(Alan Moore with Steve Bell at this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival, pic from my Flickr)

A snip from the tale: “Regard the world of magic. A scattering of occult orders which, when not attempting to disprove each other’s provenance, are either cryogenically suspended in their ritual rut, their game of Aiwaz Says, or else seem lost in some Dungeons & Dragons sprawl of channelled spam, off mapping some unfalsifiable and thus completely valueless new universe before they’ve demonstrated that they have so much as a black-lacquered fingernail’s grip on the old one. Self-consciously weird transmissions from Tourette’s-afflicted entities, from glossolalic Hammer horrors. Fritzed-out scrying bowls somehow receiving trailers from the Sci-Fi channel. Far too many secret chiefs, and, for that matter, far too many secret indians.

Beyond this, past the creaking gates of the illustrious societies, dilapidated fifty-year-old follies where they start out with the plans for a celestial palace but inevitably end up with the Bates Motel, outside this there extends the mob. The psyche pikeys. Incoherent roar of our hermetic home-crowd, the Akashic anoraks, the would-be wiccans and Temple uv Psychic Forty-Somethings queuing up with pre-teens for the latest franchised fairyland, realm of the irretrievably hobbituated. Pottersville. ”

(Pádraig has posted the story on his Moore live journal Glycon, with part one here and part two here; text is (c) Alan Moore)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PÓM: How did you find working on Crisis?

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

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

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

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

PÓM: What was your brief for Revolver?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PÓM: What about Terra Obscura?

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

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

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

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

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

PÓM: What were the music books you wrote?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Always happy to talk to people like yourself, though.

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

PH: The pleasure was half mine.

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

Last spring we even discovered that media company Cision had ranked us 31st in their top 50 of all UK blogs, the only one of its kind among the others on that list, right up there with such blogs as the Guardian and the BBC’s. That was a bit of a gobsmacking moment to think our little blog had grown up to that level – not just because it was impressive and satisfying – the only comics site on that list – but because it meant that a lot of readers clearly enjoyed what we posted up and their readership and links to us had put us into that position. Now that, that is really satisfying, knowing that it means people want to read what we’re talking about and that more get in touch to let us know about comics they’ve been involved in, events they have organised. Its been a great five years – frankly we’ve been spoiled for good works to talk about and if all five of us did nothing but try to cover all the comics and SF out there every day we still couldn’t keep up with it, its so diverse.

And that diversity is one of the aspects that keeps us all enthusiastic – there are so many fine comics, books and graphic novels we’ve seen over those five years, from big names like Alan Moore and Bryan Talbot to folks doing their own comics, planning them, writing them, drawing them, publishing them, selling them, even organising their own comics festivals. I’m really pleased that we’ve managed to discuss some great comics from so many different avenues in the graphical world, from the independent publishers to the big guns, to the self published and to comics from outside the English language world. I’ve found new writers and artists I’d probably never have come across otherwise and my reading is much the richer for it and if we’ve pointed some of you to new writers who have enriched your reading then that makes us very happy. Yes the FP blog is part of our huge webstore but from the start we’ve always seen it as far more than a simple corporate blog; we read what we sell and like many of our brother and sister geeks we love to share what we enjoy, we love to celebrate good art, we think good writers and artists should be celebrated and that’s really what drives us to post here.

So now we are five. How to mark it… Something involving the number five. Have all the contributors dress up in costumes from Babylon 5? Maybe we could form a tribute band for the Jackson 5? Perhaps we could have a guest comic strip called the Jackson 5 but its actually about the five top operatives working secretly for Stonewall Jackson during the American Civil War? Or perhaps we should stick to what we hopefully do well and have all five of our regular contributors select a favourite comics creator and to recommend one title by them that they think any reader should have on their shelves. Yes, that sounds more like us, although it immediately puts us in that hellish position of having to choose just one creator and one title. And you all know that we have an awful lot of favourites, how to pick just one… Nevertheless we have – Richard, Pádraig, Matthew, Wim and myself have all picked out a comics creator who has meant a lot to us. Although I think, on reflection, I should say favoured rather than favourite because really none of us could ever restrict ourselves to just one and there’s always a different writer you turn to depending on your mood and what you need, but that said, here’s what the five of us went with:

Richard: I’m torn, so many to choose from, but Joe wants us to choose just one creator. I could name three easily: Seth, Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis. But it has to be just one. So not Seth, no matter how much I adore his work and not, much to my own surprise, Grant Morrison, even though he came along at exactly the right moment when I felt myself drifting away from comics and filled my world with some beloved works.

No, the one creator I choose is Warren Ellis. Since when he’s right on top of his game, he’s the most thrilling, inventive and readable writer working in comics today for me.

You want examples? There’s the manic gonzo sci-fi of Transmetropolitan, the hope filled space love letter that is Orbiter, Ministry of Space, Global Frequency, Stormwatch/Authority. Ellis writes these things like a man possessed, with incredible energy and invention and they’re all books that will be enjoyed over and over again.

I come to Ellis’ books to escape, to thrill, to be amazed, to be thoroughly entertained. And to pick just one Ellis book is a very easy choice – Planetary. A book I’ll never, ever grow tired of revisiting; a wondrous exploration of comics and genre fiction all wrapped up in a perfect mystery thriller. 27 issues collected as 4 volumes with mystery archaeologists uncovering all the incredible secrets of this amazing world; wonderful, amazing, bewildering things. Things that the secret rulers of the world don’t want uncovered. Secret rulers who will slowly, tentatively, brilliantly be called to task.

So it’s happy 5th birthday to the FPI blog, a very happy home for some of my writing for 3 of it’s 5 years. Thanks to Kenny and Joe for inviting me along and welcoming me in and most of all thank you for reading, for commenting and for loving comics in all their wonderful forms.

Matthew: I’ve been asked by Joe to name my favourite comics creator in celebration of the fifth anniversary of the Forbidden Planet International blog. My choice is Paul Grist, but I’m afraid I’m having trouble articulating why. Not because I can’t think of anything to write about this fabulously gifted cartoonist, but because I’ve got too much that I want to say. Grist, the man behind Kane, Jack Staff and numerous other wonderful comics, deserves a lengthy essay extolling his many talents, rather than a brief missive.

However, under the circumstances, the following will have to do:

Paul’s name was the first that popped into my head when asked to name my favourite comics creator simply because it is his work has given me most pleasure in the entirety of my comics reading life. His comics are fucking awesome!

Happy Birthday to the Forbidden Planet International blog. Thanks for encouraging and supporting the British small press scene for the last five years. The comics-sphere is a better place for your existence.

Oh, and Paul, should you happen to stop by and read this, thanks for ten years and counting of happy comics reading for yours truly. The Kane: Greetings from New Eden trade paperback from Dancing Elephant Press brought a jaded fan boy back into comics at a time when he thought he’d given up on them forever (too many crap super hero comics will do that to even the most ardent comics reader).

Pádraig: Alan Moore is the greatest writer of comics that has ever lived. I can almost prove this scientifically, but it’s also an almost mystical belief on the part of not just myself, but many others. His work over the past nearly thirty years has led the way in transforming the comics industry, often against the wishes of the corporate entities trying to control it. His body of work represents the very finest the medium has to offer: The Ballad of Halo Jones, From Hell, Promethea, V for Vendetta, and a number of other titles.

Undoubtedly Moore’s finest work, his most influential and important work, and probably the single greatest achievement of the comics medium, is Watchmen. Every single aspect of this comic is perfect. The characters are all believable, and their motivations, although often dark and twisted, are also entirely human. The storyline unfolds slowly and beautifully, a master-class in how to use comics to tell your story in a way that no other medium can offer. There is real emotional depth in the book, something that certainly was not seen as a priority in comics up to that point. All this is complimented by Dave Gibbons’ brilliant artwork, again probably the finest storytelling artwork in any comic, ever. Watchmen is the product of two fine creators at the absolute top of their game, and will probably never be surpassed.

I would have liked to add that Alan Moore is also a fine and entertaining interviewee, a funny guy, and a damn fine dinner companion, but this would surely be seem as boasting!

Wim: I don’t like lists, at least not the kind that force you to kill your darlings: Your Favourite Books Of The Year, The Best Movie Ever, Top Ten Burgundy Reds of All Time, that kind of thing.  Desert Island Discs?  Pur-lease!

Still, the FPI blog’s first lustrum is a good enough reason to throw your principles overboard, so no MacManus, no Jijé, no Franquin, not even a Herriman or a Walt Kelly.   If I can choose only one author to spotlight, it has to be Hergé.  Hergé was the one who got me hooked on comics with “Objectif Lune”.  He taught me to read pictures as well as text.  From his earliest books onwards, he took an already blossoming artform and distilled it into a perfect pictorial narrative language.

Hergé’s importance and influences can hardly be underestimated.  His studio nourished talent like Roger Leloup, Jacques Martin and, of course, Bob De Moor.  Together with André Franquin and Jijé, Hergé defined the look, the subject matter and the atmosphere of comics for decades, with his own work, and as editor of Tintin Magazine.  European comics went through many waves of growing up and maturing, but Hergé’s adagium never faded, and was taken up by new generations of cartoonists again and again: always be as clear as possible when you’re telling a story, whether it’s in your art or your narrative style.

Hergé’s masterpiece, of course, is Tintin (although Quick & Flupke have their charms as well).  Yes, before it was a fashion brand or a property that was being turned into a movie, Tintin was one of the best, if not the best comic that Europe ever produced.  And the best album, in my opinion, is L’Ile Noir (the Black Island) – it’s an self-contained story that you can read without really knowing the whole Tintin back history, it’s full of intrigue and suspense, it’s got bandits, monsters and stunts with airplanes, and it’s got some of the best comic scenes in the series.  For Tintinophiles, however, it is above all the best example of Hergé constantly refining his art, redoing parts of the book again and again (and in the sixties having Bob De Moor creating a complete new version from scratch).

That the book is set in Scotland, is only fitting in this occasion, this fifth anniversary of the FPI Blog.  After all, how else to thank and honour Joe, our beloved editor?

Joe: Of course now I am asking myself just why I put myself into the position of picking a single writer. There are so many that I admire and more than a few who often call to me from my overflowing shelves and demand that they be re-read once more, even although I have many new works waiting for attention. Yes, Mr Moore, how often have Watchmen and V For Vendetta called me irresistibly back, interrupting my reading of new work? Mr Ellis and his Transmetropolitan which is a series always worthy of reading and re-reading. Mr Ennis and his fine expletive filled Preacher. The works of John Wagner and Pat Mills who have shaped and warped my imagination since tender childhood. Alex Robinson. Paul Chadwick. Mike Mignola. Grant Morrison.  Bryan Talbot. Joe Sacco. Chris Ware. Some creators I didn’t even know before I came here, like Alison Bechdel or Jeff Lemire. Too many to list – and I haven’t even started on the wonderful SF&F novelists I read every week too! Truly there is treasure everywhere.

But I said I’d highlight one name from the world of comics and I will and those who know me will not be surprised that it is Neil Gaiman, nor that, if pointing someone to only one body of work of his it would be the Sandman. I grew up with comics. Every week in the 70s like literally millions of other British kids I’d have the Beano, the Dandy, the Topper, Warlord, Action and then something wonderful and new, 2000 AD, back when the year 2000 really did seem so distant, the science fiction future age of jetcars and robot butlers. And when I got into my late teens and early 20s I struggled. I still loved comics but finding work that appealed to me at an older age (I’d hesitate to use the term mature since that infers qualities I don’t always have!). Oh there had been some – Miller’s Dark Knight, Spiegelman’s Maus, there was Revolver and Deadline and Crisis too. But I found The Sandman one day in the Glasgow Forbidden Planet and I was drawn back in, every month I was back in the habit of waiting impatiently for the next issue (and those of you who have only known it in collection form must remember, we had to wait each month for years and years to follow it all originally). And because of that and because of the new Vertigo imprint that sprung up around it and Hellblazer I explored more comics each month. Which lead me in meandering paths to try all sorts of works I’d never have read otherwise from other publishers like Fantagraphics, D&Q, Top Shelf…

And that, to me, is the mark of a good comic or book and of a fine writer – not just that you read their work and feel satisfied, but that you are left with the urge to read more. Not just of their work but other works. I’ve always been a reader and it is always such a joy to find an author who inspires that love of the printed page and leaves you wanting to read more, more, more, try different works, works you’d never have picked up before. Yes, I could talk about Neil’s ability to layer his tales so wonderfully, delicately lacing them with myth and folklore and references to world literature, or how his Sandman unfolded over years, new chapters connecting with past events, like Straczynski’s Babylon 5 multiple small parts coming together and recombining into new aspects of a greater tale. But that’s all been said and at greater length before. The reason I’m picking it is simply because it made me want to read more. I can say nothing better of any writer than that. And I think really its why we write here; in our own, humbler way we want to encourage readers to pick up good, new works and celebrate those talents and share them with others. That’s what it’s about. We hope sometimes we’ve lead you to a book you might not have picked up otherwise and you’ve loved it. And we thank you for joining us.

But now on his blog Pádraig reveals some new information he’s discovered: a copyright notice under Michael Angelo’s name on a Young Marvelman page reproduced in an article (see above) entitled The Age of Marvelman in the 1977 book by Mike Angelo, Nostalgia: Spotlight on the Fifties. “So, finally, it seems I have all the proof I need. Young Marvelman the character was created at the same time as Marvelman, and Young Marvelman the comic shared the same numbering as Marvelman, so started its weekly schedule at #25. It follows that Young Marvelman #38, from which the above is taken, was published thirteen weeks in the title’s run, putting it somewhere in May 1954, and from this there would seem to be no other conclusion to be drawn except that right from the very beginning, Mick Anglo was claiming that he owned the copyright on Marvelman and associated characters.” I’m not even going to pretend to know exactly how this all fits into the contentious history of ownership regarding copyright (it’s been pointed out the copyright lettering could have been added for the ’77 reproduction in the book), let alone how it affects possible reprinting (or continuation) of the later Moore-Gaiman Miracleman tales, you should simply go read Pádraig’s blog.

“Due to your behaviour at the convention some time ago and your online behaviour earlier this year we have come to the unfortunate decision to ban you from this convention. We believe that your attitude towards us has been far to aggressive both online and in the past at the convention.

This matter is not open for discussion and we will not enter into any online discussion regarding this nor will we discuss this with any other persons. This decision is final.”

Presumably the organisers feel they had sufficient grounds for such unprecedented action but its perplexing as to why they don’t make them clear and why they make a point of refusing to discuss the matter. From reading between the lines it seems they find Padraig something of a handful, don’t like his criticism and clearly are somewhat intimidated by him. I’ve known Pádraig for many years and I’m trying my best here to be impartial, which obviously isn’t easy given he’s not only a contributor here but a good friend of mine. I know he can be passionate and quite forthright in giving his opinions, but we’re all entitled to hold and express opinions and to discuss them surely? Perhaps Padraig has done things they have seen as wrongs, but not to state them leaves everyone none the wiser and opinion left to probably stream only one way.

However, that said, dealing strictly with the manner they have handled this is another matter. Given the amount of people – fans and writers and artists – who know and respect Pádraig it also seems like a very badly-conceived strategy on the behalf of the organisers; surely they must have anticipated that this news would travel around the SF and comics grapevine (as indeed it has, very quickly) and set people talking. It doesn’t seem unreasonable that someone in that situation would discuss it and ask why it was happening and it shows poor judgement on the organiser’s behalf that they did not consider this and the possible negative publicity it might cause for Octocon – surely this could have been sorted out in an adult discussion, quietly and privately instead of taking this course which was, given the connected nature of fandom, bound to generate ripples.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of their reasons for the banning (which we can’t really comment on since they haven’t been made clear) the manner in which this has been carried out does not appear to have been thought out well and may damage the con’s reputation, which is sad, especially since cons rely on a number of folks who give up their free time to organise events for others to enjoy. It all seems badly handled and the lack of explanation or discussion is bound to rankle with many as simply an unfair way of dealing with matters. That said we hope those who do attend have a good time and this matter doesn’t sour their enjoyment as it would have mine were I attending.

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

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

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

PÓM: When did you start working on Rainbow Orchid?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PÓM: Was the Alec stuff your first published work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PÓM: I’m going to take that as a yes!

(embracing the blogosphere, (c0 Eddie Campbell)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If it’s not my drawing arm I mean.

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

EC: Oh yes, more than happy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EC: Okay. Ya got me.

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

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