Will you buy the revamped Megazine? I already buy it - and will carry on doing so. It's a bit too pricey, no more Meg for me Yes, I'll start picking it up again I'll try one issue and see if it's improved. Nope, it's still not for me

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The overt sexual nature of some of the Dante storylines is certainly a change from earlier 2000AD stories. Have you ever been asked to "tone it down?"

Nope, the whole fun of Dante has been taking it close to the limit, but not going over. Dante has to be gleefully rude, but to take it further than that makes it less fun. The exception in terms of nudity was the Dante/Jena love scene at the end of 'The Courtship of Jena Makarov' which we felt had to look natural and intimate as these 2 characters have been building up to this for a long time.

I think Dave Bishop got a bit worried when I drew a ship full of religious loonies that had an enormous gun coming out of the groin region of Jesus Christ that was painted on the underside, but there wasn't any way to cover it up and nobody seems to have complained about it.

Aside from Dante, who is your favourite character in the series?

Andreas was a good character, it would have been nice to spend more time with him, as he kind of represented an older and wiser Dante. I've always liked Jena, she's never more sexy than when she's being really obnoxious. Victor Romanov because he was really the only innocent among them all. I like all my characters, even Pyre, they all have something inside them that makes them interesting, it's just a shame that we have killed so many of them off before we could really give them time to expand. That's the biggest problem with doing something of the scale of Dante in 6 pages a week, it has to be kept quite strictly limited in many ways otherwise it will get completely out of control.

You've done a fair bit of work on Dredd - could you see yourself working on one of the "epics" that crop up from time to time?

I've always been lucky enough to have more than enough work to do on other things, so nobody has ever asked me. I wouldn't rule it out completely, but the problem I find when working on Dredd is that he isn't really a very compelling person to spend time with, he needs to have good supporting cast to make an epic work. I like to draw characters with eyes and Dredd doesn't have any...actually very few 2000AD characters do come to think of it.

Many comic creators have branched out to design work in movies and television (Brendan McCarthy and Dermot Power being two particular examples). Would you ever move in this direction yourself?

I've come close to doing this on a couple of occasions, but to get involved with this kind of thing requires being in someplace like London and spending time with the right people having the right meetings. I don't live in London...or even the UK, so I tend to let these things slide and just concentrate on the comics.

Would you ever consider writing a series?

Well I'm writing a book right now, we'll see how that goes.

And finally, what other characters, if any, would you like to work on?

I've always liked the 2000AD Robot stories ( ABC Warriors, Robusters ) they were ironically often the most human stories in the comic, with the best characters.

To find out more about Simon Fraser, check out The Semi-Offical Nicolai Dante Site.