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Home ¦ Features ¦ Nigel Kitching Interview Part 3

24 May 04 Back to Part 2

The Decap Attack Characters from Sonic the Comic

N K: This was the first work I had for comics that actually paid anything like sensible money. And I’m not saying their rates were good because they weren’t. My favourite was maybe when I got to write and draw Tex Avery’s Droopy. This was the first thing I wrote for them and I got the writing by pure luck. I just happened to be visiting the office and the writing assignment hadn’t been given out yet so I asked if I could do it. The editor gave me a bit of a look and said “So, you want to write, draw and colour this strip, do you? Would you like to put the staples in too?” So I did Droopy in the Avery fashion – lots of explosions and blackened faces and so on. On one occasion my editor became nervous at the violence and was worried that the people who policed the license would object. And they did. I got a list as long as your arm telling me that Droopy’s eyes were too big and his tail too long etc. Not a mention of the violence though.

But most of this work for London Editions was just drawing stuff on model and was pretty dull most of the time. Not that I wasn’t grateful for the work, I needed to make money to justify my packing in a perfectly good job and I was a married man with a couple of kids.

2AD R: You joined Sonic The Comic, under the helm of former 2000 AD editor Richard Burton, after London Editions and Fleetway were merged. How did you find working for a comic that was, ultimately, controlled by a foreign video games manufacturer? Was there ever any editorial interference (I suppose I’m thinking here of the banned pages of a character called Knuckles being lynched)?

N K: There was interference on Sonic The Comic but it was pretty half-heated most of the time. I remember one time the editorial staff and most of the creators attended a meeting with Sega and Copyright Promotions. Copyright Promotions were a company employed by Sega to police their property. Actually, I’m pretty sure it was Copyright Promotions who made those changes to my Droopy strip. So there we all were at the meeting and I was at next to the woman from Copyright Promotions and she had a pile of Sonic The Comics with many pages book marked, obviously indicating numerous occasions of license-crime. She was clearly waiting for her moment when she would produce this damning evidence and make herself look really professional into the bargain.

The Decap attack page in question (View full page)

I can’t remember quite how it went but the first chance I got I put it to Sega that the comic was very popular and we were trying to produce a good product not a slavish version of the style guides or video game. The woman from Sega agreed and I saw the woman from Copyright Promotions quietly slip her pile of comics out of sight under some papers. Rich Elson was there too and he made very similar points about the comic as did I, but in his uniquely aggressive style. I’m pretty sure we would have discussed our strategy before the meeting. Rich and I were very much a team on Sonic.

The Knuckles page you mention was an odd one. The lynching scene was clearly in the script. It was clearly there when Nigel Dobbyn’s pencils were approved. It was only when the final artwork was finished and hand painted that the issue was raised. It was a pretty easy fix in the end with Nigel just moving the rope from the neck to the chest area. I admit that I pushed the limits a little sometimes. In Decap Attack, a strip I drew myself, (I was by this time mainly a writer) I had one scene showing a mad scientist sawing the top of somebody’s head, removing the brain, dunking it in acid and putting it through a mangle. As far as I’m aware nobody complained.

2AD R: You were considered, by many of the fans of the comic, as “THE writer”, and indeed Sonic proved to be extremely popular with the readership, as evidenced at many a convention. How do you feel about those stories looking back at them now? And would you agree with Richard Elson’s comments about the comic really ‘coming together’ artistically during Andy Diggle’s tenure as editor?

N K: I make it a rule never to agree with Richard Elson. I think things came together on Sonic a lot sooner. And to be (reluctantly) fair to Rich I think you are misrepresenting him here. He actually said: “But, I think, under his (Andy Diggle’s) editorship the writers Lew Stringer, Nigel Kitching and I, produced some of our best work on the title in our seven year run.” Which isn’t to say that there wasn’t good work earlier. However, when Andy came in as editor he gave me a run of 10 issues. I’d never had this much room and opportunity for forward planning before and it gave me the opportunity to really plan a good solid and substantial story. I’d actually been away from the comic for a while as, basically, I’d been kicked off by the previous editor. I don’t want to go into all the gory details here but let me make it one thing abundantly clear – it wasn’t my fault. Funny, somehow I never seem to think it’s my fault…

Cover for Bug Eyed Monsters

I know licensed comics are rather sneered at by some among us, and often with justification. But STC was the exception – it was a good little comic with some genuine highlights. But, of course, if you can’t get over the fact it was about a little blue hedgehog it’s never going to work for you. But look at the people who worked on the thing: Richard Elson, Lew Stringer, Nigel Dobbyn, Mick McMahon, Rob Corona, Carl Flint… there was some real talent there. And it was great for me – I really learned a lot about how to write a serialised comic strip while I was there and because I knew the stuff had to be understood by the younger part of the audience I figured out various ways of keeping a story’s clarity while including interesting stuff for the older readers (and me).

Sonic The Comic was a great British comic success and it deserves more respect, I say.

2AD R: Whilst working on Sonic The Comic you made long lasting connections with artists such as Nigel Dobbyn and Richard Elson. Would you say that these are associations that have weathered you well over the years?

N K: Rich and Nigel are a couple of my best mates. I’m off to Nigel’s wedding this weekend as it happens. I knew Nigel from before my time on Sonic, he’d sent a sketch of my Nimrod character into the fanzine and I contacted him as soon as I saw it. We worked on various projects together that came to nothing. I always feel guilty when I think about how much of his time I have wasted over the years… I lobbied to get him a place on STC and ended up giving up the Knuckles strip I was drawing so he could come in. In a sane world the editor would have jumped at the chance to use somebody like Nigel. But editors can be funny, they like you to know who’s boss and it isn’t always well received when you try to promote somebody.

Panel from the last unpublished issue of Saviour (view full page)

Richard Elson was given work on Sonic by Richard Burton and the minute I saw his stuff I knew he was the person I wanted to work on my scripts and did my very best to make this happen. I actually put it to Richard Burton that I really didn’t want a certain artist on my scripts and Rich was the person I wanted to work with – a bit of a risky strategy now that I think about it. Once we got going both Rich and I were keen to promote ourselves as a team (he may say different, of course). But the first time I called him to discuss a script I wanted to write for him I was greeted with caution, even suspicion. I don’t think he quite believed that I wanted his input into the stories. As time went by Rich often supplied great little moments for me to write, a couple of the scripts were basically his plots and we worked on one story Marvel-style – that was a bugger to write as it turned out. It was fun to mix up the way we worked – one story Rich even let me sketch out the layouts for him. Amazingly he even followed what I had drawn – a discipline I would have guessed he was incapable of. Besides, he was obviously a much better artist than me so I didn’t expect any respect. Rich is a proper friend – the sort of person you cheerfully row with about rubbish.

2AD R: You’ve also done a fair amount of freelance illustration in your time, from book illustration, The Red Dwarf Smegazine, to colouring the Scorer strip for the Daily Mirror. Ideally, would you like to be able to give up freelancing and spend all your time on comics, or do you see it simply as part of the business? Also, are there any shameful pieces of work you’ve done that you’d really rather were sealed in a drum and dumped in the North Sea?

N K: Well, working for comics is freelancing… but I know what you mean. I would like to write more comics and, if the situation was right, I’d like to do that full time. But you often find that when you achieve an ambition it’s not quite what you expect it to be, and I don’t mean that in a negative way necessarily I just mean it’s different.

Shameful pieces of work? Well, there are some astonishingly bad pieces of work out there – I did a terrible job on covers for the Magic Roundabout comic (and was soon replaced) and my Sooty & Sweep, and Rainbow art was not the best. But I don’t feel awkward about any of that: the fact that I have done bad work will come as a surprise to nobody.

Magpie by Nigel Dobbyn (coloured by Nigel Kitching) (view full page)

N K: Well, my drawing style has been buggered up as far as drawing heroic/action stuff is concerned. I’m pretty much a cartoonist now. I do keep meaning to work on a few pictures to see if I still have a ‘serious’ style in me any more. But, as far as 2000AD type work goes I am a writer. However I am comfortable writing action or humour stuff. As far as my two strips for Bulletproof are concerned this was me just writing to please myself and it was fun finding out what appeared. It was quite similar to writing for 2000AD but in 2000’s case you can’t help but be aware of the culture – I’m not saying that you deliberately write to a preconceived style but you can’t help but respond to the environment. Does that make sense? I’m not sure.

Go to part 4