(a page from the wonderful history-biography-literary Alice in Sunderland by and (c) Bryan Talbot)

PÓM: What made you decide you wanted to do Alice in Sunderland, which is after all a fairly densely packed work, and it’s fair to say unlike anything that had gone before?

BT: I’ve never done anything like it and probably never will again, though I have used the presentation style I developed for it – me as narrator in black and white on a collaged background – a couple of times since in short strips, such as the history of British comics I did for the Guardian. I’d been wanting to do something based around Alice for about twenty years, though not an adaptation of the story. I’d been accumulating books on Carroll and so forth. The original Tenniel illustrations are something that’s fascinated me since I was a child. The second issue of Brainstorm in 1976 was partly a homage to Looking Glass.

About ten years ago we moved to Sunderland when my wife, Dr Mary M Talbot, started working for the university here and I’d not been here very long before I started to hear about Carroll’s links with the place. I discovered a book called A Town Like Alice’s by local scholar Michael Bute that documented many of these links and was astounded at how this information has been wilfully ignored by other Carrollian scholars in favour of the Oxford dreamchild myth. Members of Carroll’s family lived here and for many years. He lived here himself for about three months every year and wrote parts of the Alice books in Whitburn, on Sunderland’s northern boundary, notably Jabberwocky, the most famous nonsense poem in the English language. And that’s just scraping the surface. With his penchant for puns and word games I’ve every reason to believe that he even derived the name Wonderland from Sunderland and that the roots of the Alice books are firmly established in the North East. This, I realized, was my way to do something based on Alice at last, though if I’d realized then the sheer amount of work I’d be doing on the book and how long it would take me I’d have run like hell.

(showcasing yet another different style of art in Bryan’s interpretation of Carroll’s Jabberwocky from Alice in Sunderland)

PÓM: Can I ask you what your wife Mary has her doctorate in, by the way?

BT: Linguistics. She specializes in feminist linguistics and has written several textbooks including a standard university text, ‘Language and Gender’. A chapter deconstructing the romance genre in her book ‘Fictions at Work’ inspired me to write the four part Dreaming arc Weird Romance.

PÓM: More recently, you’ve been diversifying a bit from what you’d been doing up ’til then. There’s Cherubs!, which you’re writing, but which is being drawn by another artist, Mark Stafford; and there’s The Naked Artist, a collection of scurrilous tales from the seamy underside of the comics business, which is a prose book, rather than a comic book (although with some cracking illustrations from Hunt Emerson – Joe). Is this an indication of more to come, or were you just trying to get a few things out of your system?

BT: I think it’s simply that I like writing and drawing different types of stories. I recently realised that both The Beatles and David Bowie must have been big influences on my work, in the way that they constantly reinvented themselves from album to album. They weren’t content to produce the same sort of material for years but pushed themselves to be inventive and work in different styles. As for Cherubs!, I’ve been a fan of Mark’s work for over twenty years and I think he’s an extremely talented bloke with a great sense of visual humour. It amazes me that he isn’t a nationally famous cartoonist. I thought that he’d be ideal to illustrate the Cherubs! script and he did a fantastic job. I wanted it to be drawn in a very cool indie cartoon style and he delivered. It’s a shame that Desperado couldn’t have promoted the book more (or, indeed, at all) as no one seems to have heard of it (I thought it was one of the funniest comics I’d read in years – Joe).

It would have sold well if it only had reached an audience. I mean – gonzo cherubs on the run from the first murder in heaven! Renegade archangels! Vampires! Vampire hunters! Fairy hookers! New York! Mark’s artwork! What’s not to like? Mark’s currently drawing the second and last book. I have a two page scene very early on concerning two down and outs which is a simultaneous pastiche of the opening scene of Waiting for Godot, the first scene of Bride of Frankenstein and the first scene of Terminator! And Mark drew the two tramps as Walter Matthau and Wilfred Bramble! Brilliant!

(heaven ain’t all its cracked up to be in Cherubs, written by Bryan Talbot, art by Mark Stafford, published Desperado)

I wrote The Naked Artist in the first month after finishing Alice. After such a long slog on something as complex as that it was a real joy to just bang out something light and funny. I don’t think of it as a ‘seamy underside’ kind of book. I mean, it’s not Comics Babylon or anything. It’s just a collection of humorous anecdotes, none of them nasty or pernicious. The only person who seems to have taken offence was Dave Simm, who objected to being portrayed as a blowhard. Someone pointed that section out to him at a convention, out of context. I don’t think that he could have read the rest of the book, otherwise he would have read several times that I don’t claim that these stories are true. What I DO say is that it IS true that these stories are TOLD. That was the idea of the book: a collection of the tales that are told in comic convention pro bars late at night, the urban legends of the comic industry. Old friend Hunt Emerson produced the great illustrations. Again, it’s a pity that Moonstone is such a tiny publisher almost no one noticed the book, though I gather it was nominated for a Harvey Award. I do have the concept and many notes for a prose novel (simply because I think this story would work better in prose than in comic form) but I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to writing it. I also have a proposal for a one hour TV play that a director is currently trying to get off the ground.

PÓM: There was also The Art of Bryan Talbot, published by NBM in 2007. How did that come about?

BT: I’m actually quite well-known in Italy, as I’ve been in print there for over twenty years and have done many signings there. An Italian publisher approached me about producing an art book and I started accumulating the illos and writing and editing the book. Then they were taken over and the new publisher’s policy didn’t include the production of art books. I’d already sold Metronome to NBM, who did occasionally do art books, so I offered it to them. It’s a collection of work from over forty years, including early fan work and a selection of previously unpublished life drawings. Last year my regular Italian publisher, Comma 22, produced a different art book, just using my black and white illustrations.

PÓM: I think the last of you more recent works I want to ask you about is Metronome, a wordless black and white story which you did under the pseudonym of Veronique Tanaka. I’m intrigued by this, as it really is such an intricate piece, and must have taken quite a bit of planning to make it work. Why did you do this the way you did it, and why did it have to be under a pseudonym?

BT: Metronome had been percolating in the back of my mind for about fifteen years, after I read a short story (in French) called La Plage by Alain Robbe-Grillet. It’s a haunting atmospheric piece but it’s existential – nothing happens in it! Here’s the story: some kids walk along a beach. That’s it. The waves come in, the children leave footprints in the sand, a seagull is forever swooping before them, a bell tolls in the distance. The mental images are repeated over and over. This gave me the idea to do a silent story consisting of repeated images that at first seem unconnected but, as the strip progresses, the images begin to assume meaning until a story emerges. And, unlike La Plage, there IS a story for the reader to perceive.

The strip is presented on a strict four by four panel grid, across sixty four pages and is in 4/4 time, a beat for every image. All the images are what’s going through the mind of a masturbating musician! The story of a doomed relationship. You’re right. It did take ages to work out and structure. The images are all drawn in an iconic manga style – simple, symbolic. So it was a very experimental piece. It didn’t even look like my work so I decided, as part of the experiment, to put it out under a pen name. At first I was playing with male Eastern European names for some reason, then realised, because of the style, that it had to be Japanese. Then I thought “why not push it a little more?” and it became Veronique Tanaka – the Franco-Japanese concept artist! It was a bit of a joke. If you look at page 31, where the couple are walking over the bridge, the shadows beneath it spell ‘HOAX’. To their credit, NBM didn’t try to persuade me to use my real name. This spring, two years later, I decided to ‘come out’ after being advised by NBM publisher Terry Nantier that we’d sell more copies if I did. Although it had some great reviews (I even did a couple of interviews in the persona of Veronique) it sold very little.

(a page from the fascinating silent graphic novel Metronome by ‘Veronique Tanaka’, now known to be Bryan, published NBM)

PÓM: How did Grandville come about?

BT: It’s really quite strange, for me at least. Usually I work on ideas for graphic novels for literally years before I structure and script them. I have several folders containing notes for GNs, one of which I’ve had for around fifteen years, and it’s still not reached critical mass – the point where all the groundwork has been done and the story and what it’s about has taken shape in my mind. Grandville was the complete opposite. After I’d finished Alice, at the time I was working on Metronome and The Naked Artist, I was leafing through a book on mid-nineteenth century illustrator Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard that I’ve had for years. He was a big influence on Alice illustrator John Tenniel. He did many caricatures of anthropomorphic animals in then contemporary dress and he worked under the pen name of ‘JJ Grandville’. The concept came to me in a flash: I immediately visualized a steampunk version of La Belle Epoch, fin de siècle Paris. Grandville could be the nickname of Paris, the biggest city in the world, in a world dominated by France and populated by anthropomorphic animals.

For some reason I knew from the start that it must be a detective story – perhaps thinking of the first detective, Eugène François Vidocq and Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. I’ve never done an anthropomorphic story before, a venerable comic genre and one which I loved when a child – especially the Rupert stories of Alfred E Bestall. I made several hasty notes on the spot, including a line that it should include a homage to Rupert’s village, Nutwood, and then let it percolate in my mind for a week or so. Over this week I came up with the basic plot shape and my protagonist, originally a rat (which, as you know, I’ve a fondness for) but decided on a large English working class badger – Detective-Inspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard. (I made the rat character his adjunct.) Then I sat down and scripted it, straight out, incredibly quickly over a few days. It was like taking dictation. Usually I spend much more time than this, working with thumbnail sketches and dialogue in pencil but this time I could envisage it all without props. I could see it and hear the characters’ voices. Of course I polished the script and tweaked the panel breakdowns as I was drawing it but it was a printout of this first draft that I worked from.

PÓM: Can you tell us a bit about Grandville?

BT: For a while I’d wanted to do one of those types of story which start small and parochial and just gets bigger and more exciting as it goes along. Grandville starts with LeBrock investigating an apparent suicide in a small English village (the Nutwood homage I mentioned). The investigation leads him to Paris where he finds himself on the trail of a ruthless death squad. He has to use all his deductive skills and his natural badger ferocity and tenacity to get to the shocking conspiracy at the heart of the matter and the explosive climax. Grandville is a detective thriller and the story fairly zaps along. I structured it to be very fast-paced. There’s also quite a lot of humour and several comics in-jokes, such as the cameo of Tintin’s Snowy as an opium addict in a den based on the famous Gustave Dore illustration and the French BD character Spirou as a bell boy. One panel is a pastiche of Edouard Manet’s painting ‘A Bar at the Folies Bergere’. It’s a fun read. The book is created to be a nice artefact in itself. It’s clothback with a stylised cover design, like an old-fashioned book. It has steampunk Art Nouveau endpapers and the printing quality is absolutely marvellous.

(the exciting opening chase scene with delightful steam powered vehicles in the streets of Paris in Bryan Talbot’s Grandville, published Jonathan Cape in the UK, Dark Horse in the US)

PÓM: Since we started this interview you’ve become Doctor Bryan Talbot, haven’t you?

BT: Absolutely, just two days ago as I write this. It came as a real bolt from the blue when I received the letter informing me of it, a few months ago – completely unexpected. As far as Paul Gravett knows this is the first doctorate to be given in the UK for work in the comics medium. Charles Schultz and Art Spiegelman have both received doctorates in the States. The award was an Honorary Doctorate of Arts for my ‘outstanding contribution to the Arts as a writer and graphic artist’ and, though all my major work was mentioned in the citation, really it was for producing Alice in Sunderland. Universities like to recognise work that’s been beneficial in some way to their communities.

The ceremony itself, held at Sunderland’s football ground, the Stadium of Light, was terrifying. I came on the stage last in the procession, just behind the Chancellor, Steve Cram, and had to sit there with the gowned academics while what seemed like hundreds of degrees were conferred, a total nervous wreck until I’d given my acceptance speech, after which I could relax. I’m used to speaking about comics in public but this was a completely different experience. Also, I wasn’t going to read the speech out for fear of losing my place so I did it from memory. Fortunately I actually remembered it all word perfect for the first time! My wife was there, my two sons Robyn and Alwyn, and my eldest granddaughter Tabitha, to whom Alice is dedicated, so it was a real family occasion.

(Bryan with his doctorate, pic from and (c) the Sunderland Echo)

PÓM: I’m very pleased to hear, as you mentioned back a bit, that you’re going to be doing more Grandville. Will they be coming out about once a year, or what?

BT: I’m not sure. It all depends on how much I stay put here to get on with it and how many invitations to conventions and comic festivals I accept. I’ve been trying to cut down on them but it’s hard to refuse, say, an invite to visit Australia or Brazil or a beautiful part of Italy, wherever. Perhaps they’ll be every year and a half or two years. I’ve already written the next album, Grandville Mon Amour, have pencilled about half of it and have the next two roughly planned out. I’m hoping to do a total of four or five, so they’ll be like a collection of Tintin albums. It all depends upon how the first two sell, though Grandville is being published in eight countries so that bodes well.

PÓM: As you mentioned your pet rats, do you still keep them?

BT: I’m afraid not. Not for around twelve years.

PÓM: How did you start keeping rats as pets, in the first place?

BT: When my youngest son, Alwyn, was twelve he got the notion that he wanted a pet rat. Like most people, we had preconceptions of what rats were like and spent several months trying to dissuade him, to no avail. One of his school reports was particularly good so to reward him we decided to get him one of the wretched things. I seem to remember that it cost about £13. That was for the rat, cage, feeding bottle, sawdust, everything. The rat actually only cost £1.50. It was a male white rat about five weeks old and it was so cute and intelligent that it immediately became the family pet. He named it Harpo. It used to sit on my shoulder as I worked at the drawing board and would join us on the settee as we watched TV at night. After he died we got another. We had around eight altogether, serially. Rats have a very short life span, around three years. After a while we just got sick of nursing them to death, it got too upsetting. Without the rats, especially Harpo and Beatrix, the second one, I couldn’t have done Bad Rat. Grandville, by the way, is dedicated to Alwyn who’s now a brilliant illustrator and concept artist for computer games.

PÓM: I know you take quite a bit of care about your work, and you’ve mentioned things like storytelling grammar and subliminals here already. Can you expand on these a bit, with some examples we can go look up for ourselves, if possible?

BT: To work, subliminals shouldn’t be seen by the reader. They are often built into the composition of illustrations and work on a subconscious level. Only strong images of sex and death work – images that are hard wired into our brains. If you look through Arkwright especially you should be able to find skull images in stains on walls or in the folds of curtains. In the Tale of One Bad Rat I needed the reader to empathise with the protagonist Helen, an abuse survivor. One of the ways I did this was to place the eye level in most panels exactly on Helen’s eye level. Even when she’s in a crowd, we’re at her eye level, not the eye level of people surrounding her. Of course it would be boring to use the same eye level all the time so, for dramatic effect, there are upshots or downshots but for most of the time we are “with” her.

I did this placement of eye level to a greater degree and for a different effect in Heart of Empire. In the story, the protagonist Victoria is, to start with, a stuck-up, prejudiced, miserable piece of work and, like Heart of Darkness, the inspiration for the title, the story is a voyage of discovery for her. Her character changes for the better as a result of her experiences. To visually accentuate this, for the first half of the story, I placed the readers’ eye level at the height of people around her (she’s about six foot six), distancing the reader from her and her views. Halfway through the book, she goes through a traumatic event and at this point, our eye level shoots up to hers, staying with her for the rest of the book. Also in the first half I made her pupils very small. This also has a distancing effect on the reader. We are subconsciously attracted to people with dilated pupils. At exactly the same point as we jump to her eye level, her pupils suddenly dilate (a result of the hallucinogenic drug she’s unwittingly taken kicking in) and remain big for the second half. This was something that I planned in the structure and maintain throughout the three hundred and odd pages of the novel apart from instances where another angle is used for dramatic effect. I almost always have compositional lines running through one panel to the next to lead the eye. I do all sorts of storytelling stuff like this. It keep the process interesting.

(from Belle Epoque Paris to picture postcard rural England in Grandville, by and (c) Bryan Talbot, published Cape (UK) and Dark Horse (US))

PÓM: And just what is the significance of the number 23, which I notice peppered throughout your work?

BT: Ha ha! I tend to use it if I need a number. It’s a joke really, a reference to the twenty-three enigma and the magical number five. I first came across a description of it in Wilson and Shea’s Illuminatus! Trilogy and it does seem to crop up in all sorts of synchronistic ways. Writing the scene in Bad Rat where Helen shouts out the order number of the lunch she’s carrying to diners in the pub, I automatically typed in ‘twenty-three’. Then I thought to change it to something relevant to Beatrix Potter’s life, which I do throughout the story. For example, the name of the pub is the Herdwick Arms (Herdwicks were the breed of sheep that Potter kept). So I checked to see how many of Beatrix Potter’s ‘little books’ were published. That’s right, it was twenty-three. A Jim Carey film came out a year or two ago based on the twenty-three enigma but apparently it did a really bad job of describing it.

PÓM: Bryan Talbot, thank you very much for all your time and your patience over the four months or thereabouts that we’ve been doing this interview. It was a genuine pleasure, and an honour.

BT: My pleasure.

FPI would like to thank Bryan and Pádraig for taking so much time to put this interview together; the first part, in which Bryan talks about some of his earlier work such as Brainstorm, Luther Arkwright, 2000 AD, the Sandman and The Tale of One Bad Rat as well as early influences (like being exposed to 60s era Ditko and Kirby comics) can be found here. You can keep up with Bryan through his official site here and Pádraig’s LiveJournal here; Grandville is published in October by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Dark Horse in the US and comes highly recommended (Richard’s review can be read here).

(Bryan also wrote some notes on the 23 phenomenon for the Heart of Empire CD-Rom, which I’m including here with his permission):

5 and the 23 enigma

Five has long been regarded as a magical number. The lines in a pentagram conform to the divine proportion, the Golden Section. It is the human microcosm; the number of humanity forming a pentagon with arms and legs outstretched. The pentacle symbolises the whole, the quincunx being the number of the centre and the meeting point of heaven and earth.

Five is the deity (pick your own) plus the four elements Earth, Fire, Air and Water. The Discordian Law of Fives holds that all important incidents and events are linked to the number 5, or some multiple of 5, or related to it in some way, depending on how hard you look for it. Whether you believe all this or not is a matter for you and your psychiatrist: I¹m just shooting you the sherbet, Herbert.

Five is the sum of 2 and 3, the first odd and even compounds. 1 is Unity: God alone, 2 is diversity, 3 (1 + 2) is the compound of Unity and Diversity, representing all the powers of Nature.

The Roman numeral for 5 is V (for Victoria) and the V-for-Victory sign made famous by Churchill during WW2 was formed by holding two fingers up and pressing three fingers down. It worked, didn¹t it? He won. Of course in Britain, turned the other way round, it means ³fuck off!² and supposedly derives from the time of Agincourt and Crecy, when the French (who used crossbows) would cut these two fingers off captured English longbowmen to put an end to their ability to draw a bow. When the sides faced each other on the battlefield, the English archers would wave their two fingers at the French in a gesture of defiance.

Not only are 2, 3 and 5 part of the Fibonacci sequence, but a whole quasi-mystical school of thought has sprung up around the number 23, based on Jungian synchronicity and Quantum Mechanics: everything-is-tied-into-everything-else, the Quantum Inseparability Principle which destroys the old Newtonian model of cause-and-effect.

There is no such thing as coincidence, only links we can¹t fathom. This quantum causality principle is also an explanation of how Magick could conceivably work.

For some reason, the number 23 has great significance to the universe and crops up in meaningful ways to indicate this.

This was first noticed in the 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs who knew the captain of a ferry in Tangier by the name of Clark. He told Burroughs that he¹d been running the ferry for 23 years without a single mishap. That day, the ferry sank, killing Clark and everyone on board. That evening he switched on the radio. The headline news was of the crash of a plane flying into Miami. The pilot was a Captain Clark and the number of the flight was 23.

He began keeping records of odd coincidences and found that the number 23 recurred in strange events over and over again. And, strangely enough, it does seem to do just that.

23 in telegraphers¹ code means ³bust² or ³break the line² while hexagram 23 in the I Ching means ³break apart². Parents contribute 23 chromosomes each to the fertilised egg, while within DNA itself there are strange bonding irregularities at every 23rd angstrom.

I can¹t list all the occasions where 23 has a significance in literature or movies but, the next time you watch a film, I bet the murderer is in room 23 or the disaster is going to happen on the 23rd of the month. 23 Skidoo!

Much of this and more is contained in the books of Robert Anton Wilson.

(the lovely clothbound cover to the UK edition of Grandville by and (c) Bryan Talbot, published Jonathan Cape)

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: You were born in Wigan, is that right?

Bryan Talbot: Yes I was, not half a mile from the pier made famous by Orwell.

PÓM: What sort of a place is Wigan?

BT: Today, I don’t know. I left when I was eighteen to go to college in Preston and seemed to get stuck there until I moved here to Sunderland ten years ago. In the fifties and sixties it was a small northern industrial town built on coal and cotton. I remember my days there as almost always being sunny but that’s obviously a false memory.

PÓM: Did you have a happy childhood, would you say?

BT: Yes I did. In the spoof biography of my parallel world self in Heart of Empire, I say I was the son of a sailor and a mill girl. This is perfectly true, though my dad left the navy and became a power station worker and my mum learnt hairdressing and opened a salon in the front room. She worked six days a week until nine every night and sometimes on Sunday. Dad worked long shifts, including nights, so usually he was either in bed or at work. As an only child this left me on my own for most of the day, so I spent it making up stories with my toys (usually starring the Lone Ranger) as the characters. My folks worked so hard because I suppose they were upwardly-mobile. We had the first TV in the lane and I grew up being babysat by the Lone Ranger, the Marx Brothers, Richard Greene’s Robin Hood, Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes, Popeye, Flash Gordon and, more traumatically, Quatermass and the Pit. I soaked up all these influences like a sponge.

PÓM: Did you always want to write and draw comics, do you think?

BT: Well, I’ve always been into them. I ‘read’ comics before I could read, my folks getting me the nursery comic Jack and Jill from when I was three or four, and when I was five an uncle gave me a few old Giles annuals, which I loved. I didn’t understand the politics in these cartoons but I would look at the drawings, with their wealth of detail, ad infinitum. So – I decided that I wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist when I grew up. By the time I was eight I was stapling together Woolworth’s typing paper and making my own comic stories but by that point I knew that I really wanted to be a private detective, so my aspirations to be a cartoonist were abandoned. I carried on doing the home made comics ‘til I was about fourteen but it never occurred to me that I could eventually do it for a living.

PÓM: Did you continue to make your own comics through your teen years, or did you give it all up at the age of fourteen, as you mentioned?

BT: I did go through the phase of thinking that comics were for kids and I’d outgrown them. I even gave all my Rupert the Bear and DC Thomson annuals to my cousins and sold my large collection of late fifties/early sixties DC comics for a penny each at school. And, yes, I stopped making comics. I’d found a new way of telling stories – making movies. My best friend then was Geoff Simm, who I knew from our small Methodist chapel and the grammar school. He was two years older than me. He was mad keen on films and he gave me the bug. We both asked for and got 8mm home movie cameras for Xmas and promptly formed ‘Scorpion Films Inc’.

For the next three years we made a series of five- to ten-minute movies, one of which actually won first prize in the Film of the Year competition at the Wigan Cine Club 1966! This was no mean achievement, as the other members were all over thirty and had expensive movie-making equipment. Geoff taught me a huge amount about editing and made me aware of contemporary avant-garde cinema techniques such as jump cuts and going into slow motion or black and white for effect. All this visual grammar later fed into my work in some form or another. He was a massive Alfred Hitchcock fan and we’d go to see Psycho, for example, and discuss the movie-making afterwards. We even made a ten-minute homage to Hitchcock, called When Jonathan Came Home, with me playing the eponymous murderer, stuffed with flashbacks, jump cuts and clever compositions.

Geoff went on to go to the London Film School on the strength of this and I didn’t see him again for over ten years. One day I walked into Forbidden Planet in London and he was there working behind the counter. Apparently film school had knocked the desire to make movies out of him and he was now a struggling writer, with one book of short stories in print. He’d also become gay – if one can ‘become’ gay. When I knew him he was dating girls. In fact, my first girl friend was his girl friend’s best mate. Geoff was the first person I knew to die of AIDS, right at the start of the outbreak.

As for comics, I didn’t ‘outgrow’ them for very long. Forry Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland – or was it Monster World? – started running beautifully rendered adaptations of Hammer Horror movies and publisher Warren picked up on their popularity. As a result, they started publishing the horror comics Creepy, and later Eerie. In issue ten, I think, of Creepy, I read a comic strip that totally blew me away and, basically, turned my head around as to what I thought comics were and what they could do. The strip was called Collector’s Edition, written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by Steve Ditko in an amazingly detailed cross-hatched style that I’ve never seen him use since. It was a groundbreaking strip in comics grammar terms and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up as I read it. Still one of my favourites. I’m not going to say any more but please search it out and read it. After that I was a confirmed comic reader again and actively went out to find some. What did I find? Marvel comics at the peak of their renaissance and immediately fell in love with the work of Jack Kirby.

(Bryan signing copies of Alice in Sunderland at the Edinburgh Forbidden Planet)

PÓM: So did you study art at any point?

BT: My art education was a complete and utter cock-up. At grammar school the art teacher didn’t teach, just read the newspaper while I drew what I liked. At first these were Leo Baxendale style cartoons, teeming with daftness. Later they were pen and ink copies of horror movie stills or really bad superhero drawings. I invented a British superhero called ‘The Saxon’ who was a reincarnation of Robin Hood! This was around 1967. I barely scraped through A Level art and went to Wigan School of Art for a year, where I learnt even less. Here I was taught by exhibiting abstract artists – fine art fascists who refused to allow the creation of any form of figurative art. Abstract was very definitely the vogue at this time – 1970 – and anything vaguely realistic was looked down upon by the wannabe avant-garde lecturers. Going to interviews with a portfolio of half-hearted abstract paintings, I failed to get on a fine art course. This was unsurprising in retrospect, especially as I said at the interviews that if I was accepted I’d use the time to draw what was what we’d now call a graphic novel. Comics are now becoming begrudgingly accepted as an art form. Back then they were considered to be on a par with patterned toilet paper.

PÓM: So you had plans for a graphic novel back in 1970?

BT: I was a huge horror movie fan and read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. Around 1968 in a horror magazine called Castle of Frankenstein I saw a news item announcing that Poul Anderson’s novel The Broken Sword was being adapted into comic form. Being a comic reader, I was completely enthralled by the idea. A comic that’s a complete novel! I immediately set about creating my own – a sub-Tolkienesque fantasy epic. I plotted out the entire thing, did a few character sketches and laid out a few pages but that’s as far as it got. This is the book I was proposing to create as a project at the fine art college interviews! I never forgot the concept of comic-as-novel though and that lead directly to me starting Luther Arkwright eight years later. I only discovered recently that nothing came of the Broken Sword adaption either.

Shunned by the fine art colleges, I managed to scrape onto a graphic design course in Preston the week before the autumn term started. The abstract paintings were ignored at the interview but one of the lecturers rather liked some of the illustrations and cover I’d done for the Tolkien Society fanzine. Still, it was the wrong course for me. No illustration was taught on the course, which had a very strong typographical bias. No life drawing, nothing. I did learn about layout and design – things that did feed into my comic work – but it was only after the course finished that I started going to the library once a week and taking out books on anatomy, composition, perspective and so forth and basically teaching myself. I later did life drawing evening classes.

PÓM: Can we go back to the Tolkien Society fanzine? How did you get involved with that?

BT: My wife and I were some of the first members of the Tolkien Society, when it was formed around 1970. That was a couple of years before we were married when we were aged sixteen and eighteen respectively. I saw their advert in Oz magazine, of all places. I was a street seller for Oz and the underground newspaper International Times (AKA IT). They were the first places I saw the work of people like Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton. We lived in London for about three months in 1970 and once we went to a Tolkien Society meeting, which was a strange affair. It was held in the apartment of the person who founded the society, a charming eccentric old lady who called herself Belladonna Took (a character in Lord of the Rings). At the meeting I volunteered to provide illos for their magazine Mallorn. I also did the very first cover for Dark Horizons, the fanzine of the newly formed British Fantasy Society.

PÓM: Let me drag you back just a little bit more, before we get back on track. How did you end up selling Oz and IT?

BT: It was one of the methods of underground press distribution. Oz and IT used to have ads in each issue asking for street sellers. If you bought copies in bulk – I think it was over a dozen or something, you got them half price. You could then sell them to friends or the public at cover price. I used to sell them in the Wigan Boys Grammar School when I was in the sixth form.

A bunch of us actually had a secret ‘underground’ clubroom over the art studio. After the end of day bell went, we’d climb up through a hatch in the wall above the door into a large attic space than ran the length of that school building. We named it ‘The Roof Beam Club’, (We all studied medieval architecture as part of the A level art exam curriculum. I can still identify a medieval church or cathedral within fifty years!) Anyhow, we’d stay there after hours, smoking dope and reading this subversive literature. We decorated the walls with pages from unsold underground mags. To get out to go home, we had to crawl out of a small window, traverse a few roofs and climb down a drainpipe by the back toilets! Looking back, it was extremely dangerous but we didn’t give a toss back then.

I recently wrote a piece on Moorcock that dealt with my grammar school days [for Heliotrope].

PÓM: One of the things I find fascinating about your career arc is that you’ve gone from underground comics to having a mainstream publisher in Jonathan Cape, very much an upright old publishing house. So, if I could start at the beginning, how did you end up doing your underground comics?

BT: I was unemployed! In the seventies I was a huge fan of underground comix and had even started drawing one while at college. After I finished the graphic design course in Preston I was without a job and had a wife and two sons, meaning that I couldn’t afford to move down to London where the majority of graphic design jobs were. I’d met Lee Harris when I was in London a couple of years earlier. He ran a head shop in Portobello Road – Alchemy – it’s still there to this day – and he’d offered to publish the comic I’d started should I ever finish it. I had time on my hands, in between looking for work, so I completed the comic. It took me about five months to pencil and ink twenty pages! I hitched down to London and showed it to Lee and he was as good as his word and published it. In total we did six issues from 1975 to 1978.

(the collected Brainstorm: the Chester P Hackebush Trilogy by and (c) Bryan Talbot)

PÓM: You’re talking about Brainstorm Comix, I presume? I have the collected volume on the shelf here in the library.

BT: This was at the tail end of the underground [UG] comix boom (though they still exist, for example Jim Stewart’s Ganjaman) and, by this time, the psychedelic adventure story was an established genre within UG comix. My protagonist was Chester P Hackenbush, the Psychedelic Alchemist. This sort of story goes directly back to Alice in Wonderland. In each story of the Chester trilogy, he goes on a mind-bending trip, has an adventure and comes down at the end, back to reality. That’s basically the plot of Alice. Chester’s never really gone away. He still crops up as a counter culture icon in London street magazines and was in the Hawkwind graphic novel by Bob Walker. Alan Moore produced an American version of him, Chester Williams, in Swamp Thing, who became a regular member of the cast. Today there’s a London rapper whose stage name is Chester P who apparently used to read and reread his parents’ Brainstorms when he was a kid.

PÓM: I was wondering, seeing as you were writing a lot about drugs, did you ever get any sort of hassle from ‘The Man,’ if I may be colloquial?

BT: For writing and drawing the comics? No, not at all. Lee’s shop was repeated raided though, for selling perfectly legal cigarette papers and smoking pipes, many of which were commonly available in ‘respectable’ tobacconists. After Brainstorm, Lee went on to publish Home Grown magazine, a UK equivalent of the US’s High Times.

PÓM: Are we getting up to the time you started on Luther Arkwright here, or were there other things in between we need to know about?

BT: Not much. This was around the time I got my first full-time job as an illustrator for Preston Council and, after six months, a better paid one as a designer and illustrator for British Aerospace. I did my first professional strip, a one page piece about Hassan-i-Sabbah for Seed magazine, and I’d started writing and drawing the monthly one page SF spoof Frank Fazakerly, Space Ace of the Future for Ad Astra. I hated the job at BA and was terrible at it. After six months my contract ran out and they didn’t renew it, so I was back on the dole again.

(Frank Fazakerly, Space Ace of the Future by and (c) Bryan Talbot, image shamelessly borrowed from Stephen Bissette’s blog article)

The first Luther Arkwright strip was an eight-pager in the third issue of Brainstorm, in 1976. It was inspired by Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories. Moorcock had offered the character up as a template for other writers and all I wanted was an excuse to do a strip in line and watercolour wash, in the Richard Corben style. The strip was titled The Papist Affair and was a daft romp that featured such unutterable silliness as machine gun-toting, cigar-smoking nuns in black stockings and a kung fu fight with a fascist archbishop – a scene later plagiarized by Grant Morrison in one of his Near Myths strips that featured his own Cornelius clone, Gideon Stargrave. Along with Alan [Moore] and Neil Gaiman, Grant was a Brainstorm reader. There are influences from Brainstorm in his Animal Man and in Pete Milligan’s Shade the Changing Man.

After The Papist Affair I started thinking more seriously about Arkwright and parallel worlds and realised that here was a vehicle for the ‘comic novel’ story I’d so long wanted to write and draw. At this point I realised that Arkwright had to become his own character, so developed him away from Cornelius and the Cornelius story style. At the time I was getting invited to submit strips to other UGs, notably Hunt Emerson’s Street Comics, and I thought that I could serialize it by producing a chapter each time I was asked. I actually did a 4-page jam with veteran British UG artist Chris Welch featuring Arkwright and his characters Ogoth and Ugly Boot from Nasty Tales. Then along came Rob King, the owner of the Edinburgh Science Fiction Bookshop, who was going to publish a ‘ground level’ (i.e. adult but not UG) comic called Near Myths and he asked me for a contribution to it.

PÓM: You mentioned the Edinburgh Science Fiction Bookshop. That turned into Forbidden Planet International, I believe, and Joe, who now runs the blog for them, toils away in the basement of what I think was their original shop (actually it has moved a few streets since then, but its still serving the readers of Edinburgh – Joe). A small world, all the same.

BT: The original location of the SF Bookshop, where Near Myths was published, was actually a street called West Crosscauseway.

PÓM: What were you doing while you were working for BA?

BT: Primarily illustrating their catalogue, along with several other designers/illustrators. At the time, BA weren’t just selling aircraft to rich Arab countries, they were selling entire packages that included the airstrip, control tower, hangars and, incredibly, everything that went along with having a small community in the middle of a desert. I mean EVERYTHING from offices, schools, hospitals, sport centres – even a standard design BA mosque – and everything that went inside them, from pots and pans to snooker tables, washing machines and carpets. For a couple of weeks I was drawing nothing but chairs – kitchen chairs, secretaries’ chairs, armchairs… you get the picture. What they did was agent for all the companies that made the products, which meant producing a huge catalogue with all the items illustrated in clear line drawings, rather than in a disparate range of the photographic and drawn styles of the individual suppliers.

PÓM: So how did Arkwright fare in Near Myths?

BT: Very well, in that it was the most popular strip in there. Near Myths was very sporadic though. We produced five issues in about a year and a half. I’ve no idea how many copies were sold but we had national distribution and it was available in newsagents all over the UK. I edited issue 5 and 6, the one that was never published. In many ways it was the forerunner of Warrior and featured the first published work of Graham Manley, Tony O’Donnell and Grant Morrison (who drew his strips as well as scripting them). When the publisher did a moonlight flit to avoid debt, he left all the back issues in his flat. After six months the landlord dumped the lot in a skip so they’re a bit rare!

(the Adventures of Luther Arkwright by and (c) Bryan Talbot, published Dark Horse)

PÓM: Was it long after that that Arkwright got his own comic?

BT: About ten years. A year after Near Myths folded, French aristocrat Serge Boissevain began his seminal comic magazine pssst! He was used to the French comic scene and just couldn’t believe how behind the French the UK was. pssst! was quite astounding and brave, looking back at it. Serge sank a lot of money into the book. It lasted for a year – on a strict monthly deadline – it was about fifty pages, printed on top quality glossy paper and with the highest production values. It was the precursor of Escape and Deadline and the rest of the cascade of British adult comic mags that came out in the Eighties and Nineties. It published work by Ed Pinsett, John Watkiss, Richard Weston, Stephen Baskerville, Shaky Kane and Glen Dakin for the first time and published work by established creators such as John Bolton, John Higgins and Angus McKie. Paul Gravett was on the editorial side.

It also ran Arkwright. I reworked the chapters that I’d already done for Near Myths but by around issue five or six I was drawing new ones. When it went belly up towards the end of 1982 there was enough material to publish a first volume of the collected story so far – complete with cliff-hanger – and that’s just what Serge did. This makes Arkwright the first British graphic novel as such (the term being established in 1978 when Eisner brought out A Contract with God – in the same month that Arkwright began serialization in Near Myths). Shortly after this Pat Mills got in touch, asking if I wanted to draw Nemesis the Warlock for 2000AD. I worked for 2000AD for five or six years. I left because Serge offered to fund me to finish the Arkwright story, in the manner of a Victorian artist’s patron. Can you believe these rich folk? He paid me to draw it so that he could finish reading the story! He republished the first volume and put out the new material in two volumes. Concurrently the publishers of Redfox, Valkyrie Comics, a tiny independent based in Bristol under the helm of Chris Bell, issued it as a bi-monthly nine issue miniseries. And, around a year later, I was approached by Dark Horse. Their American miniseries had new covers and was re-lettered.

(Luther Arkwright strikes a pose from the Valkryie Press edition, by and (c) Bryan Talbot)

PÓM: Was Serge Boissevain the man behind Proutt, then, who are the publishers of the copy of that first Arkwright volume I have on my shelf here?

BT: Yes, Serge WAS Proutt. Proutt is actually a sound effect in French comics for a fart. I used it as such in Heart of Empire. Actually, his business name when he published pssst! and the first collected volume of Arkwright in 1982 was ‘Never Ltd’.

PÓM: As a matter of interest, how do you feel about the term Graphic Novel? I know some of your colleagues in the business rail against it to a great degree…

BT: I’m really not happy with the term. ‘Graphic’ has connotations of explicit sex or violence and ‘Novel’ implies that it’s a bastardized form of another medium, which it isn’t. Many GNs aren’t what could be considered novel-length and many aren’t even fiction. Autobiography and reportage are now covered by the ludicrous marketing term ‘non-fiction graphic novels’! Having said that, I do use the term to describe what I produce because everybody knows what you mean and there’s no other option that’s any less vague. ‘Comics’ or ‘sequential art’ is the medium, not the form. Alan Moore calls his GNs ‘big comics’. I suspect that this is partly to get up the noses of people who utilise the term graphic novel and partly to diffuse any accusations of pretentiousness. It’s still just as inaccurate though and could just as well describe an oversized comic page or a sequential mural. I don’t like ‘comics’ come to that as it’s a total misnomer. Still, as I said, one uses phrases that people understand. It saves time.

PÓM: While we’re on the subject, do you like the term Steampunk?

BT: I don’t mind it. I’ve no strong feelings about the term, which evolved directly from cyberpunk.

PÓM: I’ll come back to 2000AD a little later. Before that, though, do you remember what sort of reaction Arkwright was getting once it came out in its own title?

BT: Excellent. The first issue totally sold out within the first month or two – that’s 20,000 copies – and I did a six-week UK signing tour that was very well attended. A few of the signing sessions lasted a hectic three to four hours. That year the comic was nominated for eight Eagle Awards and won four and was awarded ‘Best British Work’ by the Society of Strip Illustration.

PÓM: I have to say, it’s my own opinion that it’s the best comic work to have ever come out of Britain, and it’s just a shame that it didn’t prompt more people to try doing it themselves.

BT: What, try doing a graphic novel?

PÓM: I just think that, where you led, no-one seemed to follow. I really can’t think of many good examples of writer-artist graphic novels coming out of the UK in the wake of Luther Arkwright. There’s Gary Spencer Millidge’s as-yet-unfinished Strangehaven, and Garen Ewing’s Rainbow Orchid, but really, there’s no great back-stock of British GNs following on from what you started. Or so it seems to me. I know you’re probably going to come back to me now with dozens of wonderful works I forgot!

BT: I think it’s because the comic industry in the UK is tiny compared with many other countries and the majority of our creators work for America. Could you call Watchmen a British graphic novel? It certainly came out of the UK even though it was published abroad. Recently, with the rise of the graphic novel in the real mainstream, in regular bookstores, there’s many examples such as Simone Lia’s Fluffy, Hannah Berry’s Britten and Brulightly, Posy Simmonds’s Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drew and many others. Going back to the eighties though, you’re right, there weren’t many. There was Al Davison’s excellent The Spiral Cage, Eddie Campbell’s Alec and Bacchus books and Paul Grist’s Kane trade paperbacks. There was also a flurry in the late eighties published by Gollancz in the first brief graphic novel boom, including Alan Moore and Oscar Zarate’s A Small Killing and Al Davison’s The Minotaur’s Tale among others not half as good. Escape also published Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Violent Cases.

PÓM: Mostly, I think, what happened in the eighties is that publishers, in particular Gollancz, as you mentioned, wanted to produce what they saw as a viable new form of publishing, but had absolutely no idea what it was all about. They didn’t do badly with some of what they had, but there were other things that no one in their right mind should have published. Now, twenty and more years later, they seem to have a much better idea what they’re doing.

Which leads me to ask, slightly before I meant to get to it, how did you find yourself with Jonathan Cape?

BT: Cape had recently started publishing graphic novels and I sent them a proposal and some sample pages of Alice in Sunderland before I’d started to work on it full time. They rejected it, I think because they found it impossible to imagine. It is a hard book to describe to people without them actually seeing it. It’s not as if you can say ‘it’s like such and such’. When I’d reached over three hundred pages and it was nearing completion, I made an appointment to see Dan Franklin, their graphic novel editor (and Salman Rushdie’s editor, by the way) and went down to London and showed him the book in printout (it weighed half a ton). He loved what he saw but said that he’d have to read the text before he decided whether to publish. I returned to Sunderland and had a black and white dummy made up at the local Prontoprint and sent him that. A few weeks went by but after he’d had a chance to read it he offered to publish it at once and bought the UK rights. Cape were so pleased at how it sold – it’s now in its fourth printing and has sold nearly twenty thousand copies in Britain – that they published the UK edition of The Tale of One Bad Rat and took the world rights to Grandville. I’m now working on Grandville Mon Amour for them.

(an elderly Alice Lidell in a page from Alice in Sunderland by and (c) Bryan Talbot, published Jonathan Cape)

PÓM: At what point did you start working for 2000AD?

BT: I’d first met Pat Mills at a meeting of the Society of Strip Illustration in an upstairs room in a London pub in 1980 and he was very keen to talk about what we’d now call the steampunk aspect of the Arkwright story, which he very much enjoyed. We talked quite a bit that night of him writing a retro SF story for 2000AD for me to illustrate. Nothing ever came directly of this but three years later, when Kevin O’Neill left 2000AD to work for DC comics Pat got in touch and asked if I wanted to draw the Nemesis the Warlock story, The Gothic Empire – another steampunk story before the genre definition. I’d already drawn a couple of things for 2000AD – a couple of Alan Moore stories, a Future Shock – ‘The Wages of Sin’ – and a Robusters strip for an annual – but this was the start of a four or five year stint with the comic.

At the time I’d spent most of the previous year doing illustrations rather than comics. It just so happened that I’d done an illustration of Adam Ant for Flexipop magazine – named after the free flexidisc single that came with each issue (a flexible 45rpm single given away free taped to music mags back in the day, notorious for scratching your deck’s needle! – Joe) – just before he broke and became a megastar. Suddenly I was THE Adam Ant artist and my pics of him appeared everywhere in postermags and the like. I’d actually never heard of him until I was asked to do the first illo. I was also writing and drawing a weekly strip in the music paper Sounds called Scumworld but perhaps the least said about that the better.

Working for 2000AD really tightened up my discipline as a comic artist, learning to meet continual deadlines and working tightly as a team with Pat and the letterer Tom Frame. I learnt a lot working from Pat’s scripts and from our interminable daily telephone conversations discussing aspects of the scripts. Before he started the Gothic Empire script we had a meeting in London and he asked me if I had any suggestions for the story. I immediately asked for a Frankenstein sequence, which went right in. I also said something like “Hey, the ABC Warriors haven’t been in 2000AD for a few years. Ro-Jaws is in the story. Why not bring Hammerstein and the others back?” He looked at me as if I was crazy. “Are you sure?” he said. I didn’t know what he was thinking about but I sure as hell found out when I had to draw half a dozen robots in panel after panel, all with their own unique and complicated anatomies!

After The Gothic Empire I worked on another two Nemesis story arcs plus the twenty-page Torquemada role-playing comic for IPC’s experimental Diceman magazine. I also worked on Dredd for a short time – one weekly strip, a couple of fully painted strips for the annuals and the twenty-pager for the first issue of Diceman. I still do occasional work for the comic. A year or two ago I did a couple of covers for the Megazine.

PÓM: You’ve been self-employed all your life, really, haven’t you? Was this a big decision for you, or did you just sort of wander into it?

BT: I was working in underground and alternative comics for about six years before offers of paying work began to appear and I was able to go self employed – around 1981 I think.

PÓM: A lot of your generation of UK comics people seemed to end up doing something in Sounds. What was your strip about?

BT: Scumworld was basically an underground SF comedy adventure. It was set on a world where the dregs of the galaxy end up – a planet with no law, a place ruled by warlords and gangs of pirates and thugs. The protagonist, Django Schaggnasti was a mercenary with no redeeming virtues whatsoever. I was recommended for the strip by Alan Moore when he quit after he started working for DC. He wrote and drew the previous one ‘The Stars my Degradation’. My brief was to be as hard-edged and underground as possible without them getting taken to court, so it was pretty gross. I was censored on almost a weekly basis. Still, I thought some of it was pretty funny and the story, which involved sentient cacti with a shared consciousness being exploited by human scum, was very original at the time.

PÓM: Are we ever likely to see it collected?

BT: I shouldn’t think so as the story is only half finished and I’ve no wish to go back to it at the moment. When the editor moved to KERRANG! he wanted to take the strip with him so it was discontinued in Sounds. Eddie (Campbell) was hired to do the replacement strip. Then he decided that Scumworld was “too heavy for KERRANG!” and dropped it.

PÓM: To go back to Luther Arkwright, did we ever find out what the acronym WOTAN stood for in the first Arkwright story?

BT: World Oracle: Temporal Alternative Nexus. I never saw the need to actually tell the reader the meaning of the acronym though we did have a contest in the Valkyrie comics for readers to guess what it was. No one came close, though one wag submitted ‘Wet orange T-shirts accentuate nipples’.

PÓM: I remember that competition! I think that’d probably what made it stick in my head for so long. I’m eternally grateful to you for finally letting me know. I really liked those old Valkyrie comics, you know, and had them all at one point. Now long gone, of course.

Is there going to be any sort of prestige hardback edition of the first Luther Arkwright story, to give the art a chance to shine properly? The same size as Alice in Sunderland would be nice, which would be about the same page-size as the three volumes of it that were published by Proutt back in 1980s…

BT: I wish. I’ve mentioned it to Dark Horse a few times over the years but nothing as yet. It’s possible. The next time they reprint Bad Rat, next year, they’re going to do it in hardback, like the Cape edition. If you would like a prestige Arkwright just for the art, you can always order either the Czech or Greek edition from Comics Centrum or Jemma Press respectively. The Czech one is a 14” high red hardback with an inlaid illo and gold title lettering. The Greek edition is black with a colour illo printed within the old Valkyrie cover design in white (if you’re nostalgic about it), 17” high and weighs around half a ton. Both are beautifully printed.

PÓM: I know you did a second volume, Heart of Empire. Are there any plans for any further volumes?

BT: I’ve been playing around with ideas for one since I finished Heart of Empire and actually a little before. I want to return to the original feel of Arkwright and its storytelling experimentation, black and white, designerly. I’ve still not decided what it’s really about though, about the meaning behind it and ‘til that becomes apparent it won’t gel. I imagine that it’ll be a few years before I do it since I’ve recently decided to do a series of four or five Grandville books.

(a lovely pencil work of the  Kings Cross Airway Station from Heart of Empire, a nice echo of the gorgeous Bell Epoque Paris in his latest work, Grandville,  by and (c) Bryan Talbot)

PÓM: Were you unhappy with Heart of Empire, then?

BT: Not at all, in fact I’m very proud of it. I think it’s a damn good science fantasy romp and every time I happen to look at it I’m astounded by the amount of creativity that went into it. It’s a very polished piece of work. If I get around to doing another Arkwright story I want it to be as different again and the hard thing is coming up with a story that is both original and at the same time set in the same milieu. Readers want a sequel to be like the predecessor. The way I did it with Heart of Empire was to have echoes of the original story, both visually and thematically, but have a radically different type of plot and storytelling style.

PÓM : Your next major work after Luther Arkwright was The Tale of One Bad Rat, which could not have been more different in subject matter, setting, or genre. How did it come about?

BT: I’ve described this in many interviews before and, indeed, even in the afterword of the book itself, so suffice it to say that I never set out to write a book about the psychological after-effects of child sexual abuse. It was an instance of the story dictating its own direction and taking me along with it. It was the first non-genre story I’d written so I realised very early on that the storytelling and drawing style had to be very clear and accessible to non-comic readers, to a mainstream rather than clique readership. It’s probably my most successful book.

PÓM: For me, I think that Bad Rat was the first time that comics dealt with real issues properly. It wasn’t preachy or moralistic; the story just worked. It was a strong piece of work, though, and I’m glad to hear of its enduring success. Did it get any adverse reaction at all, or were there any people who couldn’t understand how you were addressing an issue like that in what was still widely regarded as a children’s medium?

BT: Before Bad Rat there was Maus of course. The only adverse reaction I remember was from the Sunday Sun newspaper. They had a shock horror headline “BEATRIX CHILD ABUSE BUNNIES!” (remember that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a famous comic then). They’d gotten hold of the fact, presumably from an interview, that all the characters in the book were named after Potter characters (or people who figured strongly in her life) so the feature was along the lines of “Peter Rabbit a crack addict! Lucinda the doll now a prostitute!” Their indignation fizzled out halfway through though, when they asked the opinion of leading Potter authority Judy Taylor, chair of the Beatrix Potter Society and author of several books on her. She told them that she thought it was absolutely wonderful and the article finished by being extremely positive! It was as if the reporter had started off writing one sort of article and ended up writing another.

(one of the quite gorgeous scenes which appear in very moving  The Tale of One Bad Rat, by and (c) Bryan Talbot)

PÓM: I think you’re the only major British artist of your generation not to have had a big project with Alan Moore. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing, do you think, or not really either of those?

BT: I’ve worked with Alan on a few short strips. He’s always said that we’d do a graphic novel together at some point but nothing ever came of it. We began what would have been Alan’s first horror strip, Nightjar, for Warrior, a strip which introduced the concept of an urban sorcerer he later recycled as John Constantine. When Alan and publisher Dez Skinn fell out we abandoned the strip, with only four pages drawn. Bizarrely, in 2003, over twenty years later, Avatar comics paid me to finish the first chapter, the only one Alan had written, for their Alan Moore’s Yuggoth Cultures title; you can read about it on my site here.

More recently, we were intending to do one of the Wildstorm ABC titles together, a completely new take on Doctor Strange, but then DC bought Wildstorm and Alan stopped writing for them. I’d love to collaborate one day as he’s the best comics writer around.

PÓM: You did quite a bit of work for DC comics at one stage, like Hellblazer and some Legends of the Dark Knight work. Were there a lot of restrictions on what you could do with the characters, as opposed to if it was your own creation?

BT: No, not that I can remember. I didn’t write the Hellblazer Special (Jamie Delano did) but I had no interference with the artwork. With Mask, The Legends of the Dark Knight story, editor Archie Goodwin was very hands-off and supportive. The only changes he suggested were when I’d used a Britishism in the script. He’d supply the American term – e.g. ‘gurney’ instead of ‘trolley’. Apparently the concept of the Batman story was lifted wholesale and used in an episode of Buffy, or so I’ve been told.

(Bryan’s interesting take on Batman, (c) DC Comics)

PÓM: Did you enjoy working on Sandman with Neil Gaiman?

BT: Absolutely. Neil’s a writer who’s a joy to work with, especially if you like working from scripts of Alan Moore proportions. A couple of times he came and stayed at my Preston house for a day or two before he wrote a script for me so we could talk over ideas. Very often, the Sandman stories were produced right up to the deadline and I’d fax pencils of pages to him as I finished them and he’d phone to discuss them. Doing the pencils for the framing sequences for the Worlds’ End story arc, I drew a character in the background in an early episode which he then subsequently wrote in the script in later ones. My favourite Sandman story that I drew was August (contained in the Fables and Reflections volume – Joe). I used quite a few subliminal storytelling devices in that one, including eye level placement and the use of horizontals and verticals in the compositions. Most of the story takes place in a market place in Rome over a whole day. I placed the light source in such a way to simulate the sun low in the sky in the morning, climbing to its zenith at noon and setting in the evening, a left to right movement that happens gradually over about twenty pages. I doubt if any readers noticed this consciously but it would have had a subconscious effect on their perception of the story.

PÓM: More recently, you’ve been doing some work on Fables with Bill Willingham.

BT: That was about six years ago now, I should think, and was the last comic I drew for DC. It was set in the deep South during the American Civil War and, like much of what I happen to do, demanded loads of research. Bill seemed to like it a lot. I still do occasional things for DC, the last being illos of Orpheus and Destruction for the Sandman anniversary poster and an alternative cover for Superman: World of New Krypton that comes out this month.

PÓM: DC’s Vertigo recently republished Dead Boy Detectives, which was an offshoot of Sandman, as a trade paperback. I have to say, it’s absolutely great to see all these things, slowly but surely, turning up as bookshelf editions.

BT: Yes, I was pleased that it eventually came out. Ed Brubaker’s original intention was to produce it in one volume, aimed at the young adult/Harry Potter market but, for some reason, DC didn’t collect the miniseries as soon as it was complete.

PÓM: There’s one other thing you did with DC that I want to single out, which is The Nazz, which I particularly liked. Are we ever likely to see a reprint volume of that?

BT: I don’t expect so. DC have never mentioned it. I still think that Tom Veitch’s script was one of the best post-Watchmen superhero stories.

FPI would like to thank Bryan and Pádraig for taking so much time to put this interview together; the second part, in which Bryan talks about some of his more recent work such as the astonishing Alice in Sunderland, the pseudonymous Metronome, the hilarious Cherubs (with Mark Stafford) and, of course, Grandville, can be read tomorrow. You can keep up with Bryan through his official site here and Pádraig’s LiveJournal here; Grandville is published in October by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Dark Horse in the US and comes highly recommended (Richard’s review can be read here).

(cover to the first part of the Rainbow Orchid by and (c) Garen Ewing, published Egmont)

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: Can you give us a very brief description of what Rainbow Orchid is about for those who haven’t come across it yet?

Garen Ewing: The story is set towards the end of the 1920s and concerns a gentleman’s bet over who will win first prize in a botanical exhibition. When one of the contenders hears about a legendary orchid mentioned in an ancient Greek text, he sees it as his only chance to win. That’s a very simplistic overview – it has quite a few subplots. The main characters are Julius Chancer, assistant to alternative historian Sir Alfred Catesby-Grey, and Lily Lawrence, silent-film star. When my agent, Oli, first saw it, he described it as ‘like Tintin, but more cerebral’, which I’m comfortable with and flattered by. He’s biased, of course. Each volume is about 40 pages, so somewhere around 120 pages in all.

PÓM: When did you start working on Rainbow Orchid?

GE: The idea first emerged at the end of 1996 and I developed it in the first few months of 1997. By June I had the first three pages done, and then I didn’t really pick it up again until 2002 when it began serialisation in Bulldog Adventure Magazine (BAM!).

PÓM: So it originally appeared in print? At what point did it become an online comic?

GE: After BAM! I collected part one in a self-published version which sold out quite quickly. As I didn’t want to reprint it, and was about to start part two, I thought I’d make part one available online for anyone to read. From there it just seemed sensible to keep publishing it on the web – I could go full-colour and got a far bigger audience, far more cheaply as well.

PÓM: Those original copies sell for quite a bit on eBay these days, don’t they?

GE: Well, I’ve only seen two. I sold my last copy on eBay and it went for £79, though I did include some original sketches with it. More recently a copy came up for sale and I think it eventually went for £12.

PÓM: Were you surprised by the publishers showing an interest in it, from seeing it online?

GE: Yes, it came out of the blue as I’d never sent it to anyone – but it led to me accidentally getting an agent. I was pretty much set on self-publishing, but after putting it up on the web I attracted interest from a couple of UK book publishers, and that led to me asking a friend of my wife’s for some advice. This friend was a literary agent for A. P. Watt in London, and the next thing I knew, I was in their offices and being asked if they could represent me. Everything went up a couple of notches after that.

But it’s gratifying to know that the big publishers are actually aware of what’s going on in the independent comics scene, and to further know that my own comic was recognised as being commercially viable was a confidence boost. It’s nice it happened that way, because I feel the work got there on its own merits – I didn’t push it under anyone’s nose or hype it up – not that there’s anything wrong with doing that!

PÓM: At what point did you start talking to Egmont about publishing Rainbow Orchid as an actual print book?

GE: Egmont were already aware of Rainbow Orchid as well, before my agent sent it to them. He’d sent Orchid out to ten publishers and I met with Egmont a couple of times before we decided to go with them. That would have been sometime around November 2007. I signed the contract with Egmont in July 2008, I think.

PÓM: Was there a lot of extra work involved in getting the material ready for print?

GE: Yes! It was mainly re-lettering the thing, which involved re-doing all the speech balloons and a bit of what I call ‘art surgery’, shifting characters round a bit so the new size text fitted okay. I also took the opportunity to re-draw the odd panel here and there, little bits that really bugged me every time I looked at them, and I also added two brand new pages, just to extend a couple of the action sequences slightly. I’d always been unhappy with the end of volume one as I rushed it before I went on holiday to get it sent to the printer in time. With the Egmont edition I had the opportunity to do it how I’d originally wanted – it’s so much better.

PÓM: After all this time its now moved out into the wide world of print – are you nervous about it?

GE: You’ve asked exactly the right question – most people ask if I’m excited. I tend not to get excited about things, but I am definitely slightly nervous about my comic, in which I’ve invested so much of myself, going off into the big wide world. I know some people won’t like it, and that’s totally fine, but you can’t help letting these things go to heart. There’ll be nice things said too, which I’ll try and concentrate on.

PÓM: You would have seen copies of the finished book in advance  of the release, I imagine. Are you happy with how it’s turned out?

GE: Yes, I am. It’s a very nice production, I think, and the colours have come out just as I’d hoped. It’s not a brightly coloured book! Years ago Bryan Talbot offered to do a quote for the back cover, so I was at last able to call him in on that, and I’ve also got some lovely quotes from Neill Cameron and Sarah McIntyre – I’m really lucky.

PÓM: Do you have any idea what sort of pre-orders Egmont took for this, or is it too early to say?

GE: I’ve no idea – I’m not entirely sure I want to know! I do sometimes peek at the sales ranking on Amazon, where it seems to vary wildly between 250,000 and 8,000 on a day-to-day basis. I’ve no idea what that means exactly, other than there must at least be some pre-orders, so that’s a relief.

PÓM: I imagine it must be useful being with Egmont, the same company who publish Tintin?

GE: It is nice, definitely, and I’ll be interested to see how it works out when the book goes on sale. Egmont are the UK’s leading children’s publisher, but I’ve never seen The Rainbow Orchid as specifically a children’s book. I wanted it to be safe for kids to read, certainly – so no extreme violence or sexual content – but I haven’t consciously directed the story at a particular age group.

And the Tintin thing has its advantages and drawbacks too. Comparison with Tintin is a given, of course, and I openly acknowledge its obvious influence as far as the art goes. Actually I think I’m closer to artists such as Edgar P. Jacobs and Floc’h, a bit less cartoony and more detailed than Hergé, but people in the UK only really know Tintin for comparison, and that’s fine. It’s been a very interesting experience working with Egmont, but they’ve been brilliant throughout.

PÓM: How many volumes are there going to be in Rainbow Orchid altogether?

GE: The story is split into three volumes. Volume one mainly takes place in England and France; volume two is in India (1920s India, Pakistan today), and volume three is off into the unknown!

PÓM: Have you any plans for anything else besides Rainbow Orchid?

GE: I haven’t allowed myself to have any other plans! After The Rainbow Orchid is completed I’d really like to start work on a brand new Julius Chancer adventure, for which I have some ideas. I do owe my wife a very big holiday first, though.

(a lovely looking bit of artwork for the second volume of the Rainbow Orchid Garen was kind enough to share with us, by and (c) Garen Ewing; click to see the larger version)

PÓM: And what of the next volumes of the Rainbow Orchid? Do you know when they are due to be published?

GE: The second volume is scheduled to be out in April 2010, and volume three later in the year (October, I think).

PÓM: Garen, thanks very much for taking the time to do this interview with me. I’ve been looking forward to finally seeing a copy of the book, ever since I first saw your work on this, years back, and I look forward to seeing many volumes after this one!

GE: Thanks, Pádraig – I really appreciate your support.

FPI would like to thank to thank Garen and Pádraig for their time and thoughts; the first part of the Rainbow Orchid is out now and, as regular readers will already know, we have been big fans for years and can’t recommend it enough for adults and younger readers alike. Richard’s recent review can be found here and for a peek back in time you can read Matt Badham’s talk with Garen here.

(Borrowed from David S Carter’s Flickr.)

Our very own interview king Pádraig Ó Méalóid set this question last week on his live journal blog (and we linked to it then) but we thought it was well worth posting here on the FPI blog as well to let more folks see it. So with Pádraig’s permission we’re running it in full rather than linking to it. Over to Pádraig.

Most interviews I do consist of asking one person a number of questions. So, for a change, I’ve asked a number of people one question instead. And the question is, What’s your opinion of the term ‘Graphic Novel’? And the people I asked, along with thier answers, are below…

Neil Gaiman, novelist, comics writer, and bon vivant:
It is at moments like this Pádraig, that we remember what Dr Johnson said on the subject:

As far as I can tell, GRAPHIC NOVEL was a term coined by YAHOOS specifically to pester, irritate and likewise get the GANDER of MASTER EDDIE CAMPBELL, such that SMALL BOYS and STREET URCHINS are said to shout it at him in the street (Viz, Here Comes Master Campbell, Have you written or drawn another Graphic Novel today?). Persons of QUALITY do not utter it, preferring such terms as BIG COMICAL BOOK ALL BOUNDEN TOGETHER WITH A THICK SPINE or even A COLLEXION OF PAGES WITH PICTURES AND WORDS PRINTED IN SUCH A WAY THAT BOOKESHOPPES CAN SELL THEM TO THEIR PROFIT.

Todd Klein, the world’s greatest letterer:
I find it a useful term for book-size and book-length comics. I don’t use it for collections of monthly comics in general, preferring to call those ‘collected editions.’ Some projects, like Watchmen, seem worthy of the Graphic Novel name, even though they were originally published in comic-size instalments. After all, so were most of Charles Dickens’ novels.

David Lloyd, artist on V for Vendetta, as well as much else:
In this corner of the globe, an essential requisite to the task of progressing the image of strip art storytelling in the minds of the masses.

Bryan Talbot, artist on Alice in Sunderland, the forthcoming Grandville, and much else:
I’m really not happy with the term. ‘Graphic’ has connotations of explicit sex or violence and ‘novel’ implies that it’s a bastardized form of another medium, which it isn’t. Many GNs aren’t what could be considered novel-length and many aren’t even fiction. Autobiography and reportage are now covered by the ludicrous marketing term ‘non-fiction graphic novels’! Having said that, I do use the term to describe what I produce because everybody knows what you mean and there’s no other option that’s any less vague. ‘Comics’ or ‘sequential art’ is the medium not the form. Alan Moore calls his GNs ‘big comics’. I suspect that this is partly to get up the noses of people who utilise the term graphic novel and partly to diffuse any accusations of pretentiousness. It’s still just as inaccurate though and could just as well describe an oversized comic page or a sequential mural. I don’t like ‘comics’ come to that as it’s a total misnomer. Still, as I said, one uses phrases that people understand. It saves time.

Rick Veitch, writer and artist on Swamp Thing, and lots of other fine work:
I know a lot of folks see it as imperfect, but when I first heard it from Will Eisner in 1976, ‘graphic novel’ did a nice job of defining how far comics might yet reach. These days, though still imperfect, ‘graphic novel’ has found its way into the general cultural lexicon as how far comics have come.

Not a bad marketing trick.

Paul Cornell, novelist, comics writer, and Doctor Who scriptwriter:
I think it should refer only to a single body of work, that’s meant to be seen as one story, contained within one volume. That is, everything from Maus to Scott Pilgrim. I don’t think it should apply to collections of comics. It irks me that mainstream folk use it when they mean ‘comic’, and I’m proud to keep calling the medium ‘comics’.

Dave McKean, painter, musician, and Sandman cover artist:
It’s a marketing term. At one point it referred to comics with the scope and ambition of a regular novel, but the glut of Spider-Super-Bat-X ‘graphic novels’ skuppered that idea. I guess it’s been adopted by the media as a way of talking about contemporary comics as opposed to The Beano or pre-80s superhero comics, but I don’t think the term means much beyond that.

John Higgins, comics artist, and the ‘Third Man’ on Watchmen:
It is a slightly clunky appellation but I love the name ‘Graphic Novel’ it says to me comics have come of age. A book you can put on your shelf, not some floppy ‘kid’ of a 32-page comic that can’t stand up by itself, but a ‘manly’ Graphic Novel. It has hairs on its chest and it can.

Leigh Walton, comics editor, and Top Shelf’s marketing coordinator:
I find it intensely frustrating, in the sense that I can’t fully support it and I can’t fully dismiss it. Great minds have worked for ages to invent a better term, and they’ve failed. Its shortcomings are obvious — it’s based on a term, ‘novel,’ which has specific requirements of length and content, and it can never replace ‘comics’ as a general term for the medium (how clumsy does a ‘graphic novel festival’ sound?). Yet ‘comic book’ was reserved ages ago for a format that isn’t really very booklike at all.

On the other hand, words mean whatever everyone says they mean, regardless of what they used to mean. Our definition of ‘novel’ is itself quite recent. And the fact is that ‘graphic novel’ is the best term to communicate what sort of book From Hell is — or even what sort of book Blankets is (despite its autobiographical nature). I wince to think of it applied to a book like Jamilti and Other Stories; at the very least I prefer my ‘graphic novel’ to be one big story. But in the end it’s about using whatever methods best get your message across. I know Top Shelf’s position is that the book is more important than what it’s called, and I feel the same way.

Chris Staros Top Shelf publisher, and Elvis fan:
I’m fine with it now, as it’s so accepted I don’t have to explain it anymore. But, in truth, as a descriptive term it’s not a great one (though neither is ‘comic book’). But we, as an industry, have imbued both terms with power, and now they are words rich with meaning.

If I was in a garage band and said ‘Dudes, I’ve got the name for the band, it’s The Beetles, but with an ‘A’ like the Beat – so, The Beatles’, I would have been kicked out of the band. But they imbued that name with such power it has transcended everything (well, except Elvis).

So, as long as we put out great books, ‘Graphic Novel’ works, because we give the term its power.

Jess Nevins, scholar, researcher, and world-class annotator:
I don’t mind it, really–it has a certain utility, both as a marketing & classification tool and as a term for comics-heads to use and argue over (and we all know how important arguing is to comics-heads). I think the emotions stirred up by its use–and even its existence–is rather silly.

(Cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan (BEK), borrowed from here, on the increasingly mainstream acceptance of the Graphic Novel and the ways it’s becoming very trendy in certain literary circles.)

Mark Seifert, creative director at Avatar Comics, and helping hand on Bleeding Cool:
I think the debate on whether ‘graphic novel’ is an accurate or useful term is about to be temporarily superseded by the coming debate over what to call comics and books in general in the downloadable era. The term ebooks seems to be gaining ground early on, and in our own industry you’re starting to see the term digital comics being used.

But then you’ve got something like our own FreakAngels, which is pretty obviously a webcomic and equally obviously what most people would call a graphic novel. That to me underlines the problem with the term — it’s being used to describe both the art form and the format, and is a bit awkward at both. And all that doesn’t even touch on the elephant in the room that ‘graphic novel’ is also largely a way to avoid saying ‘comic book’.

All that said, the term doesn’t bother me. It’s a term of convenience first and of marketing second, and it’s the best we have at the moment. Perhaps the most interesting thing in all of this is that around the office and among fellow professionals, we all just use the term ‘books’ without a second thought when we talk about what we do.

Garen Ewing, writer and artist on Rainbow Orchid, and all-round good guy :
I’m not as vehemently against it I was a few years ago, or even a year ago. Until very recently, I associated the term graphic novel with all the rubbish that was put out under that tag when companies realised that comics in book form could be an easy revenue stream in the wake of Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns. It had an air of pretension about it that 95% of the product could not live up to.

In the last year or so I’ve come across many people who are having their first contact with comics, and for them ‘graphic novel’ is a natural label, and one that many lay-people just accept. I would not personally promote my work as a graphic novel, because the old connotations are still strong with me, but I have found it a convenient badge to place on my work when describing it to non-comics people, because it’s a phrase they have an understanding of – which is quite something really. There are works I would call graphic novels, and mean it in a positive way – From Hell and Berlin to name just a couple from my own bookshelf. So, I still harbour a slight prejudice against the term, but it is rapidly thawing.

John Reppion, one half of MooreReppion, and an eminent Fortean:
Personally I don’t have any problem with the term even though it’s just generally used to describe trades now as well as actual, non-serialised, stories. Comics is not really a great term either since the majority of stories aren’t (intentionally) funny so graphic novel is certainly no worse than that.

Gary Spencer Millidge, writer of Comic Book Design, and creator of the truly splendid, but sadly unfinished Strangehaven:
I don’t particularly like the term ‘Graphic Novel,’ but it is a universally understood term, at least with librarians and booksellers, which is a hugely valuable asset in the movement to gain wider acceptance for the format.

I know some will argue that ‘graphic’ implies sexual imagery and that ‘novel’ doesn’t include works of non-fiction and perhaps is inaccurate as far as the length of some of the works are concerned. But I think the term is in such wide usage now, that when someone says ‘Graphic Novel,’ it’s pretty clear what they’re talking about.

Remember that the term ‘comics’ itself is fraught with possible misinterpretation and confusion with ‘comedians’. Alan Moore’s assertion that Graphics Novels are just ‘Big Comics’ is true, but to me it just conjures up an image of Frank Carson.
.
Yes, they are just big comics, but they are typically a squarebound, self-contained format, sold in bookshops. That’s a worthwhile distinction from a flimsy, periodical comic book sold on newsstands or in comic shops I think.

Over the years, I’ve heard many other attempts at finding a label for the format, almost all of which I’ve forgotten (which proves a point), except for Donna Barr’s ‘Drawn Books’ which I think is an awfully clunky and unattractive description of such a potentially beautiful art form. The comics’ industry’s usage of the description ‘trade paperback’ I also find particularly unhelpful. Do the comic reading public have any idea what that means?

As imperfect as it is, I think we’re stuck with the term Graphic Novel, so perhaps it’s time we all started embracing it.

Leah Moore, the other half of MooreReppion, and living proof that there is a comic-creating gene:
Leah: I think for the most part it is used incorrectly to just mean a collected edition of a series or part of a series. It’s rare that these are intended to actually read like a novel, and often the artwork is patchy, or the story kind of wavers about, much more like a series than a novel.

I think where people have written a complete graphic novel, but broken it into issues, that’s okay, and obviously when the book is brought out all in one go simply as the complete book, then it’s accurate.

The main reason people like to call them graphic novels is because it makes them seem more grown up and serious and artistically valid than just ‘comics’. People will say they collect graphic novels, or that they are into graphic novels, and not feel nearly so nerdy and naff as just saying they like comics.

(Thanks again to Pádraig Ó Méalóid for letting us repost – now – what do YOU think?)

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: Top Shelf are publishing Alec: The Years Have Pants, a collection of your autobiographical Alec McGarry stories, a lot of which has been out of print for years. Are you looking forward to having them all back in print?

Eddie Campbell: I certainly am. This 640-page compendium is undoubtedly my single most important publication to date. It collects the work that has always been the principal strain of my oeuvre, and it allows me the opportunity to add a new ‘book’ to the set. The thing I enjoyed in seeing it all together was a sense of sweeping through time, of characters ageing, without that being a conscious plan, since after all I drew it all over a course of nearly thirty years. Funny thing is that I didn’t arrange this compendium chronologically at first, meaning in the sense of the order in which events took place, since that was at odds with the order in which I drew it. That came as an afterthought. So it goes: The King Canute Crowd, Graffiti Kitchen, How to be an Artist, Little Italy, The Dead Muse (just my own pages from that), The Dance of Lifey Death, After the Snooter and the new book, The Years have Pants. There are also a couple of sections of short things and fragmentary works, appearing in their proper sequence.

(cover to the hardback edition of Alec: the Years Have Pants by and (c) Eddie Campbell, published this autumn by Top Shelf)

PÓM: What was the first one of those to be published, and by whom?

EC: The earliest work appeared as little hand-made photocopied booklets in 1981 and after, if that counts as publishing, and if it doesn’t, then the first was when the earliest material appeared as the 32-page book from Escape in 1984, which was just titled ‘Alec’. That in turn became the first part of the 140-page King Canute Crowd published in 1990 by Acme/Eclipse.

PÓM: Seeing as you’ve been revising all your old work, have you been tempted to simply leave out anything, or majorly re-write or re-draw any of it?

EC: Nothing big, but if I see an ear in the wrong part of the head it’s very difficult to not get out the correction white and fix it. Other than that I only tend to tamper with things if I remember a miscommunication or a reader misinterpretation on the previous outing.

PÓM: What made you decide to do autobiographical strips, do you remember?

EC: I was reading the autobiographical novels of Henry Miller, but now I can’t recall whether I was reading them because I wanted to go that route or whether they inspired it.  Essentially I liked the idea of finding things to write and draw in the life I saw around me rather than just filling out the readymade narrative templates of thriller and fantasy and soap opera. There’s new stuff everywhere if you take the trouble to look for it. I do know that I didn’t see Spiegelman’s or Pekar’s work ‘til 1982.

PÓM: Was the Alec stuff your first published work?

EC: Good lord no. The first thing I put out was a forty page book in 1975, when I was nineteen, titled The Tale of Beem Gotelump. In retrospect I like the fact that it was complete, self-contained and presented as a one-off, not as an Issue #1. In other words, it was forward-looking to a time when that would not be an unusual thing. I printed 500 copies for 120 quid. I sold around sixty of them and then realised I had somewhat overestimated the demand. I decided I did not have what it takes to be a published artist and I did not appear in print for another six years. Later I realised that I failed because I hadn’t made a bargain with Fate. So in How To Be an Artist, recounting when I set out to do things properly, I show myself doing that right there at the beginning.

Well here’s a scan of the cover of that first book from 1975 (above) It was A5 size, which for some time after I associated with amateurism. I guess because it’s a ready-made photocopy size. Nowadays it’s A4 that I would avoid. I had to re-examine my thoughts on this when First Second decided to make their whole line almost exactly A5 size. Standardized formats bug me. I like Top Shelf’s approach, where every book determines its own format. When I published my four Alec books in 2000/2002 I was careful to make each one a slightly different size, which I’m glad to say bugged a few people.

PÓM: How do your family feel about having their lives recorded in this way, alongside you own?

EC: I think they’re all right with it, but none of them have ever really commented. They only started giving their opinions when a TV show became a possibility. While it was just a running comic strip they would all laugh and then forget. I don’t recall any of them asking for a photocopy of a particular page to put on their wall or anything like that. But on the other hand they’ll probably get upset at me saying nobody ever cared. We get through our lives not always realizing that we made advances because of somebody else’s unobtrusive support. There are lots of people who I think might care and I’ve always taken pains to keep them from ever finding out about the books. I live a life of fear. Sometimes I think that’s why I emigrated. Actually, I do remember Cal being hurt that I drew him sleep-walking and urinating in the kitchen rubbish bin. It was plastic and white which I guess to a somnambulist might look like a porcelain toilet. It was just a background thing while something else was going on; he looked hurt so I removed it.

Later he read The King Canute Crowd in which I did the same thing to Danny Grey. I’m a repeat offender. Danny, you may recall, once mistook Penny Moore’s handbag for a urinal during his nocturnal perambulations. The bag wasn’t white and shiny, so I have no explanation in this instance. As for my young ‘uns, God knows what neuroses I’ve inflicted on them. Still, at least they can never say Dad wasn’t around.

(the family were always delighted to be the subject of father’s new illustrated work, (c) Eddie Campbell)

PÓM: What was the idea of the TV show you mentioned?

EC: I was first approached two years ago by an independent production company who were quite taken by my The Fate of The Artist. We signed papers and raised development funding soon after that, and it’s been ‘in development’ since then. Of course, the world recession has also developed since then too, which makes things more difficult than they might otherwise have been. We’ve written up a detailed plan and even filmed a two-and-a-half minute teaser. ‘Watch this space’ is all I can say at present.

PÓM: Seeing as you mentioned it, when did you move to Australia, and why?

EC: It was at the end of 1986. My wife, who is Australian, wanted to go home. Being out of work at the time, I thought it would be unreasonable of me to object to the proposal. For a long time afterwards I thought I had done a stupid thing, careerwise, but in the end there’s nobody in England I look at and think, ‘That’s what I wanted and I fucked it up’. Which is not to say I think it all worked out. I feel that I have worked hard only to wake up one morning and realize I’m a sidelight in an extravaganza of baloney.

PÓM: Do you think you’re there for good, or do you harbour ideas of returning to Scotland at some stage?

EC: I’m here for good I suppose. I’m still a British national though, and everybody still thinks of me as a visitor even though I’ve been here for twenty three years.

PÓM: To go back to the autobiographical work, didn’t you also do The Ace Rock’n'Roll Club? Why is that not included with the rest in the Alec book?

EC: I feel that the ‘Ace Club’ doesn’t belong in the big Alec book because the tone is quite different; it precedes my finding of a ‘voice’. It’s true that I did stumble upon the idea of using autobiographical material in Ace, but that was more an accident than part of the plan. It’s so long ago since most of it has been in print that there must be a few people reading this who have never seen it. The 1993 edition from Fantagraphics was the first and last time it was all collected together.

“In The Days of The Ace Rock’n'Roll Club”, to give it its full title, was a set of nine short stories I completed between March 1978 and March 1979. The pieces are intricately woven together through pattern and repetition and I was certainly thinking of them as a unit though I don’t recall having a plan at the time to publish them, because as I said, in those years I had given up hope of publication. But paradoxically the work was all completed in zipatones and made print-ready as though I was being published in some other imaginary life I was living.

It’s worth mentioning too that Ace was not unlike Eisner’s Contract with God, published in October 1978, in that his book was also a suite of short stories which instead of being united by titular protagonist, were constructed around a shared location, in his case Dropsie Avenue. I would have got the idea from the Broadway stories of Damon Runyan. I also think there are a couple of the stories in Ace that are as good as anything in the King Canute Crowd, so I didn’t leave them out on grounds of inferiority.

PÓM: Do you think you’ve learned anything about yourself through your autobiographical work, or gained any insights that you might not otherwise have?

EC: I always say, when I’m addressing students, though I fear my words may be falling on deaf ears, that any kind of art, even the modest sort, should be about communicating wisdom, even if only on the level of ‘If evil really exists, would it look like Doctor Doom?’ I stopped reading comic books a long time ago because they weren’t telling me anything that I didn’t already know. At the same time, when we reread stuff that we read a long time ago, what we feel we are experiencing is a recall of the sense of discovery we once experienced from that same work. Getting the same thing a second time from a work acts as a reaffirmation. We need to do a mental stock-take from time to time.

However, when I read fiction or study art nowadays I’m usually more interested in the story of how the work came to be than in the story the work contains, or in how it all fits into some bigger philosophical idea. Sometimes when I reread my own work after a year or two I’m surprised to find observations or ideas in it that I don’t remember putting there. Sometimes I read a review of one of my books that pinpoints something that completely takes me by surprise. Occasionally I learned stuff about myself from reading a review of my Fate of the Artist. And often it would be a point that I couldn’t argue against, and I’d wish I could say it was deliberate because it made me sound quite clever. I think when an artist is working quickly and turning out a lot of work and is in tune with what’s going on around him and in the world, and has trained his subconscious to be working for him non-stop, he can be a conduit for a higher kind of wisdom than the sort I mentioned before. You can even read your own work and learn something you never knew before, or never thought you knew. In fact, in art that is functioning fully, it’s obligatory.

PÓM: I’m going to take that as a yes!

(embracing the blogosphere, (c0 Eddie Campbell)

The other major solo work you did was Bacchus. Do you want to give a brief rundown on what that’s all about?

EC: My big mythological adventure. Since I was going to be travelling abroad (in 1986) I set out to draw something in tune with my movements, a big sprawling exotic adventure in which the characters are always moving geographically, finding themselves in a new story everywhere they go. So the first order of the day was the hijack of a jumbo jet by an implausible character, the Eyeball Kid, named after his ten sets of eyes, that goes wrong and comes down in a tropical jungle.

I also wanted to play with flashback in a big way, as though a colossal backstory was always trying to catch up to the present, always being told from different angles until it contradicts itself inside out. Thus I had, to give an example, a journey under the sea with Joe Theseus and the Anchovy, coming out in Sicily while the flashbacks had fancifully connected the mafia to obscure latter-day developments in Greek myth. All done with a sense of fun and mischief.

I recall being  somewhat mystified when my pal and fellow cartoonist Glenn Dakin would automatically skip all the ‘flashback’ stuff out of a previously acquired habit, saying that kind of thing always turns out to be something you’ve already seen in a previous issue. So it’s like arriving in the middle of a soap opera in all its complicatedness, and having somebody witty sitting on the sofa beside you explaining it as you go along: “That’s Joe Theseus’ 34th wife, and the alimony is late because the wicked Telchines have grabbed Joe by the assets.” And instead of dreary ordinary people, the characters are mythical, or at least they used to be. As one character says of another, while gloating over his demise, “You used to be mythical, but now you’re history!”

PÓM: Is Bacchus going to be collected into a single volume any time soon?

EC: It’s too big to be in one volume. It’s twice as big as From Hell; there are around 1200 pages, so it will be two volumes. Top Shelf will collect it all together in 2010.

PÓM: What sort of time period was involved with the Alec and Bacchus material?

EC: I drew Bacchus for just over twelve years, 1986-1999. Alec is me, so anything autobiographical is still part of Alec. Twenty-nine years and still going, 1980 to the present. As I said, that’s quite a big sweep of time in the new book. The peculiar thing when I revise work for these big collections is that it’s never the oldest stuff that looks the most uneven or primitive, or just badly drawn. It’s always some phase in the middle where I’ve gotten out of the habit of looking properly at the world and picked up some bad tics. One day I might look hard at the thing I’ve just done and wonder how ears have wandered so far down the sides of heads, or how noses have become so implausibly small, or what made me think I could get away with drawing so heavy-handedly, or when did this paper I’ve been using for so many years slip in quality, or is it the ink? Then a shake-up is called for.

A thing I’ve noticed about all of these different series, when I have to go back over them for a new edition, is that the dodgy artwork usually happened at the same time right across the board. If I’m perusing From Hell and I’m suddenly embarrassed about a lapse, it usually corresponds to a lapse at a similar time elsewhere. I’ve had good and bad vintages. 1988 was a year in which I seem to have been having difficulties. And when I think about it, that was a year I was having troubles in my everyday life too. In contrast, 1986 was a good year. I work better when I’m not beset by money problems and I’m getting along with everyone in my life.

PÓM: Another question I probably should have asked earlier on is, did you have any formal art training at any stage?

EC: I did a one year ‘Foundation Course’ at Central School of Art in London. I don’t know how it works nowadays, but that didn’t count for anything, because that was just a preamble to a diploma course in a specialist area which I was trying for, graphic design, which is designing for print (I explain as the word ‘graphic’ has been somewhat waylaid in the intervening period, at least in our pinched and limited field, which would be alright except that it keeps vomiting up into the world at large). I failed to get into a diploma course, and not for want of trying. And not for want of being good enough either. Perhaps my arrogance caused my failure. It’s a bloody shame really, since I ended up as a small publisher there for a while and had to bring in help on all my design matters. I mean, I was correct in my projection that graphic design was a skill that would have been of use to me. College might also have crushed my spirit if I’d seen it through, but isn’t that what we go to college for?

One thing that year was good for was that it introduced me to Brian Bolland, who was doing a one-year post-grad course upstairs and I got to know him and meet him socially, and in turn met the folk that he met, including Dave Gibbons, etc, etc. In the final event, I came out of college and lost my way. I worked in a social security office for two years and then completed my descent down the ladder of opportunity by working in a factory for the next five years and then being made redundant and being completely washed up and unemployed. At this point, 1982, aged twenty six, I took hold of the situation and started being positive about what I intended to do with my life. No, that’s not precise. In my own head I was always an artist, not just an artistic practitioner, but an artist of some import, and now I decided to commit to leaving my mark on the world. I didn’t think of it in terms of ‘now I must make a living out  of this’, because I think a small ambition is asking to fail, and being an artist and making a living are tricky concepts to reconcile. One must insanely hope to shift the world off its axis, and ‘making a living’ will just have to look after itself. It was another eight years before I was actually earning enough to say I was ‘making a living.’ The upshot of all this is that anyone who thinks of asking me for career advice has well and truly lost their marbles.

(a scene with a familiar character in From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, published Knockabout/Top Shelf)

PÓM: At some point during all of this you started work on From Hell with Alan Moore. How did that all come about?

EC: Though I knew Alan and we had stayed at each other’s houses and drank ales on numerous occasions, I had previously only illustrated one short prose piece by Alan, for a Knockabout album in 1985. I guess we had always kicked around the notion of doing a bigger story together one day. Suddenly I got a phone call, late in 1988 and ‘the game was afoot.’  When Alan conceives a project, he very quickly starts to think of it in pictorial terms, usually based, I suppose, on whatever pictorial approaches are already out there. He begins to see it in a certain artist’s style, in other words. So he was already using my hands in his head before I ever laid a hand on the first script. Since I had never drawn anything remotely in the horror or crime idioms, or anything set in a historical era, he was sticking his neck out somewhat.

Actually, I tell a lie, the thing that put my name in the hat was a little 1984 autobiographical 4-pager titled The Pyjama Girl, in which I contemplated a notorious Australian murder from the 1920s. That story is in the big Alec compendium, incidentally. And by December 1988 I had a script and we were off and running. Well, hobbling, or stumbling or crawling on all fours. Little did I know this thing would take ten years and see three publishers fall by the wayside, not to mention numerous distributors and a printer. You need your wits about you to survive in this game. All this talk about time reminds me of a teenager who asked me a couple of years ago how long From Hell took to draw. When I said ten years she looked at me in horror. How could anybody spend ten years of their life on the one thing? When I was a teenager I would certainly have thought likewise.

(“Callum’s Alan Moore anecdote”, by and (c) Eddie Campbell)

PÓM: Was From Hell the first time you drew from someone else’s scripts, rather than your own?

EC: No, I had done that before, and I had also written scripts for other artists, though nothing I feel like drawing attention to right at this minute. In fact, Alan had chucked me a couple of sets of his script carbons for Time Twisters back in 1985 and I drew them just to get a hang of things. Now there’s something that nobody has ever seen. Nor should they want to. We have to do our time and suffer a few embarrassments before we’re ready for the big one.

PÓM: As I’ve mentioned scripts, when you’re doing your own work, do you write a script first, then draw from that, or do you do both parts simultaneously, or what?

EC: There’s never anything you could call a ’script’. I always write just enough to work out the page count and a rough idea of what’s on each one. A lot of scribbling on a couple of beermats and old envelopes would be enough to get me to the layout stage. Once I’m on the art boards I scribble the dialogue in the margins, but working it out fully as I go as space limitations will apply in the next step. I’ll only note the action if there’s a silent sequence, just to assign each panel its specific task. Then I set about moving all the words from the margins roughly into place at the tops of the panels, writing everything out properly as I go, usually because I can’t read my scribbles. I’ll put in some stick figures, but only if there’s something happening that I think I might forget about.

At this stage I’m conscious about making sure the first speaker is on the left side of the panels and if he isn’t I have to carefully place the balloons so that he can be. Then I letter all the words in ink; you have to do the lettering first because it’s easier to adjust the size of a figure to fit than it is acceptable to alter the size of the lettering. And only then do I start properly organizing pictures. I always start inking before I’ve finished pencilling, which I would never recommend to a student or anybody else for that matter. I even end up with correction white all over the place before I’ve finished pencilling. It’s an odd fact about this pencilling/inking rigmarole that you never notice you’ve given a head two noses until after you’ve started inking it. Sometimes it’s a muddy mess and I flip the page over and start again on the back. Years later I always find peculiar things on the backs of at least a quarter of my pages.

PÓM: How do you go about drawing from someone else’s script?

EC: It’s actually much easier to work from the never-ending narrative that’s going through my head, because that already comes with images. With somebody else’s script I have to struggle to invent the pictures. For years, through the nineties, I used to regard From Hell as the least profitable thing I was working on, absurdly, because not only did I have to figure out images that weren’t happening naturally in my head, but I also had to read and digest Alan’s script, which, enjoyable as it was, demanded a necessary investment of time. Of course, nowadays the royalties from From Hell are the largest part of my income. And another thing, when that book was first solicited I only got orders for 6,000 copies. That’s why I printed it on cheap newsprint. It looked like being a risky undertaking. I printed much more than that, but the first wave of income just covered the six thousand. I got out of publishing in the end because it was all just too much of a  mystery to me. Chris Staros at Top Shelf is a genius with all that stuff. Me, I fret over the minutiae and lose sight of the big picture.

Talking about being a publisher, it occurs to me that, at some time or other, I must have dabbled in all of the assorted disciplines that make up comic books. I was even once employed to letter a book. That was the Daniel Torres Opium that Knockabout published in translation from the Spanish in the mid-’80s. That was one of my first strictly ‘for hire’ jobs. It felt good to be useful. I don’t know who did the translation, but I even fixed up the script a little as I went along.

PÓM: I know Alan is famous for his long scripts, and I imagine that the script for From Hell must have been particularly detailed. Did you follow it all to the letter, or did you take a few artistic decisions along the way, do you remember?

EC: I only deviated if there was something that had been overlooked. When I sat down to diagram all the comings and goings of the abduction in Cleveland Street in Chapter 1, I realized the evidence only made sense if Sickert and Mary Kelly entered the street from the end opposite to the one Alan used in the script (the script is in print in a book that came out in the early 1990s if anyone fancies checking it). But you had to sit down and actually draw it to see that. There were a few such incidents, but not many at all.

PÓM: I was intrigued to read recently where you were saying that you weren’t happy at the time that Bill Sienkiewicz got to do Big Numbers, certainly a big glamorous project at the time, while you were stuck cranking out From Hell a chapter at a time in Taboo. I presume you’ve changed your mind on this since?

EC: No, I meant that. Bill was drawing the innovative modern day real life book, which I thought of as my specialty, while I was stuck doing a Victorian horror story that had already been done every which way in novels and films. I still think Big Numbers would have been a landmark book. The two issues that came out sold sixty-five thousand copies and then forty-five thousand approximately. At the time it I think Bill regarded that as too small potatoes. But we were heading into a different kind of market. The book would have sold squillions in due course. Still, in the end I guess at the same time we did have a new angle on the Whitechapel murders, and Big Numbers, as imagined by Alan, was technically beyond my abilities in 1989. I’m referring to the photoreal soap-opera look that was used as a jumping-off point. Bill was a world-class illustrator. He’s one of the last entries in Walt Reed’s monumental ‘The Illustrator in America’, a book that I have on my shelf here. My talent lay elsewhere.

PÓM: And one more question about From Hell: what did you think of the film?

EC: It’s a shame really, but to get the film made they had to mostly lose that new angle and do the story as a straightforward whodunnit, which is the way the Ripper story has always been done. In my own memory there was Murder by Decree in 1979, with Christopher Plummer as Sherlock Holmes solving the mystery, and Jack the Ripper in 1988 with Michael Caine as Inspector Abberline. Both of those films used the Masonic cover-up theory. But I think films are a bogus medium from top to bottom. There’s too much money involved. The investors have got to be satisfied. And that can only be done by appealing to the least discriminating taste so as to fill up enough seats. Alas, what can you do? Movie people only buy book rights in the first place because that part of the process, creating story, is the part which interests them the least. They are in the business of creating spectacle and the purchased story is just a vehicle. They are happy to change it in any way necessary to make a bigger spectacle.

PÓM: Was that your only brush with the movie business, then?

EC: I got to do the whole process back to front when I became involved in adapting the Black Diamond Detective Agency (2007) into a book. Hollywood producer Bill Horberg had the script and the idea of making it into a ‘graphic novel’, as part of the developmental process. The good thing is that he accepted that the different medium demanded a different approach and I was allowed a great deal of freedom in the adapting. So I had a movie project into which I had to inject narrative logic rather than the other way around, of working from a book and having to take it out.

PÓM: As you mentioned it, what did you publish during your time as a publisher?

EC: I published 88 things over a course of eight years between 1995 and 2002, meaning I made the object, organized the printing and paid the bill. That’s close enough to something every month if you allow for a tapering off at the end. That includes sixty issues of Bacchus, which was monthly at the beginning and eight issues per year at the end, nine volumes of the collected Bacchus with two going into a second edition, Four of Alec with one going into a second edition, one-off 48-page jobs such as Graffiti Kitchen, the Dance of Lifey Death, The Birth Caul and Snakes and Ladders (these two from Alan Moore texts), six editions of the collected 600-page From Hell, two issues of a magazine titled Egomania, and a limited edition poster. During that time, as a studio we also packaged and freelanced a bunch of stuff.

(Bacchus #22,by and (c) Eddie Campbell)

PÓM: You mentioned The Birth Caul and Snakes and Ladders above, the adaptations that you did of two of Alan’s spoken word CDs. I know Melinda Gebbie is supposed to be doing Angel Passage at some stage, but is there any likelihood you’re going to do the other one, The Highbury Working, which is my favourite of the lot of them?

EC: I don’t think that will happen. I illustrated the Birth Caul because when I listened to Alan’s recorded monologue, my head filled to overflowing with images. I often say that From Hell isn’t the best book I’ve drawn and it isn’t even the best book that Alan and I made together. That would be the Birth Caul. I followed with Snakes and Ladders because I thought it would be a good idea if there was a companion book, and I did have a few driving ideas for it, such as superimposing Burne-Jones’s Golden Staircase on the double helix, and the woman dancing with the stage-prop snake in a Victorian era music hall, but as I worked on it I felt it becoming harder to keep up the inspiration and it seemed certain to me that to attempt the other projects would turn into a case of diminishing returns. I’d say that we came out ahead with the two books as they stand in A Disease of Language, which Knockabout published in 2006.

PÓM: I know you’ve started doing work with First Second, who really do do lovely books. Is there anything you did in the meantime that I’ve missed, before we get to that?

EC: Have we mentioned my 48-page Batman book, The Order of Beasts? Daren White was my co-writer on that. DC slotted it into their ‘Elseworlds’ series, but it was actually meant to be a straight Batman yarn set in 1939. I had already started work on that when I packed in my self-publishing operation and I felt that I was launching a new phase of my career. So in 2004 that became the first in my sequence of full-colour painted-art books. I worked out all the problems in that one, and the three First Second jobs followed one a year, 2006-2008 with another that’s still in the pipeline, titled The Playwright, scheduled for 2010 from Top Shelf.

(Batman: the Order of Beasts by Eddie Campbell, Daren White and Michael Evans, (c) DC)

I’d done a couple of short colour jobs before but never a whole book. In fact I’d never drawn a full length comic book for one of the two big companies, DC or Marvel, before (though I wrote four issues of Hellblazer which Sean Phillips illustrated, way back in 1995, which has never been reprinted), just a number of  little things here and there. The curious thing about the situation is that after the Batman book was wrapped up and scheduled for release, my pal Bob Morales, who was writing a run of Captain America, recommended me as fill-in artist for two issues after Chris Bachalo bowed out. So I handled the pencil and ink art on that (with a swiftly hired assistant) and the two-parter came out more or less at the same time as the Batman. Full sized projects from both DC and Marvel at the same time, and I’ve never considered myself a superhero artist. You have to laugh.

(Captain America by Eddie Campbell, (c) Marvel)

Bachalo was a tough act to follow though. I was barely hanging on by my fingernails. In his Marvel work he developed some far out notions about anatomy. How do you follow on from that, knowing that it’s all going to be put in one collection (Captain America: Homeland), all the time keeping the kind of crazy schedule necessary to turn two issues around in two months? The editor, Axel Alonzo,  cunningly had the colourist mimic Bachalo’s very specific palette to hold it all together. So all in all it was a serviceable job I thought, and I managed to project myself as a team player if only for a couple of months.

Then, after the painted Batman, I used the same techniques on a 13-page Escapist story (written by Dan Best) that appeared in the issue that had Will Eisner’s final job. I also wrote a little story titled A Day in the Life of the Flash that Paul Grist illustrated for DC’s second Bizarro book. It’s written in a very fast unintelligible shorthand. I was pleased with it. So that was my ’summer of the superhero’. But all of these stories were somewhat ‘retro’. I was going back in time to the way these characters used to be long ago. Even the Escapist had a nostalgic angle, being set in the 1939 World’s Fair. After that, White and I wrote a more hard-bitten two-part Joker story that you can find in Batman: Going Sane, illustrated by Bart Sears, just to show I can do a more up to date version of this sort of thing if you hold my arm behind my back.

If it’s not my drawing arm I mean.

PÓM: Aside from your misgivings about the uniformity of size that you mentioned above, are you happy with your work at First Second?

EC: Oh yes, more than happy.

PÓM: They’ve published three of your books so far: The Fate of the Artist, The Black Diamond Detective Agency, and Monsieur Leotard, and you said there’s a fourth one coming out next year, The Playwright. What’s that about?

EC: The Playwright will be from Top Shelf. I included it there because it’s another colour book. In fact this one is brighter looking than all of the others put together. It’s about the sex life of a celibate middle aged man. Well, he’s not actually celibate, he’s just hopeless. It’s all very British in its humour, but it’s also a very touching little story. About one quarter of it has already been serialised, and that only in black and white, so it will be grand to see this wrapped up at last. It’s written by my occasional collaborator, Daren White, and the rest of it’s all me. It’s very much my kind of story, in fact Top Shelf thought I’d written it at first.

(a panel from The Playwright, written by Daren White, art by Eddie Campbell, due from Top Shelf next year, (c) Eddie Campbell and Daren White)

PÓM: I know that there are the two volumes of Bacchus coming out in 2010. Is there anything else in the pipeline after that?

EC: There’s a lot of consolidation going on in the Campbell universe, as you can see. But I can’t see past the collected Bacchus at present. There is another thing that I’m pitching but I can’t say anything about that for now.

PÓM: And at this point, I think I’ve run out of things to ask you! Eddie Campbell, thank you very much for your time, and your patience as we went through all this.

EC: And thank you too, Paddy. Can I call you Paddy? If not, I insist you start calling me Edwárd.

PÓM: I would have to translate your name as Éamonn Cámbéal, and I’m happy to see that, on further investigation, it seems that I’m not a million miles out with my translation of your surname. Cám is Irish for crooked, and Béal is Irish for mouth, so Cámbéal is, handily enough, Crooked Mouth, which more or less goes along with what I’m finding on the ‘net.

EC: Okay. Ya got me.

(the joys of the interview, art and (c) Eddie Campbell)

FPI would like to thank Eddie for sharing his time, thoughts and art with us and to Pádraig for conducting another great interview. Alec: the Years Have Pants will be published by Top Shelf this autumn in both paperback and a hardback edition. You can keep up with Eddie via his blog and Pádraig’s LiveJournal is here.

PÓM: OK, I have a bunch of questions here from people, they kinda break down into a few general topics. There’s one thing I want to read you first, though, one thing somebody sent in, and he said, “Sorry, not a question, just a comment and a Thank You. In 2005 your song, “March of the Sinister Ducks” was making the rounds on the internet, and I linked to it on my blog.  A friend of a friend commented there, saying it was awful and hating me for putting it in front of her ears.  I replied back… and we ended up going on a date that night, and have been together since then, and married a year and a half.  She refuses though to let me to refer to Sinister Ducks as Our Song, so thank you.”

AM: Well, I’m glad that relationship had a happy ending, it’s good to be of assistance.

[youtube cFK2Xq2RyiU]

(March of the Sinister Ducks by Alan ‘Northampton’s Got Talent’ Moore, animated by pippyisatruck and techie rob)

PÓM: OK, that’s lots of people asking about who might turn up in the last volume of Century. Are you familiar with Doctor House?

AM: Yeah, he is an American-based character, who it would be unlikely for us to refer to, simply because the story is set in London, all three parts are set in London, so things that are, political figures – I mean, we refer to 24, we refer to shows that could conceivably have some global impact, enough to be mentioned on British television as news events, but I’m afraid I don’t actually watch a lot of these shows, but if there was a way that I could have worked House in logically I would have done, but then I would have been able to have worked in stuff from my favourite shows, like The Wire which, other than a passing reference in the text story, there isn’t any real desire to do that.

PÓM: I think the reason he was bringing up House is because he’s obviously a modern version of Sherlock Holmes anyway, you see.

AM: Yeah?

PÓM: Oh yeah, everything. The flat is number 221b, everything, it’s all Holmes as a modern American doctor.

AM: Well, yeah, I mean, I suppose if we ever did – I mean, one of the things we’ve talked about is a possible future American expedition for the League, in which case some of these things could turn up. Whether they will or not, I mean, we don’t know really what we’re doing beyond the end of volume three, but it’s always a possibility.

PÓM: OK. A number of people mentioned the possibility of Harry Potter – you don’t have to comment on that if you don’t want to.

AM: It probably, like I say, there’s various characters from modern narratives and culture that will be making at least cameos, some will be making more than cameos but, as we say, it’s kind of, the closer we get to the twenty-first century, the more delicate some of the copyright issues become, you know, but it’s a possibility, I suppose, some kind of reference somewhere, you know. That’s possible.

PÓM: Somebody say, “Why is Orlando so stylishly dressed if she’s basically a promiscuous war hero addicted to killing people?”

AM: Because Orlando – actually, Orlando is becoming, in this third volume, a very interesting character, especially in the 2009 section, which opens with Orlando, as a male, in Qumar, which is a surrogate Iraq, at the tail-end of Operation Sinbad, which is actually the name of the real operation which the British troops are taking, south of Basra, clearing up the last of the insurgents and preparing to pull out.

PÓM: That’s interesting, because of course Orlando and Sinbad were an item at one point, weren’t they?

AM: They were indeed, which is a kind of, an irony which, shall we say, does not escape Orlando in this opening sequence. There’s some consequences for it. I mean, Orlando, who we see as a male for the first two books, well, for the first two and a bit books, Orlando is a male. Orlando is a female for the – there’s a brief bit where we see Orlando as a female in ’76 as well, and, Orlando keeps up with the times, is the answer. The thing is, this is a problem with immortals. Mina has some dreadful problems in book three because she can’t really get her head around the idea of being immortal, and she starts to become quite desperate about keeping up with the times because she doesn’t want to become an isolated Victorian freak, and so she would rather go too much the other way.

Everyone would have to deal with that if they were going to carry on living. I mean, we do have to deal with that. I dress and act – I mean, I’m not stylish, by any means, but I dress differently now to the way I did ten years ago, or twenty years ago, or thirty years ago. You do as well, everybody does. If you had that as an ongoing problem, like Orlando does, over a three thousand year period, then you would probably be quite naturally stylish. You would keep up with what, from your perspective, would be rapidly changing times.

So, that’s why he is stylish, he’s also very arrogant, and a bit of a fop, especially when he’s a man. He’s not even a very likable character when he’s a man, as I think the readers will probably discover in this 1910 volume. He gets on everybody’s nerves because he never stops talking about how he founded London, or fought at Troy. When he’s a woman he’s much more pleasant and much more sensible, but when he’s a man he’s very vain and, as the questioner points out, he is a promiscuous killing machine, which again figures quite heavily in this opening Qumar sequence in the third part of the book, but you’ll have to wait and see how that turns out.

(a fairly androgynous Orlando in male guide being insufferably conceited and annoying in Century 1910 by Moore and O’Neill)

PÓM: Fair enough, OK. Are there any characters that you’ve written that you’d like to revisit at any stage? Have you ever felt the urge to go back and have another crack at something you had a go at before?

AM: Well I mean, all of them were such a lot of fun, I mean, Mister Hyde was incredible. It broke my heart to kill him off, but on the other hand he’s even more memorable for having had such a brief twelve-issue existence. There’s a lot, I mean, we used the golliwog and the Dutch dolls…

PÓM: No, I meant of your own characters, particularly, let’s say, there’s someone who mentions Halo Jones.

AM: Well the thing is with all of those, I’ve put them completely out of my mind because, with all of them, they were written for publishers where I don’t own them any more and where, because I’ve got such a lot of new stuff to do, I don’t ever think about any of the material that I don’t own. I’ve got only enough room in my head for Jerusalem and a few other things, frankly, but, I mean, yeah, I still look back on those things with affection, but the time has long since passed when they could ever be picked up again, and times have changed, I’ve changed, you know.

Probably the time to have done more episodes of Halo Jones would have been back when we were finishing up book three, but the publishers, although they know that they don’t have any moral right to the ownership of those characters, are not interested – I’ve told them at one point that I would be happy to write more stories if they gave us the rights back, but they weren’t interested in that, so I assume that they weren’t interested in more stories, and like I say, that time has passed. These days, even if I did get the rights back to the lot, I probably wouldn’t even want the rights back to a lot of those things. I’m just, I’m all about the stuff that I’m doing now; I probably always have been, you know.

(the brilliant Halo Jones from 2000 AD, written by Alan Moore, art by Ian Gibson, still a fave with many of us)

PÓM: Yeah, that’s true I think, I mean you always seem to have moved forward, you know.

AM: Yeah, it’s a matter of momentum, but, while I look back on a lot of those things very fondly, no, I wouldn’t want to revisit any of them again. It’s a different time, and different times need different works, you know?

PÓM: OK. The only other thing about your previous work is, do you keep up with what’s going on with the Marvelman Miracleman debacle?

AM: Nah. I mean, other than the fact that I was happy to do everything that I could to help Mick Anglo, who is the person who has always owned all of the rights to Marvelman, as far as I now understand it, that we never had the rights to do those stories, even though Mick really liked the stories that we did. We didn’t understand at the time that Mick Anglo was the sole owner of the rights. We were misled. So I’ve done everything that I can to clear all that up. I’ve said that, they talked about the possibility – what they want is money quickly, because Mick’s a very old man, he’s got a sick wife to look after, and they could use some dosh quite quickly.

I mean, I believe that the Todd McFarlane thing, his ridiculous claims to the character have now been dropped, so it can move on. I believe that they’re going to be reprinting some of my stuff, but I’m not sure of all the details, I’ve just said, “Yeah, go ahead,” and all the money from the first book, from the first printing of the book, should go to Mick Anglo. They’ve also said that what if there’s a possibility of some animated Marvelman cartoons, and I’ve said, again, “Don’t put me name on them, and give all the money to Mick Anglo.” So I hope that some of it turns up in time to do Mick some good, because he’s a great artist, you know, the British comics scene would be poorer without him, and I’m making great use of Captain Universe – oh, I’ve given it away!

PÓM: You have, you have now!

AM: Yeah, I’m making use of, some use of Captain Universe in this text story in the first part of volume three, and maybe at some point in the future I’ll be making some use of the same character.

(Captain Universe from the Minions of the Moon illustrated text story in LOEG Century, written by Alan Moore, art by Kevin O’Neill)

PÓM: Yeah, I’ve done a fair amount of digging myself, wherever I can, and everything I’ve seen leads me to believe that, yes, Mick Anglo has always owned the thing, you know. It was always his, it was never Len Miller’s, so therefore it was never anybody else’s.

AM: Mick was the owner, and also, Len Miller never went bankrupt, and all of the things that we were told when we were doing Warrior turned out to have been fabrications, you know, unwitting fabrications, but fabrications none the less, and that goes for all of the American versions. Apparently Mick Anglo was abused, by the usual suspects in today’s rather venal comics industry, you know, right up to the Todd McFarlane part of the case. Neil Gaiman has been an absolute diamond throughout all this, and I’ve done me best, and the important thing is supporting Mick Anglo, really.

PÓM: Good. OK, next, a lot of questions about magic. A couple of people saying they’re interested in magic from reading about yourself and your own work and so on, and saying where should they start? What should they be reading, where should they be looking?

AM: Well, I would say, the advice that Steve Moore gave me is to pick a god or, depending on how you look at it, let a god pick you. Some moment of recognition, something that – an idea, a concept – that you can explore. Obviously if they’re interested in magic then, what, Thoth, Hermes, Mercury, might be a good one, but they’ll find their own god, and it’s sort of, it’s a conceptual form that they can then explore and they can perhaps build up a kind of relationship with. In the Book of Magic we’ll be talking about all of this.

In terms of what books to read, I would say get a couple of decent books, get a good book on Qabalah, because basically all of the other magic systems, or the majority of them, do map very easily onto Qabalah. It was the system that the Golden Dawn based most of their rituals and grades upon, it’s fairly central to understanding how magic kind of fits together. This is not the Madonna version of the Qabalah, this is, I mean, there’s a book by a guy called Will Parfitt called The Living Qabalah or The New Living Qabalah – I think there was a couple of editions of it – that is very lucid, and would give you at least some beginner’s information.

Basically, what’s quite good advice is to just read any old rubbish, and cram your head full of a lot of mixed-up occult information and occult nonsense, which there’ll be a tremendous amount of, and just simply rely upon your own discrimination, your developing sense of discrimination to actually sort out what is valuable and what is not. You’ll find that having all these little ideas in your head, it helps to put your consciousness into the right kind of areas, you’ll find that you’re considering new ideas, some of them you’ll dismiss, some of them you’ll perhaps find are valuable.

Aleister Crowley’s Magick Without Tears is quite good, because that was written for people who hadn’t really got any grasp of his sometimes esoteric occult ideas (now out of copyright it can be read free online here – Joe). To get the flavour of magic, they could do a lot worse than read a couple of the books by Lon Milo Duquette, one of his books in particular, My Life with the Spirits by Lon Milo Duquette gives something of the flavour of magic, and he’s a very entertaining writer. Robert Anton Wilson. His Illuminatus trilogy is of course wonderful, and does contain a lot of information about both anarchy and magic and all sorts of other things, but some of the things that he did for New Falcon Books, like Coincidance and Prometheus Rising and the, what was originally The Playboy Book of the Breast, which actually became in Wilson’s handling a kind of meditation upon female goddess energy.

Like I said, these are all ones that I’ve enjoyed, and which will perhaps give you a kind of a way into the kind of ideas that you should be thinking about, and also try to remember that this is all happening upon a level of pure metaphor. That doesn’t mean it won’t affect things that happen in the real world, but that magic basically happens in the world of the mind. Promethea is not a bad place to find at least some of the rudiments of magic; there’s stuff about the four magical weapons and their importance.

Find your own way. I would advise, this is purely my taste, but I would advise not joining schools of belief, or organisations, or lodges, or cults. That’s not to say that there isn’t sometimes advantages to sharing your thoughts with other people, but what we’re advising in the Book of Magic is, find a friend with the same interests. You don’t need to buy into whatever ideas some magical lodge or organisation or cult has, because you can find yourself running into organisations where, you know, I mean, it’s difficult enough sometimes to avoid, in this kind of territory, running into delusion, but it’s better if you do, it’s better that the delusions are your own, rather than those of a third party who’s imposing them upon his or her followers. So, it’s best to try and make your own way, at least in my experience, it’s best to try and make your own way.

Read omnivorously, and you’ll find that the books that you read will lead naturally to other books, some of which will be to your taste, some of which won’t. Or, wait a couple of years until The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic is out, and hopefully that’ll be your one-stop shop for all magical and occult information.

PÓM: Nice piece of product placement there, Alan.

AM: Absolutely. It was very smooth, I thought.

PÓM: Yeah, exactly! I think the thing I got the most questions from people about was, is there any more performance work, or any more musical work, coming up?

AM: Well, there a gig in a couple of weeks’ time, and I would still like to do some more magical performances but, as I’ve said, I’ve not been in touch with Tim Perkins for a long while. However, if Tim’s out of the picture, you know, with family commitments, there’s always possibilities for, I’ve got other musical accomplices, like Joe Brown, and so, yeah, I should like to do stuff at some point in the future, but as to when or if I’ll get round to it or not, I really don’t know, you know.

PÓM: Were you ever going to do anything else with Gary Lloyd?

AM: Yeah, it’s a possibility, we talked about it at some time, but it won’t be for a while, until Jerusalem is finished, I don’t think. I haven’t spoken to Gary since I saw him at that, at the event that I saw you at…

PÓM: The science fiction convention in Northampton?

AM: Yeah, I mean, it’s always a possibility, you know.

PÓM: OK, fair enough. The various performances that you did do, was there ever any video footage of any of those? I mean, there seemed to be quite an elaborate amount of staging and so on with them, wasn’t there?

AM: I believe that there was, Bill Drummond’s mate Gimpo, the one who filmed him burning the million quid, he filmed the Highbury Working. Melinda has some footage of the Birth Caul, which she worked into a film with other footage, with the Birth Caul in the background; that still exists. Anything else? I know that there was some ridiculously inadequate video footage of the Snakes and Ladders gig, and I believe that Paul Smith of Blast First filmed all of the performances at the Bridewell, including the original Moon and Serpent gig, but as to whether that still exists, or whether he knows where it is, I really don’t know.

PÓM: Yeah, so the likelihood of them turning up commercially is not great?

AM: Not great at all, no.

PÓM: OK. Another thing a lot of people asked me: what are you reading? What’s – as somebody put it, I thought quite eloquently – what’s entertainment for Alan Moore?

AM: At the moment I am reading Iain Sinclair’s excellent Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire, a book I’ve been waiting for for ages, and Iain sent me a copy the other day. It’s all about the vanishing landscape of Hackney, which is disappearing under the Olympic village.

(Iain Sinclair’s Norton, the ‘Prisoner of London’, moving through the city’s ages in LOEG Century 1910)

The other book which I am, I’ve read the first part, and am now looking forward to the second part, this is something that you won’t be able to find yet, it’s unpublished, but it’s by Brian Catling, the sculptor, who did the wonderful glass cushion that’s at the execution block at the Tower of London, and Brian is a wonderful poet, and he’s a fantastic performance artist. His first novel, which is a fantasy novel, it is probably one of the, if not the best fantasy novels that I’ve ever read, certainly the most original. What he’s written is a novel called The Vorrh, which is a three-part novel. I’ve read the first part, it’s got characters in it as diverse as Eadweard Muybridge, the photographer, William Gull, Sarah Winchester, the proprietress of the Winchester House.

Fantastic and it’s about a forest called the Vorrh which somehow exists in lots of different states in different parts of the world and in different times. Some parts of it are in Africa, and some parts of it are a peat bog, possibly somewhere in Ireland. It’s brilliant. It’s full of cyclopses and weird Bakelite robots, and Eadweard Muybridge is dazzling, and I’ve got the second part, which I’m about to start on sometime soon.

PÓM: Tell me how to spell Vorrh.

AM: V H O O R? There’s another R on the end as well.

PÓM: Could be another R on the end, yeah, we’ll put another R on the end, just to be safe.

AM: I’ve got it here at my feet. Let’s just not be lazy, let’s open it up and see… VO double R H.

PÓM: OK, got that. Fair enough. What am I going to ask you next? Somebody says, “How do you manage to stay so passionate about your work? Most authors your age have become clichés of themselves or settled into safe security and are long past their best work. You work has remained consistent, and I wondered if you had a secret to how you manage this?”

AM: Magic has helped; it’s a way of understanding your own creativity. And also the fact that I’m determined to make every work better or more ambitious than the last one, and I have never settled for something just because it was popular. I’ve never allowed myself to fall into the golden rut, and I can’t write something unless it’s interesting to me, and because I’ve got such a very low boredom threshold, I find that everything I do I have to make it interesting and exciting to myself, so maybe that’s what’s done it.

PÓM: Something I was going to ask you: how do you feel when people, like me, for instance, call you a genius?

AM: It’s very flattering, Pádraig, it’s very flattering. I don’t know what that word means, I’m not really bothered whether I’m a genius or not. I’m just doing the best work I can, simply, and if people do occasionally say that, it’s very nice, but you have to try not to let that sort of stuff go to your head, so you try and ignore all that stuff and just get on with the work, is I suppose the short answer.

PÓM: Somebody says, “What’s you take on academics and literary critics dealing with your work?”

AM: It’s interesting, sometimes. I mean, a book I got the other day by a woman called Elizabeth Rosen, it was talking about postmodern writing with relation to apocalypse, and it had got a big chapter on me, and a chapter upon Robert Coover, who’s another one of my favourite authors, a chapter on I think Kurt Vonnegut and Don DeLillo, and that was interesting. I mean, I didn’t agree with everything she’d said, but it was interesting to see an academic take upon it, and there were some good points that she made, you know, some which I hadn’t necessarily thought of myself.

It’s always interesting, I have enjoyed some of the academic pieces. Some of them are perhaps talking about thing in terms that I don’t personally recognise. That’s not to say that it’s bad work, it’s just to say that it’s coming at it from a slant that I hadn’t really considered to be part of the work, you know. But generally I enjoy these things very much, it’s certainly better to read something that’s been thought through than just another article saying, “Well, I liked this” or “I didn’t like this,” you know, so it is very gratifying.

PÓM: I have two more questions. One person asks, “Do you believe in fairies?”

AM: Do I believe in fairies? Well, I believe in absolutely every creature that the human imagination has ever thrown up, in an ontological sense, in that the idea of fairies exists, and I believe that fairies are the idea of fairies, just as I believe that gods are the idea of gods, that these things exist in a world of ideas in which they are completely real, and you only have to look at the Victorian fairy painters, and how many of them ended up mad, you only have to look at Richard Dadd’s Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke to see that little figure of the old man with Richard Dadd’s face sitting there, looking really anxious, staring out of the picture at you, sitting there on his log, and I look at that, and I don’t thing, “Oh, that’s Richard Dadd painting himself into his own, you know, miniature masterpiece,” I think, “That is Richard Dadd trapped in a painting. The fairies got him.” He was away with the fairies.

The same went for Richard Doyle, Arthur Conan Doyle’s dad, and some of his paintings look like, the later ones, that are not jubilant at all, they look like they’re taking place in the dayroom of a madhouse, and you’ve got a figure staring at the table, trying not to look, as these little imps and fairies caper through the air. I mean, I’ve experienced fairies during some of my magical experiences, or things that seemed to be fairies. They were quite traditional cute Victorian ones, rather than spiky post-modern Neil Gaiman ones. That’s just my mind, I guess, but yes, in the terms that I’ve just described, yes, I believe in everything.

PÓM: Of course, Conan Doyle himself was a big believer, wasn’t he?

AM: I mean, whether I believe in the same literal way that Conan Doyle wanted to believe, I believe these things are real; I do not believe they are real outside the world of ideas and the mind, but then they have no need to be real beyond that realm, because in that realm they’re completely real, and they can affect us profoundly, as with any of the other denizens of the imaginary terrain, the angels and demons and monsters.

PÓM: OK, super. And the very last question, I have a John Reppion in Liverpool who wants to know, “Who’s your favourite son-in-law?”

AM: Well, actually, at the moment I can safely say that, yeah, John Reppion of Liverpool is my favourite son-in-law, but, you know, I’ll have another son-in-law in a few months, so it’s open to negotiation, so you better tell him to keep his act together.

PÓM: I will, I will!

AM: OK, brilliant. So that’s everything?

PÓM: Thanks a million, Alan. Tell Melinda I said hello.

AM: I will do. Take care, then, and I shall be talking to you soon.

If you missed it the first part can be found here and part two is here. FPI would like very much to thank Alan for again sharing his time so generously with our readers and to Pádraig for orchestrating the interview and sacrificing the health of his fingers to transcribe it all into print. Thanks also to the nice folks at Knockabout and Top Shelf for help, encouragement and images. The interview Pádraig had with Alan on here last year can still be read on the blog, with part one here and part two to be found here. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century 1910 will hit UK shelves shortly.

PÓM: OK, I wanted to run through some of the forthcoming work. You’re still working apace on Bumper Book of Magic, I presume?

AM: Bumper Book of Magic is proceeding at a gradual pace. This is largely because I’m co-writing everything in it with Steve, and Steve Moore at the moment has got, he’s got a family member who is seriously ill, and he’s having to spend a lot of time of his time looking after him. But every time I’m up there we do another couple of pages and we’re about perhaps, what, a quarter, a third of the way through? We’re getting close to the point where I’m going to be beginning the Tarot deck that I’m doing with Jose Villarrubia.

We’re about a quarter or a third of the way through the Great Enchanters, which we’re very pleased with, there’s some information that we’re digging up, and some in-fights that we’re having in these potted biographies of the  significant magicians – real and fictional – throughout history. I mean, we’ve worked out the Doctor Faust story. We know exactly who the historical Doctor Faust was – well, he was a composite of two men – and we know that the first of them, Faust the Magician, referred to himself as Faustus Secundus, which means Faust the Second, which rather begs a question: so who was this original Faust that nobody’s heard about? And we think we’ve answered that.

We’ve also explained what the Faust story as Marlowe and later Goethe portrayed it, what that is actually based upon, which is actually a much earlier figure that we cover in The Lives of the Great Enchanters, and we’ve explained why the Faust story emerged when it did, which was at the dawn of Lutheran Protestantism. But, loads of stuff like that and, yeah, the book is, I’ve just seen some illustrations by Rick Veitch for the Things to do on a Rainy Day section, and that’s all looking great, so it’ll be a while yet, because of circumstances.

(cover to The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve Moore, which will be published by Top Shelf)

PÓM: I think those of us who follow your work are used to waiting – it’s always worth waiting, but, you know…

AM: Well, thank you. I hope it’s always worth waiting for. We put all the work in anyway, and I think that the Book of Magic, when it’s finally finished in a couple of years, it’s going to be something splendid.

PÓM: I’m supposed to be doing an interview with Rick Veitch soon as well, which I’m really looking forward to doing.

AM: Well, you know, he’s a fantastic artist and a very impressive dreamer.

PÓM: Absolutely! Before I get completely away from the League, any future plans beyond Century?

AM: Well, in the first part of the text story, Minions of the Moon, there is a section which hints at a certain sequence of events that Mina was involved in 1964 – 1965 that actually is kind of a superhero story, and me and Kevin don’t know quite where we’re going with this yet but we’re both kind of intrigued by the idea of being actually two of the foremost superhero haters in the medium, and yet it’s only thwarted love in the case of both of us. We had genuine love and respect for these figures back when we were younger, and we’ve had all of that mangled out of us, and yet we still have a fondness for a certain kind of imaginative ideal, so there’ll be some possible hints as to what we could be doing in future with the League that will be in this text story. I’ll say no more than to say that it features a character, with permission granted by the very generous and venerable Mr Mick Anglo, so, one of his characters gets our treatment, at least glancingly, in this text story but, who knows.

When we get to volume four of the League, which could be anything at the moment, frankly – we try to leave our options open, but one of the ideas we’re thinking of is perhaps at least part of the story might be set in 1965, and might be a kind of superhero team story, but it wouldn’t be anything like people might imagine, because it would be a superhero team in the world of the League, which would make it very, very different, but that’s one of the options we’re considering. So, you know, there’s possibilities of doing some stand-alone stories of the various characters like the Gollywog or Orlando, or the Pirate Jenny character. She deserves probably a book of her own at some point, but there’s lots of possibilities. There’s possibilities for doing stories set in earlier eras, during the Prospero or Gulliver periods of the team’s history. We’re kind of leaving our options open. There’s even the possibility of things in the very far future.

PÓM: Now, when I interviewed you a year ago, you were saying that Jerusalem was about two years away from being finished. Is it still two years away from being finished?

AM: Yeah, it probably still two years away from being finished. I’m at chapter twenty six, which I think is officially the three-quarters mark, out of thirty five, but in the chapter that I’ve just done, the whole book’s kind of exploded into something that was much more, much bigger in its scale. Not in terms of its pages – it’s going to be immense in terms of its pages, but was much bigger in its intellectual scale than I’d previously imagined, which is great, because it’s going to fuel the last ten chapters of the book, because, obviously, at this three quarters mark I’m starting to get a bit exhausted, and I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to keep up the energy for these final ten chapters, but I just decided that the best way through that is to make it much more difficult for myself, and really go to town on these last chapters, so the one I’m doing at the moment is called Round the Bend, and it is basically one of Lucia Joyce’s days in the St Andrew’s mental hospital, which was next door to the school that I spent five or six years at. Lucia Joyce being James Joyce’s daughter, who spent the last thirty years of her life in the St Andrew’s hospital.

So I’ve got a story about her on one of her days, just wandering around the asylum grounds, and she’s also wandering in her imagination, and she’s wandering in time and space, and she’s meeting other inmates of the asylum, some of whom were in there at the same time that she was, some of whom were from earlier centuries, and I’m doing all of this in language, in an approximation of the language of Lucia’s father, which is a bugger. I mean, I don’t mind making it as impenetrable as Finnegan’s Wake, so that means it’s probably not as clever, nowhere near as clever as Finnegan’s Wake. It’s not even quite like Ulysses, its, it’s an invention.

It’s Joyce-like, because it’s meant to be his daughter, not him, but she was the only person in the family, I believe, who read his books, and they did share an incredible bond, and they shared a kind of private language. I mean, she is perhaps the central figure of Finnegan’s Wake, she is Anna Livia Plurabelle, and he believed that, I mean, when she began, in the early thirties, began her series of spells in mental institutions, he kind of somehow magically believed that it was because he was still struggling through his murky and impenetrable masterpiece that she was lost in the dark, and he believe that when he’d finished Finnegan’s Wake that she would somehow find her way back to the daylight.

Unfortunately he died in 1941, still trying to get Lucia out of occupied France, where the Germans had announced that they were planning a policy of extermination for the mentally or physically infirm, which must have worried him terribly, but he died of peritonitis in 1941 with her still lost, and, yeah, she came to Northampton in 1951. I think the week after she got here she heard that Nora had died, and spent the rest of her life here, quite happily, apparently. And I think that she’s something of a heroine, so I’m doing this chapter, and I’m enjoying it immensely, but it’s taking me twice as long to do as a normal chapter because I’m having to write each sentence and then translate it into gibberish – meaningful gibberish…

PÓM: Did you do that with the first chapter of Voice of the Fire?

AM: No I didn’t. Actually with that one I wrote it all in the language a word at a time, whereas with this one I’m finding that – I’ve tried it different ways in the course of writing the twenty four pages that I’ve written so far, but I’m mainly finding that if I do a whole sentence, then I can connect up the, I can tell the part of the story that I want to tell, and I can then translate the words so that their double meanings or treble meanings relate to each other in some slight way, and it seems to be working OK.

I’ve got her meeting with JK Stephen, the Jack the Ripper suspect who was also a patient at St Andrew’s, I’ve got a meeting between him and Lucia in which, in their incidental dialogue, there are the names of all of the Ripper’s victims given in order – encoded, but they’re there – and the names of all the streets where their murders happened given in order, in code, the names of various suspects worked into the dialogue here and there, and various comments upon how Jack the Ripper was largely a linguistic construction.

There’s a sex scene with John Clare, which I think is kind of the consummation of the classical romantic tradition in poetry, and in literature, and the modernist tradition, as represented respectively by John Clare and Lucia Joyce, and also there was something irresistible about – I mean, Clare, that means clarity, and Lucia means light – so I’ve got this steamy sex scene – it’s the only steamy sex scene in the whole of this fifteen hundred page novel, and the readers probably won’t be able to understand it.

But I’m having immense fun; the next chapter’s going to be something about the economy, which will tie in Isaac Newton and Bill Drummond. So I’m getting more ambitious, in these last ten chapters I’m becoming more ambitious. I still think it’ll be about another year before I’ve got all of this finished, and then probably another year while I’m getting it revised, edited, and I’m drawing the cover. So, yeah, another couple of years and, yeah, if you ask me in another couple of years, and I still say another couple of years, I think it’ll probably take me about five years all told…

PÓM: Yeah, that sounds reasonable…

(cover to the new edition of Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore, published by Top Shelf)

AM: It took me that long to do Voice of the Fire, and Voice of the Fire is about a third of the length of this, and of course, I mean, James Joyce, it took him eighteen years to do Finnegan’s Wake, and he said, “Well, that’s how long it should take you to read it.” So, yeah, that’s my answer, that’ll do.

PÓM: I re-read Voice of the Fire there recently…

AM: Did it still hold up?

PÓM: Well, you know, I very nearly understand that first chapter now!

AM: Scott Allie from Dark Horse phoned me up the other night and said that he’s read that first chapter on a three-hour flight, and finished it, and when he got off at the other end he couldn’t talk!

[General laughter]

AM: For about an hour, he couldn’t actually put the language together properly, which is something that happens when you absorb yourself in this stuff, but, well I mean, hopefully, once you do understand the story and get through the language, the story makes sense, and there is a story under there.

PÓM: And I noticed that you mentioned earlier on Lucia Joyce talking to people who were, you know, disconnected in time, and there’s a lot of that running through Voice of the Fire, of course, as well, and through a lot of your work.

AM: One of the things that went into my thinking on Jerusalem was the stupid notion, “Maybe I should do a sequel to Voice of the Fire? Nah, that’s stupid,” although I thought, “well, it’d be nice to do something else about Northampton, and if a couple of the characters spill over, then that’s not a big problem,” so I’ve got, you know, John Clare spills over, there are a couple of other allusions, or near allusions, to Voice of the Fire. The two books are connected in a sense, although it’s not going to make a difference if you haven’t read Voice of the Fire to whether you can understand Jerusalem, or vice versa.

So, yeah, that’s all coming along very well, and I’m confident now in saying, if I get to the end of this in one piece, this will probably be – it’s certainly the most ambitious thing that I’ve ever attempted, and if it’s any kind of success at all, it’ll probably be the best thing that I’ve ever done.

PÓM: Fantastic. I am genuinely looking forward to seeing that.

AM: Well, you know, I’m looking forward to getting it finished.

PÓM: And I think the other thing that I know is forthcoming – I believe is forthcoming – is – isn’t there a new Bojeffries Saga story?

AM: Yes, Bojeffries Saga. Oh, there’s a thing coming from Avatar that’s quite good, called Light of Thy Countenance. I’ve seen the adaptation of it, and I think they’ve done a really good job, and that’s coming out sometime soon. But the Bojeffries, yeah, I have written a final Bojeffries – well, I don’t know if it’s a final – but I’ve written a kind of, it wouldn’t hurt if it was the last one, although maybe me and Steve will want to do some more with them.

What we’re going to do is, we’re going to collect up, with Top Shelf, all of the Bojeffries material that’s appeared to date, and we’re going to cap it all off with a twenty-four page story called After They Were Famous, which is the Bojeffries in 2009, existing side-by-side with culture as it is now, as opposed to culture as it was in the eighties and the early nineties, and I think it’s the best Bojeffries thing yet, and it’s great, it’s a pleasure to be working with Steve again.

(cover to the Complete Bojeffries Saga by Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse)

It’s great working with Kevin on the one hand and Steve Parkhouse on the other. They are two of the most British of all of my collaborators, you know, their influence are – I mean, this is not to mock the artists whose influences are more from the other side of the Atlantic, but there’s something very cheering about working with a couple of artists who grew up on the same Beano and Dandy illustrators that I did. You know, the Paddy Brennans and the Ken Reids and the Leo Baxendales, and who kind of worked that into their style.

So, yeah, I mean, I don’t know what the schedule is, I believe that Steve is working away, he said he found the script very challenging, but he thought it was a perfect ending, a perfect contemporary take on the Bojeffries, so that, I think people will enjoy that when it comes out, it’s very funny. It’s also got, they’ll never need to make a movie of the Bojeffries because one of the episodes in this twenty-four page story is coverage of the Bojeffries Movie, which shows a few shots, two scenes, a clip from the Bojeffries Movie, which starred, I think, Meryl Streep as Uncle Raoul, which is probably all you need to know.

It’s pretty good, it’s pretty good, and that’s just one part of this story. There’s a whole Big Brother part to it, and Ginda is a Blair’s Babe, Reth is a Booker Prize-winning author hanging out with Julie Burchill at the Groucho Club, and, yeah, what happened to Baby, and what happened to Jobremus, and what happened to Granddad. It’s pretty good. The entire family is broken up, by the way, when the story starts. They haven’t seen each other for years, which doesn’t sound like the most promising introduction, but it leads to a very, very good story, so I think that everyone’s going to enjoy that.

P; I always loved Bojeffries, I felt they were…

AM: One of my favourite strips, and fantastic to be working on it again. Writing the script it was like I’d written the last one a couple of months before. The characters were just immediately there, and I suspect that Steve is going to find some similar things when he’s drawing it.

PÓM: OK. You mentioned Avatar are publishing Light of Thy Countenance. They’re also publishing Neonomicon…

AM: I haven’t seen more than the first issue of Neonomicon. The first issue, the artwork looks fine, I don’t know about my story, it might be a bit black, I don’t know, you know. Jacen Burrows has done a good job on the artwork, I just, that was when I’d just quit DC, and that was when I was at my absolute blackest, and that may have coloured the story more than it should have done. Light of Thy Countenance, however, is a wonderful piece. I just don’t know yet about Neonomicon, because I’ve only seen the first issue, and that looked great, but that hadn’t got most of the really nasty stuff in it, so, we’ll see.

(cover to Neonomicon by Alan Moore, art by Jacen Burrows, published Avatar)

PÓM: Ah, it’ll be interesting to see what you do when you’re dark, kinda, you know?

AM: Well, I have me moods, Pádraig. I have me moods.

PÓM: We all have our moods, Alan. Is there any chance, you’ve written a few short stories over the years, I know a few of them were adapted, again by Avatar. Any chance of those being collected as prose stories?

AM: At some point, yeah. I mean, when I figure there’s enough of them. I mean, there’s the Liavek story…

PÓM: Which one is that?

AM: Hypothetical Lizard.

PÓM: Hypothetical Lizard, of course, yeah.

AM: Light of The Countenance, there’s a couple of other pieces…

PÓM: Sawdust Memories?

AM: Yeah, Neil said that he’d sent you a copy of Sawdust Memories.

PÓM: That’s right, he did, yeah.

AM: Yeah, I’d forgotten that one, yeah, that was quite a laugh.

PÓM: That was quite entertaining, I have to say.

AM: I did me best…

PÓM: Ah, you always say that!

AM: But, no, at some point in the future I wouldn’t be surprised, but it’s not a priority at the moment.

PÓM: Fair enough, yeah, fair enough. And one other thing on the subject of Avatar. Every so often I hear rumours that Avatar are going to do something with your Fashion Beast script.

AM: Well, that has been an ongoing project for a long while. I know that I put, that Malcolm McLaren and the Avatar people are in touch, and I said it was alright by me if they wanted to turn it, I mean, Anthony Johnston always does a great job of the adaptations, so, yeah, I’m sure if anybody can turn it into a comic, then it’d be him. So, I mean, it’s certainly the only way it’s ever going to see the light of day. So, yeah, but as to when and where, don’t know.

PÓM: I think the only other thing I know that you have forthcoming, you’ve done the cover for Starry Wisdom book two?

AM: Yeah, that’s an old picture, that’s my image of Asmodeus, I believe, which is as the gentleman looked to me when I saw him, or at least as close as I could get. There was another dimension to the original that didn’t reproduce well when it came to my crayon drawing collage, but I think somebody described it, probably John Coulthart, I think, described it as a Demonograph, which is also, I should say, briefly featured in the hidden Easter Egg on the DeZ Vylenz DVD, the Mindscape.

PÓM: Yes, I found that, yeah.

AM: And there’s a brief – what John Coulthart has done, I think, is to distort that image so that it only comes into focus at the exact centre of that symmetrical piece of music, and then is distorted again symmetrically. So, I should imagine it’s the same image. They just called up and said is it OK if they used it, and I said, “Well, if you’ve got a copy of it that you can work from.” And Leah and John told me that apparently they’ve done it as a wallpaper, which is something that I’d often talked about as a joke, I said, “You could do this as a wallpaper, and it’d be ideal for papering the room of any toddler that you really wanted to mess up.” But apparently, yeah, it does work as a wallpaper.

PÓM: Now, are they talking about wallpaper on an internet site, or are they talking about real wallpaper?

AM: It’d actually work as real wallpaper. It only took a couple of little adjustments. I’d pretty much got the image so that it could be reproduced indefinitely, and would make real wallpaper, but it would be frightening and claustrophobic wallpaper, to be surrounded by an infinite web of spiders. On the other hand, I had to go through that, so why shouldn’t everyone else?

PÓM: Well, if you’re ever blessed with grandchildren, there’s a thought for the…

AM: That’s a possibility of course, isn’t it? Get to them early.

PÓM: And what else? An Austin Osman Spare book, you’re doing something…

AM: Doing the introduction. I was very pleased to do the introduction for the, there’s a new book coming out of, yeah, The Book of Pleasure – Self Love by Austin Spare, which is a wonderful book, and Austin Spare is one of my very, very favourite artist magicians, and his writing was pretty good as well, but, yeah, I’ve written one of the introductions for it. I believe the other one might be by Michael Staley or someone like that, which again will be a very interesting introduction from a different perspective so, not sure when that’s coming out but, yeah, that it something that I, I did quite a lengthy introduction for it, where I just try to get to grips with the content of the book and to try and make it clear what I think they were saying so, yeah, it might be helpful, it might be helpful to people who are trying to get to grips with an often difficult subject, you know.

PÓM: Somebody asked, as well, when I was looking for questions, you’ve done quite a substantial amount of introductions for things. Is there any possibility that they would all be collected up also as a volume?

AM: Well, one of the things that I’ve done the introduction for recently, which is not out yet, is the Savoy Book’s Into the Media Web, which is a collection of all of the non-fiction writings of Michael Moorcock. So, yeah, I’ve done yet another, which includes all of the introductions that Mike has done for other books, so, yeah, maybe at some point in the future, maybe way in the future there’ll be a book of my non-fiction writings, including my introduction to Mike Moorcock’s book of non-fiction writings, and anything is possible.

PÓM: And so on ad infinitum, kinda?

AM: Yeah.

PÓM: And are you working on anything else that I don’t know about?

AM: Not that I can think of, Pádraig. Oh yeah, there’s a little sort of, there’s a local magazine called OVR2U, which is done by the same people who did, the Street Law kids who did the X Marks the Spot video. I don’t know if you ever saw that?

PÓM: I have a copy, yes.

[youtube po0qDje6Z4o]

(Lucy and her collaborators discuss X Marks the Spot)

AM: It’s the same kids and Lucy, who is this brilliant – Lucy Lisowiec, who’s this brilliant worker from the community organisation down at the Boroughs, and I was telling them about the old arts labs days, and how many magazines we used to produce, and they thought it sounded like it would be fun to do a magazine, so they’ve brought out the first issue, which was free to schools; five thousand copies, or something like that and, brilliant response, I’ve done a, there’s a cartoon strip I’m doing in there called Rabbits, which is being drawn by Lucy, under her name as Calluz, which is her graffiti tag name, and – I should stress that she is a retired tagger, and that she’s doing the artwork on this, a little four-panel strip called Rabbits.

And I’ve also being doing a couple of articles for the magazine; I mean I’ve got one coming up in the second issue, just an article on drugs. Just, you know, talking to the kids down there, and hopefully a bit more helpfully than the Just Say No ethos, you know. I’m expecting quite a decent response on that, and we’re going to try and make the magazine bigger and better, and we’re thinking of going independent with our third issue, ‘cause it’s currently published under the auspices of, I suppose, the council, but we’ll be self-funded by issue three, with a bit of luck, so that’s another project that I’ve got on the go, and that’s about all I can think of at the moment.

PÓM: As a matter of considerable curiosity, what sort of advice are you giving them about drugs?

AM: Well, I’m just explaining to them what drugs are, in that, actually, nearly anything is a drug, and that obviously some drugs are more dangerous than others, although no drug is probably entirely safe for everybody, and that, peanuts or Ecstasy, probably peanuts have got a higher chance of killing you than the Ecstasy, unless you’re one of those people who reacts badly to Ecstasy, in which case the statistics won’t be any real consolation, but I’ve sort of said how difficult it is to get information about drugs that is reliable and honest.

I’ve talked about when I was growing up, and we were told that marijuana would lead to monster babies, and LSD would make you stare at the sun until your eyeballs melted, and I’ve said that, a lot people in my generation, when they found out that those things weren’t true, went on to assume that heroin would turn out to be harmless as well, which of course it definitely isn’t, so I’ve said it’s important to have a source of information. I said whether drugs are legal or illegal makes absolutely no difference to how dangerous they are, you know, it’s sort of, there are plenty of illegal drugs that can really screw you up, and can screw up – Crack; it’ll turn you into a monster and fuck up your entire community, but then, so can alcohol. And of course the people who take heroin so often will end up killing themselves, but you can say the same thing about Prozac.

So I’ve said that legal or illegal is actually irrelevant. What you need to know is how dangerous are these drugs, so I said, “We’ve not got much space, but here’s a rundown,” and I’ve kind of, I’ve started out with alcohol just because of the enormous amount of social damage that it does, but I’ve run through marijuana, weed, hash, through speed, the opiates, LSD and the psychedelics, mushrooms, the new legal highs, like salvia, and finished off with cocaine and crack, because crack is the most evil drug of all time.

And, you know, it’s not lecturing the kids, it’s just telling them from experience what happens with heroin, you know, how it’ll probably take you a couple of months to get properly addicted, but that once you do become addicted you’ll become a completely different person, and you might even turn into one of those heroin ghouls, that shoot up in deliberately disgusting parts of their body just to make themselves even more horrifying, you know. I talked about the first junkie that I met when I sixteen, he was holding up one of the veins in his wrist with a safety pin. So, yeah, I’m just trying to talk to these kids and the readers in practical terms in language that they can understand, and trying to be completely honest, you know.

PÓM: Yeah, fair enough.

AM: Yeah, that’s OVR2U, which is in the modern text-messaging style, so it’s O V R, the numeral 2, U.

PÓM: OVR2U, of course, of course it is.

The third part, in which Alan answers some questions from our readers will follow on the blog tomorrow, so stay tuned; if you missed it the first part can be found here. FPI would like very much to thank Alan for again sharing his time so generously with our readers and to Pádraig for orchestrating the interview and sacrificing the health of his fingers to transcribe it all into print. Thanks also to the nice folks at Knockabout and Top Shelf for help, encouragement and images. The interview Pádraig had with Alan on here last year can still be read on the blog, with part one here and part two to be found here. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century 1910 will hit UK shelves shortly.

So with the first part of the brand new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Century:1910, published by Top Shelf in North America and Knockabout in the UK) about to hit the shelves, the first of a three volume series which will take us through a century to the modern day, we present the first part of this interview, which mostly concerns itself with matters League related, the importance and uses of music, serial killers, gangsters (both real, fictional and even the comedic), Michael Moorcock, New Worlds and much more, even drawing in the Clangers and Monty Python. Over to Pádraig and Alan:

(for the Reservoir Dogs reunion Mr White and Mr Blue decided to dress down)

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: The first part of the next volume of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is coming out in May, I believe.

Alan Moore: I believe so.

PÓM: Do you want to give us a brief rundown on that?

AM: Yeah, me and Kevin [O’Neill] are really excited about it. Kevin is just off to America in a couple of hours’ time, and has been told that the first copies will be waiting for him in his hotel when he gets to California, and he’s going to send them on to me. We’re both incredibly excited about it. It’s, I mean, I’ve only seen the first six pages of Ben Dimagmaliw mouth-watering colours but I can’t wait to see the whole thing as it was intended.

This is promising to be I think the most exciting book of the League, at least for me and Kevin, since it appeared. We’re pushing into new ground, we’re telling a different kind of story and, because we’re progressing over the three books that make up this third volume, we’re progressing from 1910 to 2009, it’s quite a dizzying rush of culture, because of course in the League’s world, we’re not talking about what the world was exactly like in 1910, we’re talking about what the world of fiction was like in 1910, or in 1969, or in 2009.

(cover to the League of Extraodinary Gentlemen Century: 1910 by and (c) Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill, published by Top Shelf and Knockabout)

So, that alone has made a difference to the kind of story that we’re telling simply because, when we were doing the first two books of the League, set in the nineteenth century, we were pretty much limited to fictional characters from the novels and books of that period or of, you know, earlier periods, whereas, of course, since the end of the nineteenth century our number of entertainment media has greatly expanded, so in the first book, in 1910, we’re taking advantage of that by expanding into opera, or at least into the stage musical perhaps, with Berthold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. So, we weren’t sure how that was going to work as a comic book but, the answer is, it works splendidly.

I was a bit worried that what was going to happen was that it was going to be like all those bad Elvis Presley movies, where he’s sitting there in a café and somebody throws him a guitar and then everybody starts singing in syncopation, and it completely destroys the reality of the scene. So we thought that might happen with some of the very tense and dramatic scenes that we’ve got in this first part of volume three, but actually it turns out that having a kind of Greek chorus, singing along with the scenes, it kind of heightens their reality, rather than decreases it. It underlines the emotional and dramatic reality of the scenes in a way that we hadn’t expected, so we’re really pleased with that, and Kevin’s artwork is a joy to behold. It’s stunning, I mean I think it’s his best yet – I know I say that with every new volume of the League, but that’s I think genuinely because we push a little bit further with each one.

So, yeah, I think that I can promise, we can promise the readers a very interesting ride on this one, and I think we’re taking the League into new territory that we haven’t explored before although, for those who liked the gas-lit era, you know, the 1910 volume should at least, it’s only twelve years after the Martian invasion, so it should be comfortable enough for them, but for people who are looking forward to us getting to grips with the Swinging Sixties and the present day, I think that it’ll be quite an enjoyable ride. So, yeah, that’s going to be out, I believe, at the end of April. It’s all looking good.

PÓM: Now, because there’s musical input in 1910, is there going to be musical input in 1969 and 2009 as well?

AM: There certainly is. In the 1969 one, which I’ve already written, there are some songs that are pastiches, if you like, of actual songs of the period. There is also a really brilliant Berthold Brecht song in that second chapter where, it’s a kind of an epilogue to the second chapter which, as we’ve said, it mostly takes part in 1969, but there’s a very bleak little epilogue that is set in 1976, which of course was the Punk era, and we’ve got – whereas in the first, in the 1910 edition, one of the people who sings most of the songs, other than MacHeath himself, who sings a couple of them, but the main person who sings them is Suki Tawdry.

In the 1976 version we’ve got a punk band called Suki and the Tawdrys who are doing a number that is, it’s a Berthold Brecht piece called The Ballad of Immoral Earnings, but because this is the punk version it’s now called Immoral Earnings in the UK, and so, yeah, that’s carrying on, and into the third book, where I’m hoping to work in a couple of Brecht songs – suitably updated for 2009 – but I’m hoping to include – ‘cause I’ve just started writing that, so I’m only about four or five pages in, but I’m hoping to include The Cannon Song and also The Moon Over Soho.

PÓM: And what’s that from?

AM: I think that’s from the Threepenny Opera as well…

PÓM: OK, yeah.

AM: “So where’s your moon over Soho.”

PÓM: I don’t remember…

AM: It was certainly in the film version.

PÓM: OK, I read it recently, just for preparation, and I don’t remember that. Now, hang on a second. You’re setting it in 1910, the first part of Century. Isn’t Threepenny Opera set at the coronation of Queen Victoria?

AM: No, I believe it’s set at the coronation of King George V, which was when Haley’s Comet was passing over, in 1910, and certainly in – ‘cause there are versions…

PÓM: Yeah, that was what I was thinking, ‘cause the one I read was set – I mean, I know they virtually threw together the Threepenny Opera really, at the time. In a way it was just somebody translated the other thing, the Beggar’s Opera…

AM: Yeah, John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, I mean, we’ve established that John or Jack MacHeath is a descendant of Captain John MacHeath from John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, so we’ve kind of brought them into continuity together, but we’ve kind of taken it a bit further in that we’ve looked at some of the influences upon Brecht’s Mack the Knife, and one of the obvious ones seemed to be Jack the Ripper, so we’ve conflated Mack the Knife and Jack the Knife. We’ve come up with a credible fictional way in which the fictional Whitechapel murderer, who I think Mina referred to in the first volume…

(back from the sea, MacHeath sings his return to London in LOEG: Century 1910)

PÓM: Yes, she does, yeah.

AM: She does, in passing, so it’s obvious there has been a Whitechapel murderer in the League’s world, but this is obviously the fictional Jack, so what we’ve done is, we’ve taken – as opposed to From Hell, where it was all taken from accounts that were supposed to be true – what we’ve done is taken it from the accounts that were self-confessedly fictional. So we’ve got the scene from Pandora’s Box, which was done by Pabst in the twenties, starred Louise Brooks, and which was based upon a play called Earth Spirit by Frank Wedekind, and which starred the unfortunate goodtime girl Lulu, and at the end of the film – and at the end of the play – she brings home the wrong customer, and he turns out to be Jack the Ripper.

Now the film, which was done in the twenties, seemed to be referring to a slightly earlier period. It seemed to be set in around about 1910, which is twelve years after Jack the Ripper had been prowling the East End so we thought, “Well, maybe there’s some way we can tie that together logically.” We also noticed that in the marvellous film The Ruling Class with Peter O’Toole there’s a kind of coda to that film which also involves Jack the Ripper, and also seems to be set in around about 1910, or thereabouts, sort of.

But anyway, what we’ve done is, we’ve actually come up with quite a logical explanation as to how all these things could have happened, and could all have been related to each other. We’ve tied that in with the Doctor Stanley story, where Doctor Stanley is the fictitious name for an early Jack the Ripper, he was said to have left for Argentina after the final murder, so that’s how we’ve worked the dates out, and it all fits in quite nicely and, actually, MacHeath is a fantastic character to work with. I think me and Kevin both enjoyed it, and he gets some of the best songs and the best lines in the entire book.

The other character that we take from Brecht, the other major character, is Pirate Jenny. I’ve always found that a spine-tingling song, whether it was being done by Judy Collins or whether it was being done by Nina Simone, it’s just such a wonderful song.

PÓM: Yeah. The version I first came across was the Steeleye Span one.

AM: Steeleye Span, they did one?

PÓM: Yeah, they did. It’s great!

AM: Fantastic. There was somebody who did one on that Lost in the Stars, the Hal Willner compilation, which was also very good. Loads of Kurt Weill songs. But, what we’ve done is, we’ve kind of inverted the original Brechtian song a little bit, without changing it. I mean, in the original Brecht and Weill version it’s a very sad song. It’s full of anger, but it’s impotent anger. It’s somebody who’s in a really miserable position, and her only consolation is these spectacularly violent fantasies, in which she is able to take revenge upon all the people who’ve sneered at her and have downtrodden her.

Whereas, in the League, it’s actually a lot more serious than that. It’s not an innocent fantasy any more because of the way we’ve worked the Pirate Jenny character into the overall League narrative. She actually is what she thinks she is, which provides quite a rousing climax, me and Kevin feel, to the book. I mean we were, I have to say, we were fuelled by anger for a lot of this first part of the third volume, just because this was what we were doing when we were still getting messed around by our former publisher.

So, yeah, I think it’s fairly safe to say that we did take out a lot of our rage in the final scenes of the comic. I think that’s particularly true, I mean, you can probably hear it in most of the song lyrics all the way through. In Kevin’s drawing I can – there’s a climactic double-page spread that I won’t spoil by telling you anything about – but that was, I believe Kevin deliberately leapt ahead, because he normally does it a page at a time, but he leapt ahead to the specific illustration, because that was the day that he’d been told that they weren’t going to be bringing out the record with the Black Dossier, so he got a lot of the spleen out of his system, and I think that when the readers actually get the book and see the page, the spread that I’m talking about, they will understand the strength of our feelings over these issues, you know.

Yeah, I mean, it didn’t do any harm to the story, in fact I think it rather spices it up a little, you know, the genuine black rage which informs at least the final pages of it. So, yeah, I think it’s going to work really good.

PÓM: I was just – I noticed that by the time you’ve got to the end of that particular volume, there’s only two of the original League, the original Victorian League, left. I mean, was it difficult having to kill people off?

AM: Well no, I mean, because the thing is that the characters at least all potentially are still available to us if we simply decide to set an adventure during a period when they all lived. I mean, it was always inevitable that if we carried on with the League, that if we kept it to the original line-up, which everybody loved, and they all loved that time period, but if we kept it to that, then it would stagnate really quickly, and it would lose a lot of what made it appealing to me and Kevin, and to the readers in the first place, you know, so we decided to, let’s not kind of artificially freeze-dry these characters in their period just because that’s what sells.

We happen to believe that – yeah, we thought that we might lose a lot of readers when we moved out of the Victorian time period but, in doing the Black Dossier, which has sold, I think, better than the first two volumes, that sort of suggests that, yeah, though people did love the Victorian stuff, there are a lot of people who are quite interested in fictional characters that actually emerged in their own century.

(some of the 1910 League members regard a portrait of their Victorian predecessors)

PÓM: Well, yeah, I was going to ask you, actually, one of the things a lot of people asked me about, a question I got a lot of was, what are the sources for 1969 and for 2009. What should people read in advance to know who you’re dealing with?

AM: Well, let me see. In 1969 we thought, there was an awful lot of films out by 1969, which there hadn’t been in 1910; there were a lot of television series, so what we’ve done is, we’ve kind of gone back to some of the cult cinema that was around at that time. I think that, probably having a look at Nick Roeg’s Performance – Nick Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance – wouldn’t do any harm.

PÓM: I got a copy of that, I see that, is it Litvinoff was a dialogue coach on that?

AM: Yes he was, David Litvinoff, the author of the apparently mythical Litvinoff’s Book, who was also an occasional partner of Mr Ronald Kray of that ilk. An interesting man, David Litvinoff, but, yes, he was the dialogue coach, and he came up with some of the strange elliptical dialogue that doesn’t seem to mean much, but conveys the flavour of the period excellently, So, yeah, there’s probably going to be a couple of references to Performance, that’s a pretty safe bet.

PÓM: Are we around Clockwork Orange time?

AM: No, because Clockwork Orange was, I mean, it was later. It was actually made in the seventies, I believe, and it was set in a kind of a future, so we’re not sure with that one, we haven’t made any references to that. But films of the period like Get Carter, there are certainly a couple of nods to that; other crime films of the period, like Richard Burton’s Villain, which starred a young Ian McShane as the boyfriend stroke criminal gang member of the central Ron Kray-alike criminal played by Richard Burton. One of the things we’ve done in the 1969 version is we’ve taken all of the characters that were based upon Ronnie Kray or the Kray Brothers, and decided that they were all rival East End villains of the period.

So we’ve got Harry Flowers from Performance, who was based on Ronnie Kray, we’ve got Harry Starks from Jake Arnott’s later written but set in the sixties The Long Firm, who was based upon Ronnie Kray, we’ve got Doug and Dinsdale Piranha (from Monty Python’s Flying Circus – Joe), who were based upon the Kray Brothers – I mean, they’re referred to, as part of this warring set of criminal factions around in the East End. Then of course there’s the Richard Burton character, who was also based on Ronnie Kray.

So we’ve got all of those in play, there’s also references to things like Big Breadwinner Hogg, which was a very obscure, very violent nineteen sixties crime show about a young thug trying to rise to the top in the London criminal underworld – I think it was taken off the air after two or three weeks, but it made an impression on me, so there’s at least a passing reference to that. There’s references to the fictional music scene of the times, which includes pirate radio – we had to go quite a way to find a fictional pirate radio station, but we found one in an episode of Dangerman.

And then there’s also a lot about the sixties occult scene, which is the thread that really ties all three of the chapters together. In the 1910 chapter we’re talking about, well, we start this thread of the character Oliver Haddo, who was referred to in the Black Dossier as a way of preparing people for some of the stuff that we’ve got coming up in the future, and what we’ve done with Haddo, who is from Somerset Maugham’s The Magician, and was based upon Crowley, is to tie him in with all of the other surrogate Crowleys that appeared in the literature of the time and also in the films and books that have appeared since.

So we’ve got our essential Oliver Haddo character, who was supposedly dead at the end of The Magician, which I think happened in 1908, or something, or at least was published around that time, but we’ve also explained that, just as the real Crowley took on lots of assumed identities, that Oliver Haddo was also a character called Doctor Carswell Trelawney, which combines MR James’s Carswell, who was based upon Crowley, from Casting the Runes, with Dr Trelawney from Anthony Powell’s Dances to the Music of Time, who was based upon Crowley, and we’ve also included the bizarre architect from The Black Cat, played by Boris Karloff, who name was, I think, Hjalmar Poelzig…

(dark dream premonitions of Crowley-like magicians in Century 1910)

PÓM: Right! I’ll look that one up, so. [I subsequently looked it up, which is why I’ve got the spelling right...]

AM: Yes, look that one up! He was based upon Crowley, and we’ve also tied in Adrian Marcato from Rosemary’s Baby, who was the father of the Satanist in the film, and was based on Crowley. We’ve tied a lot of the supernatural films, at least by reference, that came out in the sixties. We’ve also got, as well as Adrian Marcato, we’ve got Mocata, the similarly named Crowley-based protagonist and black magician of The Devil Rides Out, which was probably set earlier, but the film version was released in the sixties, so we’ve got all of these neatly tied together as one man, and we managed to – oh yeah, there’s also, I’d forgotten, there’s a character called Cosmo Gallion, who is a Crowley-alike magician from I think the second series of The Avengers.

There’s an episode called Warlock, which has a character who is bearded, and reminiscent of the younger, mountain climbing Aleister Crowley, and who wanders around saying, “Do what thou wilt” all the time, so we’ve got him as a key figure. We’ve also tied in Robert Irwin’s Satanist from his brilliant book, Satan Wants You. Robert Irwin is a fantastic writer and I actually spoke to him and asked if it was OK to use the character name from Satan Wants You, and he was, he likes the League apparently, so he was OK with that.

So, it’s the usual eclectic mix; Jerry Cornelius turns up. I mean, I know he appears briefly as a child in the Black Dossier, but he turns up in his 1969 form as a black-skinned white-haired figure in a panda-skin coat. There’s a nice little exchange in the heart of Soho, where we’ve got lots of references to stuff from Moorcock’s New Worlds, and a couple of little gags thrown in for people who remember Berwick Street in the late nineteen sixties; it doesn’t matter if people don’t get the gags, but it’s still a compelling narrative without them. But when it comes up to the 2009 stuff, we’re sort of using characters that, I think for obvious reasons, it would be kind of difficult to actually talk about too much.

P: Yeah, I imagine that there are certain copyright reasons, and that people are a lot quicker to jump at these kinds of things of late…

AM: Well, that’s it. It’s sort of – we’ve preferred to be discreet about some of those, you know, but, I think, just in the background of the five pages that I’ve written so far we’ve got – the third book opens in the middle of, it’s the tail end of the disastrous American and British invasion of Qumar which is, I believe, I don’t watch the show myself, but I believe it’s the Iraq surrogate from West Wing, so you’ve got some stuff there, there’s a reference to an excellent short story by Gerard Kersh called Colonel Cuckoo – Corporal Cuckoo – I’d forgotten, I promoted him [the story is actually called Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo? – PÓM], and Corporal Cuckoo makes a brief appearance in the pages that I’ve done, and there are references to, let me see, Armando Iannucci’s Time Trumpet, Viz, there’s a couple of background references to Lost – only a very, very, very background reference – and I think also to the show Entourage, which again I’ve never seen. It’s useful to have a fictitious actor who makes fictitious films to work into the background detail of the League’s world. We’ve got some pretty good stuff from comedy shows, which, I actually like a lot of modern comedy, so people can expect some references to modern comedy shows.

I’ve been watching Nathan Barley again, because that has got some really brilliant little bits in it.  Fictitious magazines like Sugar Ape, and things like that, those will probably turn up in the background. We’re going to try and be as comprehensive as possible about modern culture, good and bad, and we’ll try to fit it all together into a version of our world that isn’t quite our world, just like the Victorian era League wasn’t quite the real eighteen nineties, but by bringing all of the fictitious parts of our culture together it will give quite a good if bizarre snapshot of what our culture’s like at the moment, you know. And I thank that overall this third volume is going to be quite a dizzying ride, because it sweeps through a whole century in three seventy-two page volumes, and I think that the way that our fictional landscape has changed, it parallels in certain ways the way that our real landscape has changed…

PÓM: Undoubtedly, yes.

AM: And I think that that’s going to be quite interesting, and quite a rush for the readers, you know. And also I should mention that there’s a backup story running through all three issues, that’s called Minions of the Moon. It’s presented as if it were a three-part story from a late nineteen sixties issue of Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds of Science Fiction, but obviously we couldn’t use the name Michael Moorcock or New Worlds of Science Fiction, because those were real, so what we’ve done is, we’ve, I found a quote from Brian Aldiss, from when New Worlds was going through all of its problems, he had at one point jokingly suggested that they change the name to Lewd Worlds of Science Fiction, so Minions of the Moon is from Lewd Worlds of Science Fiction issues 183 to 185, edited by James Colvin, who was one of Moorcock’s pseudonyms.

I believe that James Colvin, they ran an obituary for him in New Worlds where it said that he’d been crushed under a filing cabinet of rejected manuscripts. This is obviously back when James Colvin was still alive and, yeah, Minions of the Moon, the author of it is John Thomas, which was a pseudonym used by John Sladek for his first couple of sales to Galaxy, ‘cause it’s his first two names, John Thomas Sladek, but he wasn’t selling many stories under the name John Thomas, so he decided to change tack and just called himself John Sladek, but we’ve kind of made a reference to that, because Sladek was one of me favourite authors, but that’s just the title panel to it really, the actual content of the strip is looking pretty fantastic so far.

It ties together, as far as we know, almost every fictional reference to the moon. It’s a story set in 1965, but it’s got everything from Wells’ Selenites to Verne’s Baltimore Gun Club, and maybe even a reference or two to The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street through the Baltimore connection. It’s got things like Mysta of the Moon from Planet Comics, which is brought into continuity with Maza of the Moon by Otis Kline, and Amazon Women of the Moon, which was a soft-core porn film with a lot of naked women living on the moon.

So we rationalised all of this, along with Lucien and Baron Munchausen’s journeys to the moon by waterspout, and Mister Godwin of Northampton – I’ve forgotten his first name for the moment – the guy who wrote his account of travelling to the moon in a goose-pulled chariot in the sixteenth century (I suspect this is either Francis Goodwin or possibly Johannes Kepler – Joe). So we’ve got all them tied in – obscure things like Honeymoon in Space, which was a narrative serial from a British magazine in 1910 – we’ve got all of these things, oh, and the black monoliths, of course, from 2001, and a load of other things.

Oh yeah, the Clangers, the soup dragons, the Lunar hoax of 1947, I believe, where someone said that through a telescope he’d seen bat-winged creatures and moon-bison – it turned out just to be a journalistic hoax, but it’s a fiction, of its kind, so we’ve worked that in, along with all the soup dragons and Clangers and Amazon Women of the Moon and Ant-people and, yeah, there’s also, we find out what happened to Professor Selwyn Cavor who figured in the first volume, and we also find out what eventually happened to Professor James Moriarty. He becomes important to the plot, but this’ll be running over the three books.

We’re having a load of fun with it. It originally came from a suggestion that Kevin said that he’d like to do a story set on the moon, and I hadn’t got much idea as to what to do with the backup pages before he’d said that, but once he made that suggestion I suddenly thought, “Yeah, the fictional moon, that would be splendid.” So that’s almost as much fun as the lead story itself, and in fact it ties in, I’m writing it so that it does connect up with the lead story of the third volume, but it won’t be apparent until volume three exactly how it connects up.

PÓM: Right, OK. I wanted to say, actually, you mentioned earlier on that you, as we were moving forward in time, there were new media like television and cinema, and things like that. As we’re going into 2009, does that mean you’re dipping your toe into things like the Internet, by any chance?

AM: Well, if I can find fictional Internet characters that seem appropriate to the story that I’m telling, then, yeah, at least potentially, I’m not ruling it out, although I haven’t really got any good examples in mind.

PÓM: Neither do I, it was just it struck me when you said it, you know, that it was a potential medium.

AM: Oh yeah, potentially, it is, I mean, like, it’s one that I don’t know very much about, but then that goes for pretty much the whole of 2009 culture, really, I mean I’m having to research this a lot more than I did the eighteen nineties.

(Janni proving as stubborn and determined as her father, Nemo, decides to leave, which gives us a good excuse to ogle Kev O’Neill’s wonderfully detailed architecture)

P; Yeah, I mean, musically and stuff, if you’re trying to make music from this part of the twenty-first century, would it be something you’d have a lot of familiarity with?

AM: Well actually, we’ve named – each of the chapters has got a title that is taken from a song of around the period, so the first one is called What Keeps Mankind Alive?, which is taken from the Threepenny Opera. The second one is called Paint It Black, this is the one that’s set in 1969, and the third one, which I’ve just started writing, is called Let It Come Down, which is my dear mate Jason Spaceman with Spiritualized, and I think it was certainly twenty first century, and I just thought it was a lovely title for a lovely album, so we’re using that as the suitably apocalyptic title for the part of volume three.

PÓM: OK. Seeing as there’s a – I think you may have been asked this before – but seeing as there’s a lot of musical numbers all the way through, is there any possibility you’re going to release an album of the…?

AM: That is a possibility because we were so disappointed that, having recorded the double-sided 45 single for the Black Dossier by Eddie Enrico and his Hawaiian Hotshots, which is a Thomas Pynchon reference from The Crying of Lot 49, but we’d recorded this, you know, two-sided – a double B-side, perhaps – we recorded this single and then at the last minute they were screwing around, and they decided that they weren’t going to bring it out as they’d promised, so what we’re thinking is that there’s at least a possibility that we might include it with an album to be included with some sort of special edition of the collected volume three, say, in which we would be able to include that with other songs from the book – I don’t know, we’re still thinking about it, and I haven’t heard from Tim Perkins for  absolutely ages, but there’s possibilities so, yeah, I wouldn’t be too surprised if there wasn’t some sort of musical inclusion with the collected volume three.

PÓM: Is there any chance you’re going to collect together all of the old songs you did with the likes of the Sinister Ducks and Emperors of Ice Cream, maybe?

AM: Well, I mean, I doubt it. I mean, the ones with the Emperors of Ice Cream, the band, as most bands do, split up acrimoniously and, you know, it just all came to pieces, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable about releasing commercially any of the stuff we did without those people’s permission, which I’m not really inclined to seek, you know. Who knows? You know, I’m doing a gig in a couple of weeks on March the thirteenth – I think it’s probably all sold out by now – but there a gig on March the thirteenth at
the Frog and Fiddler in Northampton which I’m doing on behalf of the Lovelight Romanian Orphanage charity (see Alan Moore Stands Up – Joe)that I’ve had quite a bit to do with over the past few years, and some friends of mine who handle the Northampton end of the charity said would I like to do a performance, with the proceeds going to Lovelight, so I’m going to be doing three quarters of an hour of, well, talking, basically.

If anybody laughs, I’ll pretend that it was my stand-up debut. If nobody laughs, then it was just a brilliant and incisive monologue, you know. But then for the second half I’m going to be doing – I mean, if I haven’t completely ruined my reputation by the end of act one – then I’m going to absolutely throttle it to death by the end of act two, when I’m going to be doing a few songs, which will include a couple of early pieces – an earlier version of Murders on the Rue Morgue that was done before the Emperors of Ice Cream; Old Gangsters Never Die, which I shall be doing unaccompanied; and Madame October, which was co-written between me and the late great Tom Hall, so I’ll be doing that.

And then I shall be doing another three or four songs that I’ve written over the last year with a guy who lives around the corner, a very talented young musician called Joe Brown – not the Joe Brown of Joe Brown and his Brothers fame – but a younger and more musically varied person of the same name, so Joe and his band, the Retro Spankees, are going to be backing me on the final four numbers and, yeah, I’m not promising it’s going to be any good, but it’s all for charity, mate, and it’ll turn out a good night, I’m going to do the best I can.

PÓM: I’m sure it’ll be wonderful. Will there be a recording?

AM: Well, we’re hoping to set that up. We’re going to check out whether there could be a recording through the desk, and if it’s any good, possibly some video footage, just to see if there was any way that we could, then we could bring it out as a way of raising more money for the charity.

PÓM: Well, I’ll buy one!

AM: Well, fantastic. So, yeah, it’s happening in a couple of weeks, and I suppose there is a possibility in the future, me and Joe might put something together to release. We haven’t talked about it much, we’ve just been doing them for fun, really. And me and Tim are still supposed to be doing another
magical album at some point, but like I say, he’s bringing up two young children and I haven’t heard from him in a while, actually. I imagine he’s very busy.

The second part, in which Alan and Pádraig discuss future work, and the third part in which Alan answers some questions from readers, will follow on the blog soon, so stay tuned. FPI would like very much to thank Alan for again sharing his time so generously with our readers and to Pádraig for orchestrating the interview and sacrificing the health of his fingers to transcribe it all into print. Thanks also to the nice folks at Knockabout and Top Shelf for help and images. The interview Pádraig had with Alan on here last year can still be read on the blog, with part one here and part two to be found here.

Here’s a very special early Christmas present for our readers: Pádraig Ó Méalóid (who is rapidly becoming our Roving Interviewer At Large, following his excellent chats with Todd Klein and Alan Moore) met one of my very favourite writers Neil Gaiman during Neil’s recent busy tour (does Neil do any other kind of tour?) for his new Graveyard Book. While poor Neil had to try and combine actually getting to eat some lunch with an interview Pádraig talked to him about his career, Miracleman, the importance of his blog, conventions, Doctor Who, Stardust, Neverwhere and whether one should have Wasabi or mushy peas with chips. Over to Pádraig and Neil:

This interview took place in the Clarence Hotel in Dublin City at lunchtime on Thursday the 30th of October 2008. This was literally Neil’s lunch, and I got to ask him questions while he had a spare half hour between other engagements. Neil looked very tired, no doubt due in large part to his partying until the wee small hours the previous night in Manchester with Leah Moore and John Reppion, amongst others. I was suffering from a very heavy cold, so between us there are bits of the interview that, even after repeated listening, I’m still not sure what we were trying to say. Still, here it is, in all its glory…:

Neil Gaiman [entering the room]: Leah and John send their love. They told me that Mel [Melinda Gebbie] is coming to stay with you.

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: Mel is coming over for a week. She’s coming over next Monday, and she’s doing a talk, so I get to do the interview with her as well.

[Gestures to recording device on table] I mean, I’ve already got Alan [Moore] and I’ve got you on this, and my friend Catie [CE] Murphy – I was going to mention her later, she’s doing a comic, she’s done a lot of fantasy writing, fantasy novels, and now she has a comic coming out from the Dabel Brothers soon called Take a Chance.

NG: Did I get given a comic by her?

PÓM: I don’t think you did.

NG: I’m trying to think if I… It may have been your friend in Kinsale?

PÓM: Kate, Kate Sheehy. I’m meeting Kate in about an hour, off the train, so… She was kinda cursing herself ‘cause she was going to be here as my lovely assistant, or something like that, you know. I presume your day is entirely filled from here right to the end, so there’s no fear of squeezing in a cup of tea with myself and Kate at any stage?

NG: No, Cormac [from Repforce Ireland, who was looking after Neil’s diary for the day] has built this thing – you are my lunch…

PÓM: Yeah, I know, I feel bad about that.

NG: That’s alright, I can talk to you while eating chips.

PÓM: Yeah, that’s cool.

Anyway, I’m now officially going to start.

NG: OK, start your official interview! And this is for the FPI blog, the one that I’ve linked to in the past?

PÓM: Yes, for Joe Gordon’s thing, and Joe says thank you very much. The Todd Klein interview I did that you put a link to, I sent a mail to the two of them saying, “We got Gaimaned!”

NG: I think they can normally tell when they’ve got Gaimaned.

POM: Yeah, ‘cause it goes Boink! Todd said he noticed an immediate spike in the sales, the orders for the prints.

NG: Todd is so nice. Every time I mention it he gets…

PÓM: Yes, I imagine so.

(Before You Read This, a signed print of a free-form verse by Neil Gaiman (partially obscured to preserve a surprise until you see the actual print) and lettered and designed by Todd Klein, available from Todd’s site)

NG: It’s the strange thing about a blog, though. You kind of imagine that you’re writing to an audience of people who are reading you day by day, and the truth is that you’re not. You’re writing for an audience of people who are coming in and going out, and some of them are reading you day by day, but some of them are going to catch up every Friday, on what you’ve done the previous week, and one of the things that I’ve noticed is, if I mention something I should probably, if it’s something important that I want to mention, and I want people to know about, I will try and remember to mention it three times over a period of about three weeks, because at that point I can catch a lot of people…

PÓM: I used to just drop in and out myself, and then somebody would say, “There’s this on Neil’s blog…”

NG: And they you get caught up for a few weeks, and then you drift out because it’s the way that it goes.

PÓM: Well eventually what I did was I just put it in as a LiveJournal feed, which is what I should have done all along. It’s much easier, ‘cause I don’t have to do it, LiveJournal does it for me, and it’s the one thing I religiously look at every day. I don’t necessarily read everything…

NG: I had to explain to the people at HarperCollins that we used to have one point four million unique visitors a month to the blog, and then over the last few years that’s dropped to about four hundred thousand, and they were going, “We’ve lost a million readers,” and I said, “No, no, no, we really haven’t. Here’s LiveJournal, where you now have seventeen thousand, you know, there’s seventeen thousand nine hundred on LiveJournal subscribed to it. You’ve got this RSS fed here, you’ve got this RSS feed there, and they’re showing up as one hit, but then they’re feeding it to another fifty thousand people here, and a hundred thousand people there.”

PÓM: So you really have to go and search all the bits and pieces to see where it’s all going?

NG: You kind of do, and then you don’t worry, you try not to think about it!

PÓM: Well, somebody somewhere presumably gets to do it. Actually, this is something I was going to ask you about later on. You are very successful, you get a lot of hits on your blog, people tend to know what you’re doing, and what you’re on about, and I think you said something about when you were at Eastercon, that you felt you were…

NG: [As his lunch arrives] Thank you.

PÓM: That is the poshest fish and chips I’ve ever seen!

NG: It’s like a work of art.

PÓM: Isn’t it?

NG: [Pointing to a container with a green substance in it] You’re going, “That could be mushy peas, it could be Wasabi, it could be… How will we ever know?”

PÓM: [Carrying on with the question] I think you said you felt that there was a really nice, a really great con going on in the next room that you couldn’t go to, or something like that. You weren’t being let loose in the wild, kinda.

NG: Well, there’s definitely… I think, I mean the con in the next room, I think I was talking more about the fact that, honestly, more about the con experience than anything else. It’s the point where you look around and you realise you are Jumbo the Mighty Elephant that everybody’s coming to the zoo to see, and everyone’s getting a wonderful day out at the zoo but you.

And as a zoo attraction, it’s not a bad thing, it’s just a thing. I miss… I miss conventions, I really do. I would love to be able to go to a convention and people say, when I say that, people say, “Why don’t you come to our convention? It’s a lovely little convention, and there’s only a hundred people there,” and stuff like that, and I used to believe that. Every time people used to say, “Come to our convention. We’ve never had more than a hundred people there, and it’s lovely, and it’s just like little conventions, and we’ll all treat you like family,” and I’d say, “Great.” And I would come to them, and then nine hundred people would show up, and they’d be going, “We’ve never had this many people here before,” and I’d start feeling like a bowling ball on a rubber sheet.

PÓM: I know exactly what you mean, yeah. It’s the black hole thing.

NG: Yeah.

PÓM: It just completely distorts the space-time continuum of the con. At the beginning of this month we were at NewCon in Northampton, and because we were there, and because of one or two other things, Alan Moore and Melinda [Gebbie] came along, and they made an appearance here and there, which I think had people’s necks craning all weekend, but everyone was very nice, and actually didn’t go near him at all, but obviously he could not have set foot near the place if anyone knew he was going to be there, and even at that I think he was quite nervous.

NG: You would have had thousands of people, just coming in.

PÓM: I got to introduce him to Paul Cornell. I was very pleased to introduce the two Captain Britain writers…

It’s unusual in a way for a writer to be the victim of their own success, because they’re generally invisible. You’re not. I mean, you do a lot of touring, you’re doing a big tour for this, you’re going to spend the day doing interviews…

NG: True, but only up to a point, because if you talk to Cormac about how many authors he has come through who tour, he will tell you how many authors he’s had in this month, and it’s not like authors don’t tour, it’s that authors don’t – you know, I was in Manchester last night, and they sell out a six hundred and fifty seat university hall, there’s this giant monstrous signing afterwards, it’s all bizarre, and at some point the head of the programme who was there comes down completely baffled, he says, “We didn’t get a turnout like this for Martin Amis,” and it’s not that Martin Amis doesn’t tour and doesn’t do the media…

PÓM: I suppose it’s that we’re all aware that you’re touring, where we’re not always aware of others. Sometimes someone says, “Did you know such-and-such was in town signing last week?” and no, I didn’t, obviously because we’re not all reading their blog or wherever it’s being mentioned.

NG: That’s why I love the blog, though, because I’m not the victim – if victim is the right word – of whether or not a shop knows how to promote my appearance any more. I’m not, I don’t actually have to worry as much as other authors do about whether a publisher is taking out the advertising and promoting the book.

PÓM: You’re kinda looking after that one yourself.

NG: I’m certainly… I have an amount of control over my destiny from the blog.

PÓM: I see exactly what you’re saying.

NG: Last night I wound up being the first author at Manchester University ever to have a backing band, well, a support band, and, for the end of my signing, they’d more or less been vamping it for as long as they were allowed to, and I went down and made a guest appearance at the Jonathan Coulton gig.

PÓM: With a tambourine, I believe?

NG: With a tambourine. I did the second verse of Creepy Doll…

PÓM: Which is what? It’s a song they do?

NG: It’s a Jonathan Coulton song. It’s lovely, it’s like a little horror… it’s a Stephen King story about somebody with a creepy doll that always follows you. You buy an old house and it’s haunted by this thing and you throw it on the fire and it’s back the next morning. So… And of course you know that because you’ve read the blog already.

And in the evening I was talking to Jonathan after this was all over, and we were talking about the fact that… Jonathan was saying “If I was a medium successful person, when my contract with the record label is up in music, I cannot understand any reason why anybody would ever sign another contract. Why give that percentage of control and that percentage of your income to a record company who needed to exist as a gateway, but why if you don’t need a gateway?” There is no reason to have an intermediary between you and your readers, or you and your listeners. And while I like not being bothered with so many details, and letting people do their jobs, there are places where I feel like I’m now a safety net. Would The Graveyard Book have spent two weeks at number one on the children’s list if I had been, when it came out? Probably not, not with the blog, because everybody who wanted it knew that it was coming out.

PÓM: And another thing I noticed on the blog is that you were getting an awful lot of feedback from people about its availability, its unavailability, and you seemed to be able to chase that up in real time, as it was happening.

NG: As it was happening.

PÓM: There are some misunderstandings that I see that people at Borders are having, but I suppose that’s par for the course.

NG: The trouble with the internet is people don’t read the actual thing, they read what they think they’ve been told.

PÓM: I’m going to run along, because I see we’re already fifteen minutes in and I’ve a couple of things…

NG: Go for it.

PÓM: How was China? What were you doing in China?

NG: Researching a book. I decided it was time to, I really decided it was time to step outside my comfort zone, and it’s been twenty years since I did a non-fiction book, and the last non-fiction book I did was, um…

PÓM: Was that Ghastly Beyond Belief?

NG: Don’t Panic, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book.

Then I thought, I want to do a non-fiction book, so I’m doing a non-fiction book about me going to China, and about Monkey, and about Buddhism, and about seventh century history and sixteenth century literature, and just, mostly it was that thing where nobody is waiting for it, and nobody particularly wants a book by me about China, and it seemed like a really good reason to write one.

(the cover artwork to Batman #686, written by Neil Gaiman, art by Andy Kubert, (c) DC Comics, published February 2009)

PÓM: Mind you I see that you are – having started off as far as I can see as a comics’ writer and then becoming a novelist you’ve kind of gone back to being a comics’ writer. You’re doing a Batman story for DC, and are you meant to be writing the prequel, the Sandman prequel story? I know you said something about doing that before.

NG: I don’t know if that will ever happen. Maybe. It’s weird, because I talk to people who will tell me with a straight face that I stopped writing comics in 1996, and I say, “OK, let’s go to this century. Since 2001, I’d written two adult novels, or had published, two adult novels – Anansi Boys and American Gods; two children’s novels – Coraline and The Graveyard Book; two major children’s picture books…”

PÓM: That’d be, what? Wolves in the Walls and…

NG: Wolves in the Walls and…

PÓM: The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish?

NG: No, actually that was 1998, so, let’s say the MirrorMask book. I’ve done two and a half movies – Beowulf and MirrorMask, and Stardust is my half. And I’ve done three graphic novel-length works – The Eternals, 1602, and Sandman: Endless Nights.

PÓM: That’s a fair body of work just for the past eight years, mind you.

NG: But it doesn’t seem to me that it’s substantially weighted against comics. In terms of page-count that’s three books, each of which was more or less novel length, and about the same the same amount of work it would have taken me to write a novel, and, you know, hearing people describe my career to me as if it was one of those weird little charts where you start off coming out of the ocean and then you become a monkey, and then, you know…

PÓM: I think people can only see you as what they see as the primary part of your output. You were a comics’ writer and maybe other things, and now you’re a novelist and maybe other things, and possibly that’s it, you know.

I was going to ask you, what did you make of Stardust the movie?

NG: I enjoyed it. It wasn’t the film that I would have made if I’d set out to make a Stardust movie, but I thought it was a lovely Stardust movie. I could quite happily watch a completely different Stardust movie, if that makes sense. It was very much a “this is a lovely Stardust movie.” I guess I felt about it, it’s weird, because I suppose – with Coraline in May, over here, you’ll get the Henry Sellick Coraline movie which, from what I’ve seen of it so far, I’ve very much enjoyed. In May on Broadway you’ll see the first performances of the Stephin Merritt Coraline which in terms of plot hews, as far as I can tell, exactly to the book, but he’s doing some weird and wonderful things, including casting a fifty year old lady as Coraline, and casting a man as the other mother, and stuff, and I don’t see either of those as being, “This is now Coraline legitimised, this is what this is,” I see them both as versions, with every bit as much legitimacy as the Irish Puppet Theatre version.

PÓM: I know you weren’t happy with Neverwhere, the TV series…?

NG: I wasn’t.

PÓM: Are they remaking Neverwhere?

NG: There’s a film that’s meant to be made. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, I remade Neverwhere when I wrote the novel. The whole point of the novel was, “No, this is what I meant.”

PÓM: Certainly the novel was far more satisfactory. The TV series wasn’t bad, but it was of its time…

NG: It wasn’t just of its time. Honestly, they could have, its time, it was of its time in the world in which it was up against X-Files. It was of its time in a world in which I am saying, “We need to be forty five minutes long, it need to be shot on film or it’ll look like crap,” and they’re going [adopts posh BBC accent], “my dear boy, we’re the BBC, we’ve been doing things like this for years. It’s like Doctor Who, and that’d twenty eight minutes long and shot on video. That’s what people love. And by the way, in order to accommodate that we’ve thrown out half your script…” You know it was, I wasn’t happy with it, I felt like it had the wrong director, and it was, it needed somebody who was going to say, “It need to be forty five minutes long…” I loved the fact that when Doctor Who came back it was forty five minutes long and shot on film, or looked like it.

PÓM: Are you… there are persistent rumours that you are going to write a Doctor Who story?

NG: There definitely are.

PÓM: And is there any truth to those?

NG: Well, there’s truth in the fact that there are rumours.

PÓM: Well, that would be a good thing. You know that David Tennant has just announced he’s stepping down at the end of next year?

NG: So I heard. I actually, I was rather sad, ‘cause I’d emailed, we were trying to figure out who was going to host my Halloween event for tomorrow, and about a week ago I had this brilliant idea, and I emailed Paterson Joseph and said, “Why don’t you host my event, ‘cause that will drive people mad, ‘cause there’s Doctor Who rumours about you and there’s Doctor Who rumours about me, and if you host the event, nobody in the world, and then, we don’t have to mention anything, but nobody in the world will think, they will feel there has to be something…” and I got a think back from Pat saying he would love to but he’s actually right now in Africa filming for the BBC on something.

I mean, he is thrilled by the Doctor Who rumours, but I think mostly thrilled because it’s suddenly taken him from an actor who nobody really quite knew who he was, you’d have to say, “Well, he was the guy in the Numberwang sketch, or he was the guy from Peepshow, or he was…” to people going, “Yes, Paterson Joseph, he could be the next Doctor Who,” and so it’s done amazing things for him.

PÓM: Doctor Who does seem to turn people into just enormous superstars.

I have to ask you the obligatory Miracleman question. At what stage is Miracleman at?

NG: Currently Todd McFarlane is suing me, claiming he owns all of Miracleman, and I am going, “You are mad, because as far as I can tell right now, neither of us owns anything of Miracleman, it is actually still owned completely by Mick Anglo, who is still alive, and who has asserted his copyright on it, and everything that Dez Skinn said back in Warrior days was apparently a lie, and this thing is Mick’s, so I don’t really see why, why are you suing me now, Todd?”

(Miracleman #23: Silver Age by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham, published Eclipse and (c)… Well, just have a look at what Neil says!)

PÓM: I can’t help thinking that Todd should just do the right thing and say, throw his hands up and say, no matter what happens, he will never come out the good guy on this one, and just walk away.

NG: Yes. I don’t know why, it’s like, it’s all mad.

PÓM: The thing is, I think I’m doing a panel at Eastercon next year called Who Owns Miracleman? which is obviously what all this stuff is [pointing to a file folder on the table marked Miracleman] and I’m going to write an accompanying article that I’ve been promising to write for at least five years, and every time I look into it, it gets a little more complex.

NG: Well…

PÓM: It’s very complex unless you go all the way back and say, “Mick Anglo owned it, and kept the rights to it.”

NG: Yeah, and what was interesting is, there was a trail of lies spread chiefly, as far as I can tell – whether intentionally or unintentionally – by Dez Skinn.

PÓM: Thank you for that, for saying, “intentionally or unintentionally”!

NG: No, I think Dez made some assumptions about the law, I think there were thing that he definitely told people at the time, and that history has proved to be untrue. The biggest one was simply that he’d obtained, you know, there was a version of events in which he had obtained the rights from the official receiver. Then we discovered that Miller & Son was never, it never went bankrupt, it had simply been would up.

PÓM: The L. Miller properties had been sold to Alan Class, as far as I know, was one of the things I had heard said.

NG: No. There are many things that people have said. No, from everything that I can tell, it simply went into voluntary liquidation. It was wound up, and Mick owned Miracleman slash Marvelman before, during, and after. He held the copyrights on it. L. Miller and Son never made any claims to owning it or to having sold it.

PÓM: OK. I was always wondering that, even given that Mick Anglo created Marvelman, Marvelman was obviously, and was meant to be, almost an exact copy of Captain Marvel, who was of course a copy of Superman…

NG: Ah, now there it gets, you know, the trouble is, you have this weird magic world in which it is a can of infinite worms, and every time you reach further in there are more worms come out.

PÓM: Undoubtedly, yeah. Anyway, I’d better move on, or we’ll never get any further.

I have to say, I loved the dragon in, was it in Anansi Boys that there was a dragon who speaks just like Leslie Phillips?

NG: He does! Thank you for noticing.

PÓM: I just loved that, and I felt that he should have a book all to himself because that was absolutely super.

NG: [Laughs]

PÓM: And there’s a big man looming over us…

NG: [To Cormac, who is running his diary for the day] You need me? I haven’t even finished my tea, and you need me. What’s next?

Cormac: The filming.

NG: OK

PÓM: Two things: one question, and a photograph.

NG: And something to scribble on, or…

PÓM: I have a few things to scribble on, if that’s OK.

[Pádraig produces a camera and two books for Neil to sign, which Neil then signs, while Cormac takes photographs of the two of them.]

(Neil signing some books for Pádraig; Neil being Neil I suspect he’s having a look at the book and what edition it is. Pic borrowed from Pádraig’s Flickr stream)

Why red balloons? Red balloons come up in your stories all the time.

NG: Well, I was probably bitten by…

PÓM: A radioactive red balloon in your youth?

NG: No! I was going to say PL Travers, in my youth, that amazing story in Mary Poppins where everybody floats in the park on balloons. It’s definitely iconic, in its way, and that would be, if I had to point at anything, that would probably be where the balloons come from.

PÓM: Thank you very much, that’s great. And your public awaits.

NG: They do.

PÓM: Is there any possibility, in the next umpteen years, that we could do a long email interview, or is that just taking too much of your time?

NG: I was saying earlier, every interview seems to end with somebody saying, “Can I send you a few more questions in email?” Several times they started sending me things that are basically new interviews in email, and I hate doing email interviews, only because there’s this point where I’ve sat there and typed for two hours, producing replies, and I think, at least if I was being interviewed, I’d be having a conversation.

PÓM: OK. Let me turn this thing off…

I turned off the recorder, and Neil was led away to his next appointment, cup of tea still unfinished. Exactly thirty minutes and thirty six seconds was what I got, from beginning to end, and I couldn’t help feeling that I could easily have spoken to him for another thirty minutes. He did promise we’d get to do something the next time he was in Dublin, hopefully a longer interview, which I look forward to. Looking at my list of question topics, I saw I hadn’t got to talk to him about the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund, which I know is close to his heart, and which I’d meant to get to, partly because we’d touched on it before the interview proper started, in relation to CE Murphy’s Take a Chance, the first issue’s profits of which are going to the CBLDF, and which he’d seen preview pages of.

I did get to ask Neil one more question that day, however. After his reading at Eason’s bookshop in Dublin he asked for questions, and I stuck my hand in the air and asked, “What’s next?” He told us about Blueberry Girl, a poem he wrote for Tori Amos’s daughter Tash in 2000, which is being drawn by Charles Vess, and which is due out in March 2009, and he held forth at great and comic length about the China book, which is due out god known when. I’ve always felt that Neil would have a good chance at an alternate career as a stand-up comedian. He’s certainly got the comic timing.

FPI would like to thank Neil Gaiman very much for sacrificing his lunch break and risking indigestion to take part in this interview and thanks to Pádraig for conducting it and writing it all up for us to share with you. The Graveyard Book is out now from Bloomsbury and the fourth and final (and rather beautiful looking) volume of the Absolute Sandman has also been published recently; you can keep up with Neil, his writing, appearances and occasional semi-demonic Salsa making by visiting his very fine online journal.

This interview took place in the Clarence Hotel in Dublin City at lunchtime on Thursday the 30th of October 2008. This was literally Neil’s lunch, and I got to ask him questions while he had a spare half hour between other engagements. Neil looked very tired, no doubt due in large part to his partying until the wee small hours the previous night in Manchester with Leah Moore and John Reppion, amongst others. I was suffering from a very heavy cold, so between us there are bits of the interview that, even after repeated listening, I’m still not sure what we were trying to say. Still, here it is, in all its glory…:

Neil Gaiman [entering the room]: Leah and John send their love. They told me that Mel [Melinda Gebbie] is coming to stay with you.

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: Mel is coming over for a week. She’s coming over next Monday, and she’s doing a talk, so I get to do the interview with her as well.

[Gestures to recording device on table] I mean, I’ve already got Alan [Moore] and I’ve got you on this, and my friend Catie [CE] Murphy – I was going to mention her later, she’s doing a comic, she’s done a lot of fantasy writing, fantasy novels, and now she has a comic coming out from the Dabel Brothers soon called Take a Chance.

NG: Did I get given a comic by her?

PÓM: I don’t think you did.

NG: I’m trying to think if I… It may have been your friend in Kinsale?

PÓM: Kate, Kate Sheehy. I’m meeting Kate in about an hour, off the train, so… She was kinda cursing herself ‘cause she was going to be here as my lovely assistant, or something like that, you know. I presume your day is entirely filled from here right to the end, so there’s no fear of squeezing in a cup of tea with myself and Kate at any stage?

NG: No, Cormac [from Repforce Ireland, who was looking after Neil’s diary for the day] has built this thing – you are my lunch…

PÓM: Yeah, I know, I feel bad about that.

NG: That’s alright, I can talk to you while eating chips.

PÓM: Yeah, that’s cool.

Anyway, I’m now officially going to start.

NG: OK, start your official interview! And this is for the FPI blog, the one that I’ve linked to in the past?

PÓM: Yes, for Joe Gordon’s thing, and Joe says thank you very much. The Todd Klein interview I did that you put a link to, I sent a mail to the two of them saying, “We got Gaimaned!”

NG: I think they can normally tell when they’ve got Gaimaned.

POM: Yeah, ‘cause it goes Boink! Todd said he noticed an immediate spike in the sales, the orders for the prints.

NG: Todd is so nice. Every time I mention it he gets…

PÓM: Yes, I imagine so.

(Before You Read This, a signed print of a free-form verse by Neil Gaiman (partially obscured to preserve a surprise until you see the actual print) and lettered and designed by Todd Klein, available from Todd’s site)

NG: It’s the strange thing about a blog, though. You kind of imagine that you’re writing to an audience of people who are reading you day by day, and the truth is that you’re not. You’re writing for an audience of people who are coming in and going out, and some of them are reading you day by day, but some of them are going to catch up every Friday, on what you’ve done the previous week, and one of the things that I’ve noticed is, if I mention something I should probably, if it’s something important that I want to mention, and I want people to know about, I will try and remember to mention it three times over a period of about three weeks, because at that point I can catch a lot of people…

PÓM: I used to just drop in and out myself, and then somebody would say, “There’s this on Neil’s blog…”

NG: And they you get caught up for a few weeks, and then you drift out because it’s the way that it goes.

PÓM: Well eventually what I did was I just put it in as a LiveJournal feed, which is what I should have done all along. It’s much easier, ‘cause I don’t have to do it, LiveJournal does it for me, and it’s the one thing I religiously look at every day. I don’t necessarily read everything…

NG: I had to explain to the people at HarperCollins that we used to have one point four million unique visitors a month to the blog, and then over the last few years that’s dropped to about four hundred thousand, and they were going, “We’ve lost a million readers,” and I said, “No, no, no, we really haven’t. Here’s LiveJournal, where you now have seventeen thousand, you know, there’s seventeen thousand nine hundred on LiveJournal subscribed to it. You’ve got this RSS fed here, you’ve got this RSS feed there, and they’re showing up as one hit, but then they’re feeding it to another fifty thousand people here, and a hundred thousand people there.”

PÓM: So you really have to go and search all the bits and pieces to see where it’s all going?

NG: You kind of do, and then you don’t worry, you try not to think about it!

PÓM: Well, somebody somewhere presumably gets to do it. Actually, this is something I was going to ask you about later on. You are very successful, you get a lot of hits on your blog, people tend to know what you’re doing, and what you’re on about, and I think you said something about when you were at Eastercon, that you felt you were…

NG: [As his lunch arrives] Thank you.

PÓM: That is the poshest fish and chips I’ve ever seen!

NG: It’s like a work of art.

PÓM: Isn’t it?

NG: [Pointing to a container with a green substance in it] You’re going, “That could be mushy peas, it could be Wasabi, it could be… How will we ever know?”

PÓM: [Carrying on with the question] I think you said you felt that there was a really nice, a really great con going on in the next room that you couldn’t go to, or something like that. You weren’t being let loose in the wild, kinda.

NG: Well, there’s definitely… I think, I mean the con in the next room, I think I was talking more about the fact that, honestly, more about the con experience than anything else. It’s the point where you look around and you realise you are Jumbo the Mighty Elephant that everybody’s coming to the zoo to see, and everyone’s getting a wonderful day out at the zoo but you.

And as a zoo attraction, it’s not a bad thing, it’s just a thing. I miss… I miss conventions, I really do. I would love to be able to go to a convention and people say, when I say that, people say, “Why don’t you come to our convention? It’s a lovely little convention, and there’s only a hundred people there,” and stuff like that, and I used to believe that. Every time people used to say, “Come to our convention. We’ve never had more than a hundred people there, and it’s lovely, and it’s just like little conventions, and we’ll all treat you like family,” and I’d say, “Great.” And I would come to them, and then nine hundred people would show up, and they’d be going, “We’ve never had this many people here before,” and I’d start feeling like a bowling ball on a rubber sheet.

PÓM: I know exactly what you mean, yeah. It’s the black hole thing.

NG: Yeah.

PÓM: It just completely distorts the space-time continuum of the con. At the beginning of this month we were at NewCon in Northampton, and because we were there, and because of one or two other things, Alan Moore and Melinda [Gebbie] came along, and they made an appearance here and there, which I think had people’s necks craning all weekend, but everyone was very nice, and actually didn’t go near him at all, but obviously he could not have set foot near the place if anyone knew he was going to be there, and even at that I think he was quite nervous.

NG: You would have had thousands of people, just coming in.

PÓM: I got to introduce him to Paul Cornell. I was very pleased to introduce the two Captain Britain writers…

It’s unusual in a way for a writer to be the victim of their own success, because they’re generally invisible. You’re not. I mean, you do a lot of touring, you’re doing a big tour for this, you’re going to spend the day doing interviews…

NG: True, but only up to a point, because if you talk to Cormac about how many authors he has come through who tour, he will tell you how many authors he’s had in this month, and it’s not like authors don’t tour, it’s that authors don’t – you know, I was in Manchester last night, and they sell out a six hundred and fifty seat university hall, there’s this giant monstrous signing afterwards, it’s all bizarre, and at some point the head of the programme who was there comes down completely baffled, he says, “We didn’t get a turnout like this for Martin Amis,” and it’s not that Martin Amis doesn’t tour and doesn’t do the media…

PÓM: I suppose it’s that we’re all aware that you’re touring, where we’re not always aware of others. Sometimes someone says, “Did you know such-and-such was in town signing last week?” and no, I didn’t, obviously because we’re not all reading their blog or wherever it’s being mentioned.

NG: That’s why I love the blog, though, because I’m not the victim – if victim is the right word – of whether or not a shop knows how to promote my appearance any more. I’m not, I don’t actually have to worry as much as other authors do about whether a publisher is taking out the advertising and promoting the book.

PÓM: You’re kinda looking after that one yourself.

NG: I’m certainly… I have an amount of control over my destiny from the blog.

PÓM: I see exactly what you’re saying.

NG: Last night I wound up being the first author at Manchester University ever to have a backing band, well, a support band, and, for the end of my signing, they’d more or less been vamping it for as long as they were allowed to, and I went down and made a guest appearance at the Jonathan Coulton gig.

PÓM: With a tambourine, I believe?

NG: With a tambourine. I did the second verse of Creepy Doll…

PÓM: Which is what? It’s a song they do?

NG: It’s a Jonathan Coulton song. It’s lovely, it’s like a little horror… it’s a Stephen King story about somebody with a creepy doll that always follows you. You buy an old house and it’s haunted by this thing and you throw it on the fire and it’s back the next morning. So… And of course you know that because you’ve read the blog already.

And in the evening I was talking to Jonathan after this was all over, and we were talking about the fact that… Jonathan was saying “If I was a medium successful person, when my contract with the record label is up in music, I cannot understand any reason why anybody would ever sign another contract. Why give that percentage of control and that percentage of your income to a record company who needed to exist as a gateway, but why if you don’t need a gateway?” There is no reason to have an intermediary between you and your readers, or you and your listeners. And while I like not being bothered with so many details, and letting people do their jobs, there are places where I feel like I’m now a safety net. Would The Graveyard Book have spent two weeks at number one on the children’s list if I had been, when it came out? Probably not, not with the blog, because everybody who wanted it knew that it was coming out.

PÓM: And another thing I noticed on the blog is that you were getting an awful lot of feedback from people about its availability, its unavailability, and you seemed to be able to chase that up in real time, as it was happening.

NG: As it was happening.

PÓM: There are some misunderstandings that I see that people at Borders are having, but I suppose that’s par for the course.

NG: The trouble with the internet is people don’t read the actual thing, they read what they think they’ve been told.

PÓM: I’m going to run along, because I see we’re already fifteen minutes in and I’ve a couple of things…

NG: Go for it.

PÓM: How was China? What were you doing in China?

NG: Researching a book. I decided it was time to, I really decided it was time to step outside my comfort zone, and it’s been twenty years since I did a non-fiction book, and the last non-fiction book I did was, um…

PÓM: Was that Ghastly Beyond Belief?

NG: Don’t Panic, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book.

Then I thought, I want to do a non-fiction book, so I’m doing a non-fiction book about me going to China, and about Monkey, and about Buddhism, and about seventh century history and sixteenth century literature, and just, mostly it was that thing where nobody is waiting for it, and nobody particularly wants a book by me about China, and it seemed like a really good reason to write one.

(the cover artwork to Batman #686, written by Neil Gaiman, art by Andy Kubert, (c) DC Comics, published February 2009)

PÓM: Mind you I see that you are – having started off as far as I can see as a comics’ writer and then becoming a novelist you’ve kind of gone back to being a comics’ writer. You’re doing a Batman story for DC, and are you meant to be writing the prequel, the Sandman prequel story? I know you said something about doing that before.

NG: I don’t know if that will ever happen. Maybe. It’s weird, because I talk to people who will tell me with a straight face that I stopped writing comics in 1996, and I say, “OK, let’s go to this century. Since 2001, I’d written two adult novels, or had published, two adult novels – Anansi Boys and American Gods; two children’s novels – Coraline and The Graveyard Book; two major children’s picture books…”

PÓM: That’d be, what? Wolves in the Walls and…

NG: Wolves in the Walls and…

PÓM: The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish?

NG: No, actually that was 1998, so, let’s say the MirrorMask book. I’ve done two and a half movies – Beowulf and MirrorMask, and Stardust is my half. And I’ve done three graphic novel-length works – The Eternals, 1602, and Sandman: Endless Nights.

PÓM: That’s a fair body of work just for the past eight years, mind you.

NG: But it doesn’t seem to me that it’s substantially weighted against comics. In terms of page-count that’s three books, each of which was more or less novel length, and about the same the same amount of work it would have taken me to write a novel, and, you know, hearing people describe my career to me as if it was one of those weird little charts where you start off coming out of the ocean and then you become a monkey, and then, you know…

PÓM: I think people can only see you as what they see as the primary part of your output. You were a comics’ writer and maybe other things, and now you’re a novelist and maybe other things, and possibly that’s it, you know.

I was going to ask you, what did you make of Stardust the movie?

NG: I enjoyed it. It wasn’t the film that I would have made if I’d set out to make a Stardust movie, but I thought it was a lovely Stardust movie. I could quite happily watch a completely different Stardust movie, if that makes sense. It was very much a “this is a lovely Stardust movie.” I guess I felt about it, it’s weird, because I suppose – with Coraline in May, over here, you’ll get the Henry Sellick Coraline movie which, from what I’ve seen of it so far, I’ve very much enjoyed. In May on Broadway you’ll see the first performances of the Stephin Merritt Coraline which in terms of plot hews, as far as I can tell, exactly to the book, but he’s doing some weird and wonderful things, including casting a fifty year old lady as Coraline, and casting a man as the other mother, and stuff, and I don’t see either of those as being, “This is now Coraline legitimised, this is what this is,” I see them both as versions, with every bit as much legitimacy as the Irish Puppet Theatre version.

PÓM: I know you weren’t happy with Neverwhere, the TV series…?

NG: I wasn’t.

PÓM: Are they remaking Neverwhere?

NG: There’s a film that’s meant to be made. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, I remade Neverwhere when I wrote the novel. The whole point of the novel was, “No, this is what I meant.”

PÓM: Certainly the novel was far more satisfactory. The TV series wasn’t bad, but it was of its time…

NG: It wasn’t just of its time. Honestly, they could have, its time, it was of its time in the world in which it was up against X-Files. It was of its time in a world in which I am saying, “We need to be forty five minutes long, it need to be shot on film or it’ll look like crap,” and they’re going [adopts posh BBC accent], “my dear boy, we’re the BBC, we’ve been doing things like this for years. It’s like Doctor Who, and that’d twenty eight minutes long and shot on video. That’s what people love. And by the way, in order to accommodate that we’ve thrown out half your script…” You know it was, I wasn’t happy with it, I felt like it had the wrong director, and it was, it needed somebody who was going to say, “It need to be forty five minutes long…” I loved the fact that when Doctor Who came back it was forty five minutes long and shot on film, or looked like it.

PÓM: Are you… there are persistent rumours that you are going to write a Doctor Who story?

NG: There definitely are.

PÓM: And is there any truth to those?

NG: Well, there’s truth in the fact that there are rumours.

PÓM: Well, that would be a good thing. You know that David Tennant has just announced he’s stepping down at the end of next year?

NG: So I heard. I actually, I was rather sad, ‘cause I’d emailed, we were trying to figure out who was going to host my Halloween event for tomorrow, and about a week ago I had this brilliant idea, and I emailed Paterson Joseph and said, “Why don’t you host my event, ‘cause that will drive people mad, ‘cause there’s Doctor Who rumours about you and there’s Doctor Who rumours about me, and if you host the event, nobody in the world, and then, we don’t have to mention anything, but nobody in the world will think, they will feel there has to be something…” and I got a think back from Pat saying he would love to but he’s actually right now in Africa filming for the BBC on something.

I mean, he is thrilled by the Doctor Who rumours, but I think mostly thrilled because it’s suddenly taken him from an actor who nobody really quite knew who he was, you’d have to say, “Well, he was the guy in the Numberwang sketch, or he was the guy from Peepshow, or he was…” to people going, “Yes, Paterson Joseph, he could be the next Doctor Who,” and so it’s done amazing things for him.

PÓM: Doctor Who does seem to turn people into just enormous superstars.

I have to ask you the obligatory Miracleman question. At what stage is Miracleman at?

NG: Currently Todd McFarlane is suing me, claiming he owns all of Miracleman, and I am going, “You are mad, because as far as I can tell right now, neither of us owns anything of Miracleman, it is actually still owned completely by Mick Anglo, who is still alive, and who has asserted his copyright on it, and everything that Dez Skinn said back in Warrior days was apparently a lie, and this thing is Mick’s, so I don’t really see why, why are you suing me now, Todd?”

(Miracleman #23: Silver Age by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham, published Eclipse and (c)… Well, just have a look at what Neil says!)

PÓM: I can’t help thinking that Todd should just do the right thing and say, throw his hands up and say, no matter what happens, he will never come out the good guy on this one, and just walk away.

NG: Yes. I don’t know why, it’s like, it’s all mad.

PÓM: The thing is, I think I’m doing a panel at Eastercon next year called Who Owns Miracleman? which is obviously what all this stuff is [pointing to a file folder on the table marked Miracleman] and I’m going to write an accompanying article that I’ve been promising to write for at least five years, and every time I look into it, it gets a little more complex.

NG: Well…

PÓM: It’s very complex unless you go all the way back and say, “Mick Anglo owned it, and kept the rights to it.”

NG: Yeah, and what was interesting is, there was a trail of lies spread chiefly, as far as I can tell – whether intentionally or unintentionally – by Dez Skinn.

PÓM: Thank you for that, for saying, “intentionally or unintentionally”!

NG: No, I think Dez made some assumptions about the law, I think there were thing that he definitely told people at the time, and that history has proved to be untrue. The biggest one was simply that he’d obtained, you know, there was a version of events in which he had obtained the rights from the official receiver. Then we discovered that Miller & Son was never, it never went bankrupt, it had simply been would up.

PÓM: The L. Miller properties had been sold to Alan Class, as far as I know, was one of the things I had heard said.

NG: No. There are many things that people have said. No, from everything that I can tell, it simply went into voluntary liquidation. It was wound up, and Mick owned Miracleman slash Marvelman before, during, and after. He held the copyrights on it. L. Miller and Son never made any claims to owning it or to having sold it.

PÓM: OK. I was always wondering that, even given that Mick Anglo created Marvelman, Marvelman was obviously, and was meant to be, almost an exact copy of Captain Marvel, who was of course a copy of Superman…

NG: Ah, now there it gets, you know, the trouble is, you have this weird magic world in which it is a can of infinite worms, and every time you reach further in there are more worms come out.

PÓM: Undoubtedly, yeah. Anyway, I’d better move on, or we’ll never get any further.

I have to say, I loved the dragon in, was it in Anansi Boys that there was a dragon who speaks just like Leslie Phillips?

NG: He does! Thank you for noticing.

PÓM: I just loved that, and I felt that he should have a book all to himself because that was absolutely super.

NG: [Laughs]

PÓM: And there’s a big man looming over us…

NG: [To Cormac, who is running his diary for the day] You need me? I haven’t even finished my tea, and you need me. What’s next?

Cormac: The filming.

NG: OK

PÓM: Two things: one question, and a photograph.

NG: And something to scribble on, or…

PÓM: I have a few things to scribble on, if that’s OK.

[Pádraig produces a camera and two books for Neil to sign, which Neil then signs, while Cormac takes photographs of the two of them.]

(Neil signing some books for Pádraig; Neil being Neil I suspect he’s having a look at the book and what edition it is. Pic borrowed from Pádraig’s Flickr stream)

Why red balloons? Red balloons come up in your stories all the time.

NG: Well, I was probably bitten by…

PÓM: A radioactive red balloon in your youth?

NG: No! I was going to say PL Travers, in my youth, that amazing story in Mary Poppins where everybody floats in the park on balloons. It’s definitely iconic, in its way, and that would be, if I had to point at anything, that would probably be where the balloons come from.

PÓM: Thank you very much, that’s great. And your public awaits.

NG: They do.

PÓM: Is there any possibility, in the next umpteen years, that we could do a long email interview, or is that just taking too much of your time?

NG: I was saying earlier, every interview seems to end with somebody saying, “Can I send you a few more questions in email?” Several times they started sending me things that are basically new interviews in email, and I hate doing email interviews, only because there’s this point where I’ve sat there and typed for two hours, producing replies, and I think, at least if I was being interviewed, I’d be having a conversation.

PÓM: OK. Let me turn this thing off…

I turned off the recorder, and Neil was led away to his next appointment, cup of tea still unfinished. Exactly thirty minutes and thirty six seconds was what I got, from beginning to end, and I couldn’t help feeling that I could easily have spoken to him for another thirty minutes. He did promise we’d get to do something the next time he was in Dublin, hopefully a longer interview, which I look forward to. Looking at my list of question topics, I saw I hadn’t got to talk to him about the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund, which I know is close to his heart, and which I’d meant to get to, partly because we’d touched on it before the interview proper started, in relation to CE Murphy’s Take a Chance, the first issue’s profits of which are going to the CBLDF, and which he’d seen preview pages of.

I did get to ask Neil one more question that day, however. After his reading at Eason’s bookshop in Dublin he asked for questions, and I stuck my hand in the air and asked, “What’s next?” He told us about Blueberry Girl, a poem he wrote for Tori Amos’s daughter Tash in 2000, which is being drawn by Charles Vess, and which is due out in March 2009, and he held forth at great and comic length about the China book, which is due out god known when. I’ve always felt that Neil would have a good chance at an alternate career as a stand-up comedian. He’s certainly got the comic timing.

FPI would like to thank Neil Gaiman very much for sacrificing his lunch break and risking indigestion to take part in this interview and thanks to Pádraig for conducting it and writing it all up for us to share with you. The Graveyard Book is out now from Bloomsbury and the fourth and final (and rather beautiful looking) volume of the Absolute Sandman has also been published recently; you can keep up with Neil, his writing, appearances and occasional semi-demonic Salsa making by visiting his very fine online journal.