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Home ¦ Features ¦ Gordon Rennie Interview Part 3

4th June 04 Back to Part 2

Ravne plays his hand

When I was writing the first Caballistics series, I remember reading something that made me rather nervous. David Bishop's history of 2000AD Thrillpower Overload series of articles was running in the Meg, and Dan Abnett was quoted talking about an X-Files type conspiracy investigation series he did, called Black Light. Dan said that what he learned from that was that team stories didn't work in 2000AD. I respect Dan's opinion a lot – hey, the guy writes half the output of the UK and US comics industries, so I reckon he must know know something - and, if you look at all the most successful 2000AD strips, they're all single character-based. ABC Warriors is probably the only exception and even there the main focus has always been on Hammerstein.

So, yes, I was very pleased with the apparent success of the strip, even if developing a group of 5-6 characters has been a slog at times when you've only the space of 5-pages per episode to manoeuvre in, and none of them - at least to start with - had obvious traditional 2000AD character hooks to work with. None of them are mutants or aliens or robots or have X-ray vision or gadgets or warp spasms to make them immediately distinctive.

Necronauts

No, not Necronauts. That story's told, so what would be the point in going back to it? There is a proposal for something called Defenders of the Realm sitting on someone's desk, set in the late 1920s/early 30s, about a proto-Caballistics team, and much more of an old-fashioned spiffy-action kind of thing. So far, though, The Mighty One remains to be convinced that it would be sufficiently different from Caballistics to make it worthwhile doing. Ho-hum.

On the other hand, I think I'm going to be doing a Caballistics story called 'Weird War Tales' for prog 2005, flashing back to the occult Nazi-busting days of the Department Q characters. So that should hopefully be fun.

Have you any ambitions to write for one of the big US publishers? If so, which superheroes would you like to write?

I've worked for some of these companies before. I've worked for Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Heavy Metal. I don't go to the big conventions anymore to schmooze. I don't phone these people up and pitch projects to them. I suppose I should, since it seems to be what you’re supposed to do, but it's not something I lie awake at night fretting about.

Jenny's inner self

Ummm.....none, these days. I buy the occasional collection, but that' s about it. I really like Greg Rucka's Queen & Country, a serious and pretty grim'n'gritty series from Oni Press about British secret service agents, and the collected books of that are about the only thing I go actively looking for.

A lot of crime and horror. I like schlock stuff like Rex Miller's Chaingang series of books, although they're quite hard to track down. I really like a Canadian crime writer called Michael Slade, who dies a very good take on very nasty psychological stuff and in-depth police procedural stuff. I hardly ever read science-fiction, especially 'proper' sceince fiction. A lot of non-fiction, which is always a great source of story ideas. History, especially war and Roman Empire stuff. I have shelves full of books about Roman history and the Battle of Stalingrad. The Stalingrad obsession turns up heavily in the Rogue Trooper novel. I've no idea what use the Roman obsession will ever be.

What else? Movie books, especially horror movies. Cultural criticism, stuff like that. This year's summer holiday reading will be a collection of Ian Fleming's original Bond novels and - rather ambitiously - Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Cursed Earth Koburn

What can we expect to see next from you?

More Dredd. Lots more Caballistics. Maybe that Rogue Trooper spin-off series, and maybe a spin-off series about a member of the Dredd family. Carlos Ezquerra and I are doing more Cursed Earth Koburn stuff. Now that Missionary Man's retired, there's an open slot for another Cursed Earth gunslinger. Johnny Woo will probably be returning to the Meg in his own stories too.

Away from 2000AD, more novels of some sort, hopefully more computer game work - as well as the Rogue Trooper game, I also did work on Killzone, the big PS2 shooter coming out this year.

I'm also working on something else at the moment, but I'm not allowed to talk about it, and hunter-killer drones are probably on their way to me right now for even mentioning this much about it.

Caballistics inc returns to 2000AD in Prog 1400, and Cursed Earth Koburn returns in Megazine 221.