The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Rod McKie is a British cartoonist and illustrator who has served his time working for British institutions like IPC and Punch; these days Rod has an international reputation, with work regularly appearing in the Wall Street Journal, Playboy, the Harvard Review and many more, while he is also working on a new graphic novel project of his own about growing up in Edinburgh and Leith in the 1950s and 60s. And I’m very happy to say Rod has agreed to post the occasional musing on the world of comics and cartooning here, from the perspective of an artist involved in that realm, but here, let Rod tell you about himself in his own words:

I suppose it may come as a bit of a surprise to anyone who has just quickly glanced through Albion comic, in which I make a very, very, brief appearance as a character that I am also a real boy. However, anyone more familiar with that comic, or the subsequent graphic novel, published by Wildstorm, plotted by Alan Moore, scripted by Leah Moore and John Reppion, illustrated by Shane Oakley and George Freeman, with original series covers by Dave Gibbons, will probably just consider the fact that I am both a fictional character and a real one, simply another well-plotted ‘Mooreish’ twist that has seeped from the comic pages of Albion into the real world.

(cover to Albion, art by Dave Gibbons, published DC)

Albion is after all, a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, dropping quotes from real people like Steve Moore, and yours truly, into back-stories about cartoon characters, within a larger framework of a fully re-imagined universe, overarched by a conceit that Britain’s favourite comic characters, Grimly Fiendish and The Spider amongst them, were both fictional and real.

Don’t go getting the wrong idea. I don’t want you to think for one moment that opening a comic book and seeing the fictional me (for which I had to a sign a likeness release just as one would with a photograph) didn’t cause some kind of momentary fission. It did; but you have to admit for comic fans like us, it’s really cool. So, the brief moment of unhemlicht passed and it wasn’t lost on me that I had become, just like the story’s real central characters, a character who exists both as a fictional character in a comic book, and a real person.

The reason I’m bringing Albion to your attention today, is because FPI has given me the opportunity to talk a little about the comics that inspired me to become a cartoonist. Now that was proving surprisingly difficult for a number of reasons to do with human fallibility, and our habit of creating new and better replacement memories based on the stories that other people tell us about ourselves. I mean, when I look back on my own personal history, it runs in my head like a movie with no plot twists and turns and I even detect the faint smell of new Levis and new Baseball boots and Bazooka Joes and Batman cards, and there’s background music…but it would look like this on the page:

Batman comics, the Sunday Funnies, a Kellogg’s painting competition, Aquaman, Smash!, Wham!, Pow!, Terrific!, Fantastic!, etc, etc.

So I tried to narrow it down, and I came up with these key events: collecting comics from an early age and enjoying them and making up my own stories about the characters – my mother, who was a home-help, bringing home a huge collection of Sunday Funnies that her employer had been sent by his kids in the US – winning a Kellogg’s painting competition (I read about a US cartoonist who also won when he was young) – and Smash! comic.

Again, it lacked any real coherent structure, so I narrowed it down further and, much to my surprise, I came up with one single moment reading one single comic that inspired me to become a cartoonist. It was Smash! All the other comics and strips merely reflected my interest in collecting and reading comics, Smash! however, showed me that there was no longer an ocean between the comics and me.

(cover to Smash! #150, borrowed from the Comics World News site)

Before Smash!, my dream was that maybe one day, if my parents moved to America, and if I became good enough at drawing, that I might, with luck, get to draw Batman. But this new comic offered new hope; Smash! was a British comic that published the US comic book characters that I was a fan of, like Batman, alongside British characters that I was to become a fan of, like Grimly Fiendish. I could, for the first time, really imagine my dream coming true. Suddenly my dream had become a lot less complicated, and it no longer involved my parents having to uproot and move to a different continent. What Smash! meant was that all I had to do now was work hard and became good enough; then I could get my work into a British comic alongside Batman – a much more attainable goal.

In addition, Smash! meant I was no longer excluded by my passion for American comics. Until Smash! came along I had only one friend, who, like me, collected US comics, everyone else I knew, including my cousins, collected only British comics. Now, for the first time, we all had a comic in common, we had Smash!, a publication we could enjoy together.

Which brings me back to Albion. In his foreword to the Albion graphic novel, Neil Gaiman talks about Oldham’s Smash!, which caught his attention too, because it had Batman on the front. The way he talks about Smash! makes it sound like a sort of gateway-comic that lead him, just as it did me and no doubt many others who were not particularly keen on the Beano and the Dandy, to go on to collect and enjoy Pow!, Wham!, and Terrific! and Fantastic! and to develop a wider appreciation of comics in general and British comics in particular.

(a preview page of Super Guys by Rod, drawing – no pun intended – on his memories of growing up in Edinburgh and Leith in the 50s and 60s; you can see more in his gallery here along with more of his work; (c) Rod McKie)

Of course I took the plunge and became a cartoonist much later in life, but the exact moment that I believed I could actually really become a cartoonist was the day I opened a copy of Smash!. So, if we do adhere to the theory that a cartoon is a trick by a cartoonist to create another cartoonist, then I suppose that trickster Leo Baxendale helped make me a cartoonist, but so did Alf Wallace and Albert Cosser (the guys who developed Smash! as a British/US hybrid comic), and so too did Janus Stark, the Spider, Louis Crandell (The Steel Claw) Kelly’s Eye, The House of Dolmann, F. Solano Lopez, Tom Tully, Eric Bradbury, Batman, everyone who was Bob Kane, et al; a nice mixture of characters both real and fictional.

Rod has a regularly updated blog which you can check out, and for more information and a glimpse at some of his many works visit Rodtoons and enjoy browsing the gallery.