The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Tony Lee has been a writer for over twenty years and has worked in pretty much every medium, but in recent years has chosen to concentrate mainly on comics. In this interview, he talks mostly about his work for 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, as well as his experience of scripting Doctor Who comics for Panini and most recently for IDW. Questions by Matt Badham, interview copy-edited by Matt Badham and Tony Lee.

Matt: Tony, in our Megazine interview, published last year, we concentrated a lot on Stalag 666 (which was published in 2000 AD). I thought it might be nice to talk about your other 2000 AD and Megazine strips in more detail.

Your first sale to Rebellion (2000 AD’s owners) was a Tales from the Black Museum. Were you surprised by the sale, did you enjoy writing the strip and what do you think you did differently here that you hadn’t done in previous 2000 AD submissions that had been rejected (I know it’s a Megazine story, but you know what I mean)?

Tony: Well to be honest, it was a totally different kettle of fish from the usual sending in of a story. I’d been speaking to [2000 AD and Megazine editor] Matt Smith for a while by that point and I had a pretty good portfolio of work behind me from Marvel, Markosia, Titan etc and it helped when I spoke to him because I was able to go ‘What are you looking for?’ and from that answer work up a few ideas. One of which was the Black Museum tale The Terrible Tea-Time Torture Show. From there I was able to put together a story that Matt liked. And then accepted, which indeed was a shock to me, to be honest. After seventeen years of unsolicited submissions, you start to feel that getting in would actually spoil it! We had a little bit of back and forth, but in the end we made what I think is a rather nice Black Museum piece. And, of course, with the door open, I was able to pitch other ideas.

(looks like something he ate disagreed with him; a scene from Tales From the Black Museum: the  Incredible Teatime Torture Show, written by Tony Lee, art Vince Locke, published Rebellion)

I did enjoy writing that strip. It was always going to be simple fare but at the same time there is a dark humour to it that appealed. The ending was also a little obvious, but we deliberately did that to build the tension for the reader of just waiting for the axe to fall.

Matt: So…if the door was open…how much pitching did it take to get your next strip accepted, Citi-Def, I think, and were there any misfires along the way (strips that were abandoned)?

Tony: I think there were a few suggestions, areas of the Mega City that hadn’t really been looked at. I wanted to do a Long Walk (when judges retire they usually leave the city to ‘take law to the lawless until death’; no pottering around in the garden for retired Judges – Joe) judge in the Undercity and unfortunately that had already been done by Tempest (which hadn’t started publication by that point), but I really liked the idea of looking at the long walkers.

I also realised that the Citi-def units (a civilian militia in Dredd’s world – Joe) were woefully out of the spotlight. The only Citi-def story I could even find was in ’86, so I spoke to Matt about it. I wanted to see if there was something I could do where we took them out of their element and threw them somewhere they didn’t know [NB: Tony’s Citi-def strip was set in the Cursed Earth]. As a kid I used to play a role-playing game called Paranoia where you took people who’d lived in a bubble all their lives and stuck them outside. I remember seeing players screaming in fear at trees, simple things that they’d never seen, and I wanted a bit of this in my story.

And as for the script, there were three drafts of the pitch before we even got to that part. We needed to ensure every character had a voice, and that the setting was correct. There were things removed, but I can’t say what because I want to use them in later issues…

Matt: Some (most?) writers hate pitching. Some don’t mind. Where do you stand? Have you ever had to change a story when you started scripting and realised something had been overlooked at pitch stage (by you, by the editor, by everyone!)? Have any of your stories for 2000 AD/the Meg’ changed between pitch/script?

Tony: I hate pitching. I’m terrible at it.

I can work the high concept, I can write a detailed synopsis, but my problem is that I never know how much to put in. I get notes from US editors saying ‘no more than a page’ because they’re so busy, yet I see things like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman pitch and it’s a novel in it’s own right. And don’t even get me started on Alan Moore…

Pitches to scripting though, there shouldn’t be that much of a jump. The jump comes between pitch to issue breakdown. That is when you realise that some of your ideas just aren’t workable, and that’s the point you chop and change. The moment you have it in an issue breakdown, it’s literally page-by-page. It’s a lot easier to work from that as a blueprint.

One thing about high concepts: there aren’t that many that end up as what the writer first envisioned…

(the gymkhana in the Cursed Earth was a bit different from what the Pony Club girls had been used to… Tony’s Citi-Def, art by Jackademus, published Rebellion)

Matt: Will Citi-Def return?

Tony: I hope so. But it depends on reader response. I thought when I wrote Stalag that I’d love to use a few of the characters that survive and flesh out the Lizard/Terran war, but currently? I’d be happy to never hear its name again.

On a serious note though, Citi-Def had an open ending for a few of the characters so yeah, I’d love to do a second story. I love the Dreddverse. I don’t think I could do a Dredd, but I’m happy to play in the sandbox.

Matt: For the benefit of those who have writing aspirations, could you take us through the process of approaching and pitching to an editor, from first concept to pitch to breakdowns to scripting to rewrites?

Tony: To be honest, no. (Laughs)

Not because I don’t want to, but because it’s different every time. But I will try to explain it a little.

When you contact an editor, it’s one of two ways. Either you say ‘I have this idea. Let me tell you it’, or you’re saying ‘Hi, I’m a writer. Got anything you need written?’ And the story of pitching already splits into two. For editor one will either say no, or ask to hear the pitch. Editor two will either say no, or give you a couple of characters to consider. And then you come back with ideas, but you have the advantage with editor two that he or she, by giving you the suggestions, wants to hear what you’ve done.

To start off, most people go with a ‘high concept’. This is a twenty second or less soundbite that gets across your basic idea. For example ‘What if Peter Pan grew up?’ is the high concept of Hook. ‘There are a load of snakes and they’re on a plane’ is another. My Stalag 666 pitch was literally ‘It’s the Great Escape meets Merry Christmas Mister Lawrence, in space.’ The lizard villains hadn’t even been created at this point.

From this they either tie you to an anthill and tape your screams to sell on iTunes, or they go ‘Tell me more’, which means ‘Tell me everything.’ They want the synopsis. You explain, in detail (but not too much detail – ahh, but how much detail is too much, and there we start the problems again) what the story is. And, if it has an ending? You tell the ending. An editor does not want to see ‘…but how will they escape…?’ at the end of a pitch. They want to see ‘…and at the end the day so-and-so is saved and the coward finally redeems himself by ramming a spike up the head zombie’s ass.’

They will usually hate this synopsis. They will ask for changes. This might happen several times.

And again, this is where we split once more. Some editors will green-light a script. Some will ask for an issue breakdown, which is a more detailed version of the detailed version. This is actually a good thing for you as a writer, as it nails your pace down and, when you do start scripting, it assists you greatly.

Once you hit the script, again you can do it a variety of ways. God loves infinite diversity, so the poets say. And God knows there’s enough diversity in how we all script. I script in a panel description/dialogue kind of way, full script. And of course things will turn up that need to be changed.

And then we have a finished script. And by then your editor’s left, a new one has started, and he wants the main lead to be black and gay. And so the synopsis starts all over again…

(a very dapper looking Tony Lee)

Matt: Do you think you’ll ever feel differently about Stalag? And, just out of interest, I’m assuming that some of the negative criticism has actually helped you as a writer but…

…understatement of the year here…

…do you think that some people have kind of forgotten that there’s a person behind the scripts or maybe just lost perspective?

Tony: As I’ve said on the 2000 AD boards, a writer needs negative reviews of work because if it was all bollocks sycophantic lip service, the work would stay crappy as they wouldn’t learn from their mistakes. I’ve seen certain ‘creator boards’ where every piece of crap they release has fans spouting how it’s the best book since the Bible, when it’s obviously a plot-holed clichéd piece of shit.

And I know I can write just as bad, and that’s why I need people to tell me.

When I started with 2000 AD, various writers said to me ‘Don’t read the boards’, but I did nevertheless. And there are times when I regret it, and there are times I think ‘Why the fuck am I even trying to be a writer?’ even though pretty much everything else I’ve written has gone down a storm. But 2000 AD is a jewel in a crown. It’s a higher bar to reach and as such I have to be better.

And the people who say Stalag is crap? Are refreshingly honest about it. They explain why. And I’ll admit, several of the issues aren’t with the script. Here and there we have had communication issues between me and Jon [Davis-Hunt, the artist]. The biggest one was where Corden and Andrews are electrocuted. I never wrote that they exploded, but I also didn’t mention that Corden was burned bad and alive the following week. Instant continuity issue. It was my bad. And I’ve had a couple of other things like that, where I’ve had the whole story in my head and I’ve forgot that Jon gets it in bite-sized chunks. And this made us look silly a couple of times. Sorry, Jon.

And of course there are the guys who actually do like it, who actually take the time to tell me. That’s incredibly gratifying – a week or so after the first couple of issues came out I actually spoke to Matt Smith going ‘Am I really this bad? Should we be pulling this?’ but the people who liked the story gave me hope once more.

I think that there are people out there that forget that there’s a living breathing human behind the tale, but that’s just human nature. We all do it. I’ve said things are crap – there are movies I hated, even walked out of, but I know people who love those movies. I never thought of how the writer of the movie would feel to hear that I hated it. Probably wouldn’t care, really. Unless I went really batshit crazy and sent him some shit in the post.

Yeah. That was the point where Stalag was irrevocably soured for me. For someone, no matter how fucking mental they may be, to send me that because they hated the story so? I think I’d have trouble writing in that world again.

That said, I did have an idea about some of the survivors, so perhaps I’ll pitch it some time as a great big ‘fuck you’ to my darling fan.

Matt: Oh, and why couldn’t you do a Dredd?

Tony: Oh, don’t get me wrong – I don’t think I could do a Dredd yet. Currently there are a lot of damned good writers doing good things with him and Al Ewing is going to be the next big thing in the Dreddverse. He’s nailed what Dredd should be. I’m nowhere near that yet.

But I know the world. I even created the plot a few years back to the first Mongoose Judge Dredd RPG game, ‘The Sleeping Kin’. Go look, I’m in the credits. So I’ve known the world for years. I still have the folders upon folders of reference I got for that story.

But Dredd has enough people playing with him. I want to look at the other areas. Psi Division, the Wally Squad, the Citi Def, the long walkers, the other cities, I’d love to do a Chopper-free Skysurf story, or even something playing on the Chopper mythos. I’d love to look at the Undercity, some more of the places Pat created in the Cursed Earth, look at the Sov Block, Titan, Lunar-1 – I’d love to create another Armitage, or Anderson…

Dredd can wait.

Matt: You’ve alluded to Poogate, where some fan (if he/she can really be called a fan) sent a letter smeared with their own excrement to an old address of yours. Are the police involved?

And, on a completely different note, we’ve talked about Stalag, Black Museum and Citi-Def. Please tell me more about Necrophim, your ‘Point Blank in Hell’ story that recently ran in 2000 AD.

Tony: The police were involved, but the offending letter had been burned by the time I found out about it. But I’d had a couple of similar sounding blog comments and I had the IP’s, so they were sent to the police as well. But, to be honest? I don’t expect anything to come of it. I’d actually like to put it behind me now. It wasn’t a good time in my life. Having a letter like that sent to you isn’t a good thing, but to have someone else, someone you’re close to, open it? That’s taking the piss a little.

I’ll be honest. You send me a critical email or bad review? I’ll shrug, accept the points it makes and move on. You send me something like this? You raise the stakes. And be glad I never found out who it was, because I’d probably be in jail by now.

(a disturbing panel from Tony’s Necrophim, lovely monochrome art by Lee Carter, published Rebellion)

Anyway, Necrophim. It’s great fun. But I can’t give away too much as it’s all twists within turns. Basically we’re in modern day Hell, which is still saying that it looks like a Giger drawing. But we follow one of the Necrophim, the Seraphim that fell to Hell with Lucifer. His name is Uriel and he’s one of Lucifer’s commanders. But they’re noting that as the years go on, Lucifer is getting more and more insane. Armageddon was supposed to have been and gone, and here they still are. And Lucifer’s losing it.

Uriel’s friends are considering revolt, his lover is sleeping with his rival, Neboron, behind his back, he’s being courted as an asset to Heaven by a covert angel called Raziel and he’s being set up by his enemies to take the fall. A 5-issue prologue has recently finished in 2000 AD. Book One, ‘Hell’s Prodigal’ is yet to come and there’s some real devious shit going on in it.

And of course it doesn’t hurt that the art is beautiful and drawn by Lee Carter.

Matt: Glad that the police were involved, it’s the principle you know, and with that, let’s move swiftly on…

Have you taken any of the criticisms about Stalag that you agreed with and applied them to making Necrophim better? Or is it that they’re two very different strips and this isn’t possible?

Tony: They’re two different scripts. And I’d started Necrophim back in May 2008, before Stalag came out. There was some concern as to whether I should change it, but I decided at the end of the day that if I think I’ve written a good story, and my editor thinks so too, then I shouldn’t then start to try to double-guess myself.

(David Tennant’s Doctor meets the “Dandy and the Clown” in Tony Lee’s The Forgotten)

Matt: I wanted to ask you about your Doctor Who stuff as well. Last year, you wrote Doctor Who: The Forgotten for IDW. How did that come about?

Tony: I’d been talking to Chris Ryall, the Editor in Chief of IDW for a couple of years before this, mainly about a variety of other projects and, by pure chance, at one point, while updating him on what I’d been doing, I’d mentioned to him that I’d done a three-part Doctor Who story called ‘F.A.Q’ for Panini’s Doctor Who Magazine, a total of twenty seven pages of Tenth Doctor and Rose. This was mid-2006.

Fast forward about six months, and IDW start going for the Doctor Who license from the BBC. Because he knows me and more importantly he knows that I’ve already written the characters, Chris invites me to pitch a couple of ideas. I throw one into the mix that involved the Tenth meeting the Fourth at a 1921 Hollywood party, and we bounce it back and forth. And then I hear from Chris that Gary Russell is doing the first six-parter, and that my story would have to be put on the back-burner. I have no ego where Gary is concerned – he’s one of the mainstays of Who, and I was happy to step back and be a fan again.

Then, about six months later, I get an email from Chris saying they had a green light on a second six parter and what did I have for them? I wanted to do something that showed the newer fan the joys of the old Doctors, so I pitched The Forgotten. I expected to be shot down by the BBC, but in fact they seem to have liked it!

Matt: For the benefit of those who have yet to pick up the recently released trade collection and aren’t in the know, could you give us a quick rundown (the high concept line perhaps) of The Forgotten’s plot?

Tony: Hah! Good luck with that. Um, let’s see. Trapped in a strange Museum, The Tenth Doctor and Martha must regain the memories of all his past incarnations in the form of eight page stories, while a strange bearded man tries to kill them with a variety of classic villains. But just as you think you’ve worked it out you realised that things aren’t what they seem, the memories aren’t just lost from the past, and the baddie is an incredibly familiar Time Lord.

But that doesn’t even scratch the surface. I mentioned I was crap at pitches, yes? (Laughs)

(ten Doctors in Tony Lee’s The Forgotten, art by Kelly Yates, published IDW)

Matt: Hang on, is it just me, or have you, on your second outing writing a Doctor Who strip, managed to get a fan-wank dream of a story (all the Doctors; loads of classic villains) past the BBC?

Tony: Absolutely.

Matt: Cool.

How much fun was it to write Doctor Who? Who was your favourite Doctor to bring to life? And did Tony Lee, the kid who watched the show, have a hand in the scripts (i.e. did you get to put in any fun moments that have been with you since childhood, any watching the show and thinking wouldn’t it be cool if the Doctor did (your own ideas here)… moments)?

Tony: Tony Lee, the kid who watched the show is Tony Lee, the guy who wrote the stories. I couldn’t have done it any other way. I needed to bring back all these memories to make sure that the stories sounded exact.

And as for what was my favourite? I couldn’t tell you. There were parts I loved in all of them. Ian Chesterton’s sarcastic comments in 1, Jamie singing the first verse of ‘I am the Doctor’ in 2, the Brigadier/Doctor wordplay in 3, the lunacy of the story in 4, Having the Judoon in 5, the court case and obvious ‘Trial of a Time Lord’ links in 6, 7′s dialogue with Ace, 8′s throwaway line on how he wasn’t half human. Actually 8 was my second favourite story as I also got to put very solid blocks into when the Time War was on. But my favourite one was the 9th Doctor at the Christmas Day 1914 football match in WW1, a story I originally pitched to Panini almost five years ago.

And then you have the Tenth Doctor story and it’s not just a bookend. The entire 6th issue is set in that one and it’s a rollercoaster.

It was incredibly fun to write. And seeing each issue when they were finished was a dream come true. And by pure chance FAQ was released as a Panini trade at the same time as part of The Betrothal Of Sontar, which was a nice addition.

The best part is when you spend you life watching a show and going ‘if only he did this!’. Well, I get to make him do that.

(cover to Doctor Who: the Betrothal of Sontar which includes some of Tony’s earlier Who tales, published Panini)

Matt: Two things particularly jump out at me on reading your answer: prompting a question and also an observation that you might want to comment on.

Do you have to be a fan to write Dredd, Doctor Who, any licensed character well?

Quote: ‘…my favourite one was the 9th Doctor at the Christmas Day 1914 football match in WW1, a story I originally pitched to Panini almost five years ago.’

Nothing’s wasted when you’re a writer…

Tony: Nothing is EVER wasted. You just need to be patient.

I’d say you do need to be a fan, but that’s a personal bias. I’ve seen incredible stories about licensed characters that were written by people with only a passing knowledge, but, having said that, people who read the character are fans, and they’ll see if you don’t know your stuff.

If not a fan, then at least well read in the subject.

Matt: You like both the old and new series don’t you? Do you see them as all the same thing, rather than classic Who and new Who (putting the Judoon in a Peter Davison story seems to suggest that you do)?

Tony: Any old fan sees them as the same thing. New fans find it harder. But the Tenth states that he knows the Judoon, we’ve not seen them before, so it seems a logical conclusion that someone back in the olden days met them. And even the Fifth knows them and what they’re capable of, so perhaps he’s known them all the way back to the First?

(a very Talons of Weng Chiang looking Doctor Who written by Tony Lee, art by Paul Grist, published IDW)

Matt: What next for Tony Lee and, in particular, please tell me about the Doctor Who stuff you’ve got coming up? It sounds very exciting.

Tony: Well, the Doctor Who stuff [a one-shot and an ongoing series, both from IDW] is taking up a massive amount of my time. I’ve just cleared the hump though. I’ve been writing two issues a month to ensure that the [various] art teams can get a jump on the schedule, and because of this I’ve been writing two separate stories. The first one is a two-parter, the one after is a four-parter, so I’ve been writing issues 1 and 3, and then issues 2 and 4, etc. It’s surreal writing characters talking about the events of the previous issue when that previous issue hasn’t even been scripted. But that’s the joy of the incredibly detailed issue plan I sent IDW when I first pitched it. The average pitch is a page, about 4,500 words. This came in at over 6,000 words!

So I’m writing Doctor Who. I’m currently writing a two-parter for issues 7 and 8 called ‘Tessaract’ that’s purely set in the TARDIS, as it’s barely been seen for the first six issues. I’m getting ready for the San Diego Comic Con, and I’m working on From The Pages Of Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula: Harker, which is my big exciting original graphic novel that I’m doing for AAM/Markosia with Neil Van Antwerpen and Peter-David Douglas. It’s not only looking great, but we’re getting introductions from noted Dracula and Sherlock Holmes academics like Leslie S. Klinger (The New Annotated Dracula) and the writing partnership of Ian Holt and Dacre Stoker, Bram’s Great Grand-nephew! Which kinda gives it a backhanded Stoker approval, I suppose! In addition to that my Robin Hood book Outlaw: The Legend Of Robin Hood comes out in the summer, and already I have several book festivals and events to attend. I’m currently working out the third in the ‘Heroes and Heroines’ line of books that Outlaw is in, and apart from that I’m just writing, writing, writing, getting ready to start Book Two of Necrophim for 2000 AD, trying to convince them to do a second book of Citi-Def, doing a couple of book adaptations and sorting out the books for 2010, like Journal, and Dodge & Twist and suchlike…

It’s never dull!

FPI would like to thank both Tony and Matt for sharing their time and thoughts with us. You can keep up with Tony Lee via his Twitter and his website is here; Matt’s Citizen Badham blog can be enjoyed here and his Twitter is here.