That man Pádraig tells us of a forthcoming book from Steve Moore, Somnium, which will be coming from the fine Indy publisher Strange Attractor Press (complete with the above rather fetching cover art by John Coulthart). Over on his Glycon site Pádraig explains why he is covering a debut novel by Steven Moore on a blog dedicated to the works of Alan Moore (no relation):

“First of all, Steve Moore is Alan Moore’s closest friend. They’ve known one another since they met in the early days of British comics’ fandom, back in the 1970s, when Alan was about fourteen, and Steve about seventeen. He’s also said to be the person who taught Alan how to write comics. On top of that, they have also been magical partners for a long time. In both cases, Steve was the Teacher, and Alan the Neophyte. (Here’s the pair of them writing, not entirely seriously, as The Moon and Serpent Grant Egyptian Theatre of Marvels.) If there is one person on this Earth that Alan Moore looks up to, it’s Steve Moore. Which is very nearly a good enough reason for buying this book in itself. If Alan likes it, that’s good enough for me.

Here’s another reason:- For Iain Sinclair’s 2006 anthology London: City of Disappearances, Alan wrote a long piece called Unearthing, which is essentially a psychogeographical biography of Steve, and in it Alan refers to the novel that Steve is writing, which is Somnium. So, you could look at this book as a companion-piece to Unearthing – although more correctly it’s the other way around, I suppose, as a novel trumps an essay. In any case, each one illuminates the other. Perhaps the most important reason that I think this book deserves to be mentioned, though, is simply for its own sake. Steve Moore has a huge body of work of all kinds behind him, in fields as diverse as comics, Fortean research, and Asian studies.”

And if you look on the Strange Attractor site (where the book is available for pre-order, due November), you’ll see some more good reasons why any reader may be interested – not only an endorsement by Alan Moore but also by the great Michael Moorcock.

Snip:

“Unless otherwise specified, all figures identified are in a clockwise fashion.

Cover. The hooded figure is Oliver Haddo, who appeared in W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Magician (1907). Haddo was based on Aleister Crowley, whom Maugham disliked, and The Magician is about an occult attempt to create life. Haddo is mentioned on Pages 25 & 26 of Black Dossier and is the villain of Century: 1910.

As seen in Black Dossier and Century: 1910, a number of historical figures are replaced in the world of League by their fictional counterparts or models, so that in the world of League there was no Adolph Hitler, there was Adenoid Hynkel, from Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator. In the world of League there was no Crowley, there was Oliver Haddo.

The blond-haired man is H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain. The woman is Bram Stoker’s Mina Murray. And the black-haired man is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

· As a symbol, it’ll be repeated quite a bit throughout this book. We see it flying out of a Cyclops skull, which, as I think I’ve mentioned before, are fairly often to be seen in various volumes of the League.”

(and if you want to know more about 1969, direct from the author’s head, check out our recently posted interview Pádraig had with Alan discussing the new book and the many elements, influences and references that it contains)

(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.

(Judges Joyce and Dredd by Steve Dillon for the cover to 2000AD prog 727, (c) Rebellion)

Well, he’s Scottish rather than Irish, but in a spirit of pan-Celtic brotherhood why not work Middenface McNulty in with Spud and Maeve? (okay, I just like any excuse to get Middenface into things, he’s a great character). Anyone who’s interested should drop David a line at doomlord (at) eircom (dot) net

“For those of you who are fans of Alan Moore but are not necessarily on the Alan Moore Yahoo! Group mailing list, there has recently been a YouTube channel set up to collect all of Alan’s appearances that are on YouTube. You can find the channel at http://www.youtube.com/group/ChannelGlycon We’re still adding things to it, so it’s by no means complete and definitive, but it’s a good start, at the very least.

One of the things I’d particularly draw your attention to is the most recent posting, under the name of Alan Moore Swamp Thing Interview (see below -- Joe). A wee while back I bought a video on eBay which turned out to be something he’d done for DC in about 1985, which I believe was for showing in comics shops and the like, where Alan talks very enthusiastically about his work on Swamp Thing, and about his forthcoming work on Watchmen. With the help of a few different people, I got this put up on YT, as I’m no good with technical stuff, and anyway it’s a US video. It’s kind of sad to see how enthused he is there, compared to how he feels now after how we was treated by DC.

If you’ve anything interesting to add to channel, please feel free to do so.”

Looking at these older videos I’m amazed how much Alan and Billy Connolly look alike, or is that just me?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJlZUpgXQJI

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze3rCvyiISA

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Emi-TqzF80

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpYPOfv08F8

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gIrDgIKpas

(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).

“It is at moments like this Pádraig, that we remember what Dr Johnson said on the subject:

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