tradition of Warren’s old Monster World magazine. As well as future stars Gibbons, Bolland, and Gibson, Skinn assembled around him a creative team that included John Bolton, David Lloyd, Paul Neary, David Jackson, Steve Parkhouse, and writer Steve Moore. The magazine’s star, however, was veteran artist Brian Lewis, whose career spanned SF covers in the ’50s, boys’ comics in the ’60s, and humour work in the ’70s. His House of Hammer strips were vibrantly detailed and surrealistically composed, and surely only his untimely death in 1978 prevented him from finding significant success in the US. Indeed, when a sudden implosion of Williams/Top Sellers’ ‘men’s division’ brought the company down, Skinn himself found a new home at Marvel, and he took his creative team with him. Marvel’s emergence in the UK in 1972 with the Mighty World of Marvel (’72-’83) – an all-reprint weekly title – was the start of one of that decade’s major success stories. Packaged from Marvel’s headquarters in New York, the British line soon expanded to include Spider-Man Weekly, The Avengers, Planet of the Apes (one of their biggest successes, outliving its US parent title), Star Wars and many others. In 1976, the company launched its first all-new creation for the UK market, Captain Britain, by noted anglophiles Chris Claremont and Herb Trimpe (and later Gary Friedrich, John Buscema and Ron Wilson), but its super-hero-by-numbers yarns simply failed to engage a sceptical readership. Stan Lee and Marvel’s hierarchy felt that the distance between the US operation and its UK market was holding it back, and so Skinn was brought in to set up a more autonomous operation; thus was Marvel UK born.

the history of british comic art true brit

The first significant result of this new independence was Hulk Weekly (’79-’80) which featured new ‘Hulk’, ‘Black Knight’, and ‘Nick Fury’ stories as well as a new, 1930s-set ‘comic-noir’ called ‘Nightraven’, by Parkhouse, Lloyd and Bolton. ‘Nick Fury’ was impressively drawn by teen prodigy Steve Dillon, while long-time Fleetway workhorse John Stokes finally became a star with his lavish ink work on ‘Black Knight’. Later that same year, 1979, Dr Who Weekly was launched, with a mix of strips (by Mills, Wagner and Gibbons) and text pieces, and as Dr. Who Magazine it is still going strong today. Another new artistic discovery, Alan Davis, made his debut in a ‘Captain Britain’ revival in Marvel Superheroes #377 (September ’81) and, when joined soon after by a young Alan Moore, made the Captain one of the most memorable heroes of the 1980s. By this point, however, Skinn had left the company in the hands of Paul Neary and had struck out on his own to create Quality Comics and a new title called Warrior. Warrior hit the shelves in March of 1982, with little fanfare from the fan press, erratic distribution and a low print run of just 40,000 copies, a quarter of which were destined for the US. For those souls who stumbled across it, however, it was a revelation – beautifully drawn, intelligently written, enticing, unique and full of promise. Skinn had created the UK’s first newsagent title which guaranteed its talents ownership of their own creations, promised them profit-sharing, undertook to market their strips actively abroad and, perhaps most importantly, allowed them full creative control. Among the sterling work from Steve Parkhouse, Paul Neary, John Bolton, John Ridgeway and others, three strips stood out from the rest: the psychotic, futuristic adventures of ‘Laser Eraser and Pressbutton’ by ‘Pedro Henry’ (Steve Moore and Steve Dillon), ‘V for Vendetta’ (a futuristic updating of ‘Nightraven’ by Alan Moore and David Lloyd), and ‘Marvelman’ by Alan Moore and Garry Leach. From the start, it was apparent that Leach had made a quantum leap in quality from his 2000 AD output, frequently spending over a week on each page and combining innovative storytelling with breathtaking draughtsmanship. Sadly, Warrior’s rates were too low for Leach to survive on at that level of productivity, and he eventually ceded artistic control of the strip to Alan Davis, who was quickly establishing himself as the UK’s leading super-hero artist. ‘Marvelman’ itself had originally been a longrunning comic in the 1950s, and was itself adapted from the then-defunct ‘Captain Marvel’ strip by packager Mick Anglo. Marvelman’s publisher, L.S. Miller, was one of many British companies reprinting US comics by the thousands throughout the ’50s, but for the most part the comic was a poor substitute for the style and charm of the original Captain Marvel. Alan Moore’s genius was to take the source material and treat it realistically – ‘Gideon Stargrave’ by Grant Morrison © Grant Morrison

imagining what a super-hero, with all his ludicrous trappings, would actually be like in the real world. This was groundbreaking material, told with real skill and intelligence and, coupled with the atmospheric, visceral ‘V for Vendetta’ (which could be taken as a chilling commentary on Thatcher’s Britain), made Moore a sensation. Within a year, he had also taken over the reins of ‘Captain Britain’ and had written his first series for 2000 AD, ‘Skizz’. With Warrior making waves in the US, DC approached Moore to write its Swamp Thing, and soon after he also began work on ‘Halo Jones’ with Ian Gibson for 2000 AD. While Moore was busy establishing himself as the pre-eminent writer in comics, Warrior was becoming unravelled. Marvel Comics was unhappy with the name ‘Marvelman’ and sued; Quality protested but had to pull the strip. Then Steve Dillon disappeared to France after a year of ‘Pressbutton’, badly wounding the feature’s momentum. Moreover,

distributors complained about the comic’s adult content and retailers worried about where to rack the problematical title. Consequently, Skinn sadly pulled the plug on Warrior in early 1985 after 26 issues, and began packaging ‘Judge Dredd’ reprints for the US market. Nevertheless, his dream of licensing Warrior strips became a reality later that year when Eclipse picked up ‘Marvelman’, retitling it ‘Miracleman’, and soon afterwards started printing all-new ‘Miracleman’ and ‘Pressbutton’ strips. ‘V’ was eventually picked up by DC in 1988, with Moore and Lloyd rounding out the series with new strips. In his vision of a comics market dominated by creator-owned features repackaged into book form for a wider audience, Skinn was astonishingly prescient (and in Moore he had found one of the medium’s most influential creators), but he was perhaps ahead of his time. These days he is the publisher of the popular comics fanzine Comics International,

true brit the history of british comic art

but his career in comics themselves would seem to be over. Before Warrior, Alan Moore had experienced his first exposure to a wide readership through short ‘Future Shock’ pieces for 2000 AD, but he had even earlier worked for the alternative press and Art Labs of the underground. Britain’s underground scene

has never been as vibrant as that in the US, but it has nevertheless nurtured some genuine talents. As in the US, the earliest British underground strips surfaced in such counterculture newspapers as Oz, Friendz and IT (International Times). The latter in fact published the first UK underground titles, Cyclops (1970) and Nasty Tales (’71-’72), which

mixed fairly uninspiring British fare with US reprints, mostly by R. Crumb. Nasty Tales succumbed to obscenity charges, but rival paper Oz responded with Cozmic Comics (’72’74), Sin City, Rock ’n’ Roll Madness and a host of other one-shots. After initially packing its titles with reprints, Cozmic Comics eventually established its own roster of artists, including Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Angus McKie (later to find success of Heavy Metal), and Chris Welch. The Oz empire petered out in the mid-’70s without really knowing what to do with the issues being touched on: drugs, sex, rock ’n’ roll, fantasy, and social commentary. The second underground wave emerged in 1975 with Bryan Talbot’s surreal, drug-influenced Brainstorm Comix, which lasted six issues and which gave the world ‘Luther Arkwright’. ‘Arkwright’ resurfaced in the Scottish SF-themed Near Myths magazine (’78-’80), which also featured Grant Morrison’s first published strip, the Moorcockinfluenced ‘Gideon Stargrave’, which he both wrote and drew. Two years later, ‘Arkwright’ again appeared, this time in Psst! (1982), which finally completed the character’s first story. The whole series was collected in a 1983 graphic novel – probably the UK’s first – which revealed Talbot’s fevered imagination and everimproving, ornate artwork. Meanwhile, in Birmingham a group of like-minded artists banded together to form the Kak Art Lab, and soon published a number of unusual left-field comics under the Ar-Zak imprint. Between 1976 and 1978 they put out six issues of Streetcomix, featuring work by Chris Welch, Angus McKie, Steve Bell (later to become the country’s top political satirist in the pages of the daily, broadsheet Guardian newspaper), and Hunt Emerson. Emerson’s extraordinary work fell somewhere between that of R. Crumb and George Merriman, with a visual invention matched by a bizarre imagination, and he quickly became undeniably the UK’s top underground artist. Other Emerson work cropped up later in Graphixus (’77 to ’79), alongside some early Bolland and Leach strips, and in Knockabout Comix (’80-’87), which also printed a number of his graphic novels, such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Cassanova. Had Emerson been born a decade earlier in America, he would almost certainly have become one of the stars of the counterculture, but in Britain in the ’80s and ’90s he sadly found it a struggle to find the readership his talent deserves.

Robo Hunter by Ian Gibson. © Rebellion A/S.

the history of british comic art true brit

Slaine. Art by Mick McMahon. © Rebellion A/S

Another of Emerson’s early berths was Escape (19 issues between ’83 and ’90), produced by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury. This magazine emerged from the growing fanzine scene of the early ’80s; by the start of that decade, London’s legendary Westminster Comic Mart (situated a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament) was attracting a horde of eager young talents hawking their selfpublished comics. Inspired by this creativity, Gravett first set up a table to sell these publications and then published a fanzine called Fast Fiction, which collected a lot of the best new strips. Finally, he launched the glossy Escape magazine, Britain’s most ambitious comic anthology. Combining the best young talent with articles, interviews, and European strips in a mix that was part Raw, part Comics Journal, part coffee-table magazine. Among its discoveries were Eddie Campbell, Phil Elliott, Rian Hughes, Warren Pleece, Mark Robinson, Jamie Hewlett, and Phillip Bond, while its reviewers included Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Dave Gibbons. European talents such as Serge Clerc, Lorenzo Mattotti, and José Munoz rubbed shoulders with North American creators Ben Katchor, Chester Brown, and Ted McKeever. In spite of its talented contributors, Escape was unable to tap into the mainstream market that it so richly deserved, and in many ways its sheer diversity and quality have yet to be surpassed. One of its last acts, in 1987, was to launch a proposed graphic novel line with Violent Cases by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean; it was the first that most of us had ever seen of this pair. By this point, America had well and truly discovered Britain, and Gaiman and McKean were quickly snapped up by DC. The origins of what became the great talent drain to the US lay in the early success of 2000 AD, which first alerted DC in particular to the new British creativity. In 1981, Bolland (on Mystery in Space) and Gibbons (on Green Lantern) started working for DC, while John Bolton moved from the British Marvel Hulk comic to the US Marvel ‘Kull’ strip (in Bizarre Adventures #26). In April 1982, a month after the launch of Warrior, DC’s top brass Joe Orlando and Dick Giordano addressed a meeting in London of the Society of Strip Illustrators (SSI), extolling the virtues of working for their company. Over the next few years, almost all the leading British creators would find work in the US, from Alan Moore (Swamp Thing), Jim Baikie (Vigilante) and Alan Davis (Batman & The Outsiders) to John Wagner and Alan Grant (Outcasts), Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill (Marshall Law), and Mike McMahon (The Last American). Among other early pioneers were the trio of Pete Milligan, Brett Ewins and Brendan McCarthy, who created the groundbreaking Strange Days for Eclipse. Milligan and McCarthy’s sardonic, post-modern superhero, Paradax, brilliantly anticipated much of what was to come in the ’80s, but while Milligan found success at DC, McCarthy preferred the lure of film work, and his loss to comics is still keenly felt.

As the decade progressed, the talent drain had the positive effect of freeing up the pages of 2000 AD to a new generation of creators, and the early ’80s are widely regarded as that comic’s finest period. Witty, punchy strips such as ‘Robo-Hunter’, ‘Strontium Dog’, ‘Nemesis’, and ‘Rogue Trooper’ were augmented by a trio of Alan Moore features: ‘Skizz’, ‘DR and Quinch’, and ‘Halo Jones’ (the latter drawn by the underrated Ian Gibson). Pat Mills weighed in with the Celtic sword-and-sorcery strip ‘Slaine’, drawn by McMahon and Bellardinelli, while Grant Morrison gave the comic its first super-hero– the sarcastic, edgy ‘Zenith’. The new generation of artists included Bryan Talbot (crossing over into the mainstream), Glenn Fabry, Steve Yeowell, Simon Bisley, John Higgins, Chris Weston, Barry Kitson, and (gulp!) your humble writer. When the comic introduced colour pages, it allowed its artists to produce fully painted strips – in the grand old British tradition – and the likes of Fabry and Bisley really shone. In 1982, total sales of British comics stood at 3.3 million copies a year, with Fleetway/IPC the biggest player, but within a couple of years their sales had been eroded by a major revival of Marvel UK. With new material in such comics as Transformers (’84-’91), Spider-Man and Zoids, Action Force and Thundercats, Marvel was actively courting a younger male readership and eating into IPC’s traditional weeklies. Like 2000 AD, Marvel was growing its own new generation of creators, with the ‘Captain Britain’ team of Moore and Davis joined by Mike Collins, Mark Farmer, John Ridgeway, Dougie Braithwaite, Bryan Hitch, Anthony Williams, Simon Furman, and Staz Johnson. 1987 was a big year for comics on both sides of the pond, but what turned out to be perhaps the most significant event was hardly noticed at the time: IPC sold off its comics line. The company sold 18 of its weekly titles, including 2000 AD, Buster, Roy of the Rovers and Eagle, to the controversial publisher Robert Maxwell, while – significantly – keeping its more profitable girls’ titles, such as My Guy and Mizz (now denuded of their comic strips). Comics which had once been major sellers, including the TV tie-in Look-In (which had been regularly commanding sales of 300,000 since the ’70s) went under, seemingly without anyone noticing that the comics scene as we had known it was falling apart, piece by piece. The reason why no one was paying attention to what was happening to British comics on newsagents’ shelves was the extraordinary explosion of US comics into the mainstream with the publication in 1986 of Watchmen, The Dark Knight

Raquel Welch in 1 Million Years BC by John Bolton, from House of Hammer. © Top Sellers.

Returns, and Maus. By 1987, comics such as these were everywhere, and the likes of Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Art Spiegelman had become media stars. Spiegelman appeared on his own BBC Television Special, and eventually won the Pulitzer Prize. That year’s London Comic Convention drew record crowds to see Moore, Gibbons, Spiegelman, Will Eisner, and other stars; Moore was mobbed by rabid autograph hunters! Comics were now officially hip, and publishers rushed in to tap into what they saw as a new, mature (and affluent) market. Brett Ewins’ and Steve Dillon’s Deadline (’88-’95) mixed punky strips, such as ‘Tank Girl’ by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett, with music reviews and interviews. New comic companies such as Harrier and Trident sprang up, Marvel’s Strip and Fleetway/Maxwell’s Revolver were aimed at older 2000 AD readers, and Garry Leach and Dave Elliot’s A1 caused a stir in the growing number of specialist comic shops. In 1991, the independent Toxic appeared, helmed by the original 2000 AD line-up of Mills, Wagner, Grant, McMahon, and O’Neill but, despite full-colour printing, it folded within the year. Sadly, such failure to find that elusive older readership became a recurring leitmotif throughout the industry, typified by the collapse of the era’s defining (and apt) title, Crisis. While 2000 AD was still part of IPC, its editors had long harboured the hope of creating a viable companion title, and in 1987, by which time the comic was ensconced within

true brit the history of british comic art Romeo (1970) Art by Norman Lee. ©DC Thomson.

Maxwell’s vast Pergamon Press operation, that dream became a reality. Crisis boasted superb production values, established talents (including Pat Mills, Carlos Ezquerra, and Jim Baikie) and such tyro creators as Duncan Fegredo, Sean Phillips, and Garth Ennis; it should have been a smash. However, caught up in the Watchman/Maus hysteria, strips such as ‘Third World War’ and ‘New Statesman’ seemed preachy and ‘right-on’ rather than satirical and witty like 2000 AD itself. Wiser heads such as Alan Grant had suggested starting with a Judge Dredd solo title and growing from there, gradually introducing more experimental material as it became more established, but those voices went unheard in the general euphoria. Crisis certainly featured its share of cutting-edge strips: ‘For a Few Troubles More’, by Ennis and John McCrea, set in Northern Ireland; Morrison’s and Yeowell’s ‘New Adventures of Hitler’ and Brendan McCarthy’s ‘Skin’ (starring a skinhead thalidomide victim) – which even Crisis ultimately found too hot to handle (it eventually reappeared from one of the era’s other monumental follies, Tundra UK). Had Crisis succeeded, it could have been the springboard for a whole line of mature Fleetway titles but, as it was, its cancellation in 1991 after 63 issues heralded the end of the ‘mature’ experiment. My feeling is that, if the Gravett/Stanbury Escape had enjoyed a wider circulation, that title might have had all the elements needed to reach the older audience that publishers were slavering for: it was intelligent, irreverent and genuinely cuttingedge. In the event, as if to prove that Fleetway more readily understood the teen market than the older one, it finally released a Judge Dredd title in 1990, and that comic is still going strong today. Oblivious to Fleetway’s travails, by 1990 Marvel UK had become the country’s fourth-biggest comics company, under editor Bernie Jaye. Along with titles for younger readers, such as Transformers and Care Bears, they experimented with edgier, non-licensed comics, including The Knights of Pendragon and Death’s Head. At the same time in the US, a speculator-led boom in sales was occurring, and Paul Neary was brought back in to create a line of US-format comics under the umbrella title ‘Genesis 1992’. Death’s Head II, boasting art by Liam Sharp, sold an amazing 200,000 copies and sparked an avalanche of similarly edgy titles, most of them coincidentally requiring ‘death’ in the title. Even the most generous readers could see that quality was often sadly lacking in some of these Genesis titles, and the line soon ground to a halt, along with the rest of the investor boom. In a move that typified the coming shift in the British market, Marvel UK MD Robert Sutherland left the company to run Redan, a publisher devoted to nursery titles, and throughout the ’90s it was comics for the under-tens – and even the under-fives – which came to dominate newsagents’ shelves. What

remained of Fleetway’s once-mighty comics operation was sold-on to the Danish company Egmont, which already held the European rights to the Disney characters. Subsequently, Fleetway/Egmont successfully tapped into the pre-teen market with the likes of Disney and Me, Princess (devoted to Disney’s female characters), and the photostrip comic Barbie, which became immensely popular. And where was Marvel UK within this new market environment? At the height of its expansion, Marvel UK had bought Panini, a major Italian sticker manufacturer and publisher, with roots throughout Europe, but in 1999, following its bankruptcy, Marvel was forced to sell the company. Since then, in something of a role reversal, Panini has been the sole licensee of Marvel’s range in Europe and, alongside its string of ongoing Marvel reprint comics, the venerable Dr. Who, and such licensed comics as Action Man, Panini’s UK brands have also driven into the nursery market. Even the

national public broadcasting corporation, the BBC, had by then become a comic publisher with comics based on its own children’s TV shows, for example The Teletubbies, and by the end of the millennium it had become the UK’s top comics house, commanding over a third of total sales. As the nursery titles took over the comics market, the traditional formats were allowed to wither on the vine. Classic, archetypal weeklies such as the new Eagle (’82-’94), Roy of the Rovers (’76-’93) and DC Thomson’s Victor (almost unchanged throughout its 31-year struggle against ‘the Bosch’ and ‘the Japs’, between 1961 and 1992) were all laid to rest. Fleetway abandoned both the picture-library format and its humour weeklies, leaving it to Thomson’s old faithfuls such as Commando and the Beano to carry on their once mighty traditions. Thomson persisted with the muchmaligned girls’ comics genre until even the

the history of british comic art true brit

iconic Bunty (a newsagents’ staple since 1958) succumbed to a changing marketplace in 2001. Uncomfortably situated at the fringes of Egmont’s children’s comics group, the increasingly marginalised 2000 AD was eventually licensed to the computer-game company Rebellion, within which it has undergone something of a renaissance under editors Andy Diggle and Matt Smith. 2000 AD apart, the contracting market for adventure comics should have been disastrous for UK creators, waves of whom have continued to emerge in spite of their native publishers’ lack of interest. However, as in the 1980s, both their inspiration and their salvation were found in America. The efficiency of FedEx and the development of e-mail made the home locations of publishers and creators largely irrelevant; it became as easy to send work to a US publisher from London as it was from Chicago or Los Angeles. DC was particularly quick to capitalise on the ever-growing family of British talent, and its Vertigo line became virtually a home-from-home for them. Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean emerged as stars in the USA with very little British work behind them, and throughout the ’90s other creators, including Mark Millar, Warren Ellis, Killian Plunkett, Mike McKone, James Robinson, Ian Churchill, and Charlie Adlard followed their lead. The creative freedom (and higher page rates!) of the US also inspired a new generation of talents to grow and develop their fanbase. The likes of Dougie Braithwaite, Bryan Hitch, Sean Phillips, Simon Bisley, Staz Johnson, Duncan Fregedo, and Frank Quitely are now major players there, while Moore, Morrison, Bolland, Gibbon, Davis, O’Neill, and Fabry still enjoy a sizeable following. Outside the mainstream, the underground scene became either disenfranchised or coopted by the new players, but the biggestselling comic of the ’80s and ’90s certainly owed its anarchic spirit to the early underground scene. Viz comic started life as a fanzine in late 1979, with a print run of just 150. Its creators, Simon and Chris Donald, persuaded local shopkeepers to sell a few copies and the magazine’s mixture of Beanoinspired artwork, irreverent tone and frankly rude humour slowly began to build a readership. When distributor John Brown picked it up in 1983, the comic became an enormous cult, and its stars (including ‘Roger Melly, the Man on the Telly’, ‘The Pathetic Sharks’, and ‘The Fat Slags’) became national institutions. Just as Mad magazine had created a genre in the ’50s, so Viz inspired its own legion of followers, including Zit, Oink, Smut, and Brain Damage – and, echoing its American model, Viz has outlived them all. At its peak in the mid-’90s, the comic commanded sales of over a million copies per issue. It still sells around 200,000 copies today and remains a magnet for naughty schoolboys and bored students across the country.

Viz’s smutty, cheeky brand of humour was always too parochial to translate into foreign sales. Similarly, two other leading lights of the UK comics fraternity, Raymond Briggs and Posy Symmonds, remain little known outside the country. Briggs rose through the ranks of children’s book illustrators before breaking through with such books as Father Christmas (’73) and The Snowman (’78). Briggs has never worked in the traditional comics field, but his books are nonetheless usually drawn in the comic-strip format, densely panelled and dialogued, often drawn in soft pencil and pastel colours. Following a TV cartoon adaptation of The Snowman in the early ’80s, Briggs’ success became so enormous that he felt able to tackle almost any subject. So, in 1982, he published When the Wind Blows, dealing with the aftermath of a nuclear attack. This, too, was turned into a film. A major presence in bookshops throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Briggs cemented his reputation with the deeply touching Ethel and Ernest, a thinly veiled autobiography dealing with his relationship with his parents. Ethel and Ernest was aimed at an adult readership and, like Maus before it, was enjoyed by readers who had not picked up a comic in decades – in fact many seemed unaware that they were reading a comic at all! Like Briggs, Posy Symmonds has enjoyed success in bookshops rather than comic shops, but most of her work has appeared in the broadsheet daily newspaper, The G u a r d i a n . Symmonds studied at the Sorbonne in Paris in the ’60s before re t u rn i n g to Britain, where her first strip appeared in the Sun newspaper in 1969. Switching to the more liberal Guardian in ’72, Symmonds quickly established herself as an acute observer of the foibles of the middle class with a long-lasting weekly strip about the Weber family. Matching her dryly

incisive writing with wonderfully realised drawing, Symmonds was twice voted cartoonist of the year in the 1980s. Having broken into the bookshops with collections of her stripwork, she left the Guardian in ’87 to concentrate on children’s books, but she has returned to comics in recent years. Again serialised in the Guardian, Symmonds’ 1999 Gemma Bovary is undoubtedly her masterpiece to date – a labyrinthinely-plotted dissection of an affaire d’amore among the ex-pat community in France. Like Ethel and Ernest, it is one of the few graphic novels worthy of the name and has elevated Symmonds to the ranks of the very best cartoonists in the world. She was awarded an MBE by the Queen in 2002. The British comics scene of 2004 is a mass of contradictions, seemingly a creative desert on newsagents’ shelves but bursting with talent on the margins. Creators such as Briggs, Symmonds, and Steve Bell (another Guardian cartoonist, of incendiary bent) may operate beyond the gaze of most comics fans but they reach a wider (and possibly more discerning) readership than most comic pros could dream

of. Maverick cartoonists such as Eddie Campbell (with Bacchus and From Hell, with Alan Moore), Gary Spencer Millidge (with Strangehaven), and Paul Grist (Jack Staff) continue to plough a creatively rewarding Johnny Future by Luis Bermejo. ©Odhams.

true brit the history of british comic art

‘Judge Death’ by Frazer Irving. ©Rebellion A/S.

the history of british comic art true brit

furrow on the commercial margins. As in the US, the UK now has an established network of specialist comic shops, catering to a hard core of obsessive fans (usually estimated at around 20,000 readers). However, while these enthusiasts are supportive of challenging material, they are infatuated with American, rather than British, comics. Indeed, the typical British fan will be more likely to follow homegrown talent in a Marvel or DC comic than in a British title. Outside the specialist shop, however, there is a far bigger readership who buy their comics in newsagents or supermarkets. For many of these, there is only one comic that really counts: 2000 AD. After more than a quarter of a century of publishing, ‘the galaxy’s greatest comic’ is still the best place for new talent to emerge. The enormous popularity of Simon Bisley’s ‘Slaine’ artwork in the late 1980s and the comic’s increasing use of colour printing have inspired a generation of ‘mini-Bisleys’ to paint their strips – with varying degrees of success. In recent years, a new wave of creators, taking inspiration from the comic’s earlier stars such as McMahon and Bolland, has begun to emerge, with a renewed interest in storytelling and linework. Among this generation’s leading lights are artists Trevor Hairsine, Henry Flint, Dylan Teague, Jock, Simon Fraser, Lawrence Campbell, and Frazer Irving. Their companion writers include Robbie Morrison, Gordon Rennie, and Dan Abnett. Some of these creators have already broken into the US market and time will tell whether the rest will follow. Recent returns to the comics have included Ian Gibson, Cam Kennedy, John Ridgway, and the New Zealand artist Colin Wilson – the latter having been busy drawing ‘Lieutenant Blueberry’ in France and ‘Tex’ in Italy. Towering like a colossus over his peers, however, is John M. Burns, almost the sole still-active link with the Golden Age of the 1960s; his recent work has been among the finest of his career. The bulk of Burns’ 2000 AD work has been on ‘Judge Dredd’, which remains one of the UK’s most interesting strips under the enduring stewardship of John Wagner. The Sylvester Stallone-helmed Dredd movie (in 1995) may not have been the success that it could (and should) have been, but the character nevertheless still enjoys an iconic presence in the nation’s affections. What the future holds for British comics is far from certain. Editorial timidity and a disastrous lack of vision have written the death sentence for vast swathes of the industry, leaving 2000 AD as a lone survivor of the once-mighty boys’ market. On the other hand, most observers would be surprised to find that, on a typical day, a well-stocked newsagent might offer around one hundred titles – about the same number, in fact, as in 1965 and from a larger

span of publishers. Admittedly, many of these are aimed at a very young readership, but the interests of other age ranges are also well catered for. Titan Books sprang up as an arm of the Forbidden Planet comic-shop empire, and initially concentrated on reprinting 2000 AD strips, but the publisher now offers its own ranges of comics (including successful lines of Simpsons and Star Wars titles), magazines and books. Among licensed titles, the recent launch issue of The All-New Jackie Chan Adventures (based on the TV cartoon) sold half a million copies. For role-playing enthusiasts, Games Workshop’s monthly Warhammer and its various offshoots have kept fantasy and sword-and-sorcery strips alive, whereas they have all-but died out in the US. DC Thomson remains as stubbornly set in its ways as ever, with the Beano, Dandy and Commando largely unchanged in decades yet still finding new generations of fans. Football strips are kept alive – and kicking – in DC Thomson’s Football (usually drawn by Barrie Mitchell or Tony O’Donnell) and the computer-generated comic Striker. The latter started life as a successful newspaper strip, which became something of a cause celèbre when it became the target of a million-pound bidding war between two of the country’s leading tabloid newspapers, the Sun and the Daily Mirror. Today, all the tabloids still maintain prominent comic sections, almost all boasting predominantly home-grown strips with such old favourites as ‘Rupert’, ‘Andy Capp’, ‘The Perishers’, and ‘Fred Bassett’ still very much in evidence. Sadly, following the worldwide trend towards uninspired new humour features, only the Sun’s ‘George and Lynne’ (written by Conrad Frost and drawn by Josep Gual, carrying on the cheesecake

tradition of ‘Jane’) and the Daily Mirror’s football strip ‘Scorer’ (by Barrie Tomlinson and David Sque) carry the flag for realistically drawn features. However, in the wake of the success of ‘Striker’, both the Daily Star (with ‘Big Shot’) and the Sun (with ‘Premier’) now have their own computer-generated football strips, and three of the tabloids even carry Fumetti-style advice columns. Of course, this being the notorious British tabloid press, both the football and the Fumetti strips are invariably full of comely young things in their underwear. Across Europe, indigenous comics industries have endured enormous pressures over the last ten to 15 years. In Italy, France, and Belgium, their vast output has continued unabated, but in Spain local talent has been smothered by a great influx of US and Japanese strips. The countries with perhaps the closest situation to that of Britain are those of Scandinavia, where vestiges of homegrown material nestle among licensed strips (in their case Disney and Phantom comics). British publishers also have an everdiminishing readership to cope with; in the baby-boom years of the ’50s and ’60s, a typical family averaged 2.6 children, whereas today it has fallen to 1.6. Perhaps the biggest challenge to British publishers and creators is to re-engage with the vast, untapped teenage market – the youth which once bought comics in their millions and now look elsewhere for their entertainment. Success in this challenging area will probably determine whether the British comics industry can regain its former status as one of the most exciting and productive in the world.

Zenith by Steve Yeowell. © Rebellion A/S

David A. Roach, with acknowledgement to the pioneering research of Dennis Gifford, Steve Holland, Rob Kirby, Alan Clark, Roger Perry, and David Ashford

true brit leo baxendale

pieces. He also gained experience drawing the occasional comic strip and sports cartoons.

Leo

BAXENDALE by Peter Hansen It would be impossible to have a book about great British comic artists without including the enigmatic Leo Baxendale. In the early 1950s, British weekly comics were undergoing a revolution with the Eagle comic entering the marketplace to redefine the standards for boys comics. In Dundee, Scotland, home of the giant DC Thomson publishing empire this new event was largely ignored and the focus instead was to revamp their own line of popular comics and redefine the way humour comics were presented.

Bash Street Kids

Given a new direction, men who became comic legends such as Dudley Watkins, David Law, Ken Reid, and Paddy Brennan stormed onto the scene ushering in the new era. At the centre of this cauldron of creativity was ‘Che Guevara’ himself, Leo Baxendale. An outspoken Englishman from Lancashire, Baxendale was a self-taught artist who after completing his National Service in the Royal Air Force in 1950 joined the art department of the local Lancashire Evening Post newspaper, where he wrote and illustrated his own short, humorous

At the age of 21 Baxendale submitted some of his comic strips to the Beano comic published by DC Thomson. They hired him immediately and he began work on a number of minor pieces as a freelance artist. His first real comic strip, ‘Little Plum, Your Redskin Chum’, made its debut on October 10, 1953.

Instantly popular, this strip was followed up with ‘Minnie the Minx’ and ‘When the Bell Rings’, which eventually changed its name to the now worldrenowned ‘The Bash Street Kids’. He added to his evergrowing output in 1956 when he started drawing the popular ‘Banana Bunch’ and ‘The Gobbles’ in the new comic, Beezer.

His last major contribution for the firm was the addition of ‘The Three Bears’ in the Beano in June of 1959. This hilarious animal strip where the animals are more human than the people became extremely popular. In 1964, following a rift with DC Thomson, Baxendale left to work for Odhams Press. Surprisingly the refit revolved around artistic license and not money as one would expect. Once the die was cast Baxendale began preparing a total of 30 samples which he sent out to British comic publishers at the rate of two per day. Years later he found out from Albert Cosser of Odhams Press that he needn’t have gone to all that trouble, as Cosser recounted, “If you’d have sent a scribbled note saying ‘I’m available,’ that would have been enough.” As it happened only two packages were mailed out and both recipients responded quickly. Two days after he mailed his packages Baxendale was sitting across the table in Dundee with Alf Wallace, the managing editor of the Odhams group of comics, who had traveled from London to see him in person. He told Baxendale that Odhams market research had revealed the complete dominance of DC Thomson’s comics in the marketplace, especially the Beano. He went on to say that he didn’t want Baxendale to draw some strip in Eagle or Swift, but instead wanted to build a new comic around his talents. Within a short time a new contract was signed that doubled Baxendale’s income in one fell swoop. Furthermore, he could now sign his work, and the new comic would be printed in full-colour gravure. At Thomson’s any scripts provided by Baxendale had been free, but Odhams were willing to pay him for any he may write, which would further

Leo photo: © Respective holder. Bash Street Kids, Three Bears © DC Thomson. Bad Penny: © Odhams.

leo baxendale true brit

Little Plum© DC Thomson.

true brit leo baxendale

Little Plum© DC Thomson.

leo baxendale true brit

Little Plum© DC Thomson.

true brit leo baxendale

Little Plum© DC Thomson.

leo baxendale true brit

supplement his income. Initially Baxendale tried to steal a number of DC Thomson artists and the former Beano sub-editor, Walter Fearn. Fearn was one of DC Thomson’s brightest and youngest editors having been made editor of the Bimbo children’s comic in 1960. Fearn and the great ‘Dennis the Menace’ artist Davy Law, both staff members with DC Thomson, rejected Baxendale’s overtures. Undaunted, Baxendale approached freelance artist Ken Reid and offered to almost double his page rate. Reid contacted DC Thomson’s and offered to stay with them if they would pay him half of what Odhams were offering, but this compromise was rejected and Reid joined Odhams. Added to what was hardly the exodus Baxendale had hoped for was Walter Thorburn who had written most of the scripts for the ‘Banana Bunch’ strips in the Beezer. Walter went on to supply most of the scripts for all of the strips in the new comic for the next four years. Having assembled a team of young artists in London, Baxendale set about creating the new comic, which he had decided should be called Wham! Despite the euphoria, setbacks were just around the corner, like the day Alf Wallace discovered from an insider at DC Thomson that they had managed to get hold of a printed copy of the first issue of Wham as soon as it had come off the presses. Which of course meant that DC Thomson now knew the launch date of Wham. It was then a simple matter to set into motion a television advertising campaign which ran at the same time as Odhams’ campaign for the new comic launched on June 21, 1964. Odhams followed up with another new comic called Smash which debuted on February 6, 1966. Grimly Feendish Little Plum© DC Thomson. Grimly Feendish © Odhams.

true brit leo baxendale

At the same time as Baxendale began his venture into publishing his own work, he published his own biography through Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd. in 1978. Aptly named A Very Funny Business it recounts his extraordinary career in British comics, and exposes a great deal about the business itself and who the power brokers were. Without doubt this is a must read (if you can find it) for anyone who wants to understand British comics. As a final point it should be noted that apart from the magnificent pages of artwork that Leo produced during his lifetime, there are two other notable accomplishments he achieved that alone make him the outstanding figure in British comics that he is. Firstly he launched a lawsuit against DC Thomson over copyright related to the artwork he produced for them. No details of the out of court settlement have ever been published, however, based on some touring exhibits of his work, Leo clearly regained some of his precious artwork. His unwritten victory eventually forced British comic publishers into allowing artists to sign their work and retain their art. Eagle-Eye

In these new comics, Baxendale’s genius devised ‘Eagle Eye Junior Spy’, ‘General Nitt and his Barmy Army’, ‘Danny Dare’, ‘Biff’, ‘Grimly Feendish’, ‘Georgie’s Germs’, ‘Man from Bungle’, ‘Bad Penny’, ‘Swots and Blots’, Pest of the West’, and a host of other characters for the Buster comic. By the end of the ’60s, however, hours of burning the midnight oil began to take their toll on Baxendale. Swollen knuckles and the resultant pain slowly restricted his output, and he compensated by developing a sketchy shorthand version of his previous style. Leo Baxendale continued to draw for another few years before turning his back on comics forever. Ever the free spirit, in 1975 Baxendale began working with Colin Haycraft, Chairman and Managing Editor of book publishers Gerald Duckworth to produce his first annual based on his own creation ‘Willy the Kid’. Two further Willy annuals followed the first, and a host of other projects have followed since, though Leo does not draw any more these days. For further information I would highly recommend a visit to Leo’s web page at: www.reaper.co.uk/main.htm.

Minnie The Minx: © DC Thomson.

Eagle Eye, Grimly Feendish © Odhams.

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Secondly, it has been said that Leo’s continually evolving drawing styles have been copied and adapted by more artists than any other British comic artist. There can be no doubt that Leo Baxendale is a national treasure, and the last surviving link to those halcyon days of British comics glory now sadly long gone.

The Tiddlers Bash Street Kids © DC Thomson

The Tiddlers © Odhams

true brit leo baxendale

Bash Street Kids © DC Thomson

leo baxendale true brit

true brit frank bellamy

Frank

1917 -1976

BELLAMY by Paul Holder

Graphic, unfussy, stylish yet modern – a very distinctive signature, making a bold statement, in fact insisting upon it. A very distinctive artist whose draughtmanship, design and dynamism made him one of the most dramatic of illustrators. In a career spanning over three decades encompassing adventure, mystery, fantasy, science fiction and historical adventures he became one of the finest and most influential of British comic artists. His major works were produced from the mid-1950s until the late ’60s, during a golden era for British comics, inaugurated by the high quality Eagle comic which was to make his name.

frank bellamy true brit

Frank and Nancy Bellamy in the mid-sixties

Frank Alfred Bellamy came into the world on 21st May 1917 in a small bedroom of a Victorian terraced house in Bath Road, Kettering, in the county of Northamptonshire. A central part of England that is obviously a fertile breeding ground for talent as artist Alan Davis and writer Alan Moore both hail from the region. The second child of Horace and Grace and younger brother of Eva, Frank was a bright and lively boy, full of jokes and fun who soon displayed a love for drawing. He must have craved adventure too, as at the age of six or seven, he managed to pull some hairs from a lion’s tail while visiting a local circus. They were proudly kept in a jar for a number of years no doubt until he could fulfill his ambition to be a big game hunter! Art and Africa remained abiding passions throughout his life.

some six years at William Blamire’s studio, with a break for his national service, learning lettering, layout and honing his drawing skills. There was a lot of local advertising and display work, particularly for the local cinema advertising forthcoming attractions such as the films of Cagney and Bogart. He had volunteered to go to Africa when his call up papers arrived, but was considered more useful to the army as an artist and posted to West Auckland in Northern England. Over a period of six months he painted an aircraft recognition room, thereby being one of the few people allowed to draw the German swastika, yet still managed to draw a weekly football cartoon for the Kettering Evening Telegraph for their Saturday sporting paper ‘The Pink ’un’. He was promoted from Lance Bombardier to Sergeant. Promotion from the ranks of a single man came when he married 19-year-old Nancy Caygill from nearby Bishop Auckland, County Durham on 6 March 1942.

If he couldn’t be a big game hunter then he would have to be an artist. Luckily, Kettering had its own advertising studio and soon after leaving school he managed to get a job there. He spent

A son, David, soon followed in 1944, like Frank arriving at the tail end of a world war. Aware of growing family commitments, he looked to London to further his career, securing a job at Norfolk

Movie Crazy Years © Radio Times publications

true brit frank bellamy

Studios near Fleet Street. Here he not only specialised in figure work, but would often do the design and layout as well, despite having no formal art training, but as he said later “... I learnt more in six months in a London Studio working with specialists than I could have in six years in an art school.” David the Shepherd King

Eventually his young family joined him and they moved to Morden in Surrey where they stayed until 1975. Frank took on occasional freelance jobs through International Artists, the biggest art agency in the country. These included covers and inside illustrations for Boy’s Own Paper and Lilliput, some love story illustrations for Home Notes, as well as illustrations for Everybody’s Weekly and Outspan, which being set in South David the Shepherd King © Respective Holders

Africa, meant that he could do lots of big game illustrations and anyway “I was never cut out to do love strips... I prefer something with a bit of meat and guts.” When approached to draw ‘Monty Carstairs’ for Mickey Mouse Weekly he left Norfolk Studios and became a full time freelancer with his first single-page strip in black-and-white line, dated 25

frank bellamy true brit

Monty Carstairs

July 1953. From the outset, he displays excellent draughtmanship delineated with bold crisp linework aligned with a superb handling of light and shade to create atmosphere and depth. His first colour work was Walt Disney’s ‘The Living Desert’ in the centre spread of the same publication. In 1954 he moved to Swift, junior companion to Eagle, re-telling the classic story of the Swiss Family Robinson as a single-page black-and-white tone as well as contributing to ‘The Fleet Family’ and ‘Paul English’. This led in August 1955 to the twopage serial of ‘King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table’, swiftly followed by ‘Robin Hood and His Merry Men’ and ‘Robin Hood and Marian’ done in the same format. This followed a set pattern of three rows of squared boxes with explanatory text underneath so that each frame was almost a separate illustration. Within this framework, Frank tried to maintain as much continuity as possible, often extending frames to the full page width to portray battle scenes or sweeping landscapes. ‘Robin Hood’ shows a more robust and confident treatment of figures which sometimes point out of the frame, a feature that was to become one of his trademarks as he strove to achieve a three-dimensional effect. Panels are packed with movement and detail. Forest scenes particularly are beautifully rendered, dancing with light and shadow.

‘The Happy Warrior’ required a punishing amount of research, particularly at the Imperial War Museum in London, so much so that Frank was given an assistant to help. After a slightly tentative start, he got the wholehearted approval of Winston himself and was able to experiment more with his layouts and treatments, sometimes using what he called “a sort of pictorial symbolism” to graphically portray ideas. The German airborne invasion of Crete of 1941 depicted in episode 31, shows a grasping hand emerging from a swastika, casting an ominous shadow over the map of Crete. This strip also saw the first appearance of his dot stipple technique – drawing little black dots close together to give the illusion of grey tones, as the printing process could only show positive black or white.

Bellamy’s work was certainly noticed, as he was now asked to draw the life story of Winston Churchill in colour for the back page of the Eagle which, with a circulation of some 700,000 was the highest selling comic of the time. This was the first time the Eagle had attempted a biography on a still-living person, a story to be told in an almost documentary format.

Lilliput illustration © Respective Holders

Robin Hood

Dan Dare

Colour artwork for the Eagle was reproduced using an infrared photography process from full-colour painted originals, unlike American comics which were produced from line work and coloured by the use of mechanical dots (which is how they were able to be in full colour throughout, as this process was more economical). There were a set number of approved inks that could be used, but Bellamy narrowed his choice to three basic colours from the German waterproof Pelikan inks: vermillion for red, ultramarine for blue and the standard yellow. From these he would mix all his colours, with of course black for line. In this way he reasoned, the final result would look as close to the printed version as possible as the printing process utilised cyan (blue), magenta (red) and yellow inks all mixed with black to achieve four- (full) colour printing. Throughout his career, although his style and approach changed according to the subject, the basic techniques remained the same. He always used CS10 line board, known for its high white smooth finish which meant it could be scratched and rubbed without damaging the surface. The odd mistake could be scratched away or highlights or explosive effects could be created by rubbing away a top colour to reveal a lighter one underneath. It was ideal for masking – sellotape did the job, but was tricky to use with ink which tended to dry unevenly. Linework was done with a dip pen using a Gillott 1950 nib – sometimes going over a line many times to get a thicker edge, Dan Dare © The Dan Dare Corporation

Design drawing for Dan Dare

All artwork © Respective Holders

frank bellamy true brit

Fraser of Africa

while larger areas were filled in with a sable brush, sometimes built up in many layers using a watercolor technique to achieve the depth and fullness required. Continuing the Eagle’s philosophy to instil a Christian ethic in their young readers, ‘David, the Shepherd King’, became Frank’s next strip replacing ‘The Happy Warrior’ on the back page. Brought to vivid life in rich sumptuous colour, rather like the technicolor films of the time, the story of the biblical King unfolded over 31 weeks. There was more experimentation with framing, perspective and foreshortening, the slaying of Goliath being a particularly memorable and dramatic episode. The Happy Warrior

radical for the existing readership. Certainly the juxtaposition of Bellamy’s work against the others can be jarring, but as Frank said, “Drawing is like handwriting... it’s individual.” So it must have been a relief to move on to his next strip ‘Fraser of Africa’, which proved to be quite a departure from anything before. Frank decided to limit his palette to a monochromatic sepia look of burnt yellows and ochres reflecting the sundrenched African continent. As was his usual practice before starting a new strip, he presented the editor with a series of sketches showing how the major characters would appear. One of these was a beautiful portrait of Fraser himself, looking remarkably like Frank Bellamy. At last, he was that big game hunter! Or more accurately a big game tracker, as the Eagle was keen to promote conservation as part of its aim to entertain and educate. Frank also did a series of colour tests to allay the printers’ fears that subtle colours would not reproduce. The verdict was positive and so he was off on ‘The Lost Safari’, depicting Martin Fraser searching for a missing group of hunters in the little known Kasu district of Tanganyika in East Africa. Two further serials of Fraser followed while Frank kept up a correspondence with a farmer in Kenya ensuring everything would be as accurate as possible. Eagle also devoted a special feature to the artist which showed Frank dressed as a big game hunter – photographed in his garden in Morden. He never did get to Africa, although his editor Marcus Morris claimed that he would have sent him there had he known of his passion.

Work on the next strip, ‘The Adventures of Marco Polo’, was curtailed after only eight episodes when Frank was asked to re-design and revamp Frank Hampson’s ‘Dan Dare’. Although not happy about taking on someone else’s character, he agreed to draw the strip for one year. The production of ‘Dan Dare’ had been a team effort involving elaborate model making, posing and photography, producing highly finished pencil roughs. This was quite different from Bellamy’s methods as, with his work at least, he was essentially a loner. He never made roughs feeling, “You can’t draw the same thing a second time... and capture as much atmosphere.” He was required to use some of the old team as assistants, but despite these difficulties, the end results were startling, although perhaps a little too All artwork © Respective Holders

true brit frank bellamy

All artwork © Respective Holders

frank bellamy true brit

true brit frank bellamy

strove to “lift out the strip cartoon from just being a load of pictures.” Being fantasy, ‘Heros’ didn’t require as much research, but an episode could still take five days to draw and sometimes six or seven, days particularly if there was a large battle scene. In an interview in 1973, Frank commented that he had thoroughly enjoyed drawing the strip and given the chance would “drop everything and start drawing ‘Heros’ tomorrow.”

The whole strip was drawn and lettered by Frank at the same size it was to be printed, a scale that he preferred as he didn’t want the art to appear more detailed in print because it had been reduced in size. His next strip, ‘Montgomery of Alamein’, was also drawn same-size and was his first colour centre spread, the extra space enabling greater scope for expression and layout. Events were depicted with almost photographic realism with blood red skies and dark doom-laden landscapes peopled with armies of fighters. Frames were broken up with zig-zags or thrust like arrows into succeeding panels. In a perfect juxtaposition of words and image, a clock is shown behind a soldier shouting an instruction to “Fire,” the tail of the ‘F’ acting as the foot of the speech balloon which overlaps the next frame where a barrage of a 1000 British guns unleashes the Battle of El Alamein. A masterpiece of comic strip artistry. The final strip of his long association with the Eagle, and the one for which he received most acclaim, was ‘Heros the Spartan’, which began in October 1962. Again a full-colour centre spread, Heros, a cross between a Roman soldier and an ancient Greek warrior was drawn by Bellamy for over three years (with occasional breaks), covering four stories and 94 episodes. He found it entirely different from anything he’d ever drawn before, allowing full rein to his imagination and invention with giant warrior tribes, sea monsters, and weird characters populating eerie landscapes. As always, he was keenly aware of the composition of the page, trying to make each spread look as different as possible, asas he

Frank was approached by Alan Fennell to draw the lead strip for a new comic which was to be of the same high quality as Eagle, but based on Gerry Anderson’s puppet shows and aimed at the new TV generation. Due to his Eagle commitments he felt unable to draw ‘Stingray,’ which was to be the lead strip, but joined TV Century 21 a year later with the launch of ‘Thunderbirds’

in issue 52 in January 1966. He drew the strip for over three and a half years, firstly as a two-page centrespread and then as two separate colour pages, becoming the archetypal ‘Thunderbirds’ artist whose work succeeding artists must be measured against. He decided to draw the characters as real people with simplified heads so that they would remain recognisable as the TV puppets that everybody knew. His layouts became ever bolder and dynamic, concentrating on hardware rather than character, intuitively understanding the programmes’ appeal to millions of children. To a nine-year-old clutching his huge copy of TV 21 (a double-spread measuring some 13" x 20"), ‘Thunderbirds’ leapt off the page in vivid colour (on TV it was Heros the Spartan

All artwork © Respective Holders

frank bellamy true brit

The Avengers © Canal-Plus

still black-and-white) displaying an almost cinematic vision with angles and perspectives that the TV show could perhaps have achieved, but rarely did. Everything was depicted with a vast sense of scale and scope, be it huge engineering feats of 2065, striking futuristic craft, nuclear explosions in space or the lakes of Venus where lurked horrifying monsters. All of Frank’s techniques and experience were evident here with stunning and dramatic page layouts of tension, movement and action. Striking effects with reflected light, painterly and atmospheric backgrounds combined with stylish, graphic line. Frank Bellamy, although he may not have realised as he worked alone at his board, had become part of the burgeoning popular culture of the ’60s. So when The Avengers TV show wanted to do a story about a homicidal strip cartoonist they called him. Disgruntled artist Arnie Packer (played by Neil Hallet, who had a passing resemblance to Frank Bellamy), literally brings his

completed a five-month stint in Look & Learn, an educational childen’s magazine, in 1971, illustrating the story of World War I, a job he enjoyed

character to murderous life by dressing as his creation, ‘The Winged Avenger’. Adorned with a huge birds head and flowing cape, he climbs buildings (thanks to his silver anti-gravity boots) to reach his victims whom he rips to pieces using deadly talon-like claws. Frank too, liked to feel the character he was drawing, but perhaps this was going a bit too far! Taking a short break from ‘Thunderbirds’, he supplied over 30 illustrations as well as designing the ‘Winged Avenger’ character and his studio. It was also his idea that the strip cartoon illustrations dissolve into the live action as the ‘Winged Avenger’ brings his strip to life.

enormously as it gave him the chance to use some different techniques in a more expressionistic style.

After ‘Thunderbirds’, he moved back to more editorial illustration and became the first comic artist whose work appeared on the covers of both the prestigious Sunday Times and Radio Times. His association with the latter continued until the end of his life with regular line illustrations namely for a series on World War II and for the long-running science-fiction series Doctor Who. He All artwork © Respective Holders

Thunderbirds © Carlton International Media Limited

Thunderbirds

true brit frank bellamy

All artwork © Respective Holders

frank bellamy true brit

true brit frank bellamy

All artwork © Respective Holders

Thunderbirds © Carlton International Media Limited

frank bellamy true brit

Moon Landing

true brit frank bellamy

Garth Garth © Trinity Mirror 2004

Red Arrows

Moon Landing © Trinity Mirror 2004

Red Arrows © Radio Times Publications

A spread in the Daily Mirror newspaper picturing the Moon landing in 1969 was favourably received and more work followed, until in 1971 he took over their lead daily strip of ‘Garth’. Created by Steve Dowling in the 1940s, Garth was a blonde Adonis with super-human strength but a mysterious past, able to slip forward and backward in time. Stories could therefore be set almost any time, anywhere, the historical- and western-themed stories proving to be Frank’s personal favourites. With his usual flair and inventiveness, Bellamy managed to rejuvenate the long-running strip conveying mood, movement, detail and dynamism. Space was limited to two to three panels in black-and-white line (the coarseness of the newsprint negated the use of tone), but at least his growing army of fans were treated to new Frank Bellamy art six days of the week! Occasional commissions from the Radio Times allowed him to use colour again, which he applied with some relish, as some of these commissions in the ’70s produced some of his best ever

frank bellamy true brit

The Story of World War One in Look & Learn © Look & Learn Ltd

true brit frank bellamy

frank bellamy true brit Garth

work. A ‘Star Trek’ feature was instrumental in his award of Best Foreign Artist from the American Academy of Comic Book Arts after Al Williamson and Barry Smith put his work forward for consideration. ‘The Day of the Daleks’, and the ‘Movie Crazy Years’ covers for Radio Times were stunning, as were the illustrations for Doctor Who’s ‘Terror of the Zygons’.

Right until the end of his life he was innovating, continually striving to find new and dramatic ways to present his ideas. His untimely death in 1976 at the age of 59 robbed us of a huge talent and him of the international recognition which was rightly his. But he left a rich legacy of art which is unlikely to be surpassed, let alone equalled, and for that we should be very grateful. Thank you, Frank.

Terror of the Zygons Garth © Trinity Mirror 2004

Doctor Who © BBC Television

true brit brian bolland

Out of Lincolnshire came this left-handed virtuoso, who grew up on a steadfast diet of Silver Age DC Comics, and was so enamored with the art that by eleven he created his very own comics, sequential drawings on reams of typing paper. While enrolled at Norwich School of Art, Bolland immersed himself into the British underground – early strips were printed in Oz and Friendz in the early ‘70s along with the self-published Suddenly at 2 O’Clock in the Morning. Upon leaving school he acquired an agent, Bardon Press Features, and landed commercial assignments for magazines such as Time Out and Parade along with providing illustrations for restaurants, concert promoters and other advertising work. By 1975 Brian landed his first

Brian

BOLLAND by George Khoury

All characters © Rebellions A/S

Transcription by Marc McKenzie

professional ongoing strip, rotating artwork with Dave Gibbons on Powerman, a comic that was distributed primarily in Nigeria and neighboring African countries. Beginning in 1977, he became associated with the stellar roster of talented artists at 2000 AD and became the book’s most celebrated artist with his bold work during ‘Judge Dredd’’s golden age. After a lengthy stay at 2000 AD, DC Comics enlisted Brian to render work for Green Lantern, Justice League of America, Adventure Comics, and Mystery in Space – the work on these titles was a childhood ambition now realized. With writer Mike W. Barr, the artist undertook the longest narrative work of his career, (and one of the few occasions where his work would be inked by others) in DC’s bold experiment – the company’s first limited series Camelot 3000, which was only sold in comic specialty shops. 1988 brought readers Batman: The Killing Joke with writer Alan Moore which remains the last full-length work he’s produced. Afterwards he’s dedicated himself primarily to being a cover artist and creating some of the most exciting and titillating imagery seen throughout his lengthy stays on Animal Man, Wonder Woman, The Flash, and Batman: Gotham Knights. Bolland has also written his fair share of eccentric

brian bolland true brit

stories, all drawn by him and capturing his sense of humor, like ‘The Princess and the Frog’ (in Heart Throbs #1), ‘The Kapas’ (in Strange Adventures #1), ‘The Actress and The Bishop’ (in A1 Vol. 1 #3), and ‘An Innocent Guy’ (in Batman: Black and White #4), plus his chronicling his own ongoing short: ‘Mr. Mamoulian’. Today, Bolland illustrates directly into his computer with his trusty Wacom tablet the same sharp linework and meticulous detail that we’ve come to expect from this master. Let’s start at the beginning… where and when were you born? [laughs] Well, I was born on the 26th of March, 1951 in a small village called Frieston near the town of Boston – that’s the original Boston – in Lincolnshire.

What type of profession did your parents have? They owned a farm, I believe? Yeah, my dad was a farmer, but we didn’t live on the farm. We lived in the village, but his farm was in the next village, Benington, a couple of miles away. You don’t really have villages over there [in the United States], but we have villages. It was a very small farm; it was only 68 acres. By American standards that’s like a garden – a backyard, isn’t it?

No, that’s a decent plot of land [laughs]. Yeah. What did he do on the farm? Did he have livestock, or – ? No, it wasn’t livestock, it was arable. Cabbages, potatoes, and sugar beets, things like that.

Did you have any other siblings? How would you describe your childhood? No, I was an only child. Growing up I’ve got nothing really to compare it with. It was in the country and there was a small town nearby. I’m not sure what I can say about all that; I was – I just grew up with whatever most 1950s-1960s children grew up with, really.

What was your earliest comic book experience? I don’t think I really particularly took to comics until I was nine or ten – no, I think I was nine; it was 1960. But, even then, I remember that there had been some Batman comics around the house, because I later found them without covers lying around in a cupboard. I don’t know where they came from, because American comics only started being shipped here in 1959. There was one from 1956-57; it was a Dick Sprang Batman story. The one where Batman was – there were Batmen from all countries. There was a Mexican Batman and there were... other kinds of Batmen, all in slightly different foreign Batman outfits.

So your parents didn’t have a problem with comics? Ah, well they did later, because from 1960 onwards I started to collect them in a fairly excessive way and my dad was really worried, you know, whether they were a bad influence on me. He once threatened to take ’em out and burn ’em. What exactly did he want you to be? He always said he didn’t really want me to be a farmer; I had very little interest in the The Actress and The Bishop © Brian Bolland

farm, and he always said that he didn’t particularly want me to be a farmer, but later, in adult life, I’d been told that he was, kind of, disappointed that I didn’t take up farming. But he was very supportive when I became interested in art. He was very, very supportive when I made the decision and paid for me to go to art school later on.

So when exactly did you get the urge to start drawing? I started drawing in 1960 or ‘61, pretty soon after I started buying comics and it was – well, actually no, I remember – all kids did drawings at school, whether you take it up later on or not, because I’ve still got drawings I did of dinosaurs and of the local birdlife. There are some drawings I did in crayon of bluetits and thrushes and things. I’ve a vague recollection of stickmen comics. I’ll have to have a look for them. Was that one of your Insect League strips?

The Insect League coincided with the beginning of my collecting comics and it was maybe trying to do something that looked like a comic book. That would have been from 1960-1961 onwards. I did quite a lot of that.

So being a teenager, did you experience peer pressure because you were so into comics? When I was 16, I was at school with a kid called Jeff Harwood, and his brother Dave turned out to be a great comic collector. I met Dave and we became great friends. We still are today. He was into the fanzine scene. I wasn’t particularly, but through his contacts I got my early stuff printed in various places.

He would ink your early work, stuff like that? Yes, he inked my stuff, and I inked him, we did these kind of one-off comics – fanzine type of things – together. And that was very good for me because it meant I had someone nearby who I could show the work to and get feedback from and who would do the same to me. We just drew in ballpoint pen and colored in in crayon.

But you were pretty much a loner during high school, or – ? Well, I had a fairly typical circle of friends. I don’t think I was any more of a loner than most kids. I think the fact was that I was at a school that wasn’t all that close to where I lived meant that I didn’t spend time with the local kids. So once I left the school at the end of the day, I was not surrounded by close friends. So I suppose to that extent that’s true.

So who were the first artists that struck your fancy? Well the first comic I ever bought was called Dinosaurus. I talked my granny into buying it, bless her. It was a Dell comic, from 1960, drawn by Jesse Marsh, although I didn’t know his name until many years later, when Joe Staton informed me. After that, I was buying DC, and I think Gil Kane was pretty much my first passion. I just idolized him and I really wanted to draw like him. But I mean, all those other artists – Alex Toth, Carmine [Infantino], Bruno Premiani, Curt Swan, Murphy Anderson – they were all there and to various extents they were influences on me.

true brit brian bolland

The Actress and The Bishop © Brian Bolland

brian bolland true brit

What about British comics? Had you not seen too many at that point? No, I wasn’t particularly impressed with them. I was never into the funny comics; a lot of people in this country, they were keen on the funny comics like Beano and Dandy. But I was never into that at all. There was a comic that started the year before I was born, which is well known, and that’s Eagle, but I’d never bought it. So I never got into that stuff until my college years. I’ve now got a few of the very first ones from the year I was born. Number 6 is the earliest from 1951.

But there were also a lot of adventure artists like Don Lawrence, Hampson, and Bellamy…. Yes, all of those things I discovered in my later teenage years, in my later school years, and through my college years. I was able to, kind of, expand and discover everything that was going, including Don Lawrence’s ‘Trigan Empire’ and all the Eagle stuff that I’d missed in my childhood, you know?

Were you naturally drawn to Bellamy’s style? Well, I was never a big Bellamy fan; I’d never bought anything by Bellamy. I knew he was very highly regarded, but I never had a Frank Bellamy passion at all. In an answer to an earlier question, the first British comics I started buying as a boy, from about the age of 12 or 13 in ’64 was a comic called Valiant and that had in it a strip called ‘The Steel Claw’ drawn by Jesús Blasco, a Spanish artist. You were very into his work? Very, very much so. I think he used photos quite a bit, which was rare at the time, but it looked good. And also, something called ‘Mytek the Mighty,’ drawn by Eric Bradbury – a Brit. And various other strips in that comic. I was very keen on Valiant, so that’s the only British comic I really was into as a child. My interest in British stuff was acquired later on, really. Other things from that period – I also got very into Syd Jordan’s ‘Jeff Hawke’, a daily newspaper strip, and another one called ‘Carol Day,’ by David Wright. Both fantastic and underrated. What was it about the Silver Age that struck you, that appealed to you so much? Well, I mean at the time it wasn’t the Silver Age; it wasn’t called that until later on, really, was it? It’s just the comics that happened to be coming out at the time.

Judge Dredd © Rebellion A/S

Illustration (right) © Brian Bolland

But there was something about the American culture you liked or... was it something about the comics that were different? That’s an interesting question. I mean, as far as the comics were concerned, I think I liked them as objects. I was really keen on the comics and –

You were strictly a collector – was that what it was? I don’t think I was consciously thinking of building a collection here; I just wanted the next one and the next one and the next one. But when I got the comic itself, I held it in my hand like it was sort of

true brit brian bolland

like a treasure. I read them and enjoyed them, but it was the having them that I liked. And, you know, I’d get very excited about the fact that the cover of Green Lantern number something-or-other was brown, the background color was brown. I just loved the [laughs] certain details like that, the sort of richness of the color. I think I kind of fetishised specific design details like that.

I’ve read that you had a lot of DC comics growing up. Were you ever into Marvel comics? For some reason the shop where I bought my comics only did DC and some Charlton, and for some reason it wasn’t getting Marvel. I came across Marvel in places other than my regular shops. I remember very early Spider-Man and so on. I found the paper quality really kind of crude. There was a kind of thinness to it. I found the composition of the covers very cluttered. They had blurbs everywhere.

That’s a Stan Lee thing. Yeah, and I found it really irritating; I liked those large sort of expansive open areas that you’d get on Gil Kane covers and Curt Swan covers – there seemed to be an elegance to them – and with Marvel I just found that it looked like a cheaper, tackier comic. There weren’t any Murphy Andersons or anything sleek like that. No, I think I was – the thing about DC was that it had a kind of draftsmanship thing, whereas Marvel had the kind of kinetic artists like Jack Kirby; and to me Jack Kirby couldn’t draw very well. [laughs] In later years, I realized the error of my ways, and that Kirby was pretty good, but at the time, I just thought, you know, “This guy doesn’t know how to draw.”

There’s a certain initial crudeness to Kirby and Ditko’s art. Yeah, that’s right, I think a kid of 14 does like detail to some extent, he doesn’t really like very expressionistic stuff, and I think that applied to me I’m afraid. I quite liked Ditko, but by that time I think I was very into the details of DC comics. I liked the DC bullet and I liked certain aspects of the design that looked right – I loved the ads for forthcoming issues – the two they’d show at the bottom of the page at the end of each chapter. I knew the names of all the artists. Other kinds of comics didn’t look right.

So when you went to art school, did that help in any way, in learning how to do comics? By the time I was at art school, I’d discovered Warren and just about every other comic there was in the modern world. [laughs] I went to college in 1969, so I would have been 18 and I was very into people like Winsor McCay and all the rest of them.

Did they discourage talking about comics at art school? To be quite honest, I didn’t really bring the subject of comics up very much when I was at art school.

But, very early on, that was what you wanted to do? I knew it was the thing that I was interested in, but I had no concept that I could actually make a living doing it. So I went into art school… you know, all kinds of experimental stuff, because I assumed that as an art student you had to explore the whole range of the arts. So I got pretty far out, you know. And I’m glad I did.

That was pretty much your hippie period. Yeah. [laughs] I was still collecting the comics and drawing the comics but not in art school. In my final year I did a one-year post-graduate course. I spent the whole of that time writing, drawing and printing something called Suddenly at 2 O’Clock in the Morning.

Did you also do a thesis on Neal Adams at art school? Oh yeah, that’s right, I did! That’s true, yes. That was the previous year. Batman: Gotham Knights © DC Comics

brian bolland true brit

And how did that go? Oh, that was funny, actually, because I’d told them I was gonna do a thesis on comics. It was something that, at the time, none of the tutors really knew much about, or really didn’t consider at all. But by the time I started writing it, I realized I had so much to write about Neal Adams that I just wrote this rather large – by the standards of the time – thesis on just one artist that they’d never heard of. So when I handed it in, they’d never heard of the guy. They weren’t even sure that I hadn’t made him up. [laughter] But didn’t you show them samples and stuff, or – ? Yes, it was well illustrated, yes, but – I included a photo of him right at the end, he was smiling in a daft sort of way. They quizzed me a bit, to see whether I wasn’t making his name up and the whole thing wasn’t some kind of joke on them, and I was able to assure them that, no, I actually liked this fellow and I took him very seriously. [laughs]

But you always did a lot of fanzine work and you also did your ‘Little Nympho in Slumberland’ strip. Was that part of the late ’60s, or – ? That would have been about 1970-’71, I think, or ’72 in my Norwich School of Art days, the same time as the Adams essay.

What do you remember about your work at that period? Well, I’d had this whole experimental thing with the art school years, and so I was very interested in the underground scene. You had Zap with Robert Crumb, and everything was pretty obscene and drug-oriented and I did a lot of things like that. Looking back on all that I can see how far from the liberal attitudes of the day we’ve come.

Were you getting those comics in England? Oh, yeah. I mean, the whole underground comics scene came over here. I mean, what was happening over here was we had two or three underground youth papers, Oz and Friendz. And there was one called It. They just swiped all the Robert Crumb cartoons and never paid him for it as far as I know. So you got to see them in that way. I was doing stuff like that really, at the time, so I got into those magazines and that whole culture.

So what happened after you finished school? Did you have any difficulty finding work? Well, after my final year in ’74 I got plunged into unemployment. Back in 1972 I went to a comic convention where I met all of my contemporaries in the comic world; people like Dave Gibbons, and a lot of other people I met for the first time at this one comic convention at the Waverley Hotel. So I kind of picked their brains about, you know, what on Earth to do next. I kept in touch with Dave and I went and showed him all my latest work. He was working in a little wooden shed next to his house. He recommended this agent he had, Barry Coker. I went to see Barry Coker at Bardon Press Features and got work there.

The first sale you ever had was the Buddy Guy illustration for Time Out. Was that when Time Out was starting? Yes, yes it was. I mean that was only 1971, I think; Time Out would have started in the late ’60s. That was something I did during my college years, that and a few other things for the underground magazines, but that was the first thing I got paid for.

But you’ve always kept doing stuff for them periodically, right? Well, I think in later years, since Time Out was the magazine that gave me my first ever paid job, I’ve always had a soft spot for it. Time Out used to be one of the radical left-wing underground mags along with Oz and the others. Later, after it’d

true brit brian bolland

gone respectable, it used to have quite good illustrators doing the covers. There was one called Mick Brownfield who was doing a lot of really good covers. They asked me to do a ‘Judge Dredd’ cover once, and I thought it was really cool to be on the cover of Time Out because it meant that wherever I walked in London for a week, everywhere I looked, there was my cover, peering out of a newsagent. So I was always fond of doing Time Out covers; I did about five.

having worked all day and all night then taking the work in the next day. That was the end of sleep for me, really. [laughs] My sleep patterns have been ruined ever since.

Was this a high-paying gig at this point, or – ? No, God no! No, I was being paid 17 quid a page.

And how did you and Dave [Gibbons] work on a page? How would you separate stories? We

Why did you have an art agent? Was it important to have an agent at this point? Well, at the time, I knew no other way to get work. It was the way Dave was doing it. The comics publishing world was very old school. DC Thomson was the company up in Scotland who, from what I’d heard, had a very old world attitude to its work staff – never gave anybody credit, reprint rights, or anything thing like that. Very antiunion. All of their comics, and the others at Fleetway or IPC, seemed to be the way they had been over the last decade or two, really. Both employed a lot of Spanish artists provided by Barry Coker at Bardon and other agents. Everything seemed to be sewed up really, and there didn’t seem to be much work at all.

Did you want to do those kinds of things, like the adaptations of TV shows, things like that? When I first started, the only kind of work that was offered to me was – I’m sure I’ve said this before – were romance comics and football (soccer) comics, Napoleonic war stories, and things like that. And that seemed to be the only thing going, so I did a few samples like that. I didn’t really have any choice; there was no science fiction at the time – there was an opinion at the time that science fiction was a genre that had had its day since the demise of the much loved ‘Dan Dare’ in Eagle.

So when you were presented with Powerman did that look like something that was appealing to you? Well, it was, obviously, since

alternated. He did the odd numbers, I did the even numbers. It came out every two weeks. Each of us did a book a month.

And he would letter everything, right? Yes. Would he color too? They were black-and-white with a single spot color: red. We did that ourselves on overlay. I had one or two friends help me out occasionally – in particular Kev O’Neill. Also Hilly Bevan who I’ve never credited before. ‘Stalk-blotcher’ supreme. So this was your baptism by fire. Yes. [laughs]

So how did this end – how did you get out of doing Powerman? Did they just cancel the series? Well, in 1977 – I think it was ’77 – Barry Coker, the agent, called Dave and me and I think possibly Carlos Esquerra into his office and said, “Look, they’re gonna launch a new science-fiction comic called 2000 AD and you ought to get into this.” So Carlos and Dave went in for #1, and – was Carlos in #1? I know Dave was –

I think he was, or he was in #2. Yes. I think I decided I’d join in at some point, but they needed somebody to carry on with Powerman, so I carried on with that for a few more months on my own. So really, I was in the hands of an agent who was pretty much deciding what would be best for our careers at the time.

I’d grown up on super-hero comics, it was evident to Barry Coker that I could draw that kind of thing. And so Dave and I got given that job.

Was that the biggest thing that you’d worked on? I think you did about 300 pages of that, right? Probably. I did about 280 pages of ‘Judge Dredd.’

But what kind of experience was it working on Powerman? Was it kind of difficult because you had a deadline? Well, I remember in my college years, you know, I had no deadlines; I was able to just pretty much sit and produce my work, and I would spend a week producing a page [laughs], or however long it took. And when I went into Powerman, I discovered what a treadmill drawing comics actually is. And it was then I started just working all day and all night, and

He was like your editor, almost. Well, he was my agent. But was he sort of dictating the direction where your career was going? Yeah, I mean to some extent I think an agent does that; an agent says, “Look, there’s this job coming up, I think you ought to take it.”

But in-between Powerman and 2000 AD,

brian bolland true brit

was that when you did some ‘Jeff Hawke’ strips? That’s right; I filled in fifteen Jeff Hawke strips and I think I did some work on Dez Skinn’s House of Hammer comic at the time, too.

What sort of impression did you get working with Syd Jordan? It was a wonderful thing because, I mean, Syd’s ‘Jeff Hawke’ – I was as much a fan of that as I was of Gil Kane or Adams or somebody like that. So to actually find myself talking over the phone with Syd was wonderful. Nick Landau who is the owner of the Forbidden Planet bookshop somehow managed to get the syndication department at the Daily Express to provide him with photocopies of 6000 episodes of ‘Jeff Hawke’, and so I just sat for a week or so and read the entire run of ‘Jeff Hawke’. And I still think they are some of the very best stories I’ve ever read.

Did he write the strips? He wrote many of the strips. A friend of his called Willie Patterson wrote quite a few. I think Willie’s are some of the best – do you know ‘Jeff Hawke’ at all?

How did you arrive at 2000 AD? Because I thought that Kevin O’Neill might have put in a word for you or something like that. Was it Kevin? I don’t think I knew Kevin particularly well at the time; I mean, the person I knew at the time was Nick Landau who was also one of the 1972 comic book fans that I’d met back at the Waverley Hotel convention, I think. I knew him and a few people of that generation, and he was working in the office for 2000 AD. Kelvin Gosnell was the absent editor and Nick had pretty much taken on the job in all but name. The covers I did for 2000 AD from prog 11 onwards were got by my agent Barry Coker, but Nick asked me directly to do a ‘Judge Dredd’ story, a fill-in for somebody who was late probably. Barry was almost out of the loop at this point because I knew Nick. Kevin was in the office too, as was Colin Wyatt and Jan Shepherd, but I think I only got to know him quite well while he was there.

Were the comics different in 2000 AD because the artists who were doing it were influenced by American comics and not British comics of the past? I think

Yes, I have the collection with your covers. [laughs] Yeah. There are quite a few with funny little aliens that look like stoves with little legs, like a coneshaped thing with two big eyes. I remember one story set on a planet populated by parrots. There were three parrots that were immigration officials. The arch-fiend Chalcedon announced he was going to land in his spaceship. It turned out that there was a scale anomaly and his spaceship was only as big as a parrot’s nostril – they were giant parrots, in fact. Chalcedon invited them to board. They gave up in disgust and went away. ‘Jeff Hawke’ had the most wonderful characters. They’re still some of favorite characters and I managed to draw one of them, Kolvorok. He was, kind of, a gherkin with one eye and tentacles and a serious inferiority complex. So it was an absolute delight to do those few episodes of ‘Jeff Hawke’.

The Atom © DC Comics

so... yes. I think comics up to that point had been a closed shop where European artists and British artists were very much in a hermetically sealed comic-book world. There wasn’t any cross-fertilization as far as I could tell between European and American comics then. Apart from Barry Smith who had been working on Conan but to us he’d gone native. And, I think, Paul Neary who had worked for Warren.

2000 AD also did, instead of three-page stories, six-page stories.... Yes. And you could tell more story in it. That’s right, yes.

Do you think the punk movement affected [2000 AD]? I think so, yeah. During the punk c r a z e

true brit brian bolland

everything was, kind of... I can’t think of a good word to describe it – very ‘punky.’ I mean, you can’t really look at any part of 2000 AD and see anything that particularly looked like punk. There were a few punks in a few ‘Judge Dredd’ stories that I drew, but it had that kind of “in your face” attitude. It certainly didn’t have the hippy, trippy sweetness and light attitude that might have come from a decade earlier. It offended some of the old guard British comic fan people. It was violent. They didn’t seem to get it. It was satirical and ironic, but it was violent.

Did you ever imagine when you started doing ‘Dredd’ that this would be probably the character that you would be most associated with? At the beginning, no, I didn’t. I think when I started on his – I started at issue #40? I think he was clearly the best character in the comic at the time, but I had no idea he was going to become probably the most popular British comic book character of them all.

But during the time you were working on him he was a little – before you got there he was a little underdeveloped, wasn’t he? Yes.

You and Mick McMahon sort of developed the character more. Yes, I think the character really evolved during that period, didn’t he? I mean I loved Mick’s work and I think we all did. And I think all the idiosyncrasies of the look of the character were really thanks to him, because although Carlos had invented him [Judge Dredd], Mick drew all the early ones – well, a lot of the early ones. There was also Ian Gibson and a bit later Ron Smith. To be honest, Mick’s version was the one that we aimed for.

What do you think is the reason for his popularity? He’s kind of like a sarcastic and dry character; he’s not the most appealing – Oh, I always thought that. I mean, the thing that appealed to me about him was that he wasn’t very

Animal Man © DC Comics

appealing. [laughs] When I drew him I always tried to make him look unlikable. He had mannerisms that I associated with militarism and officialdom. He had the concave-chested look. That insolent sneer. He represented Thatcher’s Britain to me. He looks like a villain to me.

He does. [laughter] And I always loved the sort of moral dilemma of the whole thing; that you didn’t really know which side to root for at any one time, which I think was a fairly complex

brian bolland true brit

thing for comic book readers to have to grapple with, really.

Was there any pressure working at 2000 AD at that period? What sort of pressure?

Like deadlines or expectations – that people might have wanted to see you complete a full storyline or stuff like that. Did you have a lot of deadlines? It was pretty much known that all the artists had to rotate in order to bring out a weekly comic – it was always known in advance that everybody had to do what they could and then rotate and then a story by another artist would come in. I mean, Carlos was always faster then anybody (he was doing ‘Strontium Dog’), so he was the only one capable of doing a weekly comic. Mick was pretty fast at the time and he did lots of them. But I never really came under any pressure; I mean, once they told me when the stuff was due in, I was then under pressure to get it in by then, but having done it, they would schedule me in for whenever it was realistic that I could get the next one in.

They decided early on that you would ink your own work? Well... in Britain there was no such thing as an ‘inker.’ There were no ‘inkers’ in this country.

All right. [laughs] At the time, I can’t name a single person who made his living from inking. And so it was just never considered that the art would be divided up into pencilling and inking at all. That was something in the American system, but not here. Comic artists just produced comic art. Dave and I did it because, you know, since we’d grown up looking at American comics, we knew that the labor was divided up that way in American comics. So occasionally when he was a bit pressed with his ‘Dan Dare,’ I would ink a double-page spread for him or something and occasionally he would ink something of mine when I was in dire straits – including when my dad died in 1975 and I was already late on Powerman.

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I think Garry Leach also inked you as well. Yes. Yes, actually, that’s true; a number of people did it, yes.

How did you go about designing Judge Anderson? Is her appearance based on anybody? I think, at the time, Debbie Harry was on the go, and I think it was probably Debbie Harry to some extent, a young Debbie Harry. But she had that sunny disposition. Flippant. The opposite of Dredd.

true brit brian bolland

What kind of directions did you have for designing Judge Death? Actually, I don’t remember there being much conference about what he looked like. I mean, we didn’t know that Judge Death was going to be a key character; he was just another character of hundreds of others, you know? When the script came along, it just described this guy with – I can’t remember what it said in the script, but I just drew the first panel and there he was.

But you liked what you saw when you drew him the first time? He just really pops out, you know? He has a great visual. Yeah, I think at the time Kevin O’Neill had been drawing ‘Torquemada’ and so there were a lot of characters that looked a bit like that with – I mean, his work was just kind of hallucinogenic, wasn’t it? [laughs] Still is!

Yeah. [laughs] And we were all influencing each other, you know? When we saw Mick’s work we would all think, “Oh well, we have to draw Judge Dredd with huge boots and a protruding lower lip.” And so when Kevin’s work came along we, kind of, looked at it and said, “Wow! Look at that!” Inevitably something like that would creep into your own work. So I think a lot of Kevin went into Judge Death, really. The portcullis visor for instance.

So what happened, did you become dissatisfied working at 2000 AD? After a while you just stopped doing the stories, or – ? Well... gosh....

Did you have any problems with the administration after a while? No, no, I didn’t really have any problems.... I thought you had a problem getting your original art back or something like that. Oh, yes, but that was after I’d left, really, and – I think after drawing 300 pages of anything you – I think I always had my eye on American comics, and there was this pure accident that occurred where Joe Staton came and worked in my flat. He was drawing Green Lantern and he needed to finish an issue, and we let him come and work on a spare drawing table. I’d always thought of DC Comics as the kind of Mecca for all that I loved, so to draw a Green Lantern cover was just so exciting. To some extent you need the excitement, you need the fannish thrill of wanting to do a thing to keep you keen to do it. And so when I’d made this contact with that world I thought that’s probably the way to go.

How did you become friends with him? Did he come to England for a convention? It was a convention at the Rembrandt Hotel in London. A fellow called Richard Burton was working at 2000 AD and Richard was always very involved in the comic fan world and he knew Paul Levitz very well, things like that. So Richard was always quite friendly with people in DC and Marvel over in New York. Richard put me and Joe together. I’ve lost touch with Richard, but Joe and I are still good friends.

So once you did this first Green Lantern cover, did you get more work from DC? Yeah, they gave me others; they gave me a few others.

Is this where the Mystery in Space story came in? Well, I think by that time ‘Judge Dredd’ had been sort of spotted by the comic scouts at DC. And I’d been spotted I suppose....

They found you before they found Dave, right? Yes, I feel I was the first one. I think it all boils down to this accident where I drew this Green Lantern cover. And I always felt that I spearheaded the British invasion, really. But to be quite honest, Dave had actually drawn something in a Marvel comic – or I think something Dave had done for Marvel UK had been reprinted in a Marvel comic before me. Did you actually make a trip here [to America] beforehand? Yes, I did, actually, thanks to Richard Burton I got an introduction to

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brian bolland true brit

go and see Paul Levitz at DC, and they gave me a little tour around the DC offices in ’79.

All right, but that didn’t work? [laughs] Well I didn’t actually go thinking, “I hope they’re going to give me work.” I just went because, you know, I was a fan, and I just wanted to meet a few people. And they gave me this very pleasant tour of the place and I went away feeling quite happy, really. But I felt at least I had met a few people at that point. Mike Esposito, Joe Orlando, Ben Oda. I met Steve Ditko on a later visit.

So at the beginning you just did these short stories? That Mystery in Space story must have been a big thing for you. Well, I think at that stage I was discussing with Dick Giordano (or somebody like that) about the feasibility of me actually working for DC. Because I don’t think they’d really considered employing British artists before; they weren’t really sure of the logistics of it. Although they had been using Filipinos in the past, hadn’t they?

Yeah. And so we just agreed that I would leave 2000 AD and work full time. If they could give me regular work at DC, I’d do it.

But it seemed kind of sporadic at the time. It was. I think we all found that, because once they’d done it with me, I think Dick and a few of the others came over to Britain. We used to have a thing called the SSI – the Society of Strip Illustrators, where all the artists would get together and have a drink and meet each other and give each other awards and stuff. And we used to have guest speakers. And I think Dick and somebody else – probably Joe Kubert came over, too, at one point – just came over to see whether they could, you know, steal a few artists, really. [laughs] Lure them over with the Yankee dollar, you know? And you could see everybody was smacking their lips and thinking, “Oh the dollars, the dollars!”

But the pound’s worth more than the dollar, right? Well, I know, but even so the page rate was better.

Oh yeah? [laughs] For one thing the

New Wonder Woman & The Joker © DC Comics

page rate w a s better; we got our own name printed – you know, we got credit – and we got our artwork back. All stuff we didn’t get at home. We’d get reprint fees, royalties probably. We didn’t get any of this at home here.

Wow. [laughter] There was none of that, so we were all becoming aware that in American comics you had certain legal rights which were honored by the publishers. And consequently, it seemed like a very attractive proposition. Particularly for me who actually loved all that super-hero stuff. So a lot of artists said, “Yeah, okay, we’ll come and work for you,” including people like Kevin, I think. And we were all kind of flush with the thrill and the excitement of it all and then it all went kind of quiet for a lot of us because the work just didn’t come rolling in.

What was your reaction when you saw that Mystery in Space comic? Was that was the first short story they had you do, or – ? Well, I was absolutely thrilled, because I’d never seen anybody from over my side of the pond in a DC comic before, really.

You also had George Tuska and Ditko in the book along with Joe Kubert doing the cover based on your short story.... That’s right, yeah. So it must have been a real thrill. Yes, it was thrilling. But what was the first concrete thing they offered you? Was it Camelot 3000? Well, yes. I mean, there was this quiet period we’d all experienced where the work just didn’t come

pouring in. And then, one day, somebody – I think it was Len Wein – just said, “Look, we’ve got this really hot new project and we think you’re the man for the job, and that’s Camelot 3000,” and I didn’t have any say in what it consisted of; they just said, “Look, this is a hot new thing” and they sort of dragged me and Mike Barr on a kind of promotional bandwagon and we sort of felt like – compared to working in British comics where you didn’t get a credit, you didn’t get your artwork back, no one in management would even condescend to talk to a freelancer. And by comparison, when I said “yes” to Camelot 3000, I was hauled off to San Diego and made to feel like royalty.

You weren’t very keen to this project at the beginning, were you? Well, to be quite honest, I was okay about doing anything they offered me.

Well, I thought you might have wanted to do Batman, or Aquaman or something – I really didn’t think I was in any position to throw my weight around and say what I wanted. [laughs] I was just very pleased to be working for DC who I’d loved. And I didn’t really think I had the leverage to say, “Look, I’d like to do this, but I don’t want to do that.” I just did what they told me.

On this project, it was decided that you were going to work with an inker? Correct. You had mixed feelings on that, or – ? Well, it was something I hadn’t been used to except for those exceptional occasions where I was late. But I knew this was the case, you know; it had to be done. So we just looked at two inkers and chose Bruce Patterson.

But you also tried – I read somewhere that you tried to work with graphite so you wouldn’t have to be inked. Yes, the splash page of #2, they noticed how tight my pencils were and they – somebody – suggested giving it a try, you know, photographing the pencils, printing from the pencils, but I got very obsessed about – it’s very difficult to do solid black areas with graphite. I was spending ages doing solid black areas, so it didn’t really work out.

true brit brian bolland

So how was it working with Mike Barr on this book? Was there a lot of pressure right from the getgo? Well it was a serious deadline. I had to do it pretty quick by my standards. And to begin with I was doing it reasonably fast. And I really enjoyed Mike. I thought he was a funny guy – he made me laugh – and we got on very well. So I quite enjoyed it. It was through working with Mike that I learned that American and English are not exactly the same language. In England, for instance, ‘pissed’ doesn’t mean cross, it means drunk.

But didn’t you slip on the deadlines as well? I did, gradually. I was aware that the artwork needed a little bit extra and it was being sold as something a bit special, so I felt the artwork needed to be a bit special. So I tried to make it look better. I felt that each issue was to look better than the last one. I never quite got used to being inked. I spent a lot of time trying to dominate the inker by pencilling in, kind of, very specific ink lines.

But you got quite a good reception from it. This was like the first direct-market Baxter [paper].... Yeah, it was supposed to be the first direct-sales book, wasn’t it? And I think it was, wasn’t it?

I guess maybe Dazzler was. [laughs] True, I think that was the first direct-sales....

It was the first DC direct sales title. DC, yes. You also did a couple of Batman stories that were pretty good. I liked the Justice League #200 story you did. I think that was before Camelot 3000, wasn’t it? Yeah, I think it probably was. It was so short that I didn’t really have too much of a deadline problem there.

You obviously have an attraction for Batman. What do remember about working on those things like the Batman #400 story? Well, I was absolutely mad keen on Neal Adams, and so it was not that I was particularly a great Batman fan; it’s just that I thought the combination of Adams and Batman together was just so good that

Batman, The Joker, The Penguin © DC Comics

Batman suddenly became a great character to draw because Adams had done him so well. That was the inspiration behind that.

I wanted to ask you about the Batman: Black and White story you did. What was that based on? Is that something you had an idea for, or – ? Oh, you mean the one I did about five years ago?

Yeah, it had a Bernard Goetz kind of character in it? Oh yeah.

Is that who he was based on? Ah... no. I’m afraid that was – it was a bit of a swipe, really. I’d seen a film called The Vanishing and – have you heard of it?

Yes, I’ve seen it. Have you seen the original Dutch version?

No, I’ve seen the Kiefer Sutherland version. Yeah, well just completely expunge that from your brain. That was absolutely a travesty of the original. The original was a really good film. It’s about this girl who vanishes, but there’s this really interesting kind of central philosophical idea about this guy who considers himself to be a perfectly good and moral man who can only be certain that he’s a good and moral man if he has tried to do something bad. You know, if you only do good things because you’re frightened to do bad things, then he considers that his morality hasn’t been put to the test. So he has to do one very bad thing and that was really the idea that I’d swiped from that film. So my character was really, if anything, based on that character in that film. But don’t write that down because I’ll probably be sued for it. [laughs]

Okay. [laughs] But the central idea in The Vanishing really struck a chord with me. Comics and all forms of popular fiction – movies – tend to have a very simplified morality to them. There’s the good guys and the bad guys and I feel that in American popular culture, what with your cowboy movies or action movies it has to be spelled out to the viewers in very simple black-and-white terms. You know who the good guys are and you know who the bad guys are. And you know the bad guys will always lose in the end, really. And there’s never any work that the viewer has to do in terms of moral issues.

That’s like the perfect crime: the guy who does just one crime. I mean, if you ever watch TV shows, for instance, there’s

brian bolland true brit

always a pattern because the criminal goes on a spree. But if someone did only one crime, the possibility of getting away is greater. Well, I mean that was another thing that occurred to me – if Batman swings around Gotham for years and years, he’s a great detective and he can track people down, but if somebody just came from nowhere, had no previous record, and just did that, what could he do about it? I also quite liked the idea of actually drawing his death and – obviously he’s not really dying, it’s an imaginary moment – but when you draw it on the page, you’re still drawing it, you’re still drawing his death.

Did you swipe a panel from yourself? Because there’s that shot when Batman gets drilled in the head – there’s a similar image you did in House of Hammer – House of Hammer... there was, actually.... I actually liked that. There was a scene in ‘The Vampire Circus’, in House of Hammer back in 1977, that I actually had to touch up because there was too much blood splattering in the original drawing and I had to paint a lot of it out. No, not really. I don’t think I was swiping myself in the Batman. I mean, if you

and Titan were interested in doing a series of comics with Alan writing quite a lot of them. Alan, first of all, came up with some ideas that – one of which I would be drawing and one of which possibly Kevin would be drawing or something. The one he came up with that I was going to draw was gonna be called ‘Rocket Red Glare’, and it was like a spoof kind of super-hero thing.

And eventually that sort of became The Killing Joke. And how was that pitched to you? Well, there is a thing that’s going around that The Killing Joke was really just an Annual story, that got sort of hyped up a bit. And that’s not to me the way it went. There are times when artists or writers do things which bring them right to the top of the table of the artists or whatever that are getting the attention. And I was up there at the time thanks to Camelot 3000, and rather than just responding to whatever deal they offered me next, I said, “Look, what should I do next?” And at DC they said, “Anything you want, just say what you want to do and you can do it.” And I said, “All right, I want to draw Batman and I’d like Alan to write it for me, please.” [laughs] So I was the instigator of that whole thing, and Alan, since I knew him, said he’d write it. And – if I remember correctly, I think he said, “What sort of thing have you got in mind?” And I said, “Well, I’d really like to draw the Joker, and if anything, make it about the Joker and Batman only needs to be an incidental character as far as I’m concerned.” So it wasn’t really pitched to me; I think I pitched it to them.

When you finished Camelot 3000, you didn’t want to do a monthly series? Or that was the last thing on your mind? Well, I think at the have a character being shot through the head it’s gonna look very much the same.

Yeah, he sort of had the same tilt, you know... it’s kind of a cool homage to yourself. [laughs] Well, I think you say “homage to yourself,” but what you’re actually doing is you’ve got a limited amount of ideas, really. And you just – [laughs] you just recycle a few.

At one point you were supposed to do a Batman/Judge Dredd story. Yeah. And this kind of led to The Killing Joke, right? Well, it sort of did in a way, because it meant that Alan [Moore] and I got to know each other. And we did begin to think in terms of doing it. The red tape was too complicated. I don’t think Judge Dredd was really quite big enough to make it worth DC’s while putting him together with Batman at the time. Also the bureaucrats at IPC probably took a look at Batman’s sales figures at the time and didn’t like the look of them.

But was Alan the one who initiated this, or – No, no. It was Nick Landau at Forbidden Planet. He was launching Titan Books Illustration © Brian Bolland

time I was – Frank Miller had done Ronin and I could see that an artist who was popular could say, “Look I want to do something special,” and you know, he might say, “Look, I want the DC bullet on the back of the cover, not the front.” [laughs] And I thought, “Well, I’ve got to capitalize on this power, somehow,” so I thought, “I’ll do a prestige book of some sort.” And so, really, the format was just what I wanted at the time. But the realistic fact of the matter was that everybody knew that anything longer than the 47 pages it turned out to be was going to take me a very long time to do. So it ended up rather thin. So I can see why it just gives the impression of being an Annual story.

How long did it take you to work on this thing? Like two years or something? Well, the fact of the matter was that Len Wein was going to be the editor. He’d been the editor of Camelot 3000. But I think he either left DC or he was – he left that project right at the beginning. And after Alan had written it and I was sitting down to draw the artwork it just became one more project sitting on Denny O’Neil’s desk. Denny never rang me or anything. So during that time I was drawing ‘Judge Dredd’ covers for Eagle Comics as they were called, and just sort of living a fairly relaxed life; I wasn’t short of money at the time

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[laughs], and I wasn’t getting chivvied along by my editor.

You had the script all the time. I had the script all the time, yes. And I was drawing ‘Judge Dredd’ covers and a number of other things t h a t came my way just to keep in the public eye a little bit. A ‘Munden’s Bar’ story I think – or was that after?

And you didn’t break down the book or anything? No, I’m not that organized; I just drew it at a rate that seemed comfortable at the time. If Denny had rung me every week and said, “Brian, I want another page out of you,” I would have done it. But he didn’t.

What got him to notice the script? How did the project get re-started? Well, it never stopped; it was always scheduled to be done. The project was in motion, it’s just that the role of editor fell to Denny.

Okay. And Denny’s a very hands-off sort of editor. He certainly didn’t push me at all. I would have thought with the success of The Dark Knight Returns and Alan’s hit with Watchmen that they would have wanted to rush this project, you know? Yes. And with you on it.... I think Denny was so busy doing all kinds of other things that it was just another – I seem to remember at the time thinking, “Does anybody really want this book?” I think I really didn’t have a sense of urgency about it.

What were the main challenges you had working on this book? Well I think one of the challenges was this: it was me saying this is what I want to do, this is my top choice of character and my top choice of writer, and this is where all the planets have aligned and this is something I wanted to stand out as a kind of milestone in my career. There was that sort of sense that this is the best I can do and will ever do. And I just wanted it to live up to my expectations of it.

So you took your time working on the pages? No, I was drawing them at the rate I would normally draw. They just took as long as they needed.

One of the things that Alan had a problem with, he thought that Watchmen might have been too close to [The Killing Animal Man & Hawkgirl © DC Comics

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Joke] in his timing, and I think he was writing it right around the same time of Watchmen and it might have affected the way he wanted to tell the story. You didn’t see this when he gave you the script? Oh really? Has Alan said that? He’s hinted to that in interviews. I mean, the thing I’ve noticed about Alan is that over the years he’s become more clear that he doesn’t think much of it. He underplays it now. You know, I think it’s one of his best stories. Really? The way I see it, if you read The Killing Joke, you pretty much know who the Batman and the Joker are. Well, I think you’re right, yes. I think at the time, before Alan fell out with DC, I think he was writing some of the very best stories about their characters, wasn’t he?

Yeah. He did the fantastic last two episodes of... Superman. And that Superman Annual he did with Dave [Gibbons], you know? Yes, and there were one or two fantastic little Green Lantern stories he wrote. I mean, they made series out of guest appearances that he might have done, like with the Demon, you know? Yeah. So, they obviously held up, even Adam Strange and stuff like that. Yeah. He’s a terrific writer. You couldn’t begin to list all the good stuff he’s done.

So, after The Killing Joke, did you decide you wanted to do less panel work or – ? Well, I think I’d become so obsessive

Batman The Killing Joke by Brian Bolland coloured by John Higgins © DC Comics

brian bolland true brit

Batman The Killing Joke by Brian Bolland coloured by John Higgins © DC Comics

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brian bolland true brit

Will you ever consider returning to doing a longer story? Are there any personal projects you want to do? Well I’ve got all kinds of personal projects; I mean, I’ve done little bits of writing since and –

Would you want to do something like what Dave is doing with The Originals that’s this huge novel? Well, the about drawing – trying to get it right – that it had become a strain. It was a strain to – I’ll tell you what was happening: At the time, I had some friends, people like Eddie Campbell who were drawing stuff in various magazines – one was called Escape. There was another one called Fast Fiction. Just self-produced small comic magazines made by a group of, it seemed to me, high-minded new artists. And that was like a new wave, really. And I always felt that, somewhere deep down, I was a cutting edge kind of an avant-garde artist myself, [laughs] and I actually enjoyed reading that stuff more than reading about superheroes. It made me feel very old-wave. So I did Mr. Mammoulian, which was something as different from the DC stuff I’d done as possible. Mr. Mamoulian came out of a line I’d heard somewhere that drawing comics should be as easy as writing a letter to a friend. I sat down and drew in whatever style came out of my rapidograph, and whatever ideas came to mind on the day. It took two hours to draw a page.

In terms of DC, you just strictly became a cover artist? Is that what you needed to pay the bills – just Wonder Woman, The Flash, and that kind of stuff? I think the main work I took on after that was regular covers for Animal Man. Oh yeah, that’s right. [laughs] I did that first; I did about 65 of those. I think it was this: At the time I was a hit artist. You get offered a lot of work, and you can’t do it all. So people will say, “Can you draw Animal Man?” and I’d say, “Look, I’m really sorry, I really haven’t got the time.” And they’d say, “Well, could you just do the cover?” And so, there was a lot of that sort of offer being pitched at me and there was a lot of cover work to be had. And I enjoyed that because I still enjoyed the comics as artifacts – the way I’d hold the pristine new comic in my hand as a kid, without even opening it. The cover is the bit that you see, you know, before you open the book, and I’ve always liked that part. Seeing the cover is the most exciting part. It’s the memory of covers, real covers or the ones in those little ads, that still gets my juices flowing. And it meant I could draw a wide range of characters without spending too much time on one of them.

The cover work has always kept you satisfied? Ah... that’s a very complicated question. [laughs] Because I’m so slow, I realize that I either completely don’t care about what the work looks like and try to turn it out quickly, in which case the work isn’t going to look very good, or I’m going to go to the other extreme – I’ll do a very small amount of work as well as possible. Proportionately the page rate on covers is better, and I just had to think in those terms, really.

Batman & Two-Face © DC Comics

trouble with me is that when it comes to stories, I don’t have a commercial sense, and when I come up with a story, it tends to be not something that isn’t necessarily going to have any commercial potential. For instance, I did a little story in Strange Adventures in the last two or three years called ‘The Kapas’. Did you see that?

With the Chinese torture – The Chinese torture story, yes. Uh-huh. [laughs] And I’d just get these, kind of, notions that.... I was gonna ask you about that, because didn’t you draw that for that Death pin-up as well? I did, yes, and it also appeared in Mr. Mamoulian as well. Yeah. [laughter] I just get these kind of obsessions and I find that if I’m not obsessed with something, I find it difficult to drum up the enthusiasm to draw it. It becomes a real chore if I’m not committed to it.

But I can see you having no problem writing a Vertigo title or something. Because that story you wrote for Heart Throbs was pretty good, too. I thought that was quite funny, yeah. With the princess and frog. Have you ever pitched anything to Vertigo, or –? Yes, well, I did have an idea that was going to be an onrunning thing, but if I’m gonna be sitting down and drawing two or three hundred pages it’s going to take me a very long time. So a really long graphic novel is not something I’d be capable of doing. And I think also because I wouldn’t be able to turn down cover work.

Are you really selective of the titles you do covers for? Yes, I’m quite selective, yeah. I turn down quite a lot because, you know, I physically can’t do it all.

Has M a r ve l Comics ever tried to get you to do more work? Yeah, Marvel has asked me a number of times. I don’t have

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an attachment to Marvel, that’s the trouble. And not only that, but on the few occasions I’ve done little bits of work for Marvel, they’ve always been jinxed...

Yeah. ...in very odd ways. This includes even Marvel UK? Well, it started when I did a Hulk cover and they didn’t like the head, and stuck on – was it a John Romita?

I think it was a John Buscema – a John Buscema head on top of it without asking me or telling me. Yeah. And then there was another one where I did a She-Hulk cover and it turned up a day later than they wanted it and so during that day they took my original rough to the Bullpen or whatever they have there and got somebody or a bunch of people to knock the cover together in a day. So a kind of botched version of my rough went out as a cover. [laughs] And I think the artwork turned up the following day. They printed my version of the cover as a free give-away or something. I did a Howard the Duck cover which I was pleased with though.

So what’s a typical day for you like? How do you usually go about working? Well, I tend to get up at 9:30 and – it depends on whether it’s a school day [laughs] or a holiday; it depends whether I’m having to clear a way to my computers so that – you know, if my son’s

playing a computer game, it’s not always easy to clear the deck so I can get on with it. I don’t really have a routine unfortunately. I tend to waste a lot of time doing all sorts of things that have to be done: paying bills, talking on the phone to the people who look after my 93-year-old mother – I find it difficult to start cold. I have to shuffle papers around and read this or that and some e-mails – by which time half a day is gone. [George laughs] That’s why I tend to stay up late. But even at the end of the day I’m not necessarily working. Before I left London and came to live here I was completely nocturnal. If I got to bed before nine in the morning or got up before three p.m. it was miraculous. Now I’m usually in bed by three a.m.

What’s the average amount of covers you can draw in a month? Well I like to say two. I’m embarrassingly slow; part of the problem with covers is that you can actually lose several days doing the pre-lims and having them turned down and waiting for approval or disapproval from people higher up the food chain.

I was going to ask you about that... do you have a problem when you send these pre-lims and they just turn them down flat –? Yeah. After, you know, 30 years [laughs] experience, you’d think you can do the cover without having to go through all of that. Well, not really because the editors often want something, and I can’t always draw the character right. At the moment I’m drawing Wolverine on the cover of....

For Wizard, right? Wizard, yes. I mean, I should have done that a couple of weeks ago, but I was doing other things and now I’m doing it. And, you know, I had two go’s at it and they sent me a tweaked version of my roughs to show me how he really ought to look. [laughs] So, you know, I’m no more capable of getting stuff right than everybody else, really.

How long ago did you start working on the computer? You basically work on Photoshop, right? Yeah. And how long ago did you start doing that? It must have been... well, I bought the computer in ’97, and so the gradual shift-over took place from ’97 to probably 2000-2001; I suppose I must have been drawing the whole thing on a computer from about 2000 onwards.

Do you prefer this to, I guess, drawing on paper? Well, obviously, yes. I mean, otherwise I would have gone back to it. I could go on at great lengths about my reasons – and I think I did on Batman © DC Comics

Star Wars © Lucasfilm, Ltd.

brian bolland true brit

my website somewhere and in Comicology or somewhere about the reasons why I prefer it.

There was a rumor that you had, I guess, a problem physically drawing on paper. That’s not true, is it? Well, my eyesight’s not as good. And so drawing little details is difficult in the real world, but on a computer you can just hit the magnifying button and it gets bigger— there’s no worries whatsoever. Gosh, what a strange rumor! I’ve never heard that one.

I’ve heard it before; it’s like, “Oh, he doesn’t draw on paper because he has an illness,” or something like that. [Brian laughs] Whenever I see one of your originals selling on eBay there’s always the quote, “Remember Bolland doesn’t draw on paper anymore!” [laughs]. Well, the thing is I thought I ought to go public straight away about it. I thought that later on if a lot of people were doing it it would be difficult for me to say “Well, actually, I was doing it years before you were.” Dave Gibbons was the one who taught me how to do it in the first place. Him and Angus McKie. But even so, apparently Dave still draws on paper, doesn’t he?

Yeah.

And I think he scans it in and colors it up on the computer. I found it just as easy to pencil and ink directly on the computer and I got the impression I was about the only one doing it.

How many children do you have – just your one son, or –?

There’s a lot of people doing it now. Oh, are there? When it

Are there any covers or stories from your career that are your favorites? Well, I was very pleased with the Batman: Black and White story; I think that was one occasion when I was

got known it did actually affect the sale of my remaining bits of artwork.

You don’t have any originals anymore. What do you have? I had a big sell-out, recently; I sold a lot of my last bits of artwork.

What do you do now? You just have preliminaries and that’s it? No. The pre-lims are done on the computer, too. Wow! [laughter] Tell them I’ve got a rare genetic disease. I’m allergic to paper. Put the rumor out [laughter]. I’m allergic to deadlines; I’m allergic to pens and ink and paper. Batman, Robin and Poison Ivy © DC Comics

Just the one, yes.

How old is he? Seven.

pleased with the story and my art – I mean, since working with Alan, I’ve never worked with another writer, apart from me. And I think I’m getting a little more and more obsessive and – what’s the word? Is the word “autuer-istic?”

Yeah. Is there such a word? Where I want to do everything and control everything myself. If I can’t, I don’t do it. But you’ve always been that way about your art as well. I suppose so, yes.

true brit mark buckingham

Mark

While earning a Bachelor of Arts in Design at Staffordshire University, Mark flirted briefly with a career in animation before taking on comics. Within Strip AIDS, he made his debut and became acquainted with Neil Gaiman when he provided illustrations for the satirical magazine The Truth. He broke into DC Comics as an inker on Hellblazer and established himself as one of the top inkers in the industry with his brushwork bringing out the best of his pencilers in titles like Generation X, Sandman, Ghost Rider 2099, and Death: The High Cost of Living. Championed by Gaiman and Dave McKean, he was able to prove to the DC brass that he was a more than an inker when he would fully illustrate a Poison Ivy story for Secret Origins and eventually penciling even Hellblazer itself. In Miracleman – Book IV: The Golden Age, Mark displayed his knack for impeccable storytelling and design, sculpting some of the finest comics ever seen. More of his versatility as a penciler can be seen in Death: The Time of Your Life, Merv Pumpkinhead, Peter Parker: Spider-Man, Batman: Shadow of the Bat, Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme, Mortigan Goth: Immortalis, and his ‘Tyranny Rex’ art in 2000 AD. Today, you can find his present work on the critically-acclaimed Vertigo title, Fables, with artwork as compelling as ever.

BUCKINGHAM by George Khoury

Collecting? What’s that? 2000 AD and Warrior – my two favorite UK comics of all time – and the greatest influence on my work. Kev O’Neill, Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Alan Davis, Garry Leach, Ian Gibson, Mike McMahon, Steve Dillon, Bryan Talbot, Alan Moore, Grant, and Wagner... heroes every one!!

What lead you to a career in comics? And what has been your secret to constantly work in the business?

Who were your British artistic influences? What was their appeal to you? British comics were so important to me growing up, and remain so today. I loved Frank Bellamy’s stuff, and Don Lawrence.... And as for Frank Hampson and his studio producing such rich and lovingly crafted art on ‘Dan Dare’... I wish I could lavish such time and effort on my own work. Leo Baxendale... a genius. British humor comics in general, especially Monster Fun and Shiver and Shake... I loved those books and I dearly wish I still had copies of them. Those were the days when comics were a cheap disposable entertainment that you shared with friends.

Convention Ad Art © Respective Holders

I have always loved comics and they have always been a part of my life. They helped to establish my appetite for reading from a very early age, inspired me, fueled my imagination and my creativity, and they offered me a safe haven to escape to during those darker moments of childhood. I soon realized that it also offered me the chance to access my own imagination and desire to tell stories in a very direct and personal way, and I took pleasure in using it to entertain others. I always endeavor to remain open-minded in all aspects of life, and especially in my work. I love to try new things and stretch myself as an artist. I am also a very versatile artist... I have survived when others have not because I am always adapting. I guess the other reason is that although I rarely dazzle people with my art, writers and editors have often complimented me on the strength of my storytelling – which is something that will always be essential if you want to survive in this business.

mark buckingham true brit

Miracleman

Miracleman © Gaiman & Buckingham

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Could you please describe your approach when you layout a page? Read the script... carefully! The writer didn’t work long into the night for you to ignore it. Then I do loose thumbnail sketches... initially to plan panel composition and content, paying particular attention to dialogue placement and panel to panel flow.... then I usually build that into whatever design frame work I have devised for that segment of the comic. With Fables I have different grid structures and border design elements which help to give different characters and locations an instant visual cue which lets the reader now where they are. Then I grab some paper and a nice sharp pencil and away I go!

Your art continues to evolve... Why is it that so? Are you your own toughest critic? Could you describe how your art and thinking has changed over the years? I am never truly happy with my work. Evolution is essential both for my creative and commercial survival. After all the experimental work on Miracleman I spent a long time lost... absorbing other artistic influences to the detriment of my own identity. But I fought hard in the last two years to

overcome this; firstly by going back to basics and working in a more traditional style to help shake off other artists’ style licks, and then going back over my oldest and purest art to recreate the Mark Buckingham I was always supposed to be. Fables helped a lot... a fresh universe full of fairy tale fare that I could make my own, and a chance to be very playful with design elements.

Is there a favorite work from your career? And why? Miracleman and Fables – hard to choose between them these days. Miracleman was so experimental – a giant sketch book of a young artist evolving in public, with the constant support of Neil (I could not ask for a better friend). Fables gave me the perfect subject matter for my whimsical style... and a wonderful creative and editorial team to work with. What are your long-term career ambitions? More and better comics... to explore the European and manga markets... and maybe find new ways of bringing comics to a wider audience.

What do you want your readers to get from your work? A pleasurable reading experience, to take them on a wonderful journey, and hopefully touch their hearts. But I never want to get in the way of the story. In a funny way I want them just to get lost in the story and maybe just notice the little bits of me on a second or third viewing.

(top and left) Fables © DC Comics

Above: The Truth © Mark Buckingham

john m burns true brit

John M. Burns represents the finest in visual storytelling graphics – not just as a British artist but a visionary who has spent a lifetime advancing his art without the slightest interest in what it is to be a “hot artist”, “flavour of the moment/month/era,” or simply put “a star”. All he ever did was thrive in the joy of telling the best imaginable stories the best imaginable way: from within, constantly managing to improve and stay fresh no matter if it is doing black-and-white ink drawings with pen or brush, coloured pen and ink visuals, or painted vistas that inspire with their sincerity. The reason for his inclusion in this wonderful book is simple: Mr. Burns is an artistic treasure – a paragon of modesty, kindness, and generosity, and of dedication to his craft.

John M

by Brian “Duke” Boyanski

BURNS

Judge Dredd cover Judge Dredd © Rebellion A/S

true brit john m burns

Did you always want to draw comics? Yes. I always wanted a job drawing or illustrating, well, ever since I was 13 years old and passed my 13+ exam which enabled me to go to the West Ham County Technical School [in East London]. Here the lessons were in favour of art. I remember having the usual career, “what you want to do with your working life when you leave school” interview and being nervous I hadn’t explained really what I wanted to do. Later – as luck would have it – I found out that the careers officer lived near where I lived. I knocked on his front door. He was quite understanding about it and let me explain what it was I wanted to do that I had not explained at the interview.

future studio manageress and owner of Link Studios, Doris White. The book was Figure Drawing, by Andrew Loomis – an American illustrator and instructor at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. He was the first of many American illustrators to inspire me. Some of those were Austin Briggs, Ken Rilley, Joe Demers, Joe Bowler, Norman Rockwell, Robert Fawcett – a fantastic draughtsman – and lots more. Later I became aware of Alex Raymond and Stan Drake, newspaper strip artists.

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This is where luck plays its part: the illustration studio, Links Studios, that I eventually joined had decided to come back to the same school they had acquired their previous apprentice from. Every two years the Links Studios took on a young boy as an apprentice – the year I was leaving school was the time for a new apprentice to be taken on. A friend and myself went for an interview. I had concentrated on figure illustration, my friend more towards advertising. The Link Studios was an agency for comic strip illustrators, so I joined Link Studios as an apprentice in 1954 at the princely sum of two pounds and five shillings [per week]. The career officer had nothing to do with my joining Link Studios and becoming an illustrator, but I think it shows how badly I wanted to do this job.

What has inspired you to start drawing in general – and when did you start? My brother was always drawing, and I wanted to draw as well as he did. When I was 13, a friend and I entered and came first and second in a national painting competition (the very same friend I went to the Link Studios interview with) and the art teacher was very encouraging, so having passed the 13+ exams we both went on to the County Technical School.

Are there current visual storytellers that catch your fancy at the moment? Not one in particular. I like bits from most. I’m usually looking for outstanding drawing, colour, and storytelling.

Did you ever write your own scripts, or do you prefer to work with other writers? I would like to be able to write my own scripts, but I’ll stick to what I do best.

Do you challenge a scriptwriter – bouncing back and forth ideas, proposing your vision, etc. – or do you prefer just to visually realise what is written for you? I illustrate the script as presented. I might change a point of view or two if I think it makes a better looking page, but I never change the writer’s storyline.

Did you have any formal art training?

I started in 1954 when I became an apprentice at Link Studios.

No, but I had a better advantage [than formal art school training]: full-time drawing and being taught by working strip illustrators, plus [it seemed at the time] every night evening classes and weekends sketching in London museums!

Well, congratulations for the first 50 years, sir! Now, who were the artists that inspired and influenced you?

When have you decided to start painting your pages? Do you prefer that to ‘just inking’ the pencils?

My leaving present from school was a book suggested by my

When I realised that transparent inks were not giving me the

How long are you in the comics business?

Countdown © Polystyle

john m burns true brit UFO

and trace down before painting – usually art between the sizes A3-A2.

I remember noticing long time ago in a newspaper a daily strip serial written by Les Lilley and drawn by you – ‘The Seekers’. Was the visual similarity with Peter O’Donnell’s & Jim Holdaway’s ‘Modesty Blaise’ intentional? No, but I guess we were both influenced by the American newspaper strips at the time – I know I was. effects I wanted to try to achieve and I was painting out the pen line to get the result.

Were you given the freedom from the beginning of your career to express yourself as you are, or were you expected to follow either editorial instructions or a certain visual manner in vogue at the moment or a house style? In the ’50s-’70s we had to send in pencil roughs, which were checked, and changes were made if necessary. It kept style and freedom in check; visual style was kept within the publication you were working on.

Which medium did you favour: newspaper daily strips or comic books – weeklies or monthlies? I was trained to be a comic book illustrator. Then, I moved on to newspaper strips and I was able to work on both side-by-side. I think I preferred black-andwhite newspaper daily strips; nowadays, full colour is the order of the day.

How detailed are your pencils when you start the page? Very much. That way I hopefully solve any problems that might show themselves.

Do you work out any preliminary thumbnails, or do you go directly into the laying out of a page? I use thumbnail layouts for comics, but newspaper strips [tiers] offer you a set layout, so normally I would work directly on the artboard, composing, drawing up finished pencils and then inking in.

Are you drawing directly on the art board that is going to be inked and/or painted or do you have a way of transferring your initial designs via lightbox or artograph-projector? I draw the finished pencils on the artboard I would be inking in or painting, the only exception being with large illustrations where I would project a finished pencil art on the large artboard U.F.O & Countdown © Carlton International Media Limited

Did you ever want to actually draw Modesty, and why? No, but when the strip was offered long after Jim Holdaway had died [tragically in a car crash in 1970] it was great to be given the chance, even if it only lasted for two and a half stories – then I was sacked. Actually, the strip I really wanted to draw was ‘Garth’ [by the late, great Frank Bellamy] for The Daily Mirror, but it went to Martin Asbury.

Some of the sexiest heroines of comics flew unleashed from the tip of your pen nib.... Did they?! I don’t think I went out of my way to make them appear so, it was just the circumstances they found themselves in. Okay, I flashed their underwear – or the lack of it – but that was the characters.

How did you land a job drawing the [mis]adventures of the legendary ‘Jane?’ Who wrote the scripts?

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Jane

Robert Maxwell had just become owner of the Mirror group and he wanted to bring back ‘Jane’, the daily strip, and have her introduced to the latest 20th century advancements since she had last appeared in the papers 25 years before. So we had her wake up from a 25-year sleep and discover various things – space travel, etc. However, later on she became the granddaughter of the wartime Jane and – a pop singer!?! Later most of the well known newspaper script writers were used.

What is the story of her cancellation after the brief renewal? I don’t really know. They very seldom tell you. Maybe only that the strip seemed not to fit the image of the Daily Mirror at the time....

I’ve heard from a Marvel UK editor at the beginning of ’90s [who was in the Mirror at the time] that a group of schoolgirls had visited the offices of Mirror and they were shown around and asked what they liked or disliked. Allegedly, one girl said, “I don’t like this ‘Jane’ character, always losing her clothes and getting naked”. At the dawn of the Political Correctness Age of Terror, that sounded like a claxon of the ‘young generation’s dissatisfaction’ with the mentality which has soon killed off Benny Hill kind of humour, et al. Who knows? Anyway... ‘Jane’ got the chop!

Can you remember all the alluring beauties you’ve immortalised in comics? U.F.O & Countdown © Carlton International Media Limited Jane © Mirror Group Newspapers/Syndication International

john m burns true brit

No! But it can’t be that many. I think it seems a lot because they all lasted quite long.

Not even Daniella...? Or Eartha...? Well... how did the ‘Zetari’ feature come about? She was just another character. I thought her adventures might make a good daily/weekly/monthly strip, so I created this female mercenary along with a male buddy [so she wouldn’t have to talk to herself all the time], set in another time and space. The only stipulation I put on the story lines for the adventures written by the Dutch writer [and an exceptional cartoonist in his own right], Martin Lodewijk, was that all technology should be no further advanced past the Victorians. [Publisher and art agent] Ervin Rustemagiã did the rest, selling it to all of Europe.

You’ve done your bit celebrating erotica through the naked female form in many of your comics. Did you enjoy it or was it ‘just an assignment’? I was once told, “You won’t be ever able to draw women,” so I thought, “We’ll see!” As to your question – did I enjoy it or was it “just an assignment” – what do you think?! The former – I enjoyed it!

How did you develop your colouring/painting technique that is your trademark today? As I’ve explained to you before, I was beginning to paint over my lines [in black ink] and it seemed a waste of time inking [contours], so I decided to colour directly over the pencilling. This, however, entails lightly rubbing the pencils with a putty rubber [kneaded eraser] to clean graphite smudges and grease [from sweaty hands], necessitating that I almost redraw when painting – so, time saved by not inking is lost! So I most probably take longer and put too much painting in the job.

Was just inking only too unsatisfactory for expressing yourself? Yes, as I’ve explained to you before. Countdown © Polystyle

Have you ever nurtured ambitions to join the Brits working for the American comics market, or you’ve preferred to anchor yourself in Europe and ‘ye good olde Englande’? I have tried, but it seems not to be [the case], so I’ve stayed in the UK and Europe. Not so much in Europe these days....

What were your American experiences? Not too good. I’m sure mostly because of me.

Were you ever interested in trying your hand at superheroes? Apart from the USA, Britain had its fair share of costumed masked adventurers in comics during the ’60s and ’70s.... No, I’ve always tried to draw realistically, i.e., Stan Drake or Alex Raymond. I would find it difficult to draw in the super-hero style and not have it influence my attempts at realistic drawing. Countdown

true brit john m burns

Were there ever periods in your career when you had to pause due to the circumstances, or you were blessed with the continuous work-flow? Apart from the three years in the RAF and short spell to live in Cornwall, I’ve always managed to work. Even when in the RAF I managed to do a little work when stationed in England.

Did you ever feel tempted to leave comics and try involvement with other media such as illustration, animation or film storyboarding with concept art?

What do you remember from the times in British comics when besides you there were giants like Frank Hampson, Frank Bellamy, Jim Holdaway, Ron Embleton, Don Lawrence, etc.? It’s all been said and written. Anyway, I always considered myself a generation [nearly] behind these greats in British comics.

Was it intimidating to compete with such masters, or there was no competition involved?

I would love to do conceptual artwork for the animation. I did a little character creation and costume/location design for a proposed CGI TV animation series [that’s got cancelled], Size Matters – it didn’t happen! Oh, and ‘Captain Trueno’, a Spanish hero that I drew for Ediciones Publishers, Barcelona – but that never got off

I was hopefully following in their footsteps. As to competing with them...?! I followed mostly Ron Embleton, it seemed, as I took over from him [several features].

In the ’50s, ’60s, through the ’70s, many Spanish, South American, and Italian cartoonists worked for British comics publishers. Were they paid less than their British colleagues? I have no idea what they were paid, but quite a few of them worked on the romance comics at the beginning. I always thought they had a flair for that sort of strip – far better than any of the Brits at the time. Fantastic artwork!

Was the presence of these foreign artists an obstacle for British cartoonists to prosper more in their homeland? Yes and no. They represented a choice for the editors, and as they were better artists at the time, they got the work! It just made me more determined to improve. I managed a couple of romantic strips. It seems I equate the Spanish and Italian artists with romance strips, but you must remember, I was trying to get into this work and they were just too good for us British artists at the time....

Did British cartoonists organise to face the competition, and did you take part in the action? Nikolai Dante

the ground. I guess all of us strip illustrators would love to see our characters come to life.

Are the films or TV influential in any way on your work? Of course! You can’t help but be influenced by other visual [art] forms.

Do you have favourite actors or directors? No.

How important is the reference material for your work? [It] depends on the subject matter or the story I’m illustrating.

Did we organise to fight off the opposition from abroad...? I don’t think so.

When did it happen? I remember starting the SSI [Society of Strip Illustrators] in the ’70s, I think. But I’m sure it wasn’t to stop European artists from getting work here in England. I think basically my thinking was that we get an organisation to represent the British artists so that, if anything, we could do what the Europeans had accomplished here – but in Europe [and elsewhere]. Visiting publishers or their representatives could meet us and we could deal directly – but did it happen? Not really, it became too social and faded away....

Do you rely in any way on photographs as a drawing visual aid?

How important were the artists to comics publishers in those old days before comics were important and artistically recognised?

Yes, but only as an aid, not to slavishly copy or trace [it]. It’s nice to know it’s there.

Not very much, I don’t think so. After Eagle, where artists and writers got bylines, then yes. People began to recognise the

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Countdown © Polystyle

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Wrath of The Gods from ‘Boys World’ © Respective Holders

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Judge Dredd © Rebellion A/S

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contributors and tried to get them. We lowly artists just tagged along hopefully.

Apart from the period spent on drawing ‘Zetari’, did you ever have an agent/art representative? [That was for Ervin Rustemagiã’s Strip Art Features, but] my apprenticeship was served in an agency that was also a comicbook illustration studio called Link Studios, which became my first agent. Then I moved on to King Leo Agency and finally to Bardon, run by Barry Coker, but now I represent myself.

Where do you see the comics medium going at present in Britain, Europe, and America? I’d like to say ‘on the up’, but I don’t think so, not for the big publishers. But there’s a fantastic growth in self-publishing and small companies. I guess this will be the way – what about the internet? I don’t know....

Is drawing coming to you easily, in a relaxed manner, or do you painfully struggle with every stroke of pencil, pen, and brush? It’s hard sometimes, but I’m sure it’s the same for most creators – whereas when it’s flowing, it’s great!

Are you aware of the evolution of your drawing and painting style that is evident in your 2000 AD / ’Judge Dredd’ / ‘Nikolai Dante’ features at present compared to the previous efforts? Yes – but it’s still not there yet!

Did you work on defining your drawing style, or it just happened under the deadline pressures? I think that my style of drawing just evolves due to the lots of influences.

Do you push yourself creatively or you tend to let your craftsmanship take its form spontaneously? I would love to say “it just happens,” but you have to push yourself and in doing so you improve – I hope.

How The West Was Won © Time Warner & Turner Entertainment

Jane © Mirror Group Newspapers/Syndication International

(Above) ‘How the West Was Won’

‘Jane’ Continues over page ...

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Has it occurred to you to try drawing and painting on the computer, or you aren’t interested?

Besides comic strips, what else drawn by you has appeared in print?

I’m not that interested. I think that using a computer (unless you’re a master), everybody’s colour[ing] looks the same.

I can’t remember, but I’ve drawn for advertising and books.

Is the music important to you, especially whilst you create?

Was your family supportive whilst you struggled to find your place in the field of art?

No. However, I do have the radio on most of the time – background noise.

Yes, in the beginning when I lived at home and I was 16 [years old] and only earning £2, 5s a week, even though it was 1954.

Do you have your favourite novelists or poets?

Do you have a favourite scriptwriter with whom you’ve worked best?

No, not “all time favourites.” I’m very boring – when I started in this profession I was told that “to become successful one had to live, breathe and sleep art!” I guess I took the advice to heart....

How do you relax outside the work? Any interests or hobbies? Not really. It’s nice to be living in the Cornish countryside.

You live in a small Cornwall place. Did you always prefer rural life, or you’ve lived in a town/city before?

Yes, Conrad Frost, who was scriptwriter and creator of the idea for ‘George & Lynne’, a daily strip for The Sun newspaper... though in six to seven years we only ever met twice.

Which is the character dearest to you that you’ve drawn before? ‘George & Lynne’ for The Sun and ‘Lilly’, a newspaper daily strip for Bild of Hamburg, Germany.

If you still follow comics nowadays, would you name them?

I’ve spent the last 30 years living in Cornwall, about the same [amount of] time I lived in London. What can I say – I guess Cornwall wins, most of the time.

I don’t – I never really have... but they send me 2000AD and ‘Judge Dredd Megazine’.

Do you ever draw or paint just for yourself after finishing comics work?

Can you name the most unpleasant memory from your comics career?

Not really. I always thought that if I had a painting on an easel in the studio I’d be tempted to work on it instead of meeting my deadlines. But I like the idea... maybe for later on.

Yes, having to redraw and re-paint the last ten to twelve pages of a Trueno album.

Any recommendations for the aspiring artists or novices? Learn to draw really well, especially the human figure. Most – if not all – drawing aspects will present themselves whilst learning to draw the figure. Surmount these and you’ll find [out] drawing in general will be easy. And remember: Bad drawing won’t save the good colour, but good drawing will carry bad colour – and just about everything else.

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Jane

Can you list off-hand the most important comics you’ve worked on? No. I seemed to have been lucky and have worked on quite a few so far.

Is your approach to the visual storytelling more illustrative (British/European) or dynamic (American)? I’ve always thought that you should be able to follow the storyline without having to read the boxes or balloons, so I guess my approach is illustrative.

How many hours do you spend at work daily? However many it takes to get the job in on time – though I’ve stopped working through the night.

Any unfinished projects you’re sorry for having started at all? No. Can’t think of any.

Do you have a pet project waiting to happen? Plenty of ideas still – any good...? Who knows....

How would you sum up your creative life? Lucky and followed by hard work and a very understanding wife and family willing to sacrifice a lot. It’s only a job, after all.

Would you define yourself as a happy man or a lucky man? Both... well, most of the time. Jane © Mirror Group Newspapers/Syndication International

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I’m going to call out some names and I’d like you Alan Davis was to say what you think of first with each one.... born, raised, and Frank Hampson. currently resides Well obviously, I’ve got to say ‘Dan Dare’, but I don’t know in the Midlands what else I could say about him really. I know other work of England. At an that he’s done, but ‘Dan Dare’ is what he’s most well by Eric Nolen-Weathington early age, Alan known for. developed a keen You read ‘Dan Dare’ some as a child, right? interest in stories and soon began creating his own. These stories took many shapes and forms, be they Yeah, it was actually before I got into looking for my own comics. I had older relatives who had Eagle, but ‘Dan Dare’ was reprinted short stories (usually accompanied by illustrations), at various times, so I did get to see it all. It was a landmark comic bits of sequential art, or even complicated dioramas. and a landmark character. Anyone who’s seen it will know that But Alan never thought he would become a comic the designs and the philosophy behind it were far ahead of book artist. In fact, it wasn’t until well after he had anything that was done in comics then, or even since. As a established both a career and a family of his own science-fiction strip, it had just terrific inventiveness. that he drew his first professional comic book work. Did the strip influence you creatively in any way? Initially, Alan thought his foray into comics to be I can’t say that it influenced me in a specific artistic way, because merely a fun hobby he could spend time with during the artwork was very labor-intensive; it was produced by a studio. the weekends. Before long, though, the hobby Frank Hampson did the original artwork as thumbnails or roughs became the career – and a very successful career at – which were amazing things on their own – but then you would that. From his beginnings on such strips as ‘Captain have a studio of people do the finished art. They posed in Britain,’ ‘Marvelman,’ and ‘D.R. & Quinch,’ through costumes; they built models of all the characters, the ships, the Excalibur and ClanDestine, and with his current cities; so it was very, very intensive to get the reality of it. All of this work on JLA: Another Nail and Uncanny X-Men, Alan stuff I’ve only found out in recent years; I didn’t know it at the time. has built quite a resumé. But when it’s all boiled But could you tell even as a child that there was a lot of down, Alan Davis is simply a storyteller. work going into it?

DAVIS

I don’t know. I think that when I was a kid, I just thought that some artists are better than others. It’s only as you get older that you start to really understand the dedication and the limitations of the medium and the efforts that people make to try and overcome those limitations.

How about Don Lawrence? Well Don Lawrence did ‘The Trigan Empire’, which is what he’s most known for. I wasn’t really a fan of Don Lawrence’s artwork – I always found a bit of a woodeness to it – but the coloring and the way it was put together was very nice, and I liked ‘The Trigan Empire’ as a concept. It was like ‘Spartacus meets 300 Spartans in space’. It was always nice to look at, but I wasn’t ever really into as much as I was ‘Dan Dare’ and some other things.

Changing styles a bit, Leo Baxendale. The creation of his that I liked most as a kid was ‘Grimly Feendish’. As a kid I didn’t know who Leo Baxendale was, because a lot of the artwork, if it was signed I didn’t notice, but there was a lot that was just unsigned, and he did have an awful lot of imitators. The thing about a very simplistic art style is that it is very easy to copy it. I think that Leo Baxendale would be the equivalent of Carl Barks in British terms. He had a style that everyone else based their work on or at least were very heavily influenced by.

You use a lot of humor in your writing and in your artwork as well at times, depending on what you are working on, of course. Did any of that develop from humor strips like ‘Grimly Feendish’, or was it always a part of you? I don’t know if the humor comes from a specific source like that. I always appreciated it, and I don’t know if it was a chicken and egg thing. Did I appreciate it because the humor was in me, or did the humor appeal to me and make me think that way? I don’t really know. ‘Grimly Feendish’ was like the British version of ‘The Addams Family’. I honestly don’t remember that much Nightcrawler © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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about it, I just remember that there was a certain look to the artwork and a certain design to the characters that appealed to me, because it was so different than all of the ‘nice’ stuff that was being done at the time. It was an anarchic strip.

Syd Jordan. ‘Lance McLane’ was my favorite of Syd’s work, although he made his name with ‘Jeff Hawke’. ‘Jeff Hawke’ was aimed at an older audience while I was still in my infancy. I caught on to ‘Jeff Hawke’ later on. But Syd was often ghosted by other people – Paul Neary drew some of the stuff for Syd, and since then there’s quite a few other people I know who either helped Syd or filled in for him on the artwork side. But he had a vision of science fiction which I don’t think I’ve ever seen in comics. I’d say even with ‘Dan Dare’ and things like that, his vision was far more realistic – he was far more grounded in science – and it had this Lovecraftian twist where there were dimensions to the alien species and to the cultures that the characters interacted with which were just very, very strange.

Since you have that connection to him through Paul Neary, have you ever met Syd and talked about art with him? I met him a couple of times many, many years ago, but I can’t claim to know him that well. I was fortunate enough to go into his studio and to see a lot of his work and listen to him talk about how he approaches storytelling, but, no, I can’t really claim to know him.

John M. Burns. John M. Burns has been fairly prolific. Although the work of his which I prefer most are his newspaper strips, he did a tremendous amount of work in kids’ comics and various other things over the years, – in newspapers, magazines – and he’s just a phenomenal artist. I don’t know what else I can really say. [laughter] His coloring is terrific. He’s done work for Europe – Capitán Trueno. I’ve never seen him anywhere else, outside of Europe. He’s just very, very prolific and he’s able to draw anything.

Does he stick mainly with newspaper strips or...? No. I think it might be TV 21, he did some science-fiction strips for. I know he drew ‘Doctor Who’ a long time ago, and he did another science-fiction strip, but it was a long time ago and I don’t have any copies of it. Obviously, a lot of the British comics when I was growing up were anthology titles, and what I would do was rip the pages of artwork out that I liked best, or the stories I liked best, and staple them together. But when you tend to do that, it means that you end up with a pile of ratty copies that are falling to pieces – you don’t keep them like you do comics that are complete.

Now for the one who had probably the biggest influence on you, Frank Bellamy. Frank Bellamy I knew because he’d filled in for Frank Hampson on ‘Dan Dare.’ He’d also done the ‘Thunderbirds’ strip, which he was very well known for. Before that he’d done work for Eagle ’The Churchill Story’, ‘The Montgomery Story’, ‘Fraser in Africa’, other things like that. But it was when I saw ‘Garth’ that I really recognized his ability, because one of the things about seeing an artist’s work in color is you can be dazzled by the technique in a different way so that you don’t see the simplicity; it’s so clever, that’s it’s almost too clever. But when you see an artist work in black-&-white, and you know the limitations of black-&-white, and you see them go so far beyond what anyone else is able to do, you realize the ability in breaking the restrictions that other artists acknowledge.

He influenced your take on ‘Captain Britain’ as well. Can you go into that a little? Well he wasn’t really a big influence; it was more the character of ‘Garth’. I’d followed ‘Garth’ before Frank Bellamy came onto the strip, but I’d never really liked it because I didn’t like the artwork that much. But when Frank Bellamy took over ‘Garth’, I got into the ‘Garth’ character. He was a mix of James Bond, John Carter, and pretty much every other hero you can imagine rolled into one. The way that Bellamy drew the strip, it just felt right.

Barry Windsor-Smith, or Barry Smith as he was known when you first saw his work. Well Barry Smith came quite late really. I think the first work I’d seen of Barry Smith was when he was into his Kirby/Sterankoinfluenced stage when he first started working for Marvel. I don’t know if he did anything before then; I’m certainly not aware of anything. He was novel, because he was so different from everyone else – you could see that he was doing the American style artwork, but it didn’t quite fit. I really watched him grow when he took on ‘Conan’ and basically made ‘Conan’ his own.

When you first saw his work, did you just assume he was an American artist or were you aware he was British? I don’t remember. I just remember seeing the artwork and thinking, “Some of this isn’t very good, but there’s something going on here that’s exciting.”

Obviously, you spent a lot of time as a child reading the British comics and newspaper strips, but you also saw a lot of American comics. They were very different in terms of style and content. Do you think the American and British styles of comics have become more similar over the years? I think to a great extent comics have died out. They don’t have any individuality. I don’t want to sound too depressing, because it is a quite depressing picture, but when I was younger, British comics were anthology titles – the ones that still exist are as well – where you would get two- or three-page stories, and maybe six or seven of them in an issue. The very first comics that I saw were mostly text and the comics were a very small part of them, so they were almost like serialized novels with a couple of comic strips as well. As for the actual content, there weren’t any superheroes per se, especially when I was younger there were war stories, historical stories, mythological, and sci-fi. In the war stories genre, you’d have things like ‘Captain Hurricane’, ‘Typhoon Tracy’, and ‘Braddock’, who was a WW II pilot. With the historical stuff you had ‘Heros the Spartan’ from Frank Bellamy, and the classic things like Robin Hood and King Arthur – they were always coming up. With the kids’ comics, you had things like football stories, athletes’ stories. ‘Roy of the Rovers’ is one of the big footballing characters over here – he’s almost iconic. I never really got into football comics; I was never interested in football. There were other things like ‘Wilson, the Greatest Athlete’, who trained on the moors and ran barefoot and won in the Olympics and things like that. For kids’ characters there were things like ‘Billy the Cat’, a school kid who decides to be a super-hero dressed as a cat, but that came quite late on. There was ‘General Jumbo’, a kid who could control an army of toys – he had a control device on his arm. There were ‘The Cubites’, which was basically just a gang of kids riding around on bikes. There were things that might be recognized more as superheroes: ‘The Dollman’, who I’ve told you about before – the guy who has the group of robots he controls and uses ventriloquism

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to give them personalities – and that was pretty freaky. There was ‘The Spider’, who was very strange – he was sort of a super-villain who fought other super-villains. As always with these things there was a lot of science fiction. ‘The Iron Man’ was a particular favorite of mine. You basically had a robot who was a supercomputer, super-strong android. ‘The Steel Claw’, had the guy with the artificial hand who became invisible except for the hand whenever he got an electrical shock. More recently – when I say more recently, it was in my early teens, so it’s only more recently in a historic sense [laughter] – there was one called ‘The Missing Link’, which was about a caveman that was thawed out and turned out to be The Missing Link. He was mutated and became a super-hero called ‘Johnny Future’ and was in a super-hero costume for a while. I would say that he would have been the most recognizable as a super-hero. There were other interesting things where there were period super-heroes. ‘Heros’ might fit into that slightly, but ‘Janus Stark’, who I suppose was a little bit like the character in X-Files, in that he was able to distort his body and crawl through places, and he was a Victorian equivalent of Houdini. There was ‘Adam Eternal’, who was cursed with immortality – he actually travelled through time in the end, and they did some interesting things with him. But it was more bizarre stuff than what you would recognize as part of a DC or Marvel universe.

Most of the diversity in American comics faded out over time and tended to follow trends, but it sounds as though the British comics really kept that diversity throughout. I don’t think it was a case of trying to be diverse, because with ‘Dan Dare’ there were imitators, like ‘Jet Ace Logan’, where as soon as you’ve got something that’s successful, everyone else will try to imitate it. There were always lots of robots - giant robots, alien robots, clunky robots, heroic robots. ‘Robot Archie’ was a very successful strip – not one that I particularly liked. There were a lot of Tarzan-type characters, and there were loads and loads of war comics and Western strips. I think the diversity came purely because there seemed to be a market for it.

Doctor Who Doctor Who © British Broadcasting Corporation

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Comics really aren’t the center of attention there any more. So describe your first meeting with Paul Neary. You were in line to show Paul your samples.... I s it still that way in what’s left of the British comics?

It was just a case of me showing him my stuff and being surprised that he was interested in it. I was encouraged to go down by Les Chester, and when I saw the quality of work people had, I thought, “I’ve got no chance.” It turned out that because I was cheap and cheerful, I was in. [laughter]

I have very little to do with British comics, but I think British comics are virtually dead. All the ones that are in production, as far as I know, are tied to some other media, whether it’s a TV program or a computer game or something like that- they’re not stand alone comics. Even 2000 AD has been bought by a games company.

Did you get an assignment right away?

Let’s talk about how you found your way into comics. You got involved with comics fanzines through your correspondence with Mike Conroy. How involved did you get with the fanzines? You contributed artwork to several of them – were you reading them as well?

Over a fairly short period of time you take on more and more assignments and eventually you’re able to leave your old job and work in comics full time.

I think to call what Mike did a fanzine is actually a huge exaggeration, because it was basically just a pamphlet for his comic mail order business. It was maybe a few press releases about things that were coming up, and a few sketches, and an order form. I’d never really seen that many fanzines. Most of the fanzines that I contributed to, I did so after beginning to work in comics. It was maybe a year after I’d been in touch with Mike Conroy and Les Chester – it wasn’t that much more.

How difficult was it to be working a full time job and spending most of your free time drawing comics.

You got into comics through a visit to a British comics convention. Was it your very first convention, where you met Paul Neary?

When did you start going to the get-togethers at the Westminster Mart and meeting other professional artists?

No, what actually happened was Paul passed me on to Alan McKenzie, but Alan didn’t bother returning my phone calls, so I had to get back on to Paul again and then Paul eventually gave me ‘Captain Britain’. So there was a bit of a delay, but I’d say it was no big challenge for me – it happened very, very easily.

It was about two-and-a-half to three years.

I think it was pretty tiring, but I don’t think I was really aware of it, in that it was a hobby and I was having great fun doing it. Looking back on it now I know that it was gruelling sometimes, the amount of work I was doing, but I was just having so much fun that I was ignoring the problems and just thinking how lucky I was to be able to do it.

That’s right. They weren’t that common at the time. I think it was the first I knew about, and as far as I was aware, it was a big event at the time. I know that Star Wars was featured there – they had one of the ships there and the Chewbacca actor, Peter Mayhew, and various other people there. I think there were some people going around dressed as stormtroopers.

Oh, I honestly can’t remember. I think that initially I went down to London with the work just to make contacts in the offices and then found out that I could go down to these marts that I’d never heard of which were just a watering hole for professionals. It was all very new at the time. It was almost like a boom period. There were a lot of new people, a lot of very optimistic situations – it seemed like comics were taking off.

You’ve been to a lot of conventions since then. How would you compare it to the average convention of today?

Was it a tight-knit group there? There were a fairly small number of British comic artists....

A lot of the British ones are still small. I have been to the American ones – San Diego and Chicago are huge. Having said that, the San Diego convention doesn’t have much to do with comics anymore.

I think comics are, no matter how anyone looks at it, a ghetto industry – it’s a very, very tiny industry. Even when it was in its boom period it was minute. I think this a goldfish bowl for a lot WildC.A.T.S (unpublished)

Top: Phoenix and Kitty Pryde © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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of people who work in comics – because they’re in there, they try to inflate our importance in the world. To most of the world’s population, comics are a novelty. It’s not something people are really into. I think that at the Westminster Mart, one of the important things was suddenly finding there were other people who thought like you, and to meet people whose interests paralleled yours even though their backgrounds didn’t. They came from completely different areas of the country, they had completely different educations, they might be older, they might be younger, they might like different comics. But they did care about comics, which was quite startling to me, because coming from a small town, I’d always been considered the weird one for being so heavily into comics.

How often did the get-togethers take place? Once a week, once a month? They weren’t weekly.... I can’t remember what the schedule was, but I was very casual about it. I don’t think I went to every one. It’d depend on who was going there – most times I’d be going down to see Paul Neary, because at the time I’d meet up with him and show him the artwork I was doing and get his advice.

After starting out working for Paul at Marvel UK, you then started working for Quality and 2000 AD as well. How did working situations compare between the different companies? At the time I didn’t really have anything to compare Marvel to. The company I was working for, I understood the way their offices worked, and I expected Marvel to be much bigger than it was. When I first went down there I thought, “This is a really dinky operation.” The people were very nice, and for the most part the higher-ups were trying to be professional, but the ones who were lower down on the rung tended to just be fans who there enthusiastically producing something that they wanted to read themselves.

2000 AD was much more professional. They were how I thought all comics businesses would be. They were in a proper office block, and they were in modern offices, and they all sounded like they knew what they were talking about – they were very sure of what they wanted. Marvel was much more of a casual operation. It was in a building that had been converted into offices, but it had clearly been some sort of housing at one point – there were lots of little rooms and narrow corridors and enthusiastic, young people flicking paper clips at each other. [laughter]. Quality – I never had too much to do with them. I think I’d maybe gone to Dez’s place once, and the one thing I’ve got a memory of Above: Early fandom art © Alan Davis

is there were so many magazines stored there – I thought he was building himself a bomb shelter out of magazines. [laughter] There were massive stacks everywhere, because he had brought out other magazines before Quality and I think he had quite a bulk of them.

He had worked at Marvel UK before as well. I knew nothing about that then. Richard Burton, who was working at 2000 AD, had also worked for Marvel, but I didn’t know any of that. I just came in through Paul Neary and started working at Marvel, and as I went along found out that there had been people involved at some point in the past, but it was all hearsay and gossip.

When Dick Giordano came in from DC for his first talent search in Britain, was there much of a buzz at the Westminster Mart meetings? When did you find out about it? I wasn’t involved in the first run of these things. Initially it was Brian Bolland, then it was Dave Gibbons, Kevin O’Neill, and Mick McMahon. It was something I only heard about, so I don’t really know too much. All I know was there were suddenly vacancies at 2000 AD, and it was a chance to get my foot in the door there. So I didn’t really think, “Oh, I’d better try to get in touch with Dick Giordano.” I just thought I’d better get down to 2000 AD.

So at that point you weren’t thinking that at some point down the road you might get a shot at working for DC? No, I was just thinking I had some work at Marvel UK and I was getting paid for something that I did for fun, and there was a chance to move up one more rung on the ladder. I didn’t have any thought on how I might suddenly go work in American comics, because I didn’t really have much confidence in what I was doing. I really did feel like I was way out of my depth. I knew very, very little about perspective, very little about all sorts of technical considerations about producing artwork for publication. It was very different from the modern situation, with computerized publication – there were all sorts of things to know about Electrotone and gouache, and they all were mysterious to me at the time.

When you finally do get work at DC, you get placed on Batman and the Outsiders and later Detective – two highprofile books. Was that challenging for you, having your first American work be so visible? Without a doubt. Jim Aparo had always been a big influence on me, and daring to mess around in his sandbox was nervewracking.

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When you finally left Captain Britain – you had continued pencilling it while working for DC – Marvel UK ended the book. Was that because you left or were they wanting to end it soon anyway? I know that there had always been problems with producing Captain Britain. Maybe they thought that the problems were going to be too difficult once I’d left it – I don’t really know. You’d have to ask the people who were around at the time. I was being pretty selfish at the time, knowing that I could get to wrap it up and feel like I’d done something rather than leaving the character and story just hanging in the air.

Before you started working for Marvel in the US, did you know Chris Claremont, or was his asking you to work on X-Men with him your first encounter with him? I didn’t really know Chris Claremont – I was in awe of Chris Claremont, because of the work that he’d done. ‘The Dark Phoenix Saga’ he’d done with John Byrne was the last big run of comics I ever got emotional about. I don’t know if it’s because when I started working in comics I got to see too many strings, but ‘The Dark Phoenix Saga’ is the last time I can remember actively seeking a comic out, wanting to find out what happened next.

Before Excalibur started up you and Chris did a couple of New Mutants Annuals, a couple issues of X-Men, and an X-Men Annual to build up to the series. Was New Mutants Annual #2 the first work you did for Marvel? Yes.

Captain Britain appears in the story as well as his sister, Betsy Braddock, now known as Psylocke. Was this story done to establish a link between Captain Britain and the X-Men to make his role in Excalibur more natural? I honestly don’t know. You’d have to ask Chris about what was going through his mind. I was scheduled to start Excalibur at a certain point, but because I quit Detective early, I had some spare time and Marvel said, “Do this stuff for us.” That was all I knew.

In the New Mutants Annual you got to play around with Impossible Man and the humor that comes with him. Was that a fun story to work on?

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In X-Men Annual #11 Captain Britain shows up again, this time with Meggan. What do you remember about working on that particular story? I enjoyed that one much more, because by that time I’d worked with Chris for a while and started feeling things out and was a little more confident that I wasn’t going too wrong. It was interesting to work on.

When you finally get going in Excalibur, it’s very different from the other X-Men titles. Really it’s more a continuation of the Captain Britain storyline than it is of X-Men. Was there any effort on your part in trying to carry out things in Excalibur that you didn’t have a chance to do in Captain Britain? Not really. I think that happened much later, when I did my own run of Excalibur, where I started to do things I maybe had thought about. But when I was working on Excalibur with Chris, I really was regarding myself as the junior partner and was just waiting to see where Chris wanted to go.

When you did take over the writing chores a couple of years into the series, did you have any goals you set for yourself as far as where you wanted to take the book? I was just trying to have fun. The only criteria I’ve ever set for myself in comics – rather than aim at a target audience – is if I’m having fun, then hopefully someone else will have fun reading it. I try to produce a comic that I would have enjoyed when I was 11, 12, 13, whatever, and could still enjoy reading now. Not in any deeply meaningful way, but just in the fact that it’s fun – a complete distraction in its own mythology.

That was really the first time you wrote a series for an extended period of time. Did you have to change how you approached working on a story? You were used to getting a plot and going from there, but now you had to do it all. What happened initially was I said to Terry Kavanagh I was going to need at least five or six weeks per issue to make sure that I could do it right. As it turned out I was able to do each issue in slightly over a month, so by the time I’d finished four or five issues someone in the office noticed and said, “We can put these out bi-weekly.” So suddenly I was behind schedule, then it became quite stressful.

It was fun. It was very intensive – it was a very compressed story and the deadline was tight. I still look back on it and think, “Oh, I wish I’d done this. I wish I’d done that.” Because I still felt like I was struggling, not only artistically, but in the storytelling.

Obviously you had been a reader of X-Men. Did you have any reservations about working on Marvel’s biggest title? Not really. What I was very conscious of when I did X-Men was the fact that John Romita Jr. was there and he’d been there a long time and had a huge following, and I just didn’t want to mess anything up. They were really done at a pace. They were very far behind schedule.

You did issues #215 and #217, so it looks as though you were doing fill-ins to help get X-Men back on schedule. I can’t remember what the deadline problems were. I know that when I did them it was with a turnaround of a couple of weeks. It wasn’t like, “Here, you’ve got a month – enjoy yourself.” [laughter] It was, “We’re in a desperate situation. Could you help us out?”

Nightraven © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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How were you able to deal with that? I know you had fill-in issues to give you a breather. When I did take a gap I usually was thinking of quitting. I just thought, “I can’t do this,” for one reason or another, but I usually went back. I just had fantastic fun working with Terry.

Would you say that was a real turning point in your career? Yeah. I think that Terry had a huge influence on me, because he basically encouraged me to have fun with what I was doing and not to feel too self-conscious about it. One of the problems when you’re writing and pencilling is you don’t have the opposition you have when you work with a writer or a penciller who wants to do their own thing. It’s quite dangerous when you’re allowed to do everything you want to do. [laughter] You can become very obsessive. When I first started, I was lucky that Terry wasn’t the sort of editor that rubber-stamped something just for ease and think he’d just edit it when the finished job came into the office. He actually read the material, analyzed it, and was challenging and supportive, depending on what was necessary. I know that I wouldn’t have stuck with Excalibur if it hadn’t have been for Terry.

When you came up with ClanDestine, did you have someone that could fill Terry’s role not just in title, but in practice? No, not at all, because at the time I wasn’t really aware of how difficult it was. This is only in retrospect that I can see that Terry was important. At the time there were maybe times where I thought I wanted more control. With ClanDestine, it was the first time where I did have absolute control, but then I started realizing that if you don’t have the company or the editorial behind you, it doesn’t matter how hard you work, you’re wasting your time.

ClanDestine was initially published through Marvel UK. Paul Neary was back in charge there, and it seemed as though they had a larger budget to work with. A lot of the Marvel UK titles were distributed here in the US. Well, at the time Marvel just wanted as much product as it could possibly get out. I think Marvel was producing the most books they ever had, during that period, and Marvel UK was just adding to that.

Were things run differently at Marvel UK during that boom period, or was it pretty much business as usual? It was still in the converted house, the office, but it was much more organized. But I think that might have been due to the fact that Paul was in from the ground floor rather than just taking over. There was a much more focused work ethic I think.

The next project of yours that came out was The Nail. How did that come about? It was a strange situation, because I had wanted to do The Nail earlier – it took five years from when I first proposed the idea of The Nail to actually finishing it. In between, it had gone from DC just outright rejecting the idea, saying “No one’s interested in the Justice League, no one’s interested in Silver Age characters”, to coming around and saying, “Yes, we’d like to do it. We want you to do this, that or the other.” And each time I would just reject the idea and say, “I want to do The Nail this way because this is what it’s about.” The main criticism was there was no twist. Superman’s not Tarzan, Batman’s not Sherlock Holmes, Batman doesn’t get Green Lantern’s power ring, Superman’s parents aren’t shot in an alleyway. They were the sorts of twists that people were going for at the time, and the idea of “everything’s exactly the same except Superman’s not there” just didn’t seem

to be a big enough twist for an Elseworlds. So there was a lot of resistance. I could understand the resistance, and there were many people at DC who said to me that they were surprised it was successful, that they thought it had been a folly.

After ClanDestine and The Nail you continued writing, this time on the X-Men titles. Though you did pencil some of those issues, with others you were just plotting or plotting and scripting. How was the experience of seeing someone else interpret your ideas? I’d already had it happen on Excalibur and I wasn’t really very happy with it. So when I went back to the X-books, I really just wanted to pencil. Getting called in on the plotting was really the last thing that I wanted to do. It was to try and help out, because I’d agreed that I would pencil six issues, and I didn’t have anything else to do during that time. I thought I would just do the six issues of plots for myself and get out of the way, not even doing the dialogue. But as it developed I kind of got sucked into the fact that they wanted this long story. And once I got this long story figured out it became almost like solving a crossword puzzle, where I got part of the way through it and I didn’t want help from anyone else – I wanted to see if I could do it myself. It was gradually getting sucked into something in which I really didn’t know where it was going. If I had known at the start, I would have run a mile for fear of getting involved. [laughter]

You consider that your most professional piece of writing, and you mean that in terms of fulfilling an assignment within certain constraints. It was problem solving. The editor would say, “We want to have a crossover between these two books. We want this character brought to the fore again, so that we can give him his own book.” The problem was there were a lot of prima donnas at the time who would set up the story for the other editor, then the other editor would say the other writers want to do it now. So suddenly you’d have this story for another book to do, and you’d have to sort it out yourself. It was something you didn’t want to do, but now you had to deal with it. There was this fixation on coming up with cover ideas where there weren’t any stories behind them, but “wouldn’t this be a really cool image to do for a cover.” It was a real problem at the time to say, “That sounds like a good idea, but where does it lead and what are the consequences?” It was like sound-bite storytelling, where someone would come up with a pitch that was just a gimmick. I think it was the fact that the X-books had become so interrelated and so cumbersome that no one really had any idea where anything was going or what anything was doing. There was no single mind controlling it all, and it was just this big, turgid mess.

Were there any elements of your time then on the X-titles that you were particularly proud of? Working under the constraints you had to deal with, did pulling something off make it that much more satisfying? There are little things that I could point at and say I was pleased with the way this worked out or that worked out, but it would take such a long time to explain why I’m pleased with it. Because basically being handed something that was like a Gordian knot, and I would untangle it and make it neat and nice, and I was the only person who understood – apart from the editors, if they cared to know what a good job I had done – to the reader, it was just stuff. I don’t think anybody could really understand the significance of getting from A to B without letting all this other stuff drag you down. It was just so incredibly complicated – it was a mess. Right: Batman © DC Comics

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After that you appear to become a cover artist for a while, with Flash and –

toy shops; there were a number of different options that were being considered as to how to expand their audience.

I was doing them at the same time. It wasn’t like I was doing a bunch of covers and nothing else. The Flash covers – I can’t remember what year they were, but they were fairly early.

In the mainstream bookstores now, you can find a small section of graphic novels, but they’re still mainly collections of stories rather than true graphic novels.

I think they were in ’96.

That’s right. I think there’s a failure by the comic producers to realize how the majority of non-comic readers view comics as being a strange hybrid. One of the reasons I did The Nail the way that I did – without captions and thought balloons – is that I know so many people who don’t read comics, and when you give them a comic, the first thing they say is, “Which do you read first? Do you read the boxes or the balloons?” That, to any comic reader, is “don’t be so stupid, it’s so obvious.”

The Legion covers were something I took on thinking I’d just do a few, because I knew Mark [Farmer] was a fan of the Legion. But then K.C. Carlson was such a nice guy we just kept on doing them.

Let’s jump ahead to your six-issue run on Avengers. Did you get involved in the plotting at all? I didn’t want to get involved in the plotting. I suppose I was kind of disappointed, because when I’d first spoken to Kurt [Busiek] he said they wanted to get the Avengers back to the stage where they’re like gods and they’re above humanity. There were these sorts of buzzwords which I picked up on and imagined it being one thing, where it was actually something else. I thought I was going to be drawing the original Iron Man and original Thor and everything else, then found out I wasn’t, that I was going to be drawing Triathalon and Silverclaw, and I just thought “these aren’t Avengers, these are the Legion of Substitue Avengers.” I just didn’t like those characters. There were a couple of issues where I got to draw Thor and Captain America and that was fun, but so many of the characters had changed so much – that was difficult. And the story didn’t focus on the characters I enjoyed, but these new – I know they were created by Kurt and George Pérez, but they just weren’t the Avengers to me. To Kurt and George they’re probably dear creations, but I just wanted to draw the original Avengers.

With Killraven you approached the storytelling a bit differently than anything else you’ve done. What were your original ideas on how you wanted the story to work? This is sort of a laugh, since it’s not going to come out as a trade paperback now. But the idea was to try to do something which was more on the European model, where it was a proper graphic novel from its inception. It wasn’t just going to be a bunch of comic stories which might be gathered together as a graphic novel. It was really an attempt to design something where it worked as individual comics, and when put together as a whole it would have another dimension where it could be read more like a book.

Was that the original plan – to have the individual issues come out, to be followed by the graphic novel? All along it was to be with the issues first. It was sort of ironic the way that it happened, but the regime at the time was wanting to try and expand Marvel’s frontiers by doing something that wasn’t a straight super-hero comic. It wasn’t a case of me going to Marvel and saying I wanted to do Killraven; it was a case of Marvel saying “We’ve got Killraven, we could do something like this. You might want to do it, and we can get something we can present as a science-fiction title as opposed to a super-hero title to see if we can’t get some other people interested in this medium.” At the time, the whole graphic novel thing was less developed than it is now, and the idea was to actually try to prepare something that was a graphic novel. That was my part of the pitch from the storytelling point of view, but Marvel was just trying to look at ways of opening up the market. I know they were talking about doing comics for kids that would be sold in Excalibur © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Excalibur sketch

Most comic readers started reading comics at a very young age. When you’re young you only see the art at first. Eventually you start to actually read them, piece by piece, and absorb the ‘language’ until the process becomes second-nature. Well, of course. The point I’m making, though, is that comics have developed a degree of sophistication which comic readers demand as being essential to justify the subtlety of the medium. That very sophistication is an obstacle to potential comic readers.

After you finished up Killraven, you made a brief return to the Avengers, penciling the three-part Thor/Iron Man/Avengers crossover. With that story you did get to focus in on the three core Avengers characters.

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Yeah, though I hate that Thor costume. [laughter] I couldn’t wait, as soon as Iron Man came in that costume was history. [laughter]

Thor costume aside, was that story more to your liking than your previous stint on the Avengers? It was difficult because it was with three different writers and they were all pulling in different directions. It was problematic that way, but having said that, it was drawing the real characters. From a pure drawing point of view, I enjoyed drawing the images. From a storytelling point of view, I had to detach my interference mode or I would have kicked up too much of a fuss. [laughter]

By the time you got the go-ahead for Another Nail, DC had severely cut back on the number of Elseworlds projects being done. I didn’t think Another Nail was going to happen, because the edict had been handed down: “There are no more Elseworlds.”

Obviously, you showed them your proposal anyway. How did it feel being the exception? I was obviously happy, but it’s also a sort of insanity, because it is a real indulgence of time. It’s a very complex, very compact story. There’s more action and development on a single page than you might get in five or six pages of some comics – it’s incredibly dense. It sounds like I’m describing something as “never mind the quality, feel the width,” by saying so much happens, but it’s very, very intricate. And because of the intricacies, it’s very compressed – much more so than the first Nail.

Does it pick up where the first Nail left off or is there a gap of time? There’s a gap, but not so much of a gap as to fragment the thing. There’s a continuation from The Nail and a gap. It does follow on in a lot of ways, where someone might be left wondering what would happen to a certain character, and they become important plot points.

As far as the writing goes, are you trying to keep the same flavor as The Nail, or are you trying to do something different this time? With the first Nail, it was obviously heading towards the punchline: where Superman was. There was that definite punchline there. There is a lot of stuff like that in Another Nail, where there are individual parts and stories to different characters. But it doesn’t have the same simplicity that the first Nail had, where it was all heading to the one punchline.

How do you feel you’ve developed in your writing over the years, through Excalibur and X-Men and the various miniseries you’ve written? Have you found what works best for you, or is there a constant search for new ways to tell a story? Ultimately it’s for the people to decide how successful that you’ve been on anything. Having said that, I think the one thing that is dangerous is that as you do something more frequently, you become more mannered about what you do. You find a safe way to do something. As an artist you find there are certain angles that don’t work – that you can’t see reaction – there are certain angles that work well. For example, with facial expressions, if you’re looking at someone from behind you can’t see their face. So if you are relying on facial expression you tend to limit your camera angle from straight on to a three-quarter angle from the front. You also can’t do an upshot or a downshot, because the face is distorted in such a way as to distort the expression. So you start to narrow down to a very limited plane of angles that Judge Dredd © Rebellion A/S

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allow you to show what you want to show. In Another Nail, because there are so many characters, and so many changes of scene, it’s one of the real problems that I have. I have to think about how I can introduce this scene without making it look exactly the same as the last ten, or how I can introduce this character without making it look too formulaic. But unfortunately, comics are all about certain formulas. There have been times where I’ve drawn a page and broken all the rules, and it doesn’t work. You go back to the formula and think it works perfectly; that’s why it’s a formula. The clichés become clichés because they are successful. One of the problems I see with modern comics is that to try and avoid the clichés, the medium has been changed so that the storytelling is becoming ever slower and more cinematic. The beauty of comics for me, especially the American type of storytelling I grew up with in the ‘60s, is that so much is compressed onto a page. You can have three or four things happening in one panel.

After you finish Another Nail you’ll be under an exclusive contract with Marvel. Just in general terms, do you hope to do some pencilling here, do a little writing there, and keep the variety of your work going? I don’t know. One of the things about doing something like Another Nail is that it is fantastically exhausting; because when you get to do what you want to do you tend to savor it and labor it in equal parts. You’ve got the chance to do something you really want to do and you don’t want to mess it up, and you don’t want to rush it because you enjoy doing it. It’s totally unprofessional. [laughter] So when I get off of this it’s going to be time to review exactly what I do want to do.

Your career seems to go that way, where you do a project in which you are the driving force, then move on to simply a pencilling assignment where you can recharge your batteries. It’s very difficult. If you look at any of the writer/artists, unless you’re someone like John Byrne who is just fantastically prolific and good – I can’t even comprehend how his mind works that he can produce what he does. When I’m working on my own I have to second guess myself nine different ways to check that I’m not doing something really stupid. I don’t know if it’s just a confidence thing or whether I’m just not that smart. [laughter] I think most writer/artists tend not to stick with being just writer/artists all the time, because it is so difficult.

Once you started writing for yourself, you probably met people who assumed you would never draw for someone else again. There’s two ways that you can go: You can stick with being a writer/ artist and work at a slow rate, because you’re working in both disciplines, or you can decide to become a writer and give up on the pencilling or vice versa – just pencil and give up on the writing. It’s not that difficult an equation to figure out, you just have to make the choice of which way you want to go.

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Ron

Ron Embleton was one of the true giants of British comics and, along with the other artists of the “big four” (Frank Hampson, Frank Bellamy, and Don Lawrence), did much to establish the adventure strip in the country. Embleton was the first of the big four to become a professional – at the precocious age of 17 – with strips for Scion’s Big series of comics. His budding career was interrupted a year later when he was “called up” for his period of National Service (Britain’s equivalent of the Draft), including a tour of duty (1948-1950) in Malaya.

EMBLETON by David Roach

1930-1988

Once out of the army, he set up a studio with several other tyro artists and quickly established himself with publishers such as Scion, Gerald D. Swan, DC Thomson, and Fleetway. Much of his work in this period was westerns (in such comics as Comet, Hotspur, Dynamic Thrills, and Mickey Mouse Weekly), drawn in a slick, smooth style which was clearly influenced by American comics. Embleton began to come into his own by the mid-’50s with yet more westerns for Cowboy Comics Library, ‘Strongbow’ in Mickey Mouse Weekly (from ’54-’59), and strips in Super Detective. However, his breakthrough undoubtedly came with the full-colour ‘Wulf the Briton’ strip

Stingray

in Express Weekly (one of the weeklies inspired by the Eagle, the pre-eminent comic of the ’50s). ‘Wulf’ was set in the time of the Roman conquest of Britain, and gave Embleton ample scope to develop his painting skills and to reveal his seemingly effortless mastery of the human form. By the end of Wulf’s run (’57-’59), the mature Embleton style had emerged: an astonishingly realistic and detailed drawing style married to a sophisticated, dramatic control of colour. He was fast, too. Invariably, it seemed as if nothing – not even the most apocalyptic scene of massed armies in pitched battle – fazed him, and in addition to producing several fully-painted comic-strip pages he always managed to find time to contribute to numerous annuals, magazines and books. ‘Wulf’ was followed by a succession of war strips for the renamed TV Express (’60-’61), Young Lorna Doone in Princess (’62), and The Wrath of the Gods for Boys World (’63). The Michael Moorcockscripted Wrath of the Gods is widely regarded as his masterpiece, though Self-portrait © Embleton Estate “Wrath of Gods” © Respective Holders Stingray © Carlton International Media Limited

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Captain Scarlet

Embleton himself had no great love for its fantasy milieu, and happily passed the strip on to the young John M. Burns. The ’60s were Embleton’s golden era as far as his comics work was concerned, with impressive spells on ‘Johnny Frog’ (’64) in Eagle, on ‘Stingray’ (’65-’66) and ‘Captain Scarlet’ (’67-’68) for TV 21, ‘The Man from UNCLE’ (’66-’67) for Lady Penelope, and some gorgeous fairy-tale adaptations for Once Upon a Time (’69-’71). Throughout the ’60s, he was a constant presence in the glossy, educational weekly Look and Learn, contributing countless covers, illustrations and strips in his distinctive, lushly-painted style. The decade was also a time of wider recognition, as he was elected a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the National Society of Painters and Sculptors. Inevitably, the acclaim for his work outside the world of comics encouraged Embleton to move away from the medium in the 1970s, as he established himself as a popular historical artist. He was a regular contributor to historical books for the publisher Frank Graham, and his prints were widely seen throughout the ’70s and ’80s. However, comics called him back in 1973 via the unlikely figure of Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, who hired Embleton and writer Frederic Mullaly to create a sexy new strip for him. The result was ‘Oh, Wicked Wanda’, which mixed cheesecake with satire and gave the artist the sort of income that he could never have attained in mainstream comics. Wanda (’73-’81) and her successor ‘Sweet Chastity’ (’81-’88) gave Embleton the freedom to indulge his humorous side – certain politicians making regular appearances in the strip – while Penthouse’s top-quality printing allowed his stunning painting skill to shine through. While justly famous for his luminous painting ability, Embleton was also a master penman. His 1950s work may have been quite conventional (broadly in the Alex Raymond tradition) but by his ’60s heyday he had developed an intricately detailed pen style which combined a high-contrast chiaroscuro spotting of blacks with thousands of delicate pen strokes. This black-and-white work was occasionally featured in Fleetway annuals and weeklies, such as Lion and Tiger, as well as in Look and Learn, and he made an unexpected return to the technique late in his career with the newspaper strip ‘Terry and Son’ for the Daily Express (’84-’88). ‘Terry and Son’ was that most unpromising of genres, a weekly fishing strip, but, incredibly,

Stingray

Embleton’s fantastic artwork managed to breathe life into the venture with seeming ease. Throughout his life, Embleton was extraordinarily prolific but that productivity came at a price, and he died at the appallingly young age of 57. His legacy, like that of the other big four artists, is nothing less than the establishment of the British adventure strip as we know it, and his work remains a benchmark against which all others are measured. To date, no one has surpassed him.

Captain Scarlet & Stingray © Carlton International Media Limited

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Wrath of The Gods from ‘Boys World’ © Respective Holders

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‘Oh Wicked Wanda’ in Penthouse ©Penthouse Publications

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Look & Learn Cover ©Look & Learn Ltd

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Stingray ©City Magazines & Carlton Media International

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Captain Scarlet ©City Magazines & Carlton Media International

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The Man from Uncle ©City Magazines & MGM

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If Leo Baxendale, the quintessential British mainstream ‘bigfoot’ artist, could somehow have mated with brilliant American underground comix cartoonist Robert Crumb, such unholy spawn would doubtless resemble our next subject, Hunt Emerson. Though we Yanks tend to ignore any Brit comics outside of the pages of 2000 AD, Great Britain has its own rich history of homegrown underground comix – that is, non-mainstream, ‘alternative’ funny-books quite often focused on confessional tales of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll – and England’s ‘cartoony’ comics, with its weekly episodes of (more oft than not) the manic, ‘bigfoot’ antics of anarchistic, reprobate schoolchildren, have been wildly popular on the Isles since well before World War Two. Hunt, it appears, is comfortable straddling both indie and mainstream camps, and – as you’ll find out momentarily – he has a fine grasp of the history of British comics.

Hunt

EMERSON by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Steven Tice

came from, the fact that I’ve got this art and me brothers, we’re all musicians as well. We were always playing in bands together. Especially me and Norm, the elder of the two. We still play together when we get together. Yes and no. Not a lot, but I certainly do. I’ve been in a band – well, there is a band, or there was a band, a couple of months ago, which got together for a birthday party, actually for my partner Jane’s birthday party, when she was 50. We put a band together. And then we did another gig for somebody else’s birthday party. There’s nothing else that’s happened since then.

Do you still play music today?

How'd it sound?

It was great. [laughter]

What do you play?

Guitar.

I like playing live. I don’t mind what I’m playing. [laughs] For listening, I like country and western, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris.

What's your preference?

I would venture to guess that maybe 80% of cartoonists would be terrified to be on stage. It’s just something that I do. It was funny, actually, doing it with this band – what was it, two months ago now, three months ago – at this birthday party, because it was actually a good stage and a good P.A., and we were doing tracks like ‘Money’ and ‘Mess of the Blues’. Very rock and roll and R&B things. And I can really do these, I can belt it out. But all of the people that I know in Birmingham have never seen me do this, ’cause I hadn’t actually done it for years. So we did this gig and everybody was saying, “I didn’t know you could do that, that’s fantastic!” I said, “Well, I’ve always been able to do this. It’s just nobody’s ever seen me do it.” Because other times I’ve always been playing country music or traditional music, which isn’t the same, you know. [laughs] I like rock and roll.

Where are you originally from? Newcastle-on-Tyne, which is northeast of England.

You were born when?

1952.

What kind of upbringing did you have? Was it working-class?

Yes, I guess so. The class distinctions, I’m sure you know, are very finely defined in England [laughter], and we would probably be lower middle class. My dad was a radio operator on weather ships, among other things, but that was his main thing. And me mum, when I was small, she didn’t work, and then later she was an office worker.

Did you have siblings?

Two brothers.

So was it a pastoral kind of upbringing? The first half of it was, yes. Then we moved to a place that was a bit more urban. The first half was cornfields and, yeah, fantastic.

And when did you first start drawing? Well, I’ve always drawn, since I could hold a pencil. I always did funny drawings to amuse me classmates and things, but never really thought about it seriously. I knew that whatever I was going to do, it was going to be something to do with art, so when it came time to choose college and things, I insisted in going to art college.

No. Me mum was slightly musical. But no, it all came out in me and my brothers

Were your parent’s creative at all?

Not particularly, no. I had an uncle who was a very dynamic man and could kind of do most things, including sketching and suchlike, but that wasn’t what he did. He didn’t do it as a hobby or anything, it was just something he could do. But no, me mum’s often wondered this. She doesn’t know where it

Any relatives?

©Hunt Emerson

hunt emerson true brit

And I did two years of preparation work in Newcastle, a two-year course that was really more like an extension of high school. And then I came to Birmingham to do university – well, the equivalent to a university degree – in painting, but I was only there a few months and realized I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, basically. Whatever I was, I wasn’t an artist in that way. So I quit that after a year, and that was when I started doing comics and cartoons.

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I don’t know if this analogy is wrong, but it seems to me that I talk to a lot of British artists, they seem to almost have the same experience in the ’50s and early ’60s that a lot of American cartoonists and comics artists had in the ’30s: that a culture was being developed just for them. There was the growth of the weeklies with Frank Bellamy and the adventure stuff. There would actually be movie serials, right? When they were long gone in the United States, they were still going on strong in England, weren’t they? Oh, that’s right, yes. Used to go on a Saturday morning to see

When you were a child, did you regularly read the British weeklies?

Batman and Zorro....

Yeah, everybody did. Beano and Dandy , Beezer , Topper, and things like that. I wasn’t fanatical about them, but yeah, all kids saw them; they were around the place. I also used to see Mad when it was published as a comic book, except that I saw it in the Ballantine paperback reprints, the ones you had to turn on the side to read. And they were an absolute revelation. I’d never seen anything like this before, and I was very, very interested in those.

You know, I'm talking to a lot of American underground comics artists, and for me – I remember exactly where I was when I first encountered the Ballantine paperbacks, because they just – I mean, I had seen the “Super-Duper Man” beforehand but just thought that was an anomaly. I had no idea that Mad was comics. Do you have a distinct memory of where you were? Actually, I do! Which is quite unusual for me. [laughs] But yes, there was a time when, the first one I saw was Utterly Mad, and some kid had brought it into school. I must have been about eight or nine. And some kid had brought it into school, and I remember there being a great pile of kids on the desk looking at this thing, and my kind of glimpsing it from the back of this crowd of kids, sort of seeing what it was, and literally fighting me way through to the front, because I’d never seen anything like it before.

©Hunt Emerson

Absolutely! I was totally intrigued by it. And I didn’t see any more after that for quite a while, for maybe a year or more. But then gradually I started to find out where they were, so I saw two or three of them. Of course, it was only later that I managed to get hold of a full set and all the rest of it. But the one that first got me was ‘G.I. Schmoe’ in Utterly Mad.

And you must see it. [laughs]

Were you particularly attracted to the plethora of kid humor material, like Leo Baxendale? Yes, rather than the adventure strips, because we had two forms of comics in England at that time. There were the humor ones – Beano, Dandy, Topper, and Beezer, and others like that – and then there was Valiant, Hotspur, Victor, and other ones, which were basically adventure strips. And I was never particularly interested in those ones. I always liked the funny stuff.

Did you feel like you had your own little culture? Yeah, I guess so... I never really thought about it. I don’t know if you noticed, but I’ve been working for the Beano now, you know? For the last year I’ve been drawing ‘Little Plum, Your Red-skinned Chum’. Although they don’t actually use the ‘red-skinned chum’ line these days. [laughter]

Are you?

It’s great fun. I wish they paid more, ‘cause they don’t pay a lot, but it’s actually great fun doing these. I’m not writing them, the editor’s writing them, sends me scripts. But it’s very good fun doing it. And it’s the most visible thing I’ve ever done in the comics world.

How do you like it?

Did you have favorite cartoonists who worked in the British weeklies when you were – No, I didn’t realize there were any. [laughs]

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Did you recognize them later? I recognized different styles. And there was one called Ken Reid, who – I only found he was Ken Reid later – but I liked what he did. He did ‘Jonah’, about a sailor, who every ship that he ever set foot on sank. Later he did ‘Frankie Stein’. A very good style; I liked his stuff. American culture? Um... yeah. I grew up in the ’50s. This is what we’re talking about, the ’50s and early ’60s. You know this, it’s common knowledge: Westerns were then what cop shows are now, and everything that we played was cowboys and Indians. And all that was American. But I dunno... when you’re a kid you don’t think about whether it’s American culture or whatever.

Were you attracted to American culture?

Oh, it kept me quiet. [laughter] They could never understand what I was up to, especially when I was older and I had to start choosing a career. The fact that I wanted to do art, my father never understood this. It was all, “Well, how are you going to make a living? What are you going to do with this?” Then, later in life, when I started getting some success and actually started making a living at it, he started then to realize that I must actually have something here that was sellable, because people wanted to buy it. But he never understood what I did, he couldn’t figure it out.

What were your parents' feelings about your art?

Was there a stage in your life of becoming fanatical about comics, or were they just an aspect? Not particularly. We just didn’t have them to the extent you had them in the States. ‘Andy Capp’ was one. That started while I was still at junior school, I think. Drawn by Reg Smythe, who lived in Hartlepool, which is in the northeast of England, too. It’s a little further south than where I was. But ‘Andy Capp’ was quite special to us, because it was about people that we knew; we recognized these streets. Even though it wasn’t my parents that were knockin’ each other around. But so many school friends, their fathers were like Andy Capp. They wore the hat, the cap, and the suspenders, that sort of thing. So that was a special one. ‘The Perishers’ I think we used to see, as well. But because they were in newspapers, it was a bit more difficult to see them, because they were a grown-up thing, you know.

You name any kind of strip, they have this routine that they constantly play on. It’s almost like a haiku or something. Andy Capp going to the pub, Andy Capp sneaking in late and stuff like that. Did you ever conceive of doing a strip?

So did you see any Marvel Comics or anything that was coming over when Pop Art was really – ? I love pop art, but there never really was... yeah, comics I started to see, but this was just something that trickled in through the art, really, through the interest in pop art. The way the colleges were at the time, the way the art college was, they were into Post-Abstract Expressionism. It was all canvases on the floor, and painted on thick with a floor brush or a palette knife, and talking about the qualities of the visual field and things. And I didn’t understand this at all. I should really have been doing a graphic design course and not a painting course; I might have got on better there. But I didn’t understand what they were talking about. So I took onto pop art, because it was pictures and I could understand it. I started picking up on some of the influences on the pop art, including comics, so I started drifting towards it then. This was while I was at art college. But then I left, I dropped out, and started meeting people who were running underground newspapers and magazines in Birmingham. Oh, there was one of my fellow students, a guy called Dick Burn, who was the first cartoonist I ever knew. He was into comics; basically, he was a comics fan, which I certainly wasn’t. He used to go to conventions and that sort of thing. And he first said to me, “Why don’t you draw these?” And showed me some underground comics. “Have you ever seen these before?” And it was like seeing the Mad books again. It was something I had never conceived of, seeing Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb. And that became what I wanted to do. But I had already quit college by then and I was drifting around. For a while I was playing at being a painter, after I quit college. But as soon as I saw the comics, that was what I wanted to do.

So you didn’t have any difficulty reconciling – I mean, obviously you took painting, and an appreciation of the fine arts. Was your attraction to pop art, was it relatively easier to reconcile doing cartooning? Was there anything to reconcile? How do you mean?

Just where you were going in your life.

I didn’t know where I was going in me life. [laughter] I really was drifting at that time, I had no particular idea. But then seeing the comics set me going, and that became something that I wanted to do. So after that, I had a purpose in life. I was never much of a dropout, actually. I was unemployed for nine months and hated it, and after that I’ve always had a job of some sort. I was working, I was a postman, I worked in the libraries. And I worked in the prison, as well, for a little while. Ten months.

No, I didn’t, actually. I used to illustrate stories, essays for school and stories. I would copy some things, but more for the exercise of copying them. But no, I never really thought about actually doing comics of any sort, really. I just used to do cartoons. It wasn’t until later, 1970 and ’71, when I left home and was in art college, that I first saw underground comics, and that was when I first decided this is what I was going to do. I never thought about doing comics before that.

©Hunt Emerson

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What did you do? Clerical work. It was a government job there. But, see, I was happy to do that, because basically what I wanted to do was earn enough money that I could go home and draw comics. And that’s what I used to do. I used to spend all night getting stoned and drawing comics, then going to work and whatever job I was doing. It was less hassle that way than being on the dole. And I didn’t want the hassle, I just wanted to be left alone to draw the comics. Because I found this thing that I wanted to do and develop. And gradually it did develop. Oh, the next thing was I picked up a job operating a little printing machine, and I suddenly saw this was a way to join together what I wanted to do in me life with earning a living. So I started with this little printing machine at a local college and printed up pages of stuff and seeing what it looked like.

Did it have a profound effect on your art?

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Yup. [laughs]

Can you give us an example? What were you drawing beforehand as compared to after you saw Crumb? I wasn’t drawing anything, actually....

Did drugs come into play for you? Oh yes! [laughter]

How old were you? About 21.

Wasn’t it mostly pot? Yes, yes. I did acid. I liked acid for a while. But I haven’t seen any of that for, God, 25 years, I think? [laughs]

Do you think that there was a relationship between acid and the emergence of Zap comics? Ah, come on. [laughter] Was that pretty simultaneous, when you encountered Zap, that you were undergoing a mind expansion, yourself? Yeah, sure. That was the time, that was what was happening then.

©Alan Moore & Hunt Emerson

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Let me think, hang on.... [pause] I know that, I mean, I was very keen to find out about drugs. [laughs] One of the reasons for leaving home was because I wanted a bit more freedom in me life. And when I was at college, dabbled a bit with pot, but didn’t really find any decent connections, actually. And then it was Dick Burn again, he first got me stoned! Yes, I’d forgotten that. Funny, I saw this guy this weekend! I was down in London at a comics convention day, and he turned up there. I haven’t seen him for, maybe since I left college.... I’ve seen him once since then, certainly I haven’t seen him for about ten years. Funny that he should turn up and all of a sudden be involved in this. I’ve also just at the moment – well, I have been doing a little talk with overhead projection slides on the history of undergrounds. I’ve done it three times. And he’s in that, because I’ve got a slide of a cover that he did for a mag that was one of the first things I was ever published in. So here I am talking to people about him, and all of a sudden here he turns up. And here he is reoccurring again in new memories. [laughter]

Of course, yes, uh-huh. I don’t think there’s any cartoonist working today who can say that he isn’t. Certainly at first it was Crumb that I was amazed by, but then I very quickly picked up on the others. I liked Robert Williams in particular for the technique and things. And then Gilbert, of course, because Gilbert is my favorite. Gilbert Shelton. Uh-huh. I appreciate Crumb’s work, but a lot of it I don’t actually like. I think he’s a genius, but it’s a bit beyond me, it puts me off a bit. But Gilbert is just great. [laughs]

He’s your favorite? Above Crumb?

Yes, that’s it. Yes. Knockabout has just published all of the color strips, the Freak Brothers, in one volume, and I’m just re-reading that. And they’re fantastic.

Is it that Gilbert makes you just plain-out laugh?

What was the underground magazine scene in England?

Well, Oz was the magazine from London. And IT, which stood for International Times, was a newspaper. They were the main ones. For a little while, every city seemed to have one. There was one called Street Press in Birmingham. Muther Grumble in Newcastle. And there was also, this was the time of the Arts Laboratories. They opened up in several cities, including London. The one in Birmingham, for some reason, kept going. The rest of them lasted about a year and closed, but the one in Birmingham stayed open and kept going for another 15 years, something like that. And I was heavily involved in that.

➧

I guess if you were to take a cursory glance of your work, one might assume, at least a prejudiced American, that R. Crumb is a big influence on you.

©Hunt Emerson

So Zap really kick-started the...?

With the underground magazines like Oz, can you describe them? Were they all comics?

No, not at all. Oz was

a magazine, probably like the East Village Other. Yes, mm-hm. But with comics and cartoons. And they used reprint a lot of the Americans – Crumb and Shelton and Spain and those guys. Not a lot, but some. But then at IT, it was much more of a newspaper. Oz was very much a magazine. And they were kind of unreadable, because they did a lot of

Which was what, a lot of text?

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things like printing red text onto a green background and using split fonts and all that sort of experimental stuff like that. The content was New Left, socialist – the usual hippie stuff.

Y’know, it wasn’t until Roger Sabin’s book, Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, I was really surprised at the vast amount of underground material that came out of England. I know, I know. I was surprised as well! [laughter]

You know, looking at your cartooning and talking to you, you seem, if you don’t mind my saying so, amazing well-rounded, well-adjusted. Did you feel you got a level of angst in you, perhaps – ? No. Angst, no, that’s why I’m not going to do any biographical comics. I think it’s because I’m not a comics fan. [laughter] I’m not obsessed by comics. To tell you the truth, I don’t read them these days. I’ve just come back, as I said, from this convention in London, and I’ve brought back three or four books which I’m going to be reading, because I always do when I come back from these things. But other than that, I never read comics.

What did attract you, what did you bring back? I brought one called Scarlet Traces, by Ian Edginton and D’Israeli, two British, a writer and artist. A guy called Ed Hillyer – there’s a book of his which I can’t remember the title of.

And what was it that attracted you to these?

I know the guys. [laughter] I was talking to them and they said, “Have you seen this one?” Time Warp, by Ed Hillyer. End of the Century Club. Also, I know their work, I know it’s good. I’ve got a book by Spain Rodriguez, which is Nightmare, which I wasn’t aware of.

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So what strips were you doing when you were really starting, in the early ’70s? Oh, right, continuity and characters. You’re joking. [laughter] It was nonsense. I used to start at the top of the page and take a line for a walk sort of thing. I gradually started that I needed to do stories of some sort, but there were loads and loads of single page things that are literally rubbish. Whimsical drawings with no sense to them at all. They were kind of cute and funny and people kind of liked them, but they weren’t even funny in the way that Crumb’s were funny. They didn’t have jokes or anything. But then I did start doing more structured stories. I was publishing a little more. ‘Thunderdogs’ was the first main thing that I did. The longest and the biggest structured story.

Did you ever think, in the early ’70s or the mid-’70s, that you would work for Beano? I took my work once to the offices of IPC, the children’s comics publishers, and the editor there looked at them and sort of laughed and said, “Oh well, we’ve all got to start somewhere” kind of thing. [laughs] But I never really expected to get taken up by that. And I certainly never expected to be working for the Beano. Although they asked me quite a long time ago, at first, if I would work with them, but at that time I was far too busy with other work and said no. The reason I’m working with them now is because I suddenly needed to earn more money. I lost part of me income, part of one of the jobs I was doing collapsed, and so the income suddenly went down by 25%, so I suddenly had to find some work. And they were delighted, so.... Well, I’m not an artist, I’m a cartoonist. And I guess I have been successful as a cartoonist. I do a lot of illustration work, cartoon illustration. But I make me living drawing comics, more or less. You know ‘Firkin the Cat’?

Have you been successful as an artist?

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Some underground cartoonists can be quite strident about working for ‘The Man’, so to speak – That’s in a monthly magazine. Actually, they publish more than monthly, they publish specials as well. So that’s two pages in every issue of that, about twenty times a years. And then there’s Fortean Times, which is a magazine about unexplained phenomena. There’s a comic called Phenomenomix that I do in FT, that’s every month. I write and draw that one, and color it. And now there’s the Beano every week. And there’s whatever else I can do on top of that. There’s hardly anybody that’s from my generation, as it were, who actually continued to do this. Most people got more sense and went off to something that would give you a bit less backache. [laughs]

I’ve never been an underground cartoonist in that way. I think I know what you mean, like [S. Clay] Wilson and people who are still doing that idiosyncratic work, that iconoclastic. But I was never like that. I never wanted to shock people. I got into it because I was interested in the hippie stuff, that’s what interested me. I was living it, it was part of what I was doing. But I basically wanted to make a living at it, so whatever I was doing was always with the idea that I should be able to sell this, eventually.

What was ‘Thunderdogs’? I started doing that about 1976 or ’77, just idly. I was messing around with model kits at first, and I put an aeroplane together, with a tank chassis on the bottom. And it looked good, “I’ll do a drawing of this.” And that’s where it started. I started doing this story about a gang of paramilitary guys and this business where their leader, Major Mongrel, gets separated from the others and trapped in a two-dimensional universe, while they stay in a 3-D universe. So there were pictures where their airplane was landing on the comics page, and they were running around on top of the page, talking to Major Mongrel inside the page. It was made up as I went along and it’s nonsense, and it took quite a long time to finish. But when it was about half-done, in ’78, I went over to the States. And I was in San Francisco and I met Gilbert Shelton at the Rip Off Press, and I showed him it. And he liked it and said, “If you ever finish this, we’ll publish it.” So it took a couple of years to finish it, but they did publish it. That was published by

Rip Off Press. Now, just prior to that, did you edit the Street Comix line?

©Hunt Emerson

Yes, I was doing design work for the Arts Lab Press, editing and publishing Street Comix. And not doing a lot of drawing for it. That was the problem with doing the Arts Lab Press, producing these

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comics didn’t leave me a lot of time to actually draw for them. And that’s funny, in a way, because I think of it as a bit of a blank period in me production; even though I was kind of in charge of doing this comic that’s part of history now in British comics, I’m not in it very much. But when we stopped doing that and I started getting involved in Knockabout Comics. That’s when I started rackin’ up all the other ones, Calculus Cat and Max Zillion and the other books I’ve been doing with Knockabout.

You’ve mentioned Knockabout repeatedly. What was that? Tony and Carol Bennett. Carol’s somebody I knew in Birmingham when I was first here, and then Tony was a friend of hers who distributed comics around the country. Carol ran a bookshop in Birmingham, head shop. She moved to London after a few years. I lost touch with her. She and Tony got together and got married. And he was still distributing comics. And they called me up one day – oh, Tony was involved publishing as well in early days, doing experimental and art publishing. And they called me one day and said they’d got this idea to do a series of comics, to start publishing under the name Knockabout and would I like to be involved? Yeah, great. And they got the license to do the Freak Brothers in England, in Britain, which was the main money spinner. That’s what it was based on. So I started working with them. And one of the first things they did was import 3000 Thunderdogs. Most of the rest got destroyed at the Rip-Off Press at one of their things, fires or floods, you know, so I don’t know how well it was seen in the states. But about 3000 over here. And then we started doing a series of titles. Knockabout, which was the anthology, and my books. They’re not publishing so much these days. They’re still doing the Freak Brothers collections, and they published the English edition of From Hell. But they’re heavily involved in distributing comics and books. They’re one of the major distributors now.

Are they an important component of the history of comics in – ? I would say so, absolutely, yes. Their distribution arm is now called Redroute. But yes, as publishers, they’re the longestsurviving of any of the independents, outside of the major publishers, and they’ve been involved in comics and underground comics right from the beginning.

What accounts for their longevity? The need to pay the bills, really. [laughter]

So did you get attention for your cartooning? Did you start getting some feedback? Yes, it started when I was first in the underground papers locally. I was doing something that nobody else was doing. However unformed and unsophisticated it was, it was kind of unique. Then I started finding there was other people doing stuff that was the same, but different – other cartoonists. But when I first started, I didn’t know any other cartoonists. Nor did most other people. I was happy to get it published anywhere. I wasn’t doing

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lots of stories with eight or nine pages, I was doing little single pages and half-pages, and I suppose it was easy for magazines to stick them in. So they used to bang them in wherever they could. Yeah, it just sort of picked up. People liked it. And then when I was doing the books with Knockabout, that got it through to a wider audience. I think possibly it was just at the right time, after I’d worked with the Arts Lab Press and kind of built up a bit of a knowledge and an audience in the comics world. And then I started doing these books, and they hit the spot for a while. But they never sold huge amounts. The best we ever did was with the [Rime of the] Ancient Mariner. Lady Chatterley’s Lover I did with Knockabout, and that was successful. And we looked around for another thing to adapt, and chose the Ancient Mariner. And that’s my favorite of all the books I’ve ever done.

©Hunt Emerson

Now what’s your approach when you...? Well, for the Ancient Mariner, the text is dead straight. I didn’t change anything. And I’ve done it all as a comic strip. The idea was to do like ‘Wreck of the Hesperus’ in Mad, that Wally Wood did.

So you’ve been doing that for quite some time? Well, when I can. The Ancient Mariner is a book, and we keep republishing that and it keeps selling. Because it’s become kind of an academic thing, you see. It sells a lot at the Coleridge Cottage Museum, where he lived in Somerset, and also the Wordsworth place in the Lake District. They sell regularly there.

Is it bawdy at all, or is it titillating? No, no. It’s funny, that’s all.

General wholesome, all-ages funny? Absolutely. Teachers just love it because they can introduce their students to the text and get them to read the stuff. It’s also being treated by academics in romantic literature. People at universities in the States have written chapters in books about it.

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They’ve said good things? Yes, oh yeah. Well, it’s now part of the Coleridge industry. There’s only a certain amount of illustrated Ancient Mariner’s around, and I’m one of the two living illustrators of the ‘Mariner’ at the moment, or something like that.

Any other adaptions?

We did a book called Casanova’s Last Stand, which was based on stories in Casanova’s memoirs, which I stitched together with a narrative that I invented about the end of his life. It was just a story. Just a way of stitching together episodes from his life being flashed back. That never sold as well as we’d hoped. We thought it was a great book, but, nah, it didn’t sell. Yes. It was something I never really thought much about, because I was never publishing anywhere that wanted the ownership of it. But yes, I do own the copyright to all the stuff I’ve done, except for the stuff in the Beano, obviously. That’s theirs.

A very important component, I think, with the history of underground comics, was ownership of the material. Was that always important to you?

Do you think it’s more – is it a more relaxed kind of thing? Obviously, there’s always tension in the American industry about it, because it’s all tied in to the licensing. Do you think that maybe you haven’t gone enough into that realm? I think that’s true, but it’s also, as I say, my work is not something that people are clamoring to own. There’s no question about who creates my stuff. As for writing it, I’ve worked with writers. I’ve worked with Tym Manley on ‘Firkin,’ and we own ‘Firkin’ between us. Or so we assume. [laughs] I’ve worked with Alan Moore on a couple of stories, but these were with Knockabout, where... I don’t know how it would work if Alan ever wanted repaying for the work I did for him. I never thought of that. Blimey! [laughs] ‘Firkin the Cat’ in Fiesta. Fiesta ’s a men’s magazine, a sex magazine. And ‘Firkin’ is a strip I’ve been doing for 20 years now. Two-page stories.

What was ‘Firkin’?

They publish 13 issues a year. And then they do some specials on top of that: a Christmas and holiday special, and a Reader’s Wives special. A Naughty 40s special about older women. [laughter] Shaven Haven special. [laughter] I think that’s all we’re doing at the moment. It works out at about 18 to 20 issues a year.

Is it monthly or bi-monthly?

What’s the premise of the strip? It’s sexual satire. When they first asked me if I wanted to do it, I said, “Yes, but I don’t want to do something like ‘Little Annie Fanny,’ which is kind of a continuation of the magazine.” And they said, “No no no, we want you to do what you do, underground comics.” And they’ve never complained about it. I also said, “I can’t write this,” so they gave me a writer who’s a journalist who used to work with them, who was an editor at one time, Tym Manley. And he’s written it ever since, as well. And it works fine. As I say, they never asked us to beef it up, if you like, or anything like that. We never make it totally explicit, either. I much prefer it when the stories are about the people not getting sex. Tym does write them about them getting sex, as well. But there’s also a lot of other stuff, he does a lot of daft stuff, crazy stuff in it as well – surreal and bizarre.

Is this a really cool gig that you got? ©Hunt Emerson

I think so. I’ve had problems with it in the past, arguments with feminists and all that. Jane doesn’t read it; Jane refuses to look at it. [laughter] But it’s well paid, it always has been well paid. At one time, it was probably the highest pay for a comic strip in Britain, but that’s not the case anymore, particularly. It’s regular and it’s a lot of freedom in there.

Are they taking a hit with, or have they adapted to this new, which I believe did come from England, this new publishing that’s geared for 20-year-olds. We have Maxim over here. They’re kind of titillating, they don’t really show nudity so much.... No, it hasn’t done that. It’s gone in the other direction. [laughter] We still work on the guidelines of “no erections, no penetrations.” But these days, they do quite a lot of photo spreads with couples and groups and gynaecological stuff. Well, I don’t look at the bloody magazine. [Jon laughs] In fact, they don’t even send it to me anymore. There’s something broken. I must get in touch with them, because their mail-out system has broken down. I haven’t had any for a while. But when I get them, I tear my work out and throw the rest away. [laughter] And cash a check, of course, yeah. But I mean, like any of these magazines, their circulation’s dropping. I don’t see why people buy these magazines when pornography is so freely available on the Internet. I really don’t understand. But there you go. It still sells well, it’s still the market leader in the field, and although they never say this to me, I believe that ‘Firkin’ is quite an important part of the magazine to them. I think ‘Firkin’ probably consistently features high in reader’s polls and this sort of thing.

And cash a check. [laughs]

A wry observer, yeah. There’s two human characters which carry it through, as well, which is Neville Nerd. After a few years, he acquired a girlfriend called Charleen Chagg, the world’s mostf***ed human being. [laughter]

Is Firkin a wry observer?

With the other gigs that you have – What are they? ‘Phenomenomix’ in Fortean Times. Fortean Times is a magazine about unexplained phenomena, which I’ve been associated with, again, for about 20 years, from the days when it was a photocopied, subscription-only newsletter – I met the editor back then – through to now, when it’s a newsstand magazine, monthly publication. It’s published now by Felix Dennis. I did lots of little illustrations at first, but for the last 15 years, maybe, I’ve done a regular page strip in it called ‘Phenomenomix.’ There’s a continuing character called Gully Bull, who’s sort of a psychic investigator. But he doesn’t appear in all of them. Sometimes they’re just about UFOs and things. I have to write those and draw them and color them. It gets increasingly harder and harder to write the damn things, because I’ve said everything I’ve got to say about UFOs now, you know, in 20 years. But I’ve still never missed an issue.

What’s the favorite work that you ever did? The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Do you feel you might have a magnum opus ahead of you? I have no idea. I haven’t done anything for a while, and I’m very aware of this. I’ve kind of had a flat period for about three or four years. I mean, God, I’ve been churning out tons of pages, but I haven’t done another book for some time now. In fact, the last completely new kind of graphic novel that I did was the Casanova book, and that was 1992. So that’s a long time. Also, this flat period, I’ve gone through a period of wondering what I’m doing and not having confidence in what I’m doing, and so on. But having said that, I’m actually – in the last few weeks I’ve been doing one or two strips for various homes. It just takes so damn long drawing these things is the problem. You’ve gotta have the right idea for a book, because if you start it, you’re going to be stuck with it for two years.

Have computers entered the realm for you?

Very much so, yeah. I’ve had a

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Mac for five or six years now, I think, and it altered what I did in that I never touch paint anymore. I was never much of a colorist; I always disliked coloring. And now I do it all on the computer. The kind of paper that I draw on has a China clay pressed surface, which is great for brush and ink, but you can’t use color on it, it doesn’t work. So if I was doing color work with paint, I’d always have to do it onto photocopies. And that was just a mess, with watercolor onto photocopies is ghastly. So as soon as I got the computer going with the coloring – it doesn’t save me any time, but the quality is just so much better.

And you’re at a transitional time right now? Oh, everybody’s always at a transitional time. [laughter]

But does the future look good, or does it look unknown, is that an attraction to that? I’m happy at the moment. This new house we’ve got is great, we’re really enjoying it. It’s got a big garden, and I want to spend most of me time working in the garden; that’s what I want to do. Professionally, I just hope it all keeps going until I’m able to retire. [laughs] I’d love to retire, that would be great. [laughs] Oh, I always say yes, but I don’t suppose I would. I’d like to just not have to meet the deadlines all the time, because I’m harried by deadlines. I produce a lot. But then, so does everybody else who really works.

Could you put up your pen?

Is it occasionally a grind?

Yeah, all the time. Oh, yes. I mean, it’s a job. It long ago ceased – I used to draw for pleasure. I never do anymore. I don’t do anything that’s not part of me work. Unfortunate, but that’s the way it is.

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true brit dave gibbons

dave gibbons true brit

David Chester Gibbons was born at Forest Gate Hospital in London, England, on April 14th of 1949 to Chester, a town planner with architectural training, and Gladys, a secretary. At the age of seven he discovered Superman and was soon completely enraptured by the romanticism of the comic book, both British and American, like Mad and Eagle. Among those that whet his artistic eye from childhood were the elegant styles of Wally Wood, Will Elder, Frank Bellamy, Jack Kirby and Will Eisner. This self-taught artist spent much of his youth emulating the comics he cherished by often illustrating his own personal humor strips before eventually breaking into the world of comics fandom for fanzines like Rock & Roll Madness. In his early 20s Gibbons became a building surveyor but managed gradually to break into the UK comics scene lettering mostly humor books for IPC. In time he scored more illustration work at DC Thomson where he would do adventure and sci-fi strips. By 1975, together with Brian Bolland, Dave worked on Powerman, a book designed and illustrated by both, for the Nigerian marketplace. Shortly after, Gibbons put aside his surveyor day job to solely focus on his career as a comic book artist which was just beginning to take-off for the better. With the arrival of 2000 AD a new exciting breed of comics were about to commence – and Gibbons was there from the inception of the anthology comic. At 2000 AD, he illustrated and wrote stories for ‘Harlem Heroes’, ‘Dan Dare’, ‘Ro-Busters’, ‘Rogue Trooper’, ‘Judge Dredd’, and various other short stories. With his growing reputation and professionalism, his work became sought after by most comic book companies including Marvel UK where he helmed a fondly remembered ‘Doctor Who’ run for many years. Gibbon’s art finally made waves in the United States when DC recruited him to be at the art helm of Green Lantern, in 1982, and paired him with writer Len Wein. He continued to work at 2000 AD while exploring the rest of the DC universe doing covers and stories for almost every DC character, from Batman to Wonder Woman, at some point or another. A major career highlight – and one of his best experiences at DC – was the tale, ‘For the Man Who Has Everything’, a quintessential Superman story written by Alan Moore and edited by the legendary Julius Schwartz, the editor of many of the comics the artist adored as a child. The arrival and success of Gibbons’ efforts in the States – alongside those of Moore and Bolland – helped open the doors for the avalanche of British talent that would follow in the coming years. Now triumphant on both sides of the Atlantic, the artist would soon confront his biggest challenge in another book with Alan Moore that would shake the foundation of the comics industry. Rogue Trooper Rogue Trooper © Rebellion A/S

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Watchmen was the twelve-part maxi-series that transformed the art form and captured unprecedented accolades from critics, comic fans, skeptics, and the mainstream reading public. For the project the artist liberated himself from second-guessing what the American reading public wanted to see and constructed pages much the way he did for 2000 AD. The series collected many awards and prizes from many literary circles including a prestigious Hugo Award in 1988. With Watchmen Gibbons was able to push his storytelling abilities by experimenting with the design and mood of this highly expressive work. From the unique symbolic covers to the intricate layout of his pages, the artist was able to tell a bold story with complete and utter mastery of composition. The title remains fondly remembered because it will forever stand as a testimony to the craftsmanship and application that series writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons injected into this complex super-hero epic. As if being one of comics most influential artists wasn’t enough, Gibbons has also demonstrated that he’s a fabulous writer, having written World’s Finest (with artist Steve Rude), Captain America (with artist Lee Weeks), and

Dave

GIBBONS by George Khoury

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Batman Versus Predator (with artist Andy Kubert). And on the art front he has also continued to collaborate with the finest writers in the field like Frank Miller (on the Martha Washington series), Stan Lee (on DC’s Just Imagine: Green Lantern) and Harvey Kurtzman (on Strange Adventures).

since Watchmen: an original graphic novel named The Originals which is also written by him. Having spent the last two years working on The Originals, it promises to be his most personal and most thought-provoking work, utilizing all of his storytelling and design skills to make it a truly unique effort.

To this day Dave Gibbons remains as one of the most prominent names within his field. The virtuoso continues to be a part of the kind of comics that are always adventurous and fun. Presently, the artist is at work on his largest and most ambitious project

Outside of comics, Dave has provided art for advertising clients, educational companies and designed various record covers. He continues to live in England with his family.

(top) The Story So Far © Dave Gibbons – (lower) A.B.C. Warriors © Rebellion A/S

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We know how important an influence American artists like Wally Wood and Will Eisner were to your career, so how impactful were the works of British artists like Hampson and Bellamy early on? Were there any other English artists who’ve inspired you as a professional? Most British comics of the ’50s and ’60s were in black-and-white on really cheap paper, so the beautifully printed Eagle, where Hampson and Bellamy’s full-color work was mainly seen, was an object of wonder. I loved the precision and detail of their work and their powerful storytelling. Other artists whose work influenced me were Joe Colquhoun who drew World War II strips (and whose work I later ghosted at the beginning of my career); Ron Embleton, whose beautiful fullcolor work appeared in many places and who ended up drawing ‘Wicked Wanda’: Don Lawrence, of ‘Trigan Empire’ and ‘Storm’ fame; Ian Kennedy, who drew great aircraft strips; and Ron Turner, who drew ‘Rick Random, Space Detective’. Turner was heavily influenced by American pulp illustrators like Ed Cartier and drew the best aliens and spaceships ever! I also loved a lot of artists who turned out to be Italian, rather than British, notably Tacconi and Gino D’Antonio, who drew for the monthly War Picture Library series.

Were there any favorite British strips as you were growing up? Did you passionately pursue and collect them? Did your parents encourage your comics passion? I’ve mentioned a few of my favorites above. Hampson and, later, Bellamy drew ‘Dan Dare’. Bellamy was also responsible for ‘Heros, the Spartan’ and, later, ‘Thunderbirds’. As for newspaper strips, I loved ‘Jeff Hawke’, a science-fiction strip by Syd Jordan and Willie Patterson; I persuaded my parents to get the daily newspaper it appeared in and would clip the strips out. My dad had been a reader and collector of American SF pulps in the ’30s and drew cartoons himself as a boy. His parents had a lodger in their house when my father was young, who drew illustrations for DC Thomson, the big Scottish comics publisher. I still have his paintbox, given to my dad, and inherited by me. I remember my dad bringing home the first British edition of Mad, ostensibly for me, but I think he read every page, too! I have fond memories of him driving me around the local newsstands to buy comics. My parents were a little less supportive of me drawing comics for a living, with good reason, given the alternatives that were open to me!

Top: Comicon ‘71 © Dave Gibbons Above: Cyclops © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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How does the British comics industry differ from the American one? Was it difficult for you to break in? And was there a lot of early rejection? Does the storytelling differ from country to country? At the time that I broke in, there were only two British comics publishers: Fleetway, in London, and DC Thomson, in Scotland. I worked in London and got to know other comic fans who worked editorially at Fleetway. I’d hang around there and eventually got some lettering work and then spot drawings and ghosting. An art agent noticed my work and got me commissions from DC Thomson, where I essentially learnt my craft. I think good storytelling is universal, although art styles and publication formats vary from country to country.

How did you become involved with 2000 AD? In your opinion what was the secret of their success? Was it a big deal for you being there at the time from the first issue? Did being an artist, influenced by American comics, help to change the way you and other artists told these 2000 AD stories? I’d heard rumors of 2000 AD and was keen to get on board. My agent introduced me to Pat Mills, who was very much the driving force behind the paper. I drew a sample episode of ‘The Harlem Heroes’. Four or five other artists had tried out for it, but Pat liked the cleaner, super-hero feel I gave it, and I was set.

2000 AD’s art was much closer to the American style, with longer episodes allowing for splashy ‘break-out’ artwork. Several of us had grown up as fans of American comics and could give them what they wanted. There was also a great ‘esprit de corps’ amongst us, as we were very friendly with each other and felt like the lunatics who had taken over the asylum. The secret of 2000 AD’s success, however, comes down to two men: Pat Mills and John Wagner. Pat’s enormous drive and iconoclastic editorial tendencies shot the thing into orbit and John’s punchy scripting, particularly on ‘Judge Dredd’, kept it there.

Was working in American comics your goal when you started your career? Do you remember how you were discovered? Drawing American comics had always been my goal, impossible though it had often seemed, even just given the geography of the situation. There was no internet, FedEx or even fax machines back then. Even calling another country on the phone was a hugely expensive idea. I made a trip to New York in 1973, and took my samples around the publishers. DC gave them back with a "thanks, but no thanks." However I did meet Paul Levitz (when he was still Joe Orlando’s gofer); Carmine Infantino, an artist hero and, at that time, publisher of DC Comics; and Michael Uslan, then an intern, but later producer of Batman movies. Roy Thomas, at Marvel, was more encouraging, but never came through with any work for me. Eventually, my samples got me work with Fleetway back in England. However, I did get to draw a two-pager for The Monster Times out of going to the States. Later, my agent got me one job for a Marvel black-and-white magazine. (This was finally printed in color and looked dreadful!) I was happily working away in British comics, in Rorschach © DC Comics

1981, when DC sent over Dick Giordano and Joe Orlando to recruit British talent. They offered me a much better deal than I was getting so, flattered, I started work for DC.

Can you pinpoint what makes the collaborations between yourself and Alan Moore so unique? And what have you learned from working together? Alan and I grew up in similar circumstances and are of similar age, so there’s a lot of shared culture and reference points. There’s also quite a lot of overlap, in that he’s a very pictureorientated writer and I’m a very story-orientated artist. We seem to be able to join seamlessly when we work together and greatly enjoy collaborating. It’s most important when working together to have the work uppermost and not one’s own ego and we’re both happy to accommodate each other in this respect.

From what I’ve read, The Originals sounds like the biggest project you’ve ever undertaken alone – what was the appeal of the project for yourself? Has it been challenging? How would you describe it – and what do you want readers to get from the experience? It is a huge project and has taken almost all my attention for a couple of years. In essence, I wanted to say something about growing up and about my own experiences. Having said that, The Originals is not autobiographical, although it does mix versions of things that really happened with things that never did in a setting that’s not quite this reality. I wanted to get the feel of my experience rather than the actuality.

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I wanted to tell a fast-moving, graphically engaging story that was dramatically satisfying, and that has been the challenge. I’ve enjoyed the experience and am looking forward to getting it out there. The rest is up to the readers. There’s plenty of violence and bad language, so they should enjoy that, at least!

Please describe a typical work day: When do you write and/or draw? What tools do you use? When did you do the switch to computers for your artwork?

I usually get in to my office around nine a.m. and fiddle about with e-mail for a while. Then I’ll start drawing, whether pencilling or inking. I take an hour for lunch, then, with sporadic computer breaks, will finish around 5.30 p.m. I prefer not to work evenings or weekends, but it occasionally happens. If I’m writing, I like to do the thinking in the morning and the typing in the afternoon. In the case of The Originals, I print out grids in non-repro blue on Bristol board, pencil in blue, and ink with Pentel and Faber Castell disposable pens. I scan the pages in to the computer where I add rules and lettering prepared in Adobe Illustrator and add gray tones in Photoshop. I’ve been using a Mac since 1993 and it’s now a vital part of my work, from gathering reference to preparing and sending art files.

Could you elaborate on why the American comics market is so super-hero driven? Is this a healthy thing? I think super-heroes were ideal for the crudely printed color comics of the ’40s – plenty of movement, incredible ‘special effects’ only easily achievable in such a medium, and bright, simple colors. Since then, they’ve become a vehicle for all sorts of stories and treatments while still appealing to the adolescent fantasies of their predominantly male readers.

Is there anything about comics that continues to fascinate you? I just love the idea of telling stories in pictures! Right: Originals © Dave Gibbons

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Frank Hampson was born in Manchester on December 21, 1918, and his first published work appeared in the Meccano Magazine in 1932 when he was just 14 years old, a commission he enjoyed for almost two years. He joined the Post Office on leaving high school, attended art school during the evening and contributed to the staff magazine called The Post. In 1938 he left the Post Office and enrolled in a full time art course at Victoria College of Arts and Science. His studies were interrupted by WWII where he enlisted and served in the Royal Army Service Corps. De-mobbed in 1946 Hampson once again returned to his studies. He began to develop a ‘whodunit’ detective type strip with a heroine called ‘Dorothy Dare’ based loosely on his wife. It was in late 1947 while struggling as a commercial artist that Hampson first met the Reverend Marcus Morris. Although not really a religious man Hampson began to contribute to a local religious magazine edited and published by Morris called The Anvil. The magazine was a success and soon was sold all over the country. Eighteen months later Morris began to make plans with Hampson to produce a new, ambitious boys’ weekly comic based on strong Christian principles to combat the American horror comics being sold in Britain at that time. Morris’s stinging groundbreaking article in the Sunday Dispatch of February 13, 1949 was published under the headline “Comics That Bring Horror to the Nursery.”

Frank

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HAMPSON It’s almost impossible to overstate the effect that the introduction of the Eagle comic had on the British comic industry in April of 1950. My best analogy would be that Frank Hampson and Marcus Morris (Eagle editor) were the British equivalent of Carmine Infantino and Julius Schwartz. Simply put, they revolutionized the industry. The product they put out was so good, and the marketing so unique that it was an instant success for the publishers (Hulton Press). Yet strangely enough the idea for this revolution was born from religious conviction and not of any kind of true zeal for comics.

by Peter Hansen

Soon after this Hampson produced some sample pages to hawk around the publishers to promote their ‘Christian’ comic. Two pages of artwork from a story called ‘The Life of St. Paul’ of whom Morris was quoted as saying “faced daily dangers that would make even Dick Barton look like a sissy,” and Hampson’s ‘Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future’, a sort of cross between the American strips Flash Gordon and Terry and the Pirates. They named the comic the Eagle and after a number of rejections they finally managed to gain the support of Sir Edward Hulton publisher of Picture Post. With much fanfare and a great deal of marketing the first issue of the Eagle, in photogravure colour appeared on April 14, 1950 and was an immediate success selling almost one million copies. Amazingly, the Eagle maintained these weekly sales

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figures for almost ten years, in large part due to the outstanding artwork of Hampson, initially, and also the Hampson Studio which began almost right away to meet the weekly output. The Hampson Studio was a teeming cauldron of creativity driven by Hampson’s own obsession for perfection which led to Dan Dare becoming the popular comic-book hero of the 1950s in Britain. The spin-off merchandising and a radio program that aired on Radio Luxembourg ensured his success. The Eagle broke so many rules in British comics it is hard to list them all, though perhaps most importantly he used colour photogravure on glossy paper rather than newsprint and it was bigger than all of its competition. Hampson announced that “Into this scrap yard of rusty old bicycles I am going to drive a Rolls

Royce!” He experimented with the standard convention of boxed page layouts for his highly detailed panels, and he embraced the use of American style word balloons for speech. In an industry where creators laboured in anonymity (and continued to do so for many years after) he boldly signed his artwork along with the other contributors to the comic. He argued that if artists had to say who they were they would be putting their reputation on the line and hence would produce their best work. He also insisted on authenticity. His own obsession for perfection meant that the western strip or the police strip artists had to spend a considerable amount of time researching their subject matter. To his credit he convinced the publisher to pay appropriately for the artists to do this and some were paid up to 30 pounds a week to produce their strip. Finally their idea of offering membership in The Eagle Club led to 60,000 applications being received within the first month. Hampson chose ‘Dan Dare’ to lead the comic because he felt that a science-fiction strip would offer him infinite vistas and situations for storylines. In an interview Hampson commented, “It was Marco Polo discovering China brought up to date. You could visualize different types of civilizations, their history and their culture.” In truth, Flash Gordon was probably closer to the Marco. All good things eventually come to an end however, and changes in ownership in the late 1950s resulted in Hulton Publications being swallowed up by Odhams Press. Marcus Morris left, the

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new owners dismantled the studio, and the quality dropped to a point where Hampson resigned. Bringing to an end a comic that, while it continued to limp along for a number of years, never regained the dominance it had enjoyed for almost ten years. Hampson was replaced on ‘Dan Dare’ by the great Frank Bellamy who reluctantly agreed to take on the work for a year only. With the agreement of the new owners, Hampson began work on a strip about the life of Jesus Christ called ‘The Road of Courage’, which resulted in some visually stunning artwork. A year later, with the strip completed, Hampson found himself surplus to requirements. He found brief employment drawing the ‘Gun Law’ strip in the Daily Express newspaper and contributing spot illustrations to magazines such as Radio Times and Reveille.

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He also did some commercial work for Bovril and the National Coal Board, and drew briefly for the TV 21 comic before taking a permanent position as an illustrator with the children’s book publisher Ladybird Books. He later became a graphics technician at a local Technical College where he was rediscovered by British comics’ historian, Denis Gifford, and invited as a guest to the International Festival of Comics in Lucca, Italy. Hampson discovered to his amazement that his work was well known beyond the shores of the UK, having been syndicated without his knowledge (or royalties) in Holland, France, Italy, Germany, Yugoslavia and Scandinavia. To cap it all Hampson was presented with the prestigious Yellow Kid – Prestigioso Maestro award by his peers (made up of creators from the US, Europe, and South America) as the best writer and illustrator of strip cartoons since the end of WWII. A simply staggering achievement considering that it had been over 15 years since he had last put pen to ink on a weekly ‘Dan Dare’ strip. The following year Hampson received an Ally Sloper Award at Comics 101 in London from The Society of Strip Illustrators. Despite a brief resurgence of interest in the character the dust soon settled and ‘Dan Dare’ and Hampson once again faded from public view. Frank Hampson died on July 8, 1985, from cancer and heart disease at the age of 66. As a footnote, a measure of the popularity of the Eagle and ‘Dan Dare’ in particular is the fact that not only did the first ‘Dan Dare’ fanzine, called Astral, appear in the mid-’60s but to this day a lovingly reproduced fanzine called Eagle Times is still available, put out by passionate followers of Hampson’s unique vision.

(For those who want to know more I highly recommend Alistair Crompton’s Frank Hampson biography called “The Man Who Drew Tomorrow”). Dan Dare, Dawn Dare ©The Dan Dare Corporation

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Think Neal Adams on methamphetamines and you’ll get an inkling of the kinetically hyper-realistic stylings of one Bryan Hitch. Currently the Brit artist is taking super-hero comics up a notch with his superb artistry on Marvel’s The Ultimates (a riotous reworking of The Avengers written by Mark Millar and inked by Paul Neary, penciller Hitch’s collaborators on their previous – and equally offending opus – The Authority), with each issue pushing the spandex-costumed envelope to the extreme. But no alien-noshing, horny Hulk – however grotesque – can disguise the fact that Hitch just might be the finest realistic comic book artist working today. The guy’s work is simply awesome. ’Nuff said.

Where are you originally from? Far northwest of England, just before you trip over Scotland.

What’s the name? Cumbria. Carlisle’s the city.

Carlisle? I visited that. Oh really?

Yeah, the Lake District? Oh, yeah, I grew up around there, I know that very well.

And I loved visiting Edinburgh. That’s probably my favorite city in the world.

HITCH

I haven’t been there for years and years. Mark [Millar]’s up in Glasgow, but he’s not far from Edinburgh. In fact, Edinburgh and Glasgow are only an hour and a bit away from where I grew up. I grew up in a place that’s been both part of Scotland and part of England in history, and you only have to walk about ten minutes in a northerly direction to discover a Scottish accent. It’s not very far at all. Hadrian’s Wall ran through the city, of course. The original border was very close.

by Jon B Cooke

So you had history all around you?

Bryan

Transcribed by Steven Tice

Yeah! Not that you appreciated it when you were a child. After I first moved to London in 1992, I used to go back and then I’d do the touristy stuff, because I would have time on my hands. I would get a chance to visit the museum or the castle – which is a thousand years old and built by William the Conqueror to keep the nasty Scots out (it didn’t work) – or the Lake District in proper form. But when you grew up with that stuff around you, you take it for granted or worse, fail to notice it’s there. Likewise, living in London, I don’t do the tour stuff unless I’ve got somebody visiting me here. And I’ve got all the museums and all the galleries and the Tower of London and all the possible tourist things you might want to do, and some extraordinary history around here. And I don’t do any of it.

Just take if for granted, huh? You really do, because you’re just so busy getting on with your day-to-day nonsense that you seem to forget that there’s all this stuff to do that’s very, very interesting, but somehow not as pressing as getting the children to bed or getting a deadline met – which nowadays seems to be something of a current joke. [laughter] And all the other stuff that just presses at you for attention.

When were you born? I was born in the sleepy late winter, early spring, of 1970.

What did your parents do for work? My mother worked part-time for the city council in a clerical capacity, and my dad was a painter and decorator. We always used to joke that my dad was a painter, he could do three coats in one afternoon.

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[laughs] Did either have creative leanings?

So as a child, were you read to a lot?

I don’t know. It’s hard to say. My mother prided herself on a singular lack of imagination, but she could multi-task better than anybody I’ve ever seen before in my life. I mean, her evening activity was watching television whilst reading a book, talking to my dad, and knitting, simultaneously. I never discovered how she could possibly do that, because I simply can’t multi-task. I can uni-task very effectively, but I really, literally, can’t talk and chew gum simultaneously. But my dad, I think, had potential. He used to draw pictures for us as children, which as a child I remember being very good. Especially Black Beauty; he was very good on horses, I remember. Certainly he was very good at copying. I suspect he had unrealized talent but was never encouraged, having grown up in the crumbling industrial North and told to go to work at 14, with no education. I think he could have quite happily sat on a stool in the middle of the countryside and painted watercolors. He got into fishing in a big way for a while. I think the solitude really appealed to him, as a family man.

Actually, I was! One of the more enduring memories of childhood, other than running around outside in my sister’s knickers because she told me they were swimming trunks, is my dad reading the books of Enid Blyton stories to us. He had a very good reading voice. He had, when he was younger, attempted to become a priest. He felt a strong vocation, went away to seminary and spent a year or two there studying, though he never went through with it to the bitter end. Well, he never got as far as being crucified, but I understand that’s no longer a pre-requisite. He remains a very devout Catholic, however, and maintains a delightfully child-like view of faith and religion, which seems to make him happy. However, one thing that they did teach him there was enunciation and clarity of speech which, given a heretofore unrealized thespian leaning, lent itself to dramatic readings, and he brought all those powers to bear on fairy tales like ‘Rapunzel’. And my favorite was ‘Mister Meddles Muddles’.

Did you have relatives who were creative, or of note?

A great deal of television. I was very taken, and always have been, with science fiction. Of course, we grew up with Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, which was this appalling Star Trek knockoff in the ’70s. I mean, if you think the sets were bad on Star Trek, you should see the Blake’s 7 stuff. You could see the strings hanging off the spaceship! [laughter] But we kind of liked it. If I was out playing (and in those days nobody seemed worried about child welfare, as we were sent out to play very early in the morning and told to come back at dinner time – no mobile phones if we got into trouble; we were armed only with the advice to avoid anybody dodgy looking and not to shoplift if we could help it), I would always make sure I was back for Blake’s 7 or Star Trek.

Apparently there were artists on both sides. My mother’s uncle and my dad’s uncle were both artists. My dad’s uncle was a war artist of minor note, or possibly of no note whatsoever, which means he probably painted semi-naked ladies on aircraft copied from George Petty. I certainly remember seeing drawings in one of my grandmother’s scrapbooks, which she said were by her brother. I remember them as a child being very good, but I can’t confirm that, as a child’s recollections aren’t necessarily a good judge of quality. I know there were a number of average watercolors in my mother’s parents’ house, which were supposedly by her uncle, so there was certainly some attempts at artistry in the family, but nobody ever made a living out of it that I’m aware of.

How many siblings do you have? I have one sister. She’s a psychiatric nurse, and has no artistic or imaginative leanings whatsoever – more left-brain than rightbrain I feel.

Is she older or younger? She’s two years older. The Ultimates © Marvel Characters, Inc.

Did you watch a lot of TV as a kid?

Did you read? Quite avidly and, again, it was science fiction and fantasy stuff. Of course, comic books were always a must. I was introduced to comic books very, very early on, with the classic tale of the kid who was ill and off school one day and his parents brought him a comic home. So, yeah, I always remember reading.

What was the comic that they brought home? There were two. Well, memory being what it is, it might not be at all accurate, but I remember both a Marvel and a DC comic. The

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Marvel comic was an Avengers issue drawn by George Pérez and featuring one of the many Atlantis attacks on humankind. [Hitch’s note: I wonder if was issue #154, which was my first Avengers comic? There weren’t that many Pérez-drawn mid’70s Avengers issues featuring characters from Atlantis, after all.] The other one was an issue of Superman wherein Superman’s identity was revealed to the Daily Planet by Lois Lane pulling his shirt up and saying, “Go and save us from this falling comet, you arsehole!” or something like that. [Jon laughs] I was talking to Mark Waid about it, and he assured me that happened almost every issue during that particular series of Superman comics, so I have yet to identify it. Mark Waid’s apparently an expert on these things and is able to identify any issue of Superman just by a description of the punctuation; I think I remember talking to Mark about this once when we were working on JLA. I mentioned to him one line of dialogue from a Superman issue I recalled, and he was able to tell me the issue and who drew it and what number it was. I’m sure he’ll be able to fill you in if you actually ask him what happened or describe the number and placement of exclamation points.

Were you attracted at all to the weeklies, the British comics? Sure. When I was about five, I think, in the mid-’70s, there were a couple of things, 2000 AD and Starlord, both separate magazines published by the same publishing house, and had these science-fiction characters in them, such as ‘Judge Dredd’ and ‘Strontium Dog’ and they certainly appealed to me. It was the first time I came across that kind of thing over here. It was quite different. It was black-and-white, it was harder-edged and was grittier. Not that you knew words such like hard-edged, gritty, postmodern, or anything like that in those days. But they were very much out of the punk rock scene, because that was what the writers and artists drawing them were into for a while. Many of the stories, particularly in ‘Nemesis the Warlock’, drawn by O’Neill were inspired by The Jam songs. They eventually merged into one magazine called 2000 AD and Starlord, and eventually just 2000 AD. Of those characters, I think ‘Strontium Dog’ was originally in Starlord, and ‘Judge Dredd,’ of course, in 2000 AD. They really did engage me for quite some time. The accepted route in those days was of course to go and work for 2000 AD and then hopefully get discovered by DC, like Dave Gibbons, Steve Parkhouse, Alan Moore, Alan Davis, to name but a few – Kevin O’Neill. All of these chaps DC came over en masse to recruit. I remember that in the early ’80s, just seeing all these people I knew from British comics suddenly showing up in American publications getting quite a kick seeing them doing real comics. Super-heroes. Today, of course, it’s de rigeur, but in those days it was quite a novelty.

Did you enjoy the humor titles? Dandy and Beano? Well, we got Beano. Every Wednesday, Beano showed up on the doorstep, and my sister and I used to fight over breakfast for who was going to read it first and who was going to read the Daily Mail. She usually won and I would have to settle for her girlie comics after my dad grabbed the Mail whilst wearing only a vest. But I was never into it in such a way that I wanted to draw for Beano. I enjoyed reading it, just like I enjoyed watching Saturday morning cartoons. But 2000 AD and the super-hero comics, those I’ve always wanted to draw. From the minute I read them, I would copy from them. I would never copy from the Beano, because I wasn’t interested in that kind of cartooning (there are other people who can do that better and have that kind of natural leaning) I think I always leant toward the dramatic stuff.

Did you have a subscription to it, or would the newsagent deliver it? To us, subscriptions were from the newsagent. You just put in a regular order and it came through your front door with a newspaper. Oh, a memory just sparked! I remember getting a regular order for a Tarzan weekly magazine, which was in blackand-white. It must have been a reprint, because my memories tell me that it was drawn by Joe Kubert. Of course, I’ve got all those DC Tarzans now, the original books. I’m sure that must have been my first exposure to his work, too. But, again, I didn’t realize it was an American comic, or a reprint of one then. I just thought it was a British comic, and I didn’t really know who’d drawn it. I do remember it being absolutely extraordinary though, and my admiration for Kubert continues to grow to this day.

Did you live in a rural area? No. I grew up in I suppose what you would call Victorian Industrial housing in the ’70s. You can imagine all these terraced houses, just streets upon streets upon streets, each with corner

The Ultimates © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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shops, newsagents, green grocers, butchers, all kinds of local businesses, no central business district. All of these were usually surrounding some Victorian industrial centre, in our case it was a big steelworks that was at the top of the street. It’s now a vast retail park with a drive-through Burger King, but in those days it was this great British steelworks building huge cranes. These houses we lived in and other people lived in were all the original workhouses from the 19th Century and every morning I was woken in several different stages. First is the wakeup call for my dad (being shouted at from downstairs by my mother). My dad was in bed and she’d attempt to wake him up quietly by shouting from downstairs. Then he would stir. Then she would shout again even louder with a little more impatience, so as not to disturb anybody and he would finally get up. Then, just when I’d get off to sleep again, this great claxon sound of an air-raid siren would go off every morning at a quarter to seven, and that was the original buzzer (as it was quaintly known) to call all the workers to the steelworks, to wake them up, basically their industrial-sized alarm clock to call them t’mill which naturally woke up the entire city. We were pleased in the early ’80s when that was demolished and replaced by a Burger King which was altogether quieter.

When did you start drawing? Well, I think pretty much from as soon as I could hold a pencil. I don’t have any memories where I’m not involved in drawing in some form or another.

What were you drawing? Stuff out of my head, stuff I’d seen on television. I’d been reading comics since I was four and five years old, and I’m sure that the comics and the drawings went together. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing comic book super-heroes and copying pages from comics.

Were you doing sequential stories? Not originally. I mean, there were times I would create a super-hero for that particular day, called original things like ‘Electron, Proton and Neutron’ and I would draw three or four panels or a couple of pages of a strip and then get bored with it, throw it away, come up with another variation on the same idea tomorrow and keep going that way. I think, much like today, I don’t really remember completing stories. [laughter]

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Did you do your own knockoffs or imitation characters based on existing stuff? It was the classics. Everybody, of course, had to have an emblem on their chests.

How was the stuff? Did you ever look at it again, or is it gone? Much like today, I just don’t keep it. I think the fun for me has always been in the doing, and I really hate looking back on the stuff. You know, there’s times when I come across some older or past work and it doesn’t suck as badly as I remember it sucking, but frankly, if people are willing to part with money to own the originals, then that’s fine and I appreciate it a great deal. I really do enjoy the process, I’m just constantly disappointed in the end results. As long as I’ve got a set of photocopies I can look at occasionally, I don’t really need to retain the original artwork.

[laughs] So, from early on, was it a mixture of British comics and American comics that held your interest? I suppose. I mean, I read 2000 AD and I enjoyed it very much, but really it was American comics, it was Superman to start with, and Batman. Mostly I could only get DC comics. The way it worked in those days, especially where I lived, in the ’70s, there were no comic book shops so the newsagents got this stuff that I think came over as ballast in ships. It was always months and months out of date, it would say something like June ’83 on the cover, and I’d be getting it in July of ’96 or something, just ludicrously out of date, and sometimes completely out of order, as well. But my local newsagents would just put it all in a big stack in the corner, wouldn’t even put it out on the shelf, it’d just be a corner of a desk in the back of the shop, and they’d just stack this stuff about three feet high when it came in. I would go in and day by day erode the stack with whatever money I could possibly scrounge from relatives. Judging by the way the pile went down and the fact that when I went back in the same stuff was left. I don’t think anybody else bought it. Gradually over the month I would go in, week after week, and start by buying all the ones I wanted desperately, and then gradually work my way through the pile to eventually get to Jonah Hex or something, where just because it was a comic, I’d buy it. I knew I didn’t like it, I certainly didn’t want to read it, but it was a comic, so I bought it anyway even if it was by Dick Ayers. You know, that’s a little unfair, because I saw Ayers’ stuff at the arse end of his career, and as I’ve grown more familiar with the history of comics I’ve come to appreciate a lot of earlier work, including that of Dicky A, especially his inking over Kirby.

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Were your parents supportive of you pursuing art?

Were you active in grade school and during your early years in school? Were you known as an artist? Yeah, I suppose. I’d always been that kid in the class that could draw just that bit better than anybody else so I’d always help people with their art homework and stuff like that. It’s kind of a dangerous thing, really, I think, because by the time you actually get out into the real world, especially with no formal art education (I started working without it), you’ve suddenly gone from being the big fish in a small pond to drowning in a very large pool of water where everybody else is swimming quite comfortably and leisurely and you’re competing with people whose work you’ve admired for years and years and years. Suddenly you’re one of them, or trying to be one of them, and you just can’t swim at all (added to which you are wearing very embarrassing Speedos when all around are in very well tailored, full-length, and nicely pastel trunks, if I may stretch the metaphor yet further). I was completely unprepared for it. But, yeah, I supposed I was that bespectacled arsehole in school that was always drawing and looked forward to art classes.

Were you sociable, did you have a lot of friends? Were you athletic? Oh, lord no, neither. It’s something I still struggle with. To be honest I am not a great lover of people and have spent much of my life as a loner. I ought to work on my social skills, I guess, but since I don’t really like the general public as a rule, what they think of me barely registers on my give-a-sh*t-o’metre. Of course, I could be protesting just a little too much as I clearly want my work to be appreciated, but then I am more concerned with how my work is perceived than I am with how pleasant I can be. So I was the lonely, bespectacled arsehole in school that was always drawing and looked forward to art classes. I need to exercise, probably to counteract the vast quantities of wine I consume. But no, I was never really interested in that. I love playing tennis, but that’s a few months every year, and hardly seriously, I haven’t really taken it seriously in a long time. I like racquetball and racket sports, generally, I think, but no, I was never athletic. I could be athletic because I had long legs, and I wasn’t unfit, it was just not an interest. Given a choice, I was always into drawing. Much less strenuous, and it’s easier to drink wine whilst drawing than it is whilst running.

Invisible Girl © Marvel Characters, Inc.

I guess so. I don’t think they ever really thought I’d do it for a living. They sort of supported my attempting to pursue my dreams after I left school and I sent away samples with the caveat that I stop dicking about and get a proper job counting widgets for some local company after I was rejected. I think it was as much a shock to them as it was to me that I actually got a job following my first submission. Luckily I’ve never been out of work since. They didn’t think I’d ever make a living at it, because they didn’t understand it, I suppose. It was another world to them. You know, they went out at nine o’clock to a job they didn’t want to do and came home at five o’clock, exhausted and uncommunicative; and thank God they scrapped a bit of a crust and could sit down and simultaneously knit, watch television, avoid talking to each other, and read a book. That was what they thought, I suppose, I’d end up doing. I think they hoped I would get a good job but I don’t think they actually thought I’d end up doing exactly what I’d always wanted to do for companies based in America, which to them was a whole other world. I think it was a surprise to all of us when Marvel UK said, “Yeah, pop down to London and we’ll give you a job.”

Did you have a good experience in school? Did you have any interest in studies? Actually, yes and no. I hated school, felt very uncomfortable there, but I was always sort of a top-level student. I don’t think I was particularly well placed when I went to, as you call it, high school, because it wasn’t a particularly encouraging atmosphere for people who did want to learn. One was bullied. And certainly one was never encouraged to learn, or do anything above and beyond what was considered a passable grade for morons, certainly nothing extra-curricular. For instance, arts and sciences were opposed in the curriculum, so you could choose one or the other and I wanted to do both because I was very, very good at the sciences, and I was also very good at artwork. I said that I could do both, I could do the course for sciences but that I would also sit the exam for art. The school just wasn’t supportive of that at all, it took quite some fighting to get them to agree to it. They said, “Oh, you’ll be overworked,” but as it was I walked away with A grades in both, and did both exams two years early. But it wasn’t an atmosphere that particularly presented itself as one encouraging to learning, which for a school you might think is something of a shortfall.

[laughs] What was the route that most of the students would go? What were their opportunities, what were they facing? Oh, gosh. Large unemployment statistics, and for the girls, teenage pregnancy. This was a former Victorian industrial town that wasn’t Victorian; it was certainly no longer industrial. Now it’s a tourist place; they have plenty of those out-of-town business parks and the job situation there is pretty good. When I was growing up, it was very much in that transitional period, where the industries had left and nothing had come in to replace them. I don’t remember anyone else I was particularly friendly with in school being particularly ambitious. I mean, there are a couple of people I’ve still kept in touch with who have done very well and done exactly what they thought they would do, but that was very much the minority. I think everybody else expected to go work in the shop, or hopefully not work at all. And perhaps carry on having underage sex and smoking as often as possible.

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Well into their 20s. Well into their 20s, though perhaps less underage by then.

Did your friends who did go on, did they do anything of note? Well... define “note.” I mean, there’s some notoriety to a number of people who were subsequently arrested having had underage sex. [laughter] But many of the girls I socialized with in early high school went on to have lots of illegitimate children, and I gather they still carried on having lots of illegitimate children well into their twenties and thirties. No, I don’t recall. I think the people that did succeed were the people that actually left the city, that went to university and stayed away and got better jobs elsewhere.

When did you start realizing that people actually made the comics and that you could actually make a living out of this? Very early on, because when I started reading comics, the credits were on the comics as a regular thing. They came in the ’60s, didn’t they? And this is in the ’70s, the early ’70s, when I started reading. This meant I was aware of the artists as soon as I was aware of the comics, and I could spot the different styles and the different personalities within the drawing. You could show me a comic in those days and I would often be able to tell you who’d drawn it, because it was very distinctive. So I

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think for as long as I’d been aware I could draw and I liked comics, I was aware that you could draw comics and do that for a job. I didn’t understand how the process worked; I just knew that you could do it, because there were clearly artists identified with the work. I thought, “That’s very much for me, oh yes indeed.” And so it proved.

What artists did you clue into? I think one of the first ones I was aware of as being ahead of the pack was José Luis Gárcia-Lopéz. He was DC’s staple genius. Very underrated, very underused. I remember picking up a comic by him, even at a very young pre-teen age, I could recognize it and say, “Good God, this stuff is better than anything else.” (Bearing in mind that I was exposed only to DC comics at that point.) Then Jerry Ordway came along with All-Star Squadron, and it was clear that as an inker or embellisher he was bringing something to the table the pencillers were not, much as Kevin Nowlan does today. When he first penciled issue #19, and he penciled and inked it, it was another step up and had me hooked and I must have copied pages and pages from that issue time and again. That was one of my favorite comics for a very long time. I still get a buzz looking at it. It just was an excellent book and a great comic. So there were those two. I suppose they were quite realistic and quite dramatic in their approach to drawing a comic, which probably has influenced me a lot more than I realize in that I don’t go for a traditionally cartoony sort of look, I do try to at least get a feeling of veracity to the work.

So did you have likeminded peers as you were growing?

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Not where I was from, but Mark Millar and I talk about this quite a lot, because we’re pretty much the same age, give or take a couple of months, and we’ve had pretty much the same upbringing. (As I now know, he was literally an hour away from where I was living.) We were talking about the letter columns and so on, and we found that we both recognized the same names. We actually even remember some of the addresses of the various letter column hacks. [Jon laughs] We both felt the same way when we received our first letter from Dale Coe of Whitecross, Cheshire, England, and the now legendary T.M. Maple for instance, that was something to go down on our CV’s to remember.

So did you submit to any fanzines? No, because I wasn’t aware of any. Like I said, the comics that I was exposed to were just the ones the newsagent got. I think fanzines had much more limited availability. And bear in mind, I was in the backwater of backwaters. When flares went out in the ’70s, people in the mid-’80s were still wearing them up there. Now they’re back in fashion. I mean, now that communications have reached the far north of England and they’ve got hot and cold running information just like everywhere else in the country, they’re still wearing flares but they’re fashionable again. Now they’re called low-rise boot-fit jeans.

Did you go down to London at all? No, very small-town minded, I was. I went to London the first time when I was 17. I had been 16; I had just left school and I was still waiting for my exam results (which, to this day, I’ve never picked up. [laughs]) What happened was, I sent a set of samples away and due, I assume, to excessive drinking at lunchtime on behalf of the editors at Marvel UK, when they opened my sample package they decided they’d give me a shot. So they called me up – and I’d just turned 17 – they said, “Come on down, let’s have a meeting. We’ll give you a strip to draw.” In those days, there were five-page strips for the weekly toy-based young kids like ‘Action Force’, which was G.I. Joe, basically; there were Transformers and ‘Thundercats’ and all this other stuff that’s been revived today as top-selling books, which in those days were kind of amateurish knockoffs, especially in Britain. With the weekly kids comics, they would just farm out the strips to anybody going, because they had quite a lot of them going, and they needed to be quite simple, because they were being read by four- and five-year-olds. But they gave me a shot, and they gave me another shot, and they kept giving me shots. There I was, working in what was my sister’s bedroom in my parents’ house, (she had attempted to escape home by marrying early,) just turned 17 and getting all the work I could want. Of course, it was utter rubbish, but I was a comic book artist (in Superman logo style lettering!)

What was within the samples that you sent to them? I followed the sound advice (about the only time I did) of Steve Parkhouse to tailor the samples to the books that they were doing, so I do remember them being Transformers, ‘Thundercats’, and ‘Action Force’, each in a different style. I actually still have these sample pages, I can dig them out for you if you want, if you promise to print them small so I’m not totally embarrassed. But they were very, very poor, I thought. I think, as I said, there must have been something in them that was potentially hirable, but I look at them now and I certainly wouldn’t have hired me. Then again, I probably hadn’t been Johnny Storm © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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drinking as heavily as they had been. The irony of this is that in later years I would constantly bemoan the fact that editors clearly had no ability to tell the difference between their artistic arses and elbows, whereas then I was obviously grateful. So, technically, I was 16 when I sent the stuff away, and a few weeks later, when I got the reply, I was 17. And I’ve been working fulltime ever since, really.

What was that like, to receive the opportunity? Well, it never even occurred to me to charge them for it. [Jon laughs] I was so delighted! I couldn’t believe it. I thought, “This is a lot easier than everybody said it was going to be.” Hah! There was another professional artist up there, Steve Parkhouse, who did the ‘Bojeffries Saga’ with Alan Moore, amongst other things. Steve is known certainly in England as a writer as well as an artist, and he always had this love/hate relationship with comics. His other claim to fame was that he was Barry Windsor-Smith’s colleague. (Well, in those days he was Barry Smith, before he added the Windsor to his name – when they both went over to Marvel in the ’60s, and I think Steve had ghostwritten some stuff for Stan Lee, and it was Barry Windsor-Smith doing his Jack Kirby knockoffs). Steve said his biggest claim to fame was spilling coffee over the first pages of Conan when Barry laid them out on the carpet for him to have a look at. He said, proudly beaming, “Look at all these, I just spent weeks penciling all these on a park bench in Queens.” And Steve, being impressed, said “That’s great,” and spilled his coffee over them. The rest is artistic history.

[laughs] Did you seek him out? Steve’s wife taught at the local arts college, and I’d met a mutual friend who introduced me to the idea that there was a real professional living up there. I knew Steve’s name, because back then he was writing the ‘Doctor Who’ strip that Dave Gibbons was drawing, so I knew his work, as a writer, anyway; and this friend facilitated an introduction, having seen my Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew knock-offs. I think I was about 15 then, and Steve was very much of the “comics are doomed, they’re dead, exentertainment, no longer living; they can’t support income anymore, go and do something else.” And I promptly ignored everything he said and sent my samples away. I mean, he’s a very good source of advice. His advice, of course, in hindsight, was f a n t a s t i c ; everything he tried to tell me about draughtsmanship and composition to improve my basic skills makes very

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good sense. At the time I just wanted to draw great comics. He said, “Forget about comics, just learn to draw better and then apply it to being a good comic book artist.” Y’know, that’s not what you want to hear when you’re a kid and you just want success now.

Did you get art instruction as a teenager? Not officially, no. Nothing beyond high school and beyond about the age of 14. I had intended to go to Art College when I left school at 16 and I was about to apply, but you had to be 17 anyway to go there with sufficient basic qualifications. So while I was waiting through that year before studying art I took a part time job in the draughting and draughty office of an ancient and venerable engineering firm, run by a couple of old and flatulent gentlemen of local renown, doing blue prints for lubricators. But as it was, before I would have been old enough to attend the college I’d got my job with Marvel UK, so I chose to pursue that instead.

Within school, was there any instruction that you received that was good? Well, not that would have helped me in my bid to be a comic artist, I suppose, except there was my art teacher there, who was quite a nice chap – dead now – but he was always trying to get me to work on perspective, and he kept showing me stuff about vanishing points and how to lead your eye through the picture. I never really got it as a kid, but again, this stuff stayed with me, much as I said I think that Gárcia-Lopéz and Jerry Ordway were probably more subliminal influences initially, because I think that stuff that really appealed to me helped me form the approach I have now, about wanting to pursue a more realistic or possibly believable style of drawing, much like I perceived their stuff to be. This art teacher was constantly drumming in the idea of perspective and composition; nothing I could master as a kid, I just didn’t understand it at all. I got the basic gist, but I didn’t understand the idea of planes and using composition to control how you looked at the picture. This would come much later, but this stuff has stayed with me, and it’s something that I use on every picture I draw now. I kind of forgot about this art teacher for years, until I started doing this stuff and began to realize that he had drummed this stuff into me almost unconsciously over years of art classes with him. Not that, as I say, I could ever really do it then, but it did form the later basis of having to force myself into learning drafting skills that I probably would have learned in art college had I gone. But then again, they’d probably have made me do collages of fish or something using snake scales and condoms, or paint pictures of clowns using nothing but a blindfold and three hen’s feathers. That’s the kind of sh*t that they made you do then and, I’m reliably informed, still do.

Who were the Marvel UK editors that gave you a shot? There were two. There was Richard Starkings, now of Comicraft fame. He was originally a Marvel UK editor, with the happy talent of being able to lick his own nose whilst he was working, a trait most found unappealing and occasionally distressing. He was the one that made the first phone call, and the person I had originally sent the samples to was Simon Furman, who has

written, of course, all these Transformers books, and is now back working at Dreamwave on Transformers again. They were the two people that I worked for, during my two year kindergarten at Marvel UK, pretty much. I’m still friends with Simon to this day. We still ring each other up and promise to meet for a drink that we never get round to having, as true friends always do.

Did they immediately invite you down to London? Well, they did just to meet up. I think they were both surprised in fact that I wasn’t a strapping, muscular and drunk 26-year-old much like themselves, and that I was in fact just turned 17, skinny, geeky, and probably didn’t smell overly good, either. You know how it is with teens, spots and showers.

Was this the first time you were in London? It was, yeah. It was quite scary, too. I went down without any real instruction of how to find where it was I was going, I just sort of assumed I’d just get off the train and have a good instinct about where the office would be. [laughter] I still do this when I drive round foreign cities or I go to someplace I’ve never been before, I just sort of assume I’m going to know where it is by sampling the atmosphere. “It can’t be that complicated, it’s only housing 1.2 billion people. How hard can it be to find the person I’m looking for? Forget the map, follow me!”

[laughs] So you just took the train down, and did you have a place to stay? Well, no, I did it there and back in the day. I took a very early morning train down, got into London about nine o’clock (I think I got a four o’clock in the morning train down) and then I got one back about five in the evening and got back home about ten or eleven at night.

What were the offices like? Kind of small and pokey with uneven flooring. I remember them looking as though they were in a building site, which I suppose they were as there was construction on all sorts of offices going on around them; they moved offices after a crane fell onto their building crashing through Simon Furman’s office. To me, though, it was just fascinating, because it was a place where comics were made. And even though they weren’t the comics that I had read, I was about to become a comic book artist. And I do have some fun memories of that place. Well, I don’t really, but I don’t want to seem impolite! I started at the same time as people like Dougie Braithwaite, who got his first job the same year I got mine. Simon Colby, who’s in and out of comics on a regular basis depending on his mood any given month, was there. Liam Sharp probably started around the same sort of time and was working for 2000 AD. There were a few of us that were kind of hovering around those offices looking for free drinks and learning the ropes. Mike Perkins, I think, also. Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning. All of us kind of skirted each other’s lives a little, to start with, during that period and kept in touch regularly. This was in 1987 and what seems like a lifetime later, in the very early ’90s, around ’92, there was a bunch of us – Andy, myself, Liam, and others – working at Marvel UK again, this time under Paul Neary. Much nicer offices this time.

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When you went to the meeting at Marvel UK, did you walk out with a script? They had intended to give me one anyway; they had just wanted to have a meet. I think – this is all the product of hindsight and romanticism, I’m sure – but I think that they’d seen in my samples something very similar to a story that had already been written. It was a two-part story, so I walked out with a two-part story, and I remember doing an appalling job on the penciling, and having to do all sorts of corrections with the deadline for the inking approaching with all apparent haste. I was inking them myself in those days and they said, “You’ve only really got about a day to ink these five pages, do you want an extension?” And being naïve, I went, “No, no, don’t worry about it!” [laughs] I did them that afternoon. That was in the days when it never occurred to me that being late was an option, and it never occurred to me that I shouldn’t be able to do five pages in a day, if I so chose. All I had ever done before this was draw in the holidays or after school knock off a six-page story before dinner, that sort of naïve enthusiasm. It all changed with the second part though. I’d got the first part in and we dissected it, and when I did part two, I remember feeling like I’d made a significant leap, having worked a lot harder and thought more about what I was doing. I look back at it, and I can see a difference between the two. They’re both still sh*tty. But I definitely made a leap. That’s something I’ve always tried to do with every subsequent job is just try and lift the game constantly. But I couldn’t really drop the game any farther than those first two, so I suppose I had to lift it.

What was the reaction when you first saw it in print?

Did you have an attraction to Alan Moore’s work at all?

Oh, it’s crap! [laughter] That was my reaction. To me, it was a comic in print, so I was proud, and I was showing everybody. I bought multiple copies and distributed them widely around the streets of Carlisle. But it was crap. So I was doing it: I was a published comic artist and it was great. I’d done everything I’d wanted to do, I had realised a huge ambition. And next stop Superman, as far as I was concerned. [laughs]

Yeah, I loved Swamp Thing. The first exposure I had to Alan Moore’s work was as just one of the stable of people writing for 2000 AD, then working on Warrior where he did ‘Bojeffries Saga’ with the aforementioned Parkhouse, who also wrote and drew this fantasy series called ‘Spiral Path’, which I just loved. That was running concurrently with Alan Moore’s ‘Marvelman’ stuff, the few first issues with Garry Leach and later Alan Davis. Steve gave me this collection of Warrior s to have a look at, so the first time I thought Alan Moore began to stand head and shoulders above neighboring writers was on that material, the ‘Marvelman’ series and of course later on the ‘Bojeffries Saga.’ There was ‘Captain Britain’, too, revamped by Paul Neary, Bernie Jaye, writer Dave Thorpe and Alan Davis and then taken further by Moore. I started being able to see he was always worth a read. I think by that time Alan was already writing Swamp Thing for DC and the Swamp Thing stuff just knocked me out.

And like you say, you haven’t been out of work? I have not always made the right decision. Certainly I’ve screwed up more times than I care to remember, but I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve never actually had to look for work. I’ve always been very fortunate in being able to find it very easily, or mostly it finding me. So I suppose since those days I really haven’t been out of work. I’ve certainly been out of money on a number of occasions because of my inability to deliver the work after being given I, however. [laughter]

After Gárcia-Lopéz and seeing Ordway’s work, did you start getting into other artists as well? Oh, yeah. Anybody that was anybody I was into, but I was just drawn to those two specifically. I loved Pérez’s work on Titans, although it didn’t necessarily influence me in an illustrative way; again in hindsight, I can see that those issues definitely had an effect on me as a storyteller and the kind of stories I wanted to tell. I would say that Ultimates, in a roundabout way, is probably a modern version of the type of book the Teen Titans was in the ’80s. I think that Mark and I probably wouldn’t have done the kind of work that we’re doing had we not read books like Teen Titans and [John] Byrne and [Chris] Claremont’s X-Men and things like that, and of course books like Watchmen that came in our late teens. And Dark Knight, too. Books that influenced a generation.

Obviously, that was the beginning of what we would term over here a British Invasion of artists and creators from England. We were re-conquering the Colonies, really, weren’t we? With pencils.

[laughs] Did that give you hope, in seeing that Gibbons was getting work over here? Well, yeah. I guess as a kid it never occurred to me when I was very young that I shouldn’t be able to achieve what I wanted and draw Superman and all the other characters; the fact that all the British artists I was seeing were now doing those things just reinforced that typical self-delusion. [laughs] It was certainly good to see because people that Steve Parkhouse knew, all these people like Gibbons and Alan Moore and the rest of that

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fine band of British stalwarts, were becoming the toast of American comics. There was certainly something going on and standards were being raised. It was about then I started noticing Alan Davis’ work, too, when he got to Batman and the Outsiders. I didn’t like it then as much as I liked Jim Aparo’s stuff whose work, especially his Brave and Bold (which BATO replaced) I fell for long before I’d even heard of Neal Adams.

The earliest work that you were getting published, can you see any overt influences by other artists? Oh, constantly. There’s a lot of John Byrne in my very early work, John Byrne and Mike Mignola, both of whom I’d discovered very late because, as I said, I could only get DC comics. So the first John Byrne work I was exposed to were black-andwhite Marvel UK reprints of his Captain America run, short as it was. One of those reprint issues also featured a cover by one Paul Neary, which I copied many times as a young teen. Not long after this, Byrne started Superman work for DC, which of course had an impact and was very exciting and the first time I had seen an event in the medium. And then I started getting Marvel comics and I was able to go to comic shops and get back issues, and there was reprints and stuff, and I came across much more of his early work, like the X-Men and the Fantastic Four stuff, and even his brief Captain America run. So yeah, I would say John Byrne was probably my biggest overt influence at that time, long before I got into Alan Davis’ work. I got into Alan’s work because he introduced himself to me and started showing me photocopies of his pencils in sort of an attempt to take me under his wing and help me through some of the storytelling problems I was having, probably just for reasons of his own generosity, I should imagine. But it led to other problems, and certainly led me to be too close to his work. Interestingly, I was looking through a whole pile of very early work of mine. When I moved house recently, I had to clear out some cupboards, and I spent a fascinating afternoon looking through some very early work. And one of the surprising aspects of it was finding some old Transformers stuff from when I was about 17, when I was drawing that, and crude as it is, what I found surprising was that the storytelling was just as it would have been if I had drawn The Authority on a couple of these pages. It was just a flash, but it was Artwork © Respective Holders

there. I started looking through other things I’d done, and I could see that the scale was there and some of the ideas were there, some of it was even potentially widescreen, I just didn’t understand what I was doing and hadn’t fully formulated an approach yet, and I certainly didn’t have the vocabulary and language to express myself fully. But the ideas, I think, were there, and I think they might have been there a lot sooner had I not allowed myself to be so sidetracked by this strong influence of Alan’s work, because I think fundamentally I don’t work like Alan does. I mean, it led to me learning to draw figures better, but I think when I was trying to tell a story the way Alan told a story was where I really felt I was coming apart in later years. When I started to think that I should trust my instincts, the results were Authority.

Were these continuing series that you were doing for Marvel UK, or were they short stories? Well, the magazines were continuing series, but all the stories were five pages or several parts in five-page batches, each part would be five pages each, so there was a constant team of rotating people just doing five or ten pages at a time.

So was Transformers what you were doing? Yeah. Actually, the first stuff I did was ‘Action Force’, which was the G.I. Joe European Missions. That led to Transformers, and after about a year of doing these, Marvel started to do something similar to American format books. I think it was called Dragon’s Claws and was drawn by Transformers artist Geoff Senior, and I did Death’s Head. I think each issue of Death’s Head that I drew – and I think that I must have drawn about five or six of them out of the ten they published – had an extremely overt and different influence. For instance, issue one was heavily Mike McMahon, who was a British artist working on 2000 AD, and, again, a very highly underrated one; the second issue was very much Mike Mignola, and I think issue three probably was more John Byrne. After that I got into the Alan Davis stuff, and I think I was swiping fairly heavily from him at that point. So if you go back and look at those Death’s Head, I think you can see a different artist each issue.

Was it a subconscious thing? No, I was really just out of my depth. I didn’t know what I was doing. I certainly didn’t have the skills to try and work on that much material regularly, so I fell

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back on the old techniques of childhood, which was if you can’t do it, copy it! I was trying to be a professional then, but really, again, hindsight being what it is, you could say the best thing to have done would have been to have done less and to have done it more slowly and worked it out properly and logically. I think I was just very much out of my depth and all of the floundering is there to see in print.

What was ‘Death’s Head?’ He was cyborg mercenary who had a couple of horns and big tusks and wasn’t particularly well drawn, I might add.

Was it a post-apocalyptic...? Oh yeah, because everything in those days was postapocalyptic, especially in British comics.

So it was a 2000 AD knockoff, pretty much? Pretty much. That was what really pervaded the whole British creative sensibility at the time.

Was Paul Neary running the show then? No, Paul came in a bit later. I left Marvel UK in about late ’88 and went off to do She-Hulk, God knows why. [note: Bryan’s first issue of She-Hulk is #9 in December of 1989.] Paul came in, I think, the year after that, when Marvel UK was pretty much in a shambles and was assigned by Marvel to try and find a way to bridge the two markets, the US and the UK. I think he was working there a couple of years before I went back down and started working for them again, but this time I started working out of their offices. This was from October 1992 and I started with Marvel US in either ‘89 or ‘90.

So She-Hulk was the American market? Yeah, my first US work was taking over from John Byrne on She-Hulk, so going from being out of my depth, I suddenly went to drowning. In shark-infested waters, no less, with no possibility of a raft. A creek called Sh*t and a raft, sans propulsion.

Who was the writer that you were working with? The first issue was done by Richard Starkings and Gregory Wright. I think they were pitching for the book, but they didn’t get it, and Steve Gerber came on board to do it. So I think the atrocity that was my artwork was at least somewhat made up for by the fact that a comics legend and irony icon such as Steve Gerber managed to bring in something that could keep at least some people coming back to the thenever-dwindling sales on the book.

Did you confer with Steve at all? Yeah, we spoke fairly regularly. Not particularly about stories; I mean, there was nothing I had at that age that I could possibly offer to Steve in terms of stories. He was quite able to get his own writer’s block without any help from me. But I liked talking to him, because he was somebody whose work I’d admired

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and I’d loved the Howard the Duck stuff. So to actually get to talk to a genuine comics guy was great and he was very encouraging that I didn’t suck as much as I thought I did. He may even have said that.

Who was your editor? Bobbie Chase. And how was the experience? Oh, it was fine. I didn’t really have any problems with Bobbie at all. The only stuff I remember of any interest was that she was constantly trying to stop us doing any cheesecake, so I was constantly finding She-Hulk’s skirts getting redrawn so that you couldn’t see the tops of her legs and god help anyone who caught a glimpse

of underwear. At one point I’m told to “feel free to do titillation, but don’t show any tits.” [laughter] Titillation without titties: not a good combination.

What was the Incomplete Death’s Head? I think that was just reprints that Marvel UK under Neary put out when

Death’s Head II turned out to be quite a success. Was She-Hulk your entrée into American work? Oh yeah, it was. Again, I was out of my depth in terms of trying to do a monthly book when I hadn’t even figured out the basics of how to draw; I think how to draw well has always been more important to me than anything else, even more important

than the need to make money, unfortunately. So I think I could have made more of the opportunity than I eventually did. But that could be my cry of lament throughout my whole career. Lots of opportunities unrealized or just plain screwed. Dammit, I should be wealthy beyond the dreams of Tony Stark by now! There were various things going around when I was offered She-Hulk, though nothing I knew at the time. Chris Claremont told me he was thinking of me to replace Alan on Excalibur when Alan left, but I can’t imagine that to be true, because I think Alan and I had long since stopped communicating by that time and I can’t think it would have been a decision that either party would have thought good. I think there was very much a negative feeling between myself and Alan and I can’t imagine that would have been a particularly supported move. But Mike Carlin must have seen something, because he approached me after I’d been winding up my She-Hulk stuff and asked me to come and work on some projects for him, too. He offered me some regular Superman work, which in hindsight I was probably foolish to have turned down, since it led to the ‘Death of Superman’, and being a part of that regular creative team would have been something. I think that was the first time I missed out on the chance to make a million. It wouldn’t be the last either. The book I actually accepted was an abortive attempt to relaunch The Outsiders with Mike Barr.

You had admired Alan’s work before? Yeah, I got into it about the time he hit Batman at DC. I remember the first time his stuff really knocked me off my seat was that first pass at ‘Batman: Year Two’. I just really loved that issue; it just kind of woke me up to what he was doing. And I’d just also managed to get ahold of by that point, I think, reprints of his ‘Captain Britain’ stuff with Alan Moore and later Jamie Delano. That stuff really blew me away, and I don’t think that Alan’s ever risen beyond the inventiveness of the work that he did then. That was his earliest work, and even though you can see that his drawing, by comparison with his later work, was more crude, and that his drawing clearly got a lot better, I think the fact that he was just trying everything, every angle, every idea, every approach in that early stuff made it wild with invention. And that’s something I think that he’s settled into a certain stable approach that makes him happy, I think some of that inventiveness has disappeared. Whereas the drawing has improved, the inventiveness is gone.

You say he took you under his wing? I suppose, to a degree. As a 17-,18-year-old (very much flattered and very much out of his depth) to have an artist, one I admired as much as I did Alan,

The Ultimates © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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to make himself available and help me with advice was very valuable to me. The only thing that proved problematic is, because I was so out of my depth, I was floundering for any life raft I could see, and if that meant swiping from the copies of Alan’s work he was sending me – amongst other people I hasten to add – that’s what I ended up doing. So despite the self-righteous indignation displayed by Alan and Mark, they weren’t the only ones I was swiping from at that point. I wasn’t the first to do it and I wouldn’t be the last, either. Bill Sienkiewicz started as Neal Adams, Arthur Adams as Michael Golden, Alan himself is a very firm mix of Gil Kane and Adams; everyone starts somewhere and hopefully develops from there. I don’t know why I was singled out and a fuss made, that would be something best asked of Alan and Mark.

Mark being Mark Farmer? Yeah, Mark Farmer. So who were the others? That I was swiping from? Gosh, anybody and everybody. I could probably go through most comics I was drawing up until a little bit before I did Stormwatch. Even though the swiping got less and less as the years went on, it was pretty much when I hit Stormwatch that I started to really do it for myself. I could pick a comic out and look over the pages, I’ll tell you which issue of somebody else’s work they came from.

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How did the relationship deteriorate with Alan? Was it pretty soon? The relationship, such as it was, didn’t last very long. I mean, he was somebody who was in the position I’m in now, I suppose, one of relative stability in his employment and recognition of work. I suppose I could describe it best by being like me finding somebody that no one had ever heard of at a comic book convention and saying, “You’re work’s quite nice, I can probably help you out a bit,” sending him photocopies, trying to give him advice, and then discovering several months later that some stuff I had sent him of mine that hadn’t been published, has suddenly been published with his name attached to it, but drawn by him! It’s not going to be good for any sort of relationship. It’s – I wouldn’t say unforgivable, but it’s certainly not the done thing, is it?

How do you feel about that now? Oh, ashamed, appalled, mea culpa, etc. It’s nothing I’m proud of, because when it comes down to it, I didn’t achieve

How do you feel about that now, in retrospect? [pause] I have lots of mixed feelings. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it, either, because I certainly wasn’t the only one to do it, nor the first. I honestly feel like I’ve had two careers. I feel like there was the one where I got it wrong, and the one where I got it right. My life as a comic artist has been going for 17 years, but I think my career really started when I worked on Stormwatch, because that’s when I really began to take it seriously and I became determined to work it out and find my own language. I think that was also the point where I said, “Bugger this for a lark! I’m going to learn how to use perspective properly. I’m going try this and try that, and I may even try the other in to the bargain;” just do what I think should be on a page, not what I think somebody else would put on a page. To not try and base my ideas around what I thought another artist would do. Whether I was swiping or not, the thinking process was still very much, “Now, what would Alan Davis do? What would Neal Adams do? What about Gil Kane?” Or any of these other people whose work, by that point, I’d got quite into. Instead the process became, “Okay, can I see the picture? Okay. Now can I draw the picture?” So it became a whole process of learning. And Stormwatch was very much in at the deep end, because the book was so colossally late when I started on it that there was no time to think about anything, I just had to put stuff down on the page and get it done. And that was the first time I’d done that; just put it down, drew, it, sent it in, drew the next page, send it in, and so on. I didn’t sit and second-guess myself and didn’t question it, I just drew it. It turned out to be a lot better than I thought it would be which in turn gave me a lot of confidence. I think if I hadn’t done that, I couldn’t have done what I did on Authority, which is produce twelve consecutive monthly issues in a monthly schedule, four weeks each. In fact, most of them were done in two to three weeks each!

Wow. Yeah, I know. Not that anybody reading the Ultimates would believe that!

The Ultimates © Marvel Characters, Inc.

anything. I didn’t learn anything; I didn’t break any personal ground and lift my work to a new level. Nothing was enhanced by the doing of it – not my work and certainly not my reputation.

So have you come to terms with Alan about it? Not really. I haven’t spoken to Alan in years.

Is it just sour feelings? I don’t know. I guess Alan and Mark did since they devoted an entire convention panel one year to the subject, at some length. I don’t really have any feelings one way or the other anymore. I don’t know Alan personally at all. I mean, we had some conversations 12 or 15 years ago and we’ve crossed each other’s paths occasionally but that’s it. I was trying to find my way,

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and it took me a long time to find it. It’s one of those hiccups on the route to actually learning something.

Was Kirby big for you? No, Kirby was something I appreciated later. In fact, I didn’t really start appreciating Kirby fully as an artist until I started getting the Kirby Collector, which Paul lent me, because you get to see it in black-and-white, and sometimes just seeing an artist’s pencils will allow you to actually at least feel like you can tap a little into his thinking as he’s drawing the pieces. When it’s inked and colored, it’s finished and polished; when you see the pencils you see the under drawing, you see some of the attempts to make the line that didn’t quite work and have been erased and the construction. That allows you some access to the creative process that you don’t see in a finished page. So seeing Kirby’s work like that just made me rethink it altogether. So the other person you were talking about was Gil Kane? Yeah, Gil Kane. I can pull out Gil Kane and still get an incredible buzz out of looking at the drawings because it was so incredibly well constructed. His storytelling was so assured and his productivity was legendary, almost as fast as Kirby was. Of course, Gil Kane was a big influence on Gárcia-Lopéz and especially Alan Davis as well.

So have you had experience working the old-fashioned Marvel style of plotting? Yeah, when I was younger. I don’t have a problem with it, particularly, if the story’s good. But I think problems only exist with it because it can be a lazy way to do the stories. A lot of writers used it as a short cut to greater productivity without any consideration for getting the basics right. I think these people would have produced equally sloppy scripts had they tried to work that way. They weren’t actually trying to tell a story, they weren’t trying to break the story down properly and pace it properly, that was something one inevitably had to fix. That’s one thing I’ve loved about Warren [Ellis] and Mark Millar is that they worked very hard at getting their pacing right. You can draw it literally, as they write it, but you can also work into it an awful lot more, as I do.

So you get full scripts? I get full scripts, yeah. And that works well because the dialogue’s there, so I know how to make the characters act. I work actually more from the dialogue than I do from any panel descriptions as, especially in the character heavy scenes, the real The Ultimates © Marvel Characters, Inc.

information is in the dialogue rather than the stage directions. There was a point in Authority where Warren just stopped writing panel descriptions for quite a number of pages just because they weren’t necessary; all I needed was the dialogue to see how the characters were to act. Mark also puts minimal descriptions in his scripts. I mean, I’ve seen his scripts for other artists, and they’re far more involved than they are for me; but he puts the descriptions in more for himself, to pace his own dialogue. If you were to compare pages from the script with pages from the artwork, the actions may be the same, but they’re certainly not shot the way the writer would originally ask for them, because it becomes apparent when you’re drawing it that it’s not always the best way to do it.

Do you have any... I’ve talked to some artists, some people who care about these characters, and they do term it perfectly as grotesque the way that these characters are being treated. Does it bother you at all, you going to such extremes with some of these beloved characters? No, not at all. Those beloved characters, as we say, still exist; they’re still doing exactly what they’ve been doing for the last 30 years over in Avengers. So if people want them they still have them; it’s not like we’ve replaced them. I think it’s significant that we outsell them though!

Do you start with thumbnails? Well, I always do some rough work before I start a page, but it’s very easy to see the pictures in my head from reading the script because Mark and I are discussing the stories constantly, so it’s half-formed anyway. When I get the script from Mark, it’s very just put the picture in my head. So it’s not like I have to start kind of working out the pages in detail in advance, I simply work out panel sizes and the flow of panels from page to page, where the big points are going to be. If you want to take it musically, where the emphasis is going to be within the underlying rhythm, a point of clarity or a crescendo or what have you. And the big panels aren’t always the most obvious ones. Just because it’s an action shot doesn’t mean it has to be a big shot. Sometimes you need an exclamation point to be a close-up of a head, or even an establishing shot, to allow a certain time for the reader to look at it and give it a certain sense of pace. One thing that’s always the comic book artist’s enemy is the

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speed you read the comic book, and you have to control how that’s done. And sometimes you can turn the page too quickly or you can scan the page too quickly. And the tradition of just doing a tiny establishing shot and going through the story can often lead to a very formulaic approach. If you treat every page the same way, an establishing shot, a full-figure shot, a head shot, a trick shot, whatever you want to call them, if that becomes your formula, then you’re never going to be able to change the mood or the tempo or the pacing of the story. So getting that set up up front is something that I can do just on the side of the script, just to kind of pace the panels. The thumbnails I do are generally the same size as original art kind of thumbnails, where I’m just trying to do a lot of the rough drawing on separate sheets just to keep the art board as clean as possible.

I guess technically that’s not a thumbnail, then. [laughs] I suppose not. Technically, it’s just a bit of rough underdrawing, where I can refine the working out process and get some of the construction worked out ahead of the actual drawing. Most of the drawings, though, I do on the original art board now, I don’t do a great deal of working out in advance.

I’ve heard that you may have used Saving Private Ryan as photo reference of freeze-framing? Not freeze-framing, no. I had the ‘Making Of’ book, and it had some shots in there, and I used that for part of my getting the gear right. And I did stick in a couple of shots of Tom Hanks as a bit of a joke. And it was certainly useful for showing how you hold the old rifles, because it had a lot of modern military reference for rifles and costumes. But not all the stuff I had on World War II – in the very old photographs, which are very grainy and black-and-white – showed them in enough detail, so I used the Saving Private Ryan stuff to supplement some of the D-Day landing books I was using as well, more just to get the feel right. The freeze-frame stuff’s not true, but it was certainly a point of reference for me.

Do you use photos as reference with any frequency? Not with any great frequency, but where required.

Just for details? I mean, obviously I want New York to look like New York, so I get New York reference. Sometimes I’ll use photo-ref as a guide. Obviously, it helps clarify some lighting problems I’m having on a face, but using photo-ref for comic book drawing doesn’t often work, because the proportions are all wrong for a start. But it does help provide you with a way of grounding what you’re doing, especially something like this where I’m trying to make it feel more realistic. It helps to surround myself with some stuff. Originally I was constantly looking at Samuel Jackson The Thing © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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photographs for Nick Fury, but I don’t need to use those anymore, because I can draw him looking like Samuel Jackson without even trying, now. Often there are times Paul Neary’s picked up pages and asked if I’ve used photo-ref for something and it hasn’t been, it’s just there are things you get a facility for doing, eventually. If I can find reference that will help, I’ll use it. If you’re going to have to go on location to shoot a movie, you’re going to have to build the set. You can’t just make this sh*t up sometimes.

So this will be your bread and butter for the foreseeable future, for the next couple of years? Yeah. We’re hoping to be able to bring volume two in on a much more regular schedule. Providing I don’t get divorced, remarried, move house, move office, and suddenly have two instant children and a baby. [Jon laughs] So assuming that doesn’t happen again over the next year or so, we should be able to bring volume two in probably by early Spring 2005. After that, we have some other stuff lined up as posibilities. We’ll clarify it when we get closer to that time. But, yeah, Ultimates is it til we’ve reached issue 13 of volume two.

Is The Ultimates your favorite work? Yeah, it really is. I’m genuinely proud of it. It’s had its ups and down, obviously, for many reasons. But I’m absolutely, genuinely proud of it. In a way I wasn’t with Authority. As I say, Authority, my feet didn’t touch the ground, because I just did it and didn’t really think about it. This has been a designed and considered approach from both Mark and myself, and the fact that we’ve been able to hit many of the marks we intended to hit has been very gratifying.

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For over 50 years he’s explored the furthest reaches of the universe, discovering new When and where were you born? worlds, encountering unknown alien races and What was your upbringing like? breathtaking adventure – the legendary draftsman Sydney Jordan has done all of this Born 1931 in Dundee, Scotland, where the renowned publishing and so much more in the space yarns he’s house of DC Thomson was producing a staggering range of chronicled. The artist, a native of Scotland, is best comics, including five story magazines a week filled with known for being the creator of ‘Jeff Hawke’, the intelligent, literate adventure tales for boys and carrying the title illustrations by some of Britain’s leading illustrators of the day. world’s longest running science-fiction Enjoying that peculiarly literary emphasis which the Scottish newspaper strip, for The Daily Express, and the educational system bestowed at that time, and encouraged by popular ‘Lance McLane’ in The Daily Record – both my parents to read the comics and earlier classics, my syndicated across the globe. Jordan’s interest in childhood was happy and full. My father used to quote the great aviation and space started at the end of World War II poets to me from an early age, and I fell in love with what he when he enrolled at Miles Aeronautical Technical called “golden-tongued romance.” School for aspiring aviation designers, an Did you study art formally? education that would serve invaluable And what attracted you to the comics form? throughout the rest of this career. Unable to find work in the aviation industry, he turned to Despite my interest in drawing and writing my love of aviation comics and landed worked as an assistant to Len led me to attend Miles Aircraft's experimental college for wouldFullerton on his comic Dora, Toni and Liz in 1951. By be aeronautical engineers just after the war, and it was there 1952 he moved to London and worked for the agency that I learned about the nuts and bolts of flying. But the lure of Man’s World, where he did the art for ‘Dirk Hercules’ storytelling through comic book brought me back to Dundee where I worked in a studio run by an ex-Thomson artist and his in a series of comics promoting physical fitness. colleagues. This was how I studied art – at the feet of those who Soon after, Jordan pitched a proposal for a character understood the demands of drawing the human figure in the called Orion to The Daily Express, who picked up the medium of pen and ink. strip once the hero was turned into a Royal Air Force pilot and bestowed the name of Jeff Hawke in Who were your most important artistic influences? 1954. In 1956, Willie Paterson, a childhood friend of Jordan’s and a fellow classmate at Miles, While at Bill McCail's studio, I studied the work of Alex Raymond joined Hawke as writer/co-plotter and assisted in (‘Rip Kirby’), Milton Caniff (‘Steve Canyon’), and later Stan Drake making the newspaper strip a classic by presenting (‘The Heart of Juliet Jones’). Raymond for his mastery of the heavier science-fiction elements to the plotlines and clothed figure, accurate and graphic; Caniff for the wonderful introducing amusing aliens like the infamous rendering of uniforms and particularly aircraft (no one could touch him for the image of an aeroplane in combat); and Drake Chalcedon, the space pirate, a villain as beloved as for his photographic use of tint and the sheer glamour of his the hero himself. When ‘Jeff Hawke’ ceased in 1976, characters. Jordan created ‘Lance McLane’, a more psychedelic and fantastic mix of science fiction that endured many years of fanfare. Whether it’s the sight of his celestial landscapes, his gut-ripping action, his meticulously detailed aircrafts, or his beautiful women, Jordan’s library of work and brushwork has made him one of the true masters of British comics.

Sydney

JORDAN by George Khoury

All Jeff Hawke art © The Daily Express

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What inspired the ‘Jeff Hawke’ strip, in terms of its look and story? In 1954 the flying saucer phenomenon was well under way, and by linking my opening sequences to the contemporary newsworthy nature of the ‘sightings’, I was able to sell the idea to the Daily Express. The first two or three stories saw Hawke progress from being a kind of super-hero to a much more realistic character firmly based in a not too distant future. Chesley Bonestell’s fabulous spacescapes and the eerie science fiction of Ray Bradbury were to influence the background and storylines which eventually developed.

Could you please describe how Willie Paterson and yourself collaborated on the strips?

Willie Patterson, a school friend and fellow student at Miles Technical College, had an intellect bordering on genius, and when I asked him to help with the scripts he brought all of his classical knowledge and Bohemian lifestyle to bear. The result is what the Italians (the most receptive of all the foreign syndication readers) call the Golden Age, including as it does the pantheon of aliens which he and I created – bizarre, yet cursed with most of the frailties which beset mankind! We thought so much alike that it was rare for us to argue over any aspect of the story or drawing. His scenarios, linked with the dialogue, were almost always what I myself would have envisioned, and I changed them only after careful consideration.

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Is there a specific work or storyline that you are particularly proud of? Although I have always admired Willie's take on early visitations by aliens – ‘The Immortal Toys’ (what a title!) – I think his masterpiece was ‘Counsel for the Defence’. Here we see a range of galactic life high and low, with sly comparisons with our own legal system. I like to think that the artwork complemented his story – it was an inspiring script to work to!

My own story, ‘Sitting Tenants’, was I think one of my best in terms of artwork, as it allowed for a range of locales and characters in a more contemporary setting and still let me indulge in a poetic pastiche at the end, when great vain Pan himself tells Hawke how much he admires Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “A Musical Instrument”:

“What was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river?”

All Jeff Hawke art © The Daily Express

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What advice do you usually give fellow artists? Study the greats – Toth, Kirby, Caniff, Raymond, de la Fuente, (John) Burns, Moebius, etc. – and see how they solved the problems which you may be having trouble with! Do you still work? What's a typical day like now? And do you have any projects in the works? I still draw and write and have recently done film storyboarding for a friend in L.A. I am working on a film script and two comic book ideas as well as space art for an upcoming “cosmic mystery” book. And my daughter has introduced me to the pleasures of horse ownership! Cisco Kid, move over!!

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Donald Southam Lawrence was born in East Sheen London on November 17, 1928. With his passing in December of 2003 the last of the great British comic book illustrators/artists passed on to the big art college in the sky.

Don

1928-2003

LAWRENCE by Peter Hansen

Like many of the greats, Don was quite modest and selfeffacing where his art was concerned, and when asked about his work would always wax lyrically about others. A lifelong admirer of his great friend Ron Embleton (‘Wicked Wanda’ artist in Penthouse) and others such as Frank Bellamy and Frank Hampson, Don never really saw himself as their contemporary. When I mentioned that he would be featured in this book alongside Bellamy and Hampson he was embarrassed and humbled to be even considered alongside people he admired so much. Such was the man. Never a great student Lawrence, took refuge in his art at school. After being evacuated during the war he joined the army in 1947, leaving in 1949 to study art at the Borough Polytechnic in London until he left in 1954. Almost 50 years later in September 2003, I had the pleasure of interviewing Don Lawrence in London at the first British convention he had attended since 1976.

Left: Artwork © The Don Lawrence Estate & all characters copyright to respective holders

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After leaving art school, Don, what did you do? Well I had decided to do strip work after an ex-student had come back to the college to show off a page of cowboy artwork that he had done. So I went to see a man called Ted Holmes at Amalgamated Press who gave me a tryout... which I failed!!

[laughter] I thought it was going to be easy you know, but of course it’s not easy. Anyway he paid me for the art and he said, “Well look, why don’t you try Mick Anglo,” who was the bottom of the bottom, you know, you can’t get any lower than Mick Anglo. [laughter] So I did and he paid me a pound a page for black-and-white and he gave me a tryout and he said okay, and that’s how I started.

A pound a page doesn’t sound very much. No, and I didn’t realise it was only a pound a page at first. He asked me to draw a sample page of Marvelman flying over a bunch of skyscrapers and I went home and spent a whole bloody week drawing that sample page with all of the windows in the skyscrapers. It was bloody murder. I almost died when I found out he was only going to pay me a pound a page!

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So this was the first real paying job in the comics business that you had? Not really, I also did a small little magazine called Dolphin for a gentleman called Mr. Feldman who lived in Meadowvale who was a tailor, and he wanted a magazine to advertise his business, and he was my first paying customer. Which was great, because up until I got that job I had been really struggling.

It’s a strange looking little magazine, Don, and I can’t see what it had to do with a tailoring business. [laughs] It had nothing at all to do with tailoring. He just wanted to do it, and he handed them out to his clients. I did a few stories for it, but once I started on ‘Marvelman’ I really didn’t have time for it anymore. So once you started on ‘Marvelman’, Don, were you thrown in at the deep end? Or did you start off by erasing pencils or inking? No, he just sort of said “off you go” and he gave me a few scripts to start with, but after a while they dried up and I started writing my own stories.

Did you know anything about comics when you started, Don? You know, were you an avid comic reader when you were a kid? Well it was war time, you see, and there really weren’t any comics around. I remember getting my hands on a Canadian comic, it was a big one, and how I got hold of it I don’t remember, but it had ‘Dick Tracy’ in it and a lot of the heroes of that time. I mean, I just loved those types of comics, but I never thought about being a comic or strip artist. It was the fact that at art school abstract impressionism was ‘in’ and I never really liked it as I was a ‘realist’ painter, and I was completely out of my depth. I just thought that I had to use what talent I had and comic strips seemed to fit. I didn’t want to go into advertising, I knew that. I had gone up to London to show a company my stuff even before I went into the army, and they said, you know, “Do your service and come back and see us.”

So you never really did any commercial work? Well, I did a bit, but not much, I did a game cover design for Milton Bradley called ‘The Temple Raiders’. But they would come down every couple of weeks to make little changes and they were so picky, I thought, “Well I’m not going to do this again.” I also did a big poster to advertise Hong Kong, and got paid very well for it, but in the end they decided not to use it.

Wells Fargo Wells Fargo © Respective Holder

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probably a good thing really, because I tended to be a little verbose in those days.

So you were making ten pounds a week in those days, which was pretty good I would think? Yes, it was, and it soon went up to one pound ten shillings and in the end I was getting 20 pounds a week – by working bloody hard! I remember my bank manager used to say [resentfully] “You’re getting the same money as I am!”

So here you are drawing ‘Marvelman’ and ‘Young Marvelman’ and ‘Marvelman Family’, and you probably didn’t know anything about the history behind Marvelman at that time, the whole Captain Marvel thing? No, not really. I wasn’t interested either probably, I just wanted the money!” [laughter]

Now, Miller Publications started producing the ‘Marvelman’ series of comics in February of 1954 and you would have probably started drawing for them in about early 1955. But you also started doing western material for Miller as well such as ‘Davy Crockett’ (Oct. 1956) and ‘Daniel Boone’ (Feb. 1957) and eventually ‘Gunhawks’ (Anglo Features Oct. 1960). But you stopped doing the ‘Marvelman’ material after a while?

So you got the Job with Mick Anglo and started drawing ‘Marvelman’ for a pound a page. Can you remember how many pages a week you were doing? I’d say about ten a week.

Now I mentioned to you before we started this interview, Don, about Mick Anglo telling me that he quite often had to go down to your mum’s house and collect the pages from you. Is that true?

Yes, Mick and I had a row about the quality of my last story for him and he said it wasn’t up to my usual standard. I said that my worst page on my worst day was better than anything else the other people he had working for him were producing, and he said, “You know that may be true, but I’m paying you for your best,” so I quit.

So this is when you started drawing western strips for Amalgamated Press who of course had rejected you early on in your career. You started on Sun Weekly and this would be in about mid-1958? Eventually of course you ended up drawing ‘Billy the Kid’.

So you never worked in the studio?

Yes, I remember I went back to Ted Holmes and he was really guarded when I got in to see him, because he had already rejected me once. So I showed him what I was doing and he said, “Oh great, well we can use you,” and I started doing westerns, and I got a bit type cast as a western artist. Which I thought I was never very good at, because I could never draw horses properly, you know.

No never. I’ve never worked in a studio – always at home.

You were always very critical of your own work, Don?

Did you have to do everything – pencils, inking, lettering?

Yes, well it’s the only way you get any better really, isn’t it?

Well, no, not really. I mean, maybe occasionally, but I used to cycle over to Mick’s place in Gower Street from where I lived near Croydon with the pages on the back of the bike.

Yes, I did everything except the lettering. I mean I pencilled in the word balloons and the lettering, but Mick would ink the lettering. We would agree on the story and I would write it out, then Mick would rub out my lettering and put something totally different in his own language when he got it back. [laughter] Which was The Trigan Empire & Karl The Viking © Respective Holder

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∫ When you started drawing the strips, Don, were you aware or were you looking around at what other artists were doing? Yes, very much so. It was when I went to Lion and Tiger I came across Ron Embleton and other artists. I always admired Frank Bellamy and Frank Hampson, though I always preferred Bellamy over Hampson because he was a bit freer, whereas Hampson was a little more mechanical.

When you went to Amalgamated Press did they give you any examples of house artwork to follow, perhaps people like Eric Parker, or Geoff Campion? They did give me one or two pages to look at, though I can’t remember who it was, but I do remember I was terribly impressed with it. After all, at that time anything was better than I was doing. [laughter] But for the most part you were left to your own devices.

So they just sent you the scripts for the stories and left you to get on with it, and did you do the lettering for your AP work? Yes, they basically just left me alone and expected me to hit my deadlines, and fortunately I didn’t do the lettering, because I am appalling at it!

When you left the lettering up to them, did you ever have occasion where they put the balloon over a critical piece of the art? I have heard this complaint from other artists. I don’t recall it happening with AP, but I do remember it happening once with the Dutch. I was drawing this large frame and in the background was a mountain with a very special shape, and they stuck the bloody balloon right over the shape. I mean they had the whole damn frame to stick it on, but they had to stick it on the mountain. [laughter] Ruined the whole frame, but that happens. Erik The Viking © Respective Holder

You didn’t like cowboys, yet you did a lot of them, including a ton of spot illustrations for cowboy stories. Yes I did, and then I started another cowboy series ‘The Tales of Wells Fargo’ in Zip and Swift comics. That was very difficult because I found that Dale Robertson, who played Jim Hardie, was very difficult to draw.

Did you have sheets or photos for reference to draw Robertson? I had about three photos of him, which wasn’t much help. No, I definitely failed a bit with his likeness. I knew it wasn’t very good.

Was ‘Wells Fargo’ a popular series – did you know? I have no idea; they never told you anything. I suppose as long as the scripts kept arriving it must have been popular.

What kind of rates were you making at AP? Was it more than when you were working for Mick Anglo? Oh God yes. I mean, I can’t remember exactly what I was making, but it was more than working for Mick. Though it was harder work because the strips were in half-tones, you know, and I had to put a lot more work into it.

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Fireball XL5

At this juncture we are interrupted (yet again) by Sydney Jordan and the formal interview ends at this point. However, this was not the end of Don’s career by a long shot, more like it was just beginning. From 1964 to 1976 Don Lawrence ruled supreme, drawing historical adventure sagas in British comics. His colour work on the Saxon sagas of ‘Maroc the Mighty’ coupled with his colour work for The Bible Story magazine led directly to his being teamed with writer Mike Butterworth on the unequalled colour adventure series epic ‘The Rise and Fall of the

Of course to wrap up your western portfolio you ended up doing ‘Blackbow the Cheyenne’ in Swift. Yes, thank goodness that was about the last of it I think.

You also filled in on some ‘Olac the Gladiator’ stories in Tiger at some point, didn’t you? Yes, though it was regularly drawn by an Italian artist called Ruggero Giovanini; he did the most of the artwork and I just filled in occasionally.

So I suppose that your first full-fledged adventure strip was really the ‘Karl the Viking’ series in Lion, which began in 1960. Do you remember how this came about?

Trigan Empire’ in Ranger, published by Fleetway Publications, where he also did a number of beautiful front covers. Although this comic only lasted for 40 issues, the series moved over to the new Look and Learn magazine where it ran for another eleven years. All the while that the ‘Trigan Empire’ series was running, Lawrence continued working on numerous strips for the former Amalgamated Press comics, which by then had been taken over by Fleetway Publications and latterly IPC, as well as work for other publishers drawing strips such as ‘Thunderbirds’ and ‘Fireball XL5.’ He also found time to draw a British version of ‘Wicked Wanda’ or ‘Little Annie Fanny’ called ‘Carrie’ in the British men’s magazine Mayfair. His work also could be seen in classier magazine type comics such as Boy’s World and Once Upon a Time.

The house of cards collapsed however in 1976 when Don Lawrence attended his first ever comic book convention in London (Comics 101) to discover that IPC had syndicated the ‘Trigan Empire’ series all over Europe. As Don put it to me during our discussions, “I was well and truly pissed I just have to tell you, Don, that this series left such an impression on off about it when I found out!” They just asked me if I would be interested in a Viking type strip, and I had always liked historical type stuff, so I said, “Sure, I’ll give it a go.”

me that I named my oldest boy Karl. [laughter] You followed this series up with ‘Maroc the Mighty’ – again in Lion – which began in 1964. Your writer for that series was, of course, Michael Moorcock. Yes, I enjoyed that one. Fireball XL5 © City Magazines & Carlton International Media Limited

To add insult to injury the votes of his hitherto unknown European fans led to his employers IPC having the pleasure of presenting him with an award for the series at the convention!

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Storm

Immediately after this Don met with the publisher and demanded some sort of compensation or royalty for the syndication and an increased fee for future work. The publisher said no, and Don quit on the spot with absolutely no regrets after drawing almost 1000 pages of beautiful ‘Trigan Empire’ coloured artwork. Almost immediately, and in no small part due to his burgeoning international reputation, he received an offer from Martin

Lodewijk from the Dutch publishers Oberon. This led eventually to the publication of the Storm series which sold over two million albums and made Don Lawrence a superstar on the continent, with more awards for his work than you could shake a stick at! The jewel in the crown however was his knighthood presented to him by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands for his service to comic art in November 2003. Possibly because of his disappearance from the British comic scene and because his work in Holland was never printed extensively in the UK, Don Lawrence felt he had faded from the minds of British comics fans. He never really received the accolades for his work overseas that he deserved. And therefore in Don’s mind he was a forgotten figure in his homeland for the last 28 years of his life. Certainly he was not forgotten by longtime fans such as Dave Gibbons, Kev O’Neill and Barry WindsorSmith who lent their voices to the inclusion of greats such as Don Lawrence in this book. Fortunately I had the opportunity to dispel the myth that he was a forgotten man when, with great difficulty and the co-operation of his lovely wife, Lis, I managed to get Don to travel from his home near Eastbourne to his first British comic convention since 1976 in London in September of 2003. Not only did people remember him and line up to talk to him, but he met up with an old friend, Sydney Jordan, who told Don how much he had always admired his work. It was clear to see that this was a poignant moment for Don. Not only did the British comic fans still remember him, but his contemporaries recognised the value of his work. I later found out from Lis that Don had returned home from the convention in a buoyant mood very happy in the knowledge that he was in fact not a forgotten figure in his own country. I thought of this on hearing with great, great sadness of Don’s sudden death on December 29, 2003 only a couple of months after he had attended the London convention and we had conducted our interview. Without question Don Lawrence was one the best British comic book illustrators. While preparing this article I recalled asking Don what he thought was the best thing he ever did, and he replied without hesitation that his latter work on Storm was without question as close as he had ever come to being ‘perfect’ in his mind. Who can argue? I will miss Don and am happy to know that I at least made his acquaintance and had an all too brief opportunity to talk at length with one of life’s true gentlemen.

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Beneath the sadistic grin of a man named V, within the belly of a dark, totalitarian British government and beyond Alan Moore’s visionary script – you will find that the true foundation of the timeless V for Vendetta is the rich atmosphere and theatrical storytelling that the artistry of David Lloyd provided in every page of that tale. When he was 13, he would doodle and by George Khoury emulate the art of his favorite comic book artists. The young artist was a constant fixture in the early days of British fandom, and learned the fundamentals of illustrations when he trained as a commercial artist in advertising. After a few attempts of pitching newspaper strips, David broke into professional comics when he drew a strip for The Magician annual in 1975, an effort he considers a misstart. It was in 1978 with his faithful adaptation of Quatermass’ ‘Enemy from Space’ (in Halls of Horror #23) that his career began to take shape as he landed a variety of steady work with strips like ‘Night Raven’ and various Doctor Who back-up stories (for Marvel UK) along with ‘The Kicktail Kid’ and ‘Kojak’(for TV Comic). Over the years, Lloyd has drawn over a hundred comic stories for a wide array of publishers, but the jewel of his body of work remains V For Vendetta. With V’s powerful semblance, stark blacks and moving frames – along with a dash of inspiration from Jim Steranko’s Chandler – Lloyd earned the respect of his peers and the admiration from legions of fan for what still stands as his largest endeavor in comics. The illustrator continues to remain a vital force in the industry, always striving for excellence in his art and stories that are free of clichés and rich in originality.

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V © DC Comics

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Could you fill us in on your background in terms of what your parents did? What type of upbringing and education you had? My dad worked in a bus garage doing maintenance work. My mum did lots of different part-time jobs as well as looking after the family. My dad didn’t really understand what I was about as an artist. Once he suggested buying me a paint-by-numbers kit, and I didn’t know how to answer him – though I think he guessed from my reaction that it wasn’t what I wanted. For years, I thought he had no artistic ability himself until the day he decided to redecorate the upper rooms of the house and pick the color scheme for every room, including mine (at a stage when I wasn’t particularly worried about what it looked like). He chose an unusual but effective combination – and even though the decision he took was governed as much by how many tins of paint he had left in the shed as by his own good sense, it was obvious he knew exactly what he was doing. I think he was one of those guys who hid an understanding of art and color, because it wasn’t what guys of his generation and his background were supposed to know anything about. He was a really great dad when he could be, and I wish I’d seen more of him. Sadly, he spent too much time doing night work because that’s where the best pay was. The Spirit

My mum did everything humanly possible for me and my brother. She saved and bought new things for the house with the money she got from her part-time jobs. My education was ordinary – I didn’t shine academically. I was always good at art and English, then later took crafts like photography and printing. Left school at 16 with no really useful qualifications, except for one in art. Wanted to go to art school, but career guidance officers hadn’t been very informative about that route to fame and fortune – and by the time we figured out how I could get to art school, it was too late to me to enter in the year I left school. There was no question of me hanging around doing nothing until the year after, so I was directed to the nearest employment office, and soon secured a job as a trainee artist/messenger and general gofer at a commercial art studio in central London, a stone’s throw from St Paul’s Cathedral.

When did you start drawing – and when did you want to become a comic book artist? How did you go about learning your craft? Top: The Spirit © Will Eisner

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As a kid – can’t remember what age – I think the first strip I drew, though, was a collaboration with a friend of mine. I can’t remember exactly how the tasks were broken down but we both drew some of it. It was like a little newspaper three-framer, and it was called ‘Jim Tack’ and ‘Jack Boot’. Memory dissolves into a mist after that... until I did an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Security Check’ – my very first attempt at a comic book style strip – which was heavily influenced by Steve Ditko’s work. Then I produced a controversial, two-page tribute to the ECs (which I’d been introduced to via the Ballantine reprints). It was controversial because having hung it in the school corridor – to my art teacher’s enthusiastic urging. I found myself being summoned to the headmaster’s office for publicly displaying something he considered to be lacking in appropriate taste. He was very nice about it, though, and congratulated me on my talent. However, the art had to come down – before it could spread its poison of corruption to many more of my vulnerable schoolmates. The strip was called ‘Vampyrus’, and owed a lot to Graham Ingles. The studio I trained at was a perfect place to learn how to appeal to comic readers, because we were taught how to draw stuff in a way that would make people want to buy it. However, almost all of it was still life work: toasters, desk lamps, tea sets. I taught myself how to draw people, and how to draw strips. The only how-to books on strips I had were a Walter Foster book which I liked as much for its large-size format as for what it contained, and a little Charlton tips-’n’-tricks book I got from somewhere. For figure drawing, one of the best books I had was People in Action, by Nigel Lambourne; it emphasised the necessity to initiate a drawing first from rough lines of energy, which could be moderated at completion. I just loved strips and I wanted to draw them whenever I could. I practised endlessly and loved it. Drew great epics in line and wash that no one was ever meant to see. They were my stories, just for me. Like painting for fun, I drew strips for fun. I even drew them in the lunch hour at the studio – and when things were slack. When I left the studio, it was on the tissue-thin promise of being able to sell some newspaper strip concepts I’d come up with to a European syndication agency. It didn’t happen, I’m sorry to say – and it’s just as well it didn’t, in the long run, because I still had a lot of very rough edges as an artist which I desperately needed to smooth out. I ended up doing non-art-related part-time jobs for some time, as well as trying to get freelance work doing book covers, children’s book illustration, posters, and greeting cards – comic strip work was not my first choice to aim for at that time, for reasons I have yet to fully understand. I did a number of greeting cards, but most of my samples leaned a bit too much towards the dramatic, and I had to be guided towards evoking a lighter feel for things. My heart definitely wasn’t in it. It was an unstable existence, work-wise, but I was determined never to go back to a nine-to-five job in art, again. I liked being my own boss – even if I wasn’t paying myself much money!

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Who have been some of your influences? And exactly what about their work influenced you, and how that affected you? Turner. I had an aunt who always gave me cool things at Christmas and one of them was a little book called The Observers Book of Painting, which had reproductions of the great masters. One of them was Turner’s ‘Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus’, which I managed to get a print of, and which remained on my bedroom wall for years – even during the ‘film poster wallpaper’ period of my late teenage years. It was the atmosphere made from light that impressed me most with Turner – and Rembrandt was on the same team. Then Millais for his extraordinary photo-realist work allied to amazing lighting effects, Geoff Campion – he drew ‘Texas Jack’ in one the English weeklies – Steve Dowling, who created the newspaper strip, ‘Garth’, the first British super-hero (not Marvelman); Giles, an English political cartoonist whose work was an extraordinary blend of the realistic and the cartoony; George Woodbridge and Jack Davis – loved their work so much, of daffy dogs and gunfighters, that I did tracings of them and hung them on the wall; little b-&-w reprints of US comic book stories, packaged in the UK under the titles Mystic and Spellbound; Wally Wood; Orson Welles; H.G. Wells; Ray Harryhausen – The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad; Ron Embleton; Rod Serling; Ian Fleming; Mickey Spillane; Robert McGinnis; Josh Kirby – who painted covers for a series of sf paperbacks (some time before he did Pratchett stuff) including some for... Ray Bradbury. Then there was Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Robert Sheckley, H.P. Lovecraft, Don Medford, Don Siegel, Alfred Hitchcock, Boris Sagal, Terence Fisher, Ron Cobb of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Frank Frazetta, John Burns, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Frank Bellamy, Al Williamson, the EC crowd, Tony Weare, the early Warren crowd, Gray Morrow, Toth, Torres, Jim Steranko. Steve Ditko astounded me with his work on Amazing Adult Fantasy, which was the most consistently powerful, individualistic, and

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atmospheric comic book work I’d seen to that date. I tried to draw like Ditko. I tried to draw folds in clothing like he did, but couldn’t because I knew practically nothing about the way people were put together at that time. At around the same period, I saw the work of the great English strip illustrator, Ron Embleton, on the first series of ‘Wrath of the Gods’ – a centre spread in a beautifully printed comic called Boy’s World – in which the use of black shadow, expert pen work, and rich colors, collaborated with faultless draughtsmanship, to produce the single most impressive piece of work I have ever seen in this area of craft.

Amazing Spider-Man appeared then. Then the Fantastic Four and Kirby/Lee – those fantastic, overblown, revolutionary, soap opera-style epics that had to be tracked down issue by issue through the various stores in my neighbourhood, ’cos we had unreliable distribution of US comic books in England. Dr Strange. The EC guys came after that through the Ballantine books – you know the names – and not just the smooth guys. Al Feldstein’s work looked like he cut it out of pieces of wood – but it was © DC Comics

extraordinary. Then I got the early Warrens. Even better. Bigger. More of it. Frazetta. Unbelievable covers. Blazing Combat. Gray Morrow on ‘The Long View’. Reed Crandall. Alex Toth. Too much. But not enough. Never enough. Then, when I was at the studio, I saw a newspaper strip called ‘The Seekers’, which was drawn by a guy called John Burns. I thought he was American ’cos I didn’t think an English artist could draw in such a smooth, cool way – like Alex Raymond but with more realism. He took risks which worked; he drew water solid black, and minimalised it into a design element. He was totally in control. A master. Tony Weare was drawing another newspaper strip – a western called ‘Matt Marriott’ – which was all done with one brush, it seemed, and looked lazy but wasn’t, and largely depended on shadow for delineation of figures and objects. All of all of that, and more I could list, helped me.

When did you feel that your art style came into its own?

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I don’t have a particular art style that I can detect, apart from that which people have come to associate me with through my only major sales success, V. That particular style was brought about in part from being inspired by Jim Steranko’s superb illustrated detective novel ‘Red Tide’ – generally known as Chandler, of course. That style had a bleakness to it, which was perfect for the bleak world of Vendetta. It’s my job as a storyteller to pick the right style for any kind of story I happen to be telling and that’s what I always try to do.

‘Nightingale’ I did most of the panels which weren’t aboard ship in wide frame because of the nature of what had to be shown and the breadth of scale needed), I just go straight to pencils – which are quite rough, and may be rougher if editors want to see various stages before giving a go-ahead – because I like to get going when I start a project, so I’ll submit the least that shows what I want to do. I’m not capable of doing very tight pencils, so my inks often allow me fun and enjoyment instead of the tedium of repeating what I’ve already done in pencil in a heavier manner.

The only other point I can add to that is that I am attracted to thrillers – love moody, atmospheric stories about people in conflict over something important – so my natural style has leaned towards the use of more shadow than light. Where personal preference hits preferred subject is usually where sparks happen, so I guess you could say that the first time my particular strengths were shown to their best was when ‘Night Raven’ appeared.

What was your first break into the industry? What do you remember about those early experiences? The first job turned out to be a false start. It came about through going to a publisher of British annuals – these are collections of strips and stories and features on popular TV shows, launched at Christmas and aimed at fans of the shows – or, more

Vampire personal ad

Is there anything that frustrates you as an artist? Yes, the fact that we’re all forced into convenient little pigeonholes by editors – but I don’t blame them. They need reassurance when they hire an artist. The ideal artist for an editor is one who is reliable, can do the work on time and at an appropriate speed, and will come up with the right goods. So, if you’ve got a bunch you can hire who you can point at and say, “War story, you; romance, you; horror, you,” that’s what you want – an easy life. I, however, would like the opportunity of doing all kinds of short stories about all kinds of things – and to be able to chop and change styles for those stories according to what’s appropriate for them. That would be fun and would alleviate one of my greatest problems in life: a low boredom threshold.

Could you describe your process from script to the inked page? That’s changed over the years. When I first started out working on someone else’s script, I went over the script marking which panels could be small – hand shots, close-ups, etc. – so I knew how much space I had to play with and how much room I had to breathe in, then I did little thumbnails of the frames, then went to pencils, then inks. Now, after initially thinking of things like appropriate panel design and layout (for instance, on

accurately, those who would buy gifts for fans of the shows. I did some try-out sketches for one on The Magician TV show in ’75. They were good, but the final work I did for the book was stiff and lifeless. The editor knew it, I knew it, but he didn’t come right out and say it. It was the result of first job nerves, although I wasn’t really aware of that while I drew it. Unconscious fear, I guess. Ironically, John Bolton – just out of art school and rough as sandpaper – was in the same book as me, with similar work, but his stuff was bursting with life and energy. I left with my tail between my legs, and came back in two year’s time to the same editor with some samples that got me all the illustration work in the Logan’s Run Annual – which still looks like acceptable stuff to me today, I’m pleased to say.

How were you lured towards Marvel UK? I’d done an adaptation of ‘Quatermass II’ for Dez Skinn when he was editing Halls of Horror, and when he got his position at Marvel and wanted some artists for Hulk Weekly – an Englishformat comic launched to capitalise on the start of the Hulk TV show – he called me up.

How was ‘Night Raven’ developed? And were there any elements of it incorporated into ‘V for Vendetta’? Dez and Steve Parkhouse created this mystery, prohibition-era, vigilante character, which Dez, initially, gave me freedom to

develop visually. Knowing it was for Marvel, I created an action-adventure figure who dressed in a way that is now reminiscent of Indiana Jones – with a two-gun draw – who would swoop from the shadows, like an avenging angel. That version was declined, however, and I had to draw him more like a cross between a trenchcoated Humphrey Bogart and The Shadow – so he slinked rather than swooped. I was allowed to keep the two-gun draw, but he always had to shuck off his trenchcoat before he could engage in any heavy action sequences. So it was an uneasy compromise for me. Ironically, Stan Lee came over later and suggested a more action-adventure style be added to the strip, which kind of made me feel justified that I’d made the right choice in the beginning. However, ‘Raven’ was a big hit with the readers, compromise or not. Steve’s stories were clever, and there was a nice, silent episode early in the series, which Dez suggested would be an appropriate paring down of a particularly effective piece of minimalist scripting that Steve had come up with. The V connection simply rests on the fact that when Dez set up Warrior he wanted a set of characters that echoed some the creations he’d been responsible for at Marvel, through Hulk and Doctor Who. He initially asked me to write and draw the vigilante character myself – but I thought the potential of the opportunity could be exploited to a much higher degree with more hands on deck, so I strongly suggested we get Alan on board for it. The rest, of course, is history.

What was your approach to designing ‘V for Vendetta’ – and how was it different when compared with some of your shorter work? Was it the most demanding work of your career? Well, I’ve mentioned Jim Steranko. The rest? Stark, bleak future equals stark bleak style. I’ve done much more – and very tedious, though entirely necessary – reference work on short stuff like the War Story books. There was nothing toilsome on V, at all. I took a few pictures. That’s it. It was first done at a rate of a few pages a month – six to eight – when it was part of a monthly anthology. The workload became heavier only when I had to complete the series for DC. The important thing to remember, though, is that V was my thing. There’s no real work involved in doing something you care about so much that you have total control over, that’s so good, and which means something, and says something worth saying. It’s a pleasure.

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There were plenty of innovative techniques used for V, but none was more important in the delivery as the suggestion you made to Alan Moore about dropping captions and sound effects. What originally brought this up? Well, I think we should be getting more people to read comics who aren’t aware of what terrific stuff you can do with them. Unfortunately, a lot of the usual elements of comics are seen by the general public as shorthand for morons. You can’t upgrade a medium if the medium’s language shouts as if it were addressing a dunce. So it was a good idea to see if we could do without some of the usual conventions of comics for that reason alone. Also, by doing this, we made it more like TV or cinema, and thus made it more acceptable in that way. The decision to be conservative in layout – just rectangular frames – was also done to be ‘serious’ in the approach. Designerly layouts of any kind have a tendency to speak to the converted in comics readership and put off people who don’t usually read them. The rectangle also associates with the newspaper strip, which is read by thousands of people who would never pick up a comic book to read.

How did the Guy Fawkes mask become the face of V? That came from using Guy Fawkes as the character. He was one of the great anarchists of history; he wanted to create disorder from which a new order would arise. Just as V plotted to do. It was just a suggestion I made to Alan ’cos it tied in to everything he wanted to do with the character and it had the theatricality he preferred, too. At the time it was agreed on, there were no Guy Fawkes masks around – it not being November, when the festivity around the character takes place – so I imagined one, which had the spooky smile that always seems part of even the meanest Guy Fawkes mask I’ve ever seen. It worked. Flashlight © Dark Horse Comics

stages to balance the colors to the original. These disasters, however, were always taken with a pinch of salt by some production personnel because – it seemed to me – they ‘were only doing comics’. These days we can thank the Lord for computer coloring and the high level of technical skill and care in comics printing that now seems widespread. If you do good color on your work now, it has a real chance of making it to the finished book – though you’ve still got to keep your eye on it....

Do you look forward to ever seeing your images of V in a motion picture? It would be nice to see a good adaptation. The Wachowski brothers wrote a good screenplay of it, which only had a few things wrong with it. In another world they might have made the movie, but, unfortunately, at about that time, they had a big success with something called The Mattress.... Above: Global Frequency: © DC Comics and Warren Ellis

Why do you think the public responded so positively to V? V’s everyman. Us against the Tyranny, whatever our personal view of whatever tyranny at any particular moment in time needs to be faced. It’s universal. Great female central character. Anarchy always rocks, too – a hopelessly Utopian political ideology, perhaps, but we all need dreams. Most of all it’s a great story about people you can believe in, and care about.

How do you think the story and its politics have aged over the years? Not one jot.

Are you a perfectionist in terms of how your art is presented? Wow, this is a good one. Doing color for US comics used to be the biggest problem for me. I was shocked when I discovered how poor and inadequate the mechanical color reproduction processes were for the regular comic books in the US, when I first dealt with them in ’86. I have the greatest respect for anyone who has managed to make them produce anything in print that has any aesthetic value – and there are a surprising number of things which have been produced which do have such value. I had not fully explored the limitations of this field when I was introduced to it, and I made some terrible errors in my stumblings which I now wish I could reverse. Unfortunately that cannot be. My Wasteland period, for instance, was the sharpest learning curve I have ever had the misfortune to suffer. My experiences in trying to achieve a good color page through the technique of marking up colors from color guides led me very quickly to the safe, shallow waters of pastel shades in the main, because to go out on the storm-tossed seas of purples, browns, ochres, and crimsons was always to invite a shipwreck of unimaginable scale and horror.

Nowadays, what draws you to the stories you illustrate? And what are some of your future projects? And is there anything you would love to do in comics that you haven’t done? I’m always attracted to an interesting story that says something interesting – but it can’t be anything with regular super-heroes in it, interesting or not, unless it’s for a benefit book or something. This is a point of principal for me, really, because I resent the way this one particular genre – which I still love for the best of its qualities and appeal – has almost completely dominated a medium which should be busting out with talent, spinning all kinds of yarns in a more evenly balanced marketplace. We’d have more of a chance of widening the comics audience in such a situation – which would be healthy for everybody, as well as being beneficial for the medium’s AngloAmerican future. I’d love to do lots of different short stories in different styles, as I mentioned previously. In fact, I think I could spend the rest of my career working on anthologies. Currently, I’m negotiating to sell a detective story of mine to a publisher in France.

The technically superior blueline system of coloring was also prone to disaster due to the apparent inability of printers to regulate the flow of ink to presses, thus causing a light yellow to become bright yellow at a moment’s notice, and a color to change quality and tone with similar rapidity, despite whatever efforts may have been made during earlier color separating V for Vendetta © DC Comics

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McKEAN

by George Khoury

To pigeonhole Dave McKean as being just ‘a comic book artist’ would be criminal, for he’s not only a talented all-round illustrator but also a gifted wordsmith, an accomplished photographer, an exceptional musician and a visionary filmmaker. It was back during his education at Berkshire College of Art, from 1982 to 1986, that McKean began to seriously consider comics as a career. Although comics were an early love in his life, they weren’t the driving force for the sequential stories he wanted to tell. Rather, he was driven by his appreciation for the great illustrators and painters whom he had studied and became interested in injecting the abstract qualities of expression into comics. During 1986, the artist befriended an up-and-coming writer named Neil Gaiman, and they started a fruitful collaboration that began with the release of the acclaimed Violent Cases and continues to the present day with The Wolves in the Wall. DC editor Karen Berger soon scouted the pair and they soon found themselves working on Black Orchid, a three-part prestige series lavishly painted by Dave. When the Batman hysteria of the late ‘80s hit, the artist was able to raise his profile by showcasing his talent for imagery with Batman: Arkham Asylum, written by the renowned Grant Morrison, and at one point the most successful graphic novel of all-time. From 1990 to 1996 he worked on his next project, Cages, a graphic novel which stands at 500 pages and remains his magnum opus. For Cages, his most personal work, McKean created its art with everything and anything imaginable, in every media possible and using all of his skills to illustrate his inspiring ode of creativity and emotion. Another of his achievements in comics are the haunting covers he’s provided for so many books like Hellblazer, Black Orchid, The Dreaming, Alice Cooper: The Last of Temptation, Miracleman, and the entire collection of Sandman. Other graphic novels by the artist include Mr. Punch and Signal to Noise (both written by Mr. Gaiman), and Slow Chocolate Autopsy (with Iain Sinclair). Outside of comics, he’s designed and illustrated plenty of compact disc covers, among them one for The Rolling Stones, and created ad campaigns for Kodak, Nike and other clients. The filmmaker-side of McKean has directed and written ‘The Week Before’ and ‘N(eon)’, both short films, and now his first feature film MirrorMask for Sony Pictures and slated for release in the fall of 2004. The Dreaming © DC Comics

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When and where were you born? How would you describe your upbringing?

Was there a particular moment that caused you to want to be an artist?

Taplow, near Maidenhead in Berkshire, England. December 29, 1963. A background I would characterize as supportive, but neutral. My parents had a Northern England working class ethic, but ended up in the aspirational middle class. My father was the managing director of a shipping company, but also fought for his workers rights. But underneath all of this he really wanted to be an architect, but never got the opportunity to try, despite the offer of a scholarship.

I remember a few key moments, my father drawing cartoons for me. Drawing some portraits of film actors that actually looked like them. Drawing a surreal little illustration that worried my father about my sanity. Seeing Max Ernst paintings at the Tate. And then reading comics, Marvel comics at eight, Warren magazines, Heavy Metal , American undergrounds, independents. Four great years at art school, publishing our own comics, arguing with everybody. Great teachers who hit me in the head with a whole world of possibilities. Exhibitions by Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe at the Festival Hall, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns. A wonderful talk by Marshall Arisman at the ICA.

My father died when I was 12. My mother supported me completely and unconditionally, and so I think I had the opportunity to create my own path from an early age.

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Who were some of your most important influences? Were there any British comics and creators you admired?

As well as the above, probably the most important influential was Bill Sienkiewicz in America, whose experimental illustrative approach to mainstream comics was inspiring and a bit demoralising. I would have liked to have got there first, and Bill did it so well. I never liked British comics, except Warrior, which was Alan Moore’s home before DC and published V for Vendetta, which is still one of my favourites. I met Garry Leach who was very encouraging and supportive, even though I still wasn’t good enough to employ at Warrior. I went to see 2000 AD once, because they were the only game in town. I never liked the magazine, and I’m glad other opportunities arrived.

When you began your career were you certain you wanted a career in comics? From looking at your work, I can see you could have taken your art in a different direction, which is why I ask. Early on, were you also willing to do super-hero comics? And did Arkham Asylum leave a bitter taste for that genre? I always loved the medium of comics, and really wanted to make my own books. But I also loved music; I’ve always played piano, and I work to music all the time, so I also wanted to do CD covers. Also, if you want to test yourself as an illustrator, you have to try doing book covers for the conceptual problems, editorial illustration for the chance to comment, and advertising for the incredibly high t e c h n i c a l standards. So I wanted to try all of the above, and whatever else came along. I’m glad the first book I did with Neil

was Violent Cases, which was a general fiction story, nongenre, so that planted our flag really. I think super-heroes are basically silly and juvenile and have stilted the medium for 50 years. When Neil and I started there was a general view of super-heroes as an untapped opportunity to experiment with, but I think we hit our heads on the creative ceiling pretty quickly.

Which is exactly your art style? You’ve always used everything at your disposal to create: Where did you learn not to limit yourself in art? How would you describe your work to those unfamiliar to your work and stories? Well, surrealism has had a guiding influence over everything I’ve done, with an emphasis on the realism – stories and images that are about real people and the real world, but told through dreams or metaphor or from a slightly skewed perspective. But I’m not part of a group. I’m not a surrealist; I don’t believe art should be dogmatic.

Do you still consider comics to be art? And did you ever feel limited in terms of what you could express in comics? I think any creative endeavor can be art, that is, operating at its very highest levels: communicating profound ideas and the forefront of human thought, shaping society, helping us to empathise with each other. Comics are no different, they are full of potential. I certainly have barely begun to tap that potential.

Can you elaborate on what makes your collaborations with Neil Gaiman successful? What are your favorite aspects of Gaiman’s storytelling? I trust him. He understands story and structure; he cares about his characters. When we work together, it doesn’t really matter

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who is right, even though we both argue our points of view fiercely, it only matters that it works. We both like a challenge, it’s no fun doing the same thing again. I think we both like to learn, so learning from each other is always fun. We have very different characters and outlooks on life, but the differences make the work stronger, I think; we fill in each other’s blank spots.

What’s the most challenging aspect of creating comics? Is there a difference in your approach to your sequential art in comparison to your cover work? Yes, the comics are all about story, communicating emotions through narrative, keeping the reader involved in the story or the characters. It’s in how it develops over time that the real power of the medium lies. Cover work is about compressing a whole story or theme into a single image, not giving too much away, creating a symbol or metaphor for the story. It is also a filter through which the story will be seen; it is the book’s shop window; it gives you an initial feeling, and you take that feeling into the meat of the book.

How did Cages change you? Was it emotionally draining? Is it a reason why you’ve done less sequential art? Did it make you more selective on choosing projects? Yes, in as much as I now only want to do my own books. I can’t go back to regular adventure comics, that would be too depressing. I’d love to do more books; I have another book of short stories planned, as well as a couple of longer books. I don’t know when I’ll do them in between my other work and now, starting to get involved in making films, but I’m sure I will do another novel in the next few years. All artwork © Dave McKean except Mr. Punch © DC Comics

Have comics had an effect on your films? Is there a relation between comics and film? Of course. They are both about narrative, evolving along a timeline; they are both visual. Film has sound, which is a great plus. I really miss that aspect in comics. But I don’t think they are instantly transferable. My knowledge of storytelling in comics has helped in shooting films, but they are massively different and, I find, much more difficult. You can’t just treat a comic as a static storyboard either, and comics that have been drawn out like storyboards are often pretty dull. They each have their own peculiar strengths.

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Mike

NOBLE by Norman Boyd

Mike Noble is to most British fans what Curt Swan is to American comic fans. Like Swan in the ’60s, he could always be relied upon to produce beautiful work. Noble holds a special place in UK comic readers’ hearts because his regular output during the ’50s to ’90s expanded children’s horizons and conveyed a positive value system. Many of his works are based on television shows, some American, some British – ‘The Lone Ranger’, ‘Fireball XL5’, ‘Captain Scarlet’, ‘Zero X’ (from the Thunderbirds Are Go film) – and many UK children’s series. His work is entirely his own because in the UK, unlike most American comics, artists tended to pencil, ink and colour their work. But what of the man? When I tried to share with Mike how I personally felt about his work, I asked him to think back to his childhood. A big smile crossed his face and he burst out with ‘Sexton Blake’ (a fictional British detective created in 1893). “I used to buy Film Fun with Arthur Askey in it; it was a Friday treat back then.” Noble is a humble man who still cannot understand all the fuss about his work. At times I felt that Mike was very self-denigrating about his work, but I suspect now, he is, in fact, the quintessential Englishman, modest about his achievements. We interviewed Mike on a typical drizzly March afternoon at his Sussex home. He is retired now but not idle. His life in a rural village sees his participation in village life. He won a national competition to design a church lychgate, he co-designed a poster for the Millennium celebrations of people in the village, and has made a brief comeback illustrating posters of familiar subjects for the recent Gerry Anderson-inspired comics of the ’90s. He lives in a detached bungalow inherited from his parents, a well-kept garden surrounds the property, and Mike is keen for the rain to let up so he can get out there. We started the meeting at one of Mike’s favourite pubs, next to which he informed us he often played cricket. We enjoyed a relaxed meal and pint of the local beer whilst Mike regaled us with stories of the war. His knowledge is obviously inspired by having lived through the period in the London Blitz as an 11-15 year old. When I mentioned my mother came from Lüneburg, in Germany, Mike immediately pricked up his ears, citing the signing of the armistice on the Lüneburg Heath. The subjects of his early childhood drawings were war subjects, too. Mike Noble was born on the 17th of September 1930 in Woodford. His father was a stockbroker’s clerk at the Stock Exchange, where he would deal on behalf of clients. Mike Captain Scarlet Captain Scarlet © Carlton International Media Limited

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laughed when I asked if, like the children in Mary Poppins, he had the opportunity to follow his dad to his place of work. “Well, I went into the offices with my brother while father was dealing on the floor and used to tap away at the typewriters.” Mike’s father is important to him as his main inspiration. His father, although a talented artist, did not take up art as a career: “You were regarded as a mad fool if you relied on art to make a living, in those days. From his background, which was in the country, work in the city of London was a real step up, a real advantage and father was pretty intelligent and it suited him and he enjoyed it. But his art was always going to be a hobby. But nevertheless he was very capable.” Mike has samples of his father’s works at home. His brother would draw as a child too: “It was obviously in the genes. Father would let us get on with it and every now and again he’d do a drawing for us and we’d be all aquiver.”

Mike’s older brother (by 18 months) shone at school and went into the Navy, having to do his National Service. “In universities, at that time, there were certain vacancies for ex-servicemen, and because of David’s qualifications, he went up to University College Oxford for three years and then he went into hospital administration, eventually leading to his working for the Medical Research Council and a CBE at the end of it all.” I was curious why one son should have such a different career path from the other, and Mike admitted, “Academically I didn’t shine like my brother, but father thought, ‘This boy can draw,’ anyway, and insisted I had a reasonable education, which I thought very wise. So I went to a private school in Ilford and then to art school (South West Essex Technical College).” “Why that one?” I asked. “There was a lady at my school, who had been to this art school, and she said if one or two of us wanted to go to this art school she could put in a word, and father was happy with that. And besides, it was the nearest to home. So I had to produce some drawings for a test, and they accepted me. You went to life class, drawing for plaster casts, Greek Gods – a classical education. They taught you the basics of how to draw, and I chose the commercial course, which was advertising rather than fine art, because I didn’t see myself starving in an attic. [laughter] If you do fine art you have to come Fireball XL5 © Carlton International Media Limited

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up with something new if you’re going to make anything of it; you have to break new ground.” At art school he learned how to draw “bottles of beer, motor cars, how to use the aerograph sprays, did a bit of lettering posters, how to get paint on flat, how to do large areas of watercolour, gouache, how to handle charcoal.” He appears to have been born with an innate ability to draw figure work without a model, which can be the hardest part of art for many. In evening classes he found inspiration from an artist who showed drawings he had committed for the national bestselling magazine Radio Times. From art school he joined an advertising studio in 1947, drawing labels for tins of peas and TCP (an antiseptic fluid). Repetitive drawings of the same subjects with little individual creative flair forced Mike to look further afield to the illustration world. But before he could move on he was called up in 1949 and joined the 8th Royal Tank Regiment in North Yorkshire, where he stayed for 18 months. Then he had to do three years compulsory service in the Territorial Army. He spent a lot of time in the Regimental Drawing Office covering some of his favourite subjects, especially hardware. He returned to ‘civvy street’ at the advertising studio in 1950, but shortly after managed to get a job in Coopers Studio in Oxford Street, Mayfair, London. At this studio Mike learnt a lot from a great figure artist, Leslie Casswell. Mike would often have the enviable job of posing with young girls for Casswell, who needed models for his romance stories in Home Notes amongst others. Mike also did roughs for a practical teaching strip called Bringing up Baby (no relation to the Cary Grant/Katherine Hepburn film), the aim of which was to train young post-war mothers in looking after children. “Casswell showed me how to design a picture within a frame,” says Noble. “On the left hand side, you always get the character facing into the page, and as you go along the deck you face into the right.” Mike’s first comic strip was published in Robin, a companion comic to the famous flock of bird-named comics, Eagle and Swift. This simple toddler’s strip ‘Simon and Sally’ broke Mike into strip continuity. Caswell eventually left the studio

and after a spell in another London studio took off for Cornwall. “Billy Cooper said to me ‘Oh, I’ll give you a raise,’ she said [laughter], to keep me in the place, I think. Caswell did ask if I wanted to follow him, and I thought, ‘Blow it, I’m not going to play second fiddle,’ you know. The result of that was that Billy would give me ‘drop-in’ sketches for the Birmingham Weekly Post, Titbits, and Wide World – all line drawings.” He also added illustrations to Woman, Woman’s Own, and John Bull. One of his favourites was the ‘Life and Sally’ illustrations, which showed the story of a young girl writing a weekly poem, for which Mike did a line drawing with a single flat red dropped in. Letters were received by the editor of Woman magazine asking why Michael Noble did not marry young Sally off: “[Was] Noble a died-in-thewool bachelor?” Many illustrations from that time were blackand-white line and/or washes. Colour was a rarity, as this would mean paying artists such as Mike two to three times more money, and many illustrations were printed on pulp type paper. Mike also learned the value of artists’ references, finding Picture Post a godsend. “Fox Photos would hire out photos. Our studio was awash with photos with a ticket on the back saying ‘please return by 1843.” He then moved on to draw ‘The Lone Ranger and Tonto’ for

Express Weekly and then for TV Comic where he also did ‘Range Rider’, both based on ’50s television series. ‘The Lone Ranger’ was executed in a “black ink drawing with process black, with washed in tones.” In Express Weekly he started his first full colour strip, ‘The Mountie’, which he is not fond of remembering. His next jobs were painful reminders of the restrictions of advertising: “Although ‘Popeye’ and ‘Beetle Bailey’ was easy money, I felt I wasn’t getting anywhere with it.” Fortunately, at this time Alan Fennell was creating a major photogravure British comic, TV Century 21 and needed the best artists. Mike jumped ship very quickly and produced a colour two-page version of ‘Fireball XL5’ whilst still producing the cartoons for TV Comic. Due to the workload he had help on the colour, but found a major mistake in the choice of inks. British comics dictated a limited number of inks that would reproduce correctly. However, he admits that he did mess up at the start of ‘Fireball’ using indigo ink, not realising that it contained black and when printed it looked like “washing-up water.” After that he stuck to the correct colours, finding Prussian blue a useful colour.

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wonderfully coloured strips. After a hiatus of two years (due to family health problems) he returned to create the best interpretation of ‘Star Trek’ in UK (if not any) comics. Frank Bellamy won an award from the Association of Comic Book Artists (headed up by Archie Goodwin and Neal Adams at that time) and became known as the UK ‘Star Trek’ artist. The irony The Famous Five

We compared his early ‘Fireball’ work to his later ‘Zero X’ (the further adventures of the Martian exploration vehicle seen in the film Thunderbirds Are Go) work in TV 21 and Mike declared, “This is early stuff – I’m not really very proud of these.” The difference in the two strips is marked. Both are two-page, full-colour work, but ‘Fireball’ certainly appears naïve against the later ‘Zero X’. “I was being too literal and putting lines around everything.” Later he learned to give objects gravity through shadow on their base and contrasting colours without the need to put lines around everything. Here he acknowledges that working “against” Frank Bellamy, Don Lawrence, and Ron Embleton forced him to study their work. He highlights the Embleton stories about the Ghost galleon for ‘Stingray’ and Bellamy’s explosions and landscapes. Nevertheless, Mike acknowledges that his mother’s natural colour taste inspired him to keep his colours bright. Noble describes his own style as “human,” in contrast to the few American comics he has seen, which he describes as “brutish” (with the exception of Spider-Man). By “brutish” he means the emphasis on rippling muscles and violence, as opposed to the interesting storytelling of ‘Star Trek’, for instance. He also credits Angus Allan with his inventiveness in providing Mike with such imaginative scripts. “He had the ability to fire your imagination and knew what would make a good picture. I then had to make the impossible look as if it just might have happened.” One particular ‘Fireball’ script describes Steve Zodiac clambering along some pipes suspended from the ceiling. Mike learned to add tension by switching from long shots to close-ups and found inspiration from attempts portrayed on the news of the day of potential Iron Curtain escapees who used this means to travel under the Berlin Wall. As to his method of working, “I did all my thinking in pencil, and these were quite detailed when done, and then I’d turn on the radio and got my inks and coloured in the blacks, followed by the colours.”

was that Mike had drawn the strip for 24 weeks in 1970 (three full-colour pages) and Bellamy had provided spot illustrations and a one-page strip for the leading TV guide Radio Times. “At my peak, I was comfortable with what I was doing,” says Noble pointing out his ‘Star Trek’ work. “I realised that the more lines that are in the background, the more they compete with foreground figures. So I used pure colour with no lines in the background to add perspective.” He also added some of those wonderful sound effects that were not enclosed in a speech balloon. Mike’s joy at impersonating people shone through our interview, and his adept pronunciation of these sound effects demonstrated a natural comedian’s talent.

His run on ‘Captain Scarlet’ included some spectacularly clear and exciting images on the covers of TV 21 and provided some

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TV 21 in 1970 had fewer Gerry Anderson strips, but saw some TV series adapted in comic form. Alan Fennell, seeing the inevitable decline of TV 21 as it was sold to a new company, left to create a new comic magazine for children, Look-in. Mike’s first strip for the new comic was a popular science-fiction children’s series about two children travelling backwards and forwards in time, ‘Timeslip’. This two-page, full-colour strip (two complete stories are available on the Internet – see list at end of article) captured the excitement and cliffhangers of the TV series and is still remembered affectionately after 30 years. Mike was obviously inspired by Angus Allan’s scripts. His next feature couldn’t be

more different in content, yet showed his enormous control in figure work and drawing horses. When it came to ‘Follyfoot’, (based on a TV series about a retirement home for old or unwanted horses) he found that he could suggest ideas to Angus Allan, the scriptwriter. “I noticed that we had never had a shire horse in the stories and I suggested to Angus that they take a horse box over to Butler’s farm to pick up ‘Tiny.’ [laughter] Of course they then find out how big he is and they have to ride him back with all sorts of adventures on the way.” The horse theme continued with ‘The

Mike executed this strip in black-andwhite due to pressures on his time, but this restriction gave him the opportunity to show us just how detailed his drawing could be. Again he suggested some ideas for ‘Space 1999’ to Angus Allan, and the story of an English mystery, ‘The Long Man of Wilmington’ – a 266-foot drawing cut of the chalk hillside of Sussex – appeared in 1976. The following illustrates his standing as a sought after and dependable artist. Colin Sherborn, the latter editor of Look-in, asked Mike to do ‘Worzel Gummidge’ in colour. Due to lack of time, Mike had

Adventures of Black Beauty’, a small run on the ’70s series ‘Kung Fu’, and another science-fiction series ‘The Tomorrow People’. But one strip, which many people still regard as a fairly faithful adaption, was ‘Space 1999’ (complete stories are available on the Internet – see list at end of article). Space 1999 © Carlton International Media Limited Timeslip © Carlton International Media Limited

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Websites: Space 1999: The Catacombs > Reference Library > Reference material > Comics > Look-In

to decline. But he offered to do it in black-and-white and, surprisingly, the editor accepted. Mike created a uniquely British strip about a scarecrow who believed he was a human being. The rural settings were taken from Mike’s beloved Sussex countryside. Finally, for ‘Robin of Sherwood’ (1984-1986) Mike drew in black-and-white, but overlaid a coloured guide for Arthur Ranson to complete the strip – only the second time he had help with his coloured work. Mike has occasionally come back to do posters for Thunderbirds the Comic in the ’90s, but in general he now only accepts commissions from friends and family.

http://www.space1999.net/~catacombs/comics/w2lookin.html The Story Index has complete reproductions of the stories. Thanks to Martin.

Star Fleet: SFXB Home > Star Fleet Multimedia > Gallery > Comics http://www.sfxb.co.uk/ivs/stftgallcomics.html

32 weeks of stories reproduced. Thanks to Andy

Timeslip: Merchandise http://www.timeslip.org.uk/merchandise/index.php Two full-colour strips are reproduced. Thanks to Steve.

We concluded the interview by reading the following quote to Mike. Lee Sullivan (a ‘Thunderbirds’ artist) mentioned in an interview that “Bellamy is in many ways the artist's artist, and I'm fully aware that for fans he's the number one guy, but I actually prefer Mike Noble! Unsung to the point of madness – in my view he was always the better storyteller.” I then asked Mike if he could give us a clue as to what he would like his epitaph to read. For the first time Mike is silent. For what seemed ages, but was only seconds, he said “I think I’d say, ‘Here lies an artist, he tried his best.’”

Thanks to Paul Holder and Nicola Boyd, but particularly to Mike who, though nursing a throat infection, put up with two more fans! Mike you are a star! Zero X © Carlton International Media Limited Worzel Gummidge © Southern Television Ltd

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His long journey into professional comics began behind the scenes at IPC magazines, where as a teenager he was employed as an office boy on Buster. Over subsequent years, O’Neill paid his dues working through the production ranks at IPC until finally serving as art director for 2000 AD

during one of the most fondly remembered, and controversial, periods of the title. Shortly after, Kevin left his staff position to pursue freelance assignments and the chance to demonstrate the artistic skills that he had been honing for so long. The artwork that the artist unleashed must have come as a surprise to those who only knew O’Neill’s cavalier and low key demeanor, because his provocative illustrations reflected a far different side of him – these drawings were intense with grittiness and full of menacing, kinetic energy with a richness in detail and atmosphere. With his chief collaborator, the legendary scribe Pat Mills, the illustrator co-created tales full of social commentary, darkness and, mostly important, mischievous humor in books like ‘ABC Warriors’, ‘Ro-Busters’, ‘Metalzoic’, ‘Nemesis the Warlock’, and Marshal Law. Nowadays, a more seasoned O’Neill shines brightly with the most ambitious work of his career in the adventures of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen for America’s Best Comics with Alan Moore. Where and when were you born? And how would you describe your upbringing? I was born in Eltham, South East London on the 22nd of August 1953. I was raised on a working class council estate by an Irish father and an English mother. As a small child I became a big fan of the Fleischer’s Popeye cartoon transmitted on British television in the late 1950s. Was addicted to all animation subjects and read as many comics as I could afford: British, American, hybrid reprints of Captain Marvel… also Marvelman and British Annuals that reprinted Blackhawk and Plastic Man.

How did you discover comics? How did you know this was the career you wanted?

Kevin

O’NEILL by George Khoury

My first comic was probably a British nursery comic, something like Playhour, but I really wanted The Beano and Dandy – as soon as I had the pocket money to spend I bought those that I have always loved: the DC Thomson work of Dudley D. Watkins (especially his masterpiece ‘Desperate Dan’), League of Extraordinary Gentlemen© Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill

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shy, no idea why no one else in family was like that, so I guess I retreated into the world of imagination. I think this spurred me on as I was clearly unfit for work in the real world. When I was 15 I had a Saturday and summer job in a supermarket working in the store rooms and filling shelves – memories of wearing that vast brown overall in front of girls from my school still make me shudder!

Could you list your most important influences – and what is it about their art that lured you in? Is there anything of those influences that you see in your art and storytelling? Influences are interesting to reflect on; comic art, animation, and illustration all at some level alter perception. Comic art, in particular; those ink lines and squiggles, represented to me a glimpse of worlds more real and powerful and desirable than the world I lived in. And attempting to draw my own images conjured up a wonderful sense of well being – most probably some intense form of daydream manifest. Instead of having sports heroes, I had artists whose work I grew to recognize and even worship, even if it would be many years before I knew their names (if British). As I’ve said The Beano and Dandy artists were important to me, but when a school friend traded me his

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Leo Baxendale on the ‘Bash Street Kids’ and ‘Little Plum’, Davey Law’s ‘Dennis the Menace’, and the magnificent cartoon art of Ken Reid on ‘Jonah’. I started drawing from an early age, and I know my father did not care much for me reading comics as I grew older, but as I also read a lot of books from the local library, he tolerated it. My parents never discouraged me from my ambitions, they just could not help in any way; there were no other artists in the family that I was aware of. It never occurred to me that it may have been impossible to break into comics or animation. I was always a dreamer and inhabited a pretty rich fantasy world in my head. The main obstacle was putting that world on paper from a self-taught background. I was painfully League of Extraordinary Gentlemen © Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill

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paperback, it had a truly profound influence – Bill Elder, Wally Wood, Jack Davis, and ‘the usual gang of idiots’ as they say, all burned into my psyche. Also, as I Mad picked up magazine when I could find it, I learned to be a little more suspicious of the adult world I was growing up into; even as a kid I was never comfortable in the Catholic faith. And our teachers despised Mad as a pernicious evil American rag – the very things that made it so attractive. I’m loathe to invoke truly great artists as having an influence that shows in my work, but I’d like to feel the art of Ken Reid and Bill Elder had a lasting effect on me. Their paper worlds were so rich and detailed. They just inspired me to keep on drawing, drawing, drawing….

When you were 16 your father retired and you had to seek employment – was your family in a dire place? Was it difficult in deciding between work and the possibility of going to art school? My father taking early retirement meant I had to give up a place at St. Martin’s School of Art (and Goldsmith in New Cross – I had a choice). Financially things were tough, but an ill wind proved good in the long run; my headmaster before I left school said I should apply for a job at Odhams, the publishers. I did and a very nice lady in the women’s magazine department told me they had sold their comic division to IPC magazines and I should go to Fleetway House in Farringdon and visit an editor: Mr. Sidney Bicknell.

Could you describe what it was like working at IPC when you were an employee there? How you went about learning your craft? Sid interviewed me when I was 16 and had just left school, and Fleetway House seemed like a rather strict school. Sid introduced me to his boss, Jack Le Grand, and also their top art editor, Janet Shepherd. I began work as an office boy on Buster. I handed out soap and towels to the editors once a week, spent time leafing through old volumes of comics, and gradually doing minor art and lettering corrections and pasting up reprints of ‘Billy Bunter’ strips. Jan was a good, if strict, teacher. She also told me while looking through my samples that it would be ten years before I was good enough to work as a professional artist – and she was right! Kind of an odd atmosphere at Fleetway House, the older staff all seemed to wish they were working on something better than comics, and the younger guys (Steve Moore, Steve Parkhouse, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen © Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill

Dez Skinn…) really were looking for an opportunity to rejuvenate the place. It seemed the house rules on grammar were more important than the pure art and story of comics. The whole business by now (1970) was aimed at their antique idea of what the maximum of eleven-year-old reader wanted (based, I think, on what their fathers had wanted). I appreciate the grounding it gave me in production and I did pretty much every job including a stint in the coloring department – no regrets, but that old school ‘job for life’ mentality did not appeal to me. Steve Parkhouse gave me some very valuable advice. He said never learn to letter because if you do they will have you constantly doing urgent freelance lettering jobs instead of having time to concentrate on your art. Jan did encourage me to do display lettering and logos – she was brilliant at this (Jan designed the original ‘Judge Dredd’ logo). After working on Buster, Scorcher, Valiant, Whizzer and Chips… I’d really had enough and in 1973 went freelance. My folks were surprised as self-employment seemed like unemployment to them but I was doing a little freelance art for the humor department annuals (or) coloring for the Disney reprints and girls comics and some paste-ups. In this period I was also doing fanzine art for Fantasy Advertiser and an H.P. Lovecraft fanzine and several others. I began my own fanzine called Just Imagine, which was dedicated to interviewing special effects people – an early interview was with Ray Harryhausen (I was a lifelong fan). I found Ray’s phone number in the London phonebook, rang him up, and he invited me to visit his home. He and his wife were delightful. (In common, with Ray the original King Kong had a profound influence on me as a kid – fantastic film, and those Gustave Doré-inspired jungle scenes are the best ever!) Having spoken to Ray, I had the courage to approach other effects people like Derek Meddings, Brian Johnson, Ian Scoones, John Stears, Les Bowie…. This fanzine work overlapped with my position as art editor of 2000 AD. I covered the first Superman movie and then stopped the publication. When I began it nobody was covering the FX world apart from FXRH – devoted to Ray

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Harryhausen

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Cinefantastique. British technicians were very reluctant to give interviews. Indeed Les Bowie never did grant a recorded interview to me but loved talking about his work in private. Just prior to 2000 AD, I did another fanzine, this time a comic strip one called MEK Memoirs, this led to be being given a staff job on JNP-13 (Juvenile New Publication No. 13). This became 2000 AD.

Did you immediately recognize there was something different about 2000 AD from previous IPC books? In 1974, after meeting my future wife, I found I needed more money, so sometime in late ’75/early ’76, I bit the bullet and accepted the offer of a staff job on the humor comic Monster Fun, now housed with the rest of IPC in the new purpose built Kings Reach Tower – I was rapidly depressed! Apart from Leo Baxendale’s ‘Badtime Bedtime‘ stories and back covers by the great Ken Reid, all I could feel was a sense of a waste of great talents by lesser talents. I heard rumors of some secret new project, JNP-13, and I went to see our boss of bosses, John Sanders, and said if I could not be transferred to a staff job on the new comic I would quit the company. He was angry at my ultimatum but did arrange for me to meet the projects editor, Pat Mills, and his assistant, Kelvin Gosnell. I showed my samples – some dreadful poster magazine comics I’d done for a Canadian friend and also the first and only published issue of MEK Memoirs – and in late summer 1976 I began work on 2000 AD. It was apparent from my first impression of it that this publication would blow the roof off – that this was something fresh. Pat Mills’ energy powered 2000 AD – he was the heart. Pat also wanted new artists with a fresh eye and a different perspective on things than the by-now slightly faded house style of the other adventure comics. Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Mike McMahon… they all walked in the door and were snapped up by Pat, along with some veteran artists and foreign artists who were prepared to express things the way he wanted. Sometimes in the latter case, this involved us fixing up pages in the office or employing a creative lettering job to jazz up a disappointing strip. It always seemed the new blood represented the best hope for 2000 AD. I shouldn’t forget Carlos Ezquerra who drew/co-created/designed ‘Judge Dredd’ – fabulous work! Pat and Kelvin were the first editors I’d ever met who asked me for input – incredible! My job as assistant to the art editor was known as a bodger, hardly a term to make one proud, but soon I was designing stuff for strips and doing one-page pin-ups, back covers, and so on. We also were aware that other comic publications disliked us. Two main reasons: we were loud – a lot of laughter every day – and we paid our lettering artists a higher page rate; this caused some friction. Doug Church was a wild roving art editor at IPC Juveniles and he and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen © Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill

Pat spent a lot of time working out the early covers and original

2000 AD logo. Janet Shepherd was appointed art editor and I assisted her – frankly, I thought it was too good to last.

When did you make the decision of leaving your art editor position at 2000 AD to enter the freelance world? When Pat Mills left the editorship of 2000 AD, Kelvin Gosnell took over. Kelvin was approached by management to create a new comic; this became Starlord. Kelvin offered me the art editorship of this, but I turned it down as I truly loved working on 2000 AD. Jan told me off and said I was crazy turning down a job promotion with more money. In the end, Jan moved onto Starlord and I was promoted to 2000 AD art editor. By now Nick Landau was on staff as assistant editor – Kelvin was still 2000 AD editor – but had a lot of work to do on the Starlord launch. Left on our own we began slowly taking the comic apart as we felt it had drifted a little. In this period we lived and breathed the 2000 AD but left to our own devices we started to have censorship/legal problems, mostly on ‘Dredd’. The never reprinted ‘Burger Wars’ episodes by Mike McMahon and Brian Bolland’s Jolly Green Giant advertising icon episodes caused a lot of trouble – our fault, not the artists. Also, violent art on ‘Harlem Heroes’... created problems. All of this prompted the appointment of Bob Bartholomew as overseer/censor. Every week we had to carry an issue worth of originals over to him to read and approve. I designed the credit card badges, as I’d been hounding since issue one for 2000 AD to carry full credits. Nick and I decided to go ahead and run them; Kelvin was fine, but Bob said, “What are these?” I said, “Just an experiment, Bob. If the readers don’t like them we’ll stop doing it.” But despite these victories the atmosphere on 2000 AD was becoming a little sour for me and every week was a new fight. One week I did a cover just in blackand-white with a dash of red. Bob hated it, but it was too late to change it. When it came out we had compliments from the IPC board! But it was all uphill, so with a heavy heart I quit to go freelance and by now Steve McManus was editor and he both encouraged my move and supported it by employing me as an artist on 2000 AD. Also while I was art editor, Nick and I had persuaded Pat Mills to return as a writer for 2000 AD. Pat and I had become good friends so we elected to work together.

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Please elaborate on the creation and designs of “Nemesis,” “Ro-Busters,” and “ABC Warriors”? From the early days of 2000 AD I had contributed prop and the odd character

‘Robot Archie’ strip that ran for years in Lion. Pat may have seen in MEK Memoirs – plus my enthusiasm – a different way of doing them. He became 2000 AD’s prime robot strip writer!] I guess he felt the disaster squad angle had played itself out. I only drew two episodes of the ‘ABC Warriors’. I’d grown unhappy again with Bob Bartholomew’s corrosive influence on 2000 AD. I quit to work briefly on a Gerry Anderson movie at Pinewood Studios that soon fell apart. I returned to 2000 AD and created the ‘Terror Tube’ with Pat Mills. This was a development of an idea we used in the final ‘Ro-Busters’ series – a chase through a tube system which Bartholomew hated. He told me if the art had not been so late he would have blue penciled the whole sequence and had it written out! Amusing to think how this led directly to ‘Nemesis the Warlock’, a strip I’m proudest of in my 2000 AD career. ‘Terror Tube’ introduced the Blitzspear and Torquemada and the underground world of Termight; we did not reveal Nemesis until the third one-off story simply called “Nemesis.” This was my first chance at drawing a strip on my own from the ground up, by now Pat and I had become a close team – shared the same Catholic background and sense of humor. The early episodes I guess we did Marvel-style: that is, we discussed the story over the phone, then I went off and designed and drew the finished art, marking up script notations on overlays. For me, my career really begins here. To start with, my odd style was not to everybody’s taste, but I guess my passion compensated for lack of art training and a rather raw drawing style. But pretty soon we found the series had a strong following, which further encouraged the bizarre directions we took. In all my designs I try to make characters/vehicles identifiable in silhouette – that is the contours sell the personality, emotion, drama, or humor. I guess this may have been picked up from a lifelong interest in animation and production design. Also in this period many of us would meet in the 2000 AD office and see who was doing what. Catching sight of the latest work by Mike or Dave or Ron Smith just spurred one on. A lot of energy was being poured into 2000 AD at this point.

designs – Walter the Wobot and other robot stuff for ‘Judge Dredd’ – odds and ends really. When I became art editor I did logo designs for different strips, cover layouts and finished art from time to time, and even after turning down the art editor post on Starlord. Kelvin had me design free gifts for the launch issues and also character designs for ‘Ro-Busters’. This was written by Pat Mills and was a project we had talked about doing earlier on 2000 AD. A robot rescue squad who invoiced for saving humans and property – an inhuman international rescue. The first episode was to be drawn by Carlos Pino, I believe, but Pat wanted my visual input so I came up with designs for Ro-Jaws, Hammer-Stein, Mek-Quake, Mr. 10%, and other visuals. I was sorry I was not in a position to draw the strip, but many fine artists drew ‘Ro-Busters’, including Ian Kennedy and Dave Gibbons. Dave really nailed it down and pretty much established how it should be done.

It seems that it was with your work on ‘Nemesis’ where we begin to see the style of art we’ve become accustomed to from you. What occurred at this point and provoked change? Were the restraints off with this strip? And did it change the way you focused on your storytelling?

When Starlord merged with 2000 AD, I was freelance and began drawing new adventures, alternating with Dave Gibbons and later on with Mike McMahon. I always loved drawing the strip; it mixed comedy with drama in a very appealing way. Pat created the ‘ABC Warriors’ as a spin-off from ‘Ro-Busters’. [Note from Kevin: Ironically Pat had never wanted robots in 2000 AD. He associated them with the old

‘Nemesis’ was really exciting us. Pat and I would spend hours on the phone developing ideas, routines, laughing our heads off. By now I couldn’t face asking permission from editorial to do progressive stuff – we just did it. And it was weird, they always treated my work as if it was loaded with dark and unpleasant material – they were right – and I just stood my corner with Pat and defended our work. Curiously

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Torquemada’s c l e a r l y underage wife caused no fuss, but the bridge between two giant statues of warriors did. By now Gil Page was censoring 2000 AD, and Steve, the editor, called me up and told me I had to go into cs the office urgently. When I omi DC C arrived Gil said my cover rro © a z i B clearly showed a phallic bridge between the statues. Bizarre, as the bridge between the figures was at mid-stomach level. So I removed 1/16” of ink line; it still looked the same but Gil was happy. (Much later he questioned a next prog caption Pat had written: “Next Prog: The Return of Mr. Floppy!”) Mr. Floppy was in fact a rabbit – Gil thought it referred to a sexual dysfunction! God help us all.

You haven’t done much super-hero work, is there a reason for that? Does this have anything to do with Marshal Law being an outlet for those emotions? As a kid I loved super-hero comics but mainly Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby. ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ attracted the attention of DC editors, but really my style didn’t suit anything published in the early 1980s. So when Dick Giordano asked me which strips I’d like to draw, I said The Spectre, Plastic Man, or Blackhawk – he looked puzzled and said, “How about something we still publish?” Twice in this period I could have done something with Alan Moore – once on a Spectre series, and then a Bizarro idea. I’d also done designs for a Michael Fleisher Spectre revival – I gave the originals to Walt Simonson. Back then I guess I could have done an interesting job on company characters, but really Marshal Law allowed me to burn off all my super-hero interest.

How would you describe your artwork and your method of designing a page? Do you ever find drawing therapeutic? After reading a script, I make thumbnail sketches of the page layout and important elements like figure and balloon placement. Clarity of vision is important to me. I feel I can express an idea better visually than verbally. Also, my production experience makes me very fussy about the exact position of type and word balloons. I always do lettering position overlays or guides, even when working with the brilliant Bill Oakley or Todd Klein. Funny, on early 2000 AD I wanted to layout pages in a classic (grid), but the style of ’70s UK and US comics was for this jigsaw pattern of page design, selling the

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razzle dazzle of the art, not the sequential telling of the story. Drawing has always been therapeutic for me. Some of my best work has been produced under the most stress. I find I can channel my emotions through my art – in real life I’m pretty even-tempered and only lose my dark, Irish temper over

production snafus. My dad was similar – he could take apart and reassemble a watch, but lose his temper over the most modest personal slight.

What are some of the tools you use? Is there a particular regiment that works best for you? I’ve been a night person since childhood. So you have to get up late in the day to catch me up, as they say. For most of my career I’ve inked with dip pens. Usually Joseph Gillott pens; I have a collection of them that I gradually work in, using them on backgrounds until they develop enough juice to use on faces. In the past I’ve inked jobs with Edding Profi pens, Rapidoliners, broken/drippy Rapido-graph pens – seldom use a brush, except for solid blacks. For color work I used to use colored inks on CS10 board. Also acrylics, airbrush, watercolor. On Marshal Law I did most issues as full-color art inked with Edding pens which did not drag or blotch when colored with magic markers. At the moment I’m having a great time doing the black-and-white line work on League. It gives me tremendous pleasure. The only problem is looking back on the work of great pensmen of the 19th and early 20th century, they cast a very long shadow. But far better to be looking up at them than looking down on the less capable. I stopped looking at super-hero comics when I started drawing League, I’m like some old character actor desperate to remain in period.

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What made your generation of comics artists – Bolland, Gibbons, etc. – different from the generation before – Bellamy, Lawrence, etc.? Our generation of artists in Britain grew up in a rich period of comic history. The absolute highest standard of comic art and illustration by Frank Bellamy, Ron Embleton, Angus McBride, Peter Jackson, J. Millar Watt, and many others. Also all the imported DC and Marvel Comics of the late ’50s/early ’60s and onward, plus, of course, underground comics and Mad magazine and the European artists like Hugo Pratt who were working on British war comics. I first saw underground comics by Crumb, Jackson, Shelton, Irons, etc., in 1970, when I began work at IPC. I’d say they had a profound effect, a different way of looking at things – the same effect Mad had on me. Then add Metal Hurlant, Moebius, and the whole wave of cultural cross fertilization, and you have this rich visual primordial soup which begat a lot of ambitious, young artists and writers.

Most of the stories you’ve illustrated have been written by Pat Mills or Alan Moore. Do you feel kindred to their vision? Is there a difference to how you approach working with either? Working partnerships are important to me. I’m not a writer and see writing as an arcane skill best left to professionals. More than that is the uncanny way two people can synchronize on a project and bring out richer and more lasting material. Pat Mills was the first writer to encourage my input and co-creator status. We share a similar sense of humor, but are different enough to bring something new to the table; ‘Nemesis’ probably could never have happened independent of each other. Also, if you’re known someone more than 25 years, you can disagree and yet have respect for each other’s viewpoint. In the early days of 2000 AD Pat had Alan’s reputation for very detailed scripts. One artist, the great Brian Lewis, sent back one of Pat’s scripts to us with the comment: “Who does he think he is, Cecil B. DeMille?”

Pat separated the wheat from the chaff. When you worked from a Pat script, you really worked, but he also wants the best finished results – often sacrificing his own text to free up visual areas. I had known Alan Moore for some time and we often met at the old Westminster Comic Marts. After browsing dealers’ tables, we would go downstairs in a pretty big group (Dave, Brian, Mike, Garry Leach, and others) and chew the fat. Mike Gold approached Alan to develop an anthology comic for First Comics. Alan devised ‘Dodgem Logic’ for me and another strip for Mike McMahon to draw. This project fell apart, as did Spectre and Bizarro World also. Titan Books were going to launch a comic line in the 1980s of all new books – this also foundered. My memory of the book I was to draw for Alan was, it seemed, beyond my abilities at the time. It was set in was set in an international airport. I believe I declined, but, again, it all imploded. Finally we worked together on a little Omega Men back-up strip – rather beautifully written by Alan but poorly drawn by me. Also the repro was god awful. The Green Lantern Corps story, ‘Tygers’, had better work by me but was rejected by the Comic Code. As I understand it from editor Andy Helfer, no alterations could make the strip acceptable to the code – they found the art style offensive! It appeared later in an annual with no code sticker. A lovely story and our last chance to collaborate before League many years later. Looking back on things, Pat gave me the confidence to stick with a style I enjoyed working in despite grumbles from IPC management, and Alan has provided me with new material so rich and demanding without asking me to adjust my style – in fact I adjusted it myself to suit the atmosphere, pacing and layout of the story and found myself drawing people and situations entirely new to my experience. Mina standing aloof or drinking tea was far more difficult for me than Marshal Law destroying a city block of evil super-heroes. I’ve reined in my bombastic style, and I’m attempting small character traits and subtle body language, but I hope I’m still delivering the big operatic moments of drama when needed and the lurid and funny stuff that affords me cheap amusement. The biggest difference between working with the two writers is Alan’s scripts are so precise you ignore them at your peril. He is without question the greatest writer of graphic continuity comics have ever seen, with a triumphant gift for dialogue and silence. The silent panel he uses like a maestro. Pat projects words and pictures on a page like a howitzer. I’ve been very lucky working with the best of the best.

At what point did you start to crossover to America, seeking work at DC and Marvel? DC came looking for British artists sometime in early 1984. I always had the feeling no one really knew what to do with me. My work as such could not really adapt well into a mainstream style. I was excited to see my work published by DC Comics, a real childhood dream fulfilled, but it was the period of Flexographics printing and rather poor color repro; I was horrified by the reproduction on my early DC jobs. Len Wein and Marv Wolfman were instrumental in getting me work at DC Comics and were great champions of the British.

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Have you ever had to compromise in what was expected from you? And if so, is this why you have done more creator-owned material in your career? I prefer marching to the beat of my own drum. Most of the strips I’ve worked on have been off-beat, even when mainstream, like Lobo or ‘Batmite’. Sacrificing my creative freedom for reasons of commerce is at odds with my nature. I’m content with operating at the fringe of mainstream comics. The creator-owned option is the most important one to me. Hell, we fought on 2000 AD for creator credits, return of artwork, royalties…. Perhaps some of us rocked the boat more because the boat was small and leaking and doomed anyway. But rights taken for granted now were not easily come by, and I suspect on both sides of the Atlantic it was just a handful of people making a difference. Publishers of old behaved like stern adults and treated creators like difficult children. Mostly a clip around the ear and, if you were lucky, a boiled sweet and smile. The British publishers started losing prime creators to the USA – they contradicted every story they had told us about rights and royalties leading to their demise. In the end they hung themselves. Greed and poor management cost us our once thriving British comic industry.

When Alan Moore says that your art is “so uniquely English,” what do you think he means by it? Compared to my contemporaries, my work is more English than American or mainland Europe. I guess it has to do with growing up in South London: small houses, narrow doors, big scary

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housewives, working class humor. Also, perhaps a love of the history of British comics and illustration. I’ve always delighted since a kid in seeing how Robert Prowse and Stanley L. Wood may have influenced the Eagle generation of artists who in turn influenced ours. The charm of Lawson Wood or historical authority of H.M. Brock and the fantastic Fortunino Matania; the acid inland revenue fueled rages of H.M. Bateman; the inventions of William Heath Robinson and his marvelous lyrical illustrations. We once had giants in this country; I’d hate to see all comic art streamlined into one awful branded style – what a nightmare vision, the world having one big harmless dream. Alan describing my art as “uniquely English” is the greatest compliment he could have paid me.

Has the success of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen spoiled Kevin O’Neill? The success of League has not spoiled me in any way I could identify. My editor Scott Dunbier knows I’m still slow and fussy, but if anything I’m working harder to improve my work. Having this good fortune at the age of 50 is rather splendid and I feel I’m doing the best work of my career. I’ve never drawn to cultivate celebrity – I’m shy by nature – but people’s genuine enthusiasm for League and its ongoing success is heartening. As for the future, I’ve never projected ahead no ten year plans to achieve. League will continue for as long as we’re happy doing it. It will certainly develop and grow in that time. After that who knows – probably League of Extraordinary Gentlemen © Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill erotic illustration, or dirty books as we used to call them – I’d like to go out with a bang!

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true brit frank quitely

Frank

QUITELY by George Khoury

Quitely studied Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art and has worked through every facet of illustration, from face-painting to advertising. Since breaking into the comics industry with his underground work on ‘The Greens’ in Electric Soup, Frank became known for his unique characterizations and elegant storytelling. In 1993, the artist started work on ‘Missionary Man’ (written by Gordon Rennie) in the pages of Judge Dredd Megazine. He entered American comics working on short stories for DC editor Andy Helfer’s Big Book line through the companies’ Paradox: Big Books imprint. Although the limited series Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery (written by Grant Morrison) is tragically outof-print, because of legalities, it was with that title that the fanboys began to take notice of Quitely’s refreshing line work and imagination. His later work with Mark Millar on The Authority continued the progressive tone set by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch’s early run with stories that were even more twisted than the original. For his next work The New X-Men, Frank reimagined the X-Men for a new generation of fans and won Wizard Magazine’s Best Artist of 2001. Aided by Grant Morrision’s scripts, he was able to give the mutant team a fresh look with the attitude to match. More of Quitely’s artwork can be seen in JLA: Earth 2, The Invisibles, Flinch, Kingdom Come: The Offspring, Strange Adventures, Transmetropolitan, 411, Weird War Tales, Heartthrobs, Gangland, ‘Blackheart’ (in Dark Horse Presents), Batman: The Scottish Connection, 20/20 Visions, and the upcoming We3 (written by Grant Morrison). He continues to make Scotland his home with his wife and three children.

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Where and when were you born? Start with the easy questions. Glasgow, in Scotland.

What year? In January ’68.

What did your parents do? My dad, Vincent, was a high school teacher. He taught P.E. – physical education. [chuckles]

And you went to the same school where he taught? Unfortunately, yes. Every kid’s worst nightmare. [chuckles]

And your mother was a housewife? And my mum, Patricia, was a housewife, yeah. She had been a teacher prior to being a housewife but, I can’t imagine her being cut out for it.

Did they encourage you into the arts? Yes, they did. At the very least they were very, very enthusiastic and tolerant, even indulgent of my art. Neither of them were particularly artistic themselves. Both of them were very, very practical. They could do a lot with their hands, but neither of them was actually artistic. You would expect two teachers would have pushed their son further in the academic side of it and less so on the art side, but I think they just resigned themselves to the fact I was a whimsical child with a short attention span and the arts were the thing that was doing it for me. You see I performed kind of average in everything else, and I’m sure I could have done better. I mean, they did encourage me to study my academic subjects, they just weren’t too strict about it, thankfully, and they were very supportive about my art.

But, you were rebellious growing up, or were you the laid back-type? Yes and no, I looked rebellious. I dressed as a rebellious artist, and I used to make my own clothes and make my own hats, make my own hairstyles and modify my own clothes. Yeah, I was quite a colorful teenager, growing up. I’m sure to people who didn’t know me, I’m sure I looked liked a real handful, but I wasn’t really. I wasn’t really a rebel to my core. [laughs] I just liked to look the part.

Did you ever professionally design clothes and hats? No, I sold some of my efforts, but the combination of being artistic and liking David Bowie and Iggy Pop and Frank Zappa and Lou Reed, and y’know, and the combination, I suppose, of being artistic and being a teenager, wanting to look different, wanting to make some kind of a statement, not having a lot of money to spend... all these things came together. I’ve got some The Greens © Frank Quitely

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painfully embarrassing photographs I could show you from my teenage years, but I never started out with the ambition of being a clothes designer; I was just enthusiastic about it.

What were the comics that got you into? What were the ones you remember best? Unlike most comic artists who come from anywhere in Britain, I didn’t actually grow up reading 2000 AD, and loving 2000 AD. [chuckles] My earliest memories were of a Scottish newspaper strip. There were two strips, one was called ‘The Broons’, and the other was called ‘Oor Wullie’. They were written and drawn by the same artist, a guy called Dudley D. Watkins. I would say if I had to pick only one comic artist as being the single biggest influence on me, then Dudley D. Watkins would be the one. When I was very young I read ‘The Broons’ and ‘Oor Wullie’, and I read ‘Rupert the Bear’. In Scotland, we have quite a strong tradition of children’s comics, like The Beano, The Topper and The Beezer; I read comics like that, too. As I got a little bit older – seven, eight, nine, ten – I started reading comics like Bullet, which was an adventure comic – war stories and crime stories – and it always had at least one story about a kid from a working class background struggling against the middle class. I never saw 2000 AD when I was younger, and I only saw a handful of American comics and very few European comics. I particularly liked Conan the Barbarian, for some reason.

Did you solely live off comics, or did you have a job? Did you go to art school? After high school I went to Glasgow School of Art. I specialized in fine arts; I specialized in drawing and painting. Because I had this idea that if I studied drawing and painting I would become good at drawing and painting and I could become a children’s book illustrator. This was one of the big ideas I had of how to use my talent to make money. The only dream I ever really had, in terms of using art professionally, was just that. It was “imagine you could make a living from drawing,” and how good would that be?

I had ideas that it would be nice to design clothing, or to illustrate books, or to do backdrops or whatever. But really it was just anything – if I could just use my talents, just to get an average wage to help pay the bills and I was actually doing something that I enjoy, then that would be a dream come true. That was the extent of my ambitions. When I went to art school, the first year was fantastic! I did a bit of everything. And the variety was great. And then, I had entered drawing and painting and realized that drawing and painting

wasn’t actually a place where you go to learn the craft of painting. It’s not like a craftsman’s course when you go along and become proficient at something. It’s more like a general experience when you find out who you are and find out what it is you actually want to say to people. And what your political agenda is, or what message you want to put across, or whatever. So, really, it was a very different type of drawing and painting course from the one that I was actually needing to become a book illustrator. And I ended up being chucked out of it, in second year, and I just became a freelance artist. I did window dressing, I did shop displays, I did business cards, portraits – I did portraits of people’s pets. I did murals in restaurants and schools – you name it, I did it! I was just a jobbing artist. If you needed something drawn or painted or built, then I would do it for you, but the problem was I couldn’t make a living out of it; I couldn’t make a steady income. I had heard through a mutual friend that there was a printer, in Glasgow in the theater district, who had been looking for a caricaturist and cartoonist. I went down there with a portfolio, and I had photographs of murals I had done and shop windows that I had dressed, of portraits that I had done, of posters I had done for night clubs. I took all sorts of things: oil paintings, and woodcuts, all sorts of stuff. But there wasn’t actually a job on offer. There were just guys in the print shop who decided to put their own comic together and were looking for others to get involved. It was guys that hadn’t put a comic together before. They were basically just looking for people who had similar interests and would write and draw their own pages. If there were any

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profits later from selling the comic, then they would be divided up. I had the time to do it in-between doing the other work that I was doing that wasn’t paying enough to make a living... and that’s how I got into comics – a comic called Electric Soup, which in Glasgow slang is just the name given to a type of cheap, potent alcohol that the tramps drink – that bums and derelicts drink. Electric Soup. It was a kind of low-quality, toilet-humor, anthology title, which had little moments of stuff that was either well-written or well-drawn, but in general it was a pretty crappy comic. Over a four-year period we managed to put out 17 issues.

How did you create ‘The Greens?’ This is my awful tribute to Dudley D. Watkins. ‘The Broons’ was a story that I used to read when I was a wee boy, and it was about an ordinary family – an ordinary Scottish family – and just the kind of innocent, amusing scrapes they used to get into. And so my family, ‘The Greens’, had absolutely nothing to do with The Broons apart from they looked very similar. It had a Maw and a Paw, and there was a pair of twins, and.... Basically, it was a

mirror-image of ‘The Broons’; it was like taking a family like ‘The Simpsons’ and giving them a different name and changing all the hairstyles slightly. It was that kind of thing. Basically I was just using the set-up of this family strip that I was used to, that meant something to me, and just made it a very different type of strip, where sometimes it was rude, and sometimes it was kind of revolting, sometimes it was kind of dangerous, and often it was just very stupid. It was a vehicle for me to do whatever I liked.

‘The Greens’ was tailored to your tastes, not.... It was tailored mostly to my tastes, but there’s always a danger that you end up post-rationalizing everything. Part of the truth of it is that I just didn’t give a great deal of thought back then. It was just some wee under-the-counter comic that me and a bunch of guys I hardly knew got together every Saturday and we worked on it together. They were a nice bunch of guys and we had a lot of laughs, but I find it very difficult to look at the comic objectively. It’s very difficult to look at the comic and imagine what I would’ve thought of it JLA: Earth 2 © DC Comics

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had I not known the people involved. I’m not sure how much I would have actually liked it. It was an enjoyable time in my life; it was kind of like being in a band. And like being in a band, we always kind of felt that we were just around the corner from actually going somewhere with it, and we never actually got anywhere with it. And then personality clashes and squabbles over tiny amounts of money ended up pretty much killing it, and eventually we all went our separate ways. We keep in touch now.

What is it about Dudley D. Watkins’ art that you admire? That’s affected the way you look at your own artwork? Economy of line, and some kind of human quality that’s just missing in so many people’s work. The economy of line thing is just something that’s always fascinated me. It’s the thing that I perhaps most admire in artists like Alex Toth. I mean he’s also got a great sense of storytelling and a great sense of design for the way he lays out the pages. But there’s that basic simplicity that I just love. (I’m talking about Toth because he’s much more familiar to US readers.) There’s a basic deception going on: what

he’s drawing in so few lines is so simple, but it tells you so much. And that economy of line is a difficult thing to master. Lots of people work in a relatively simple style and don’t get anything like the amount of information across that Toth and Watkins would. At the other end of the spectrum, lots of people spend far too long polishing things up far too much. And the original image wasn’t worth that amount of polishing. That’s one of my problems. But there was this really human quality, too. Are you familiar with Norman Rockwell?

Yes. One the thing that really appealed to me about his work was the fact that the people that populated his pictures, the people in the background – the supporting cast – all actually seemed to be involved in some way, and that was something that was always evident in Watkins’ work. That interaction, it’s just a human quality that he gave the characters. If he had old ladies walking past in the background, if there was something happening, some

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’91, or maybe ’92. Probably ’91 I would think, ’cause I think I had started working for Fleetway around about ’92. Andy Helfer, from DC, was probably the first person to actually express an interest. And David Bishop, who at the time was editing to Judge Dredd Megazine, Dave Bishop was the first to actually commission me to do some work.

Was ‘Missionary Man’ your first strip at 2000 AD?

street scene, with the main characters, then the old ladies would be nudging each other as if they were whispering about it as they walked past. There was lots of stuff, lots of simple things about his work which just made me smile and nod my head with satisfaction.

How were you discovered by 2000 AD? Because of Electric Soup, I started going to comic marts and comic conventions. We would go and hire a table in the small press area and sell our latest issue. Comic shop owners and other people that read comics, and people that were organizing these marts, mostly local people, said to me I should do some sample pages. Just draw some pages of ‘Judge Dredd’ or Batman or something and send them off to all the comic companies and see if I can get some work. And that’s exactly what I did. I did a four-page Batman sequence. No dialogue, it was just a kind of fight-and-chase scene. Never finished the fourth page (probably a warning sign to prospective publishers?). I just took it around, and I think I sent it to all the addresses of all the publishers that were at that time listed in Comics International. I sent them off to everybody. Most of them didn’t reply, and the few that did reply just sent me one of those “tick as appropriate” post cards – y’know, “This is good, but it’s not what we’re looking for,” or “Good luck trying other publishers” kind of thing. I didn’t get any work that way, and I actually handed out the same photocopies the day I went down to a London convention. I suppose this would’ve been, ah... ’90 or

Yes, it was. Gordon Rennie, who wrote ‘White Trash’, had written it out of the character the two of us had come up with together. It was supposed to be futuristic, and of course, because I hadn’t been reading 2000 AD or Judge Dredd Megazine before that, it ended up not being futuristic – I just drew it like a traditional cowboy story.

Did you enjoy working at Fleetway? When I started working for Fleetway, I was being given a script which actually had a point to it. I wasn’t having to think up the ideas and stuff was being described for me. It allowed me to concentrate fully on the images themselves. And, of course, in comparison to doing self-publish work, the money seemed very good. The other thing to remember, I had been an art student, and students are notoriously poor because we don’t actually earn money while we’re studying. I had been trying to be a freelance artist and I never made enough money to support myself, so I had never had a real job; I had part-time work in supermarkets and I had done some bar work serving drink. I had never had a serious job; I had nothing to compare it to. So I actually felt that I was quite well paid for doing something I was really enjoying. For all that I hadn’t been a big comic fan prior to starting, despite the fact that I didn’t have any real grounding or history in 2000 AD or ‘Judge Dredd’, I was still very, very excited with the prospect that somebody would actually pay me if I keep turning out these pages. So it was very flattering, I suppose to have been taken on as a professional, and I never actually felt like a professional for a long, long time. It’s like when you get married; you don’t actually feel married…. You don’t feel any different, you always feel like your pretending. It’s the same as starting comics; one minute I had been drawing comics for myself, the next minute they were appearing in a real comic and I was getting paid real money for it. I would go to conventions and people would want me to do sketches for them and they obviously treated me like a pro. The funny thing is that other

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comics professionals treated me like a fellow pro which also seemed really weird.

Did you get married around the time you working for Fleetway? Sadly enough, I actually did. My girlfriend, as she was then, we had been going out for years and years since we were teenagers – high school sweethearts. Until our early 20s we had come to a stage where we realized we were going to stay together and we were going to get married, but there never seemed to be a good time to get engaged because I didn’t have a job. Eventually it got to the stage where I was 25 and Ann-Jane was 24, and we had decided we were going to get engaged. We were just going to do it on her wages – she worked for a bank as a teller – and we decided that we would manage to get by on her wages and anything that I could make over and above that would be a bonus. I can’t remember if it was just before or just after I bought her her

engagement ring that was the first time I got commissioned by David Bishop, who was the editor of Judge Dredd Megazine, and it was on a ‘Missionary Man’ script. It was a seven-page story and I worked six-and-a-half days a week doing this seven-page story. I don’t know if it matters how much I got paid, I think it was £180 a page was the rate then for fullypainted artwork. He had said when he gave me the commission, when he sent the script at first, that if I did a good job with this that then he would give me another one after that. So I really pulled out all the stops to do the best work I could, and sure enough he gave me another one after that. And when I’d done the second one, he had said that as long as I wanted to work, he would always keep me in work. I was just delighted to be getting paid for drawing comic books. And I remember thinking at the time that was the best offer I could ever get; that somebody would be willing to keep me and work all the time as long as I wanted work. That happened either just before or just after Ann-Jane and I got engaged – everything started falling into place at the one time.

Did you gradually leave Fleetway to head over to DC? The thing that happened was that I had started touting material around, I had sent stuff to all the major publishers and nobody wanted to get me any work. The same samples that I actually

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242 took to the Glasgow convention and the London convention, I got some interest from Andy Helfer, Dan Raspler, and David Bishop, and it just so happened that David Bishop was the first of the three of them to get back to me and commission something. As a result, I ended up working for a couple of years but alongside doing the Fleetway work, Andy Helfer had set me up with a couple of short stories for the Big Books. The Big Book of Death was the first one that I read; I did a three-page story in that. I think I ended up doing something in nine or ten of the Big Books. Dan Raspler wanted me to do something as well but that really came about through Alan Grant. At one of the Glasgow conventions, after I had just started working at Fleetway, Alan Grant approached me and told me that he liked my work and if I ever wanted him to write something for me I was to just let him know. Obviously this was just a huge compliment because I knew who Alan Grant was and I had read some of the Lobo stories that he had written that Simon Bisley had drawn. I had some kind of understanding of what kind of character Alan was within the comic community. Basically, I just found it very flattering that he wanted to work with me and that he was willing to actually write something specific for me, something that I wanted to draw, and he had suggested Lobo. I had been reading some of the Simon Bisley Lobos that he’d written so the idea of drawing Lobo really appealed to me. And he wrote me a Lobo story which never saw the light of day. Between the Big Books and Vertigo, that’s how I got into DC. Then there was a London convention, I think it might been ’92 or something, Karen Berger was interviewing British talent that she was interesting in and Art Young approached me about going to see Karen with an interview to showing her my portfolio and to see if there was anything I could do for Vertigo. She was very poignant, enthusiastic and supportive – it’s a bit foggy exactly how everything happened between Karen liking my work and the fact that I had already started being introduced to DC. Maybe it’s because of the Big Books via Andy Helfer and through Alan Grant and Dan Raspler… between Karen liking my work and Grant Morrison wanting me to do something for him, this was how I got started with Vertigo. So because Lobo got shelved, Flex Mentallo was the first work I had published by DC that wasn’t one of the Paradox’s Big Books.

Since a lot of people haven’t read Flex, how would you describe it? So many different people have given me their take on Flex Mentallo. To leave it very vague and open-ended, it’s about the relationships between fiction and reality, and how fiction is as real as your memories. It’s as real as your imagination. It’s as real as your dreams. And real life is interpreted through the way you see things, what you remember of things, where you escape to when you were young. People tend to think of things either being part of real life or part of fiction, as both completely separate from each other, and they’re not. There’s an area in the middle between them where they cross over, and this thing about where ideas come from and this relationship between what’s real and what’s not real is something that Grant tends to deal with a lot and in Flex he dealt with it using super-heroes and creators and the creative process and childhood and he mixed it all together.

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To be honest, everyone I speak to has a different take on what Flex is. Obviously there’s Grant’s, sort of, commentary on comics in there, and it’s very obvious from reading it that Grant loves super-heroes and believes in the power of super-heroes. What I mean by that, he doesn’t just treat them as some colorful diversion, he just treats them as modern myths of modern gods. I suppose I shouldn’t be drawn into what’s really Grant’s take on it – this is my take on Grant’s take. The first time Grant phoned me up to talk about Flex – Grant gets very enthusiastic when he’s talking about his work – and he was talking incredibly fast about lots of different things at one time and he was referencing eras in comics history and heroes from various different periods in comics history, most of which I didn’t know, and I didn’t get any of the references he was talking about. In his enthusiasm to explain as much as possible about what this was going to be and what it was going to do in the shortest space of time, I really came off the phone feeling that I didn’t actually know what I was getting involved in, I just knew that the guy who was writing it [chuckles] was incredibly enthusiastic about it and was convinced it was going to be a masterpiece – which kind of happens every time Grant approaches me about something. It’s just that ever since working on Flex with him, I’m always much more confident about working on another project with him. Each time he approaches me about doing something together, he’s always fired with enthusiasm and “this is going to be the best thing since whenever.”

How would you describe your approach to anatomy? To the look of your characters? I suppose you started with a more realistic style. I don’t feel that I’ve found my style yet.

Your people don’t look like most other comic book characters. I don’t know. Is that not the way Mike Mignola’s characters all look like Mike Mignola characters? Steve Dillon’s characters all look like Steve Dillon characters? Mine all look like mine. I think part of it is it’s like your handwriting: you can decide whether you’re gonna write slightly differently at the start of this page. You start writing “left-handed” to try to write it in a slightly different handwriting than your own handwriting, and by the time you get to the bottom of the page it’s going back to the way it used to be. I think for artists that don’t use photo reference, when you’re just drawing things from your imagination, you sketch out a figure (if you’re drawing a walking figure, a standing figure, a sitting or a leaping figure), you work it out as a little rough and then you draw it out very simply, and then you draw in rough where all the muscle groups are. It’s not as accurate as Batman © DC Comics

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it would be if you had a model posed in front of you or if you had a piece of photo reference that was exactly the position you were after. So I think unless you happen to be some kind of genius for drawing the human figure without any reference, which I’m not and most comic books artists aren’t, then you have a shorthand formula for how to draw human figure in respect to whether it’s a fat person, a thin person or muscular person or whatever. On my figures, they’re not particularly accurate, but it just so happens that for all that you lose in realism or accuracy, when you’re drawing from your imagination rather than from photo reference, I think that you actually gain something. I think what you lose in realism, you gain in something else. Sometimes when you look at the work of a comic artist who use a lot of photo reference, it can be very convincing but it’s very convincing in a very slightly false way. Where when you look at the work of an artist who does everything from their imaginations, it’s not nearly as real looking, but it seems more real because everything looks the same. You know the way when you’re reading Preacher, Steve Dillon draws – I’m sure that he sometimes uses photo reference if he has to do a specific type of truck or a specific type of motorbike or whatever – Steve Dillon tends to draw people and cows and motorbikes and cities just from his imagination, and everything has a very slight simplicity to it, but you believe it because it all looks the same environment, like it came from the same place. The same way that we’re watching The Simpsons, because it’s being done in the same style it all fits together. Some people do use photo reference very, very well. I suppose a prime example would be Alex Ross. What he does with photo reference is very, very impressive and he takes it to an absolute limit where he’s actually trying to make it look as real as possible in a very everyday way. Most of what Moebius does doesn’t involve any photo reference at all, and it’s very real as well, in a completely different way. Getting

back to your question of how I would describe my style, I don’t know… I tend to use as little photo reference as possible.

What type of criticism would your art teacher when you were in school – would they compliment your figurework? Yeah. When I was in art school, obviously a couple times a week there were life drawing classes where there would be a nude model posed in the center of the studio and we would all be standing around or sitting around with our easels or drawing boards either doing detailed laborious sketches or detailed drawings of the figure in front of us, or lots and lots of simple sketches. Obviously that helped with getting to know the human figure. When I was younger I used to copy right out of books with art from Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, two of my favorites for copying, which again gave me a slightly different thing; and I also had those how-to-draw books when I was younger where you start with a stick figure and then you built up to kind of oval to the head, oval for the ribcage, and oval for the pelvis and then you rough the shape muscles around it and you bring a figure to life that way. It’s a method to drawing a figure from your imagination; you don’t need to have something to copy. I have a method for drawing the human figure without having any reference to look at, and sometimes it works better than other times and it works for some readers better than it works for others. There are some people who really like my approach to drawing comics, and there are other people who really don’t. I don’t know. How would you describe my figure work?

Very surreal. [laughs] It’s very different from the norm. I always thought I saw a little bit of Moebius in it, and thought it was cool. I really liked your take on the X-Men – very different from the traditional superhero artist. I guess what appeals to me is it’s strangeness. Another thing I find fascinating about your art is folks do really seem to either love it or hate it. I find myself debating about your art to some, which is funny because I always find your art interesting. Most comics fans would probably prefer Bryan Hitch’s art because it’s very polished and clean super-hero work from the Neal Adams school, but your art seems to be a more required taste—a more finesse one. Your storytelling is also very clever and very different from the mainstream. Over the past years, I’ve been concentrating more and more on storytelling to the detriment of my deadline. Every page of script that you get could be interpreted in so many different JLA 2: Earth 2 © DC Comics

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ways when you go to draw the page out. Over the last few years I’ve gradually spent more and more time exploring the different ways I could be laying out each page or each scene or how I like the layout, and to be honest it’s been playing havoc with my deadlines. What I’ve actually noticed is that more often than not I end up, after much deliberation, with something that’s much closer to my initial instinct. What I’m going to be doing in the future – in an effort to try and improve my productivity – I’m going to try and trust my instinct for the storytelling. Because these last few years I’ve been working longer and longer hours, and producing fewer and fewer pages because I’ve been allowing myself to get more and more drawn into how many different ways I can quickly layout a page and how I can chose the best elements of all of these and put them together in the best way. You don’t get paid by the hour when you’re drawing comic, you get paid by the page, and I really spend far too many hours on each page. For people who don’t like my work, they’re looking at it and saying I don’t see where the hours are? Because they just don’t like the drawing style. The hours are in all the preparation that’s been given to the storytelling before I actually start drawing on the boards themselves. I really need to, for financial reasons as much as anything… I really need to try and get away from that and try and trust my instinct, try to speed things up and have a bit more confidence in what my instincts are telling me. What I’ve found was that after having done the X-Men, I was trying to do a mainstream book, I was trying to do the unordinary super-hero book, and I was trying to do seven issues a year – which was what I told Joe Quesada I would manage – but I was spending an insane amount of time working out how best to do the storytelling. I just feel it’s time for a change again. When I started doing ‘Missionary Man’, all I thought about storytelling was that as long as it was clear for the readers to see what was happening in each individual panel, and as long as they had a rough idea… as long as you could follow what was going on without the words, by the time the words went on top of it they would definitely be okay. When I started working in American comics – when I started working with Dan Raspler in particular – I started getting a lot more advice about how to improve my storytelling and over the years I just allowed myself to become more and more drawn into the complexity of storytelling and the subtlety of storytelling and the “how to try to make it as easy as possible to follow,” but still make it dynamic and still make interesting, still make it believable, still tell the story that I’m trying to tell. I really feel it’s time for a change. Every change I’ve tried to make throughout my career so far, I’ve tried to make it as slowly as possible, because it’s like the handwriting thing again. If you just try and change your handwriting completely, it’ll keep creeping back to what it was anyway.

Have you started this change with the Books of Magick covers? I was looking at your first piece and it looked very different from the stuff I’ve seen in the past. One of the reasons it looks very different from what I’ve done in the past is that it’s fully painted. I used to do fully painted work when I worked for Fleetway; it was all fully painted work that relied very heavy on the lines. It wasn’t fully painted work like Simon Bisley’s painted work, there was a combination of line and painted surfaces.

There’s nothing digital about that image. No, there’s not. I’m very bare bones about the Photoshop so far. I do plan to learn a bit more in the future, but I just don’t have the time at the moment. The first painted work I did for the American market was the Sandman: Endless Nights book – that’s sort of traditional drawing and painting, there’s no digital manipulation in there. Just because I’m painting instead of just drawing it, it obviously does look different from my normal comic work, the Bite Club covers and the Books of Magick covers… I just don’t know how different they are from the covers that Captain America © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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I’ve drawn. I suppose that one of the things is that if you’re drawing a cover and someone else is going to color it – whether it’s an X-Men cover or an Authority cover – then you do a traditional drawing and you leave it to somebody else to color or you leave just a detailed color guide, but when you’re painting, it frees you to experiment with different effects which would take too long to describe in words if you were passing on to another colorist to color for you.

From now on, you don’t want to work with an inker; you would prefer to be more in control of your own artwork, don’t you? Yeah. To be honest I just don’t like how other people ink my pencils. I have respect for who they are. I respect them for how more much experience they may have at inking. I’ve been inking my own stuff for “X” number of years and maybe some guy will come along that’s been inking twice as long, but I just don’t like other people inking over my stuff. Obviously the last three issues of the X-Men were digitally inked, which was good in some ways and not good in other ways. I left the X-Men having spent a year and a half or more doing these really, really tight penciled pages that I was spending a huge amount of time and thought and Flinch © DC Comics

effort working on, and they were coming back inked by other people and colored by others, and I was never… I look at those New X-Men pages in the X-Men comic that I’ve got in print and I look at my own Xerox copies of the pencils and I prefer the pencils in black-and-white and that’s just me. There is no way of getting around that. That’s just somebody who doesn’t like other people inking and coloring his work. And so when I left the X-Men, and went and did that short Destiny story for the Sandman book, ‘Endless Nights’, I got a very, very simple open script, and everything that went on those pages, the way those pages are printed, everything that’s on those pages is mine. In terms of the images there wasn’t somebody else coming and inking, there wasn’t The Invisibles ©DC Comics

somebody else coming in and coloring. They’re not perfect and there are things that I would go back and change if I had to do them again, but the little things about them I don’t like are due to my own shortcomings not due to somebody else’s shortcomings, not due to me not liking other people being involved. So it’s actually much easier for me to look at those pages then it is to look at Flex or 20/20 Visions or Batman or JLA or The Authority or The X-Men or any of the other things that somebody else has colored or that somebody else has inked on with a lot of them.

You’ve said you had a friend this time around, someone more acquainted with your style than your past inkers? Well, the process of digital inking for those who don’t know it involves taking the pencil page and scanning it in a computer using Photoshop or other software, manipulating it so that the lines come out dark enough and strong enough to ink, to print, without actually being inked. It’s like if you have a pencilled sketch and you take a Xerox copy, you lose some of the finest lines. So what’s you do is that you can make it much, much darker and you capture some of the finer lines, but the thicker lines become too thick and will join on to the other lines beside it. It’s a difficult balance to strike, I have a guy at the moment that’s digitally inking my pencils for We3, which is the creatorowned thing I’m doing with Grant Morrison from Vertigo. The guy is called Jamie Grant, he actually took over for me when I left Fleetway, he took over ‘Missionary Man’, but mostly he’s worked for small press and he worked for a games company for years and he’s come back to comics for now. Jamie is really professional with Photoshop and he’s got a method for taking my penciled pages and making my penciled pages ready for going straight to print. So basically they look almost like their inked, but it’s just the way we manipulated the scans. Obviously there’s slightly different quality of line from what you would have if it was traditionally inked. I prefer the look of it to be these tight pencils than having somebody else inking on top of them. I’m not fast enough to pencil and ink on a monthly schedule. At the moment I’m still not fast enough because I’m still spending a lot of time with the storytelling, I’m actually not fast enough to pencil on a monthly schedule, but hopefully the next year or two we’ll see me trusting my instinct a bit more and spending a little less time deliberating over the possibilities of how best layout the page; how best to tell the story. I’ll just trust my instinct a bit more and hopefully I’ll get those pages done.

Having worked with Mark Millar and Grant Morrison, are there any differences in their approach? Mark is probably a little more specific than Grant. I think Mark, more than most writers, likes to tell the artist what to draw. In fairness, Mark’s usually got a pretty good eye for visuals, but Grant draws his stories out actually as thumbnail comics before writing them as scripts.

So you get thumbnails along with your script?

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No. He never gives them, but sometimes he shows me the thumbnails that he has done for scripts that he’s written for me, and his thumbnails are very simple cause he knows exactly what he’s seeing in his mind. He just sketches out very, very simple thumbnail pages just to give him an oversight of how the whole thing is going. But Grant can be very specific about what he wants as well, but he’s also got a lot of confidence in what I’ll come up with so he tends to cut me a lot more slack. More recently, the way I’ve been working with Grant since we been working on this creator-owned thing, we’ve been getting together beforehand with a simple bared-down version of the script that’s only got little bits of dialogue here and there. It’s almost like a first draft script and we sat down with it together and talk about it. Both of us actually do some thumbnails, and then Grant talks to me about the kind of things that he’s got in mind. We have a conversation about it to see what ideas I’m bring to it visually and how close my understanding is of what he wants, what he’s actually trying to get from me. And then I go away and lay out the pages and show him the layout and then he goes away and finishes the script while I’m away finishing the artwork, and then I come back with finished pages. Then after that he redialogues it to the way I’ve drawn the pages. It’s actually a much more organic way that I’m working just now with Grant. It’s like a halfway house between full script and the Marvel style script, where you just work from plot. Mark and Grant have a lot of similarities, but it just so happens at the moment, Grant and I on this most recent project drifted into a slightly new way of working together where it’s a little more like the sort-of Marvel style.

How different is We3 for you when your protagonists are a dog, a cat and a rabbit? Is this a comedy? How would you describe it? No. It’s not a comedy. To describe it as a story about a cat, a dog and a rabbit… obviously I think the first thing it would conjure up in most people’s mind would be some kind of Disney-like story, which it absolutely isn’t. Neither is it a comedy. I’m really worried to try and pigeonhole it, just for fear that people won’t even pick it up if they thought it was just about a cat, a dog, and a rabbit…. I suppose it’s a kind of science-fiction/horror thing, for all that it sounds kinda fantastic. It’s a very short step to being completely believable. It’s roots are somewhat based on experiments that have actually been done at the moment with animals and genetics and prosthetics, and with medical, scientific, military applications and the kind of research, the kind of background of the story, it’s very nearly already happening and it’s very nearly true – it’s just that one step further. It’s what maybe could believably be happening in the very near foreseeable future. The point to the story, other than to shock and entertain – and it is quite violent, and it is quite moving, and it’s quite harrowing at Small panelabove X-Men © Marvel Characters, Inc.

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points, and it’s quite sad – I think a lot of it comes down to the way higher species treat the lower species in general. It’s also about the chain of command amongst people. It’s a slightly damning look at just how shortsighted people can be in terms of thinking all progress is progress in respect to all the damage it does to other humans or to the environment or to animals or to whatever. As I say, I’ve only the first of three scripts.

Is this more fun than drawing a school full of mutants? It’s different fun. It’s more fun insofar as that it’s much more personal, it’s much more adult. I shy away from saying that it’s new, as such, because everyone seems to claim that what they’re working on is new…. It’s certainly not going to have a whole lot in common with the majority of other comics that are going to be beside it on the shelves when it comes out. I hope that people will find it refreshing and different. But to add to some kind of prospective, generally speaking, whatever I happen to be working on at the time, it always seems like the most fun I’ve had. I really did love working on The Authority, I loved working on The X-Men, I loved working on the Sandman book, and I loved working on the first issue of We3.

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REID

Britain’s comic genius

by Peter Hansen

It is difficult to describe the impact Ken Reid had on the British comic book market without first describing briefly what that market is all about. Even to this day the British comic book market bares no resemblance to its American counterpart. It’s almost as if they are on two separate evolutionary tracks really.

Fudge the Elf

In the UK, comics for the most part have always been weekly publications. Historically they have been produced on newsprint resembling the Sunday funnies more than they do a comic put out by DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, or any other US comic book publisher. Furthermore, not only were they weekly and on newsprint but they were a mixture of humor with adventure strips in serialized form stretching over from one week to the next carrying a single storyline for weeks, sometimes months. So perhaps it would be best to think of them as weekly Sunday Funnies sections with Prince Valiant type adventure pages, and full page Blondie type humour strip stories side by side. Finally, on top of this for most comic books there was no color added except on the cover, back page, and the centre page, with all the interior pages just plain old black-and-white. Of course there were a few exceptions, but they were few and far between. The Nervs Usually aimed at pre-teens, the British comic book relied heavily on humour strips, and from his first appearance in 1953 in the Beano comic published by the giant DC Thomson and John Leng publishing companies, Ken Reid made an immediate impact in this genre. Over the course of the next 25 years he would rise to the very top of his profession as one of, if not the best humour strip artist ever to dip a pen into an inkpot anywhere in the world. Born on the 19th of December 1919 in Manchester (same town and a few months before Lee Elias) Reid was a born artist. His mother was quick to tell friends and family that he was drawing recognisable things at the age of two. Like all kids of his day, he grew up on a diet of British comics such as Funny Wonder, Film Fun, and Chips. At the age of nine, Reid was diagnosed with a Tubercular hip, and as a result was confined to bed for six months with the possibility that he would spend the rest of his

Faceache © IPC

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life in a spinal c a r r i a g e . Fortune smiled on him, however, and not only did he recover, but throughout his illness he drew continuously. On leaving school at 14 years of age, Reid was granted a full scholarship to Salford Art School in M a n c h e s t e r. After four years and just before graduation, Reid was expelled for refusing to sign a letter of apology when he was caught by the Principal during class time at a local café near to the school (boy have times changed!) Having made the decision not to return to art school, Reid set up his own studio in a room behind a store in Water Street Manchester in 1936. He made himself a large sign: KEN REID: COMMERCIAL ARTIST, and sat back waiting for the work to roll in. As he would comment many years later, “Absolutely nothing happened!” Without a small amount of work from a commercial photographer in the same building, Reid would have quickly joined that well known fraternity of starving artists. Either way the amount of work was not enough to live on, and so he hit the streets visiting every commercial art studio in the telephone directory asking if they had any freelance work. In this way he managed to get a couple of minor jobs but still not enough to keep him going. Eventually Reid’s father intervened and offered to come around with him and act as his agent. Although Reid’s father was not shy about going where angels fear to tread, a whole day of slogging around the streets of Manchester produced nothing. At the point of going home Reid and his

father found themselves outside of the

Manchester Evening News offices – still in business! A v e r i t a b l e impenetrable fortress, at least as far as young freelance artists were concerned. But not to Reid’s father! With Reid in tow, he strode into the large imposing foyer and marched up to the peakc a p p e d , sergeant-major type Commissionaire and told him he had an appointment with the art editor. He delivered this line in such an authoritative fashion that the man immediately got a boy to take them up to the art editor’s office. Barton, the editor, looked blankly at them for a moment before saying that he didn’t remember making an appointment with a Mr. Reid. At this point Reid’s father confessed that he had lied in order to in to see him and show him his son’s artwork. Whether he admired his cheek or what we will never know, but he invited them in and carefully went through Ken’s portfolio. He then told them that the Evening News was thinking of starting a children’s feature and various artists had already been asked to come up with ideas, adding that perhaps Ken would like to submit something? Reid immediately set to work and his first idea was to take advantage of the current craze for keeping budgerigars as pets. Why not turn one into a strip and call it ‘The Adventures of Budge’. However, Reid quickly discovered that he wasn’t very good at drawing budgies and so he invented a companion he could Martha’s Monster Make-up

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Evening News on April 7, 1938. So popular did the strip become that a Fudge doll was in the stores for Christmas 1938, along with a hardbound annual of completely new stories called The Adventures of Fudge the Elf, published by Hodder and Stoughton. A total of six other annuals based on reprinting the adventures of ‘Fudge the Elf’ from the newspaper were published between 1941 and 1951, with Fudge Turns Detective the last. All of these annuals are extremely rare and very hard to come by. Even more difficult to find is Reid’s small pamphlet of a character called Dilly Duckling produced by Brockhampton Press in 1948. This small oneshilling pamphlet has an advertisement on the back for a Dilly Duckling squeaky rubber duck available from Hygienic Toys which as the ad suggested, “Brings Ken Reid’s character to life, more loveable than ever.” Clearly Reid was on the merchandising trail from the very beginning. Later however in 1956 this character would turn up in a story book called

The Adventures of Dilly Duckling (same title

feature on occasion so that he wouldn’t have to draw a budgie all the time. He decided that the companion would be a likeable little elf that he found he could draw and so he went through the alphabet to come up with a name for the elf that rhymed with ‘Budge’ until he came up with ‘Fudge.’ There he had it: ‘The Adventures of Budge and Fudge’. The only problem was that after numerous tries he just couldn’t get into the budgie character and draw him well in a consistent fashion. So Budge was dropped and the strip became ‘The Adventures of Fudge the Elf’, which was duly submitted to Mr. Barton. Reid freely admitted that the look of Fudge was influenced by Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse to a great extent. Particularly the face, which looked like Mickey Mouse with a cap on! Six weeks later Reid was hired and Fudge made his first strip appearance in the Jonah © D C Thomson

as the pamphlet), but published by a children’s book publisher called George Newnes Limited, written by long-time comic writer Arthur Groom, with illustrations by another great British cartoonist called Harry Banger. No reference to Ken Reid at all, so one can only assume that Reid must have sold the rights, since by 1956 he would have been far too busy to develop his character. ‘Fudge the Elf’ was suspended during the war from 1941 until Reid was de-mobbed in 1946. Over the years that he wrote and drew Fudge, Reid’s style matured and the detail he put into the panels, coupled with his imagination and development of new characters in the Fudge world turned the strip into a very accomplished piece of comic art. However as much as he loved Fudge, by 1952 Reid realised that he could draw more than just the three panels a day for the

newspaper, so he began to cast his net around the major comic book publishers. His first catch was with Amalgamated Press, the oldest, largest, and most established comic book publisher in the UK at that time. For them he drew his own creation, ‘Foxy,’ and another set called ‘Super Sam,’ in the style of the regular artists which Reid did not enjoy doing at all. Both sets appeared in a longrunning comic called Comic Cuts. A relic of an earlier age, and unknown to Reid, this comic was on its last legs and not long after he began working for Amalgamated Press he received a letter telling him that it was winding up and that, as they say, was that! In a curious and unrelated coincidence the British comic book market appears to have mirrored the plight of the American comic book market during 1953-54 with a number of titles falling by the wayside. At this point Reid’s career took a fortuitous turn for the better (thanks to an introduction by his brother-in-law, DC Thomson artist Bill Holroyd) when he received a letter from DC Thomson asking if he would be interested in doing a new series entitled ‘Roger the Dodger’ for their best selling comic, The Beano. For many years DC Thomson had been considered to be a poor Scot’s relation when compared to the mighty Amalgamated Press (AP). However, since the end of the Second World War Thomson had been eating away at AP’s circulation. In the early 1950s a change of the guard with respect to their in-house art staff had seen the addition of young whippersnappers such as Leo Baxendale, Paddy Brennan, the brilliant Davy Law, and others who had revitalized their line of comics in the same way Marvel had done against DC in the early 1960s. The addition of Ken Reid was tantamount to adding the jewel in the crown and within a very short space of time The Beano was selling in excess of one million copies per week!!! It’s interesting to note that such was the importance placed on the addition of Ken Reid and the introduction of ‘Roger the Dodger’ that the managing editor of DC Thomson, R.D. Lowe, traveled down from Dundee in Scotland to Manchester in England to meet with Reid and discuss the project. In their meeting Lowe described Roger as young lad forever ‘dodging’ out of things through various bizarre schemes he concocted. After some discussion Reid drew up a few versions of how he envisaged the character and Lowe selected his favorite. With this the deal was done and Reid became a freelance artist with Bing Bang Benny © D C Thomson

DC Thomson drawing a half-page ‘Roger the Dodger’ set every week with the first set appearing in The Beano dated April 18, 1953. Originally a half-page set, ‘Roger’ soon became a full-page set. Soon after Reid was asked to draw a second feature called ‘Angel Face’ for DC Thomson’s other big selling comic of the day, The Dandy. An angelic prankster Reid was later to admit he never liked drawing female characters. A conclusion the editor of the Dandy obviously arrived at after only a short time, and Reid was asked instead to turn his talents towards a male

feature called ‘Grandpa.’ Reid soon got his teeth into this character, who was a scallywag of an old codger who behaved like a schoolboy although he was 80 if he was a day and he lived with his dad who must have been over a hundred! Like ‘Roger,’ ‘Grandpa’ quickly became extremely popular with readers and ran for many years after Reid stopped drawing him. The following year Reid was asked by the editor of The Dandy to add another character to his growing list, and this time it was right up his alley. Set in the Wild West, the feature called ‘Bing Bang Benny’ was about a young man who had a dangerous preoccupation with explosives. He was always blowing up things. The other interesting thing about the ‘Bing Bang Benny’ strip was that it was set in the Wild West. This gave Reid the opportunity to let his imagination run wild which he did on a number of the stories. In addition to his work for DC Thomson and Fudge for the Manchester Evening News, Reid was also producing a competition page for the Irish edition of the Sunday Express newspaper, which he drew for many years. On March 15, 1958, Reid’s personal favorite series began in The

Beano. ‘Jonah’, the story of a goofy looking jinxed mariner who sunk every ship he set foot on, was the beginning of Reid’s best comic work, and quite possibly his very best comic work in many peoples eyes. It certainly brought out the best in him at that time of his career. Written by Walter Fearne who was later to become an editor with DC Thomson, ‘Jonah’ swept to the top of the of the popularity charts, even displacing the hugely popular ‘Dennis the Menace’, by Davy Law. All of the ‘Jonah’ scripts were written by Fearne, and Reid admitted that they quite often had him laughing out loud. Although Fearne usually made provision for about twelve panels per page, it was not unusual for Reid to cram in up to 36! When questioned about this on one occasion Reid replied: “Ah, um, yes… well the way Fearne described a particular incident often set me off on a train of thought that had me creating additional scenes. I admit that I sometimes simply got carried away with things. I’ve always had trouble just drawing a script as it is written. This usually means lots more work on my part, and that’s why I’m not rich. I simply like to take what has been sent to me and do the best possible job I can do with it, even if it is a lot more work.”

characters that appeared in the strip every week must have taxed even Reid’s ability to create different faces for each one. But such was his ability at that time that he handled it with consummate ease. In 1963 ‘Ali’ was replaced on the back page of The Dandy by ‘Big Head and Thick Head’, two hilarious school boys – one brainy one dumb – who managed to get into all kinds of trouble every week. Concurrently, Reid also started drawing ‘Jinx’, a new feature for the inside pages of The Beano about a troublesome, little girl who had the same kind of bad luck as Jonah.

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Not only did DC Thomson not object to this enhancement of the scripts, but they acquiesced when Reid decided to carry over a story into the next week’s issue with one week’s adventure leading to another. This was unique for a humour strip at that time. On one occasion Reid caused a bit of a stir and a lot of merriment in the Beano office when quite unintentionally (so he claimed) he added a perfect caricature of the Beano editor, George Mooney, into the ‘Jonah’ strip. By 1958 Reid had really hit his stride on ‘Jonah’ when he changed the appearance of the character to a completely chinless goof with the famous elongated neck. So popular was the character that Reid, in response to a letter to the editor, got carried away and produced a life size image of ‘Jonah’ for the sailors onboard the Royal Navy Aircraft Carrier H.M.S. Victorious, which they duly hung on the bulkhead in their mess. In 1960 Reid began another new strip called ‘Ali Ha Ha and the 40 Thieves’, this time for The Dandy. The son of a police sergeant in old Arabia, Ali was always getting into trouble while trying to help his dad catch the 40 Thieves. This usually ended up with his dad getting locked up in the pokey rather than the bad guys. Such was the popularity of this strip that it ended up as a colour feature on the back page of the comic. To me this was just another great strip by Reid, but with a difference. The number of

In 1964 the unthinkable happened: Reid, always a freelance artist, left DC Thomson to work for Odhams – a competitor who had lured away their other ‘gem’, Leo Baxendale. When asked about the change, Reid quite candidly admitted it was all to do with money. In 1963 Reid was being paid £18 a page (about $33 US in today’s money). Odhams offered Reid £30 a page to come and draw for them in their new comic to be called Wham, which they intended to launch that year to compete with the hugely popular Beano and Dandy comics of DC Thomson. Curiously enough, this was the same sort of thing that was happening between Marvel and DC Comics at the same time in the USA. Reid didn’t want to leave, but a £12 a page increase in those days was substantial to say the least! He wrote to DC Thomson to tell them of the offer and to request a raise of one half of what Odhams had offered to gladly stay with them. He received a response from R.D. Low, the managing editor of DC Thompson juvenile publications for over 40 years, saying that “Odhams’

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offer was quite unrealistic and he wasn’t prepared to increase my page rate by any amount.” There was nothing further to be said except that Reid immediately stopped working for Thomson and joined Odhams.

of 13 Stingy St. was the richest old miser for miles around. Designed to compete with the flagships of DC Thomson, Wham lasted for only 187 issues from June 1964 to January 1968, but with Reid and Baxendale leading the charge they were some issues.

Early in 1964 after the deal was struck, Alf Wallace, the managing editor of Odhams Group, and Albert Cosser, the editor of the new comic to be called Wham, went to Manchester to meet Reid and discuss concepts for new sets. When Reid told them of his unfulfilled passion for comic horror, Cosser immediately threw out an idea for a set to be called ‘Frankie Stein’. This series turned out to be one of the most popular in British comic’s history, and it ran for more than 20 years. Taking the broad concept from Cosser, Reid created the character and wrote all of the scripts as well as penciled and inked the pages. This was the first time on a comic set that Reid had a completely free hand, and it showed.

Once Wham had hit the streets and was selling well, Odhams brought out a companion comic called Smash in February 1966. For this comic Reid produced what some consider to be his crowning glory, a set called ‘Queen of the Seas.’ This was a ‘Jonah’ type series about a couple of real idiots with a steamship of the same name as the series. In this old bucket they traveled the seven seas lurching from one disaster to another in hilarious fashion.

From here Reid moved on to one of his most interesting characters called ‘Jasper the Grasper’. Uniquely set in Victorian, rather than modern day England, Jasper McGrabb

In addition, Reid took over a two-page set from the great Leo Baxendale called ‘The Nerves’. It turned out to be just Reid’s thing. Located in the world inside of a fat glutton’s body, ‘The Nerves’ offered Reid no end of opportunity to indulge himself in comic horror. It was while working on Smash that he developed a reputation for sneaking in ‘naughty’ bits into kids’ comics that the editors soon became acutely aware of. Things like a gallows located far off in the distance in one panel with one of the Nerves dangling from a short rope. Such things were definitely not suitable for a juvenile publication in those days. Launched in January 1967, the short-lived Pow comic was an experiment in mixing reprints of Marvel (US) strips in black-and-white with classic British humour strips that never quite took off. Not even the inclusion of ‘SpiderMan’, ‘Nick Fury’, and ‘The Fantastic Four’ Top: © Odhams

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could sustain the comic for more than 12 months before it merged with the faltering Wham, lasting only another nine months before disappearing forever. For Pow, however, Reid created the excellent ‘Dare a Day Davy’, about a schoolboy who could not resist a dare, all of which were provided by the readers. In one instance, Reid’s set about a dare requiring Davy to resurrect Frankenstein was so risqué that the editors pulled it before being published and it never saw the light of day. That is until the artwork was rescued by Steve Moore (writer 2000 AD, America’s Best Comics, etc.) and published in David Britton’s Weird Fantasy magazine in 1969. Next on Reid’s agenda was another comic horror series called ‘Face Ache’, which he scripted and drew for almost ten years. A mischievous schoolboy billed as ‘The Boy with a Thousand Faces’,

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he could change his facial appearance by using what was known as the ‘Scrunge’ effect. Over the period of the series these changes became more and more bizarre and fantastic until he could alter his complete appearance and change into absolutely anything. At the same time as ‘Face Ache’ was on the go, Reid was also producing one-page fillers for Whoopee (‘Wanted Posters’ and ‘World Wide Weirdies’) and Shiver and Shake (‘Creepy Creations’). These were usually based on suggestions from the readers also who received a cash prize for their suggestions. As the ’70s drew to a close, Reid was called on to add ‘Martha’s Monster Makeup’ (Monster Fun) to his repertoire, as well as ‘Tom Horror’s World’ (a take off of the British TV Show called Tomorrow’s World) in Wow and then Whoopee. Martha was a cute little girl who had a jar full of make-up that had monstrous effects whenever she applied it! Tom Horror was a bespectacled boy in coveralls who was a schoolboy inventor. Tom’s proud pa is invariably always the recipient of his inventions gone wrong! Named Best Writer and Best Artist by the British Society of Strip Illustrators in 1978, Ken Reid sadly passed away in March 1987. For me, Reid was unequalled; his zany humour and the variety of characters he produced combined with the ever increasing detail he put into every panel made his work instantly distinguishable and a cut above the rest. I don’t believe we will ever see his like again.

Thanks go to Alan Clarke and Ray Moore for their assistance with this article.

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Bryan

TALBOT by George Khoury

Coming from a mining town and generations of miners, Bryan Talbot began drawing his own comics as a child for his own enjoyment, never

once imagining that comics would be his true calling. It was after studying graphic design at Preston Polytechnic, that he began to seriously consider comics as a career when he entered the UK comics underground scene. His strip ‘Chester P. Hackenbush – The Psychedelic Alchemist’, his first major work at 65 pages, was chronicled in the first three issues of Brainstorm Comix for Alchemy Publications. ‘The Adventures of Luther Arkwright’ was given life in the pages of Near Myths and Pssst!, and proved to be a ground-breaking cosmic epic and a provocative reaction to mainstream comics. When ‘Luther’ was completed and collected, it would earn the storyteller four Eagle Awards and The Best Produced British Work of the Year title from Society of Strip Illustrators, and helped bring forth a successful sequel, ‘Heart of the Empire’. In 1984, he followed Kevin O’Neill on 2000 AD’s ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ for three successful full-length books of devilish delight. Over the subsequent year, the artist crossed over into America, providing artwork and stories for a variety of titles like Sandman, Hellblazer, Legends of the Dark Knight, The Nazz, Fables, The Dreaming, Teknophage, and so many others. The ’90s brought readers the most important work of Talbot’s career, The Tale of One Bad Rat, one of the most emotional works ever created in comics. The poignant One Bad Rat demonstrated the possibilities of what could be achieved within a graphic novel – here was an engaging story tackling the difficult subject of child abuse with great tenderness and maturity. Presently, Talbot continues to work on his latest opus Alice in Sunderland, and bedazzling us with his vision and passionate artwork.

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Where and when were you born? Wigan, Lancashire, 1952.

And how would you describe your upbringing? I was an only child and both my parents were working, so I spent a lot of time by myself – playing with toys or watching the tiny screen TV. My folks both encouraged my drawing (my dad used to paint at one time) and introduced me to comics by getting me a weekly nursery comic, Jack and Jill, from when I was two to encourage me to read, and later the DC Thomson comics such as the Beano and Beezer. Every Christmas my dad bought me the Rupert the Bear Annual.

When did you decide that you wanted a career in comics? I didn’t. I always knew that I wanted to work in ‘Art’ in some way, but I didn’t know what. When I was five, an uncle gave me a pile of old Giles annuals, which I loved (and still have) and for a while, I wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist. Even though I read comics all the time I was growing up, and even drew my own stories, it never occurred to me that I could make a living by doing it professionally.

Which were the types of comics that appealed to you? And who were some of you influences? I loved the strips by Leo Baxendale, Ken Reid, and Dudley D. Watkins. And I think that Alfred Bestall’s Rupert style eventually had an influence on Bad Rat. In the ’60s, I became a big fan of Marvel comics and Jack Kirby, and, later, artists like Steranko, Starlin, and Barry Smith were big influences.

How did you go about learning your craft? By reading comics all my life, making them for my own amusement while I was growing up and then, later, writing and drawing underground comics, which I still consider to be my apprenticeship in the medium.

What formal art training did you have? My art education was a complete cock-up. At grammar school we were just given sheets of paper and told to draw. That was it. I used to spend most of my time doing big and extremely silly ‘Bash Street Kids’ style cartoons, like the ones in the Beano annuals by Leo Baxendale. Leo was a big hero of mine and eventually we became friends and were in exhibitions and such together. Luther Arkwright © Bryan Talbot

I barely scraped through my O- and A-level art exams, and went to Wigan School of Art, a department of the technical college, to do a one-year foundation course. Unfortunately I learnt buggerall there as well. I was taught there by three exhibiting abstract artists who had a total horror of figurative art. Abstract was very trendy then, realism scorned as old fashioned. As a result, all I learnt there was how to make abstract pictures; pretty damn useless considering my future career. After this, I failed to be accepted at any Fine Art colleges because, I suppose, I just wasn’t enthusiastic enough about the portfolio of abstract art I dragged around to interviews. At the last minute I managed to blag my way onto a graphic design course in Preston. After starting the course I realised that no

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illustration was taught there, no life drawing, nothing. I did learn typography, layout, use of technical pens and airbrushes, etc., but all the illustration I did there was what I worked into the brief myself. After I finished the course I used to go to the library once a week. I got out books on art, perspective, composition, anatomy, etc., and learnt what I should have learnt at college.

What type of things did you design for British Aerospace? Basically illustrating the catalogue of goods that they agent to countries who buy their airstrips – everything from pots and pans to snooker tables. I also did charts for presentations and such – stuff that’s done in five minutes on computers today.

Having completed the ‘Nightjar’ short recently, how would you say your art has evolved over the last 20 years? What are some of the differences you see in your approach to your work? I suppose that it’s clearer, sharper now – less crosshatching and with strong outlines – though I still like to change style to suit the story.

Why did you gravitate towards the UK comics underground when you started? Did the spirit of era help define the early part of your career? I was a huge fan of the American underground artists, Crumb especially. And yes, the spirit of the time swept me along. These comics were radical and experimental. They were also hyper cool – drawing an underground comic book was the next best thing to playing lead guitar in a rock band. It was while I was unemployed after finishing college that I drew the first Brainstorm comic. After it was published, I started work on the next one and that’s how my career started.

Is there still a vital comics underground in England? No, but it does exist. There’s the glossy, full-colour Northern Lights, produced in Glasgow and a wealth of Small Press comics, some of which could be described as ‘underground’.

Is Chester P. Hakenbush based on anyone in particular?

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Myself, I suppose, as his reactions were all basically my own. But I never looked like that, aside from the long hair. One of the hardest things to learn in drawing comics is making characters recognisable, from all angles and at different distances (especially if, like Chester, he’s morphing into different forms all the time!). I gave him round glasses, a straight nose, and a beard to get around this problem. I took the first name of a close friend and combined it with Groucho Marx’s Dr. Hackenbush for his moniker. The ‘P’ spontaneously appeared in the middle. Funnily enough, there’s now a Notting Hill Gate rapper – an Eminem type – who’s using Chester P. Hackenbush as his stage name.

What sparked the creation of ‘The Adventures of Luther Arkwright?’ The original strip, ‘The Papist Affair’ (which is just reprinted in the Brainstorm collection) was an excuse to do a Richard Corben-type strip in line and watercolour wash, its story very influenced by the Jerry Cornelius books by Michael Moorcock. After doing this seven-page strip, I started to think more seriously about Luther and his milieu, and developed it away from the Cornelius influence, so he took on his own character. ‘The Adventures of Luther Arkwright’ was an attempt to do an intelligent adventure story for adults that was every bit as rich as a text novel and was drawn in illustration-quality artwork, not in the American ‘shorthand’ style then employed by most comic artists. It was also a reaction against the bland state of mainstream super-hero comics of the time; Arkwright had sex, drugs, swore, vomited, etc. – sounds inane now, but, at the time, these were shocking things to see in comics. I thought, “Mainstream text novels and movies contain all this stuff, why not comic books?” On the story level I also wanted to get away from the mainstream formulaic story; I wanted to create a story that was complex and multi-layered, one that had real depth, one that dealt with politics, religion, sex, philosophy – stuff that adults were into but was totally lacking in mainstream comics at this time (1978) – but was also a cracking good adventure. It’s hard to imagine now, with books like Hellblazer and company around for years, but I think ‘Arkwright’ was one of the first comic books to use researched magic – genuine ‘occult’ material, as opposed to fantasy hocus-pocus.

And how did it become the first British graphic novel? It was structured as a novel to begin with – that was my big idea. I’d had he thought to do a novel in comic form since I was 17, in 1969, when I started to plot a rambling ‘Lord of the Rings’ style heroic fantasy story. Even so, ‘Arkwright’ had to be serialised in order for me to be financially able to do it. It ran in Near Myths for five issues. After Near Myths folded, I had to wait for a couple of years until the experimental comic magazine Pssst! came along before I found another home for it. In 1981, after running in Psst! for eleven months, there was such a natural break in the story that the publisher, Serge Boissevain, and myself thought that we could break it into two or three volumes, and he published the first. As it turned out, because the magazine ceased publication, there was then a seven-year gap before readers could continue beyond the cliff hanger!

How did you go about planning ‘Luther?’ The same way I usually do my books. When I’ve thought about it long enough and have the basic shape in my head – scenes,

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ideas, etc. – I work on large sheets of paper (usually three A3 sheets taped together, enabling me to structure the whole thing before me). For me, the structure of the piece is very important and has to be rock-steady before I start on the first draft of the script. On the A3 sheets of paper I built the plot, scene by scene. I like working like this; you can see the entire structure at a glance, see plot threads interweave, foreshadow events, chart climaxes and lulls, move scenes round, edit and add. And I can always change, adapt or add to it later. This goes through several drafts, reworking the structure until I’m satisfied. Then I usually write the entire first draft of the script, but with ‘Arkwright’, I scripted it in short passages – scripted each scene just before I drew it.

In the end, did you feel you were able to accomplish what you initially envisioned? Yes, I think so. If anything I tried to do too much, make it too rich. I wish that the art was better. Much of that stuff is over 25 years old and I can draw better now!

When and how did your work capture the attention of DC Comics? Dark Horse published the American nine-issue edition of Luther Arkwright in 1990 and some of the DC editors read it. Over the four or five years that I was working for 2000 AD, I got to know Jeanette Kahn, Karen Berger, and other DC people when they used to come over for the UKCAC and GLASCAC cons and always used to have a party and take the Brit pack out to dinner. When Jamie Delano wrote the first Hellblazer Special, he asked for me as artist and I got the job.

For you, is there a difference working for an American publisher and a British one? Only that you have to be careful not to use Anglicisms. When writing dialogue for an American character, though, a good editor will catch any if they do slip through.

Were you ever prepared for where The Tale of One Bad Rat would take you as a storyteller? No, I didn’t deliberately set out to write a book about the psychological after-effects of child sexual abuse. This was a definite case of the story developing itself, completely going in its own direction. The story loosely plotted, it was while I was doing the research that I realised that child abuse was far too important a subject to marginalize – originally it was simply a plot device, a reason for Helen running away from home. After reading some books and talking to abuse survivors I realised that this is what the story had to be about.

And was it a story that just kept unravelling as you worked on it? All my stories seem to grow organically as soon as I grasp what I want to do with them, as soon as I realise what angle to take.

In your conclusion for One Bad Rat you mention that you partook in the method of Frank Hampson. What does this involve? Yes, though not to the extent that Hampson did. Bad Rat was a mixture of photo ref, invention, and life drawing – I’d often grab people walking past the studio, drag them in and get them to pose while I sketched them. This is the only time I’ve worked

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using extensive photo ref. Because of the nature of the story I wanted to firmly root it in reality. I cast the story after the script was finished, though I’d already done sketches of what I wanted the characters to look like. Nearly all the London, motorway and Lake District scenes are based on the location shots I took, though some are invented.

As a result of One Bad Rat, was your work beginning to be more socially conscious? I think that it already was to some extent. Much of ‘Arkwright’ was produced against the background of apartheid South Africa, Thatcher’s reign, and the rise of the National Front, which is why it has such an anti-fascist theme. Parallels with South Africa, Pinochet’s Chile, and Northern Ireland are made within the story. It also touches on homelessness and drug addiction in Arkwright’s early life.

‘Batman: Mask’ is perhaps the most intelligent Batman story – Nice of you to think so!

What type of research did it involve? Not a great deal. A close friend at the time was a psychiatric nurse and I grilled him on the psychological and diagnostic sides of the story. I think that he also loaned or showed me passages in a textbook concerning the form of mental illness Wayne suffers in the story, though I can’t remember what the book was. As for the masks – I have dozens of them on my walls at home and the ones that appear are drawn from life. The basic premise was that Batman didn’t exist. Yes, Bruce Wayne’s parents were shot by a mugger, but they didn’t leave him millions – they left huge debts. As a result, Bruce grew up in orphanages and ran away when he was a teenager, eventually

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becoming a schizophrenic alcoholic. Having no power in the real world, he escapes into vivid delusions of being a millionaire playboy by day and a super-hero by night. The endings are the same in both the comic version and the album collection Dark Legends. The only difference is that Archie Goodwin let me do an extra page for the collection that really made the ending more explicit. At the end of the story, Bruce is a mental vegetable, trapped in his world of fantasy. I’m surprised DC let me get away with it. To emphasise the dichotomy between the two states, I drew all the hospital ‘reality’ sequences in light line with technical pens with no dark shadows and no sound effects, using prosaic pointof-view on a strict nine-panel grid and on a white ultimate background. I had Steve Oliff, the colourist, make all the colours pale and antiseptic. For the Batman and dream sequences I inked heavily with a brush to give stronger lines, using lots of black shadow and large sound effects, and had lots of angled and dynamic point-ofview using completely freestyle layouts, often with panels overlapping, on a black ultimate background. I also had Oliff really vamp up the colours so that they w e r e rich and

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vibrant. It really did show the difference between the two worlds of the story. Someone recently told me that the whole idea has been ripped off and used in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I haven’t seen it yet!

What inspired it? The story was based on an idea I’d had when I was a teenager in the ’60s – except it was a Spider-Man story. But, of course, it was a scam – by Mysterio – Spider-Man wasn’t really insane. I’d forgotten all about it until I was lying in bed one morning, coincidentally a week or two before I happened to be having dinner with Archie Goodwin when he informed me that he’d just become editor of Legends of the Dark Knight. The Spider-Man idea sprang to mind and I told him that I had a notion for a Batman story and he asked me what it was. I told him and he said “Great, send me a proposal.” I didn’t. I just assumed that he said this to everybody. The next time I saw him was about six months later, and the first thing he said to me was, “Where’s that Batman proposal?” I told him that I thought he was joking, but he told me he thought it was very original. So I wrote it the following week. He rang back and told me to get on with the script. That was that.

And is it safe to say you’re not a huge fan of the superhero genre? Not now, though I used to be a massive fan. Jack Kirby, an amazing innovator and great storyteller, is one of my heroes. I stopped reading super-hero comics regularly in the early ’70s while I was reading an issue of Spider-Man and I realised that it was the same story I’d read a thousand times before. There can be good super-hero stories – Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns showed that – but I find the genre dull. I suppose it’s because I’m not a soap opera person – I like finite, well crafted stories with no flab. Also, many of the present day artists seem more concerned in making each page a splash illustration that will fetch a good price as an original piece of artwork, but fails to tell the story competently.

Has your perception of the comics industry changed over the years? I think that there’s a bigger and better range of comic books now than at any time in the industry’s history and that this is mirrored in the way that they are now selling in regular bookstores.

What are your future projects? And are there any more graphic novels in the works? I’m working right now on Alice in Sunderland. It’s not one story, but (what seems like) hundreds, some told over one panel, some taking many pages, all within an overall framework of a theatrical performance, so, in many ways, it’s like a variety performance – using different comic techniques, different styles, contained inside the overall structure. The central theme is Alice, and a central story is that of Lewis Carroll and the ‘real’ Alice – Alice Pleasance Liddell. The other is that of the history of the city of Sunderland – a history of England in microcosm. It’s a strange thing in that I can’t point to another comic and say, “It’s like that.” It’s a bit like Understanding Comics in that it’s about storytelling (and comics, in passing) in one way, but totally Batman © DC Comics

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different. It’s what I’ve been describing as a “dream documentary.” It’s about storytelling, myth, and history. Shares some superficial similarities to Joe Sacco’s work but it isn’t reportage. Some bits are autobiographical. It’s also a bit like The Cartoon History of the Universe in some respects but more similar to TV historical documentaries in that there is a front man – me! – which makes it a little like those Crumb strips where he addresses the reader. It’s also a little like Alan Moore’s novel Voice of the Fire in that, as storytellers have done over the ages, I’m putting magic into the place where I live by the way I tell the stories. I’m still very nervous about it – I don’t know whether I’m breaking new ground or whether I’m constructing a scaffold from which to commit professional suicide from. It started as a neat idea to do a quick graphic novel and escalated into something that I’ve spent that much time over that I now have to do it – and it’s taking an eon to produce! I kid you not, the amount of research has been astronomical, like doing a Ph.D. or something. It’s also the first graphic novel that I’ve not only drawn but am also using collage – incorporating old maps, old illustrations and suchlike – and am putting it all together on computer, which is taking far longer than doing it the regular way! I also have a fantasy story that I’ve been thinking about for several years that I’d love to do next. I’ve also been developing another Luther Arkwright story.

Barry

WINDSOR-SMITH by George Khoury

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Barry Windsor-Smith was born in London’s East End on May 25 of 1949, and studied art at East Ham Technical College where he earned a degree in Industrial Design and Illustration. A connoisseur of comics all throughout his childhood, it was the grandness of Jack Kirby’s storytelling that appealed to him more than the others. His early art, which was very Marvelesque in approach, earned him his first pro assignments: providing illustrations for Odham Press, the English publisher with the Marvel Comics license at the time, on books named Wham!, Pow!, Terrific, and Fantastic. During the summer of 1968, with his friend Steve Parkhouse, Barry came to America with barely a dime to his name and a portfolio that would open the doors for him at Marvel Comics. X-Men #53, was his first Marvel book, and along the way he would make stops throughout the Marvel line in Daredevil, The Avengers, Astonishing Tales, and Iron Man. Conan the Barbarian, his only regular series at Marvel, proved to be a major stepping stone in his career along with being a period of growth as his artwork started to become more sophisticated, drifting away from the super-heroics to a more romantic approach. His last stories for Conan and the elegant adaptation of ‘Red Nails’ (in Savage Tales) are among the most fondly remembered of the title and have been reprinted countless times. Upon leaving Conan and the world of comics in 1974, the 1970’s self-portrait © Barry Windsor-Smith / Early UK Odham art © Marvel Characters, Inc.

artist formed The Gorblimey Press, which gave him the opportunity to expand beyond comic books and a chance to be independent. For his imprint he created art full of romanticism, detail and vigor in producing his fine line of posters, prints and lithographs. This was an important creative phase for him as he embraced his influences, particularly PreRaphaelite and Art Nouveau, into the way he would create art afterwards. Longing to create new comic art and stories, he returned to Marvel Comics in 1984 re-energized and provided artwork for Machine Man, Uncanny X-Men, and covers for The New Mutants. His most prolific period in comics occurred in the ’90s when he became an integral part of Valiant Comics’ success as their creative director and writer/artist of twelve issues each of Archer and Armstrong and Solar, followed by Rune (for Malibu Comics), ‘Weapon X’ (for Marvel Comics), and his most personal and ambitious work in the industry, nine issues of Barry Windsor-Smith: Storyteller (for Dark Horse Comics). Storyteller was an anthology comic that presented the stories of ‘The Freebooters’, ‘The Paradoxman’, and ‘Young Gods’. Fantagraphics is presently publishing all three features from BWS: Storyteller separately along with unpublished material. Two volumes of Barry Windsor-Smith: Opus, his series of autobiographical art books, have been released thus far, and they show his life’s work as comic book artist, painter, designer, illustrator, and publisher, as well as his work in film. Today, he keeps himself constantly busy working on new stories and paintings in his upstate New York studio.

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Have you always been artistically inclined? Once the school system singled me out as a ‘talented boy’, I began to realize that I perceived things and thought differently from my friends and most of the other children at school. Although it’s the outward manifestations (drawing pictures that surfaced from one’s imagination) that teachers and elders will first respond to, the bottom line is that this kid or that kid possesses raw capabilities to access and channel parts of the brain that the other kids can’t. But having this capability means nothing much at all if it’s not nurtured. Having talent is as elementary and natural as being born; it’s what you make of your life that matters. In my case, a working class ethic superimposed on my own particular neural composition.

What initially attracted you to the comics form? Storytelling, I guess. From my youngest years I can recall no particular artist or style of art that attracted me to British comics. But once I discovered the Miller & Co. black-and-white reprints of American comics, I began to recognize and appreciate individual art styles, and style and clarity of how each artist told a story. So, I guess, by the middle years of my pre-teen youth I’d become attracted to comics for both their story and their art. Once that was established in my head, I began to judge and criticize artists by their capabilities, their standards, and their limits. I was awfully precocious. It was like I’d become a functioning editor at the age of eleven, or something.

Did the works of any of the British comics old masters – Bellamy, Jordan, Baxendale, etc. – make any impression on you? Were there any British strips you enjoyed? Do you mean ‘strips’ in the American or British sense? In the US comic strip means newspaper strip (a few panels published in a single horizontal strip each day in a newspaper). Strip in Britain seems to mean any form of comics. I’m a bit fuzzy on the timelines here. I recall being stunned by Frank Bellamy’s ‘Heros the Spartan’, but in what period of Bellamy’s work, or my youth, this came about is lost to malleable memory. I don’t recognize Baxendale’s name, but Jordan sounds familiar. ‘Jeff Hawke,’ right? There was another strip artist, he did Modesty Blaise. What a great name for a heroine. I do recall the slick brushwork of ‘Jeff Hawke’ and Modesty Blaise; all those dramatic blacks and chiaroscuro. Despite my appreciation of these British artists, I really wasn’t influenced by any of them at all. If I were, I’d’ve probably tried to emulate them in one way or another and seek work in England rather than in America.

What lured you to the United States? Why were you so sure that you wanted to build your career there and not in England? Simply put, in 1968 there was no American style comics art career to be had in England. Power Comics were just goofy black-and-white reprints, and I did get some limited work with them, but beyond that there was nothing whatsoever. Compared to the visionary dynamics of Kirby/Lee Fantastic Four, Mighty Thor, and all else, British material, no matter how well produced it was, seemed rather lame, old fashioned, and, to use the current US vernacular, retarded. Although some good folk, who should really know better, have recently suggested that I broke into Marvel and American comics by deliberately emulating Kirby, this is not quite true. The fact is that in the mid- to late 1960s, I’d become so awed by the genius of Kirby’s work that, in my 17-year-old naïvety, I couldn’t perceive comics art as anything other than Jack Kirby’s extraordinary style of dynamic figure drawing and fantastical tableaus. The result being that, as I was a basic student out of a great London art college, who was willing to be transformed by any emergent power that might enlighten him, Kirby’s style and dynamics in both art and storytelling became the ideal that – at that time – I comprehended best of all. A year prior, in 1967, I was very influenced by Ralph Steadman. Ralph taught illustration and cartooning at my school, East Ham Technical College, and his influence over me meant that I emulated his style to some degree or other. But, y’know, with Ralph as with Kirby, I wasn’t wholly conscious of actually copying these artists’ styles. I never said to myself, “If I can draw like Kirby, I can go to America and get a fab job.” I never thought that way. I was just following my instincts. Within a year or so I was moving away from Kirby as I began to find my own way.

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In an interview, Kevin O’Neill has said the following about you: “Barry Smith was always a shining beacon, because he had actually done what seemed like the impossible and gone to America and carved out a career. That just seemed incredible.” And I know that other British artists hold you in very high regards. How do you feel about the British comics and artists that emerged after you leaving the UK?

Monster

It was a great deal easier for me to go to America “and carve out a career,” than Kevin imagines. It was simply because my style was so eminently Marvel – I was trying to draw like Kirby and ink like Joe Sinnott. If I’d been more ‘illustrative’, say, I might have considered getting work in England, perhaps as a paperback

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cover artist or something. So, what I did isn’t really anything for anyone to hold in high regard; I just did what common sense dictated. Despite that easy perspective from 30 years after the fact, the actual 1968 trip to America that I and my friend Steve Parkhouse embarked upon was a rough and colorful ride that could use a whole article/interview unto itself. Many years later, the first I knew of the then-emerging British artists was from their American work. I saw Warrior only after Miracleman was published in the US, and I tried to track down the source material. I don’t think I’d ever seen a copy of 2000 AD until last December 2003. But about the creators themselves: I instantly recognized Brian Bolland as a British artist, although I knew nothing about him personally. Quite the same with John Bolton. There exists a yet to be properly defined quality of perception and practice that comes from certain English artists and writers creating fresh material from the American canon of heroes and villains.

I could offer many theories for this phenomena, but simply put: imagine Gil Kane drawing ‘Judge Dredd’. Think of all that his American, commercial hero mainstream sensibilities might bring to, or frankly detract from, the ‘Dredd’ storylines. But this is no slight on Kane. Also, just for Jungian fun, consider ‘Desperate Dan’ as staged, written, and drawn by Jack Kirby in his ‘humourous’ style from Not Brand Echh. I hope everybody Monster © Barry Windsor-Smith

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reading this understands that I am alluding to a cultural meltdown that might, in an aftermath, illuminate the contradiction of subtle yet extraordinary differences between UK and US creative thinking.

For yourself, what’s the difference in doing a painting versus doing a comic page? It is all the difference in the world. For a painting one considers a single image. For a comic page we must consider several images that have come from somewhere and are going to go somewhere else. I try to make my single pictures a whole unto themselves. In comics, it might take five pages or 30 pages to make that whole become materialized. That’s a very simplified answer, George.

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Do you get the same satisfaction? There’s no template. I’ve started dozens of paintings that failed right before my eyes. So too with comics stories. Just at this time, I cannot recall how it feels to be satisfied with my own work. Casting back, I can remember certain short periods when I was pleased with what I had created. It’s a short list. Currently I’m trying hard to finish a very big comics project that I began exactly 20 years ago. I’m not at all sure whether I’ll ever be satisfied with it even when I have finished it.

What attracted you to the Pre-Raphaelites? And has that influence shaped how you work in comics? The reason I ask is because I remember reading that you found it somewhat taxing to get the feel back for sequential art after the Gorblimey Press period. How have things changed since you started in terms of genre, narrative style, etc.? What attracted me to the PRB (Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) is probably the same elements that attracted everybody else, whether they’re artists or not. The design, the beauty, the sense of wonderment through astonishing detail that reminds one of lucid dreams, or prompts a person to ask what, exactly, is a lucid dream? A million years after the Pre-Raphaelites, Salvador Dali attempted to paint surrealistic images (meaning a vision of non-reality rendered so exquisitely real that it rises above and over our sense of what is and what is not common reality) that would, could, or might affect the viewer’s electrochemical impulses enough to make a difference to the viewer’s perceptions from that initial viewing onwards. In other words, the experiencer of a particular Dali painting would be, or feel to be, transformed during and after the encounter. Didn’t happen, Sal. Same with the Pre-Raphaelites. They only barely affected a long-term change of perceptions in those who viewed their early works. But here’s the rub: John Everett Millais’ ‘Ferdinand Lured by Ariel’ (1849) is a singular visionary work that, for all of its fantasy structure, makes a sudden impact into one’s sense of reality, not necessarily by the scene itself, but by Millais’ shockingly meticulous rendering of the flowers, shrubs, and all else in the uncannily lit, yet perfectly perceived, English summer garden. It’s best to see the original painting to fully understand this effect. Answering your intermediate question, George, if I could produce ten thousand brilliant pages of art and story before I die, I’ll likely never be able to come close to Millais’ ‘Ferdinand’ for wonderment in all its varied forms. Of interest, perhaps, is that although Millais was far and away the most naturally talented of the PRB, he was the least intellectually inclined (if it can be understood that the PRB were the Beatles of their day, Millais was Paul McCartney).

What compels you to work in comics nowadays? And which are some of the projects that you are working on at the moment? Like some other artist and/or writers who should have shrugged off the comics medium long ago, I remain enthralled by possibilities inherent in words and pictures, and find myself drawn back to the medium time and again, even though the business of comics continues to suck. Better for me if I could not draw; because I’d’ve eventually found too much frustration as a writer whose principle visions were constantly bastardized by some incompetent penciler. If I’d remained just an penciler, I couldn’t have continued in a field where so many writers are visual incompetents, and even scripters imagine that the more they say, the greater is their story told. There’s just a small saucer-full of artists, writers, and writer/artists who understand, and thereby have enhanced, the complex crafts of graphic storytelling in their work. Currently I’m trying to compile the companion volumes to Young Gods & Friends, which will be The Freebooters & Friends and The Paradoxman.

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Br Brian “Duke”

BOYANSKI

actually doesn’t exist – the bearer of that false name is called slightly differently and dwells in the wilderness of Middlesex, just outside London Towne in Ye Olde England where he came many Earth rotations ago from a now non-existent country far, far away. Still with his first, beautiful wife and musical progeny of a son, he devours comics, shreds a mean bass, wickedly draws sometimes, and enjoys food and the fact that he’s got no pets whatsoever.

Norman

BOYD

– mid-40s plus – is a librarian in a further education college in the UK, who grew up on Swan, ‘Legion of Super-heroes’, Adams, etc., but loved his TV 21s to bits! His wife, Nicola, has the patience of a saint – 25 years this year – and he loves his kids so much, he tries anything to get Susanna, Libby, and Matt’s names in print! Love you guys. He is currently helping Paul Holder to research (properly!) Frank Bellamy’s life and work, whilst for enjoyment he is re-discovering an underrated-to-the-point-of-silliness writer called Don McGregor.

Jon B

COOKE

Peter

HANSEN

is the editor of Comic Book Artist magazine, though born and bred stateside, spent an important year of his youth living in Great Britain. In fact, the UK is where the Eisner Award-winner first started collecting comics, which became a lifelong obsession. “My favorite was the short-lived Brit science-fiction title, Countdown,” Cooke explained, “but my appetite for comics also yearned for not only the imported American comics, but the weeklies Cor, Dandy, and Buster, as well. So my affection for British comics and those creators from the Old Country is long-held and I'm proud to contribute to my pal (and co-editor of our forthcoming book collaboration, Swampmen: Muck Monsters of the Comics), George Khoury’s much-anticipated book.” Currently residing in Rhode Island, Cooke, a 45-year-old husband and father of three boys, added that complete versions of his enclosed interviews with Hunt Emerson and Bryan Hitch will appear in future issues of CBA. Someday he hopes to scribe the history of 2000 AD, the UK’s premier science-fiction comic book weekly. an exiled Brit and a self-confessed failed artist who chose engineering over art, Peter became a professional engineer who now owns and runs his own consulting engineering company in Vancouver, Canada. His first love has always been comics, and over the past five years he has focused most of his energies into comic book research rather than the previous 30 years of comic book and comic art collecting. He collects comics from all around the world, but has really spent most of his time researching British, Australian, and Canadian comics, since so many other people do such a great job with American comics. He hopes to one day become the curator of a comic book museum in the UK.

Paul

HOLDER

a child of the sixties who is presently growing his hair for peace. A designer and artworker from Bedfordshire in swinging England. He’s designed the official calendars for Thunderbirds (2004) and The Avengers (2005) (the sixties TV shows). At the present, he’s hard at work on his Frank Bellamy art book, which will be a comprehensive overview of his life and career and building the website for frankbellamy.com.

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TRUE BRIT

CONTRIBUTORS 2004

George

KHOURY

32, straight out of Jersey City, USA, was first published at age of 18 for El Siglo, a Spanish newspaper. He’s written and edited the Eisner-nominated Kimota!, G-Force Animated (co-written with Jason Hofius), and The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. He's always been an Anglophile: fond of British films, music, comics and culinary treats.

Eric

NOLEN-WEATHINGTON

is the editor and designer of the Modern Masters book series, the first volume of which featured Alan Davis. He also performs various and sundry duties for TwoMorrows Publishing. Eric lives in Mebane, North Carolina, with his wife, Donna; son, Iain; dog, Casey; and too many cats to name individually.

David A

ROACH

was born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1965 and drew his first strip for 2000 AD in 1987. For 2000 AD he has drawn numerous ‘Judge Andrson’ strips, as well as ‘Nemesis the Warlock’, ‘Judge Dredd’, and has inked ‘Rogue Trooper’ and ‘Synamon’ amongst others. In the ’90s he began to work for the US, including stints at Dark Horse (Star Wars & Aliens), Topps (Cadillacs and Dinosaurs) and DC (as penciller or inker on many Batman, Star Trek, Green Lantern, and Babylon 5 issues, among others). In his alter ego as an illustrator, he has drawn or painted literally hundreds of pictures for Wizards of the Coast role-playing games and has also worked for Oxford University Press amongst others. As a writer, he co-authored The Warren Companion for TwoMorrows, written extensively for Comic Book Artist and Comics International, and contributed to several comics history books, including The Slings and Arrows Comics Guides (volumes 1 and 2) and The Superhero Book (Visible Ink). He is married with two wonderful daughters and far, far too many comics!

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FOR A FREE COLOR CATALOG, CALL, WRITE, E-MAIL, OR LOG ONTO www.twomorrows.com

TwoMorrows—A New Day For Comics Fandom! TwoMorrows Publishing • 10407 Bedfordtown Drive • Raleigh, NC 27614 USA • 919-449-0344 • FAX: 919-449-0327 E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com • Visit us on the Web at www.twomorrows.com

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“George Khoury’s True Brit is at once a passport and the perfect travel-guide to

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Front Cover: ‘Thunderbirds’ by Frank Bellamy/ ‘Daleks’ by Ron Turner ©City Magazines. Back Cover: Top Left: ‘Thunderbirds’ by Frank Bellamy ©City Magazines. Top Centre: “Fireball XL5’ by Mike Noble ©City Magazines. Bottom Left: ‘Doctor Who’ by Harry Lindfield ©Polystyle. Top Right & Bottom Right: ‘Dan Dare’ by Frank Hampson ©Dan Dare Corporation. Top Centre: Storm by Don Lawrence ©Don Lawrence Collection. Centre Left: Desperate Dan ©D C Thomson. Centre Bottom: Judge Dredd by Brian Bolland ©Time Out. Judge Dredd© Rebellion A/S

TwoMorrows Publishing, Raleigh, NC