(Grant Morrison at the Edinburgh Book Festival this summer, pic from Joe’s Flickr)

TAO, sadly, is long gone, but Pádraig recently excavated an untouched strata of fossilised interweb and found this Q&A he had with Grant, and since the TAO version isn’t online anymore and DC have reprinted a rather fetching deluxe hardback edition of We3 this autumn we decided it would be nice to post the interview back up again. As they also touch on other then current or forthcoming works Grant was involved in, such as All star Superman, or a film version of We3 (which still sadly hasn’t seen the light of day yet) it also offers a wee slice of comics archaeology and a look at what was going on with the Scots superstar writer at the time (Joe):

In We3, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely tell a disturbing and violent tale of animal instinct and military technology gone mad.

A dog, Bandit, a cat, Tinker, and a rabbit, Pirate, are turned into the heavily armoured and extremely deadly Animal Weapons 1, 2, and 3. When the military decide they are no longer of use, they escape, and go on a corpse-strewn quest to find ‘home.’ This is one of Morrison’s most provocative works to date, particularly as it is uncomfortably close to the truth, and Frank Quitely’s art is at time too savagely beautiful to look at. This is definitely comics for adults only.

So, with the Titan Books UK edition due to hit the shelves, I thought I’d take the opportunity to ask Grant Morrison a few questions about We3, as well as his current ongoing work for DC Comics, The Seven Soldiers of Victory, which will be available from 2006.

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: You became interested in animal rights while writing Animal Man for DC in the late eighties. Is We3 a follow on from your work there?

Grant Morrison: To some extent, certainly. In other ways, We3 is a riposte to the more sentimental ‘noble savage’ portrayal of animals in Animal Man. As I’ve refined my thoughts on this issue, it seemed important to at least acknowledge the real complexities of the human/animal relationship and the ways in which animals actually conceptualise the world. I still think we treat animals very badly and in some frankly sadistic, sinister and quite unjustifiable ways and I’m sure a lot of that comes across in We3, but I hope the messages of the book are more nuanced than the simple ‘Two legs bad, four legs good’ of some Animal Man stories.

PÓM: You’re doing a mixture between short, 3-issue stories like We3 and Seaguy, and huge, multi-issue, multi-volume works, like The Invisibles, and your current work on The Seven Soldiers of Destiny. Do you have a favourite length to work to, or does the story dictate the length?

GM: Story drives format. I like the huge sprawling epics but I love the 100-page form of We3, Seaguy and Vimanarama, and I love the formal structure of the single-issue 22-page comic book short story.

PÓM: You’ve worked with Frank Quitely before, on the X-Men, and on Flex Mentallo. Would you agree that this is his best work so far, and possibly some of the best artwork ever seen in comics? Also, is there any likelihood of seeing a collected volume of Flex Mentallo any time soon?

GM: We3 is his pinnacle so far definitely and hopefully opened up the possibilities of layouts using page depth instead of just surface, as well as creating a style of art more influenced by video and computer games than by film noir. We’re both currently at work on the All Star Superman title which is DC’s big year end launch, following on from Frank Miller and Jim Lee’s All Star Superman. We also have another major project in the works, outside of the comics format.

As for Flex Mentallo, the only way to get a collected edition is to go to Italy, where they’ve done a nice, well-designed volume in Italian. Otherwise, the Charles Atlas company still seem to think the noble and selfless Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery, is some kind of cruel and subversive parody of their golden goose. Until they stop being stoopid, our masterpiece will remain uncollected and unavailable. Nobody wants to upset the Charles Atlas Corporation by waving art under their noses, let’s face it. Have you seen those leopard print trunks?

(A fetching hardback collection of Flex Mentallo is, finally years after that question, coming soon from DC, due in February 2012 – Joe)

PÓM: Can you tell us a bit about The Seven Soldiers of Victory, which you’re doing for DC at the moment?

GM: Seven Soldiers is something I’m calling a ‘mega-series’. It’s seven 4-issue mini-series, each featuring a character from the DC archives recreated by me and a bunch of amazing artists. The seven series can be read separately but when you read them all together it forms one huge interconnected story. I wanted to write about grass-roots super-people – the ones who don’t have amazing cars or secret headquarters, really, so the whole thing explores what it would actually be like to be a C-list hero on the margins, in a world where Superman and the Green Lantern get all the attention. Our characters are puritan Goths, freaks, monsters, losers and wannabes all clamoring for a place in the spotlight.

PÓM: Finally, what are working on at the moment, once The Seven Soldiers of Victory is finished?

GM: All Star Superman, the screenplay for the We3 movie (we’ve currently doing a deal with New Line) plus a couple of new ‘creator-owned’ series for Vertigo including something called Supertrendy Young Doctor.

PÓM: Thank you very much, Mr Morrison.

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: What’s Somnium about?

Steve Moore: Without giving away too much of the plot, it’s a historical fantasy about a young man called Kit Morley in 1803 who, fleeing an impossible romance, arrives at an inn on Shooters Hill, where he’s intent on writing a story set in Elizabethan times, titled Somnium, which means ‘a dream’. In that story, a courtier named Sir Endimion Lee arrives on Shooters Hill and finds a lunar dream-palace called Somnium, where he encounters someone who appears to be a moon-goddess. Then there are various other stories embedded within these, set at various times, written in various styles and providing a number of layers, while Morley himself starts to question the nature of the world he’s living in. So it’s a fantasy, but a long way away from the sort of Tolkien-type adventure that a lot of people think of as fantasy.

As to what it’s about … myth (particularly that of the moon-goddess Selene and her mortal lover Endymion) and dream and the fluid nature of reality … lost love and redemption … the psychogeography and psychohistory of Shooters Hill, where I’ve lived all my life … about writing, and real and imaginary books … and goddesses, and Romantic Idealism. It’s poetic, and it’s very, very pagan …

PÓM: How much do you think this would be a different book if you hadn’t lived in Shooters Hill all your life?

SM: I think the short answer to that is that the book just wouldn’t have been written at all, if I hadn’t spent my life on Shooters Hill. It’s a pretty strange place, especially when you start digging into its history. There’s a burial mound here that’s three to four thousand years old, and the woods that cover the hill are thought to be eight thousand years old. That’s almost back to the Ice Age. And there’s something about living on top of a hill that moulds your viewpoint. It’s not that you ‘look down’ on the people living around you, but it makes you feel different. There’s an awful lot of sky and a very wide horizon. So there’s geographical breadth and temporal duration. And I’m part of that. A native. Anyway, I think what I’m basically trying to say is that if I didn’t love the place, I wouldn’t have set the book here; and the setting’s generated a lot of the material in the book. Without that … probably no book.

PÓM: To what extent is Somnium autobiographical?

SM: Well, as far as the main character and the plot are concerned, it’s clearly not autobiographical. I’m a long way past being 20 years old, and I’ve never gone to an inn to write! And besides, it’s always a mistake to assume that an author’s characters reflect his own views and feelings; we make up characters after all, and I’ve certainly got no desire to go round assassinating people like Laser-Eraser & Pressbutton used to do. But as anyone who’s read or listened to Alan Moore’s Unearthing will know, at the time I was writing the novel, a few years ago, my emotional life was fairly turbulent, and I was also engaged in various mystical exercises centred on the Greek moon-goddess Selene. Somnium was written in parallel with the mysticism and was, to a certain extent, part of it, so the two have definitely fed into each other. In a way the mysticism, the novel, and Alan’s Unearthing, all became part of a vaguely-defined ‘Somnium Project’. And apart from all that, there’s a lesser character who appears briefly in the book called ‘S’, the author of one of the embedded stories, who is, quite plainly, me. It’s a bit like an Alfred Hitchcock walk-on. When the whole book is so self-referential, how could I resist being in it?!

PÓM: You are legendarily reclusive. How did you feel about Alan’s Unearthing, which is essentially a tell-all biography of you? Or is the reputation for reclusiveness exaggerated?

SM: Reclusiveness is relative! I prefer to think of myself more as ‘private’. I love seeing my friends, and I like going out (though with the state of 21st century culture, it has to be said that there isn’t really a great deal to go out for, except perhaps dinner) … but I just don’t like making public appearances, and I’m not at all interested in fame or reputation. All I want to do is write. I don’t have the slightest interest in the game of being ‘a famous writer’ and I’ve no liking for Conventions, so nobody sees very much of me. Which suits me …

Anyway, as for Unearthing … Alan was invited to contribute a piece to Iain Sinclair’s anthology London: City of Disappearances, and really the only part of London he knew anything about was Shooters Hill, as he kept visiting me here. He then decided, for reasons best known to himself, that he wanted to make it a biography of me as well, so I just said okay. I told him I’d correct any factual details, which I did, but apart from that he could write anything he liked about me, which is what he did! Apart from the comic exaggeration in places, it’s all true, so I said fine and thought the piece would disappear as one of Alan’s ‘minor works’. Obviously it didn’t happen like that! Now it’s become an audio-recording, been performed, will soon appear as a coffee-table book photo-illustrated by the brilliant photographer Mitch Jenkins and, apparently, will even be coming out as an app. How do I feel about all this? Well, I imagine that like most people I tend to judge what’s ‘normal behaviour’ pretty much against what I do myself, so I’m just sort of bewildered by all the attention it’s getting. But overall, it’s been a lot of fun hanging out with Mitch and his photographic team, meeting the musicians and attending the performances. And the whole thing has rather surprised my friend and relatives!

PÓM: I suppose there’s an enormous irony in a piece about a private man becoming the subject of such an amount of attention, particularly in a book apparently about disappearing. There’s a section in Unearthing where Alan dictates what happens next, and then has you do what he’s said you would. Did this actually happen, or is that just Alan entertaining himself?

SM: Of course it happened! I read through the manuscript when it first arrived and knew I just had to go for my usual walk, as described. And, yes, I hung about for a while by the burial mound, as described, and there were actually rain showers that morning. Unfortunately I couldn’t quite disappear, as the manuscript prescribed! But you have to remember that Unearthing was both about magic and, to a certain extent, was a magical piece in itself, with the writing and world described merging together. So I naturally acted out what was described, just to ‘make that real’. And Alan knew I would when he wrote it, even though he hadn’t told me in advance what he was intending to do.

PÓM: Inevitably, the name of Alan Moore was going to come up here, and already has. You’ve been variously described as his oldest and best friend, the man who taught him all about writing comics, and his magical partner – and, famously, as ‘no relation,’ as in ‘Steve Moore – no relation’. How accurate are these, and is there anything else you think the world needs to know about Alan?

SM: Ah, yes … I think they’ll probably put ‘Steve Moore – no relation’ on my gravestone. Still, I get my own back on the jacket copy for Somnium! As for all the other things I’ve been described as, I think you’d be better asking Alan about them. Oh, and by the way … we’re not related …

PÓM: Are there going to be more novels, or have you said everything you want to say in Somnium?

SM: The next thing I really need to finish is my non-fiction book about the mythology of Selene, which I’ve been researching and writing off and on for 35 years! It’s very nearly done, so that will probably be the next book to appear. Apart from that, I’ve been idly working on a comic (funny, not graphic!) fantasy novel, which may get finished sometime. About a third of that’s written. So if I can overcome my inherent laziness, I see a future split between non-fiction and prose fiction.

PÓM: Can you tell me anything more about these two books? Are there any tentative publishing dates, anything like that?

SM: The book about Selene is almost complete, and basically just needs revising, so I’m hoping that might see print next year. It’s one I owe my Goddess, so it needs to get done before I die. I don’t want to say too much about it, but essentially I’m going back to the original sources for the mythology and stripping away a lot of modern rubbish about ‘triple moon-goddesses’ and ‘women’s mysteries’ to find out what the stories really refer to, which is much stranger and much more interesting. It’s extremely scholarly and densely written, so it’ll probably sell about nine copies!

As for Scrollwork, the fantasy novel, I’ve really no idea when that might be finished. I rarely work on it for more than an hour at a time, usually last thing before I head for bed, and sometimes weeks go by without my touching it. So who knows when that might get finished. It’s set in a world quite similar to that of the Tales of Telguuth stories I used to write for 2000 AD a decade ago and has a hero who’s really stupid, which is something I’m not used to writing about, so it’s an interesting challenge.

PÓM: I know that yourself and Alan are writing The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, which I’m looking forward to immensely. How is it coming along, and are we anywhere near getting any sort of publication date for it?

SM: It’s coming along very slowly! That’s mainly due to the fact that Alan has so many other commitments right now and, of course, that he lives in Northampton and I live in London. Close to half of it’s written, and it’s a big book of 320 pages. But when it’ll appear … well, like so many things Alan’s involved with, it’ll be done when it gets done. And I’m afraid that’s about as much as I can tell you about scheduling at the moment.

PÓM: Of course, if you could persuade Alan to embrace the internet, the two of you could probably work on the book faster, but that’s never going to happen, is it?

SM: No, it’s not! And frankly I wouldn’t have Alan any other way. More to the point, though, we need to actually be in the same room to talk about what we’re going to do and toss ideas around, or to pull books off the shelf and look at stuff. Once we’ve got the basics sorted out, one of us will then write up the piece on their own. Email wouldn’t help with the way we work, and I don’t think even Skype would, either.

PÓM: I wanted to ask you, how did you become involved with the Fortean Times, and the Fortean Studies project?

SM: Steve Parkhouse and Barry Smith introduced me to Bob Rickard in 1969 when the four of us were working on a little magazine called Orpheus … which you might call a fanzine, except it was dedicated to publishing new work. Eventually Steve moved to Carlisle and Barry to the States, and we rather drifted apart, but Bob and I stuck together, and he remains one of my very closest friends. So when he started Fortean Times in 1973, as a small magazine of 100 copies, I just joined in, contributing news-clippings, helping mail out copies and writing stuff for it. For a while I was an assistant editor.

Come the 1990s, Bob had a new partner in Paul Sieveking and they turned the magazine professional with John Brown Publishing, and I spent a fair amount of the decade as a contracted writer/editor, though I was still working from home. I compiled things like the first Fortean Times Book of Strange Deaths, etc., produced FT’s four-volume set of the books of Charles Fort, and edited and produced Fortean Studies, which was perfect for me. I’ve always had a strong interest in researching and writing non-fiction, and Studies gave me the chance to do something extremely academic, publishing individual articles of a hundred pages or more, with reams of footnotes and extreme detail.

Apart from the actual covers, I edited the book, compiled the indexes, designed it, typeset it and dealt with the printers, all from one little home PC. Unfortunately, when it got to volume six John Brown decided they wanted to take the design in-house and give it to one of their people, who made a complete pig’s ear of it, whereupon I instantly resigned (I’m rather prone to quitting when publishers upset me). That’s when I went back to comics, writing for ABC and 2000 AD for a while, before the final Hercules books from Radical. But I still see Bob and Paul and the other Forteans pretty regularly, and still occasionally contribute to the magazine.

PÓM: Hercules is your most recent comics work. What is it about, beyond the obvious?

SM: I actually finished that two-and-half years ago now, and it seems like an age. The people at Radical asked me to do a Hercules book, and to set it in historical times rather than make him a 21st century hero; which was just as well, as I wouldn’t have done it otherwise. So I told them I wanted to do it as authentically as possible, which meant trying as much as possible to give it a correct Bronze Age setting, circa 1200BC. Thanks to all the research I’d been doing for the Selene book, I was fairly well up on ancient Greece, so that was fairly easy. The architecture and weaponry, and so forth, is as authentic as I could make it, and I gave the artists lots of reference material (although there were occasions when they still managed to get it wrong!). I also gave Hercules a bunch of companions who were actual mythological figures who were his contemporaries, as far as traditional genealogies were concerned: if Hercules, Tydeus, Atalanta, etc., were real people, they would have been around at the same time.

Having decided to make the characters a band of mercenaries, in the first series I took them to the relatively barbaric country of Thrace, north of Greece. Of course, the story was basically an adventure, but I also wanted to show in that story that Bronze Age warfare, using edged weapons, was actually very brutal and unpleasant, and not at all romantic, so it ended up very downbeat. With the second series I decided to take them to Egypt, which I knew much less about. So I had to research what was going on there in 1200BC, and found some wonderful, historical characters, like the Pharaoh Seti II and his wives, who I worked into the story, along with a real civil war between Seti and his brother. On top of that, I added a much more romanticised tale of magic, to give it a change of pace from the first series, and ended up with a sort of H Rider Haggard adventure. I was quite pleased with the stories, but having had a certain amount of trouble with Radical over the female costumes, which they wouldn’t allow me to make as authentic as they should have been, I was also quite pleased to just leave the whole thing behind after two series.

(interior page from Hercules written by Steve Moore, art by Admira Wijaya, publishd Radical Publishing)

PÓM: Have you retired from comics now, or are there other projects you have in mind?

SM: Definitely retired. My circumstances changed a couple of years ago, leaving me with no need to work in comics any more. And frankly I’m glad to be gone. I became disenchanted with the business and lot of the people in it quite a while ago, and as a writer I find prose a far more satisfying challenge these days.

PÓM: How did you end up with Strange Attractor Press as your publisher for Somnium?

SM: I’d been quite happy to show the manuscript to friends, one of whom was Val Stevenson, who’s the reviews editor for Fortean Times and also runs a literary website called nthposition. A little while ago she told me she wanted to do an ebook of Somnium, so I said sure … and that will be out shortly after the hardback. Having told Alan about this, he then very kindly offered to write an afterword, and also suggested doing a hardback that we could both sign.

That sounded like a good idea too, so I talked to Mark Pilkington at Strange Attractor, who I also knew through Fortean Times … and I’ve also written stuff for his Strange Attractor Journal in the past. He was interested, but as Strange Attractor mainly publishes non-fiction, we decided the best way to do the book was as a co-production between Strange Attractor and my own Somnium Press, which published Technical Vocabularies, the collection of poetry Alan and I put together a few years ago. And as Mark’s been doing all the hard work, like typesetting and dealing with printers, it just seemed like a marriage made in heaven to me! But he’s done a beautiful production job, and the jacket illustration by John Coulthart is just gorgeous, so I’m really pleased with the way things have turned out.

PÓM: Are Somnium and Technical Vocabularies the only publications from Somnium Press? And are we ever likely to see anything else published by you on it?

SM: Somnium Press is basically my private press where, generally, I just run off little booklets of verse or odd stories to give to my friends, in very limited editions. Somnium and Technical Vocabularies are the only public things that have appeared so far, but Somnium will actually be the seventh title from the press. As for your second question … well, there may be further titles. I don’t really know. Whether anyone apart from my friends and relatives will actually see them is another matter entirely!

(Petals, one of the poems from Technical Volcabularies by and (c) Steve Moore)

PÓM: Can you tell me something about how Technical Vocabularies came about?

SM: It was pretty much a spur of the moment thing. Alan was visiting me for the weekend and the Saturday was 1st May 2004, and we just decided we wanted to do something creative. So we decided to produce a booklet of poems in a single day. We decided to use four traditional verse forms … Alan wrote a pantoum and a sestina, I did a sonnet and a villanelle … which explains the title, ‘Technical Vocabularies’. That’s actually a quotation from Théophile Gautier’s biography of Baudelaire, where he mentions this in a definition of the Decadent writing style.

The sub-title ‘Games for May’ comes from a Syd Barrett song and was obviously applicable to the date we were doing this. So we wrote the poems and then I designed and typeset the pages while Alan drew the cover illustration, and we had the whole thing assembled by the evening. It took a bit longer to actually print, of course, and then we had to get together again to sign the copies. So we ended up with a ‘private edition’ of 26 copies to give to our friends, which had silver covers, and a ‘public edition’ of 75 copies with cream covers, which were then sent over to Chris Staros at Top Shelf to market, and they sold out in two hours. We used to do things a bit quicker in those days!

PÓM: Thanks very much for taking the time to do this interview with me, Steve. I really appreciate it, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the book.

FPI would like to thank both Pádraig and Steve for taking the time to share their thoughts with us. Pádraig has, with permission, posted up scans of Technical Vocabularies on his Alan Moore Glycon site, which you can see here. Somnium can be ordered from the Strange Attractor site.

So, as we’d done the big long interview the last time, I only asked him about Resident Alien (currently running in the Dark Horse Presents anthology) this time…

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: So, what’s the premise for Resident Alien?

Peter Hogan: The clue’s in the title, really: there’s an alien called Harry, and he’s been living here for a few years. He’s marooned, waiting for a rescue ship that may or may not ever come, and he’s been living like a recluse until our story kicks off, when events conspire to draw him out into the world.

But no one knows he’s an alien – we show him that way throughout, but everyone around him just treats him like a normal person, so evidently that’s the way they see him, because he’s sort of hypnotized them into doing so. Anyway, Harry ends up kind of liking his new friends and new situation – and he’s also intrigued enough by a series of murders that are taking place in the small town where he lives to start playing amateur detective. He’s very good at reading body language and micro-movements of eyes and muscles, as a result of which he’s pretty confident that he can catch the killer.

So, it’s kind of a strange blend of sci-fi and murder mystery, with a few other threads to it as well – like the fact that the government seems to know about Harry’s existence, and is actively searching for him. Anyway, we’ve discovered that you get really interesting sparks when you rub two different genres together like this, and both Steve and I think we’re doing our best ever work here.

(art from Resident Alien by and (c) Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse, in Dark Horse Presents)

PÓM: When do we get to see this in print?

PH: There are three 8-page instalments running in Dark Horse Presents (#4 – #6) at the moment. Next Spring those will be reprinted in one issue as Resident Alien #0, and that’ll be immediately followed by a three-issue miniseries.

PÓM: Is this supposed to be an ongoing story, or do you have an end in mind for it?

PH: It’s ongoing, and we’re hoping it’ll be enough of a hit with the readers for it to last for quite a while – I’m knee-deep in writing the second miniseries at the moment. In terms of Harry’s story – who he is, how he came to be here, how he’s survived, whether he’ll ever get back home again – all of that will unfold very, very slowly. But in terms of the murder mystery plot that kicks off in the Dark Horse Presents episodes, all of that will be resolved in the first miniseries.

PÓM: This isn’t the first time you’ve worked with Steve Parkhouse, is it?

PH: No. I’ve always loved Steve’s work, ever since I first saw his Bojeffries stuff, and so I signed him up to do a strip for Revolver, Happenstance and Kismet, which was written by Paul Neary. And then when I started writing for Vertigo I requested that Steve be the artist for ‘The Lost Boy’, the first story I did for The Dreaming … and we did another Dreaming story together a few years after that, the Blitz story ‘London Pride’. Steve and I stayed vaguely in touch after that, and at some point he told me that he’d always wanted to do a story about aliens … so I went away and thought about that for a very long time, and eventually I came up with this.

PÓM: I still have a soft-spot for Happenstance and Kismet, and there’s still a gap on my shelf that needs a collected volume of that to fill it.

I have to say, I really loved the colouring on Resident Alien, as well as Steve’s always gorgeous art. Is that Steve as well, or someone else?

PH: Yeah, it’s Steve. He’s doing his own lettering as well. I don’t think the man ever sleeps!

(art from Resident Alien by and (c) Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse, in Dark Horse Presents)

PÓM: Is there any news on that other Tom Strong series you were supposedto be doing for DC?

PH: Tom Strong and the Planet of Peril. Yup, still happening, next year sometime but not scheduled yet. But it’s all written, and Chris Sprouse is about two-thirds of the way through drawing it.

And I think most people probably know by now that the Planet of Peril is Terra Obscura…

It’s 1969 ok
We got a war across the USA
There’s nothing here for me and you
We’re just sitting here with nothing to do

There’s nothing here for me and you
Another year with nothing to do.

(1969 – The Stooges)

(cover art to LOEG Century 1969 by and (c) Messrs Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, published by Knockabout and Top Shelf)

On his visit to the Forbidden Planet in Dublin as the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1969 came out, our man in Dublin, Pádraig Ó Méalóid , got to sit down for a good chat with one of the most remarkable artists to come out of Britain (in my humble opinion), Kevin O’Neill, discussing the LOEG, working with Alan Moore, Pat Mills and others, his early comics career and much more, while Pádraig’s better half Deirdre took some great pics of the pair of them. Over to Pádraig and Kev:

The interview was done at midday on a Sunday, and I think both Kevin and myself were a bit bewildered at doing something like that at a time like that. So, it’s disjointed in parts, we both tail off the ends of sentences sometimes, and I regularly break the most fundamental rule of interviewing, which is that the question should never be longer than the answer. In fact, seeing as we seemed to get on well almost from the beginning, it quickly became a conversation, rather than an interview, although you can see me trying to drag it back to a Q&A format occasionally. However, having said all that, I think I’d rather have it exactly as it is as this is what was actually said, pretty much exactly. I could do a version that is tidied-up, and has a more linear flow, if The Editor wishes (nope, we love it just as it is – Joe), but here it is, as is, for the moment.

One of the things that you’re not going to get from reading this is how entertaining it all was. Occasionally I’ve marked the bits where we did a lot of laughing, but most of the time it was all very good humoured. Really, you had to be there…

Interview with Kevin O’Neill
Conrad Hilton Hotel, Dublin
Noon, Sunday 7th August 2011

(Kevin O’Neill chatting with Pádraig, photos here are all by and courtesy of Deirdre Walsh – thanks, Deirdre!)

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: …It’s now recording. Most of my recordings start we me saying, ‘Is this thing on?’ Now… How was the signing? Was there a good crowd?

Kevin O’Neill: It was good. It was good fun. Really nice people.

PÓM: Yeah, Kevin’s very good, Kevin in the Forbidden Planet [Dublin], I’ve known him a long, long time. Eh, I have a list… I was reading an old interview, and looking at your Wikipedia page, and things like that. Right, 1969. You actually started off as an office boy on Buster in 1969, I think, didn’t you?

KON: 1970, yeah.

PÓM: Yeah, you were 16, so 1970, yeah. So, you kinda have some recollection of 1969, actually 1969, which you obviously don’t with the previous stuff, so some of what you’re doing is… were you working in London then?

KON: Yes I was. What happened was, I had a place in art school, or could have had a place at art school, but my dad had to retire from his health, so I was the next one in the family to be a breadwinner, you know, it was that kind of thing. I couldn’t afford to go to art school, so I thought I’d get a job.

PÓM: Actually, I was going to ask you – are you from a large family? With a name like Kevin O’Neill, there’s some Irish connection…

KON: Yeah, my dad’s from Tipperary, Clogheen, and my mum’s got Irish blood in her family, so it’s a fairly big Catholic family, you know, a Catholic neighbourhood, an Irish Catholic neighbourhood.

PÓM: Where was that?

KON: South London.

PÓM: Yeah, ‘cause I’ve been looking at Punk Rock recently, because basically thirty -five years ago now it started happening, and one of the things with that is there was a lot of people, Johnny Rotten – John Lydon, Elvis Costello, lots of people who were of Irish extraction, and that seemed to be one of the things that fuelled it, and I was wondering…

KON: It is a curious… and in America as well, you get people like Frank Miller, who was certainly a Catholic…

PÓM: Was there anything like that… I think there was a certain amount of that in the people who were doing comics in the UK at the time as well.

KON: Pat Mills has an Irish Catholic background. He was an altar boy.

PÓM: Do you think all that nasty dark Catholic stuff did something to you all?

KON: I’d say it’s fuelled more of my artwork than I probably give it credit for. When me and Pat get together we credit it for quite a bit of inspiration, the Catholic background, the very old-fashioned way we were taught. The nuns were brutal, I just remember, they were really brutal.

PÓM: I was taught by the Christian Brothers – I remember telling somebody at one stage that I was almost disappointed that, I was one of the people that wasn’t abused. It’s a terrible thing when you know you’re too ugly even for a Christian Brother!

[General laughter]

I may clip that bit out. I may not…

But yes, anyway, so, what sort of a family were you from? What size of a family? You said you were the next breadwinner after your father.

KON: There were five of us, and I’ve got a surviving older brother. No-one did any art or writing in the family, my dad was a building worker, a scaffolder. I just loved comics when I was a kid, and I wanted to know how they were done. There were no conventions in those days, there was no…

PÓM: It was all completely anonymous, nobody had any idea…

KON: Absolutely, yeah. I remember writing to IPC to find out who the artists were on some of the strips. When I worked there years later they told me they used to tear up letters from kids. They couldn’t be bothered. It was terrible.

PÓM: Really? That’s terrible!

KON: That was why at 2000 AD we always made a big effort to answer letters, because it was important to people.

PÓM: Yeah, a mate of mine is still very proud of the letter he had published in 2000 AD. I think it meant something to people.

KON: I remember when I was a kid, the first letter I got with my name written on that wasn’t a birthday card was from Marvel Comics. I sent them a little drawing of Captain America when I was a kid, to Stan Lee, and I got a lovely letter back from Flo Steinberg, his secretary, to say, ‘next time you send artwork, put some backing board, ‘cause it gets all scrunched in the post.’ Kinda ‘keep it up,’ you know, it was just encouraging, which was really nice. It had the Incredible Hulk on the envelope, really exciting.

PÓM: Which must have been pretty cool to find dropping through your letterbox.

KON: They went to the trouble, they had a nice connection with their readers, so that was good. But IPC, when I joined it, when I was a kid, it was all ex-servicemen, and it was very strict – it was like a continuation of school, really. It was very, very regimented, and very old fashioned – strict on time-keeping, keep you late after work if you got in late, having to work your lunch hour, all that stuff.

PÓM: I suppose they had to churn this stuff out every week, I can’t see how it could have been conducive to…

KON: No, the military background probably helped enormously for efficiency – put the fear of god into you not be late with stuff, yeah. And it was a machine for producing material. You get good stuff that comes through the machine, and that kind of process, but you could feel it was the early seventies, and everything was changing in society, except them. They were like, this is the way we do it, comics are for kids, there’s no older readership, anyone who’s older is a delinquent or something, we don’t want their money – so that was the atmosphere. So it was really Pat, Pat Mills and John Wagner coming along that changed everything. They did new comics, Battle and Action and then 2000 AD. 2000 AD was an explosion…

PÓM: Pat Mills was involved in things like Misty as well, wasn’t he, writing all these really dark, strange, sadistic girls’ stories.

KON: Pat had his fingerprints all over…

[Brief interlude while refreshments are ordered...]

PÓM: So, yeah, 1969. I’m looking at the pages here… I mean, you put so much stuff in the background, is there any, in this case, any of your mates, or anything like that, or people you knew at the time?

KON: There is in the Hyde Park sequence – let me point it out. Alan asked me to include something…

PÓM: Funnily enough, just a couple of weeks ago on Sky Arts they showed some footage from the Hyde Park concert. Did you see that? It’s something that Granada made – it was bizarre, ‘cause the day they showed it, the next day was the release date for that [Century 1969].

KON: On this page, that is Steve Moore, Alan Moore’s best friend, the comic writer, and that’s Bram Stokes, who owned the first comic shop in Britain, and they were… Alan sent me a photo, just that image of them sitting on a bit of grass watching, so I included them in.

PÓM: Yes, that particular one I though must be someone in particular. That’s not, is it? [Pointing to the figure sitting to Steve Moore’s left.]

KON: No, no.

PÓM: This is the thing – by the way, Jess Nevins, I was mentioning on Facebook that I was coming in to see you, and he says to send his best regards…

KON: Oh yeah! He’s alright, Jess.

PÓM: We correspond a bit. He was doing the annotations for this one and he’s already got lots of them online (see here for Jess’ invaluable and exhaustive LOEG 1969 annotations – Joe), and I send him some…

KON: Yeah, I usually see it when he sends me the manuscript of the book, and I put notes in for stuff, yeah…

PÓM: I was saying, you remember 1969, were you aware of all this stuff, The Stones and…?

KON: I was the right age, I suppose, being born in 1953, I was just the right age for The Beatles. It seemed a change from the old… My brother was a Teddy Boy, so growing up I was very aware of the shift from the fifties to the sixties. The sixties began about 1963, effectively, you know, and everything was changing. So, yeah, I was a long-haired kid at school, and then it felt very old fashioned at IPC, it was all short-back-and-sides. They hated the outside world – you walked through a door and you were back in the fifties. It was interesting – I’m glad I saw it, I saw the end of days, the end of the old way of doing comics, really, the old-fashioned way. I did hate working on Whizzer and Chips, and things like that, because it was pretty boring, week in and week out.

PÓM: How is work coming on 2009?

KON: I’ve done twenty-eight pages, a third of the way through. Yeah, it’s going very well. It could be out next spring.

PÓM: That’s not bad!

KON: By my glacial standards, that’s almost like speeding…

PÓM: Yeah, Alan is always blaming you for things being late.

KON: Well, he’s right! His scripts are usually finished years in advance.

PÓM: Well, you know, I agree with him when he’s saying, people complain about deadlines, but in ten years’ time, nobody is going to say, ‘Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if it had come out on time.’ I certainly agree with that.

If you’re doing 2009, the visual references that you generally chuck in, I mean, is that going to be difficult? Say, particularly the background things?

KON: It gets very, very difficult – copyright, trademarks, and things like that, yeah, very difficult. We just have to be crafty, fly, don’t use anything – the law is pretty complicated nowadays. It doesn’t inhibit the book really, ‘cause there’s so much else going on, particularly in the next one, yeah, we can strip things in the background, I think that’s fair use…

PÓM: Yeah, yeah, particularly if you’re not literally borrowing the character in character, if you like.

One of the things, when I was reading about your previous work, you do seem to have had a couple of instances where people just really took a dislike to your art style and your artwork. The Comic Code Authority did, I think, and IPC did with some of the stuff in 2000 AD. How do you feel about that?

KON: It makes me laugh, really. The reason I ended up at IPC was kind of an accident, really. I tried to get a job at Odhams, Odhams Publishers – Smash! and Wham! and Pow! I loved as a kid – and they’d Leo Baxendale and Ken Reid doing magnificent work, so I wanted to work with them, on those papers, but they’d just been bought by what became IPC – the Daily Mirror group – so I was directed to Fleetway House, and was swiftly made aware that they didn’t like the way Odhams did comics, they were trying to beat that subversive nature out of the artists who took over, like Ken and Leo. It was a great shame, because they were absolutely brilliant.

PÓM: Ken Reid and Leo Baxendale, and people like them – there was Dennis Law and… They were the ones who revitalised the Beano and things like that, and it is their work that is remembered and is important. Yes, editorial interference… You’re with a new publisher, and does that give you a lot…

KON: Oh, it’s totally different, because the problem with League was – well, you probably know the story: originally it was just for WildStorm, when WildStorm were independent, but WildStorm, before we even started, were sold to DC, and Jim Lee sorted that out so that the League book was protected, it was…

PÓM: It was meant to be firewalled, but it wasn’t really.

KON: No. The inevitable happened, and DC gradually crept into the picture more and more, so the dam was always going to burst with Alan. Alan’s… he’s a very, very patient man… no means no – you can go so far… They seemed to do things, whether by accident or design, that deliberately made things even worse than they were to begin with, which was quite bad. So in the end it just became untenable, and it’s, I think, the one ABC book that Alan actually owns with an artist, so we could take it away to someone else…

PÓM: It was always the case that all of the other stuff, the Tom Strongs and Promethea, and all that, were all owned by WildStorm – owned by ABC comics, which was owned by Wildstorm, which is now owned by DC – but the League, and only the League, was a separate entity – I’m not entirely sure why that was – are you?

KON: I think it’s a by-product of… the film rights were sold before the comic was even – before the first issue was written, just based on a synopsis – and part of the contracts was that the publishing rights belonged to the creators, so it was embedded, and I think we weren’t strictly meant to be part of the ABC one, we were just subsumed into it.

PÓM: I suppose from a marketing point of view, it was handier for them. What did you think of the movie? Did you see the movie?

KON: I didn’t recognise anything, you know. I got sent the screenplay, and I remember opening it up and thinking, I must have the wrong thing. It was set in Venice, and the Bank of England, and all this kind of stuff – Leonardo’s plans, it was a crazy thing, really, it was crazy. But it was a vehicle for Sean Connery – once they said that… If Mina’s not the prime character, you’re immediately off on a tangent, and it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

PÓM: And they do kinda do this thing where she does something vampirey, and I always though one of the endearing things about the League is that there’s always this possibility that she might have been infected with, quote-unquote, some sort of superpowers, or whatever, but that never actually manifests, and we’re always left wondering if there is or isn’t.

KON: Exactly, yeah. It doesn’t really bother the film makers that they’d be left with, ‘what’s this woman doing here?’, whereas in our book she’s the strongest character, she’s just very formidable, she controls everybody, and runs damage on everything, so she’s possibly the only character who could have kept Hyde and the Invisible Man together and in the same place at the same time. But, yeah, I have to say, they dabbled with it so much on the film. But it’s never going to stop – people are always going to ask about it. It’s repeated and repeated, it’s on TV all the time.

PÓM: Yes, it was on quite recently. Last night, I think, Watchmen was as well, which is just a truly dreadful, dreadful film. I did at one stage try to persuade Alan that V for Vendetta was quite good, of the movies, of all of them…

[Sound of Kevin O’Neill choking]

PÓM: … but I don’t know how completely I succeeded. But of all of them it’s the one I like.

What… I’m looking at my notes here… [sound of papers being gone through] Yes. Research. How much research do you have to do, or is this stuff you’ve already read, or do you say, ‘let me go out and find what I can that relates to 1969,’ or 2009, or whatever?

KON: Well, it’s funny, ‘cause Alan would have done tons of research doing From Hell, of Victorian London, but I had loads of books on Victorian London, where I grew up in south London it was very old, the buildings were very old, it was near Woolwich, and the old docks, near the old bombed-out buildings, it was fascinating, so I grew up with quite a few books. What I did was re-read all the Victorian novels, and started to work my way out to curious things like Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, a fantastic barmy book which you’re not too aware of, maybe…

PÓM: I know the name, and I don’t know an awful lot more about it…

KON: it outsold Dracula, back in the day, but he sold… he needed money desperately, so I think he sold the copyright for like ten pounds, or something, and lived to regret it for the rest of his life. He never wrote another book near as popular, but it outsold Dracula. It’s completely mental, absolutely mental, very disturbing. So it’s fun, it’s actually fun researching, and finding… reading The Mysterious Island and going, ‘oh yeah, Nemo’s actually an Indian character,’ an Indian background, and that influenced the way the Nautilus was done, it was the whole way we handled him: before it was either James Mason or a man from the old engravings with the white beard, a Father Christmassy sort of character. So, yeah, the research is pretty important. Now it’s just, it’s finding… once we started – originally we just had the main characters interacting with each other, and I think at one point Alan said, ‘let’s have the coach come from the Charles Dickens book,’ kinda thing, and then somebody thought, ‘oh, we can start using lots of things like that,’ just in the background, shop names and stuff, but when you come closer to the present everything is possible: newspapers, cans of food – there’s a fictional version of almost everything nowadays, but it is kinda bonkers. Since the Black Dossier it’s just nuts, ‘cause we feel a slight obligation to make the effort to find a fictional version of almost anything you see.

PÓM: One of the things I noticed in 1969 particularly is that, a lot of it is actually reflecting what was happening in the real world at the time, and they are, rather than just being fictional characters and having adventures, they’re also reflecting real word stuff – there really was a Rolling Stones, and there’s a band in this, there was a Hyde Park concert, so that’s a kind of a strange extra layer to it that wasn’t there before.

KON: yes, and the Norton character, the Iain Sinclair character, he’s talking from the real world into the fictional world.

PÓM: Yes, I noticed that very much…

KON: Which makes it fascinating, ‘cause they’re completely baffled by what he’s saying…

PÓM: I think everyone is. I’ve attempted to read books by Iain Sinclair, and I’m kinda going, ‘I’m none the wiser.’ I’ve made a couple of efforts at Slow Chocolate Autopsy. Have you read Slow Chocolate Autopsy?

KON: Yeah, I love Iain’s work. It’s a very particular style, though, isn’t it?

PÓM: It certainly is that, yeah.

KON: His writing on London is fascinating, I must say.

PÓM: To go back to Jess Nevins:  the fact that Jess, and a huge amount of contributors from all over, at this stage – everyone send them on to him – that they’re doing that, and you have these annotations, and you have this… there’s a kind of a symbiotic relationship between the two in a way.

KON: There is now, yeah. When we first saw what Jess had done, on the first series, we were completely astonished. We knew while we were doing stuff, maybe a couple of people will get this, but it doesn’t really matter if they don’t, ‘cause it just amused us, but when we saw that people actually quite like it, and they actually like contributing to the notes and stuff, and he was seeing connections that we hadn’t made, and he was occasionally seeing things which we hadn’t intended, but he missed other bits and pieces.

PÓM: Something I came across, just yesterday, somewhere completely different – on the internet – was a reference to… the Rolling Stones did the second gig, the second Hyde Park free concert. The third one, the last band to play, their last song was called ‘Out Demons Out,’ which I thought was fascinating. I must get the name – I’ll drop the name of the band into the interview and pretend I knew it all along… [It was the Edgar Broughton Band.]

KON: Yeah? I didn’t know that. How interesting. I’ll tell Alan that, ‘cause he’s quite interested in coincidence.

PÓM: Yeah, sometimes these things, these extra layers just add themselves.

KON: I know, absolutely, yeah.

PÓM: I think as well, the great thing about the annotations, and uniquely of any other artwork, is that everyone gets to… everyone gets the opportunity – I mean, it’s like we were all sitting there, waiting for the off, waiting for the thing to be published, waiting for Jess to put up the first set of annotations so that everyone could then go, ‘yes, that’s this, and that’s that.’ You don’t do the internet?

KON: No, nor does Alan. No, it’s funny, we’re completely distanced from it, so we just, we see the manuscripts, which is the first time I see any of the notes, and then I just add stuff for Jess – my annotations. I’m fascinated to see this big block of material, you know – and we keep trying to outwit him, as well, but we’ve never, no matter how obscure, there’s always someone out there. It’s really weird – the book had only been published a couple of days and some young guy mentioned in one of the comic shops how he liked Zom of the Zodiac. Now, Zom of the Zodiac is like, so obscure, but there’s always somebody on the internet, I suppose, who knows these things.

PÓM: The other thing is, it does bring these things back into… there must be people – I have tracked down some of the old source material, or gone looking – I got a copy of Performance, several months back at this stage, and I’ve just picked up the video for… the DVD of The Rutles, because I haven’t seen it in years, and I was going, I remember The Rutles! So in a way you’re giving a new lease of life to some of this stuff as well, I think.

I have a question here that says, ‘Was DC difficult towards the end,’ but I think we might have kind of covered that…

Anyone you really wanted to use that you couldn’t? Any characters? Or that you couldn’t find a way to use?

KON: Nothing major, I don’t think. I mean, it’s a pity, as you mention Marvelman, it’s a pity we couldn’t have used Marvelman, ‘cause I always liked him when I was a kid, I thought he was a fantastic character, but it’s… it’s one of those characters that is now almost toxic, anyone who touches Marvelman, it’s like a curse, you know, you just want to pass it straight on, which is a terrible state of affairs for the character to end up in.

PÓM: As I said, I’ve researched the thing in enormous detail for the past several years. The book was going to be called Poisoned Chalice, because both Alan and Neil refer to it as a poisoned chalice in different interviews I saw, and now I find that my own curse of Marvelman…

[Earlier I had mentioned to Kevin that the book I’ve written on Marvelman is now without a publisher, as MonkeyBrain Books, who had contracted to publish it, were taking a break from publishing, at least for the time being, leaving it without a home for the moment.]

KON: Isn’t that weird?

PÓM: And even Kimota!, George Khoury’s updated Kimota!, seems to be on permanent hold – that was meant to be – there’s an updated version, and that hasn’t come out either, so it’s kind of bizarre…

KON: I was saying to someone yesterday that it was really odd that Marvel are printing the old black and white stuff in too expensive editions that no American kid would even understand. I mean, if ever a strip that needed a softback cheap edition…

PÓM: Like the stuff they usually do, the big, thick old Spider-Man (Marvel Essentials series of budget bumper value reprints – Joe)… The story is bizarre beyond all belief and – there’s one thing I came across, which is… the Millers, and because of some stuff that the son had been publishing, reprinting some of the American real nasty stuff, the EC things, you know, this brought about the Children’s and young Persons’ Harmful Publications Act in 1955. There was only one prosecution under it, in 1970, which was the Millers themselves were prosecuted under it, and even that as well, that fifteen years later they were prosecuted under this thing that they brought about themselves…

KON: And Mick Anglo is still alive.

PÓM: Mick Anglo is still alive. I get the impression from the interview he did recently with Marvel that he’s not all there, really, it seemed to me, you know. But even the whole argument about whether he owns it or not, I don’t… he was commissioned to do it, and to a very specific brief – the Millers, and I’ve reason to believe Fawcett were aware of this as well. I got to have some correspondence with Arnold Miller, who was the ‘and Son’ in L Miller and Son… I’ll have to cut all that bit out.

KON: I’m sorry about that. It was an interesting digression for me, because I’m fascinated by the story. I’d love to read it.

PÓM: I’ll print it out, al 95,000 words of it as it stands, and send it on to you.

Right. Do you have any other current work?

KON: No. Pitifully, this is all I do, you know. I know it sounds… someone asked me the other day, ‘Well, obviously you’re doing…?’ and I just burst out laughing. If only I’d the time to do anything else. People think I’m dead for two years, and then a book comes out, you know. Apart from Dodgem Logic I haven’t done anything else. There might be some new pages for the Marshall Law collection next year, when that finally surfaces – hopefully.

PÓM: I was going to ask you – so is that due next year?

KON: I hope, yeah. We keep trying to get a date out of them. It’s got an editor, I think, for the reprint, but nothing’s been put together yet. We’ve contracted to do it, so it will happen. I’ve no idea when.

PÓM: That’s Top Shelf…?

KON: No, we’ve took it away from Top Shelf. It’s DC. DC are doing it.

(Marshall Law, displaying his more gentle, softly-softly approach to dealing with errant capes. “I hunt heroes. Not found one yet”. By and (C) Pat Mills and Kev O’Neill)

PÓM: Oh, is it? Oh, I see!

KON: Which amused us greatly, ‘cause Paul Levitz when he was there I think hated Marshall Law with a great vengeance.

PÓM: You haven’t foresworn from ever working for DC again then, obviously.

KON: No, not really. I’ve never had any big falling out with them. I’d the same reasons to be uncomfortable that Alan had, with certain people – Like Paul Levitz, we just didn’t get on, none of us really got on…

PÓM: And he was one of the people who was making things difficult, wasn’t he, with Black Dossier…

KON: Yeah, Paul has a very particular idea of comics, and how DC should function. He had his way, but it didn’t leave much wiggle room for people like us, you know. I’m sure we just made him very uncomfortable.

PÓM: Aggressively independent people like yourselves! And quite rightly… Yes, the Marshall Law omnibus. It’s going to be quite big, I think, isn’t it? It’s one volume?

KON: I think they’re going to split it into different volumes. I think with the retail climate being what it is, you don’t have to do a big volume – I don’t see how anyone can afford it anymore, spending a hundred dollars on a box set of something. Maybe later, to do a nice big edition would be cool – but I like trade paperbacks, I like the affordable versions of things.

PÓM: I think the trade paperbacks are lovely to read, but things like this [I pull a copy of the slipcased two-volume hardcover Absolute edition of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume one from my bag] …

KON: They’re nice editions.

PÓM: The Absolute editions. They’re very lovely things to have, even if it almost never gets taken down.

KON: I know, I know. The same with my version, yeah.

PÓM: You know, books aren’t just for reading, sometimes books are just for having! And… Actually, there’s a thing – because you’re not on the internet, you don’t have any dealings with the internet, but you’re going to do something set in 2009 – in 2009 the internet does play a large part in people’s lives, just in general, so are you going to make any effort, or are you just going to blithely ignore it?

KON: Well, we do have scenes with mobile phones, which for us is like inventing the atom bomb, or something! [Much general laughter] Actually, Alan doesn’t have a mobile phone. At least I’m slightly in the late twentieth century, if not the twenty-first century. But, no, funnily enough, let me think…

PÓM: I think Alan is actually going backwards, because there was something I was reading recently, where he said he no longer has a television…

KON: That’s right. They turned the signal off, the analog signal, and he… you see, he’s forgotten why he was making the stand, he’s completely forgotten why, but he doesn’t miss having a TV. So, yeah, you’re right, he is rolling, gradually rolling back to the Spinning Jenny, or something like that.

PÓM: Yeah, I saw something that Leah wrote about him, at some point, saying he doesn’t believe in the twenty-first century… A man is entitled to his beliefs, I suppose.

KON: I was telling him I was dreading drawing the present day, because I realised that all the stuff I’ve drawn since I started was avoiding the present day. Everything was either the future, it’s alien, it’s superheroes, it’s abroad, it’s anything that’s not my world, the real world around me. I just wanted to draw to escape from that, when I was growing up. But drawing 1969 now is drawing a historical period for me, even though I probably would have found it less interesting…

PÓM: And even ‘77…

KON: Yeah, it was a nice shift, actually, it’s such a short gap between those periods, the shift in society was massive.

PÓM: Slowly but surely actually the League is filing in… you started in 1898, and we have something in 1910, we have something in the 1950s, and the sixties, and the seventies, and then there’s the one-shot he was talking about doing with Mina and the Seven Stars, is that a kind of a plan…?

KON: That’d be in 1964, that’d be set in.

PÓM: There’s another incident with Mina in Arkham that gets mentioned a couple of couple of times. Is that ever, are we ever going to find out what that is?

KON: Yeah, we’d like to do that, cause that’d be a kinda big – Alan’s a huge Lovecraft fan…

PÓM: Yeah, no shit!

KON: … and my first published work was a HP Lovecraft fanzine illustration, the first thing I ever had published, so… We’ve certainly not made our mind up what the next book will be. It might be the supergroup, but we’re checking out all the… just checking out if it’s possible to do that, really. Or it’ll be a big Blazing World epic, which we’re quite keen to do, and I’d still like to do more with the Golliwog, I love the Golliwog character. The Americans seem a bit baffled by it…

I was at a signing and a lady came up to me, a Black photographer, and she said, ‘Look, I really like your book…’ I knew what was coming, she said, ‘I really liked the Black Dossier, but I have a problem with the,’ I think she called it a pollywog. I explained, oh, it’s actually a really heroic Black character, in fact it’s the only heroic Black character of the fiction of that period. It was created by Florence Upton, it’s not a racist character at all. Her mother wrote the verse to accompany her illustrations. She didn’t copyright it – her spelling ends with a double G, golliwogg – she didn’t copyright it, everybody ripped it off, they changed the spelling and ripped off the image, and all the minstrel kind of golliwogs were post her, or contemporary with her. Her original inspiration was I think a minstrel doll which is in the museum back home, the toy museum.

PÓM: I have to say, with golliwogs, as a kid a golliwog was this toy, this creature, I had no concept it was meant to be a caricature…

KON: I’ve heard that a lot. I didn’t, when I was a kid, I never saw it as a black character, I saw as like an alien thing…

PÓM: yeah, so I think Alan’s take on it is… if you were to ask me what it was I’d say, ‘a strange looking… creature.’

KON: And the relationship with the Dutch dolls is pretty authentic, actually – the books are very, very odd. They were hugely popular – a lot of children’s illustrated fiction of that period, there’s a kind of slightly erotic undercurrent running through them. The Arthur Rackham illustrations, there’s a lot of nudity in those illustrations which you wouldn’t have seen when I was growing up, but they were in the old books that I was buying.

PÓM: Things like Peter Pan, I suppose, and especially Alice…

KON: The Water Babies…

(a scene from The Black Dossier by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, published DC)

PÓM: the old story about Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell is a thorny subject, although comprehensively covered by Bryan Talbot in Alice in Sunderland!

What am I going to ask you next? I don’t know. Yes! Em, no, not that. You really do, your artwork is quite slow. I mean, is… As I was saying, Alan is always saying, ‘well, it’s Kevin’s fault.’ He’s always blaming you for everything. He also blames you for trying to drive poor Jess mad. Is it just that, I presume it just takes as long as it takes. Is it all research, or…

KON: It is. I was saying to someone, you’d think as I get older it would get quicker, but… I suppose, because we keep shifting time-period as well, it’s starting over again. I got quite used to the Victorian period by the conclusion of that era, 1910 was close enough that it wasn’t a big shift, but the Black Dossier drove us mad.

PÓM: Yeah, I suppose Nemesis and Marshall Law were really, between one thing and another, fantasy landscapes that they were in, if you like, whereas this had to be some semblance of…

KON: It is, yeah. When I first started, I was going, ‘I can’t even do this,’ because there was lots of scenes of people talking, sitting around, which I’ve never really drawn before – everyone’s running, or being blown up, or chopping heads off, things like that. So, yeah, that was a big shift for me, so I really did slow down, and I tried to lose a lot of bad habits as well, which you pick up when you’re doing other stuff, you know. I’d been doing a lot of fill-in issues of DC books before starting League, I wasn’t doing Marshall Law – we couldn’t find a publisher, by the end it was impossible to find a publisher for Law.

PÓM: Yeah, it was jumping all over the place.

KON: The nineties were a really bad time for comics, they were really sliding down. Comic stores were going bust, Marvel did their own distribution, do you remember that?

PÓM: Yes, kinda…

KON: It all went horribly wrong so, yeah, I was just filling in. The League came along at the perfect time for me, but I did have to think, right, OK, I’m going to draw this really differently to anything else.

PÓM: How did you end up getting the gig at League?

KON: It’s odd. I went to Comic Showcase in London – Paul Hudson, it was his shop, he was a friend of mine. I walked in the door and he said, ‘Oh, I hear you’re doing a book with Alan Moore.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to ring Alan tomorrow about something else, nothing to do with working together.’ But I don’t know what he means, that just scuttlebutt. I rang Alan, we were talking about some IPC stuff, contract things, stuff from the old days, nothing very important, but right at the end of the conversation he went, ‘Oh, I don’t know if you’d be interested, but I’m sort of thinking of this idea, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and it would be…’ and listed these fictional characters, and it’s the best idea I’ve ever heard.

So he said, I’ll send you a synopsis, and he sent me a synopsis, which was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. So I said, yeah, fine, I’d love to do it, and it started like that. Then we talked about the characters, so when the first script was being written we could have embedded in it the Indian heritage for Nemo, and we talked about the state Quatermain would be in by that point – I’m glad we didn’t, we were talking about giving him African tribal scarification, tattoos and things on his face, but it wouldn’t have given him much of a stealth capability, going undercover.

PÓM: No, when he was sitting, in the 1950s, sitting in the bar, waiting for Mina to lure Jimmy Bond…

KON: We became so obsessive, I found all the Quatermain stories I could, and there are quite a few short stories by Rider Haggard which have fascinating bits of information, so I’d ring Alan up and say, I’ve just read this story about Quatermain’s youth, where he saved a girl from fire, and she has – and it’s his first love – and she’s got a scarred neck from the fire. And that’s great, ‘cause Mina’s got a scarred neck, which ultimately we’ll reveal, so we could embed that straight in, by complete chance. But then we had the bed scene – Alan describes Quatermain getting undressed with some trepidation, and he’d be beaten up and scarred from various things in his life, so I read all the stuff again, keeping notes of when he was savaged by a lion, what bit of his body had been savaged, where he’d been shot. So all the bullet holes and everything, the scars from the lion, they’re all in the right place – I don’t know if anyone… I don’t think I even mentioned it to Jess, ‘cause that might seem too mad, completely mad…

PÓM: I’ll send him a copy of the interview, so he knows. But I think the thing is, when you do research like that, even though people may not get all of it, I think it does enrich the finished work.

KON: It feeds through to the audience somehow. When I was a kid, most of the MAD paperback stuff, I didn’t understand the Jewish humour, but I kept going back, and I gradually got to understand it, because I was studying it, figuring it out. I just liked the attention to detail, the feeling there’s more to this than meets the eye, maybe.

PÓM: Are you happy to continue to do this – I don’t know if I can say ad infinitum – until they take your pen out of your cold dead hand?

KON: I said to Alan, I made a horrible mistake a couple of years ago, I worked out roughly how many books I’ll have left in me, then I got quite scared – I forget what I worked out, I’ll just pretend I’m going to have a very, very long Mick Anglo sort of life that’s going to run well into the future, like Will Eisner or something. No, they take a devil of a long time, these books, they tend to get, they get more ambitious as they’re going along, so…

PÓM: Are you suggesting, as Alan gets madder and older, and comes up with madder and madder things…?

KON: Yeah, ‘cause no-one’s stopping us… I suppose if the Black Dossier hadn’t sold, it would have made us sit back and thing, well, OK, to keep going, we recalibrate another way to do a mad book, and see if that mad book works, but Black Dossier surprised even DC.

PÓM: I love Black Dossier. I was re-reading it – every so often I take them down – and there’s stuff in 1969 which is in Black Dossier. Let’s say, there’s stuff in Black Dossier which only really clicks into place… so it’s not just a source book for the previous volumes, but a source book for…

KON: Yeah, absolutely, and the text carries a lot of material if people do read it. I know the Black Dossier, people were expecting the third series, a conventional series…

PÓM: Yeah, a lot of people refer to it as the third volume, which it actually isn’t…

KON: It isn’t.

PÓM: No matter what they try to say. I think I might have run out of things to ask you. I’m going to ask you if you’ll sign one or two things, and what the possibility is of your drawing me a little picture…?

KON: Of course, yeah, no problem.

PÓM: I’m going to leave this running anyway.

KON: I’ll be careful what I say!

PÓM: No no! Don’t worry. Unless it’s safe for publication, you know. How did the thing in Gosh go?

KON: Oh, that was crazy. We didn’t get out until almost nine o’clock that night, and we started about two.

PÓM: Yeah, you were at two, ‘cause Gary Spencer Millidge was in before that with his book.

KON: Yeah, it was nuts. It was fantastic – they started queuing at eight o’clock. Alan attracts huge crowds – one guy flew over from Texas, and Alan said to him, ‘You’ve come from Texas?’ And he said, ‘I’ve come just for you,’ and Alan said, ‘well, are you going to go sightseeing?’ ‘No, I’m flying back tomorrow!’ Alan has no passport, unless you fly to Britain you’re not going to see him, you’ll never see him.

PÓM: I’ve tried to lure him to things over here numerous times. I’m hoping that… I have some paper, if that’s any use to you?

KON: That would be useful, yeah, ‘cause I’ve just realised I’ve got no…

PÓM: Just in case, I stuck a few sheets in here. This is a terrible question to ask a man, but are you now financially comfortable on the back of all of this? If you like, you know, it’s making you a living?

KON: Yeah, it does make a living certainly, yes. It’s one of those businesses, you put a load of effort, you put more effort in than you’re possibly sometimes rewarded for, but if you’re in the business only for going into an art business just to make money, going into advertising, or something like that, it’s a hugely unsatisfying sort of career path if you wanna do kind of wild stuff. No, we just love comics, so as long as there’s an audience who can keep it viable, you know…

PÓM: I think with something like this, and with, let’s say, a lot of Alan’s work, he’s proved that you can actually stick to your principles, and you can take the harder road, and still you can be successful. And huge quantities of talent and genius and things like that possibly also help. I’ve always admired him for the very fact that he is uncompromising.

KON: Yeah, I know. Alan, he’s turned back huge amounts of money on principle, you know, and suffered as well. People don’t really understand it. It seems to annoy people as well, they say, ‘well why don’t you do this for the money, or that,’ whereas the point is… It really annoys American Hollywood people – ‘if he doesn’t want the money, what does he want?’ He actually doesn’t want anything, he wants them to go away, and they keep offering him more…

PÓM: I’ve seen interviews with him where people are asking him essentially… do you know what I was going to ask you to draw? Any possibility of Mina with Alan Moore? Would that be possible?

KON: I’ll try…

(Kev sketching for Pádraig, pic again by Deirdre)

PÓM: OK. Well, I can ask no more than that! I mean, I read interviews with Alan where people are asking him about Watchmen, and about the Watchmen movie, and about stuff that, if anyone had any sense, they’d know he’s not interested in talking about, that annoys him, and so on. And then the interviews are published and people say, ‘Ah, there he is giving out about Hollywood again,’ and he’s only doing it because people are asking him what his opinion is about stuff that they should know he doesn’t like.

KON: A lot of stuff, quotes from Alan, are misunderstood, because they don’t hear the voice behind it, because Alan’s very, very funny, he’s a very funny man, but they can seem very dry, dry comment.

[I continue to ramble on as Kevin draws.]

(Kev’s sketch for Pádraig showing Alan Moore with the LOEG’s Mina Murray)
PÓM: A friend of mine says this a lot, that the thing that people don’t seem to get with Alan is how remarkably funny he is, and he’s very dry, very droll. He’s lately been hanging out with comedians and scientists…

KON: Yes, that’s true.

PÓM: A dangerous mix!

KON: Yeah, he’s great buddies with Stewart Lee. Yeah, I heard him on radio recently, Alan…

PÓM: He’s doing a lot of bits and pieces of all sort of strange stuff…

KON: People think because he doesn’t go to comic conventions, he’s a recluse, as if life is only a comic convention – he does a monstrous amount of work, he’s always active.

PÓM: Yeah, and he does seem to do an awful lot of work in Northampton itself, and the community. I think essentially Alan believes that Northampton is the most important place in the world. I believe the same thing about Dublin, and we’re both correct. And my wife puts up her hand there and says, ‘you’re both wrong, it’s Waterford.’ [Deirdre had come along to take photographs...]

I think I’ve run out of things to ask you. You see, I came along with a list of things here, and I know when I’m interviewing Alan, I ask Alan a question – you know you’ve got an hour, right – the terrible fear is that that question is the only question you’ll get to ask, because he’ll go, ‘Well…‘ and ramble on… Talking about art, I saw there was a photograph of you with a guy called Tom Mathews, who’s an Irish cartoonist, at the signing yesterday – white hair, moustache…

KON: Yeah, I remember Tom.

PÓM: Tom, as far as I’m concerned, it Ireland’s greatest cartoonist, his stuff is fantastic. He was saying, you draw a cartoon and maybe, weeks, months, years later, somebody looks at it and laughs. But you never hear that laughter. At least when you do these signings…

KON: You get feedback, which is great.

PÓM: Because otherwise it is a very solitary occupation. I suppose with Alan and yourself, he does do these famous monstrously long phone calls, so there’s an ongoing feedback there, I suppose, between the pair of you.

KON: Yeah, absolutely.

PÓM: I think at this stage I genuinely have run out of things, so I’ll turn this off. Fifty minutes, we got…

FPI would like to thank Kevin and Pádraig very much for taking the time to share their thoughts with us. LOEG 1969 is out now from Knockabout and Top Shelf, with collected Marshall Law volumes expected from DC, possibly next year – Pat Mills also confirmed them coming from DC but we’re still waiting for an actual planned release date. And don’t forget you can also indulge yourself in some of Kev’s amazing art in the likes of the 2000 AD Nemesis the Warlock collections too.

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: The next part of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century is coming out quite soon.

Alan Moore: I would hope so.

PÓM: So would I! So, do you want to tell us what it’s about, briefly?

AM: Well, I’ll tell you a little bit. It’s a continuation of the first part, 1910. This part happens in 1969, which explains its title, which is 1969.

PÓM: Fair enough.

(cover to LOEG Century 1969 by and (c) Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill, published Top Shelf/Knockabout)

AM: I bet nobody saw that one coming! The actual episode title is called Paint it Black. It is following on from some of the threads that were established in the first part, notably the Moonchild stroke Antichrist Oliver Haddo thread. This is developed against a backdrop of the mid-1960s, which of course was a time of a great psychedelic… a magical revival, that coincided with the psychedelic culture. Aleister Crowley had been on the front of Sergeant Pepper, they’d just released the Thoth tarot deck by Crowley and Freda Harris in 1967, and a lot of the rock stars of the period were flirting with mysticism, if not with actual Satanism. And of course, Crowley was very popular at that time.

Other things that I remember from the 1960s was how all the psychedelic culture, yes, it crossed over with mystical culture, it also crossed over with criminal culture, as perhaps best exemplified in films like Performance. What we’ve got in 1969, in keeping with the League’s usual practice, is that we’ve got a world entirely composed of references to the culture of that period, or around that period. So we’re taking bits from various films, television series, books, comics, any culture of that time we’re working into the fabric of our story, and me and Kevin personally think that this is the best League episode yet, and the job that Ben Dimagmaliw has done on the actual colour is wonderful, and Todd Klein’s done his usual marvellous job on the lettering. So it’s looking wonderful.

I hope that people will have as much fun digging out the various references as we had putting them in there, and there’s also the second chapter of Minions of the Moon, which I think develops nicely, and there some… as with the first part, we’ve tried to work in a number of different lunar fictions, so if you can think of lunar fictions that we haven’t included, then do please send them in, in time for part three, in about a year’s time. Yeah, it’s going to be a very, very good issue, and Kevin’s artwork is exquisite, and I’ve also seen the first eight or nine pages of 2009, so he’s banging on with that, and that looks like it’s going to be incredible, so, yeah, we’re very pleased with it.

PÓM: I’m kinda guessing, if you’ve literary references and other contemporary fictional references from, let’s say, the 1960s, and certainly from right now, you’re obviously dealing with things that are still in copyright, so you’re going to have to be a little more creative, I imagine.

AM: That’s it. And that’s not to say, of course, that we might not run into bits of trouble from certain areas where people might have their own reasons for being particularly litigious. However, we think that we’ve been sufficiently clever in our glancing references. We’ve still got to get the issue finally back from the legal advisors, but no news is good news, I’m hoping, at the moment. I mean, yeah, it does make it more and more difficult. Once we’re past 2009, then we’ll be mainly using science fiction stories that were providing versions of the future, but perhaps a long time ago, so we won’t have the same problems, but we’re very pleased with the way things are working out. Yeah, we could have a couple of instances of difficulties over a few things, I’m sure, but we seem to be doing alright so far.

(Alan Moore talking with Steve Bell at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2010, pic from Joe’s Flickr)

PÓM: Yeah, I think you’ve cleared a few hurdles before, so… You reckon that the final part of Century is probably due next year?

AM: Yeah, I believe so. I mean, Kevin, like I say, is getting on with it very, very quickly, but I wouldn’t want to say that it would be earlier than next year, because a lot can happen, but it’s on its way.

PÓM: And you’re also basically saying that there are more plans for more volumes of League set further in the future?

AM: Oh yes, or ones that are set in the past. I think that in 1969 there are a few faint references to the fact that Mina had been in London since her and Allan’s visit in 1958, as documented in the Black Dossier, that Mina had been there in 1964, without Allan or Orlando, and had a little side project of her own going, which we give a couple of tantalizing glimpses of.

(Mina trips out – hey, it is the 60s, after all, alter your perceptions! Pic borrowed cheekily from post about lettering work on 1969 by the excellent Todd Klein on his blog, (c) Moore & O’Neill)

PÓM: There is a kind of an extra story running through all the previous volumes, I think, about Mina, is it in Innsbruck, or something like that? No, not Innsbruck…

AM: Innsmouth, but this is not then, this is set, I think if you notice in the text story for 1910, there are references to Mina having been involved with some sort of group of superheroes, so there are, I think that there are references to Mick Anglo’s Captain Universe – used with permission – and to Vull the Invisible, and there’s glancing references to a couple of other people in there as well. But, what will probably happen, is that when we finish this, we will probably do a little one-off special, which will be detailing Mina’s adventures in 1964.

Then, I have got an absolutely killer idea for something which would be a great climactic episode of the League – that’s not to say that it would be the last episode of the League, but it would be a fantastic climax to stuff that’s been referred to since, well, the first couple of volumes, but certainly since the Black Dossier. It would be tying all of that up in a spectacular fashion that I thought of while I was writing the 2009 sequence. I got to a piece in 2009 where Orlando had got a real dilemma which, as a writer, I was not certain how she was going to solve. But when I thought of the way that she could solve it, that opened up an absolutely blockbuster plotline that would tie up so many of the… it would tie up ends going all the way back to that Shakespeare pastiche in the Black Dossier.

And then, after we’ve done that, we’d be pretty much free to do whatever we wanted. We would have the League in a situation where they could explore the future, as it’s depicted fictionally, or of course we could always flash back to earlier incarnations of the League. As long as we can keep it fresh, so that each episode, so that it won’t be what people are expecting. That is all that we want people to be able to expect from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, so that it doesn’t just get into a profitable rut, with keeping all the characters alive if they’re popular, and keeping it all in the 1900s, or whatever. So, I think that we’ve established that the League can go into pretty much any direction that should take our fancy.

PÓM: OK, Alan, thanks a million for that.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century – 1969, will be released towards the end of July from Knockabout in the UK and Top Shelf in North America. Alan’s partner-in-crime Mr Kevin O’Neill, Esquire, will be in our Dublin store on August 6th to sign copies of the new book. FPI would like to thank Alan and Pádraig very much for taking the time to have this chat for us.

BONUS TRACK!

Back in 2009 Pádraig conducted a very long, in-depth interview with Alan for us here on the blog, and as it happens part of it took in the then-two-years-in-the-future LOEG Century 1969 book, with Alan discussing some of the elements he was weaving into it, his references and influences, from Moorcock’s New Worlds to the Clangers and the Avengers TV series, so we thought it was worth repeating the relevant segment again on here so you will be better armed with what to watch out for in 1969 (if you want to read the whole of the 2009 interview it is still on the blog archives in three segments, part one, part two and part three:

(a familiar yet different submarine makes an impressive entrance in LOEG Century 1969, (c) Moore & O’Neill)

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

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

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

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

PÓM: Are we around Clockwork Orange time?

AM: No, because Clockwork Orange was, I mean, it was later. It was actually made in the seventies, I believe, and it was set in a kind of a future, so we’re not sure with that one, we haven’t made any references to that. But films of the period like Get Carter, there are certainly a couple of nods to that; other crime films of the period, like Richard Burton’s Villain, which starred a young Ian McShane as the boyfriend stroke criminal gang member of the central Ron Kray-alike criminal played by Richard Burton.

One of the things we’ve done in the 1969 version is we’ve taken all of the characters that were based upon Ronnie Kray or the Kray Brothers, and decided that they were all rival East End villains of the period. So we’ve got Harry Flowers from Performance, who was based on Ronnie Kray, we’ve got Harry Starks from Jake Arnott’s later written but set in the sixties The Long Firm, who was based upon Ronnie Kray, we’ve got Doug and Dinsdale Piranha, who were based upon the Kray Brothers – I mean, they’re referred to, as part of this warring set of criminal factions around in the East End. Then of course there’s the Richard Burton character, who was also based on Ronnie Kray.

(swinging sixties means Mina’ hemline is a little higher than her original Victorian era costumes. Great boots too, I think they were meant for walking...)

So we’ve got all of those in play, there’s also references to things like Big Breadwinner Hogg, which was a very obscure, very violent nineteen sixties crime show about a young thug trying to rise to the top in the London criminal underworld – I think it was taken off the air after two or three weeks, but it made an impression on me, so there’s at least a passing reference to that.

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

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

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

AM: Yes, look that one up! He was based upon Crowley, and we’ve also tied in Adrian Marcato from Rosemary’s Baby, who was the father of the Satanist in the film, and was based on Crowley. We’ve tied a lot of the supernatural films, at least by reference, that came out in the sixties. We’ve also got, as well as Adrian Marcato, we’ve got Mocata, the similarly named Crowley-based protagonist and black magician of The Devil Rides Out, which was probably set earlier, but the film version was released in the sixties, so we’ve got all of these neatly tied together as one man, and we managed to – oh yeah, there’s also, I’d forgotten, there’s a character called Cosmo Gallion, who is a Crowley-alike magician from I think the second series of The Avengers. There’s an episode called Warlock, which has a character who is bearded, and reminiscent of the younger, mountain climbing Aleister Crowley, and who wanders around saying, “Do what thou wilt” all the time, so we’ve got him as a key figure.

We’ve also tied in Robert Irwin’s Satanist from his brilliant book, Satan Wants You. Robert Irwin is a fantastic writer and I actually spoke to him and asked if it was OK to use the character name from Satan Wants You, and he was, he likes the League apparently, so he was OK with that. So, it’s the usual eclectic mix; Jerry Cornelius turns up. I mean, I know he appears briefly as a child in the Black Dossier, but he turns up in his 1969 form as a black-skinned white-haired figure in a panda-skin coat. There’s a nice little exchange in the heart of Soho, where we’ve got lots of references to stuff from Moorcock’s New Worlds, and a couple of little gags thrown in for people who remember Berwick Street in the late nineteen sixties; it doesn’t matter if people don’t get the gags, but it’s still a compelling narrative without them. But when it comes up to the 2009 stuff, we’re sort of using characters that, I think for obvious reasons, it would be kind of difficult to actually talk about too much.

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

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

It’s useful to have a fictitious actor who makes fictitious films to work into the background detail of the League’s world. We’ve got some pretty good stuff from comedy shows, which, I actually like a lot of modern comedy, so people can expect some references to modern comedy shows. I’ve been watching Nathan Barley again, because that has got some really brilliant little bits in it. Fictitious magazines like Sugar Ape, and things like that, those will probably turn up in the background.

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

PÓM: Undoubtedly, yes.

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

I believe that James Colvin, they ran an obituary for him in New Worlds where it said that he’d been crushed under a filing cabinet of rejected manuscripts. This is obviously back when James Colvin was still alive and, yeah, Minions of the Moon, the author of it is John Thomas, which was a pseudonym used by John Sladek for his first couple of sales to Galaxy, ‘cause it’s his first two names, John Thomas Sladek, but he wasn’t selling many stories under the name John Thomas, so he decided to change tack and just called himself John Sladek, but we’ve kind of made a reference to that, because Sladek was one of me favourite authors, but that’s just the title panel to it really, the actual content of the strip is looking pretty fantastic so far. It ties together, as far as we know, almost every fictional reference to the moon. It’s a story set in 1965, but it’s got everything from Wells’s Selenites to Verne’s Baltimore Gun Club, and maybe even a reference or two to The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street through the Baltimore connection.

It’s got things like Mysta of the Moon from Planet Comics, which is brought into continuity with Maza of the Moon by Otis Kline, and Amazon Women of the Moon, which was a soft-core porn film with a lot of naked women living on the moon. So we rationalised all of this, along with Lucien and Baron Munchausen’s journeys to the moon by waterspout, and Mister Godwin of Northampton – I’ve forgotten his first name for the moment – the guy who wrote his account of travelling to the moon in a goose-pulled chariot in the sixteenth century. So we’ve got all them tied in – obscure things like Honeymoon in Space, which was a narrative serial from a British magazine in 1910 – we’ve got all of these things, oh, and the black monoliths, of course, from 2001, and a load of other things. Oh yeah, the Clangers, the soup dragons, the Lunar hoax of 1947, I believe, where someone said that through a telescope he’d seen bat-winged creatures and moon-bison – it turned out just to be a journalistic hoax, but it’s a fiction, of its kind, so we’ve worked that in, along with all the soup dragons and Clangers and Amazon Women of the Moon and Ant-people and, yeah, there’s also, we find out what happened to Professor Selwyn Cavor who figured in the first volume, and we also find out what eventually happened to Professor James Moriarty.

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

(Dave McKean signing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, pic from Joe’s Flickr)

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: The first work of yours that I think I came across was when you did the artwork for Violent Cases, back in 1987. Were you doing anything before then, or was that actually your first published work?

Dave McKean: Before Violent Cases I had done some illustrations for a gaming book (I’m being vague because it’s rubbish), some illustrations for banking brochures, an Isao Tomita LP cover, and a few other freelance jobs completed while still at art school. My first professionally published comic, by a whisker, was a short story for Mr. X that I wrote, drew, coloured and lettered, and gave to Bill Marx while he was in London.

PÓM: I believe that Violent Cases led directly to both yourself and Neil Gaiman being offered work by DC Comics, is that right?

DMcK: Kind of. Neil got us an audience with DC Comics editors Karen Berger and Dick Giordano, and I only really had pages from Violent Cases to show them. It was a leap of faith to go from that book to tackling a DC superhero, but I think Dick liked some of the drawings quite a bit. Meanwhile Neil frantically pitched away until he hit on a character that wasn’t taken by another writer. Black Orchid came out of that, but also the Hellblazer covers, which do relate to Violent Cases in their collage approach.

PÓM: It really was a leap of faith, with an unknown author, an unknown artist, and an unknown, or at least completely forgotten character, Black Orchid. What sort of reception did it get in the US, do you remember?

DMcK: I don’t. I had my head buried in my hands at the time. If I could have driven around to all the comic shops in the world and confiscated all the copies, I would have; they would have made a colourful bonfire. I think it sold well, that was a time when ‘PRESTIGE FORMAT’ alone was a real novelty. I didn’t read any reviews, I’d already made up my mind, I didn’t need any more kicking to add to the self inflicted wounds.

PÓM: So am I to take it you weren’t happy with your work on Black Orchid?

DMcK: I was happy for the work, first proper job out of college. I was happy clearing away the dreary, recycled portrayal of people as usually illustrated in superhero comics, and getting back to what real people look like and how they move and talk. I never intended to continue drawing photo-realistically, I just thought it was worth starting from scratch, and then developing a more expressionistic style with future projects. I was happy that the big dramatic ending, was someone saying “no, I’m not going to kill anyone.” I was happy at the time to be doing something vaguely (very vaguely) ecological. I was happy with the humans-and-the human-world in grey/nature in colour schematic. I like the odd drawing of a frog, or the guys in the bar… I’m struggling now. The rest is pretty awful.

PÓM: There was a time when the prestige format stuff DC were trying out really was worth checking out, I seem to remember. There seemed to be a spark under their tails then that really made it a good time to be buying comics.

DMcK: You have a rosier memory than me. I remember Ronin and Dark Knight grabbing attention for their flashy, designy visuals, but that’s about it.

PÓM: After Black Orchid, I don’t think you did any other internal comics artwork for DC, would that be right?

DMcK: I wonder why?

Well, I did do Arkham Asylum and 2 issues of Hellblazer, but that’s about it.

PÓM: I can’t believe I managed to forget Arkham Asylum! I seem to recall that that was the first Batman original graphic novel, and also the first book DC published in hardback, and they really did seem to give you an awful lot of leeway on the design side of things. Are you going to tell me you didn’t like that either?

(one of the creepiest -- and best -- depictions of the Joker: Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, published DC)

DMcK: Yes, I think it was the first HB, and yes they did give me a lot of rope, but only after Jenette Kahn was summoned by Warner’s to explain why the Joker was dressed in high heels and basque and pinches Batman’s bum (apparently Jack Nicholson was concerned). That all went away, the Batman film came out, and Arkham did very well. I kept my head firmly buried in my hands.

Again, I put a lot of love and ideas into it, I just can’t relate to superheroes, including Battyman, in any meaningful way. He’s a bloke dressed up as a big bat for god’s sake. It’s also the single worst print job (and worst binding job) I’ve ever had on one of my books. The illustrations do actually look much better in person (well, maybe not MUCH better, but…). The repro looks like 3rd. generation bad colour xerography.

PÓM: As you already mentioned, you were also doing the covers for Hellblazer and Sandman. The Sandman covers in particular were really like nothing we’d seen before on the front of a comic, and I think you were the first artist I remember specifically as a cover artist. How did this all come about, and did you have any problems getting them to let you do the kind of work you wanted to do -- which I seem to recall included sets of shelves containing odd things framing the central image for some early Sandman covers?

DMcK: Karen wanted to raise my profile from ground zero, so I got the Hellblazer gig as I was working on Black Orchid. I remember assuming I would be fired with each rough I sent in. Sandman was launched to up Neil’s profile, and for some reason I got that gig as well. For a while I was doing both covers, but I had to get Arkham done to a deadline, so Karen wanted me to drop the Hellblazer covers. Actually I was gently removed from Sandman as well, but I didn’t want to leave, so I did 4 covers (9-12) over a long weekend, and got them out to DC. I couldn’t see them refusing to print them, as it was only the conflict with Arkham that was an issue. If I was 4 months ahead, I had a little grace time.

The only issue that came up during my run of Sandman was NOT featuring Sandman on the cover of every issue. “How will the readers know it’s a Sandman comic?” was the question, “because it says SANDMAN at the top of the cover” was my response.

This was a period of complete openness and freedom at DC. I really don’t think they understood who this new audience was. I think they just wanted to keep quiet and let us get on with it, as it seemed to be popular. It only took a few years for that state of mind to change to the more traditional “no, the reason it’s popular is because WE publish it, and it’s got a whizzy new VERTIGO logo in the corner, and…” you get the idea.

(just two of Dave’s deservedly acclaimed run of covers for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, you couldn’t really imagine the series without these covers each month, could you? Art by Dave McKean, published DC Vertigo)

PÓM: Incidentally, do you still have the original artwork for those?

DMcK: I only kept the cover for number 3; my favourite of the first batch of Sandman covers. The rest I sold to Kevin Eastman for his comic art museum, which, along with everything else he initiated, crumbled a couple of years after it opened its doors. This is all sounding like a long extended moan. Hopefully happier times, and better work, are only a question or two away.

PÓM: Hopefully this’ll have happier memories for you: wasn’t it around this time you were doing things for Atomeka Press’s A1? I particularly liked your Mr X cover for Book 2. There’s also a Mr X story you did with Neil Gaiman in Book 1. Is that the same as the one you mentioned earlier?

DMcK: No, I wrote and drew a Tales from Somnopolis short story for Mr. X proper, not A-1.

I was friends with Garry Leach at the time (I guess I still am, but haven’t really talked to him for 18 years?), so was very happy to be involved with A1, especially as Garry was the most friendly and helpful of the ‘UK COMICS ESTABLISHMENT’ that I met in the early days of ’82-’86.

I always liked Mr. X, but I have a feeling the story I liked was more my version of the concept, rather than what actually appeared in the book. An architect whose perfect city had been built with all the tiny compromises that any public work entails, and it’s these irritating little imperfections that set up a dissonant visual hum that turns its inhabitants to suicide. A story about the impossibility of perfection, and the effects of chaos. I’m not really sure that’s ever stated, but that’s the Mr. X story I would write as a novel.

PÓM: Is there any other work from around that time I’ve forgotten about, before we get to Cages?

DMcK: I did some other short stories, and Hellblazer 27 and 40, and started working in other fields; a lot of CD covers, advertising, editorial, book covers. Performing at Edinburgh Fringe with The Unauthorized Sex Company, but maybe I’ll leave that alone.

PÓM: Well, considering that this interview is going into the FPI blog, which has its headquarters in a cave deep under the streets of Edinburgh, perhaps I should press you for more details on that?

DMcK: A series of writings in science fiction, dramatized on stage by Geoff Ryman, Colin Greenland and Simon Ings dressed in red jumpsuits. I composed and performed the music live, and created a simple set, and a series of projections that smothered the stage.

PÓM: I’m guessing that at this point you were pretty much done with the major comics companies. Was there anything from that time you look back on with any affection? The two issues of Hellblazer, maybe?

DMcK: No, not really.

I thought the covers for Sandman, The Dreaming and Sandman Presents got better over the years.

PÓM: I recently got a copy of the Vertigo Tarot, which has been re-released. How did that come about, and what’s your opinion on it all these years later?

DMcK: It was a project floated by Rachel Pollack I believe, I’m not actually sure where it started, but I remember I was due to fly to NY to sit down with Neil and Rachel to decide which characters would be which symbols, but my computer crashed, taking an unfinished job with it, so I had to stay and redo a week’s work. It was one of my first Photoshop jobs, so a lot of it looks pretty raw now. I loved researching the minor arcana especially, and immediately started my photographic tarot which I think is much more
successful. I should have realised at this point that DC were not interested in my work at all, only their own characters.

PÓM: Do you use a Tarot deck yourself, then, and if so, do you use it for your work in any way?

DMcK: No. Tarot is at best a way of provoking a conversation or eliciting a reaction from the subject of the reading. It’s all nonsense really. What I do like about the cards, is the completely ridiculous idea of cataloguing the entirety of human knowledge in 78 cards. It’s a classic mad human thing to do. And the iconography is wonderful, but they have no real use.

PÓM: Considering that I’m guessing you didn’t have the best of experiences with the bigger comics companies, what prompted you to decide to create Cages?

DMcK: I enjoyed working with Grant and Neil in their worlds, but I really wanted to do something in my own. I had started making notes for a collection of short stories, but they all seemed to exist in the same place, and many of the characters seemed to relate to each other. Also, at the time, there was an interesting air of independence among the illustrators and writers who started work in the 80′s. The distribution system was quite good, so there was no NEED for a Marvel or DC. Why are we giving away the rights, control and most of the income from our creations? Plus, I knew I wanted to do something that was more experimental than anything DC were interested in, and I wanted to expand into a few hundred pages, not just 64 or 96, in order to pay close attention to how my characters talked and moved and thought.

PÓM: I only ever got my hands on the first issue of Cages, so I’m not as familiar with it as with your earlier work. So, can you give us a brief overview of what it was about, and what you were trying to achieve with it?

DMcK: I wanted to spend some time in my world. I had written notes on various short stories, but they all seemed connected. I wanted to do a book that I would read, something that was more conversational than action-packed, something about our inner  lives. Something about belief, a subject I’m fascinated by. I’m completely anti-theist, but the reasons people have for believing in things, or not, and why we all continue to get out of bed in the morning and keep living, working… this is all fascinating to me. I was also quite shaken by the Salman Rushdie affair at the time, it was the first time I (being a creative person) would be considered a candidate for a death list (in the abstract), as I am very antagonistic towards all organized religions. So I wanted to put some of those thoughts into the project. I wanted to deal with my definition of fantasy, not goblins and hobbits, but our dream-lives. I also wanted to get away from painted comics, and find a simpler, more fluid way of storytelling. I also wanted to have the space to do it, to make a graphic novel at 400 -- 500 pages, rather than a novella or short story at 64.

PÓM: One thing I certainly remember noticing in that first issue of Cages was that your art had changed quite considerably from what you were doing in those early books for DC and Escape.

DMcK: It was simpler, and paid more attention to the subtleties of human communication, how people move and talk. That’s basically it. I was disenchanted with painted comics as the storytelling seemed to drag. I was after a lighter touch. I wondered how few lines you really needed to explain a character, or an expression. Of course I could have simplified a lot more, but I’m also drawn to an illustrative approach, rather than a cartoonists approach. I love cartoons, but I’m interested in finding something new in
each drawing, rather than creating a ‘style-sheet’ of the character. All that said, I think the bones of the drawings in Cages can be seen under all that paint and stuff in Arkham and Signal to Noise.

(the artist struggles for inspiration, the cat watches in Cages by and (c) Dave McKean)

PÓM: There were ten issues of this over about six years, I believe. Were you just choosing your own schedule, or did you have problems with your publisher?

DMcK: I decided not to take an advance, as I wanted Tundra to be a sustainable, equitable, risk-sharing arrangement. Little did I know that, because it was set up by Ninja-Turtle guy Kevin Eastman, everyone else ripped him off mercilessly, and they sank in a sea of bills and squandered opportunity around issue number 7. (Not everyone obviously, but a surprising amount of creators who really should be ashamed of themselves).

So anyway, I had to make a living doing other work as well, so Cages took its time appearing. I also did Mr. Punch in the middle. When Tundra died, Kitchen Sink took over, and the remaining issues came out under that banner, but only after quite a pause.

PÓM: I work in the second-hand and bargain book end of the retail book trade, and I’ve seen a lot of the things Tundra published in that time turning up cheap, and there certainly seemed to be no sense of restraint or common sense on either side, either creatively or editorially, mostly because everyone got blinded by the idea of there being endless money flowing in from the Turtles, and nobody having to worry about whether or not there was a market for what they were producing, or even if it was any good. There seemed to be lots of full colour hardback things that no-one else would have gone near, simply because they were unpublishable. At least some of the blame is editorial, it seems to me, as there were things going through that no editor should have ever approved, badly conceived and badly drawn books that did none of them any credit.

DMcK: Yes, this is all true. It was a huge waste of money, opportunity and time. Tundra UK was a particularly lamentable episode. I had high hopes for an umbrella label that would bring together self-publishers everywhere under one weightier organization, but it was scuppered in all directions. These opportunities come along once in a very long while, that’s why I jumped at the chance, and that’s why it was such a shame to see it all squandered.

PÓM: I know there was a collected edition of Cages published, but it’s currently unavailable. Am I right in thinking it’s to be re-published in the near future?

DMcK: It was collected into hardback by Kitchen Sink, and then they went down. NBM rereleased it several years ago. Dark Horse will do the paperback edition this year (please note the interview took while we were waiting on the new puublication date for Cages to be confirmed, it was released by DH in September and is available now -- Joe). They will also be releasing a paperback of Pictures That Tick (short stories) and the first hardback of Pictures That Tick 2.

(the cover to the new Dark Horse edition of Cages, by and (c) Dave McKean)

PÓM: You mentioned that you did Mr Punch while all this was going on. You and Neil Gaiman have been collaborating together for quite a long time now, on comics, graphic novels, children’s books, and on movies. I presume that the two of you must find the other easy to work with, to have gone through so many different forms over such a long period of time?

DMcK: Yes, we are good friends, and we trust each other. There is nothing better than growing up with someone, that experience can’t be replicated any other way. I think we both have healthy creative lives apart which fuel our interest in working together again. Also, we have approached projects in many different ways. Sometimes, the text dictates everything, sometimes words and pictures evolve together, occasionally I will get more involved in the writing. Mr. Punch was a very creative to-ing and fro-ing. Neil wrote the script, but I helped organize the story after the first draft.

PÓM: Did you say at one stage that, while you and Neil work very well together, you can’t do so in the same room?

DMcK: We only worked in the same house during the planning and scripting of MirrorMask, and, for that particular project, it was very difficult. I think it was the worst possible thing to work on together in retrospect. We had a brief, which I’m not sure we completely agreed on, we had very different ideas on what the script, and the film, should be doing. I think it would actually be possible to write something together, but we’d have to have a clear idea that we were both completely committed to, and clear about.

PÓM: Was it a big jump to go from working on paper to having to think in terms of the big screen?

DMcK: In some ways, not at all. They are basically the same, telling stories with pictures and words. The sound aspect is a big plus, but I’ve worked a lot with sound and music in the past. In other ways, it is much more chaotic and compromised, so that is tough. I tried to control it all too much, and didn’t get the best out of the situation. On the other hand, it was a complex shoot, with a huge amount of CG work to add later, so it had to be controlled through tight storyboards, otherwise we wouldn’t have had any idea where we were.

PÓM: Are actors harder to deal with than characters you’re making up yourself?

DMcK: Again, yes and no. Actors don’t want to be treated as puppets, and if you want the best from them, you invite them to participate and go with their instincts. It was really Gina McKee that made me understand this. During the shoot for Luna, I think I gave the actors a lot more room to play and be themselves.

PÓM: Were you happy with how MirrorMask turned out? I got a copy recently, and I must say I enjoyed it very much.

DMcK: Thanks, but sadly no. I was very disappointed with the film as soon as it was done. I think during production, it was such a chaotic and overwhelming task, it was hard to sit back and look at the big picture. And if I had questioned it too much, I might never have finished it. As it was, I only had to watch it a couple of times to realise it wasn’t very good. A few nice ideas, a good performance from Stephanie, but could and should have been so much better. The biggest problems are in the script, and it never really recovered.

PÓM: Do you think MirrorMask would have fared better if you’d had a bigger budget, or do you feel it was flawed from the beginning?

DMcK: Well, as I say, I think the generic nature of the story and script are the main problems. There are others, and some of those are related to the budget. There were plenty of technical problems that could have been dealt with by throwing money at the issue, but we could never do that. But there were also many mistakes made that were down to simple inexperience.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pbNMf0FZJw

PÓM: You mentioned the film Luna, which I have to say I know nothing about. What is it? Is it entirely your own work this time?

DMcK: I have written it. It is a contemporary drama with a strange dream sequence running through it, like a parallel narrative. Two couples meet up over a long weekend. One of the couples has lost a baby in hospital. Emotions boil over, and the life of the dead child is lived out in a series of fantastical encounters.

I don’t know when I’ll get the film back on track, soon I hope.

PÓM: You’ve done quite a bit of other film work, including a few pieces with Iain Sinclair. How did you find yourself working with him?

DMcK: Many years ago I heard he was interested in writing a comic, and I was looking for interesting collaborators. We’re still doing odd things together, I just added titles and graded his short film Maggid Street. He’s a unique mind really, a library. A place to wander around in for a while. You’re never really sure what’s real and what’s not, and what being ‘real’ really means. I’ve enjoyed it all.

PÓM: Is that how you ended up doing Slow Chocolate Autopsy together?

DMcK: We first got together to talk about doing a book for the Victor Gollancz line that included Mr. Punch and Signal to Noise, but that project never happened, partly because VG disappeared. So we did a short story for a collection edited by Oscar Zarate called It’s Dark in London, and then expanded the project out to a series of illustrated short stories, three of which were done as comics. Iain has a very dense style of writing, so the challenge was to find a visual equivalent.

PÓM: Is the film making going to continue, or is this kind of creative work too expensive to pursue?

DMcK: Certainly it’s expensive in terms of wasted energy. I have several film projects either out with producers or at script stage, so I’ve decided I’ve spent enough time doing pointless meetings and power lunches. If any of them land, with money in a bank account with the name of the film on it, then I’ll go to work. But I’m not wasting my life any more, time is passing, I have books to do.

PÓM: Speaking of books, you recently did the Fat Duck Cookbook with Heston Blumenthal. How did you become involved with that?

DMcK: We share a publisher in Bloomsbury Press. The editor of the book showed my children’s books, especially Wolves in the Walls, to Heston who wanted a picturebook, Alice in Wonderland feel to his book. We spent several days over the year it was in development and  production, brainstorming and playing off each other. He’s a great character, and a completely engaged mind, interested in  everything.

(classic comics meets cutting edge cooking with Little Heston in Breakfastland in the Big Fat Duck Cookbook, art by and (c) Dave McKean, published Bloomsbury. Pic borrowed from the excellent Art of Dave McKean site)

PÓM: Did you try to persuade him that you needed to get to sample everything in the Fat Duck to help you with the book?

DMcK: Fortunately that was a pre-requisite so, much as I wanted to stay at home with my beans on toast, I had to schlep over to the Duck to try the tasting menu. It was a tough job as 4 hour lunches go. I’ve eaten there a few times and many times at his pub across the road, and I really can see why he’s progressed so quickly, and is considered to be THAT good. It’s a completely unique and utterly memorable experience.

PÓM: What other books are you working on, or have worked on recently? Weren’t you doing another graphic novel with Neil, I seem to recall?

DMcK: No, I’m doing another graphic novel and a book of short comics on my own. I’m doing two more books with David Almond after the big success of The Savage. A book of paintings and more sketchbooks from cities.

PÓM: The sketchbooks, now that you mention them, are something I wanted to ask you about. When we were in Paris last year we went to see an exhibition of your work there, which included some of the sketchbook work. How many cities are you doing, and do you have exhibitions to go along with them in each city, or was that just Paris?

DMcK: So far I have done Vienna, Barcelona, Paris and Brussels. Rome, Amsterdam and Bilbao are on the cards. I’m planning to do around 15, that would make a cube of books, I could then do a slipcase cover for them as a set and call it a square world of sketchbooks. Not sure if any will be outside Europe yet. Some have exhibitions attached, some don’t. I’ve learned so much about drawing from doing these books, I can honestly say that all my recent work has come directly from them.

(cover art for Postcards from Paris by and (c) Dave McKean)

PÓM: Do you think there’s a different attitude to your work in Europe, rather than in the UK?

DMcK: A little. Illustrated books and comics are so woven into the culture in France and Belgium, also to a slightly lesser extent Spain and Germany. But there’s still a distinct separation in the UK between the fine arts and the applied arts. I think those  demarcation lines are blurring, but not quickly enough for me. Also, I think the kind of stories I like to tell are more appreciated in the rest of Europe. The UK still has close links with the US.

PÓM: I saw you on one of those great shows that BBC Four seem to always be making, talking about The Savage. Do you want to tell me a bit more about that, as again I’m not that familiar with it?

DMcK: I’m hugely proud of this book. As soon as I read the manuscript it became very personal for me. It is a young readers’ novella, that is told in prose, comics and illustrated text. A boy called Blue has lost his father, and is encouraged to write about his feelings in school, but he wants to write about The Savage, a wild child who lives in the woods. Fact and fiction merge in a beautiful way, as the Savage helps Blue deal with a local bully. I’m doing two more books with David Almond, the first being Slog’s Dad (you can read reviews of The Savage here and Slog’s Dad here -- Joe) .

PÓM: Can you tell us more about the graphic novel and short stories you mentioned earlier? When should we expect to see those?

DMcK: The novel is called Caligaro and is a recreation of the 1920 silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It’s a long one, around 450 pages, so it won’t be out for a couple of years. The short story collection is Pictures That Tick 2. This should be out from Dark Horse late next year, if I can get all the stories done in time.

PÓM: I follow your Twitter feed, and you always seem to be immensely busy, both with work and with travel. So, two questions: Firstly, how many things are you working on at the moment?

DMcK: At the moment I have just finished another chapbook for Ray Bradbury, I’m doing 3 illustrations for a US magazine, a poster for a film festival in Naples, a book cover for Gordon Dalquist, animated illustrations for Heston Blumenthal’s website, and something for his restaurant. Postcard from Brussels sketchbook is just out, and Amsterdam, Rome and Bilbao are being planned. I have 4 scheduled exhibitions this year, so I’m doing 4 new paintings for the next show in Brussels in May, then preparing prints for a
show of my Nitrate paintings and Klimt’s folio prints in Chicago in July, then a collection of new work for a show in Rye, UK in September, and finally some new photos for a show in the Canary Islands in Dec.

I’m in the middle of Caligaro and Pictures That Tick 2, and reconstituting Cages and I’ve done a new cover for Pictures That Tick 1 for paperback release by Dark Horse. I’ve committed to doing Slog’s Dad for David Almond this year (again this part of the interview was conducted before some of these projects were completed -- Joe), and Smoke and Mirrors for Neil as well. I’m trying to sort out MCPS for my DVD collection of short films, and finally complete the last few bits for my website to go live. My film Luna should come back on line within a couple of months, so then I have to edit and grade it, direct pickups, oversee animation and music.

There would be a Luna book to complete. Also, I’ve pretty much committed to another big graphic novel based on a major franchise, I’m pursuing another very interesting project for next year, and I’m still working with Henson’s on tests for Varjak Paw, and other more distant scripts and books. I’m sure there’s more as well, but I don’t want to think about it.

PÓM: And, speaking of Twitter, how do you feel about that kind of online presence, and the kind of feedback and interaction it gives you?

DMcK: At the moment, I’m enjoying it. As I said online, I work alone, sometimes not speaking to anyone for days, so it’s interesting to break occasionally and have a bit of ‘office’ banter. Also, I realise what a great way it is just to tell people what’s going on, and hear directly from my audience.

PÓM: Do you also pursue art privately for its own sake, as it were, as opposed to what is eventually going to become commercially available?

DMcK: Ha. Not really. Everything finds a place, in a book, a show, or a commercial venue.

PÓM: I know you’re also a jazz musician. I can’t help feeling that there’s a kind of jazz improvisation element to some of your work. Or is that just me trying to be clever, do you think?

DMcK: I think so, they always start with a clear idea, a clear melody, and then they evolve and change, but almost always finish on the melody again. They have to communicate what I intended at the start.

PÓM: And the last question: can you give us a quick round-up of what work of yours is out recently, and is coming out soon?

DMcK: In addition to the list above, I can only add Crazy Hair with Neil, Subterranean special edition of The Graveyard Book, both just out, and Nitrate, a collection of all the silent film paintings and drawings I’ve been doing, out next year sometime.

PÓM: Dave McKean, thank you very much.

DMcK: Thanks.

Pádraig Ó Méalóid: Where are you from, and when were you born?

Peter Hogan: I’m from South London – born there, and lived most of my life there. Born on May 5th 1954.

PÓM: Did you read a lot of comics as a child, do you remember?

PH: Sure, from the age of about five up, and everything that was going – all the obvious British comics, like Beano and Beezer and Dandy. The entire Harvey line, Sad Sack and Casper and Richie Rich and so on. Tons of silver age DC and early Marvel… my Dad used to insist that I also read all of the Classics Illustrated titles he could find, so that I’d gain some semblance of an education along with all the men in tights. The first thing I remember really loving was Alex Toth’s Zorro, which was serialized in Mickey Mouse Weekly. The first thing I remember being completely blown away by was an issue of Superman that retold his origin, with a back-up story about time-travel and parallel worlds. I was six or seven years old, taking in all these science-fiction concepts for the very first time in the course of about an hour. I don’t think I ever recovered.

PÓM: Who was buying all the comics? Was it just your father, or were there older brothers and sisters, or what?

PH: Both my parents bought me comics, but my father initially had a bit of a problem with it. I remember him trying to explain to me, very seriously, that Superman wasn’t real. Something I didn’t really buy into at the time, or now! My brother’s nearly nine years older than me, and he was kind of beyond comics by then… but he still had some old Eagle annuals and some Mad paperbacks lying around. He was also my route to discovering lots of other cool stuff, like Tom Lehrer and the Goons and the Everly Brothers.

But I had cousins my age, and we’d swap boxes of stuff – you’d lose all the comics you had, but I didn’t really mind at the time because I’d get this completely random selection of stuff in return, Archie and Turok and Beetle Bailey, as well as Silver Age DC. Got my first Marvel comic that way, Fantastic Four # 6. Also ended up with a copy of some pre-code horror anthology title – no idea what it was, but it gave me nightmares for weeks. My parents nearly banned comics completely because of that, but I talked them round in the end.

(cover to Fantastic Four #6, with art by Dick Ayers and Jack Kirby, (c) Marvel)

PÓM: Do you still have any of those comics from your childhood left?

PH: The originals? No, all long gone. But I’ve replaced a few. Every once in a while I’ll see something up on a comic shop wall and succumb to temptation.

PÓM: Were you reading books at the same time, or was your childhood reading mostly comics?

PH: Probably more comics than books, but I still read fairly widely – lots of Billy Bunter and Tarzan. Read all the James Bond books when I was nine or ten, after seeing From Russia with Love for the first time. But it’s the fantastical stuff that I think of first and foremost … Narnia and Wind in the Willows when I was about seven, then Conan Doyle and John Wyndham and H.G. Wells and Alan Garner. Tolkien and Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft I discovered in my early teens.

PÓM: Did you decide you wanted to write comics from reading them then, do you think?

PH: No, never gave it a thought. I don’t think I was aware that there were such things as comics writers until Stan Lee made it obvious – you just assumed the artists did it all. But I didn’t really consider comics as a possible career until literally decades later.

PÓM: Did you have any sort of career path in mind, then, when you left school? Did you get any sort of qualification, for instance?

PH: I probably did want to be a writer, but I didn’t have the confidence to pursue it. I also kind of felt that while I knew I had some ability with words, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what I wanted to say. So while I wrote a lot of bad adolescent poetry in my teens, and I’ve been tinkering around with songwriting ever since, I didn’t attempt any prose writing or fiction at all until I was into my thirties.

My father had sent both my brother and I to Dulwich College, which is a public school in South London, and when I was there it was a real mixture of 19th century attitudes shot through with a hefty streak of arty liberalism. I was there between the ages of nine and sixteen, and largely hated it at the time, but I feel a certain fondness for the place in hindsight. Anyway, my father then managed to scupper my education by breaking up with my mother during my very first term at the place. Pretty much nobody got divorced in those days, so there wasn’t anything resembling a support network, or counselling, or even much in the way of sympathy.  I had a pretty rough ride of it, and as a result fell drastically behind academically – and I didn’t really catch up again until after I left school. Since my ‘real’ life was pretty hellish, I simply retreated into fantasy worlds – comics, horror, science-fiction.

I left school with two ‘O’ levels, scraped up another four and a couple of ‘A’ levels at adult education colleges later on. But I spent most of the next eight years as a bookseller, mainly at Dillon’s University Bookshop, which is now a large Waterstone’s. That’s kind of where I grew up, really.

I left there in 1978, because my friend Pete Townshend wanted to open a bookshop in Richmond, and he asked me to set it up and run it for him.

PÓM: That would be Magic Bus Bookstore, would it? How did that work out?

PH: Magic Bus Bookshop, actually… and while we’re correcting Wikipedia, I should probably point out that my first wife never actually worked there, though that is where we met. She wandered in as a customer, and I chatted her up.

Anyway, Pete had found an empty shop and bought it, and I then had three months to turn it into a functioning bookshop, aided by a couple of other people. We opened in October, and our first Christmas was a roaring success. It was a smallish general bookshop, but we ignored some subjects completely and leant heavily in some of the directions that Pete and I were both interested in, like mysticism and music. We were fairly Stalinist about the mystical side, in that we completely bypassed all the stuff one might categorise as new age twaddle, since I saw no point in stocking books I considered deeply dubious or downright pointless. I mean, you can hold a crystal for as long as you like, but it’s not going to make you a better person – and I don’t really care whether crap sells. It’s still crap, so why stock it?

Anyway, I ran the shop for about a year, then transferred over to Pete’s publishing company, Eel Pie, where my brief was to produce some decent books about rock music and pop culture in general. Did that for just over three years, during which time we published a couple of dozen books I suppose, a handful of which I’m really proud of: Pennie Smith’s book of Clash photos, Viv Stanshall’s Sir Henry At Rawlinson End, Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray’s Bowie – An Illustrated Record, Tony Stewart’s Cool Cats, which was a book about street style that featured contributions from Ian Dury and Paul Weller. The last couple of years of Eel Pie was basically myself on the editorial side, with John Brown on the business side. John of course went on to publish Viz, amongst other things.

(Pennie Smith’s totally iconic Clash photograph, (c) Pennie Smith)

And we were doing fairly well, for a small publisher. But Pete had managed to get himself hooked on heroin, and when he got clean again he hit a financial crisis and decided he was going to radically change his entire life. So he quit The Who, and shut down all his businesses – many of which deserved to be shut down, because they were insane. Recording studios on barges, for example. But Pete told me years later that his accountant was completely mystified as to why he’d shut the bookshop and the publishing company down, because they were actually making money. So it goes. The bookshop got sold, and has changed hands several times since then but is still a bookshop, which I’m quite pleased about.

As for me, I suddenly found myself both unemployed and single again. So I went to New York, and spent a couple of months there editing Dave Marsh’s book about The Who, which was mildly ironic in the circumstances.

PÓM: I think you’ve corrected several things that Wikipedia has wrong, just in that last answer!

PH: Yeah, I’m finding this whole business a little bizarre, but if people are going to write stuff about me, I’d rather it be accurate than not.

PÓM: Before we go on, can I ask how you ended up being mates with Pete Townshend? For all I know, of course, he could have been your next-door neighbour…

PH: That’s okay, feel free to backtrack on stuff if you want to. Let’s see… I first met Pete socially in… 1972 or 1973, I think, because we were both followers of Meher Baba. Still are, for that matter … though I don’t really have much involvement with Baba organizations or centres these days. It tends to become a much more personal thing, as time goes on. For me, anyway.

PÓM: At this point we’re up to about the early 1980s, I think, seeing as Dave Marsh’s Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who was published in the US by St. Martin’s Press in 1983. I know that you didn’t start working on things like Crisis and Revolver for a few years yet, so what were you doing in the interim?

PH: Yeah, this is going to be another long answer. I edited Dave’s book in the spring of ’83. After that, I came back to Britain, and decided to set up my own literary agency, which was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. I found out the hard way that I just wasn’t a businessman. I had a few successes, but not enough to amount to a living, so I was having to do all kinds of other freelance work to keep myself and the agency afloat – editing, and publishing consultancy stuff. It was a bad period, which went on for about four years. I developed serious back problems, and was having cortisone injections directly into my spine, which sent me a little bit crazy for a year or two.

But at least I had a few jobs that were interesting during that period. I was a record company press officer for a while – worked at Rough Trade during the early days of the Smiths, handled the press for the first London gig by Los Lobos, worked on press for REM while they were still on IRS and did a short tour with them.

A few months after all that ended, Dez Skinn asked me to help out in one of his comics shops. I’d met Dez right at the end of the Eel Pie days, because I’d wanted to put together book collections of Marvelman and V for Vendetta. I got in touch with Dez again a year or so later to revive the idea, this time with me acting as Quality’s literary agent. I set up a deal with Virgin, but it all fell through because they primarily wanted Marvelman, and that had already begun its descent into legal chaos.

Anyway, I ended up working for Dez for about a year. He’d got the licence to do 2000AD reprints for the States, and I did some of the editorial work on those. I also caught up on all the comics material that had passed me by till then – Miller and Chaykin and so on – and met most of the people on the British comics scene during that period. That all ended too, of course, because Dez eventually parted company with his backers, and they kept the licence.

That takes us up to the spring of ’87, when I fortunately came to my senses long enough to realize that I’d developed a serious booze problem, and that I’d better do something about it pronto, because it was only going to get worse. So I knocked it on the head, and haven’t touched a drop since.

It was rip it up and start again time. I finally shut down the literary agency and began trying to reinvent myself as a journalist. I knew quite a few people in magazines, so I slowly built up a trickle of steady work. Mainly wrote about film, for magazines like Melody Maker and Sky and Vox, and much later on Uncut. I also wrote for a kids’ newspaper called Scoop, for whom I interviewed people that I’m really glad I got to meet, like Hanna & Barbera, Jim Henson, Patrick Stewart, Mark Hammill… I even interviewed Ricki Lake, when the original Hairspray came out.

It was also the time of the big comics boom, so people were constantly asking me to write articles about comics, and I interviewed most of the big names of the day, like Alan [Moore], and Grant [Morrison], and the Hernandez brothers. Neil Gaiman I knew because I’d done editorial work on his Douglas Adams book.

Probably because of all that, Igor Goldkind asked me to go and work for Fleetway, just to babysit Crisis for a couple of weeks so that Steve MacManus could take a much needed holiday. Steve asked me to stay on as his assistant on Crisis, and six months later he asked me to put Revolver together.

PÓM: How did you find working on Crisis?

PH: Interesting. I grew very fond of Steve, who was really trying his best to do something different and occasionally succeeding. The Brendan McCarthy pin-ups were great, and he’d managed to discover Garth Ennis, who was obviously really talented even then. Signing up the Pleece brothers was pretty smart as well.

The trouble was, Crisis had Pat Mills’ Third World War hanging round its neck like an  albatross. It was an unreadable shambles, to my mind, just Pat ranting away on his soapbox, and it was eating up half the comic. But Steve was committed to it – probably out of loyalty to Pat. I can’t even remember when it finally got dumped, but it seemed to take forever, and it really held the magazine back.

PÓM: You mentioned working with Dez Skinn, who seems to polarise opinion amongst people who’ve met him. How did you find him?

PH: Dez is … a bit of a rogue, obviously. But he has the charm to go with it, and whatever else he may have done, he at least had the gumption to give the world Warrior, and all that was in it. I can completely understand why so many people are pissed off with him, and they have my utmost sympathy but … personally speaking, I have to say that the man never did me any harm, and he gave me work when I needed it. Without Dez I might never have got involved in comics, though that’s definitely been a mixed blessing.

PÓM: What was your brief for Revolver?

PH: Pretty open-ended. Basically, they trusted me to put something together, and let me get on with it. They wanted to do something vaguely adult, and not as po-faced as Crisis … and they had a couple of ingredients already racked up. Dare was already half-finished, and had been for a long time. Charlie Murray’s Hendrix strip Steve had bought a few months earlier, at my suggestion. I caught flak for that one, because a lot of people didn’t understand why we were doing a strip about a 1960s musician. I’d get really depressed about it, but practically every day I’d see 17-year-old kids on the street wearing Hendrix t-shirts. It was the people who were a bit older than that who didn’t get it, because they weren’t caught up in the whole rave-psychedelia thing that was going on at the time.

(cover to the first issue of the short-lived but fondly remembered Revolver, featuring Grant Morrison and Rian Hughes’ famous take on Dan Dare)

Anyway, given those two strips, what do you add? It blows the whole thing wide open, so that seemed the only way to go. Beyond that, there was a time factor. I was given the go ahead just after Angouleme, so it was January or February… and they wanted to launch in June. So there were lots of people who couldn’t sign up for the kickoff because they were busy elsewhere, and we basically ended up with the best line-up I could put together in what was a ridiculously short space of time. Thank God we had Rogan Gosh and Dare, both of which were class acts.

But we had all kinds of good things lined up for the future, and the Hallowe’en and Valentines specials are probably the best example of what Revolver might have become in time, if the rug hadn’t been pulled out from under us. The excuse was low sales, but… the truth was, they’d screwed up the distribution. Outside of comics shops, the first couple of issues were almost impossible to find – and then we were judged on the sales figures for those issues and found wanting, even though the ongoing sales figures were well above what they’d hoped for.

I honestly don’t know if this was a case of simple ineptitude, or malice aforethought. I’ve been told that there was a Maxwell executive a couple of levels above Fleetway who absolutely hated them, wanted the whole division to fail. He wanted to cut their budget so he could launch his own pet project, a music magazine. I’ve even heard that he’d told the sales force ‘not to bother with this one’. The music magazine subsequently lost a fortune, apparently, whereas Revolver actually made money. Not much, but some.

PÓM: I know at least some of the strips from Revolver were continued elsewhere, or collected, weren’t they? A particular favourite of mine was Happenstance and Kismet. Did anything ever happen with that?

PH: Dare was concluded in Crisis, and has since been collected and republished several times, and Vertigo picked up Rogan Gosh. Several of the short stories got republished elsewhere, I think, including Neil’s Feeders & Eaters. Nothing further happened with Happenstance that I know of… if it got translated into Albanian, nobody’s told me.

PÓM: Wouldn’t it be around the same time that you started actually writing comics?

PH: There was one important thing that came first, and that was the Comic Relief Comic [AKA The Totally Stonking, Surprisingly Educational And Utterly Mindboggling Comic Relief Comic]. Neil Gaiman roped me into that one, shortly before Revolver ended. Fleetway had agreed to do all the production and sales on the Comic Relief title, and they also loaned me out as an editor to work on it. Then Revolver folded and I was made redundant … but I felt kind of obligated to Comic Relief to see it all out, which took a couple more months. But that was okay. I figured I might never do anything for charity ever again, so it was time to step up … and even though it ended up being one of the most complicated and demanding jobs I’ve ever done, it also kept me sane, by giving me something worthwhile to do. It turned out well, too, and did what it was supposed to, which was to raise a stack of cash for genuinely good causes.

(cover for the charity publication The Totally Stonking, Surprisingly Educational And Utterly Mindboggling Comic Relief Comic, edited Hogan, Gaiman and Curtis)

The editorial team was Neil, myself, and Richard Curtis. Grant Morrison had come up with an overall plot for the thing, which we divided up into two-page sections and parcelled out to a whole load of different writers to turn into scripts. Once those scripts came back to us, the only way to get them all to tie up – and to improve the weaker ones – was to sit down and rewrite the whole thing as one cohesive script. Which the three of us then did, all huddled round one computer. I’m sure my input was minimal compared to Neil’s and Richard’s, and Neil did most of the typing, as I recall …

But it changed my life. In terms of trying to write a comics script myself, up until then I think I’d always had a terror of the blank page, or perhaps I should say the blinking cursor. Where do you start ? The answer is that you start anywhere you like… Doesn’t have to be Page One, Panel One. Could be somewhere in the middle, or at the end. You can start with an image, or a line of dialogue. It really doesn’t matter, because you can always change it later. The most important thing is that you actually make a start, and the second most important thing is that you finish. Anyway, watching Neil and Richard in action kind of… demystified the process for me, and took away some of the terror.

So, I ended up writing my first ever comic script for that, the two-page section of Dan Dare meeting Dr Who, which John Ridgway did the art for. When I finished it I still doubted that it was good enough, but Neil very sweetly told me that it was as good as any of the other contributions, and better than some.

After that, I decided comics writing was something worth exploring further. I persuaded Alan McKenzie to let me write the Steel Claw for his Action Special, sold Richard Burton a couple of Future Shocks and then a series for 2000AD… and while I’m sure there was an element of Richard and Alan giving me a tryout because I was a mate, they wouldn’t have kept giving me work after that if they hadn’t liked what I was delivering.

PÓM: Your time on 2000AD ended up quite abruptly, I believe. Do you want to say anything about that?

PH: 200OAD is like Comics Academy, and I learned a lot from working there. You always tend to wince a bit when looking back at stuff, but… I think I did some good work for them. Some of the short stories, the second Timehouse series… the Judge Dredd story wasn’t bad, and I think all the Robo-Hunter stories I did with Rian were absolutely spot on. But Strontium Dogs and Durham Red were… a bit of a curate’s egg. Some of it really works, but overall it’s kind of a mess. That was partly my fault, partly theirs – they kept changing story lengths on me, which made it hard to plan out. If I were doing it now, I wouldn’t have gone the meandering route – I’d just jump ten years into the future and explain the backstory on the run.

Anyway, that all ended when David Bishop became editor. The thing is, David had a perfect right to use – or not use – anybody that he chose, and that’s absolutely fair enough. But when he rang me up to fire me, he was kind of unnecessarily unpleasant about it. He’s at least had the grace to apologise for it since, but he basically told me that he wasn’t going to give me any more work, and that the work of mine that was already finished he was going to savagely edit and re-write. I told him that in that case I’d like my name taken off it, and we subsequently agreed that those stories would appear under the name ‘Alan Smithee’, which is the traditional Hollywood label for disowned work.

In point of fact, David only made one real change to the Durham Red story, and it was one I could easily have lived with if only we’d discussed it sensibly. The main change he made to the Strontium Dogs story concerned the last page. Instead of being a revelation that set up some interesting possibilities for the future, you had this really limp conclusion, which just seemed to me like David shooting himself in the foot. But… stuff like this is par for the course, there’s no point in getting too upset about it. As it happened, I was already working for Vertigo by then.

PÓM: So, how did you end up writing for the American market, and for Vertigo in particular?

PH: Alisa Kwitney rang me up. She was getting The Dreaming off the ground, and had discovered some of my 2000AD material in a dusty corner of the Vertigo office, and had liked it. She invited me to pitch her a story, liked what I pitched and bought it. That was ‘The Lost Boy’, where I got to work with the wonderful Steve Parkhouse for the first time – and it was the longest and most complex story I’d tackled up till then. I learnt a lot – and it’s quite a jump, moving from doing six-page chunks in 2000AD to doing twenty-plus pages at a time.

Anyway, after that Alisa asked me to do another story, and then another, and another… and I loved doing them, they were easily the most challenging and interesting things I’d written up till then. I thought Sandman was terrific, a stunning piece of work – and obviously a great springboard for new stories. I think Neil was quite surprised when I first turned up there – he’d moved to the States a while before, and had never seen any of my work for 2000 AD.  Fortunately, he liked what I was coming up with. I don’t know how many other Dreaming writers took the opportunity to pick his brains about that whole universe, but I did – partly because I already knew him quite well, and partly because it seemed foolish not to ! Neil was always incredibly helpful and supportive throughout the whole thing, and afterwards.

(the Dreaming: Through the Gates of Horn and Ivory by Peter Hogan, Caitlin Kiernan,  Jeff Nicholson, Peter Doherty et al, based on creations by Neil Gaiman, published DC/Vertigo)

But at some point Alisa and Neil decided that the Dreaming format just wasn’t working, and that instead of switching writers practically every issue they were going to use just two, myself and Caitlin Kiernan. So the two of us came up with a storyline that ran for a number of issues, but I think we were a bit of a mismatch, and the collaboration wasn’t that successful. Caitlin had also come up with this long continuing story that she wanted to do, so they gave The Dreaming to her from then on.

I was already knee-deep in writing Love Street at that point, which was originally intended to be an arc in The Dreaming. So, when things changed, they decided to put that out in a new title, The Sandman Presents. The original plan was that they’d do three or four projects a year under that title, most of them by me … but it didn’t work out that way. I wrote the next one, Marquee Moon, and then while it was being drawn Alisa decided she’d had enough of editing, and wanted to spend more time with her kids, and do other things as well. But when she left – apart from a one issue fill-in on The Books Of Magic – that was the end of my career at Vertigo. Marquee Moon went into limbo, and I have no real idea why … I think it’s probably as simple as Alisa being gone meant that I was gone too.

Something similar happened to me at Marvel. I did one project for them, a WWII story that teamed up Captain America and Sgt Fury with the Ancient One. And it was a fun one to do, but… Bob Harras, who’d commissioned the story, got fired while I was writing it, and then Bobbie Chase, who edited it, got fired while it was in production. After that, it felt like everyone I talked to at Marvel was like, ‘stay away from him – he has the Touch of Death’! At any rate, I never got any more work out of them. I was supposed to do a Madam Hydra story with Bill Sienkiewicz for a Captain America anthology, but we were the last people to get signed up, so we were the first ones to be dropped when the page count got cut.

Sometimes you just hit simple bad luck. Like … Will Eisner told Kitchen Sink to hire me for The New Adventures of The Spirit. So I duly wrote two Spirit short stories, and then Kitchen Sink went under, a couple of weeks before the first story was due to appear. Still, at least I’d had a nice letter of encouragement from Will, which really made my day, to put it mildly.

PÓM: I’m particularly curious to know how you ended up working with Alan Moore on the America’s Best Comics titles?

PH: Well, the backdrop is the fact that I’ve known Alan for well over twenty years now. I interviewed him several times as a journalist, and we always got on well – I’m only six months younger than him, and we share quite a few reference points. So, when I started writing comics myself, I’d send Alan copies of the odd thing that I was particularly pleased with, and several of them he’d said he liked. Then about a year or so after he started ABC he did an interview in which he said that he was hoping to eventually bring other writers in to work on the line. So I rang him up, and said if that ever happened I’d like to be considered – and Alan, bless him, told me I was already on his list.

It took about a year before anything happened, and then it was suggested that I might do something with Tesla. Alan had already done a story about other Teslas from parallel Earths, and I thought there was more mileage in that – which really appealed to Scott Dunbier, since it meant he could recruit a whole bunch of great artists to do a few pages apiece. So, that was The Many Worlds of Tesla Strong. I’ve heard of quite a few people since who thought that Alan wrote it, which is about as big a compliment as I could ask for.

PÓM: Is it difficult trying to carry on a title Alan has already worked on? And do you get any sort of negative feedback for doing so?

PH: Well, Alan’s obviously a hard act to follow – as is Neil, for that matter – but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. I was enjoying Neil’s take on Marvelman before it got shot down, and I enjoyed quite a few Swamp Thing stories by other people after Alan’s run. So, it obviously can be done, but I’ll let other people be the judge of how well I’m doing.

As for negative feedback… yeah, there’s been a fair number of people saying things like, ‘well, he’s not Alan Moore’. And I never claimed I was, you know? It seems to be subsiding a little these days, and at least with Tom Strong they can measure me against all the other writers who’ve had a go at the character as well.

But I got a lot of it when we were doing Terra Obscura. It’s not as if they’d have had Terra Obscura without me either, because … it was something I’d suggested doing, because I thought those characters had real potential, and I still do. But Wildstorm wouldn’t go for it unless Alan was on board as well. So Alan suggested that we plot it out together, and that I then go off and write the scripts. So that’s what happened, and it was basically an incredibly generous act on Alan’s part, to keep me in work. I’m going to have to be his butler or something in my next life, to work off the debt – and of course, I learned a phenomenal amount from him in the course of writing it all.

As far as following Alan goes, the whole Tom Strong universe is somewhere I feel completely comfortable and assured. The hardest things for me were the comedy characters I did for the ABC A-Z. The Splash Brannigan one isn’t bad, basically thanks to Hilary Barta suggesting lots of ingredients we could use. But Jack B. Quick is one of Alan’s best-ever strips, I think, and although what I did is likeable enough, it’s not up to his standard by any means. The Top 10 entry I’m pleased with, but that one had a lot of input from Alan … I got to read the Forty-Niners script, which was still being drawn at the time, and Alan filled me in on other material that he’d planned to use but never got around to.

PÓM: While I have you, do you know what happened to the ABC A-Z series, which only ran to four of the six issues it was supposed to be?

PH: The first I knew that there was anything wrong was after they made a printing error in the Terra Obscura issue, leaving the text off one page. So, I said I hoped this would get put right for the trade collection, and was told there wasn’t going to be one, and that not only that, but the series wasn’t going to be completed. Low sales was the reason given.

The only thing of mine that didn’t appear was the Smax entry, and that was easily the weakest one I did. I’m actually more annoyed that we didn’t get to see Steve Moore’s take on Promethea, which was probably well worth seeing.

When the series was first mooted it struck me as a bizarre title to publish unless they were planning to do an ABC relaunch after Alan finished up, in which case it made perfect sense. So I assumed that was what was going to happen, but as time went on and nothing was said, it became clear that was the end of it all. Alan had never had any problems with the thing continuing after he left – though I think Wildstorm accepted there was no point doing more Promethea without him – so … I don’t know. Maybe things changed somewhere along the line.

(cover art to Peter Hogan’sTom Strong and the  Robots of Doom #4, cover by Sprouse, Story & Strachan, based on characters created by Alan Moore, published Wildstorm/DC)

PÓM: Tell me about Tom Strong and the Robots of Doom.

PH: After ABC shut down I tried banging on various doors in the comics industry, but nobody answered, so … I wandered off to do other things. Wrote four music books in four years and became a father, so I wasn’t exactly idle.

Then Roz Kaveney wrote some nice things about Terra Obscura in her book on superheroes, so I dropped Ben Abernathy a line to let him know about it, and that got us talking again. We’d discussed various projects without much success when Ben asked me how Alan Moore might feel about the possibility of my writing Tom Strong. So I rang Alan up and asked him, and fortunately for me he was absolutely fine with the idea. He just said, “You’ve got this whole backstory and universe to play with now, so go and have fun with it”. And I have done! I’m also really, really pleased that Chris Sprouse came on board as well.

For me, plotting Tom stories is often a case of problem solving. You want to do x, so which character or device will help you bring that about? In this case, if Tom was to have any kind of ongoing future, I couldn’t really have the world stay the way that Alan left it. So, who might want to change the world? Tom’s illegitimate son Albrecht seemed a good candidate, and time travel a good tool. The Dero I brought in partly because they’d never been used and partly because… there’s an old joke about time travel stories, that if you change anything at all in the past then the Nazis will end up ruling the world. It’s an idea that’s been done badly so many times. So, I wanted Albrecht to have a weapon that would make taking over the world actually feasible, and the Dero fit the bill. Other story problems brought other characters onstage to solve them, and the whole process flowed quite organically.

Anyway, I set out wanting to write a perfect Tom Strong story, and I think I’ve come pretty close. There are, I hope, quite a few surprises lined up before story’s end. I’m very pleased with the finished thing, and working with Chris and Karl is always an absolute joy.

I was talking with someone the other day who’d coined a term to embrace Tom Strong and Planetary and Grant’s Superman and a few other titles. He called it ‘Postmodern Silver Age’. I’m not entirely convinced that makes any sense, but it does have a nice ring to it.

(a page from issue 4 of Tom Strong and the Robots of Doom by Peter Hogan, artwork by Chris Sprouse, published Wildstorm/DC)

PÓM: In case people haven’t heard of them before, tell us about the Dero?

PH: The Dero are an old pulp concept dreamt up way back when by a guy called Richard Shaver, that there’s a race of ‘detrimental robots’ hidden away in caverns under the Earth. Alan had planned to use his own version of them in Tom Strong, which is why there’s a statue of their leader in Tom’s hall of villains, but he never got round to it. I’ve no idea what Alan might have done with them, but they fitted into my story perfectly.

PÓM: Do you have any more plans for more Tom Strong stories after Robots of Doom?

PH: Sure. I think Chris and I would both be happy to do Tom Strong stories almost indefinitely, but only time will tell if we’ll get the chance to. Regardless, I think I can safely predict that you will be seeing more of Tom, but that’s all I can tell you for now.

PÓM: Are there any plans for the rest of the ABC properties to come back, do you know, either written by you or by others?

PH: Not by me, and not that I know of. Promethea I think they’ll leave well alone … but it’d be a shame if they didn’t do more Top Ten. I was enjoying it, and I don’t think I’m alone in that.

PÓM: What about Terra Obscura?

PH: Maybe, if the Tom Strong stuff goes down well enough. But right now I think it’s far more likely that you’ll see it in the pages of a Tom Strong story than in its own series.

Q: Didn’t you do a Batman story for DC at one point?

PH:  Yeah, years ago – can’t even remember when, but it was around the time I was doing stuff for The Dreaming. I wrote a short story featuring Poison Ivy for one of the 80-page Giant specials – just a ten-pager, and it was more cramped than I would have liked, but… I still actually got to write Batman, which makes the six-year-old inside me jump for joy whenever I remember it. Had fun writing Alfred too, but… that’s been my only venture into the DCU to date. A pity, because I suggested a few nice ideas to them, though I’m not sure anyone there actually read them – at one point John Bolton and I were talking about maybe doing something with the Demon, but I couldn’t get anyone at DC to even discuss it.

PÓM: What else are you working on at the moment?

PH: I’m about to start trying to find homes for a couple of creator-owned projects, one of them in partnership with Steve Parkhouse – and hopefully somebody will offer me some superhero stuff this time around, who knows ?

PÓM: What were the music books you wrote?

PH: I contributed to Glenn Baker’s book on the Monkees, and went on to write books about the Bangles, the Doors, Queen, REM, Shirley Bassey, the Velvet Underground – did two books about them – and Nick Drake. There’s also an unpublished book about Johnny Cash, which may still come out one day. To some extent that does reflect some of my musical tastes, but mostly they were just subjects that publishers asked me to do, so I did. The Rough Guide to the Velvet Underground is probably the best of them – I managed to collate a load of really obscure material from all over the place and even dug up some brand-new info – but even that one has some editorial errors, sigh.

PÓM: As you’ve an interest in music, and would’ve been the right sort of an age at the right sort of time, did you end up in a punk band in London in the seventies, by any chance?

PH: No. I was in a comedy band in the mid-70s called Laughing Jack Gasbag – never recorded, only did a handful of gigs, but people seemed to like us. My friend Michael Jones was in that with me, and he’s now in a musical comedy duo called The Big Fibbers, probably playing tonight at a festival near you.

Other than that, I spent a lot of time in the 70s and 80s making slightly more serious music with Michael and various other friends in garages and living rooms, and I actually recorded a couple of singles in the 1980s – one at either end of the decade – that were never released. The mainstream labels said I was too indie, and the indie labels said I was too mainstream, and I simply didn’t have the money to stick them out myself. One of these years I might do it, just for the hell of it.

PÓM: As far as I can see, you don’t really have any sort of Internet presence, like a webpage or a FaceBook or Twitter account. Any reason why not?

PH: Laziness, probably. Friends keep nagging me about it, so I keep vaguely thinking I should, but… it’s just another thing to do. I can really understand the appeal of blogging, but I just know if I started it’d quickly expand to fill up my entire day. But there isn’t enough time to read or watch a sunset as it is… and I’d rather live in the moment than comment on it, you know?

And part of me looks at the whole cyberthing and thinks, there’s never been a better time to be a recluse.

Always happy to talk to people like yourself, though.

PÓM: Thanks very much for taking the time to answer all my questions, Peter. It’s been a real pleasure doing this interview with you.

PH: The pleasure was half mine.

FPI would like to thank both Peter and Pádraig for sharing their time and thoughts with us; Peter’s current series, Tom Strong and the Robots of Doom (how can you not love a series with a title like that?) is running right now from DC, with the fourth issue recently released.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PÓM: How did Grandville come about?

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

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

PÓM: Can you tell us a bit about Grandville?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BT: My pleasure.

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

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

5 and the 23 enigma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PÓM: What sort of a place is Wigan?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PÓM: So did you study art at any point?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PÓM: So how did Arkwright fare in Near Myths?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BT: What, try doing a graphic novel?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PÓM: Are we ever likely to see it collected?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PÓM: When did you start working on Rainbow Orchid?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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