Sinister Dexter - should the gunsharks be permanently retired? No - they've many more stories to tell! Yes - to the electric chair with them!

RSS Feed   Small Press   Links   About 2000AD Review   Email us

Home ¦ Features ¦ D'israeli Interview Part 2

PART 1

1st December 03 Back to part 1

Batman gets into a tight squeeze

That was so bizarre! The first half of 1998 had been a real work drought, I had one month when I only earned 30 quid by drawing a private commission, and I only survived at all because DC lost some of my artwork from the previous year and had to pay me compensation!

So I 'm getting to this point where I'm not sure any more if I'm an artist with a lot of time to lie on a sofa watching Godzilla movies, or a fat bloke who lies on a sofa watching Godzilla movies who thinks he's still an artist, when Ian Edginton rings me and says "How'd you like to do Batman?"

It turned out that Ian had been pitching for work at DC, and had sent in a graphic novel we'd done together called Kingdom of the Wicked. This had done the rounds at DC and someone at the wonderfully-named Bat Office had decided we'd be good as a team for a No Man's Land segment.

So in due course I get a call from the wonderfully-named Jordan Gorfinkel (henceforth "Gorf") - it was a good thing Ian had tipped me off or I'd have presumed it was a practical joke - and I was booked to pencil and ink one episode, with two months to do the work. After some negotiation, I managed to wangle the colouring too.

However, there must have been a problem with one of the other segments because soon after, we were asked if we could do two issues worth, so by the time I started on August 30th 1998 I had two months to pencil, ink and colour two episodes plus one cover - that's normally three people's work. The only reason we got through it was because Ian and I had a long-standing working relationship - essentially we worked out what we were going to do and then bullied poor old Gorf into approving it.

So for two months I did almost nothing but work on Batman, from 6am each morning to 10pm each night. I remember I had the whole job broken down into segments in order to get through it, so at any time I knew to 1/135th part where I was! It all got a bit crazed towards the end, I started looking like a panda-eyed Morlock, plus I'd have these panics every morning when I woke up. You see, when work is thin, as it had been up to then, I become haunted by convincing dreams that I've just landed some huge job which will really save my bacon, so each morning I'd wake up in a cold sweat and dash through to my work-room to check that the pages really were on my drawing board!

The Penguin holds court

The really big surprise in working on such a high-profile character was how laissez-faire the Bat Office was. My previous experience with DC had been working for Vertigo, and they were lovely people, but they really did edit you to smithereens; if you got away with four corrections a page you were doing well. With Batman I had one set of corrections from Gorf at the pencil stage and another set from the approvals committee at the end (mainly to do with giving Batman a slimmer waistline (!). I remember counting and the total number of corrections came to seventeen over forty-four pages. Bliss.

I'd love another pop at Batman, perhaps some Legends thing, and I did have hopes at one point, as Gorf had been very enthusiastic about my work, but then he left not only DC but comics editing altogether. Defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory once again.

Xtnct's Rptr

Despite being an established artist for many years, you've only started working for 2000AD relatively recently. What tempted you to join the fold? How does working for 2000AD compare to working for bigger companies, like DC or Dark Horse?

I like that - "tempted me to join the fold" - in fact, the way it's worked for me is that I've grabbed desperately at whatever work I could get for most of my career. I read 2000AD as a child and it was always an ambition to work for them. What I realised early on was it was going to be a long haul to get in. In the late 80's and early 90's 2000AD went through a phase of using work that relied on spectacular surface effects but was perhaps not so strong on the storytelling. I was always much better at the nuts-and-bolts storytelling than the spectacular image, especially back then, so it took a process of years for me to build up my skills and for 2000AD to return to its roots.

I got in originally because they were moving over to computer colouring to save money, and I was among the first wave of artists in this country to invest in the technology. That was under David Bishop.

A couple of years later, when Andy Diggle took over, I was getting burned out as a colourist, so he suggested I write and draw some Future Shocks, having seen a one-off comic called Consequences that I'd done for a small outfit called Autocratik Press the previous year.

Scarlet Traces

I then spent a couple of years away from 2000AD, doing a project called Scarlet Traces for an online comics publisher, Coolbeans, with Ian Edginton. When Coolbeans folded, we got the rights to Scarlet Traces back, and sold it as a reprint to Alan Barnes at the Megazine. From that, Both Alan and Matt Smith offered me new work (XTNCT with Paul Cornell and Leviathan with Ian again), and at that point, I feel my career as a 2000AD artist REALLY started, in that I was not only working for 2000AD, but doing stuff that was getting a real, positive response from the readers.

Lazarus Churchyard

I loved working on Lazarus, and I'd be delighted to do more stories. When I did the extra pages for the Laz collection back in 2000, it was a very nostalgic experience; the seven years since finishing the original stories fell away and I started drawing in the way I had back in 92. It was like putting on a comfy old pair of shoes.

My understanding, the last time I heard Warren talk about this, is that he wrote Lazarus as a young man, based loosely on himself, and he feels he's changed so much that he can't write the character any more.

I certainly would like to work with Warren again, on Lazarus or anything else; every so often seems to pop back into my life with some new opportunity, so I wouldn't dismiss the possibility, but given how busy he is, I don't pester him for work.
about them...

Go to part 3