Ken Harrison: You were a film journalist before you wrote strips for 2000 AD (and my understanding is that you still write journalism). How much was that a help or a hindrance to you when penning comic scripts? I’m thinking that studying and thinking about films may have helped develop your visual literacy.

Alec Worley: I was a film journalist for about six years before I got into comics. I wrote for all sorts of magazines, from Sight & Sound to Zoo. When I went freelance back in 2000, I had this tragically naïve plan that niche journalism was going to pay the bills in between writing comics, novels, screenplays and wotnot. Suffice to say, many bitter lessons were learned trying to make that work! These days, I do the odd film piece for SFX, but the film writing’s fast losing ground to the comics work, to be honest.

I studied film under my own steam just before I left school. I pinched a massive book on film theory from the library – not cool! – and studied it cover to cover and back again. In a way, I got into reviewing as a way of finding out more about how films and storytelling work, which is something I’ve always been interested in. People often make the comparison between films and comics, but the similarities are mainly in editing, I think, between ‘the cut’ in film and ‘the gutter’ in comics. Moving from shot to shot and assembling meaning as you go along. But yeah, studying and writing about film definitely sharpened my instincts for visual storytelling, when to cut to a close-up, an establishing shot, how to shape the story and what have you. Having said that, I think I came to comics with a certain amount of arrogance, in that I knew I could write, I knew how stories worked and I knew the genres. But after receiving some of my very first amends from Tharg The Ever-Perceptive it soon became apparent that I had a lot to learn. And always will.

KH: How long had you been trying to sell scripts to 2000 AD before you sold your first Shock and did you have any other experience of writing comics?

AW: I decided to lay siege to 2000 AD in Christmas 2006. The plan was to spend the next few months writing nothing but Future Shocks and to write them as though they’d already been rejected. That way your head is clear to just write the thing without worrying about whether it’ll get accepted or getting bummed out when it gets turned down. Based on my previous ventures into submission hell, I assumed I’d never hear back or a rejection would turn up a year or so after I’d forgotten ever having written to them. As it turned out, Tharg got back to me within a week. I think I was lucky enough to have started submitting just as the Nerve Centre was commencing its periodic shovel through the slush pile.

Anyway, Tharg said he liked the idea but it needed revising. I’d written two more Shocks by then and was on a bit of a roll. So instead of reworking the first one, I just sent the next one the same day I got the reply from Tharg. That one got rejected a week later by a chap called David Leach, who said I should definitely send more scripts and whose feedback at the time was invaluable. By now, I’d written a stack of Shocks and when David received submission three he got back to me a few days later saying, ‘Christ, you’re keen!’ He said the script needed reworking but the idea and the twist were solid.

I dutifully tweaked it several times, but a month later, having completed the final pass, David moved on to Titan and my finely tuned Future Shock tumbled into a Thrill Vortex never to be seen again. I continued writing Future Shocks until I had a stock of about five or six, which I fed into the slush pile over the next few months. Eventually, Tharg began picking some of these up, by which time I was writing a film review column for the Megazine.

I’d previously attempted to get into some other UK comics including those by Panini, Titan and Games Workshop. That Warhammer Comic folded three days after I sent my submission! I very nearly got into Commando, whose then-editor George Low, was fantastically encouraging. I also had a few scripts picked up by some excellent small press comics, including FutureQuake, Something Wicked and The Girly Comic.

KH: Why comics? Why not prose fiction or screenplays or some other form?

AW: I’ve always loved comics, but I never thought they were a professional option until I realised some of them actually took submissions. I remember doing these sample scripts for Panini. I had Spidey and Black Cat vs. the Lizard in a museum full of animated dinosaur skeletons. Night at the Museum came out a year later, dammit! And another one with Spidey and Ghost Rider vs. Carnage on a runaway train. I was surprised at how easily the ideas came, how naturally the process flowed and how much it felt like I already knew how to do this even though I’d never done it before, which was a bit spooky.

Other than that. I’d pitched tie-in novels, screenplays, radio plays and everything else that involves you having to write 30,000 unpaid words based on the vaguest possible guidelines on the off-chance that an editor might say ‘yes’ to a project that will consume your life and end up paying you less than if you were stood at a set of traffic lights cleaning car windscreens with your tongue! No, the freelance experience hasn’t left me feeling at all bitter. Why do you ask…?

The thing is, in my experience, the try-everything-and-see-what-sticks approach rarely works. I found it really helped to focus on one thing at a time, gather momentum and have a body of work – published or not – to stand on. Comics was really the first time I’d ever done that.

KH: You’re talking about something in your answers here that I think I haven’t seen talked about much by comic creators: the importance of cultivating a relationship with an editor. How important do you think it was to show you were ‘serious’ about comics writing by regularly submitting scripts?

AW: I guess you prove you’re ‘serious’ by actually being serious, by just doing your job as effectively as possible, by being practical and thinking ahead. When I was Future Shocking, I was scoring one commission for at least one rejection, so it was important to have a pile of finished scripts to shovel onto the fire. I figured any that got bounced would still have been good enough to polish up according to Tharg’s feedback and sent to find a home in the small press. That way nothing was wasted.

I think in terms of being ‘serious’ about what you’re doing, I remember reading an interview with Ken Loach in which he said if you want to be a successful filmmaker you’ve got to be more in love with filmmaking than with the idea of being a filmmaker. And it’s the same with writing, or art, or music or whatever it is you’re into. Getting starry-eyed and full of yourself or starting to think about developing your ‘brand’ or whatever will only distract you. When I got the greenlight to write the first series of Age of the Wolf, I spent the first few weeks in a daze, thinking, ‘Bloody Hell, I’m actually gonna be writing a series for 2000 AD! How awesome is that?’ I got so carried away with the romance of what I was doing I lost sight of the best way in which to do the job and my first draft of the series breakdown suffered because of that.

Luckily, Tharg The Wise And Munificent has always been on hand to keep me on course. Since my very first commission, every single bit of feedback has been noted and referred back to. Having constant pointers from a detached and experienced editor makes it easy to deal with bad habits and blind spots. It can be embarrassing when your editor points out that you’ve made a goof, but it’s a good way to learn.

KH: Did the movie review column help in terms of getting work at 2000 AD in that you were in regular contact with Matt Smith?

AW: I’m not sure exactly how much the movie column helped. I guess you’d have to ask Matt. But my always being a good boy couldn’t have hurt, always meeting the deadline and the word count, and making sure the copy didn’t read like it was written by a stoned orang-utan with a Wikipedia fixation – and I’ve done enough sub-editing in my time to know how often that’s the case! In that sense, writing for the Meg and the Prog is the same as writing for any other outlet. As a freelancer, it’s your job to make the editor’s life as stress-free as possible. And when it comes to writing comics scripts, I’d extend that to the artist and the letterer too.

KH: How did the review column come about?

AW: I was early for a screening for another magazine and was mooching around Borders where I found a copy of the Megazine featuring a review of X-Men 3. I didn’t realize the Meg published reviews and, as a jobbing film journo, you’re always on the look-out for paying outlets that may be small enough to not have a dedicated film writer on their books. I sent a query email to the 2000 AD website and Matt got back the following day, asking if I could do a round-up of the month’s genre releases. He never asked me to stop, so I kept going for almost three years.

It was a bit of a dream gig, but orchestrating the screenings, check discs and images was a nightmare. In the end, the organisational side got too much to handle and I had to let the column go. Some of the bigger magazines for which I was writing were dying off and I suddenly found PR departments bullshitting me more often than usual, until I was almost literally fighting for a seat in the preview theatre. I’ll never forget that screening of Aliens Vs. Predator… It got to the point where I was pretty much paying to write the column.

Of course, the other thing was I wanted to concentrate on writing scripts for the Prog. Film writing was only ever meant to be a means to an end, so it was time to call it a day. I explained all this to Matt, who was brilliant and asked me to find a replacement. Luckily, I was friends with Andrew Osmond, who is a much higher profile journalist than me and has no problem getting past the velvet rope. Plus, he’s one of the most articulate, knowledgeable and insightful film journalists in genre circles right now, which helps.

KH: Why didn’t George Low being enthusiastic about your scripts turn into an actual gig at Commando? What’s the story there?

AW: The feedback I kept getting from George Low at Commando was that he’d published stories like mine a zillion times before. Unsurprising, really, given that the comic’s been around for five decades. No matter how much research I did or how offbeat I made the story, I just couldn’t get a submission accepted. George Low was really positive about my writing and said he wanted to see more from me, but in the end it felt too much like stabbing in the dark. Commando turned out to be a bit of a Moby Dick for me, to be honest, and I’m planning to give it another go soon.

KH: Which of your Shocks/Terror Tales are you proudest of and why? Conversely, which would you like to go back and re-write?

AW: I’ve hidden behind some of the best artists in the business. If I had to pick a favourite, I’d probably say the Terror Tale, Lost Property, which I did with artist Warren Pleece and letterer Ellie De Ville. This was the one about a guy who returns lost property to the ghosts on the London Underground. Actually, it was Tharg who came up with the idea of the ghosts needing specific artefacts in order to move on. And my wife came up with the ending. Warren’s a terrific storyteller and character artist. He’s also great with atmosphere. I was also really pleased with the Tharg’s 3riller I did with Death Sentence and Rex Royd artist Mike Dowling. I’ve never worked as closely with an artist on a comic as I did with Mike on that one and we were really in synch over what we were out to achieve.

Having said that, I’d happily rewrite everything! I’m one of those insecure writers who can’t read anything they’ve had published without seeing anything other than the mistakes I feel I’ve made, and I just squirm at the thought of anyone reading them. Having a new series coming out tends to fill me with dread. When a comic I’ve written comes out, I’ll set some time aside to see what I’ve got wrong and take notes. I started out with a two-page Word document listing the things to remember when writing a comic. Five years later, I’ve got 200+ pages in a ring binder stuffed with Post It notes, clippings and scribbled down quotations.

KH: Looking back specifically on your first Future Shock, A Terrible Hunt, what are your thoughts and feelings about it?

AW: This was the one that fell into a black hole after David Leach left Rebellion. I got to resubmit it once Tharg started commissioning some of my other stuff. It turned out to be my first published script, but the second commissioned by Tharg (after Adventures in the War Trade, which I did with Staz Johnson and Annie Parkhouse).

I think Terrible Hunt actually works quite well. The low squirm-factor on my part may be due to PJ Holden’s artwork. I’ve only just noticed, he put a sea monkey head on the wall of the trophy room! Sweet!

KH: I got the impression reading your movie column that you’re a big fan of horror stuff. I was a bit surprised to find during my research that you hadn’t written more Terror Tales (my memory had tricked me and told me you’d written a whole lot more). Which do you prefer, Terror Tales or Shocks, and why?

AW: I think Terror Tales are generally easier to write than Future Shocks, which can be a real challenge to anyone who’s still finding their feet. But then again, nothing beats a Future Shock that can pull off a fresh idea – or at least a fresh angle on a hackneyed idea – and a well-delivered twist. Terror Tales can get away with just a satisfying climax, which isn’t quite as demanding as a twist – which is a very specific type of satisfying climax.

I reckon good twist stories are like mousetraps and you really need to have an understanding of narrative engineering in order to set up a good one. I got mine right maybe once or twice, and even then I tended to overcomplicate stuff. I learned a lot by reading short stories by writers like Saki, John Collier and O Henry, who all keep their tales dead simple. One of the things I’ve noticed in their stuff is that the twist is usually in plain sight the whole time! I hate it when writers pull a twist out of a hat at the end with no reference to anything that’s gone before. You can’t have the main character suddenly reveal at the end that he was his own clone from the future all along without having established that cloning or time-travel are possibilities within the story!

I think twists use the same psychological tactics as magic tricks and street hussles, and part of the pleasure in reading them is in being ‘had’. But what makes the Future Shock writer’s job so difficult is the fact that the reader is actively looking to catch them out from page one! And this makes it harder to foreshadow the ending without giving it away. We’re all so bloody smug and postmodern these days, aren’t we? I’ve found that Terror Tales don’t put you under quite as much pressure. It’s enough for a Terror Tale to be scary, unsettling or shocking. But there’s a reason these things are considered an apprenticeship at 2000 AD. It’s because they’re all so bloody hard to write, but also a great way to learn how to write comics.

KH: Were you surprised when Dandridge received his own series? What would you have changed about that first one-off if you’d known he was going to return?

AW: I’d actually conceived Dandridge as a series from the very beginning. I love British ghost stories and used to read all those Usborne ‘World of the Unknown’ books when I was a kid. I got to thinking about all these ‘real’ ghosts from around the country, the Enfield Poltergeist, Borley Rectory and so on, and how they all felt like individual personalities, like these unique little treasures. So I figured what if people collected ghosts in the same way they collected antiques? In what kind of world could such a market exist? I also had this feckless dandy character floating around that I really wanted to write, and from there the whole thing just clunked together like a Transformer.

Ideas just kept coming and coming, all these scenes and characters and adventures. I thought if I ever get the chance to do a series for the Prog this is what I’ll pitch. But at the time, I hadn’t had anything published and getting a shot at a series seemed a bit pie-in-the-sky. So I got it all down in this horrendously overstuffed Future Shock, which ended up as a Past Imperfect alternative world story. Once the story had reached the twist, I still had to resolve Dandridge’s character and the easiest way to do that was to kill him off. As it turned out, this was the perfect thing to do.

I assumed that if the series ever came about, then I’d have to set it in some kind of Edwardian steampunk era. Until I saw Simon Davis had done this beautiful teaser picture for Ian Edginton’s Ampney Crucis and my heart just sank. I love Edginton’s work – really elegant, literate stories full of these really slick ideas – and I figured there was no way I could compete with that and that Dandridge was going to be just another case of, ‘Oh well, someone got there before me’. But in the end it forced me to think harder about how to make Dandridge different.

So I focused on an idea I had about exploring a sort of post-steampunk world, one in which all that scientific certainty and imperialistic optimism had given way to irrationality and the supernatural and everything had just gone to shit. The British Empire had failed and become a ghost of its former glory. This world could easily be the ‘Ghost Town’ described by The Specials, but with Dandridge as this sort of Adam Ant figure, full of charm and life. The shallowness and the romance and the politics of the eighties made it a perfect fit for Dandridge, so everything I’d set up in that Past Imperfect turned out to be just right.

KH: Why the change of artist, from Warren Pleece to Jon-Davis Hunt?

AW: I was in the middle of writing Return of the Chap, which was the five-part launch series, and I knew Warren was on board. I also knew Dandridge, who was now a ghost, had a magic jacket that would allow him to take on a physical form. And I knew the coat could transform into all these different outfits like a pop star with an unlimited wardrobe. But I needed some kind of default setting, some sort of iconic ‘costume’ for Dandridge. I had all these elements in mind, but no idea how to combine them into a coherent look and I didn’t want to dump all my notes in Warren’s lap when he was on a deadline.

So I asked Jon, since we’d just finished working on Age of the Wolf, how I could possibly make this work. About five minutes later he’d come up with this sketch, which was just perfect. The white frock coat and the red sash just said it all. I could imagine Peter Wyngarde or Johnny Depp swaggering about a haunted house dressed like that. So I included it in the script and Warren went with it. Tharg gave the following five-parter, The House That Dripped Devilry, to Jon, which came as a nice thank you for his contribution to the first series.

KH: What do you think makes a good comic artist/writer? What qualities are needed?

AW: I know very little about artwork beyond ‘Oooo, that’s lovely’ or ‘Errr, that looks a bit wonky’. But from what I’ve picked up listening to artists, I think nice splash pages are all very well, but storytelling has got to be key. You can tell when an artist has really thought through the action taking place in the script. Looking at Tiernan Trevallion’s work on Absalom in the Prog recently, he’s got all these telling details: the Sellotape around Harry’s mobile, the dead pot plant in his flat, the open flick-knife on the dashboard of his car. I don’t know how much of this stuff was in the script, but it all gives an insight into the story and its characters and the world, and brings everything to life without you even realising. I think character expression is also important, since the characters are the reader’s portal into the story. Again, look at what Trevallion did in Absalom and what D’Israeli did in Low Life. Just an extra line on a character’s face can make all the difference between the reader ‘getting it’.

As for writers, I think – again – storytelling is crucial. Going back to Absalom and Low Life, the writing on these is so simple and direct. It’s not cluttered. You know where the story is on every page. You know where the characters are going, what they’re driving towards. You’re not at any point fuzzy as to what the hell’s going on and yet it’s all happening in a completely unexpected way and the story is constantly surprising you.

But also what makes these two series stand out for me is how they deal with character. I think you’ve got to work really, REALLY hard to make a character feel alive within the space of five pages of action-heavy comics, to make them linger in your head long after you’ve put down the book. And it would be so easy to let characters like Absalom and Dirty Frank become these one-note, one-joke ciphers, but as you’re reading them, you’re really seeing who they are and why they do what they do. And then to find yourself identifying with and even liking a character who’s completely mental or a complete shitbag. That to me is really great writing. And when a writer and an artist are in synch like that the whole story just sings, the pages can’t turn fast enough and you find yourself poring over them again and again when you’re supposed to be doing the ironing or whatever.

KH: How did Age of the Wolf come about?

AW: This was another cherished idea that I hoped to pitch as a series one day. I wanted to do something that explored a different angle on werewolves. One of my favourite movies as a kid was The Company of Wolves, which I ended up getting a bit obsessed about at the time, probably because the lead actress looked just like this girl I fancied at school. Anyway, what I love about this movie is the way it explores ideas about the werewolf and moulds them into all these different stories and meanings. A bit like Clive Barker did in the Books of Blood, taking these genre tropes and mutating them into something completely different. As soon as I started researching werewolf folklore, I found out that what we consider these timeless werewolf legends are really only a very narrow cultural strain that didn’t really come about until the 1940s with Lon Chaney Jr in The Wolfman. The idea of this cursed guy who turns into a wolf every full moon is all well and good, but it’s really limited dramatically, there’s one way a story like that can end. And it doesn’t explore this wealth of wolf and werewolf folklore that runs through Britain, France and Northern Europe, stuff which is really gnarly and disturbing and more akin to Fight Club than The Wolfman.

Anyway, I pitched the series out of this paranoid fear that someone else would come along and write it before me – or even worse, write it better! I got very excited and perhaps a little too carried away with my own ideas, thinking I’d better get this in now as I may never get another shot. There were whole sequences I had to drop in order to make the thing fit. I had this big siege in the mall on Oxford Street and a lot more stuff with Pete the homeless dude. I think Jon’s spectacular artwork got me out of a lot of trouble.

KH: Did you write that first series with a sequel in mind? And has the sequel taken the direction you planned or gone off in another direction?

AW: The first story kept growing until I couldn’t fit everything into the first series. And it wasn’t long before I had this whole other story about a ‘Mad Maxine’-type character doing all this Robin Hood parkour stuff in a post-apocalyptic forest. Once the first series of Age of the Wolf was finished, I queried Tharg on the possibility of doing another. He said he’d be interested in seeing two more, which we could headline as the ‘three ages’ of the wolf. Since the story is based on all these Norse ideas of wolves and fate and stuff, I thought it might be interesting to take Rowan through the three forms of the Norse fates – the three women who spin the threads of our lives – the maiden, the mother and the monster. In the first series, Rowan’s the sacrificial maiden. In SHE IS LEGEND, she’s this protective mother of the people, and in the last one she’s going to be… something else…

But I also wanted to give the reader something different with each series, so each one could stand alone and let anyone pick it up without having to have read anything before it. So far, it’s all gone pretty much according to plan, although the characters in She Is Legend ended up taking the plot in some unexpected directions.

FPI would like to thank Alec and Ken for sharing their thoughts on the blog, thanks also to Tharg’s human avatar Matt Smith and to that man Matt ‘Madman’ Badham; the Megazine #324 is in store and available online now.

Launching this weekend at London’s Kapow comic-con is new 36-page Brit comic Overload, boasting this absolutely splendid piece of zombie Thatcher cover art by Graeme Neil Reid. The brainchild of writer/editor Martin Conaghan (who brought us the fine Burke and Hare), it is, in classic Brit comics fashion, an anthology (using creator owned tales), with Martin explaining the idea is to have a showcase for established and also some incoming writers and artists (on a related note yes, he is accepting pitches for possible stories, but please, keep it to a pitch, don’t send in entire scripts – good advice when approaching any publisher to begin with, actually).

The first issue includes work from Cy Dethan (the excellent Cancertown), Steve Penfold (Fallen Heroes), Matt Gibbs, James Reekie, Dave Cook, Gary Crutchely, Geoffrey D Wessel, Aaron Moran and of course, from the cover star, the warped mind of 2000 AD stalwart Gordon Rennie, with Emma Beeby and Eoin Coveney offers us up a UK facing the dead rising once more, including the most feared Tory Prime Minister staggering towards Downing Street to reclaim her throne… The trio issued a statement to go along with the strip:

“The Prime Minister must be aware of the fear sweeping the nation about the coming zombie apocalypse. Will he now release HM Government’s plans to deal with this matter? This comic is a call to action. The people need to know the truth; need reassured that they have thought of every eventuality. No matter how terrifying. We hope Overload’s readers will follow suit, and email their MP to ask what they intend we do when the dead rise. We all know it’s going to happen.”

The first issue launches at Kapow this weekend and indeed editor Martin himself will be there at table 34 and he will be holding portfolio sessions at 1pm on both Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th so potential writers and artists looking to pitch a story to future issues of Overload are welcome to swing by and talk to him there. Always good to see another outlet for homegrown comics talent, if you are at Kapow do pick up a copy an offer the guys up some support. You can check out a quick preview of the first issue via Martin’s blog.

Adam Cadwell drops us a line with some absolutely cracking new: he and Marc Ellerby are launching a brand new British Indy comics publisher, Great Beast. It will be “for professionally self published, creator owned comics”, with an unashamed embracing of pop culture (and why not?) influences and happy to take in comics for all ages, including younger readers, something we’re especially keen on here, partly for altruistic reasons – getting young kids interested in reading is one of the greatest gifts you can grant them, partly for pragmatic reasons – where else would our next generation of comics and book readers and creators come from otherwise? Besides, younger readers especially need their imagination and sense of wonder stimulated and that’s something the comics medium can deliver in spades. Here’s an excerpt from the first blog post:

“Great Beast aims to provide the most fun and creative stories to as wide an audience as possible. All of our titles will be creator owned and professionally self published; these are comics brimming with passion.

We launch with the work of two creators who bring their successful self published and award nominated comics to Great Beast; Marc Ellerby‘s Chloe Noonan: Monster Hunter series, and the vampire slacker series Blood Blokes by Adam Cadwell. Both creators will also be publishing long-awaited collections of their previous web-comic work, Ellerbisms and The Everyday, later in the year.

We believe that there should be a place for every genre of comic in the thriving British industry, and that we can offer the comic-buying public something new. So with that in mind…

We want to build a new audience of comic readers. We’ll make comics aimed at a wide range of ages, including children and teenagers.  We make comics that aren’t afraid to be funny and are proud to be cartoony. Our comics will be brimming with pop culture, but still retain their heart.  We don’t think ‘pop’ is a dirty word.

We will put as much thought into production values as any other publisher to make the best printed books possible.  AND we fully embrace digital distribution. We want you to read our comics in the format you want to read them.

We’ve never been as excited about making comics as we are right now, and that’s why we’ve decided to launch Great Beast. It’s a banner for like minded creators who want to get their work to every person who wants to read it, regardless of format or location. More creators will join the line-up throughout 2012, but for the time being check out the comics we have on offer and take a chance on something new. We think you’re going to love them.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook for updates.”

Just a few short years ago when we first started this blog we use to bemoan the fact that although we had great success with UK creators in major US publishers and some large professional publishers like Cape, and a vibrant small press, self-published scene, we in the UK simply didn’t have any publisher that sat properly inbetween those levels – where was our equivalent to Top Shelf, D&Q, Fantagraphics, Sparkplug etc? Tony Bennet had flown his freak flag with Knockabout for years, but we needed more. Then in the last few years the rise of Blank Slate Books, SelfMadeHero and Nobrow and gods but how we loved it. We love comics from all over the world, but we were especially happy to see good work being published right here by great British Indy comics houses. We’ve covered them and their works extensively on the blog (and will continue to do so) and it isn’t just us – a browse through our annual guest Best of the Year posts from dozens of writers and artists yields numerous selections from those publishers; they’ve made a real impression with good work and given UK comics creators something to aim for. Hard to imagine the UK comics landscape without them now, isn’t it?

And now here we have two creators we’ve enjoyed a lot on the blog launching a new Brit Indy comics publisher, kicking off with two books we’ve praised pretty highly on here too. Isn’t that just fantastic? Just how fantabulously amazing is it being in Brit comics right now? Creators, reviewers, bloggers and, most importantly, readers – we’ve never had it so good. I’m sure many of you will join us in wishing Great Beast the best of luck and look forward to these first two releases and more to follow. Marc and Adam will both be at Comiket this weekend in London and the official launch for Great Beast is tomorrow morning, so do bookmark them, like on Facebook, follow on Twitter and spread the word around because just like Blank Slate and SMH they need the support of the Brit comics community to do the sorts of things we want to see.

I also want to appeal to comics professionals to vote for the book; that means all you artists, writers, inkers, letterers, colourists, shop owners and retail managers. All of you in the comics industry are able to vote and can register here.

Normally, I’m not a great follower of awards; they are open to all sort of bias, groupthink, vagaries of jury and voters. They often reward something people love right now but in time may seem less worthy than others passed over – often raised are Citizen Kane losing out to How Green is my Valley or Raging Bull to Ordinary People. What they do, however, is attract attention to winners, which can have a great commercial value and certainly, for a short time at least, give the nod of artistic merit.

In an English-speaking comics world, the USA is almost monopolistically dominant on a publishing level. Our creators have, of course, done well, with Nick Abadzis, Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Sean Phillips and more winning in recent years, but UK comics publishers have been almost invisible. Only Fanfare have had 3 or 4 nominations, on each occasion for a translation of Japanese material. It could be that Nelson is one of the few comics that you can feel the British stamp on from creator, through subject matter to publisher. A British comic nominated in the most important English-speaking awards.

There isn’t much poetry in commerce; it’s more often than not about promotion irrespective of artistic quality, and winning an award and moreover wanting to win one, as I do, is often more about commerce than art. I think for Nelson though, the impetus to vote for those of us in the UK industry is much more worthy. To those yet to read it, Nelson may appear as just another anthology of comics stories on one level, but on another it’s more – it’s a calling card for a whole industry wanting to come into being as legitimate and sustainable. With no native awards to give our books credence – the once relevant Eagles having dissipated their impact in too many years of disorganisation and the sometimes wild results of an open popular vote – UK comics have had no way of making a book something that could be promoted just as hard as Habibi or the latest Clowes.

Should Nelson win this award, the industry will have that chance.

Given that Nelson is a showcase for the talent of over 50 artists, a win here is something that could help each of those artists – and the building of a comics-making field in the UK – move onwards and upwards. I’m sure all the other nominees are worthy but I would doubt that any is quite as important to as many people as Nelson is, might be, could be.

So, if, like me, you rarely bother to vote, I’d ask you to think again. If you have friends in comics, encourage them to read the book, encourage them to vote for something that is a proxy for voting for the whole of UK comics, A win for Nelson is also a win for NoBrow, SelfMadeHero, Fanfare, Accent UK and others; a win for all the artists involved in the book but also for all those who aren’t. Sometimes that first foot through the door is all you need for the door to swing wide open.

We’ve all been out here waiting, waiting for a long time for a moment to come. Never quite able to bring it into focus, always knowing there will be something that could change things but never able to grasp it or recognise it. We’ve been Joseph Cotton standing alone in the fog of a New York City park waiting for Jennifer Jones to grow up, to change from that childlike sketch into a Portrait of Jennie. It could be UK comics Jennie moment – as she says “I was hurrying, hurrying to grow up” – with your vote cast in the Eisner’s we can all take that next step towards maturity.

Some Nelson reviews:

Rachel Cooke in the Guardian

Jamie Smart in the Guardian

Deborah Vankin in the LA Times Hero Complex

Cara Fielder in Starburst

Johanna in Comics Worth Reading

Richard Bruton on the Forbiddden Planet Blog

Joe Gordon on the Forbidden Planet Blog

Beware! Spoilers abound beyond this point!

Just over a year ago, Brendan sent me an email regarding a possible new series for 2000AD. We’d worked together before on a couple of Dredds, where he’d come up with the plots and I’d done the scripts, and while my stuff was a bit ‘wordy’ – I have a habit of erring on the side of dense, ‘old-school’ verbiage, which isn’t always the right way to go – he obviously liked the way I extrapolated on his ideas enough to bring me in. This time, he was after – I quote – “a new, wacky, totally surreal “Sooner or Later/Hewligan’s Haircut’ type of strip called THE ZAUCER OF ZILK… It will mix the surrealism of 60′s Dr Strange with a ‘Lord of The Rings’ imaginative scope. And with a bit of The Mighty Boosh in there too.”

And attached to the email were these sketches…

Well, obviously, I jumped at the chance. A couple of days later Brendan gave me a phone call in which he gave me the seeds of the plot, including what became these very pages – in fact, the plot for this first episode is pretty much unchanged from his original idea. After that, I was working more to a basic skeleton, mostly extrapolating from Brendan’s sketches but occasionally dropping in my own ideas – like Charognae, the nightmarish spectre of age and decay who’ll be haunting the Zaucer soon enough. Once I had the plot sorted, it went into a back-and-forth process of emails to get any impurities and things that didn’t quite work smelted out of it, and then we moved onto the scripts, which went through a similar to-and-fro process to get them exactly right before they were sent off to Tharg for approval.

Anyway, before I give anything else away, here’s page one:

Rain’s a big part of this. Errol Raine was the figure who caught my imagination first out of all the characters (apart from the Zaucer, of course, sir) and with his four lightnings and four puddles it’s easy to see why. He rains in error. Forgive him.

Raine is the Zaucer’s opposite number – where the big Z is all pop and dash and dazzle and fame and fortune, Raine is wet weather and cold nights, sour luck and ill wind. He came to represent all the bad things in life – depression, despair and failure, the rain that gets in no matter how you try to keep it out. If it’s raining in the strip, you know that Errol Raine’s close by in his exquisite misery, waiting to make things worse.

Our first look at the Zaucer to be. At the time, I was getting into Joe Orton – it didn’t make it into the final product so much, but Peter McEnery’s performance as the young Mister Sloane was in the back of my mind during the back-and-forths with Brendan, and when I came to write the scripts. If you’ve ever seen the film, you’ll know how McEnery’s arrogant sexuality almost drips off the screen, and I tried to trap a portion of that in the Zaucer. I did have to tone down the arrogance a little at first – he was a bit too Sloanish to be sympathetic – but pretty soon we found the proper level.

Meanwhile, in the puddle, strange reflections. More on that as we have it.

I like the creepiness of these pages – Raine’s really quite Satanic here, offering his temptations. One bite and your soul is gone… who knows what terrible things Raine’s sinister magic could do to a human body if let out of its bottle? And who’s to say we won’t see the full foulness of it for ourselves in just a few short weeks? I couldn’t possibly comment.

The ‘sweet hearts’ were Brendan’s idea, another bit of detail relayed during that original phone call. It makes for some great imagery – the one glowing packet in that dreary monotone shop. Nobody does pop and pzazz quite like Brendan, but there’s a qlippothic other side to that in that nobody does murk and drear and awfulness quite like him as well, something I tried to exploit where possible. The Zaucer Of Zilk ended up going quite deep into those contrasts – as a wiser man than I once said, it’s a yin-yang kinda thing-thang…

More creepiness as Raine passes by like a ghost ship in the night. Four lightnings, four puddles.

Meanwhile, more fun with the Sweet Hearts. Are there some mystery messages being conveyed there? Hints of the future to come? I’ve said too much.

And at the turn of the page, we burst out of this rainy prologue…

And get into the real story. Crissymouth and Spantalex form the Zaucer’s entourage – one a rough chum from his days in the orphanage, the other a hovering presence sent by his betters to teach him the joys of etiquette. But you’ll be seeing more of them as the series goes on. Meanwhile, this is the Zaucer as he truly is – can you believe that in an early draft I wanted him naked in this panel? That would have probably been too much of a good thing.

And on that note, we’ll leave it for a while. Hopefully this commentary will have whetted your appetite enough that you pick up a physical or digital copy – 2000 AD is, for now, the only place where this scrotnig saga will be available. I’ll be back in a few weeks with a look at some… fancy pants.

Out this very day, partly to honour the immortal Dandy which is celebrating 75 years of making the kids of Britain chuckle (including during the dark days of World War II – even Hitler’s hordes couldn’t stop Brit kids enjoying their comics!), a new set of stamps from the Royal Mail paying homage to decades of British comics culture from across the years. Of course the Dandy and its only slightly younger sibling the Beano (both still going today) are honoured – there’s Desperate Dan and Dennis the Menace on their respective stamps – along with the Topper (how well I remember spreading the massive tabloid format Topper out on the floor to read, making sure to be in the way of all the adults as I did do, as any child was meant to), The Tiger, Buster, Bunty, Valiant, Twinkle, the iconic Eagle (with suitably heroic jawed Dan Dare, still a solid favourite of mine) and the Eagle’s spiritual modern heir 2000 AD, complete with ole’ Stoney Face. The stamp set is released today, more details on the Royal Mail site here. And courtesy of the Royal Mail twitter and Melanie Seasons here is a close up look at the 2000 AD stamp issue:

The fine chap Lew Stringer has started a new occasional post on his blog over the weekend, This Week in… sees Lew casting his eye over some strips from a classic comic relating to the week ahead. He kicks off with a look at the Illustrated Chips from March 1947, noting that the issue has two numbers (2805 and 2806), a side effect of the paper rationing which still afflicted the shattered post-war British economy. As well as the difference in some strips (for instance, smoking being allowed, unthinkable today) Lew adds that there were a couple of adverts, including one which extolled to the youth of Britain just how nutritious a Mars bar was! As Lew observes, modern advertising rules on selling to children would make that kind of thing less likely. Lew is always great on comics, especially classic British comics, so I reckon this will be a fun series to watch out for

Andy Diggle and Jock are teaming up once more (hurray!) and returning to the 2000 AD fold with a creator-owned new series starting in the Judge Dredd Megazine #322 out at the end of this month (personally I love that the Megazine dedicates some space each month to creator owned series, kudos to them for that). San Francisco slacker Jake is riding through Golden Gate Park when he finds a state of the art smartphone and retrieves it. Thumbing through some pictures on it at his work in a comic store later he finds some of the images detail a murder. And then the phone rings…

“Jock and I have been chipping away at Snapshot for a few years now in our spare time, assuming we’d approach a publisher once we had enough material to show. But when I bumped into [editor] Matt Smith at the New York Comic Con, he suggested the Megazine’s creator-owned slot might be the perfect place for it. After all, the Megazine was where Jock and I first worked together on Lenny Zero, back before The Losers or Green Arrow: Year One. So it feels like coming home,” Andy Diggle commenting on taking his and Jock’s new series to the Megazine. The Megazine #322 is out on March 28th in the UK and April 11th in the US market.