MB: How did you come up with the idea for The Thrill Electric?

Leah: It was actually one of those mythic “sit bolt upright in bed and have to write it all down” moments, which, to be honest, I’ve never had before and didn’t really believe in either. I’d been looking at an amazing website about the telegraph and must have read almost all of it in one day. I found it fascinating that way back in the 1800s people had a form of instant messaging. That small fact kind of changed the whole way I’d thought about the whole of the Nineteenth Century! I’d previously thought of them all as very ponderous old men, sitting in their gloomy studies growing huge sideburns and being philanthropic.

If you introduce what was effectively a Victorian Internet into that idea then they become much more recognisably modern, feeling people. The other thing that really struck me was the fact that it was a really big breakthrough industry for women getting into the workplace. It was a clean respectable, white-collar job that young girls and women could get into and rise through the ranks of. I couldn’t stop thinking about this really modern story, of a girl starting her new job at the telegraph office. It just seemed so cool to me.

MB: How did it come to be placed with Channel 4?

John: We got an email out of the blue from Andrew Mettam at Hat Trick Productions saying he liked our work and that he’d like to meet up and discuss the possibility of us working with them on something to pitch to Channel 4 Education. We knocked a few rough ideas together to show him the kind of thing we thought would be interesting and educational for 14 to 19 year-olds, and The Thrill Electric was one of them. Andrew really liked what we’d come up with and was keen for us to push things forward. Within weeks we were down in London meeting with Hat Trick and pitching our ideas with them to Channel 4. The Thrill Electric was the one that everyone seemed to really love. Within a couple of months of Andrew contacting us we had an agent and had signed the contract to write the series. It’s all very exciting.

MB: I’ve been describing The Thrill Electric to myself as a ‘motion comic’, but it’s not is it? It’s an enhanced digital comic. But what’s the difference?

John: Up to this point in time, motion comics have largely been stories that have already been printed in the normal format and then later been digitised and enhanced to add something a bit extra. This has resulted in some of them basically turning into sub-par animations, complete with dodgy voice acting.

Because we’ve written The Thrill Electric specifically as an enhanced digital comic, we’ve been able to stick to what we see as the fundamentals of comic-book storytelling – pages, panels, word balloons, captions – and add extra layers.  So, we have things like sound-loops for each panel that set the scene and provide a bit of ambience; we have panels stacking up one in front of another to form corridors, or becoming the walls of a 3D space; we have clickable icons serving the same function as old-fashioned thought balloons, allowing you to see what a character is thinking.

We’re not trying to hide the fact that it’s a comic by adding a load of bells and whistles. We’re trying to make it everything a print comic is and more. Even though the reader for The Thrill Electric was purpose-built for the project by LittleLoud, we’ve ended up pushing it to the limits of what it’s capable of, which can only be a good thing.

MB: Why did you go for that approach, rather than a ‘straight’ comic or animation?

Leah: I think it’s appropriate for Thrill to be like that, because, like the protagonist, it’s embracing the surge in technology. We wanted Thrill to be available to its audience in an accessible form, so they can read it on their phones, their tablet PCs or Ipads. You often get existing comics sold as digital copies, or motion comics where they have been adapted into semi-animated comics with a voiceover. Obviously that has a place in the industry but we didn’t want to do that.

The Thrill Electric is essentially a 150-page graphic novel written specifically for the digital online format, which I’m not sure anyone else has done before. We wanted to do all the things you definitely can’t do in print, but that you see all the time in online content, soundtracks, music, movement etc. It has been a challenge to make all of that work and make it fit with the story, but I am really pleased with the result. I think it’s a really fun story and hopefully the format will be something new for people. A new way to enjoy comics.

MB: What is Emma Vieceli’s role in The Thrill Electric and how did she come on board?

Leah: We’ve known Emma for ages and loved her work, so when we were asked who we might like to draw The Thrill Electric, she was one of our very first suggestions. Unluckily for us, she was much too busy to draw and colour 150 pages of comic all of a sudden. Luckily for comic fans, this was because she was already drawing the Vampire Academy graphic novel adaptations, which, I believe, recently made the New York Times best-sellers list! Despite being so incredibly busy, Emma kindly offered to design the characters and the whole feel of the story, and then put us in touch with Windflower Studio who would go on to draw the comic in Emma’s beautiful style. The whole thing couldn’t have worked better really. Our only worry is that Emma will be in such demand now we’ll not get a look in! We’ll have to snag her on something else soon!

MB: Please tell us about Windflower Studio and their involvement.

John: All-female UK-based comic book collective, Windflower Studio has turned out to be a perfect fit for the project. They’re all incredibly talented and have properly slogged their guts out on the series. To get The Thrill Electric ‘look’, the foreground, midground and background of each panel had to be drawn separately, so you can imagine how much work went into every single page. I just hope we haven’t put them off doing more comics work, not least because I’d love to see more from them in the future.

MB: Even though it’s set in the Victorian era, the Thrill Electric is actually quite contemporaneous in terms of its subject and themes. Would you agree with that statement and to what extent, and in what way? (Cor, that one’s a bit like an essay question. Soz.)

Leah: Whoo. Okay. Loving your use of the word contemporaneous by the way! Yes, it’s dealing with young people going into the workplace for the first time and how daunting that can be. It’s about what an online network like the Internet, or the Telegraph actually means for people in their everyday lives. Gossip spreading faster than people could imagine, online bullying, sexting, spam and scam artists, online gaming and Skype-type intercontinental communications.

It’s about being in a world where you can hear the voices of so many other people and more importantly, they can all hear you too. It’s about a group of young people suddenly finding themselves at the very cutting edge of technology, and almost becoming a species of their own, with their own language, their own slang, their online buddies, their Siemens telegraph key. I’d say in a way it’s one of the most modern things we’ve ever written, even though it’s set in the 1870’s.

MB: Finally, what haven’t I asked about the Thrill Electric (or the creators involved) that I should have?

John: The fact that it’s set in Manchester is a pretty big deal and quite important. When we were still at the pitching stage we were thinking of setting it in London, which would have made things very different. Manchester was the first truly industrialised city on the planet and was viewed by the rest of the world as a kind of metropolis of the future. The cotton industry was incredibly important, of course, but there was just so much industry – so many inventions and innovations that were changing the world all coming out of this place that had been little more than a small market town mere decades before. Victorian Manchester is about as steampunk as it gets.

MB: Leah and John, thanks for your time.

Leah Moore and John Reppion are the critically acclaimed writing team behind such works as The Trial of Sherlock Holmes, Albion, Raise the Dead and Wild Girl. Their website can be found here, while the Thrill Electric is online here.

Windflower Studio is a UK-based, all-female comic book studio. For more on Windflower Studio, check their website.

Emma Vieceli is the acclaimed writer/artist behind many works including Marvel Girl Comics and Dragon Heir: Reborn. For details of Vieceli and her work, have a look at Em’s site.

Matt Badham has written articles for the Big Issue in the North, Comic Heroes and the Judge Dredd Megazine. He’s also had three of his comic scripts realised, in 2000 AD, Commando Picture Library and Zarjaz. He can be contacted via mattbadham (at) hotmail (dot) com. He doesn’t have a blog or website because… well, he’s doesn’t do enough interesting stuff to justify having a blog or website. (Last night he painted the bathroom door. Tonight he’s going to give it another coat… or two.)

(some gorgeous promotional art for John’s Mercy Heights in 2000 AD, art by the excellent Kev Walker)

Matt: How did you first get into the comics biz?

John: I was a graphic design student, and in the second year of my B.A. course at Leicester Poly. I wrote to IPC, DC Thomson and Marvel asking for work experience. Marvel was first to respond, although I expect to hear from IPC and DC Thompson any day now. I’d always wanted to draw comics; writing never occurred to me as an option. All my illustration work was done with a pointy little Rotring pen and I used to think I was pretty good – but the first actual page of professional comic art I saw was a revelation. For one thing it was huge – twice the size it appeared in print, and rendered in beautiful brushwork. The first pages I saw were from Steve Dillon’s Abslom Daak (the famous ‘Dalek Killer’ – Joe) strip for Doctor Who Magazine and, though he was maybe 17 years old at the time, he was already drawing like a seasoned pro. I couldn’t believe how good it was.

Matt: How much pressure came with editing an iconic comic like 2000 AD?

John: The main source of stress on a 32-page, full colour, fully-originated weekly comic is deadlines. I was incredibly lucky when I edited 2000 AD in that the freelancers tended to turn things in on time; writers and artists are free-spirited, sometimes flaky creatures and to corral them into the rigid confines of a weekly schedule can be akin to herding cats. Very rarely someone (more often an artist than a writer, though there’s no hard and fast rule) would go AWOL, but there was invariably another available to fill in and we never went late on sale. Now and then we’d have to break a series and drop in a Future Shock to allow the artist time to catch up, but the readers rarely complained.

(cover art for 2000 AD Prog 1133, with  Tor Cyan by Greg Staples, introducing part 1 of  John Tomlinson’s Mercy Heights)

Matt: What makes a quintessential 2000 AD strip (if indeed there is such a thing)?

John: The mere fact that I’ve been asked this question, let alone attempted to answer it, might suggest that I regard myself as some kind of authority on the subject. I don’t – and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claimed to be. Despite having written a bunch of strips for 2000 AD over the years and edited a lot more in my time as Tharg, I’m still just guessing around. Maybe it’s because the audience has seen it all before. Or maybe there IS no quintessential 2000 AD strip – after all, if a writer or editor ever discovered the formula and tried to impose it on the writers every strip would be the same, and that wouldn’t work.

Obviously it helps if it’s set in the future, though that’s not compulsory. Ostensibly a science fiction mag, 2000 AD has always been a pretty broad church, incorporating fantasy, horror and (in my case, anyway) kitchen sink drama. Albeit the kind of sink that has sentient, inimical growths lurking in it. One strip I wrote was directly inspired by the seething Petri dish of Dickensian squalor that I remember only too well from my first shared flat. The sundered MFI kitchen units, the drunken 3AM grill fires and the slugs. Oh god, the slugs. Memories are made of this, and of substances still a mystery to forensic science. There were four of us in there, and we very soon began to disavow responsibility for the washing up. Towering mesas of it piled up and up, and started to smell. We would carry it to the end of the garden to alleviate the stench rather than actually clean the bloody stuff. And from that came a story about a stack of possessed washing up that needed exorcism.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I’ve always thought that the most effective 2000 AD strips are those that leave the reader feeling afraid, appalled and slightly ill. It’s a tricky formula to pull off, but when it works it’s instantly identifiable. It was there in the early series of Flesh, in John Smith’s work, in the best Dredd stories and it’s there in abundance in Al Ewing and Henry Flint’s Zombo. There may not be an archetypal 2000 AD strip, but Zombo comes pretty close in my opinion. And if there’s a quintessential 2000 AD writer/artist team, those two are it.

Matt: Why are Al Ewing and Henry Flint the ‘quintessential 2000 AD team’?

John: It just seems to me that their work typifies all that’s baddest and best about 2000 AD. I’ve never met Al Ewing, but I’d be willing to bet he grew up reading it, and his writing, particularly Zombo, captures its pitch black essence just right. Same goes for Henry Flint, who I brought to Richard Burton and Alan McKenzie’s attention after he drew a couple of my strips (Of Ill Omen and Kicking The Monolithic Habit) for Monster Massacre, published by the gone but not forgotten Tundra. They fell upon him like hunger-maddened lampreys, nabbing him to draw Rogue Trooper, and he’s rarely been out of 2000 AD since. His work is often, and justly, compared to Mike McMahon and Cam Kennedy, two of the very best artists in 2000 AD history. When he draws Dredd there are elements of Ezquerra too, but his style has its own unique identity, particularly in strips like Zombo and Shakara, and it’s all 2000 AD.

(above and below, some wonderful Rogue Trooper pages from John’s script, illustrated by the great Dave Gibbons, (c) Rebellion)

Matt: How did you ‘learn’ to write comics? By reading comics, by just sitting down and getting on with it? By editing them? All three?

John: By reading them, for sure. But like milk that takes the flavour of whatever it’s next to in the fridge, there were plenty of other influences.

The biggest influence in terms of comics storytelling was undoubtedly David Lloyd, who I was lucky enough to interview for my college thesis. V For Vendetta was running in Warrior at the time and, though it seems incredible to me now, I’d never really considered the importance of storytelling in comics until that strip. The best comics, and Vendetta is pretty much a paradigm in that respect, are those in which it’s possible to follow the story without the benefit of captions or dialogue, like a movie storyboard. I remember him saying ‘forget Dallas and Dynasty – watch Citizen Kane!’ I never saw any scripts and therefore couldn’t say how much influence Alan Moore had on the storytelling aspect, but David Lloyd also said that V was a total collaboration and I have no reason to doubt him.

Again though, all the above rather gives the impression that I regard myself as some kind of bleedin’ expert. The inescapable fact is that I’m still learning how to write comics, and I’m not even halfway there yet. A few years ago the Danish artist Peter Snejbjerg, with whom I’d worked on a horror series (The Lords of Misrule, co-written with Dan Abnett and Steve White.), asked me to dialogue a graphic novel he’d written and drawn (Marlene), about a shape-shifting succubus. His approach to the visual storytelling was so original, so fluid, so utterly different from The Lords of Misrule that I suddenly realised I didn’t know a damn thing. I was inspired rather than depressed by this realisation however.

(cover to Marlene by and (c) Peter Snejbjerg)

Matt: What was that approach?

John: To me it’s like the difference between a three chord pop song and a symphony orchestra. One thing that impressed me was the way he uses the panel count of a page to vary the pace of the story. In writing a six-page 2000 AD strip I stick to a pretty rigid template; between five and six panels a page, with an occasional three or four-panel page for the intro, or if there are any shocking or spectacular scenes I need to spring on the reader. It varies, but not by much.

In Marlene, by cutting between progressively smaller, tighter panels Peter creates the impression of increasing speed and mounting tension, a technique I’d never seen before. The way he uses body language to establish a character is also innovative, and perhaps more likely to occur to an artist than a writer. The hero of Marlene is a cop, Michael Joergensen. As the story opens he’s a somewhat stiff, repressed figure. Peter conveys this in a fight scene in which he barely moves; ducking slightly or stepping aside, his upright pose and expression barely changing as three desperate hoods effectively beat themselves up in their clumsy attempts to lay a finger (or shovel) on him. From that scene also comes a particular favourite sound effect, which I’ve pinched and used elsewhere since, as someone is clobbered with the aforementioned shovel: BLONG! Love it.

Incidentally, the first two pages of Marlene, introducing three key characters and ending in a gruesome murder, are played out entirely in tightly paced images and sound effects and are all the more effective for it.

(above and bellow, scenes from Marlene by and (c) Peter Snejbjerg)

The story is set in two main locations. The city scenes are dark and cramped, huddled in shadow. When the narrative moves to the country the panels become larger, more open, with less use of blacks, creating the impression of wide open spaces and bright sunlight. Subtle techniques, but highly effective. For my money Peter is also the equal of David Lloyd in his ability to tell a story without captions or dialogue. Editors (and I’ve been guilty of this myself) are infamously wanton vandals when it comes to ‘empty’ pages. If a page of strip has no captions or dialogue they really can’t bear it, and start whacking them in willy-nilly.

If a page is particularly wordy they get a glassy stare and the hacking and slashing begins. Perhaps because Peter was his own editor on Marlene there’s none of this; silent pages remain silent, wordy pages are allowed to stand, and the story as a whole is richer for it. Although I dialogued Marlene based on Peter’s translation, I could see how well this approach worked and was happy to leave it alone.

I hesitate to say this, because it wrests a lot of control from the writer – writers are notorious control freaks and I’m no exception – but I’ve come to believe that the best method for writers and artists to collaborate is ‘Marvel style’ (pioneered in the 60s by Stan Lee, who was presumably too busy to write full scripts). In essence, the writer supplies a detailed synopsis of the story, containing all essential plot points and relevant details. This goes to the artist, who breaks it down into visual storytelling; pages of comic art. The strip is then returned to the writer who adds captions, dialogue and sound effects. The inescapable fact (though by no means a rule of thumb) is that the average comics artist knows a lot more about how to tell a story in pictures than the average comics writer.

I worked this way recently on a script written for Marvel veteran Herb Trimpe, an artist famed for his cinematic storytelling, who coincidentally drew the first Marvel comic I ever read (Incredible Hulk issue #117). It was great fun and turned out well, though he did say that my plot was way too detailed: ‘Usually we only got a few lines!’ As Stan might say, they fight Doc Doom this month.

(a page from Mercy Heights series 2 in 2000AD by John Tomlinson, art by  Trevor Hairsine, colouring by Chris Blythe)

Matt: You’ve (fairly) recently returned to writing Dredd for 2000 AD after a break of some years. How do you write a Dredd? Both how do you and how does one write a Dredd?

John: Another thing I’m still trying to figure out. Judge Dredd has changed and evolved quite a bit in its long history, the jokier, action-based strips giving way to more layered, political stories. This has much to do with the evolution of John Wagner’s writing, since he’s still the main Dredd writer and therefore sets the tone. He certainly didn’t need any guidance from me when I edited 2000 AD. As a strip Judge Dredd appears to have grown up – however, though I love the current approach I still kind of miss the old school stories. So I tried to hark back to them in the few I’ve written recently.

Like most good SF, Judge Dredd isn’t really about the future. It’s a grim satire about today, current social, political and scientific trends extrapolated to terrible extremes. And it’s not easy to do – particularly as the present day becomes increasingly difficult to satirise, and London in particular seems more like the Big Meg with every passing year.

Matt: Why is Stan Lee one of your heroes?

John: Where do you start? Just check out every other movie blockbuster of the past decade. But long before any of those movies there was Stan the Man, Jack ‘King’ Kirby and the Mighty Marvel Bullpen. Pushing 90, he’s still a tireless showman and huckster for comics, fizzing with energy and enthusiasm. He’s taken a kicking over the years for supposedly grabbing glory due to Kirby and Ditko, but for anyone who’s read the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Thor et al, Stan’s writing style is instantly identifiable, clear and distinctive as a watermark. He may indeed have called Jack once a month to say ‘they fight Doc Doom this issue’ rather than write full scripts, but it was the synthesis of their talents that made the FF great. Jack created a galaxy of characters, but Stan made you care about them and laugh at their jokes.

A total eccentric too… All that cod-Shakespearian, quasi-biblical, Omar Khayam stuff: ‘Verily true believer, tamam shud!’ and so on. My favourite Marvel cover line of all time has to be ‘WHAT PROFITETH IT A MAN TO FLEE HIS FATE? FOR HE SHALL SURELY FIND… WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS!’ I’ve no idea if Stan actually wrote that, but it certainly wouldn’t have happened without him. You couldn’t get away with any of that nonsense at Marvel now, and more’s the pity. I hope he lives forever. The only tragedy is that Jack didn’t live to enjoy the spoils too.

FPI would like to thank John and Matt for taking the time to share their thoughts with us.

The interview is cross posted here and at Down The Tubes and the original is on Matt’s blog.

Okay, over to Matt:

West, by Andrew Cheverton and Tim Keable, is one of my favourite indie comics. It’s the story of Jerusalem West, a conflicted anti-hero with a chequered and incident-filled past. West is smart, sophisticated storytelling that both subverts and embraces Western tropes.

And I’m not the only one who likes it…

The Forbidden Planet International blog reckon that ‘… with this Morricone, Leone, Eastwood-inspired Western tale, Cheverton and Keable have delivered the goods.’ Meanwhile, Comics – on the Ration has called it ‘ …very well-written and well researched…’

I decided to chat with Andrew and Tim about West and the following interview was the result:

(Above: An atmospheric panel from West: Stray Bullets. Art by Tim Keable.)

Please tell me how West first came about?

Andrew: Towards the end of 1993, I had packed in my job to look after our newborn son and started working Saturdays in the local comic shop to keep my sanity. Tim was one of the customers pointed out by the manager as ‘a good sort’. We began to discuss comics, movies, books and television shows, and have never really stopped. Our tastes are quite consistent with each other, and whenever we do disagree we have the best debates and arguments.

During this time, I had become quite prolific on the old Comics International email group. I was later selected by moderator Phil Hall (based, I assumed, on my sarcastic and profane comic reviews on that group) to write for his online comics PDF magazine, Borderline. Initially, I did an opinion column called The Blank Page, though I later branched out to reviews and even a few interviews (culminating in a Grendel feature/interview with Matt Wagner, who was my idol at the time). Through Borderline I met such people as Jay Eales and Selina Lock, and was exposed to the British small press scene. Tim and I went up to a Caption event one year (2004, maybe? Whichever was the last one held in the Oxford Students’ Union bar) and were so enthused we began, separately, to get work published in The Girly Comic.

After having been friends for about a decade at this point, one day I asked Tim if we should probably work together on a short comic strip.

His answer was, simply, “Okay. Something with cowboys or Romans.”

Tim: I’d like to add that the Caption event was definitely in 2003. Also, I seem to remember Andy saying to me that cowboys or Romans were definitely not his thing. Then, about a week later he called me up all enthused telling me he had an idea for a cowboy story!

Then he had another one…

And another….

(Above: It all kicks off in a story from West: Stray Bullets. Art by Paul Rainey.)

What experience have you guys got outside of small press comics? (Tim, didn’t you work on Doctor Who Magazine (DWM) under John Freeman?)

Tim: Yes, many years ago I did some one-off illustrations for DWM. I did these for John and for his successor, Gary Russell. Later I did some back cover CD illustrations for Big Finish’s Dalek Empire which led to one more illustration accompanying an article in DWM about these. That would’ve been in about 2003. I also illustrated Jim Mortimore’s Blood Heat. That was for Virgin’s Doctor Who [novels] range in the nineties.

Andrew: My experience, as far as writing goes, doesn’t really extend beyond the stuff I did for Borderline and the two or three short strips I did for Factor Fiction (I think that Believers – the first West strip, published inViolent! – was the third script I sent Jay and Selina). The debut issue of West, Justice, was the first time I ever wrote a full-length comic.

Had you both been ‘creative types’ since childhood? Always doodling or writing? Andrew, you draw as well as write don’t you? Tim, do you write?

Andrew: Actually, I can’t say that I was especially creative as a child, beyond the sort of thing all kids do. I had always drawn, copying characters from Marvel comics and, later, 2000 AD, but it was never for more than my own amusement, though I would always add an illustration to the interior of friends’ birthday cards. I barely scraped through O-Level art at school.

Writing short stories was something I experimented with in my teens, but that was just for fun too. I didn’t do it with a view to submitting to magazines. Back then it was all longhand and typewriters, and I had neither the patience nor the attention span.

If it hadn’t been for Borderline (and having a PC word processor to organise my chaotic thoughts into actual writing) I wouldn’t have been encouraged to write again, and wouldn’t have become aware of the opportunities of the small press and desktop publishing.

Of course, once I did start writing again, I had more stories than I had artists to draw them. So that was a matter of sitting down, looking hard at the comic artists I liked (Ted McKeever, Mick McMahon, Matt Wagner, Nabiel Kanan) and teaching myself how to draw all over again.

Tim: I’ve been drawing ever since I can remember. At school other kids would get me to draw things for them. Usually Spitfires and the like…

I don’t really write. It’s not something that comes naturally to me. Guns on a Cold Morning is about it, I’m afraid! That was a short West story that appears in Tall Tales, which was a collection of short stories we put out a couple of years ago.

I was messing about in my notebook and sketched an image of these guns poking out of a saloon window. Then I thought about who might be behind those guns. Then I thought it’d be fun if they were all lying in wait for West.

I didn’t really write it. I just drew it then did some dialogue afterwards.

It was an exercise in page design really. I’d been looking at some of Dave Sim’s crazy page layouts and I wanted to have a go at it.

Then Andy had me add one line and suddenly it fit in with the big West story line.

There’s been a lot of serendipity about West.

(Above: Art by the talented Emma Price from the West: Stray Bullets anthology.)

So, how did West start to cohere into an ongoing after that first strip?

Tim: Andy just kept coming up with new ideas. I think it’s best if he tells that one.

Andrew: Believers was, by publishing necessity (Violent! being an anthology title), only six pages long. I wanted it to be both a classic western, but also different. The last panel was the first thing that occurred to me: the gunfighter, his pistol emptied, facing off against a gang of men with only bluff and his reputation. Writing the five pages leading up to that was simple enough, in retrospect. [It was a] classic barroom shootout. I didn’t really give it any thought after it had been sent off to the editors.

But every once in a while Tim would ask me what happened next. I didn’t know. We leave West there in the street, his gun empty, facing down two hardened gunfighters armed to the teeth, with only bravado to save him. That’s the point of the story. Either the bad guys would draw and shoot him, or they’d both sheepishly wander off, their tails between their legs. Neither are good endings.

The only option – as I wanted to keep working with Tim – was to do a prequel. After a bit of brainstorming, I came up with what I thought was a simple Western ghost story. I checked with Tim that veering into fantasy territory was okay with him and started writing what became Justice. At some early point I may have naively thought I was writing another short strip that we’d send to Violent!, but it rapidly became clear that I was writing my first full-length comic.

As is usually the way with these things, the writing of one story lead to another, and a character for Jerusalem West began to form.

I read up on a bit of Wild West history and the thing that struck me was that there didn’t seem to be as many ‘bad guys’ and ‘good guys’ as the movies would have it. Outlaws would become lawmen and vice versa. Law-abiding men were easily driven to murder and men would travel, learning trades to survive. It seemed like one man could be, in a lifetime, many men to different people, depending on which stage of his life they’d known him.

As we’d already set the non-chronological template for West, I liked the idea of jumping around in time; it gave us the opportunity to tell many different types of story and to change West’s personality a little bit to suit. In some stories, like Population 489 and The Last Bounty, he’s proactive, with an agenda (even if it’s not entirely clear from just that story what his agenda might be). Some other tales, like Justice and High Moon, simply feature West while the story essentially unfolds around him.

And, as you say, ‘cohere’ is the right word. I have the whole story in my head (in fact, I have the final story already written), but it evolves in small ways all the time. High Moon, for instance, was a deliberate reaction to my noticing that the first two issues had West walk into a town, have an adventure and then leave. So I pointedly started High Moon mid-adventure, told a separate story in the middle, and then had West abandon it halfway. I figured if the audience we’d built up at that point would go for it – would quite happily read a comic with one and two half stories in – then we were probably on to something.

(Above: Jerusalem West, in trouble as always. Art by Andrew Cheverton from West: Stray Bullets.)

Have you guys been surprised (gratified?) by the positive critical reception West has received?

Tim: Absolutely! Even more important to me is the vibe I get from the punters who regularly buy the book. I mean, sometimes it can be a real struggle creating something like this while doing a full-time job as well. Enthusiasm is a strange viscous thing that grows and shrinks. Meeting the people who like what you do and keep coming back for more is very important as a driving force. That and the sheer vibe I get from reading one of Andy’s scripts for the first time. It makes it all worthwhile.

As for critical acclaim… I tend not to read our reviews. I get Andy to do it for me so I only get to hear about the good ones, lol!!

Andrew: Gratified, yes. It’s always good to see that your hard work is rewarded.

Surprised? If I’m honest, no. I don’t mean that to sound conceited. What I mean is, I think anyone who creates something knows when they’ve done well, and every issue we finish is, I think, good work. If I didn’t think my scripts were up to scratch, Tim wouldn’t get to see them. And I have no doubt that if Tim thought his art was substandard, I’d never see that. Every once in a while, Tim will pick out something in the script that doesn’t work well – as I will in the art – but these are rare instances. By the time each issue is finished, it’s the absolute best work we can do. I’m surprised, however, that so many people like it and like it as much as they do.

Having said that, I wasn’t at all sure at the beginning who our audience would possibly be; after all, embarking on a multi-issue, non-chronological Western series and randomly switching genres with almost every issue isn’t what you’d call a targeted plan. It’s pretty much all of the things you’re not supposed to do if you want to reach a market. But we’ve ended up with readers of all ages and both genders. I like to think that’s because we quickly steered away from using strong Deadwood-style profanity and portrayed strong female characters, on the few occasions women enter what is largely a male-dominated genre. As West is coming from the classic western background where his wife was killed, I think it’s important to balance that with other women who aren’t simply there to provide the men with vengeful motivation.

(Above: Jerusalem West under siege in a strip from West: Stray Bullets. Art by Warwick Johnson Cadwell.)

It suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t asked you chaps for the ‘Hollywood-style’ high concept that underpins West, which would be useful for those unfamiliar with the series…

Andrew: West is, at its heart (and as much as we can make it), self-contained stories set in the Wild West – but that layer each other the more [of them] you read. For the first six issues (what we’re now calling Volume One), it wasn’t obvious that the whole thing hangs together as a totality; that every issue contributes something to a larger story the reader can’t yet see. Volume Two (so far comprising the two parts of Distance) makes these connections far more apparent. Those two issues build up to one name written on a piece of paper, the name of a seemingly random bad guy from a previous issue. It was very satisfying to hear from people who read that and then went back and reread everything. That’s what I want: to let people make their own connections from the clues we drop and to occasionally surprise them with something they never saw coming.

Tim: Okay. How about ‘Classic Revenge Western meets Universal Horror taking in George Romero on the way’?

How’s that for a Hollywood high concept pitch?

Andrew, you mentioned that you’ve taught yourself to draw so you could illustrate your own comics. What fresh insights, if any, has that given you into the medium of comics? Also, do you think it’s helped your writing at all?

Andrew: For a start, I’ve stopped writing so many 12-panel pages for Tim to draw! He hates those and now I understand why.

When I write a script (and I even write myself a script for the stories I plan to draw), I like to keep beats and moments running through the pace and I’m fastidious about only switching scenes mid-page if it’s part of the plot. So I have a scene of West and I’m often left with the choice: is this scene worth two pages of steady action, or can I fit everything into one page? If it’s three or four pages, where are the breaks, the mini-cliffhangers and moments of action or dialogue that I can end a page with to keep the reader turning the page? As soon as I isolate those moments, I have the pace of a scene and that’s something that I thought I knew as a writer, but I have a more solid sense of it now that I draw. As soon as I start edging over six panels [on a page], I start to fret about it. I write West full script and I like to write dialogue, so the tendency to fill the page is always there. Six panels is about our comfortable limit (though I tend towards five or seven, to keep Tim from using a standard 2×3 panel grid!), unless we’re opting for multiple small panels or splash pages for effect, such as we used in Distance.

For my own comics, I love tiny panels. I hate drawing big. It’s something I’ll need to learn, but my preference is small panels of close-up faces: intimate character-based comics. I’m lucky enough to get people asking me to draw their scripts. It’s a learning curve but I like to be challenged, otherwise I won’t get any better. But once these next couple of scripts for other people are done, I’m settling down to draw a couple of projects I want to write for myself.

(Above: It’s not all about Wild West shoot-outs. A romantic scene from a West: Stray Bullets story. Art by Jenika Ioffreda.)

Tim, have you got anything you want to say on that subject?

Tim: Only that I think Andy’s scripts are more visual now. I should qualify that: they were always visual but there was plenty of dialogue too. In fact when we came to publish the collection, Andy told me he was struck by how verbose the older stories seemed to be compared with what he does now. These days he’s much more confident using an image to tell the story.

I also happen to think he has a very beautiful art style and he’s much more confident about placing blacks than I am!

Please tell me about the the various West comics that are coming out in 2011, plus any other projects that are ongoing for you, either as individuals or as a team?

Tim: As far as 2011′s comics go I’ll leave that to Andy.

I don’t really have time for any other projects although I try to do one-off paintings when I can and I’m always happy to take commissions.

Andrew: The current issue of West is Stray Bullets, which is a bumper-sized special (32 pages!), crammed full of short stories drawn by guest artists. As well as having art by Tim and me, we also have Paul Rainey, Warwick Johnson Cadwell, Emma Price and Jenika Ioffreda. It started out as a way to give Tim time to get ahead of his schedule, not only so that he isn’t facing publishing deadlines all the time, but also to get him into a comfortable position to start work on our own bumper-sized West issue coming up soon – that one’s called Points West. In between both of these issues, though, we have Confederate Dead, which is the script Tim’s drawing now.

For myself, I’ve recently drawn a script Rol Hirst wrote called Face For Radio, a one-pager for Simon M’s The Sorry Entertainer, a newspaper comics anthology, and I’m writing and drawing a one-off comic called Pictures Made Of Light. Also, I’m writing a script for an AccentUK book, but I don’t think they’ve announced that yet!

After that, both Tim and I are drawing some very short strips for a new Rol Hirst series, and I’m working with Chris Doherty (creator of the excellent Video Nasties) on a miniseries called The Whale House, which will be an off-kilter family drama, partially inspired by two types of movies – the American ‘awkward Thanksgiving get-together’ movie and the British ‘Old Dark House’ movie. I’m writing and Chris is drawing, but we’re thrashing out the details and the characters at the moment.

(Above: Andrew takes time out from West to illustrate Rol Hirst’s Face for Radio.)

Where do you hope to be in five years, with West and as creators?

Tim: In five years I hope West will be reaching a much bigger audience. Also I’d like to be able to spend more time on my drawing and less time in wage slavery!

Andrew: Last year was personally quite stressful and busy for me. I managed to keep on top of our commitments to West – we finished both the issues we planned, and we finally had the collection published – but I wasn’t in any real frame of mind for much else. We’d like to persevere with getting West: Justice into some comic shops and submitted to distributors. We actually took the book into a couple of small press-friendly London comic stores and were pretty much rebuffed out of hand. That was a knock-back, considering the reviews and feedback we’ve had on it as a professional-looking package. But, as with anything, I guess it’s just a matter of plugging away at it. I have faith that it’s a good story, well told. We’ll get it finished one way or the other.

Thanks to Andrew and Tim for taking time to talk to me. For more on West, visit http://www.angrycandy.co.uk/

- And thanks to Matt for giving us the chance to share it with you. Like he said right at the beginning, we’re big fans of West here at the FPI Blog. Stray Bullets certainly looks a very nice continuation of the saga – you can buy your copy at the Angry Candy store here. West: Stray Bullets is written by Andrew Cheverton and illustrated by Jenika Ioffreda, Emma Price, Warwick Johnson Cadwell, Paul Rainey, Tim Keable, and Andrew Cheverton.

Matt: We’d all like to see Third World War reprinted, but who should we pester? Did Rebellion get the rights when they bought 2000 AD, as Crisis was a “sister comic” and Finn later appeared in 2000 AD, or does Fleetway still have the rights?

Pat: Please pester everyone!  So pleased you would want to. Actually Egmont own the rights… They don’t have any interest in reprinting it (It’s not Donald Duck) and I doubt Titan would (It’s not heroes in long underwear) so I reckon we’re currently screwed.

That said… There’s no reason why 2000AD shouldn’t reprint Finn. I keep asking them. They don’t say no, but — it may be my imagination — they don’t seem to be that enthusiastic. Thing is… Finn was actually more popular than Sláine for a while.

(scenes from Third World War by Pat Mills and Carlos Ezquerra, still one of the classic Brit series many of us would like to see collected and reprinted, come on publishers!)

Matt: Can we have more Marshal Law? I need more cynical cape-bashing to cheer me up!

Pat: Me too. There are plans afoot, but everything seems to take forever in the world of comics.

Matt: What makes super heroes so odious to you? Is it a personal thing or issues about what they represent/purport to represent?

Pat: The issues. Superman, for instance, is a symbol of US military power. It is also a Biblical thing, which makes it odious to me. With Batman you have a billionaire beating up street criminals. I don’t find that attractive, although I admire Frank Miller’s work as a brilliant writer.

It’s something I explored in Marshal Law, notably Kingdom of the Blind.

Superheroes blind us to real heroes, e.g. ordinary soldiers in Charley’s War.  Battle readers saw that clearly which is why the story was so popular.
Matt: Any plans to work with Kevin O’Neill in the near future? Your partnership was one of the most creative in comics, resulting in original and stunning work and I would love to see more. As far as I know it has been quite a few years since you worked together.

Pat: Yeah, I miss working with Kevin, too. That´s why we did the Marshal Law text novel (Origins) but we should really do more together. We have another project, which ticks all the boxes, but setting it up right and finding the right home for it is quite problematic. We keep trying!

Matt: Do you ever get irritated by all the fan input? (Online comment etc…)

Pat: Not at all. There´s a very different and far more pleasant vibe now compared to ten years ago.

Matt: You spend hours writing all these scripts for our entertainment, and then here on this very board [NB: the 2000AD messageboard] people who have never had anything published themselves nitpick at them/ tear them apart/spew hatred, bile and venom over them. No wonder you have a reputation for having a temper! Yet when I met you at a signing last year you were the most patient and pleasant man I could have hoped to meet.

Pat: Once again, I think it’s going back ten years to a bit of a Dark Age in 2000AD history.

Matt: What made it a ‘Dark Age’?

Pat: There was a negative era about ten years ago or so on 2000AD which was unpleasant for many of us, including John Hicklenton, and I don’t believe it should be forgotten. It’s not about grudges, it’s about ensuring it’s not whitewashed out of comic history. After all, one of the individuals concerned writes comic history. Let me give you one example and there are many more like this.

It was the 2000AD millennium party. Against all my instincts (because of past negative experiences with the same people) I very reluctantly accepted the invite. As I started the comic it would have been churlish not to. I think I’m just going to have a social evening, being polite and friendly to people and vice versa. How wrong could I be!   [David] Bishop, [Andy] Diggle and some fan are there. There’s no friendly welcome. Instead, the fan immediately proceeds to launch into a passionate and detailed critique of some story error I’ve supposedly made on Nemesis, just finished.

Not having a clue what he’s talking about (hey – we’re here to celebrate. It’s not an editorial conference.) I mildly fight my corner. Diggle then reinforces the fan’s critique, lecturing me on some Nemesis plot point and goes into more exhaustive critical detail, as Bishop –the editor — looks on amused. It never occurred to him to perhaps suggest to his underling this might not be an appropriate time to discuss story plots. There’s no “Hey, it’s great we’re all here to celebrate 2000AD; let’s party.” It’s… How can we cut the guy who created 2000AD down?”

It was a very bad evening for me and as a result I haven’t gone to similar events for many years. Later, I ask some fans if they know what the Nemesis point is (as I still didn’t get it). They don’t either. I pass this onto Diggle who writes back with  “Okay, you asked for it! ” and sends me some readers’ letters covering the same ground. So some readers have one perspective, others another. Fair enough. Not a subject for a party. Nobody seems to have picked up on it since, so it’s hardly the end of the world. I have termed this deliberate and confrontational encouragement of fans — normally in letters but sometimes in person — ” creator baiting”.

Thankfully it’s long gone. Today’s editorial is very supportive of all of us and that makes a big difference, which I greatly appreciate. There was one rare example recently when some fan described Johnny [Hicklenton]‘s collaboration with Clint as “Ice cream over shit”. Johnny was upset. I was very angry on his behalf. It should never have been printed. That is verbal abuse, which would not be tolerated in any other walk of life. But that was an exception. Ten years back, aggressive and vicious letters  — as opposed to constructive criticism — were the norm. If people are looking back to that era this needs to be remembered.  Were the stories back then any better as a result of this hostility, or are they better now? I think most of us would say they’re better now and the fan press seems to agree. That’s why it’s important to remember that past era and what went on then.

(cover to Vampire Requiem Knight Volume 2 by Pat Mills and Ledroit, published Panini)

Matt: You write for the French market. What could British comics learn from the French industry?

Pat: Have more detailed backgrounds, longer stories. But also if a French book doesn’t sell in its opening weekend, it’s probably going to flop and be withdrawn.  So there is a lot of pressure to get everything right. To be a perfectionist. British comics can be ephemeral and some rough edges can be accepted.  Also the French books are selling on one character, so it has to be strong. Sometimes weaker stories in 2000AD are supported by stronger stories.

Equally, French comics can learn from Britain – notably by having more visually striking heroes, more action and our more perverse way of looking at life.

I wish we could do more stories like Charley´s War. The equivalent in France — by [Jacques] Tardi — is seen as quite normal.  Here, an anti-war story is unusual. Similarly, they have westerns, detective stories, historical, secret agent, cop stories… whereas we are mainly science fiction, which can be limiting.

Matt: Please tell our readers about Requiem, Vampire Knight.

Pat: An evil German soldier goes to Hell and reincarnates as a Vampire. The Vampires are the elite in Hell.  Hypocrites are ghouls.  Mindless thugs are zombies etc. It’s a world where everything is reversed… evil is praised, good is bad etc.

Matt: It’s been a massive success in France. Are you surprised that such a weird idea caught the French imagination?

Pat: In France, it would be seen as not that weird. Bear in mind, 2000AD was inspired by French comics which were WAY ahead of the Americans at that time (apart from artists like Mike Kaluta and similar). The French were doing kick-ass science fiction and fantasy.

(scenes from Vampire Requiem Knight by Pat Mills and Ledroit, published Panini, image borrowed from Word Daddy’s blog)

Matt: Why do you think it’s been so popular?

Pat: For these reasons and also it’s brilliant art. Olivier Ledroit would be the equivalent in UK of McMahon or Bolland.

Matt: What one thing would you change about the British comics industry?

Pat: Follow the French model and give creators better rights deals. But it’s unlikely to happen because with the French respecting creators is in their blood, going back into history. Thus it’s well known that the best place to establish copyright is France. Similarly, a negative attitude to art and creators is in the British blood.

When you see how big the French market is and compare it with the UK, you can see clearly that all this stuff about kids not being interested in comics because of computer games is defeatist nonsense. French kids have both!

Matt: You’ve been in comics a long time. Have you ever been tempted by other media? And am I right in thinking you’re making moves into the movie business?

Pat: I’ve recently written the screenplay for American Reaper, which will also be a graphic novel. And I’m shortly going to be working on a similar project. I think comic/film tie-ins will happen more and more. They don’t always have to be negative experiences. There are no universal rules in this business.

Matt: What is American Reaper and how did it come about?

Pat: American Reaper is set in New York in 2062. In this era it is possible to transfer a person’s identity from one body to another. The Reapers are cops who investigate identity thefts. It was commissioned by Xingu Films (Moon) as a screenplay and this has been adapted for the graphic novel version. It’s illustrated by Clint Langley.

The old are stealing the bodies of the young via legal and illegal transplants. In practical terms it means that rich old people are using (exploiting) poor young people. So plenty of social commentary there!

Young prisoners on Death Row are the subject of legal transplants.  If you think of China we’re not that far away from this and if the technology existed…

Matt: How did you first come up with the idea?

Pat: Originally by thinking about the principles of reincarnation, where people return as someone else. And then seeing a way of doing it within a science fiction framework where it would have more appeal.

Matt: Are there any artists you haven’t worked with in your career that you would like to?

Pat: Mike Kaluta. We were going to work together on a couple of projects for France and the French publisher and I went over to New York to talk to him about them. I wrote a script for Mike but it never happened for various reasons. I wish it had because he’s a brilliant artist. I love that style. And – hey!  Mike’s art proves there is more to mainstream US comic art than superheroes.

Matt: Do you yourself still read other writers’ comics? If not, why not? If so, which comics are you reading?

Pat: I’ve read some female-orientated comics such as Suburban Glamour and Strangers in Paradise because I wanted to see where the female market is. Similarly, I read the excellent Persepolis because I have connections with Iran myself and I’m into political comics.

Matt: Will your strips and characters retire with you, whenever that point comes, or would you like to find talented/trusted writers to carry them forward?

Pat: My past experience has been disastrous.  For instance, when Charley got taken over by another writer the story bombed in a few months.  It was a turkey despite Joe’s brilliant art. The same has happened on other stories. No. They retire with me.

(the superb Charley’s War by Mills and Colquhoun, still one of the finest Brit war comics series of all time and the equal of Tardi’s War of the Trenches)

Matt: Which of your new strips (nineties and onwards) are you most proud of and why?

Pat: Requiem, because it breaks out of the antique system of the publisher owning all the rights to a property.

Matt: Which of your older strips?

Pat: Charley’s War, because it appealed (and still appeals) to mainstream readers.

Matt: If you could find the right artist and sort out any rights problems, would you like to revisit some non-2000 AD strips in the same way you are writing new Flesh? I’m thinking Charley’s War, for example…

Pat: Yes. There is constant media interest in Charley’s War.  A while back Dirk Maggs and I put it forward as a Radio 4 classic serial.  We got turned down but you never know what could happen with the character.

Matt: What’s your biggest regret, career-wise?

Pat: Not doing for Misty what I did for 2000AD. They wouldn’t give me a rights deal, so I walked. But if I stayed, I believe Misty would be bigger than 2000AD now. See my article for Comic Heroes.

Matt: And your proudest moment?

Pat: Writing about the Great British Mutiny in Charley’s War because it has been hushed up… These events need dramatising and they are about true heroes: our grandfathers and great grandfathers.

Matt: What are your thoughts on the future of the British comics industry?

Pat: I think it could surprise us all yet. Rebellion graphic novels do well.  And I know of lots of plans by various people to do exciting new things in the medium. I think as long as we realise there’s life beyond super heroes we’ll be okay.  And that’s the title of a panel I was on, at the SFX event in February.

(Greysuit by Pat Mills and John Higgins, published recently by Rebellion)

Matt: And, finally, please tell what you’ve got coming up in 2011, projects-wise?

Pat: More film work with our company, Repeat Offenders ltd. More Flesh. More Requiem. Hopefully Greysuit. And maybe a graphic novel geared towards that ‘female market’ we were discussing.

Matt: Ok, that wasn’t the final question after all, because…

This interview is fairly long and you’ve been very generous with your time, but…

…it feels like there are a thousand more questions I could ask you, which makes this question that we received from one of your fans especially pertinent:

‘John Wagner has started answering questions on a fan-created facebook page. Is this something you could ever envision yourself doing?’

Pat: Sure. I’d be happy to.

Matt: Thanks, Pat, for taking time out to answer these questions.

FPI would like to thank Pat Mills and Matthew Badham for taking the time to do this interview and share it with us. I’m sad to say this will be the last of Matt’s excellent series of interviews for the blog for the foreseeable future – I think our regular readers will agree that he’s brought us some brilliant talks with some fascinating comics creators and along the way done something he always does, highlighted and celebrated the best in British comics. But a freelance writer needs time to work and these interviews do take a lot of time and effort and Matt needs that time right now. On a related note, editors, if you’re looking for an erudite, informed and passionate freelancer on Brit comics, I highly commend Matt to you (seriously, just have a look at his ‘portfolio’ on here that has been read by thousands) and I would like to thank him personally for making such a major contribution to our blog (you are owed a pile of beers at some convention one of these days). You can keep up with Matt at his own blog (where he has even more interviews) and his Twitter, while you can also follow Pat on Twitter.

And coming up in 2000 AD you can soon read the new Flesh tale Texas by Pat and James McKay, which  starts in 2000 AD Prog 1724, on sale 9th March. Book 7 of Savage, Secret City, by Pat and Patrick Goddard will follow this summer,  Slaine: The Lord of Misrule trade collection by Pat and Clint Langley is published by Rebellion this spring, and ABC Warriors: The Volgan War Volume  4 follows in the summer. Greysuit: Project Monarch by Pat and John Higgins is out now from Rebellion. And Pat has just told us that DC will be printing the Marshal Law series, I’m sure we’ll hear more details on that later.

NB: Matt Badham, Richard Bruton, various readers of this blog and members of the 2000AD online forum wrote the questions for this interview. (Thanks, blog readers and forum dwellers, you came up with questions that we would never have thought of in a thousand years.) The finished piece was copy-edited by Matt Badham and Joe Gordon. In this first part Pat talks about his writing and how he approaches it, how some of his series, such as Savage and the ABC Warriors are increasingly sharing a history, how he works with artists and also some of the darker side of the comics business, such as the less than kind way some fine writers and artists and their creations have been treated. The second part will follow tomorrow.

Matt: Is writing ever a hard slog for you or is it always a pleasure?

Pat: It’s always a pleasure these days because the stories reflect something I’m interested in. Occasionally the tight, six-page format on 2000AD can be restricting, so good scenes get left out. That means the scenes don’t always flow as well as I would like and that can be a bit negative.

Matt: Why has 2000AD endured?

Pat: It had very firm foundations, but some years ago this wasn’t always recognized so the formulae got messed with to its detriment (e.g. that phase where it seemed to be influenced by Loaded). Not any more, thank goodness. The first Dredd story, the first Flesh story, the first few episodes of Invasion (Savage) and others still stand the test of time.  Great writers and artists have come and gone but the comic has survived their departure, so it has to be the product itself. So I think it has to be about sticking to the roots of the comic and the best of the newer stories reflect this.

(Prog 1 of 2000 AD from 1977)

Matt: Do you prefer the weekly serial format of 2000AD for your stories or would it be better for you to be able to realise them as part-work graphic novels? What are the advantages/disadvantages of writing for both formats?

Pat: I think ultimately graphic novels are the way forward. 2000AD is like Private Eye, a magazine held in great affection and therefore likely to continue for many years, and it’s possible to adapt to new times and new ways of story telling.

Also, the readers like cliff-hangers which you don’t get in a graphic novel AND it is a great way to train new artists and even test out new stories without releasing a whole album.

Matt: Do you still consider your characters to take place in the same shared universe as Dredd or was the whole shared world something you wrote into scripts when you were initially editing 2000AD? If you prefer for your characters to exist in their own ‘universe’ is this why you tweaked the dates of the wars in your recent ABC Warriors?

Pat: I think basically my stories are in one universe and the Dredd stories are in another. There has been the odd link. But there’s never been any great impetus to take this further.  I am enjoying linking Savage into the ABC Warriors early years… and there is more of this to come!

(Bill Savage, the British resistance hero, there in the early days of 2000 AD and still, under Pat’s pen, popular with readers 30 years later)

Matt: In the flashbacks to the Volgan Wars in recent ABC Warriors why did you decide not to include Happy Shrapnel, the only original warrior we’ve never seen outside of their original run? Was there something about the character you didn’t like? He was originally killed ‘off-screen’, I seem to remember…

Pat: I have plans for Happy Shrapnel, which are already set up in the script. Only problem is that it takes forever to get each book out, so it may be a while before you will see the connection.

Matt: Also, was it your intention that Happy Shrapnel appeared to be self-censoring? In the early strips he makes a buzz sound every time it looks like he is about to swear.

Pat: Yes, absolutely. But when he reappears, he may well be very different.

Matt: I seem to recall, perhaps wrongly, that you originally planned to make a series with Joe Pineapples as a private detective in the Gothic Empire. Is this true and if it is, is it a concept you would ever consider revisiting?

Pat: Yes. I think all the ABC Warriors could make their own series. But we’re always up against difficulties of time and artist availability.

Matt: How did the Martians (in ABC Warriors) survive the Torquemada era, being so close to Termight?

Pat: That’s a damn good point. I think there’s (another) missing story that could cover this. Probably to do with the fear of Medusa. Governments can often ignore regimes that are alien to them when it suits them. e.g. the USA is hostile to Iran, but not Saudi Arabia.

Matt: Why do you think science fiction and fantasy stories are such good vehicles for satires and political allegory? If, indeed, you agree that they are…

Pat: I think they’re good vehicles and make good stories. There was a recent Nemesis lecture at a college, for instance, doubtless analysing its sub-text. But I think that oblique allegory often doesn’t hit the mark and is seen as just a great story. People fall in love with the wrapping paper not what’s inside. Example: High Noon, inspired by the McCarthyism in the 1950s. But who is interested – if, indeed, they knew this? I personally like “on the nose” material, but I realise I’m in a minority here, probably a minority of one!

A good further example of all this is Charley’s War which does not use satire or allegory, it shoots from the hip. No wrapping paper. Many would say it’s my strongest story and I’d agree.

Matt: You seem to have had great success in matching artists to your scripts to get the very best out of both, with them frequently producing the best work of their careers. How do you go about finding and choosing artists, and persuading editors to use them? In particular I’m thinking of Mick McMahon here… while Belardinelli was the perfect if obvious choice for a rural fantasy world, McMahon had produced gritty SF all the way up to his incredible work on Sláine.

Pat: Mike had always wanted to do Sláine, but it was important to create a beautiful natural world first, which Bellardinelli achieved. Then it was set up for Mike. But readers divided fiercely at the time between which artist they preferred, which was painful for all of us. It’s a tricky, time-consuming process… example: I have a new artist in James McKay for Flesh.  It took me ten months for his first episode to be ready for 2000AD. It takes so long because I know what I want from an artist… and what the readers expect… so I have to be very critical to get the right look. I’m very excited about bringing Flesh back. It’s time it was done properly.

Matt: Was it as hard as people say to control Simon Bisley’s alleged artistic excesses or was that the editor’s job?

Pat: I think I was lucky as I was working with Simon at the beginning of his career. And on ABC Warriors, I deliberately wrote all the biker stories for Simon and the others for SMS. So both were drawing stories they wanted to draw. I still miss SMS, by the way. He is a brilliant artist who got ‘pushed out’ because his face or style somehow didn’t fit. I would love to see him work for 2000AD again.

Matt: You sometimes tailor your scripts to artists, as in the case of SMS and Bisley. How often, if at all, does it work the other way? Do artists ever offer story or ‘scene’ suggestions to you?

Pat: Yes, they certainly suggest scenes from time to time. For instance, James McKay suggested a scene in Flesh where a Quetzal bird attacks. Similarly I had a scene in Hell Creek Montana and he added the detail that the biodiversity there is all wrong. This prompted the idea that it was time-travelling Flesh hunters having wiped out the local wild life that caused this. Kevin O’Neill often suggested scenes on Marshal Law and the most anti-super hero scenes are generally his!  For instance, in Cloak of Evil, the Street Surgeon’s car was Kevin’s idea.

(you are never too old to enjoy some major dinosaur action – one of early 2000 AD’s most popular strips, Flesh, returns in Prog 1724, out on March 9th)

Matt: I was saddened to read that Clint Langley is leaving Sláine. What do you think he has brought to the character over his eight year run?

Pat: I think he brought back the epic nature and totally empathised with the way I saw the character. His version is definitive. There had been some problematic art before Clint. This was actually the fault of the editors at the time not the artists, who were not correctly briefed by them. This caused the character to lose ground. Clint brought it back to its old popularity and beyond and also established a unique graphic novel format that has found huge favour in the UK and abroad. He did all those extra pages for nothing or virtually for nothing. That’s one hell of an achievement.

Matt: Were those extra pages for the graphic novel collections?

Pat: Yes. I think he did many for free.

Matt: Is Clint leaving ABC Warriors as well?

Pat: No, he’s not leaving ABC Warriors. And I’ll be writing a new ABC when I find time.

Matt: Thinking about Sláine made me think about the first artist on the strip, Angela Kincaid. What was her contribution to the strip and its development?

Pat: Everything.  It was massive. It was the first story where the hero smiled and looked sexy to women and looked tough without being a macho git. You will find female fans will particularly note how they liked her interpretation.

All of this was down to her and all of it is hellishly difficult to make work. ‘Episode Ones’ are the hardest in the world to get right.

All the key visual ingredients in Sláine she created, which I made damn sure of. Because I sensed if anything was created subsequently her achievement would be diminished by her critics. As indeed it was anyway.

Matt: What makes first episodes so hard to get right?

Pat: Because you’re starting with a blank sheet of paper. The story could go anywhere. The art could go anywhere. What holds it all together is the strength of your combined – writer and artist – vision. Creators are sometimes eclipsed by developers [editors etc…] who look at a story and see how to take it further. But it’s that first episode that really counts. I don’t think this is always understood by readers, which is why I make a point of stressing it. Ask yourself how many of those developers have actually created anything comparable and as memorable. The answer is – not often. That doesn’t detract from their talent as developers, but stresses how difficult the creative process is and why it needs the most acknowledgement

Matt: Do you think she’s been slightly, unfairly perhaps, ‘whitewashed’ out of comics history?

Pat: Oh, yeah. Her face never fitted. Not one artist, writer or editor who I knew or was working with at the time rang her up to encourage or support her. As would be the case normally. It was like she didn’t exist. To our surprise, there was silent hostility from within the industry, which I’ve never forgiven. Yet she was the first artist (and possibly the last) whose story beat Dredd in the polls to be number one that week. It never happened again on Sláine, not even with Fabry and Bisley. This unpalatable fact sticks in too many people’s throats so its quietly forgotten.

Ironically she had agreed to create Sláine because she found her own world of illustration, where she was very successful, rather distant and thought she would be part of my usually friendly and supportive comic world. She found the industry so bloody unfriendly that she said never again (plus I’m very tough to work with — there was no nepotism there) [NB: Pat was married to Angela at the time]. Although she helped me out on a few later stories on Crisis when I was up against it time-wise. And her colouring on John Hicklenton’s Inspector Ryan series is genius.

(Some of Angela Kincaid’s artwork for Pat Mills’ popular Sláine for 2000 AD)

Of course no one will ever own up to sexism, jealousy and putting mainstream readers second and fans first, but that’ s what lay behind the passive aggression. Editorial really wanted someone like Mike McMahon, Alan Davis or Cam Kennedy to draw it. All their names were put to me. This would have been aimed more at — what shall I say? — hard-core comic fans. But I wanted it to appeal to mainstream fans. The reader in the street, if you like, who is always my target audience. I wanted a European, illustrated look which — despite imperfections — she was the most suited to achieve. The reason it is a success as a graphic novel and throughout Europe bears this out and owes much to her origination. Her Ukko is still unbeatable. If the foundations are weak, you can’t build even with great artists.

Other artists needed more time to develop their styles further, but were still encouraged at the start of their careers when they were a bit rough round the edges. She got zilch, which is disgraceful.

Matt: When you’re working on a strip like Sláine, do you have a conclusion/potential length in mind or do you prefer to try and let the strip develop organically?

Pat: I try and let them develop organically. Sláine was always designed to be a story that could be wide-ranging and draw on material from different sources.

Matt: How about your other strips, such as Savage?

Pat: I think there are certain aspects of resistance fighting that need to be worked through…. e.g. classic resistance fighting….  escape lines… “Mission to destroy secret weapon”…. gangster stories…  analogies with the way Britain and the USA are invading and occupying other countries and are seen as the Volgans.

I never quite seem to reach the end of those possibilities, although Allied Forces are now established in Wales, but the Volgans are still fighting back.

Matt: The Mills-verse is converging a bit in Savage and the ABC Warriors as you plot some of the development of the ABCs/Ro-Busters in the former? What led you to decide to ‘merge’ the two stories by tying their histories?

Pat: Both featured the Volgans when they first appeared so I think I had to explore how all that made sense – when/where/how etc. It also provided a science fiction element for Savage, which I think it needed to give it a certain visual spice.

Matt: Also, with all these flashbacks in the ABCs, tying in of separate histories, is there any chance we might see some new, untold Nemesis/Torquemada stories?

Pat: I would love to do more Nemesis stories but I always said to Kevin [O'Neill] that once I had pursued and resolved the outstanding story themes I would bring it to a conclusion, rather than have it continue as a “house” character.

(the mighty Kev O’Neill’s artwork complimenting Pat’s writing in the early Nemesis the Warlock, published Rebellion)

Matt: Why do you think the fans love to hate the likes of Torquemada?

Pat: We love villains and Torque is the most appalling of villains.

Matt: Do you think there could be more non-Nemesis stories set in the world of Termight in the vein of the Deadlock stories that you wrote and Henry Flint drew? Would you be interested in that?

Pat: Yes. That’s why I wrote that Deadlock story. I was very disappointed when [former 2000AD Editor Andy] Diggle specifically said he didn’t want to continue that approach, with further post-Torequemada stories, probably because he had plans for Henry elsewhere. I think the opportunity may be lost now.

Matt: You have an aversion to other people writing characters you’ve created. However, you’ve let the guys behind the Zarjaz fanzine play with your characters and offer them to other creators. Why are they the exception?

Pat: Well, Zarjaz is a fanzine so it’s not a threat to my living.  My aversion is well-founded, though. Ten years ago there were definitely plans afoot for people to take over my stories. And there were hungry hacks around at the time in need of a free lunch who would do it. I think my aggressive response at the time helped put a stop to this. Consider how Gerry Finley-Day’s stories got taken over by others and — in my view and of many readers — this was to their detriment. For instance, the sequel to Fiends. Or the sequels to my Flesh Book One. There are numerous other examples.

Perhaps the best is Charley’s War where the new writer killed the number one serial stone dead in a couple of months, despite Joe’s brilliant artwork. That was a tragedy. Publishers and editors I think have finally got the message:  it doesn’t work. No one would ever consider anyone other than Alan Moore writing Halo Jones or D.R. and Quinch.  I think that’s now the same with my stories. This should apply to everyone — including Gerry — not just writers with clout. But if Zarjaz is fun and an homage to the characters, why not? And I really enjoyed their 2000AD Defoe advent fan story. Excellent work.

Matt: You mentioned Gerry Finley-Day as a creator who has been somewhat ‘airbrushed’ out of British comics history. Are there others?

Pat: Gerry is the main one. Girls’ comics writers have also gone off the radar, but I’m doing my best to reverse that. Hence I have an article out in the next Comic Heroes about girls’ comics writers and the way everything began with Gerry.

Matt: Despite your maxim that only creators should write their characters, you have written Dredd in recent years? Why is Dredd the exception?

Pat: Well, firstly I’m the developer of Dredd and my version of Dredd started the character off in the comic before John [Wagner] returned to writing it. But also Dredd is a “house character” whereas my characters are not. I’m told there are great Dredd stories written by other writers, but I think John’s are still the ones that appeal to me.

Matt: In Defoe we don’t know a huge amount about the state of the rest of the world. We know they are importing zombies to the Caribbean instead of slaves (as the Native people, like the Arawak, were destroyed on contact with Europeans) but beyond that… not so much. Are the zombies just a British problem or worldwide? Will we see any of the wider knock-on effects for the rest of the world in Defoe?

(Defoe 1666 by Pat Mills and Leigh Gallagher, published Rebellion)

Pat: I think Britain was the main focus…. Because the Angelic intervention required this in order to create the British Empire. Eventually I’d like to see a wider focus on Defoe’s world, but I reckon he will be in Britain for the next two serials at least after the current one has concluded. I’m so happy writing Defoe… Leigh [Gallagher] is doing a fantastic job!

Matt: If you were editor what would you do differently, if anything, for 2000AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine?

Pat: I think Matt [Smith] is doing a brilliant job editing the comic. As proof… we have had ten years of peace and progress and I can’t speak highly enough of him, and that’s an objective view, Matt can be as tough on my stories as any editor. So I wouldn’t presume to say how he could change it, given the limited resources, writers, artists etc he has available. You can only have one driver. That said, if it had been either of his two predecessors I would have much to say about what should be different. Thank Grud their dark era is over.

Matt: I understand that you wrote “Moonchild” for the comic Misty, but did you do any other serials for it?

Pat: Yes, I wrote a number of stories for Misty. I formatted the self-contained scary stories… although I wasn’t happy with the way they toned my stories down.

These included Paint it Black (which I recycled in Nemesis – about an old house covered in flies)… Roots  (about a horrible secret of why everyone in a village is happy)… and one about poisonous spiders in supermarket bananas.

They toned them all down… annoyingly. But the art was brilliant on Roots!  The standard was as high as anything 2000AD has ever printed. I should try and track down a copy!

I also wrote a serial called Hush Hush, Sweet Rachel about reincarnation (inspired by Audrey Rose) and probably another one whose name I forget.

Matt: If people are trawling though the back issue bins, which girls’ comics/strips would you recommend keeping an eye out for?

Pat: Early issues of Misty… my story Moonchild.  Malcolm Shaw’s story The Sentinels (set in a Nazi Britain).

Matt: Would you like to write for the female market again?

Pat: Yes. I have a graphic novel at early stage — Rose Noir, female vigilante

Matt: Or is that question in itself one you find reductive/sexist? The notion that there is a ‘female market’ distinct from a male one…?

Pat: People sometimes say unisex as a way of justifying and excusing male dominance. Until unisex is truly unisex, I think the term female market is appropriate.  And who buys all those acres of vampire novels like Twilight? They are clearly aimed at a female market.

Part two of Matt’s talk with Pat will appear tomorrow and will see Pat discuss working in comcis in both Britain and France and the pros and cons of each country’s take on comics, his dislike of superheroes, the ‘dark age’ of 2000 AD when he felt the leadership was much less than it should be and branching into writing for other media, with his script for American Reaper.

(Sarah with the Vern and Lettuce collection at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, pic from Joe’s Flickr)

Cartoonist and illustrator Sarah McIntyre first came to my attention via her Vern and Lettuce strips in The DFC. Since then, I’ve been following her work both online and in print. She’s a fantastic artist whose mini-comics never fail to make me smile. In this interview (cross posted with Down The Tubes), Sarah talks about her art education, the links between comics and picture books, and why she sees a healthy future for the British comics scene.

MB: Are you a formally trained or self-taught artist?

SMc: A bit of both, really. A very kind art teacher give me after-school oil painting classes, starting when I was five. I spent the next six years mostly painting kittens, puppies and rather tedious landscapes, but it made me love mucking in with paint. My high school art teacher was also great in that she didn’t make me follow the class assignments, just let me set my own projects and get on with them, even if I had to stay through lunch break or after school. I took a few oil painting classes from a wonderful and slightly dotty Hungarian woman who collected filing cabinets full of dead crows that had been run over on the road in front of her shop, so we could draw them.

(‘Dear Diary’ mini comic showing a teenage Sarah with her dotty Hungarian art teacher, by and (c) Sarah McIntyre)

I didn’t think I could earn any money doing fine art, so I studied Russian at university. But in the States, we have this great option of completing a ‘minor degree’, which is half a regular degree, so I did my minor in History of Art. And the professors there let me fudge the requirements a bit so a lot of that time was spent drawing life models in the art studio instead of memorising slides. Before my last year of university, I spent two years in Moscow, running around its galleries and museums, teaching myself a lot about Russian painting and its arts and crafts movement at the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century. Until I realised I couldn’t live on the pay of three dollars an hour, I worked in the Moscow branch of Shakespeare & Co bookshop, and we hosted these marvellous arts evenings where I got to meet loads of fascinating painters, sculptors, writers and poets, and occasionally I’d get to see their studios.

I spent several years working as an illustrator, just taking a few evening classes here and there. My favourite short course leader was Elizabeth Harbour, who set loads of brilliant little book projects, similar to the kinds of things you see at small press fairs now. She’s the one who got me set on the path to making full books, not just drawings. About five years after moving to London, I enrolled at Camberwell College of the Arts to do my Master’s degree. I was lucky, it was the first year Janet Woolley began leading the course, and it was still small, only 14 students. (I think it’s over 50 now) Jan combined being a total powerhouse with being quite mumsy; she really cared about the people on her course and looked after us at the same time as pushing us hard and being utterly frank with us. What I didn’t learn on that course, I was able to pick up from the Association of Illustrator’s Business Start-up classes and seminars led by the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators. And Ellen Lindner on my course started me off learning about comics, pointing me to the kind of comics I actually liked, not the kind I’d seen when I walked into mainstream comic book shops.

(early comic made in art college, in response to reading ‘On Sight and Insight’ by John Hull, by and (c) Sarah McIntyre)

I think it wouldn’t have been too difficult to slide through the course without doing much; I tried to come up with at least one piece of artwork every day and I think that decision made all the difference. I only felt I’d made my first real breakthrough about a week before the final show. Jan and the Graphic Design leader actually let me set up a second, separate show in the hallway because my work had changed so dramatically between the stuff I’d carefully printed up for the exhibition and the artwork and comics I’d been doing in the meantime.

MB: So when did you actually start making comics?

SMc: When I was about eight years old, I used to make a magazine called ‘Family Favorite’ and leave it on my neighbours’ doorstep, ring the bell and run away. I think the first comics I ever made were for that magazine, and they were copied, possibly even traced, from Archie comics. But all the comics I ever read in the Seattle Times or Archie seemed to have funny punch lines, and I didn’t think I would ever be able to do that. And I read a few of my mother’s stashed-away story comics (Jack London’s ‘White Fang’, a couple fairy tales) but they were so old and brittle that I didn’t think people still made them. I didn’t even connect them as a storytelling medium with the funnies in the newspaper. In fact, the linework and colours looked so polished to me that I never even thought about real, live people making them at all. Maybe I thought they grew on trees or something.

I think my first comic was a little book I made for my dad for his birthday, telling his life story from my point of view. It was more of an illustrated book that a comic, but if would have fit in with minis you see at small press fairs. My first comic I made at art college was a double-page spread about some yobs throwing a beer can into the Thames and then the river bursting its banks to take revenge on everyone. Ellen gave me some good tips on it and it made me start thinking more seriously about making comics. I read a book called ‘On Sight and Insight’ by John Hull about the experience of blindness and thought I’d write a graphic novel with a character in a soundscape environment, simulating blindness, but in a visual way, using typographical artwork. That subject was WAY too big for me at the time and I had to shelve it. I made a couple travel minis and took part in an online comics jam with some people on LiveJournal. Then the opportunity came up and I cheekily promised David Fickling I could do a page a week of comics for the DFC. I practically had my fingers crossed behind my back when he asked me if I could do it; I had absolutely no idea if I could, and I sweated bullets. But I approached Vern and Lettuce like a children’s book, just drawn within panels instead of pages, and the editor didn’t ask me to stop, so I figured it must be okay. I was overwhelmed when people started telling me they liked it.

MB: What did producing Vern and Lettuce, a weekly comic, teach you in terms of making comics and also the business, deadline, discipline side of being a comic artist?

SMc: I was already used to deadlines and discipline from making picture books, although I still had a lot to learn about the business side of things. When I started with David Fickling, I was approached by one of the best agents in the business and she’s made my work phenomenally less stressful.

In terms of making comics, I’d never submitted more than a few single illustrations in digital form, and I still had a lot to learn about Photoshop. I still only really know what I need to know, but I try to keep things simple by sticking as closely as possible to the methods of traditional printmaking. For Vern and Lettuce, I tried to think of the layers in Photoshop as the layers in a screen print, one layer per colour. I hate the overly slick, airbrushed effects and gradients so many people rely on in Photoshop; it often it makes beautiful linework look like cheap pizza flyers, or makes everything look muddy. But I love the imperfect, slightly textured look of hand painted signs, and I saw some gorgeous revolutionary posters in Moscow in places like the Mayakovsky Museum. They owe a lot of their visual power to the fact that the painters didn’t have many colours of paint, they just made do with two or three tins. With Photoshop, I can access millions of colours, but if I just stick to a few, my work looks so much better. There’s a lot of experimentation in Vern and Lettuce with this; I was very strict with myself in the first few pages, then I started to introduce more and more colours until about episode twelve, when I got frustrated and reined in my colour palette again.

Writing was also difficult, the relentless pace of the weekly deadline. In the beginning I had a few weeks to play with, but then I took a holiday and after that, I was finishing bang on the day the strip was due for print. There’s this tricky thing, just like in picture books, where there’s supposed to be a sort of ‘flip’ at the end of the story. It can be a joke, but it doesn’t even have to be funny, just something to give the strip closure and make the reader look at things a bit differently. A lot of the other DFC people I talked to started their stories with this end point in mind, but I never did. My way of working was just to put Vern and Lettuce into a situation and see where they went. They’re so real to me that I can hear exactly what they’d say to each other. And sometimes they defied tight little endings, they still weren’t very domesticated animals. A few times they got me into a real panic and I’d ring up my DFC colleague Woodrow Phoenix, who lives nearby. He would patiently look at where my strip had gone and then walk me through to the end of it. It’s been the same working in a studio with Gary Northfield; it’s shown me that endings aren’t magic, that much of the job just requires focusing and taking things to their logical conclusion, and then one step beyond. I think it’s the ‘one step beyond’ that looks like magic to the rest of us. (I think DFC artists James Turner and Jamie Smart live in the land of one step beyond.)

(Airship, a comics jam with David O’Connell)

Doing comics jams with David O’Connell also helped me get my writing out of terrible ruts. In a comics jam, I can’t get pig headed about where a strip is going; when I hand the next page over to Dave, he always takes it in a direction I would never have dreamed up. When I get his page and start on the next one, it’s almost like a completely fresh story. That really helped show me that there’s never one solution to telling a tale, the permutations are infinite, and when I’m stuck, instead of blundering on with something dull, I can step back and send the story flying in a completely different direction. And writing with friends makes things more fun. Vern and Lettuce were great to me that way, in introducing me to so many amazing comics friends who know how to combine hard work with being a bit silly.

MB: Can you give me a couple of examples of ‘flips’ from your own work?

SMc: Well, things such as the raisins in Vern’s cake ingredients, which turn out to be something much less palatable (see below). Or the little stowaway moles that parade out of the airship, just as Vern thinks he’s going to get some peace in his park keeper job.

MB: You make comics and picture books. What’s the difference between the two? Is there a difference? Is any distinction arbitrary, they are, after all, both collisions of text and art? What do picture books do well that comics don’t and vice versa?

SMc: This is a huge subject, I can do long workshops on the answer to this, and it needs me to show lots of visual examples. But I was amazed with The DFC, at how smoothly I could transition from picture books to comics. In the old days, a lot of picture books had very simple formats: a picture, possibly in a box, with text underneath. But there’s more of a move to vary formats in picture books now, and make the text intertwine and work with the pictures. I’ve always liked doing this, and never wanted to leave it solely to the book’s designer. Often in picture books, you’ll see several small images on a page, which picture book editors would call ‘vignettes’, and comics people would call ‘panels’. Many picture book people (Russell Ayto, Mo Willems, Posy Simmonds, Raymond Briggs, Satoshi Kitamura, loads of others) have been using comics formats for years, even if they wouldn’t have called it that, or wanted you to call it that. I remember the surprise of learning that Maurice Sendak’s 1970 book, In the Night Kitchen, was a direct tribute to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. I always knew it as a picture book, but of course, it’s a comic, too, and a love letter to comics.

I don’t think there has to be any boundaries between picture books and comics. I think they can flow into each other entirely seamlessly, and keep people developing their visual literacy well after they’ve moved on from reading only children’s books. And it lends added sophistication to children’s books, when kids can read a book that’s slightly above their level without it being a huge break from picture books to text-only novels. I think this merging needs two things to happen: Editors need to overcome their prejudices against books looking too much like comics, or ‘cartoony’ (a damning adjective in an editor’s office). And I think this is happening, as they realise there’s a market, and librarians go nuts trying to get their hands on these books that ‘reluctant readers’ will pick up. (You can see this happening with picture book publishers such as David Fickling with his DFC Library, Walker Books, a bit with Templar; and even more so in the USA with Toon Books, Scholastic Inc and others.) Some editors are starting to warm up to speech bubbles, as a clear and vibrant way of showing who’s talking on a page. Children’s magazines such as Okido and Anorak are just getting on with it and making lovely non-traditional, kid-friendly comics. And some publishers are tentatively starting to experiment with publishing adult picture books, such as those by Audrey Niffenegger (although she had to prove herself first with a text-only novel).

It’s essential that comic fans do their best to let people know about the new books they love, so we’ll get a chance to see more of them. Write reviews, blog about them, make as much noise as you can.

(Vern and Lettuce, from pencils – above – to inks – below – and then the final coloured page – lower image, all by and (c) Sarah McIntyre)

The second thing is that comic creators need to go visit the children’s book sections in shops, see what’s happening right now in publishing, and accept that some stories can be told without having to rely on sexual clichés, excessive violence or bad language, and that it doesn’t make them a wimp for writing these kinds of stories. (I keep hearing comics people saying ‘I’ve got this amazing character, who fights THIS character, it’ll be awesome!’ And that’s their whole story.) I think sometimes people switch into a different mode when they’re writing for children, they get very patronising, clichéd, or even boring (because their adult comics rely on sex or cheap shock tactics and they suddenly can’t use them). Or they over-egg the pages with so many high-impact graphics that there’s no resting time for the eyes and it’s hard to read. There’s nothing wrong with a comic that has a single panel on a page. I think simpler formats with less panels may be a way forward for making comics for children. Reflections of a Solitary Hamster does this well: sometimes a single panel, sometimes two, three or four panels, but the large pages have plenty of breathing space.

Kids like clear stories with solid plot lines and well-developed characters they can relate to. I believe, if you can write an excellent story for children, adults will like it just as much as the children. I think it was Philip Pullman who said something about the difference between kids books and adult books: that adults remember what it was like to be kids and can relate to the experience, but kids have no idea what it’s like to be adult yet, even though they wish they could. So you need to keep that in mind if you’re writing about adult characters or including adult conversations in a children’s book, don’t talk over their heads. You can have more than one story going on a page at the same time, but the simplest story always needs to be the best one, don’t neglect it for subtext.

In terms of format, picture books tend to be shorter, full-colour, and better paid for the amount of work put into them. You might earn as much for a 32-page picture book as a 200-page graphic novel. Which means the picture book editors will scrutinise each page in much more depth. As comics get more popular (and I don’t doubt that they will), hopefully publishers will raise their payments for comics, but it may take the best comic creators getting good agents, or really learning hard negotiation tactics before this happens.

MB: What next for Sarah McIntyre?

SMc: A week after Vern and Lettuce comes out, I’m launching another picture book with the writer Anne Cottringer, called When Titus Took the Train. (You might recognise one of Anne’s other books, Eliot Jones, Midnight Superhero.) The editor and designer said they really wanted me to illustrate it because of my ‘comic sensibilities’. I originally thought they wanted it in comics format, but it’s more of a straightforward picture book. But there are bits of comics creeping in from all sides. Woodrow lent me some of his Western comics, such as Bat Lash, Buffalo Bill and Johnny Thunder so I could get into the wild frontier swing of things. The story’s about a kid named Titus who goes by himself on a big train journey, which gets more and more fantastical, so it’s not entirely clear what’s really happening and what he’s imagining. Bandits, white water canoeing, a T-Rex… actually, Gary helped me with the dinosaur because mine wasn’t looking nuts enough. I thrust a post-it note across the studio at him and begged, ‘Gary, please please will you draw me a T-Rex?’ He scribbled something in two seconds that was just PERFECT. So you might notice that my dinosaur looks an awful lot like Gary’s Derek the Sheep. (I call him Derek the Dinosaur. It’s one of my favourite spreads.)

(Gary Northfield lends a hand with some dino-design! This is the sort of thing that happens at the Fleece Station and, below, a spread from Titus Takes the Train which borrowed from it)

MB: Who would you like to big up, comics-wise, on both the small press and the pro’ scene?

SMc: I’m constantly amazed by the pictures Warwick Johnson Cadwell keeps making. Such amazing line work and colouring, and he looks every part the boat captain that he is. (I’m a bit smitten with him, can’t you tell?) He contributed to the first Birdsong anthology, and I’m also keenly watching the work of another contributor (and one of its editors), Will Kirkby. He also has gorgeous line work, and I’m hoping he takes his more epic, Japanese influenced tales and turns them back to his hometown in Sheffield to tell more personal stories. (But that’s just me, we’ll have to see where he goes.) Darryl Cunningham is on a roll after launching his hard-hitting novel Psychiatric Tales. Viviane Schwarz is working on a marvellous sheep comic with Walker Books and she’s posting its progress on her blog. My three studio mates at the Fleece Station, Gary Northfield, Ellen Lindner and Lauren O’Farrell all have amazing projects up their sleeves at the moment and we all joined together because we get so excited about each other’s stuff. We all work in slightly different areas, and I think some great thing are going to happen in the places where our creations cross over. And the DFC Library crew are making magic, I’m so excited by the books they’re putting out.

I think Nikki Gamble, who heads the Write Away website and huge picture book review database, is very hot on comics for children and teenagers, and sharing them across the country with teachers and librarians. So I’m hoping we’ll get a lot more comics in front of kids with the help of people like her, Paul Gravett and others, and the industry in Britain will make even more business sense to publishers and booksellers and really take flight.

(Sarah sketching in and signing one of her books at the recent Edinburgh Book Festival, pic from Joe’s Flickr)

Sarah’s Vern and Lettuce is published next week by David Fickling and you can follow her Live Journal for regular updates on her work, events and  plenty of lovely sketches; Sarah will be at the Wigtown Book Festival on Saturday 25th at 10am and on the same day there is one of her Morris the Mankiest Monster original pieces being auctioned for the very good cause of the Facing Africa charity, you can bid in person or online here. Matthew posts thoughts on his Citizen Badham blog and the brand new issue of Comic Book Heroes (from the SFX stable) has a special feature on the British small press comics scene by Matt.

(Star-Spangled Dredd by Boo Cook, Dredd (c) Rebellion)

MB: Let’s start with your recent work on 2000 AD’s Damnation Station. How did you come on board with that project?

BC: There often comes that scary moment as a freelance comics creator when your current crop of jobs is about to run out, so you tentatively put the feelers out to your various sources hoping that there’ll be something lurking to keep that old roof up there. I asked my longest standing ‘source’, Matt Smith, aka Tharg the Mighty, if he had anything floating about that I could work on; preferably in the ‘gritty, realistic, sci-fi written by Al Ewing category’. Wouldn’t you know, that’s exactly what was available and I got offered episode five of Damnation Station. The script immediately sang to my old skool sci-fi sensibilities: big bleak moonscapes, detailed space suits, wrecked spacecraft and tangible characters. I really jumped in with both feet, and whether Matt detected my enthusiasm, or he just had three more episodes without an artist attached lying around I don’t know, but I was handed the next three-part story arc shortly after completing part five. It was a refreshing change to go from working on something like Anderson: Psi with its 20-odd years of canon set in stone, to something where I got to design fresh characters, outfits, guns, ships etc, not yet drawn by hundreds of artists.

MB: You were picking up from artist Simon Davis, right? How much were you working from his designs and how much of the design work were you doing yourself?

BC: Simon had the task of introducing the bulk of the cast with his initial four-episode arc, so I was sent jpegs of the main characters to work from. This was a little tricky in as much as all Si’s people are incredibly life-like and emotionally articulate. I don’t know if he works directly from photos of models or just has an incredibly inventive brain, but without either of those I had to kinda start by copying the faces from the few jpegs I had, and evolving them from there. It’s not like Dredd for example where he is 90% uniform that you can copy and build on. These were very real, human characters.

In an effort to keep up with the realism of Si’s work I used a lot more photo reference for my figure posing than I usually do, but then I would have to try and morph a photo of me into an overweight middle-aged black guy, for example. Incidentally, the character Joe Nowhere is someone I didn’t get quite right to begin with. There were less reference pictures of him and the strip hadn’t started in the Prog at the time when I was working in my run. I just had him pegged as an average build/age kinda guy with no hair and a goatee. It wasn’t until I’d drawn him a few times that I twigged he was meant to be considerably older and considerably less fit and healthy, so I tweaked him gradually as I went on.

The episode that my run on the strip began with was the introduction of a new character, so I designed him. He was meant to be loosely based on Roy Batty from Bladerunner, who is one of my all time favourite sci-fi characters. He ended up looking kinda like Mr. Hudson for all you Ndubz fans… I am not among youuuuu!!!!!!!! He was in a space suit that hadn’t been mentioned previously, with a gun that hadn’t appeared in Si’s run, and a ship that had only been vaguely depicted so far, so I really went to town on that lot straight away, hoping that where my art style differed from Si’s in a realistic people way, I could ramp up the ‘sci-fi’, which I love to do.

(giant steps are what you take, walking on the moon; Damnation Station by Al Ewing and Boo Cook)

Also, I like to try a fresh approach with each bulk of work in order to keep me on my toes artistically. As soon as I start relying on the formulas of a particular style or method of working, my brain slowly starts to switch off and rely on tested techniques rather than progressing and thinking things through meticulously at each stage. With this in mind I asked writer Al Ewing if he had any ideas about how I should approach the strip. I think he said that I should definitely go for painted backgrounds and inked figures in the foreground. It was an approach I hadn’t tried before, so I was happy to dive in and accept the challenge. Already though, by the end of my fourth episode, which all happens in a relatively similar environment, I could feel myself starting to rest on my artistic laurels once more, so the next work I do will probably be in acrylic paints.

Si gave me some great characters to work with and in particular I loved drawing the seriously twisted ‘Host’ alien, but Al also gave me plenty of other stuff to design in the final three episodes of my run: more aliens, more craft, and more ways to explode!

MB: You mentioned Al Ewing, the writer of Damnation Station. His work on his own strips and on Dredd seems to have really caught the imagination of the 2000AD readership – why do you think that is?

BC: One word: genius.

Not for nothing did I vote for Al as ‘best writer’ in the Eagle Awards. It was no sudden rush of 2000 AD jobs for Al, and I think that was maybe even a conscious effort by Matt Smith to help hone Al’s full-on mentalism into a grounded and fully-fledged writing brain, which definitely seems to have happened. Al can make me laugh out loud reading the Prog, which is a very rare thing. But he can also write very believable and emotionally realistic, slow burning characters as is apparent from Damnation Station. As for his work on Dredd, it’s clear that Al has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Dredd’s back story and universe, which, when combined with his genuinely hilarious sense of humour, solid characters and infinite idea stream, makes him second only to Wagner in that arena.

Nuff said!

(fabulous cover art for Richard Starkings’ Elephantmen #15 by Boo Cook)

MB: I also wanted to ask you about your work on Richard Starkings’ Elephantmen (pick it up folks, it’s f**king brilliant!)

BC: Three years ago I wrote to writer, editor and letterer Rich Starkings to ask if I could work on his monthly Elephantmen comic because, basically, I love it – simple as that. Having been raised on 2000AD for nearly 30 years, the comic instantly caught my eye when it came out around eight years ago because of it’s similarity to the classic AD strips of old – there’s slices of Rogue Trooper in there, Meltdown Man, Halo Jones – just the very vibe of the art and writing oozed 2000AD so it was a no-brainer for me to get.

(you know how to whistle, don’t you? Classic Noir femme fatale on the night time city streets meets Bladerunner sci-fi future for Elephantmen #16, art by Boo Cook)

The Elephantmen comic stems from the wider universe of Starkings’ Hip Flask Mystery City books with uber artist Jose Ladronn, and is a mixture of many genres, largely the sci-fi realms of Bladerunner. The story follows human/animal genetic hybrid protagonists, the Elephantmen, bred for war, and now trying to reintegrate into a society that shuns them. As well as some well rounded, very human characters there’s some serious philosophical, metaphysical, ethical and ecological issues in there to wrestle with while yer eyes pop out at the lush myriad of artists involved, one of whom was Henry Flint. It was Henry’s issue that really fired me up and compelled me to write my ‘I love Elephantmen!’ email to Richard. Since then I’ve been regular cover artist on the book, did interiors for issue 21, (subtly titled ‘KILL!KILL!KILL!’ ), and I’m just commencing work on volume 2 of the prequel/offshoot ‘War Toys – Enemy Species’.

If you’ve never heard of the Elephantmen, head over to http://www.hipflask.com/ and dive in deep! There are three gorgeous hard and softcover trade collections to get stuck into, the original War Toys trade, the monthly comic, and coming soon to a screen near you – ‘Elephantmen – the motion picture.’ it’s a harsh but incredibly entertaining world… (he’s not wrong, folks, much recommended – Joe)

MB: What next for Boo Cook, comics wise and otherwise?

BC: Well, I’m currently working on a two-issue follow up to the gritty Elephantmen prequel, ‘Wartoys’. It’s called Wartoys: Enemy Species and again it sees me working in a new experimental way. I’m doing ultra expressive ‘dirty’ pencilling, with a sort of Charley’s War meets sci-fi edge, and Gregory Wright, the top notch Elephantmen colourist will be applying grayscale tones to it in Photoshop, so it will be in monochrome like the first series. I’m about 10 pages in and so far I’m having some of the best fun I’ve ever had drawing comics!

Aside from that, I am of course always up for doing anything that Tharg will throw my way, and in fact he’s recently commissioned me to draw more Anderson. There are also a few things I’m working on off my own back. Firstly a sci-fi comic product named ‘BLUNT’, about a Neanderthal-gened terraformer who has a penchant for making moonshine… a fledgling colony of planet pioneers, over-reliant on technology have to turn to him for help when their planet’s evolution goes haywire! It’s scripted by novelist Tom Eglington, a close friend, and it’s something we’ve been knocking into shape for a while, with a view to pitching very soon. Some concept pics are on my blog.

(always our favourite Psi, the one and only Judge Cassandra Anderson, depicted by Boo Cook, Anderson (c) Rebellion)

I’ve also been writing a sci-fi novel in my ‘spare’ time for a couple of years now. It’s on it’s third draft at the moment and will hopefully be ready for touting around soon. It’s called ‘The Distance’ and is a sprawling, psychedelic road movie of a book, set in the far future. It features a man who may in fact be Syd Barrett but doesn’t realise it, a neon-covered wrestling Golem, and a tank track-legged Glaswegian drug dealer for starters…

Finally, future wise: playing drums, there’ll be lots more of that.

MB: One last question, what’s on your reading list at the moment, in terms of comics?

BC: My comics reading has peaks and troughs in terms of amount and content. I used to read a lot more Marvel/superhero stuff a few years ago, but that has almost trailed off to zero. You get the odd, mind-blowing good run, such as Greg Rucka and J.H.Williams III’s recent stint on Detective Comics/Batwoman, which was an incredible read, and shows there’s still much to be done in the genre. Obviously, I love Elephantmen, but I’ve probably said enough about that.

I love Kirkman and Adlard’s Walking Dead; character-driven comics don’t get much better than that! I’m also having a massive flirt with old school fantasy in the form of Conan, which I’ve been ploughing through with the Savage Sword reprint volumes as well as the new monthly. This affection has carried over into more contemporary stuff like the excellent Northlanders and Viking. I’ve been loving Frank Quitely’s work on Batman and Robin, but I’m also really looking forward to seeing what Dave Taylor is getting up to with the caped crusader – see his blog for some teaser evidence…

I love pretty much everything Jack Kirby ever produced – my favourite run of comics ever being his take on 2001 a Space Odyssey – in both his ten-part re-visioning and his massive treasury edition direct adaptation, which, to me, is the Bible. But as far as new artists go, I’d say Elephantmen’s Marian Churchland is producing some beautiful work right now. At the opposite end of the style scale, I’m a massive fan of the frenetically bombastic Nick Dyer’s work on Dredd etc. for 2000AD. To be honest, there’s really too much to mention as far as my favourite comics and creators go, but that’s definitely a pretty representative core sample of my current likes!

(Boo’s cracking art for a promotional banner for the 2010 comic con)

FPI would like to thank Boo and Matt for sharing their time and thoughts with us. You can keep up with Boo via his blog, which can be found here, while Matthew can be followed on his Citizen Badham blog (where he recently posted a long interview with David Ziggy Greene) and regularly in the Megazine. And, seriously, check out Elephantmen. It’s amazing! This interview has been published simultaneously on Down The Tubes.

Matt: How did you first get involved with the Who comic strips?

Dan: I lost my job, and there was pretty much nowhere else to go. I’d been itching to write or draw something Who-shaped for a long, long time. Since I was a boy, in fact. And losing my job with erstwhile Scots publisher DC Thomson gave me the kick up the arse necessary to send out some samples. The very first place I hit was Panini. I wrote and drew an eight page Who strip (still available here), and did a couple of colour samples. I had a pretty good idea that they were of a reasonable standard, but was still astonished when (then DWM editor) Clayton Hickman phoned me two days after I sent the package. I keep weird hours, so when Clay called at about one in the afternoon, I had ‘just’ got out of bed. I ran from the bedroom to the phone, with a weird feeling that this call was ‘important’… and without putting any of my clothes on. So I effectively did my job interview for DWM in the nude. I still haven’t told Clay that. (I’m sure Clay’s delighted to learn it now! – Joe)

(a page from Hotel Historia, one of the Doctor Who strips you can see on Dan’s site)

They asked me to develop the pitch a bit, plot out what was going to happen in the rest of the story and so on. It quickly became apparent that this story wasn’t going to work for a number of reasons (too similar to Tony Lee’s recently-published FAQ, too “Mind Robber-y”, not good enough), and I thought that was it, I’d blown it. But Clay, bless him, wanted to see if I had anything else going. My girlfriend had just brought Ernest Shackleton’s account of his attempt to cross the Antarctic, and I figured he would make a good historical figure for the Doctor and Martha to meet. I also figured, as I would probably be drawing the strip, that I couldn’t mess up the ice plains of the South Pole too badly, so it was perfect really. The brilliant Martin Geraghty ended up drawing the strip in the end, but by then there was no getting rid of me.

Matt: How much ‘interference’ (bad word, I know, but I can’t think of another at the mo’) is there from the BBC? What’s the process in terms of getting your stories vetted to ensure that the Who TV production people are happy with them?

Dan: No interference at all, actually. Tom (Spilsbury, current editor of DWM) and the staff at DWM really know their stuff, they’ve been around the block, they know what’s acceptable, what works, what doesn’t. I’ve eulogised (DWM strip editor) Scott Gray quite a lot before, but it bears repeating: he’s one of the best Who writers, in any medium, we’ve ever had. So I was in very safe hands.

I did hit a small snag after I wrote Hotel Historia. It’s a very time travel-y strip, with a hotel which offers visits to Earth’s history. I’d planned another strip with a time travel component when the edict came down from Russell T Davies himself that the only time travellers in the Nu-Who universe were the Time Lords, the Daleks, the Time Agents and, at a pinch, the Sontarans. So time travel as a plot point was right out from then on. That said, at the end of HH (which is set in the present day), the cosmic bailliffs take Majenta Pryce away to a prison which is part of the Great Human Empire. So… the cosmic bailliffs can travel in time? Maybe? Oops. Don’t let on.

Matt: What was it like getting to use ‘your companion’ (Dan’s ‘specially-created-for-the-comic-strip’ character Majenta Pryce) in a whole run of stories for Who’s ‘year off’ during 2009? Did you enjoy the freedom that gave you (if, indeed, it gave you more freedom)? Was it refreshing to create a story arc like that? Or daunting perhaps?

Dan: Yeah, it was fun. Majenta was fun. She’s sexy, sparky, difficult. I’ve loved all of the Doctor’s new companions, but I did think there was a bit too much of the “you’re so brilliant, Doctor” stuff. Scott and I agreed that it would be nice to have a companion who was the polar opposite of that, who didn’t see the Doctor as a lonely God, or the most wonderful man in the world, or whatever. To Majenta, he’s just the chauffeur. Useful in a jam, nice arse, knows his way around an android, but other than that… It’s quite funny in a way – my instinct was to make her a bit nicer, play up her admiration of the Doctor a bit, but Scott was always like “no! She should be talking down to him!” Which makes it much funnier, of course.

Creating a companion also meant I got to give her an arc – a beginning, a middle and an ultimate end. You couldn’t do that with Rose, or Martha or Donna. You can’t make them into villains, or kill them off. Right from the start, the chaps at DWM were clear that this was my story, my Who… and I could do what I wanted with it. That’s brilliant. What an amazing thing, to be able to play with these toys.

(a page from the Doctor Who story Mr McGuffin, art by Dan McDaid)

Matt: What challenges do you think writers/artists will face now they have a new Doc’ to accommodate?

Dan: For the artist, getting Matt’s face is going to be the real trick. I got a kind of caricature of Tennant down pretty well, but he’s a lot easier than the next guy. The big quiff, the pronounced lower lip, the big eyes. The Tenth Doctor practically *is* a cartoon. The Eleventh Doctor is more like Davison – faint eyebrows, deep eyes, strange good looks. Much more mercurial features, if you like, much harder to pin down.

Writers are going to have it just as hard, in some ways. There was a wonderful egalitarianism to the RTD-era, particularly towards the end. His tenure invited people to imagine these concepts he would just toss in there – stuff like the Nightmare Child and the Cruciform. Lovely gaps in the narrative, where the amateur (or pro!) fan could scumble in some extra details. I think the beginning of the Moffat era will be more like how Who was when it first came back – he’ll want to spend a season or two establishing the new status quo, which means all the ancillary stuff (the comics, books and so on) will have to hold their breath while the new world takes shape. We don’t really know what we’re dealing with yet, so I think that experimentation, that wildness, if you like, will probably get dialled down. Once it’s running nicely, and we know the Doctor, and Amy, and the universe they’re travelling through, it’ll be back to the same madness.

Matt: Why do you think the comic strip has endured for so long?

Dan: Pretty much because of that madness, actually. When the DWM strip started, Who wasn’t the brand that it is now, and the tie-ins weren’t quite so keenly scrutinized (How else does one explain the Tom Baker underpants?). This meant that the comic strip could pay lip service to honouring the TV series, getting the likeness and “voice” right, while going off in their own oddball direction. They could push things a bit, take the TARDIS into strange new parts of the Universe, without the BBC machine stripping off all the interesting bits. It’s also partly an alchemical reaction: when you take the idea of Doctor Who – that is, the idea of a man who can travel anywhere in time and space – and bolt it to the inherent wildness of comics, something interesting is bound to happen.

It’s also worth remembering that the seventies were an incredibly creative, fertile period for comics generally. People like Dez Skinn and companies like IPC were overseeing our own comics Golden Age. You had creators like John Wagner, Pat Mills, Mike McMahon and Dave Gibbons doing some of the best work of their careers, crafting subversive satire for the children of Britain. That’s pretty punk, isn’t it, when you think about it. But it’s those people, that powerhouse of invention and energy, that got the Who strip machine up and running. And it’s that energy which keeps the strip going even today.

Matt: Cheers, Dan. I also wanted to talk about Jersey Gods a bit. Please give us the high concept behind the series.

Dan: In a nutshell: the New Gods come to New Jersey.

Matt: How did you get involved with the series and what’s it like taking a back seat in writing terms?  Do you find that difficult?

Dan: In late ‘07, I entered Comic Book Resources’ Comic Book Idol event. I hadn’t planned to – I was pretty convinced my work wasn’t up to snuff and I wouldn’t make it past the qualifying round. But my girlfriend kept poking me, threatening to withold favours… that kind of thing. So I took the plunge, and I’m glad I did, because as a platform for promoting your work, getting your name known, it’s hard to beat. I don’t know if they’re still running it, but it was a lot of fun, and it got me in with Image, Oni and a few other people. It also got me noticed by a guy called Glen Brunswick, who contacted me out of the blue, told me he loved my stuff, attached a PDF of Killing Girl #1 (his book with Frank Espinosa and – latterly – Toby Cypress), and asked if I wanted to work on something with him for Image.

(a page from issue 8 of Jersey Gods, published Image)

The competition was still going at this point, so my main focus was hitting my deadline for each week’s entry. I was also 100% certain that as soon as the contest was over, the guys at Marvel and DC would be battering down my door with job offers, lifetime exclusives… stuff like that. But it didn’t happen. I got knocked out, nothing came… so I went back through the stack of emails I got during the contest – a lot of “would you work on my book for free” stuff – and came across Glen’s. I had another look at his pitch, decided I loved it, roughed some character designs and away we went.

As for the writing… yeah, that’s a weird one. But there’s something to be said for taking the  backseat, letting someone else work out the character beats, plot out a year’s worth of stories and so on. Drawing is physically more of a challenge, but writing is exhausting, a constant headache that nags at you throughout the day. I’ve had more migraines in my year of writing Who than I’ve had in the rest of my life. So it was nice to step back from that for Jersey Gods. And Glen is a great collaborator, in that he’s happy to hear my stupid ideas, use the better ones, then pass them off as his own down the line. That takes a special kind of genius.

Matt: Jersey Gods seems to have had accolades from…all sorts of people, including Mark Waid! What’s that been like for you?

Dan: I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. Glen keeps coming to me with the latest variant cover from guys like Mike Allred or John Romita Jr and I just kind of go “uh huh, that’s nice” because I really don’t know what to say. How do you process the fact that legends like Waid, Allred, Romita, Cooke are taking an interest in your work, writing and drawing characters you’ve helped shape? That’s just nuts, isn’t it? What I suspect will happen is that in a few years time I’ll wake up in a hospital bed, and the last few years of success will have been a coma-induced dream. I banged my head in ‘98, when I was working for Blockbuster Video, and I’ve been dreaming since then. That’s the only way I can explain something this awesome.

Matt: How can people get hold of Jersey Gods? I understand that there are trades that people can buy to get up to speed on the series.

Dan: There’s one trade out already. That’s issues 1-5. I can hardly bring myself to look at it now, it’s so raw, but there’s some groovy stuff in there. We have another trade coming VERY soon, which collects the following 5 issues. And then – get this, here’s you’re heads up as to how it will all end – the book is going to run for another 2 issues, then we’re wrapping it. So there’ll be a last trade with issue 11 and the mammoth finale, and all the other JG bits and pieces we’ve done. I’m drawing that final issue right now, and it’s an absolute killer. Glen is setting out to break as many hearts as possible.

(cover to volume 1 of Jersey Gods by Glen Brunswick and Dan McDaid, published Image)

Matt: And, finally, what next for the McDaidster, in terms of Who, JG and whatever else may be  on your plate?

Dan: First of all, I endorse your use of the phrase “the McDaidster”.

Secondly, the plan is to do more work with Glen, this time over at Boom! Studios. He’s got a really smart, funny idea for a book, which he’s kindly letting me ruin with my daubings. I think there might be something on the cards with Rascally Richard Starkings (another legend in my personal pantheon – the man behind the Marvel UK of my youth), and two incredibly exciting top secret projects with Oni Press. All for this year. I’m going to have to clone myself or something, aren’t I?

FPI would like to thank both Dan and Matt for sharing their time and thoughts; you can see more of Dan’s work via his site here and Matthew can be followed on his Citizen Badham blog.

Darryl Cunningham has been involved in the British independent comics scene since the eighties. In this Q&A, he talks about his forthcoming collection, Psychiatric Tales, a touching graphic novel which handles the delicate subject of mental health problems sensitively and honestly, battling his own depression and how, despite now being a critically acclaimed cartoonist, he’s managed to keep his feet firmly planted on the ground.

Matt Badham: Please tell me a bit about your comics background. You’ve been published before haven’t you, but have you ever made your living full-time from comics?

Darryl: I’ve never managed make a living from comics publishing. It’s always been a side-project which has occasionally made me a little money. I first got involved in the comics small press back in the eighties, self-publishing as well as appearing in other people’s ‘zines. I dropped out of the scene for years, somewhat disillusioned because I just didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Drawing and writing comics involves a lot of effort, and if you’re making no money and you only have a small audience of readers, you do begin to wonder if it’s all worth it. This was before the Internet, so getting people to see any of your work was extremely difficult. Printing up small runs of little magazines, and selling at comic marts to other people who were doing the same, seemed a bit futile after a while. I was always waiting for the next step up, but it never happened, so I gave up for awhile.

Matt Badham: In terms of Psychiatric Tales, when and why did you decide to start making strips about mental illness?

Darryl: I worked for many years as a health care assistant on an acute psychiatric ward and throughout this time I kept a diary, in which I gradually amassed a huge amount of material about the day-to-day workings of a psychiatric hospital. People kept saying to me that I ought to turn these stories into comic strips. I was at that time trying to knock the material into a prose book and didn’t think that adding drawings would enhance the work in any way. Surely all the information you need is already there in the writing as it is, I thought. But eventually, I did start drawing it all up into narrative strips. By this time I’d seen Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, a simply drawn autobiographical strip about the writer’s childhood and young adulthood in Iran. This book was a big international success. I thought, ‘Well, I can do something like that.’

Persepolis was a big inspiration to me in terms of what you can do with the comics medium. It was not so much that Satrapi was a particularly good artist, more that she had a dynamite subject that she told well and clearly. She threw light into an area that the Western world was quite ignorant about, revealing Iran to be a more subtle and conflicted place than we imagined. So, very simply in black and white, I began drawing up various tales of my experiences working on the wards. I wrote about what I knew and what I felt most strongly about. The subjects in the book include dementia, depression, self-harming, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.

Matt Badham: You’ve had both personal and professional experience of  mental illness. Please tell us about this and how it informed the comic?

Darryl: After a few years as a health care assistant, I decided that if I was going to drag myself out of the minimum wage trap and have any kind of a life, then I should become a trained psychiatric nurse. I had to do a year’s night course, at a local college, just to get the qualifications that would get me onto the nursing course in the first place. This I did alongside my health care job. I bit off far more than I could chew. Two years into the nursing course, and with only one year to go, I found that I could not continue. I began to struggle with terrible anxiety and depression.

(Darryl turns the spotlight on his own mental health problems, ironically exacerbated by working in the stressful environment of a mental health care facility, (c) Darryl Cunningham, published Blank Slate)

I had always suffered a certain amount of anxiety in the job, but I’d managed to deal with it. As the last year of the course began, I became completely overwhelmed with feelings of despair and hopelessness. Thoughts of death and suicide haunted me. I ran up huge debts, not caring whether I could pay them off or not. I had to leave the course. I’d invested so much time and effort into becoming a psychiatric nurse, but in the end it had all come to nothing. I was devastated.

In the aftermath of all this, and while I was putting myself back together, I began to look again at much of the old comic strip work I’d done in the years prior to the nursing course. The Internet had arrived by then and this gave me a direct line to a new and bigger audience. The story strips that had the largest impact were the ones written about my psychiatric ward experiences. These strips developed a life of their own, being picked up all over the Internet, on sites such as Digg, BoingBoing, The Comics Reporter, and many others. This led to Blank Slate offering to publish the stories. Well, I didn’t have many strips done at the time (I hadn’t even looked at them for four years) and so I began drawing more in order to have enough for a book. This process helped dig me out of depression and gave me a new direction and a future.

Matt Badham: What specific timeline are we talking about for the above events?

Darryl: I started the diary in 2001 and I had my experience of anxiety and depression in 2006. I first posted the first chapters of Psychiatric Tales online in 2005, then there was a gap, and I restarted the work in 2008.

Matt Badham: What are your hopes for Psychiatric Tales? What do you want readers to take away from the experience of reading it? Presumably there’s an educative, awareness-raising aspect…

Darryl: Psychiatric Tales is first and foremost a book that attempts to demythologise mental illness. Forget what you’ve seen in movies or on TV,  this book shows what the experience of mental illness actually is for both patients and the staff who treat them. Media representations of people who suffer mental illness tend to be appalling. We live in an age where racism and sexism is considered unacceptable, yet the mentally ill are still considered fair game for ridicule and are subject to the worst kind of prejudice.

I had an email recently from a young man who intended to buy two copies of the book when it came out, one for his mother and one for his stepfather. He wanted to show his family that the bipolar disorder he’d been diagnosed with was a real illness, and that he needed their understanding not hostility. We still live in a world, sadly, where depression is seen as weakness of character, and psychosis (such as hearing voices) is considered proof of dangerousness. Even the psychiatric nursing profession itself suffers prejudice. I’ve worked with many general nurses who considered psychiatric nurses not to be real nurses at all. This is a surprisingly common view among general nurses. I’m hoping that Psychiatric Tales will be a real stigma-busting book.

(the most severe of self-harming illnesses, the suicidal patient. How to reach out to such a patient in need… (c) Darryl Cunningham, published Blank Slate)

Matt Badham: You’ve drawn on some of your own experiences for the comic, particularly as a professional. Are the events portrayed based on real events or are they entirely fictional but realistic portrayals of mental health situations?

Darryl: The events depicted are quite real, but I’ve changed many the details for reasons of client confidentiality. I’ve not named the hospital concerned and I’ve changed some aspects of the people portrayed in order to help hide their identity. The character used in the bipolar disorder chapter is more of a blend of people I’ve known that have suffered this illness.

Matt Badham: What other projects have you got on the go at the moment?

Darryl: I’m part of the Activate webcomic collective, where I’m running a weekly serial strip called The Streets Of San Diablo. It’s a fantastical mash-up of the western, horror, and superhero genres set in a small town on the edge of Hell (act-i-vate.com). I’m also in the planning stages of a second volume of Psychiatric Tales. There are plenty of subjects I didn’t get around to covering in the first volume. There’s still an enormous amount to be said.

Matt Badham: How do you feel about selling Psychiatric Tales to Bloomsbury in the US and what does it mean for you professionally?

Darryl: This Bloomsbury thing came about in a strange way. I didn’t contact them. They contacted me. An editor in the publishing firm had seen chapters of the work online after it had featured heavily on sites such as BoingBoing and Digg. This is another way that the Internet has changed publishing. Forget sending your stuff to be buried in a slush pile of hopeful manuscripts on someone’s desk. Do good, interesting work, build up a readership online, and the interest will follow.

How this will change me, I’ve no idea, but I fully expect my life to be turned upside down in the coming year. My long-term plans involve giving up the care work I’m obliged to do to support myself and doing this creative stuff full time. Tomorrow I’ll be trudging through the January snow to the local hospital, where I’ll be working on an orthopaedic ward, feeding people and wiping bums though, so that should keep my feet firmly planted on the ground, for now at least!

FPI would like to thank Darryl and Matthew for sharing their time and thoughts with us; you can follow Darryl via his website here and Matthew’s site here, in addition to his other interviews on the FP blog which can be found here. Psychiatric Tales has been published in the UK by Blank Slate Books and is available from our stores and our website.

(cover art to volume 2 of Requiem Vampire Knight by Pat Mills and Ledroit, well received in Europe and thankfully now getting its English language release)

How many Pat Mills stories did you read in your formative years, how many comics that had his guiding hand on them? And how many of those pushed the envelope, especially in regard to what you could do in a comic aimed at young readers (as most in the UK then were)? Not everyone can make it to comics conventions to hear their favourite creators, so here is a rare chance not only to listen to Pat but to put some of your own questions to one of the most influential writers in Brit comics. Leave your questions for Pat in the comments section and we’ll try and incorporate the most interesting ones into Pat’s Q&A later this year.