The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

John Higgins is one of the most respected comic artists working today, with a long career that has seen him illustrate everything from Future Shocks to Jonah Hex. In this interview with regular contributor Matt Badham, John talks about his weird horror strip Razorjack (a title he self-published and then took to British indie comics company Com.x) and also gives us some thoughts on writing and drawing comics, and on his early years at 2000 AD.

(cover to collected Razorjack by and (c) John Higgins, published Com.x; click on the pictures to see the larger versions)

Matt Badham: Razorjack, you did for the love of it, yeah? I’m assuming that, so far, it hasn’t made you a millionaire.

John Higgins: Funnily enough, it hasn’t.

MB: You say, in the introduction to the collected edition, that it was a story you had to tell.

JH: Yeah. Graphic novels now are crossing over in a way that they never have before. This gives creators the opportunity to produce work that can be very personal; that can be approached in a way where you touch on profound ideas. But for me, first and foremost, I just wanted to have fun. And I also wanted to let people know that the sort of stuff that I want to do [professionally] is really still pulp entertainment. Razorjack is something that I would have gone out and bought if someone else had written it. It will appeal to the sort of audience that just wants an enjoyable couple of hours sitting down reading about buxom wenches in skin-tight leather tramping across dead bodies into your dimension to lay waste to it.

(Laughter)

With Razorjack, I suppose, I was trying to bridge a gap between my experience of looking for material to read myself and not finding it and the work I was doing for the likes of Vertigo, that was dark, gritty and had a certain social realism. I wanted something a bit more light-hearted than that, but still touching on deeper themes. Darker themes, shall we say, rather than anything profound or intellectual.

MB: I found Razorjack quite hard to pigeonhole. The best description I can come up with is weird horror, although it also has SF elements.

JH: I had the same problem myself. One description I did come up with was hard-boiled, SF noir.

MB: You’ve got the mean streets of the city and elements of a crime story, but also weird dimensions and aliens.

JH: It has a bit of everything. Trying to get the hardboiled detective into the SF/fantasy/horror and then also the noir, which is dark and dirty. A fan at the Bristol Comics Con said it was Hellraiser meets CSI, which I thought was quite nice. I hope that the mix, at least, was innovative. I was literally trying to put in everything that I enjoyed doing, stuff that I had previously touched on in my work for other companies, like 2000 AD, which has that science fiction element and brought me into comics.  If it hadn’t been for 2000 AD, then I probably wouldn’t be in comics now because I came into this business, first and foremost, to do science fiction illustration. And then fantasy elements came in, when I was doing book covers and stuff like that.

I mean, before 2000 AD, you had the odd science fiction comic that came out, but certainly in the ‘70s and ‘80s when I was a real fan, there wasn’t anything that was current. There were a couple of things that came out from America and obviously Metal Hurlant, which was a French science fantasy comic book. That was really brilliant. That certainly touched on all the elements that I enjoyed, in literature as much as anything.

MB: The thing Razorjack has done and, correct me if I’m wrong, is that it’s brought you back to writing.

JH: Yeah. It was a strange thing in some ways. I was writing for myself at the very beginning of my career. 2000 AD had Future Shocks and Time Twisters [one-off twist in the tale stories] to use to try out new talent. Probably, in some ways, it was to try out new writers as much as anything. You couldn’t just be a good writer for 2000 AD. You had to be something special, I think. And I’m not saying that I was particularly special. But I went there with the package [as writer and artist] and if you had a good idea and your artwork was acceptable, they’d give you a go.

(some of John’s famous Judge Dredd art for The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic, Dredd (c) Rebellion)

MB: I suppose 2000 AD took a risk on people and working there, a weekly comic that ate material, gave creators a chance to really improve their game quite quickly.

JH: I was talking to some really talented comics guys at the Bristol Convention, some of the painters, and telling them about the early stages of my career. There was a certain element of lucky accident when it came to my art, particularly with colour. I was spending ages and ages on my painted art, probably a week on each page. But what I was doing in those days was learning on the job. You’re experimenting and you’re trying new things and if it goes wrong, then you have to start all over again. Or you discover something that’s completely and utterly wonderful by accident that you wouldn’t have been able to think through.

Nowadays, I know about colour and my own techniques and way of telling stories, and can more or less do what I want immediately without worrying about if it will work. Now, when it comes to black and white line work, I think that there’s a purity of storytelling there. This is, first and foremost, because you’re not worried about the deadline. You’re drawing ten times faster than you would be if you were doing it in fully-painted colour, and even if the pages are coloured but that’s done in Photoshop, then you’re completely separate to the colour process. You can concentrate on telling the story and getting the clarity of the black against the white. I think that there is something special about black and white comics. It is a prime way of telling a visual story. Probably the hardcore of my comic collection is the old 2000 AD on that toilet paper that they used, that goes brown as it ages. Terrible stuff, but it looks wonderful. But the black line still looks damn effective no matter how bad the paper is.

MB: I interviewed Charlie Adlard a little while ago for the Megazine. He did a lot of painted art in the early days of his career and is now doing quite stark black and white stuff for The Walking Dead. He was talking about how often with comic art, because it is about communicating a story, less is more, and that when he looks back at his painted stuff, some of it was way too detailed.

JH: Steve Dillon is the same, in terms of what Charlie was saying, in that he enjoys the simpler storytelling. As far as he is concerned, story is first, he does not get lost in detail, and I completely agree. Sometimes fully painted comics are just detail and the colour doesn’t necessarily add too much to the storytelling process itself.

MB: I suppose it’s about balance. You’re balancing multiple elements, such as the composition of the individual panels, the page itself, the layout, all that stuff. Layers upon layers. Text, the panels on the page, the page as a whole, there’s so much that can go wrong with comics. You do your job art-wise and someone places a speech balloon badly and screws up the whole page.

JH: It’s a collaborative medium that is all about design and structure. If you, as you say, put a speech balloon in the wrong place, then you can direct the reader to a different way of reading the whole page and that has very important consequences in terms of the storytelling.

(John Higgins in the studio)

MB: Was it liberating on Razorjack to be your own man, the guy who did everything?

JH: It was completely liberating, just because I knew the story that I wanted to tell and I wasn’t filtering anyone else’s ideas.

MB: You’ve worked with some great writers.

JH: I have worked with some of the best writers in comics and it’s nice to be able to say that. No one can refute that statement. When you work with Alan Moore and Garth Ennis, these people are the best in the business.

MB: I think Ennis is actually underrated. He makes what he does look really easy.

JH: Very much so.

MB: His writing is clever, but not showy.

JH: That’s the thing about Garth. He just loves characters and he can set his characters anywhere from the Dredd universe to the Second World War to the superhero genre, as in The Boys. And I’ve never seen anyone write superheroes like him. His ideas are clever, but first and foremost, he makes you care about his characters. And I agree that he’s underrated, perhaps because, even now, the mainstream superhero genre is the best way to get noticed within English-speaking comics and he’s avoided that. He will only do the projects that interest him, such as war stories or horror or whatever. Definitely underrated. Definitely.

MB: He seems to avoid the limelight a bit. He doesn’t have a website does he? Or a blog even?

JH: I think he started to find going to conventions a real distraction, which is one of the ways that you can raise your profile. And, as far as he’s concerned, what he does should speak for itself, so he tends to allow his work to do the talking.

MB: In terms of the publishing history of Razorjack, how did it come to Com.x?

JH: The freedom that I originally had producing my own book, when I published the first issue of Razorjack, was soon counter-balanced by the fact that I had to get it out to the public all by myself. There’s a whole process that you have to go into after you’ve completed your story and collected it together. Up to that point, the writing and the illustrating was hard work, but also fun.

Collating everything into a magazine became very difficult and, by this stage, I had to solicit it through distributors and I was worn out. I couldn’t take it any further. I needed people to promote it. I needed people to advertise it. I needed people to do all the things that I just did not have time to do and that was Com.x. Luckily, I’d known [Com.x publisher] Eddie Deighton for quite a few years. I actually gave a talk at his art college when he was a student there. We kept in touch and became good friends. He runs a very successful design company called An.x and, prior to that, just before he started Com.x, he had a company called Department.x.

They were just starting to think about producing a series of their own books. The time seemed right for them to start doing their own projects because Eddie in particular had done so well with his design company that he had money to invest. I think that I was speaking to them and giving them advice and doing some odd fill-in stories for them. I don’t think I approached them about doing Razorjack. I think that they approached me and suggested that they would like to publish the rest of it. It worked out perfectly. It was timing as much as anything, from them and from me.

MB: You’d done one issue at that point.

JH: I’d self-published one issue at that point under my own banner, which was Jack Publishing. But then it ended in the middle of the story because I had to work to earn some money. I’d taken time out from working within the industry to do the first issue and it didn’t hit the sales figures that were anywhere near to what I was hoping. And it takes so much to make the money back from a venture like that, that I had to start working again to make a living. After I connected with Com.x, they financed the next two issues. The book that’s out at the moment, the collected edition, has all three issues in plus an extra story. I’m dead chuffed, because we’ve been getting some good reactions and some great reviews on the internet. We got a very good review in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago.

MB: Oh. So much for not being highbrow. The Guardian likes pulp. Nice one.

(black ops teams, guns and black magic, how can you go wrong? A page from Razorjack by and (c) John Higgins, published Com.x)

JH: Yeah. The last line, which I had a t-shirt made of, said, ‘Good, trashy fun to be had here.’ I was very proud of that. It was a very good review and that line at the end was just something that tickled me, and I really appreciated that. And it really did sum it up well. That’s it. I wanted to entertain people. And people are actually going out and buying it and I’m very proud of that.

MB: Does being John Higgins of ‘Watchmen and 2000 AD fame’ help you get the word out about Razorjack? It must, surely.

JH: There’s something about Watchmen that’s very, very special and I am trying to use that association to make Razorjack a bit more high profile. 2000 AD, meanwhile, also has a long history of excellence. There’s a certain cache to being associated with both titles.

MB: And, of course, Razorjack is your property. You own it. That’s always nice.

JH: Yes. The thing is that Com.x have connections that can lead to multi-media exploitation of properties. We are talking to people in Hollywood, not only about Razorjack but also about other titles. We’re getting some interest along those lines and so we’re very, very pleased. The thing is, Com.x are putting so much time and effort into, not only their own projects, but also Razorjack. Anything else that comes out will be with Com.x. If I do go on to do another book of Razorjack, I wouldn’t want it to go anywhere else but Com.x.

MB: So there are more stories to be told in that universe?

JH: Very much so. The depth of story, of all the multiple storylines that I had going; there’s so many elements that I put in place in the original story. Little offshoots I can go down and little avenues that I can explore. The mythology of the world with its different dimensions and why there are thirteen dimensions and why Earth is the core dimension. The Razorjack character and so on and so forth. I put so many elements in place because I really was so confident about the first issue that I assumed that it would be an ongoing story and I didn’t want to run out of ideas halfway through the 100th issue. Unfortunately, I’ve only got to the third issue.

(Laughter)

But I’ve got enough there to carry me into the 100th issue if I do get there. And the nice thing is that once you have an idea, you suddenly see offshoots and if you come up with another idea, there’s another offshoot. It’s like multiple strands of spaghetti. They all start crossing over and every time a new character hits an old character, it hints at a potential new storyline. So, yeah, there’s loads more stories to be told in the Razorjack universe.

(fantasy, monsters, violence and oh, looks like some sexual overtones in there too, oh we love it! A page from Razorjack by and (c) John Higgins, published Com.x)

MB: Do you ever regret not coming back to writing sooner? I know you’ve done bits and bobs haven’t you, but…or were you always writing behind the scenes?

JH: I think the thing that I liked about doing Razorjack was that I was everything. I was the publisher, I was the artist, I was the secretary, I was a very bad advertising secretary and I was writing. In some ways, particularly now it’s been collected, I feel satisfied and almost sated by that opportunity. And now I’m just actively looking for mainstream projects where I’m only responsible for the art. There are a couple of things on the horizon and a couple of things that I’ve been talking to Matt [Smith] at 2000 AD about, which will be exciting if they come off. And I’ll not have to worry about the writing. It’ll be a fun thing. I can take a breather and relax and let someone else do the hard work. And writing is really hard work.

MB: You have to wonder how the likes of Pat Mills, John Wagner and Alan Grant do it, year after year, coming up with ideas and turning them into stories?

JH: I think that it’s about talent and ability, but also, importantly, discipline. The fact that they sit down each day and have to do for themselves x amount of hours and they probably do that five, six or seven days a week. Garth Ennis, I know, walks around with one of those moleskin notebooks and whenever he thinks of something he’ll jot it down, whenever he hears a nice piece of dialogue, he’ll jot that down. The fact that some of those things may never appear in his work, that’s neither here nor there. The point is that he’s constantly working. That’s the thing with John and Alan and Pat. It’s just an ongoing process for them and after awhile, I think that it does become automatic because every single thing you look at, there is a way of…everything can be new, everything can be fresh to a writer or an artist.

(Stone Warriors by John Higgins; click the image for the larger picture)

MB: I suppose it’s not just about core ideas, about having ideas, it also about dramatising them. Because that’s the trick, isn’t it? Turning an idea into a story.

JH: Yeah. Very much so. Neil Gaiman was on the Jonathan Ross radio show the other week and I’ve known Neil for a very long time, although I haven’t seen him for a very long time either. We more or less started at the same time, particularly at DC. He was saying that people keep coming up to him and telling him they’ve got a great idea and what they suggest is that he can go away and use their idea to write a story, and they’ll split the proceeds fifty, fifty. Of course, he said on the show that it was an absurd notion, that, yes, everyone can have great ideas, but the hard work is in sitting down and making them work.

MB: I wonder if the guys that approach Neil Gaiman and get knocked back approach other writers? You know, Alan Moore’s shopping in Sainsburys and feels this hand on his shoulder. And, as he’s turning to see who it is, he hears a voice say, ‘Alan, I’ve got this great idea for a sequel to Watchmen.’ Sorry, silly digression. You were talking about the creative process.

JH: Plus, I reckon there are only so many ideas. If you and I started throwing ideas around, we’d be coming up with stories that had already been told as Greek myths or by Shakespeare. Someone else will have had your idea before you. But the difference between an idea and a story that appears in a book or a comic strip is in the way that writer has interpreted it. That’s what makes it completely fresh and new.

(a beautiful, painted fantasy image by John)

MB: I suppose there are two things here that are analogous to what you were saying about art. The first is putting the hours in. Writers work. The second is this notion of putting your own spin on things. It’s almost like art, in that each artist tends to have their own quirks, their own visual signature. Given the same idea, Neil Gaiman and John Wagner would each give that idea a very different spin.

JH: I think that’s right. Give a creator a one-line subject matter to work with and they’ll each do something completely different with it. And, in some ways, you know that they will probably purposefully turn that idea completely and utterly on its head, just as a pride thing as much as anything.

You can keep up with John on his own website here., while Com.x can be found here. You can also check out Matt’s own blog where at the moment he is manfully powering through his 100 Days, 100 Cartoonists project as we speak. FPI would like to than both John and Matt for sharing their time and thoughts with us.