Al Ewing is one of 2000 AD’s rising stars. In the last seven years he’s written numerous Future Shocks and Terror Tales (these one-off twist-in-the-tale stories have long been the acknowledged route into the comic for fledgling creators; even Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman tried their hand on Future Shocks once upon a time) and has now graduated onto longer series and semi-regularly scripting Judge Dredd. He’s also written scripts for the title’s younger sibling, the Judge Dredd Megazine.
Ewing is renowned among 2000 AD fans for the twisty-turny nature of his stories and his out-there settings, ideas and characters. His longer series include Tempest (for the Judge Dredd Megazine; about a ninja judge, or is it?), Dead Signal (about a television star come bounty hunter with financial problems, or is he?) and Zombo (I don’t know, or do I? No, honestly, I don’t, as I haven’t read it yet.)
(Tempest graces the cover of the Judge Dredd Megazine, written by Al Ewing, art by Jon Davis-Hunt, published Rebellion)
As well as writing for 2000 AD and the Megazine, Ewing has contributed several one-off strips to Panini’s Marvel Heroes title. He’s also written novels for Abaddon Books, a publishing imprint set up by Rebellion, the computer games company that also own 2000 AD. In this interview, Ewing talks about.all sorts of stuff. Take it away, Al:
Matt: Your career seems to have accelerated somewhat recently. You’re writing Dredd and working on stuff for publishers other than Rebellion. What’s the state of your head? Over the moon, amazed that it’s all finally happening or just weary and anxious and constantly playing catch-up to hit deadlines?
Al: All of the above. Happiness tempered with the knowledge that it would be very easy to trip over myself now, and that I need to get faster and not start sitting back and resting. It’s not like a computer game where I’ve earned the ‘writing Dredd’ badge and can knock out a script by hammering the space key. Every single thing I do, especially Dredd, especially now, has to be absolutely top quality, which can lead to a lot of second-guessing, blocking and slowdown, all of which I have to conquer. It’s a good feeling to be getting so much high-profile work, though.
Matt: How much reverence do you have for Dredd and his main writer, John Wagner, and how hard does that make writing the strip? Do you ever get ‘Dredd block’? Also, how much of a balancing act is honouring what came before while saying something new about Dredd and his world?
Al: I’ve got a great deal of reverence for Dredd, especially Wagner’s Dredd. I grew up reading the classic stories with Ron Smith on art, so it’s a bit like the archetypal American comic writer who gets to write Spider-Man or Superman. But, oddly, that doesn’t make it difficult to write. Or rather, I don’t get a Dredd block. I can close my eyes and at least get a rough idea of his dialogue and what he’d probably do in a given situation, like watching a favourite old TV show play out in my head. The trouble starts when I’ve sent off a pitch and I suddenly realise at the script stage that Dredd wouldn’t do that, and then I need to either change the plot very subtly or fix it with dialogue.
So far, dialogue’s been the easy part, especially with Dredd. He’s one of those characters that actually helps you write him, like the Hulk, in that his words and actions seem relatively obvious once you get to the given moment. And I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be the only writer to say that. All of that’s due to thirty years of John Wagner’s perfect characterisation, although like all other Dredd writers I’m sure my interpretation of him is very different, mostly because all the characters who aren’t Dredd don’t have thirty years of characterisation behind them, especially the ones I made up. So they, in particular, have a tendency to SHOUT A LOT aka the Tempest school of drama. MY MUTANT BRANE WILL DETECT TREACHERY chiz chiz chiz etc
(Actually I have an ambition now to have a Dredd villain that talks like Nigel Molesworth i.e. “Dredd you are a wet and a weed and know 0. Plus under your helmet you hav a face like a squashed tomatoe as any fule kno, go to the bak of the class and write 10000000 lines.” But lukily Dredd 2 hav arrived and is making DER DER DER DER DER sound with his lawgiver. “Wot is this, blimey it is a fare cop i would also like a whelk stall to be taken into considerashun” sa evil head GRIMES but it is too late and he must go to the cubes wich is not far for St. Custards is now a merciless ISO BLOK we always knew it would hapen chiz chiz. Etc.)
Matt: How did you end up doing Dredd? Did you pitch or were you invited? And could you please tell us a little about the scripting process?
Al: I was invited. [2000AD and Megazine editor] Matt Smith basically told me he needed a ten-page Dredd for the Megazine, which became Koan. My writing process starts with a pitch to Matt, where I tell the story in as engaging a way as possible. For series or multi-parters, I do an episode breakdown and put in all the cliff-hangers, and for Tempest I did little breakdowns of the main characters as well. Matt has a look over that and suggests any changes.
Either I’m fine with them or, at the most, we’ll have a very brief back-and-forth about how best to implement them over the e-mail. After that, I sit down and write the script, dialogue first, blocking out what the panels will look like in my head. I’m usually not given a deadline, with the result that I’m a bit slow and perfectionist, but I’m working on that, honest, Guv etc.
There’s a rule Matt gave me that I still try and stick to, despite having seen it broken a billion times by hundreds of writers, which is no more than twenty-five words to a balloon, no more than three balloons or captions to a panel. A good rule with dialogue is the less words the better, especially with Dredd because he’s quite taciturn. Occasionally I’ll let an SFX or a ‘later’ caption break that, but not often. So I end up with a load of dialogue with little lines between them to denote the panel breaks, like this:
PAGE ONE:
DREDD: WELL, HERE I AM, SAYING SOME WORDS.
PERP: DIE, DREDD, DIE!
–
DREDD: THIS IS A DIFFERENT PANEL, AND I’M GOING TO CONTINUE SPEAKING.
PERP: OH NO, I’M BEING SHOT! BETTER HAVE SOME SFX HERE.
SFX: BANG!
–
DREDD: YOU SAID A MOUTHFUL, PUNK, A MOUTHFUL OF DIALOGUE… AND NOW TO
SHOUT SOME WORDS THAT NEED TO BE EMPHASISED IN BOLD FOR THE LETTERER!!
DREDD: AND SOMETIMES — DOUBLE HYPHEN — I NEED TO SHOUT EVEN LOUDER!!
DOUBLE EXCLAMATION MARK!!
The final job is to replace all those little hyphen breaks with panel descriptions, which can involve even more rewriting of the dialogue and juggling of where it goes. Then I put my name, address and e-mail on it with a little note for the prospective artist and off it goes to Matt.
Matt: We’ve talked a bit about Dredd. What non-Dredd stuff have you got coming up?
Al: Well might you ask! We’re currently seeing the results of a recent collaboration with Henry Flint on an original idea of his: Zombo! (ongoing in 2000 AD) Firmly in the ‘death planet’ genre, this is the story Henry always wanted to tell and I’ve been happily doing my bit in the telling of it, making sure to keep the essential Flint-ness while at the same time adding in my own weirdness where there’s room. As you can imagine, it’s completely batshit insane and very violent indeed, with some of the best art you’ve ever seen in your life. Working with Henry is an absolute joy and seeing his fresh pages come in makes the whole week sparkle like a fantastic diamond. Obviously the pressure’s on me to make sure the dialogue and the blocking of the scenes is as perfect as possible, but I seem to be doing okay.
Matt: Can you tell us more about the Flint/Ewing collaborative process and about Zombo?
(cover to 2000 AD Prog 1634 featuring Zombo, written by Al Ewing, art by Henry Flint, published Rebellion)
Al: I don’t want to do too many spoilers for Zombo, but I will say that he’s probably the character apart from Dredd that I’ve had the most fun writing, and I’m looking forward to reader reaction to the series. It’s the first ‘Death Planet’ story to come to 2000 AD in some time, and we’ve got all sorts of fun ways to kill off our cast of castaways. And Zombo himself is, I think, unlike any 2000 AD character who’s come before him, although if an enterprising reader points out that personality-wise he’s the spit of Maze Dumoir or Grudgefather or someone then I’ll have to eat those boastful words.
Working with Henry is a joy. He’s full of feedback and lets me know any time he’s not happy with anything in the script, which is fair enough seeing as the character was originally invented by him, although I’ve really enjoyed giving him a voice and getting inside his rotting head. Basically, Henry sent Matt a pitch for a ten-parter, which I tightened to eight parts, suggesting various changes, some of which made the cut because they were good ideas and some of which didn’t because they weren’t. (Like setting the entire series in the PITS OF HELL. Oh dear. I’m quite glad that didn’t make it through now.)
So the plot is a gloopy mixture of me and Henry (and I will bestow a bag of chocolate shillings on the first person who can correctly identify which of us came up with what). Then I come up with the dialogue, which involves fleshing out the weird universe of Zombo and giving the half-man, half-zombie himself his distinctive turn of phrase, at which point the whole thing becomes a little more mine. Then, of course, Henry turns in his utterly glorious and splendiforic artwork and puts my feeble verbiage to shame. Henry seems to like the hints I’m dropping at how his universe operates, and in turn he’s coming up with ideas for a future series, which I’m looking at and thinking of ways to extrapolate and flesh out, and the whole wonderful cycle continues…
That’s not really answered the question, but the collaboration so far has been a big lovely soup and it’s difficult to tell where I end and Henry begins. I think the best analogy is that he fathered the child Zombo from his own seething brainpan and then sent it to a filthy boarding school which I run in order that it be educated, taught to walk and talk, and quite possibly sodomised violently by the prefects.
(a very hungry Zombo in 2000 AD, written by Al Ewing, art by Henry Flint, published Rebellion)
Matt: Please tell us about how your Marvel Heroes work came about and about the strips you’ve done for them so far.
Al: My Marvel Heroes work came about when I pitched a Spiderman story at a pitching contest at the Bristol convention on a whim. Ed Hammond at Panini liked it a lot, but I didn’t apply to do any Speccy Spidey strips as the excellent Ferg Handley had that sewn up at the time, and still does as far as I know. So I dillied and dallied and eventually Ed came at me to ask if I’d do something for Marvel Heroes, and the rest is infamy. I’ve only done three strips for them, a Hulk, an Iron Man and an Ant-Man story which essentially treats the character as a comedy hero, like Bananaman. For various reasons that I won’t go into, that’s probably going to be it, at least for the foreseeable future.
I’m very proud of each of those scripts. I wrote those characters to the best of my ability, and it was good to be able to leave my grubby fingerprints on my old childhood favouritest hero, the Hulk, if only for a few brief pages. I’ve got a bit of a thing about kids’ comics like the Panini imprint – it’s a place for the kind of stories that I think are desperately, incredibly important and yet completely undervalued within the industry. Stories unplugged from continuity, suitable for all ages, imaginative, vibrant, exciting, inspiring, all wrapped up in one issue and great value for money. In fact, the Marvel Adventures line is probably the thing that gives me the most hope for the comics industry at the moment simply because it exists, it’s growing and it’s great. It’s rapidly becoming the ‘real’ Marvel Universe in my eyes, just by unassumingly being so ace. I’m hoping this new Batman cartoon leads to DC trying something similar, and judging by a couple of new titles that have come out they might well be.
So, yeah, if I die and that’s the only Marvel work I ever do, I’ll be happy with that. I could have done a lot worse.
Matt: Does that mean you’re going to be staying with the Brit’ comics industry for a while or are you keeping an eye out for the first ride to Marvel/DCville and uber-success a la Moore/Morrison/Milligan et al?
Al: I don’t think it’s an either/or situation. If there’s work, I’m interested in it. I suppose if you’re putting a gun to my head I’d be happier consolidating my work on Dredd by getting more work on Dredd, at least this year, but that doesn’t mean that if an opportunity to go off to America presents itself that I won’t do it. There’ve been murmurings recently from certain quarters, but it’s all far too up in the air to go blabbering about it right now.
Matt: Are Zombo and Dredd it for 2000 AD/The Meg at the mo? What else is bubbling under? And what happened to the second books of Dead Signal (not Dead Eyes!) and Tempest? And will you ever pen any more Future Shocks/Terror Tales/Tales of the Black Museum or are they just do damn hard?
Al: They’re not hard, but they don’t pay as well as other options that are now on my table. I could knock out a five-page future shock, but if I can get a six-page Dredd accepted instead, that’s an extra page and it looks a bit better on the CV. A nine-page Black Museum doesn’t have the CV value, but it does have nine pages, but a ten-page Megazine Dredd trumps it, although it’s not in the prog so it feels a bit less ‘canonical’ than the six-pager, which is where juicy five-part Dredds like my upcoming Rehab come into play and so on up a league ladder of things I want to do until you get to a Dredd Mega-Epic or my own ongoing property. The ongoing property is probably the thing most within my reach at the moment, although there’s yet to be one that’s ongoing, which brings me to Dead Signal 2: Deader Signal.
Matt was of the opinion last time I talked to him that it didn’t need a sequel. I could certainly carry on the story, and that was the original plan, but doing more Dead Signal seems a bit less important as time goes on. Unless Matt takes a look at the demand for it in the future and asks me to create more supply, Marc’s going to be left with those myriad other characters who ended on a cliffhanger and then regretted it when their new adventure never arrived.
Tempest 2, on the other hand, is a different matter. It’s been through the wringer a wee bit – there was a planned second series that was nixed on various grounds, so I’m keeping a couple of bits of that, like the Golden Age Tempest, back for later. It’s being replaced with something just as insane that’s mad in a different way – it’s still Tempest and Deathfist squaring up, though, and it’s still packed full of martial arts action, including a fight between the protagonist and an actual kung fu panda that will allow me to work out all my bitterness against pandas. Plus, I’m pretty sure the ending will be – for regular 2000AD readers at least – the most controversial thing I’ve ever done. NOW ALL BUY.
(Dredd from the Megazine Prog 1627, written by Al Ewing, art by Ben Oliver, published Rebellion)
Matt: What projects, comics or otherwise, do you have to coming up (pimp, boy, pimp)?
Al: Well, there’s various Dredd stories – including a Sex Olympics tale and the aforementioned ‘Rehab’, which is five episodes of lunacy – there’s Tempest, which I’ve talked about, my new novel from Abbadon, Death Got No Mercy, which is about a man who punches bears to death facing an entire city of maniacs out for his steaming guts. what else? That upcoming American project – although that’s a bit of a slow burner and also a chicken that hasn’t yet hatched. It’s arguable whether it’s even been fertilised. Best not to jinx it. The sequel to El Sombra. A creator-owned novel, provisionally titled Odessaland. An idea I waved at the States but will probably instead go to 2000AD. oh, there’s all sorts. I’m not short of work, and I’ll be in the prog on and off all year, and there’s always something going on somewhere.
Matt: Which strip/project/piece of your writing are you proudest of? And why? And where do you hope to take your career next? What are your goals for the next five years, say?
Al: I’m probably proudest of the comics I’ve written for kids. There’s something joyous about writing a comic for an eight-to-twelve year old – it just feels free. Liberating. It’s nice to have something that’s just straight fun, without necessarily tying into anything or leading on to or from anything — something that anyone of any age can pick up and enjoy. I’d like to do more of that, but I’ll go where the work is, and right now the work is in a much gorier direction. As 2000AD readers are currently finding out.
FPI would like to thank both Al and Matt for sharing their time with us and allowing us to post it up here for our readers to enjoy. You can check out Al’s work in The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic and the Megazine on a regular basis as well as following him on Twitter, while over on his own blog Matt is currently in the midst of his 100 Days, 100 Cartoonists marathon, which you should really check out.
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