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Home ¦ Features ¦ Charlie Adlard interview part 3

13th February 05

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Onto part 4

Superman and Luthor pin up

CA: Oh yes, it’s probably a bit of a cliché really: my two other interests are music and film! It’s like people who write down in those big questionnaires that they like pub evenings. Yeah, everyone likes pub evenings! Yes everyone likes music; everyone likes film.

You can say that you like comics – not everyone does like comics, so you could say that’s a hobby of sorts. You can mention a comic in this room and no one will really know what you’re talking about. You can mention a film to everyone and they’ll have been to the cinema to see it, but not everyone’s read a comic.

But there’s a certain point at which you move beyond just casually going to the cinema, or just buying the occasional cd, and really get into something!

EB: Until eventually you become obsessive!

CA: You become an obsessive, which I think we all are! Obviously I don’t get to the cinema as much as I used to, and that’s one thing I really wanted to pursue when I was in my late twenties – getting into film.

EB: But it’s still investing in a visual medium.

CA: Yes, it’s not too dissimilar. Because, you can argue, it’s all to do with storytelling, and you learn storytelling through films as you can through comics, so it helped. It wasn’t like the three years were a complete waste of time! Being in the band might have been more of a waste of time – I don’t think that really helped towards drawing comics! But doing three years of Film and Video was certainly not detrimental towards it.

EB: So what was the actual subject of your course?

CA: It was a very fine art-geared course, so it wasn’t technical by any stretch of the imagination. In a lot of ways it was a lot better for me because I’m not a technical person; I’m a complete technophobe actually. It was just “Here’s a camera, go out and do whatever you want”. It was slightly different at Maidstone because it was very fine art; so most people were going out and filming their naval, doing experimental movies. I was going out and shooting horror movies! I was going against the grain, and I really should have gone to another place, but I had to accept my lot by that time. So I was going against the grain and making strange narrative films, and everyone else was making these normal, non-linear movies.

EB: Do you think that had an influence on your later move into comics illustration?

CA: Yes and no: I mean it showed in a lot of ways that perhaps my heart wasn’t totally in it. It made me realise that…I wanted to do something else!

[Both laugh]

Especially after I came out of college after three years and discovered that the only job was as a runner for some crappy video-editing company or something, which is a job you can get off the street, basically. You don’t need a degree to be a runner! I suddenly realised that I had no qualification whatsoever, really. I thought, “What was the point of me just doing three years – for what?” And because I wasn’t technically trained, and I didn’t want to be a technician, I couldn’t get anything like that.

So I think that was another impetus to shy me away from wanting to pursue that career, because I suddenly realised that I wasn’t going to be a director instantaneously. You really had to work from the bottom up and my heart wasn’t in it enough to be that committed to something. I don’t think I was talented enough to go into something like that anyway.

EB: At what point did you decide you wanted to take up comics work?

CA: It was just everything going to pot in London, basically. For eight months I was in this band, and I wanted to make it ‘big’. The whole thing just went tits up, and I sort of just went home with my tail between my legs, not really knowing what I was going to do, to be honest. I just wanted to get out of London and kind of start afresh.

So I went back home with my parents again, to literally purge the system of everything that had gone before. I was probably there for about a week thinking, “What could I do?” and various ideas went through my head. And then literally, literally, I just thought, “Why don’t I try this comic lark again?” And within a week or so I thought, “Why did I ever leave this behind?” and I suddenly realised that this was what I was really good at.

I mean, I was a perfectly okay drummer; I wasn’t a particularly brilliant drummer in a rock band. I think the difference between that and comics is that in a band you’re only part of something whereas, being a comics artist, what you do is yours. You can never claim to have that in a rock band, and if you’re the drummer, and you’re not writing the songs (which I wasn’t!), you’re, shall we say, a ‘lesser’ part of the whole makeup. So that was another good reason for starting to do comics again – you had complete control and you stood and failed on what you did, so if it was good you could take full credit for it.

Soon after that I realised how much I enjoyed it again and I very quickly came to the realisation of “Why did I ever stop doing this”? I never really stopped doing it, but “Why did I decide to pursue these other avenues when I could have matured my style a lot sooner, when I was younger”? I spent about two years braking in to the industry. I think I must have spent two years catching up on lost time, in terms of style and artistic competence. Because I certainly wasn’t very good when I started drawing again, because I’d lost about four or five years previously and not drawn that much when I was a younger student.

EB: So what was your first published work?

CA: Well I did a couple of strips with a guy called Tim Quinn for The Sunday People bizarrely enough. Tim lived locally in Shrewsbury; he was the guy who used to do the little strips with Dickey Howett, all the Marvel UK stuff. And he lived in Shrewsbury, and I got to know him, and he’s still a good friend now, and he still lives in Shrewsbury, and we did a lot of that stuff together. But if we discount what I did with Tim, which isn’t exactly the sort of stuff we’re talking about here, my first proper published comic book work was The Hand of Fate, a Judge Dredd strip for the Judge Dredd Megazine, written by Alan.

Adlard's first Dredd work in the Megazine

EB: Yeah, that’s right, Alan Grant.

CA: And that was got, I remember, at a Glasgow convention, back in the good old days when there were the two big conventions that you could go to, with loads of Americans at each one, so you had a nice pick of editors to show your stuff to.

In the end it was showing my work to, I think it was Alan McKenzie, when he was editor, and I’d already met Alan [Grant], and Alan was very kind to complement my artwork and I was cheeky enough to say “If I can get one of the editors interested, would you write a story for me?” And he said yes! So, of course, when I was seeing Alan McKenzie I sort of mentioned the fact that “Oh, Alan Grant’ll write me a story. He’s already said yes!” And he said “Oh, alright then. I’ll talk to Alan and we’ll see what happens”. And I got put in touch with David Bishop, because he was editing Judge Dredd Megazine, and that’s what it was for. It was a bit of a baptism of fire, because for the first year of my career I was just fully painting stuff.

EB: Because that was the big ‘fully painted’ period?

CA: Yes, and I went on to do Armitage which was fully painted, so pretty much like everybody else’s strips it was being printed like mud, because I made the big mistake of not doing it bright enough. I couldn’t get that idea that you had to do it brighter to account for the printing; I did it as I saw I’d like to see it.

EB: And it was still being printed on that ‘bog paper’.

CA: Exactly, yeah, so it was coming out pretty horrible. But, y’know, they never complained!

[Both laugh]

Judge Dredd's winter collection

EB: How did you find drawing Judge Dredd? It seems to be one of those characters that divide artists: they either seem to love it or hate it.

CA: I’ve always come back to Dredd over the years. I’ve come back to Dredd about three times in my career. He’s hard to draw because of course, as any artist will say, it’s the eyes that are the emotional part of the face, and you’re drawing a guy with no eyes!

But having said that, how many bloody superhero comics are there where the guys wear masks and you’ve only got the whites of eyes? I remember, when I was doing Green Lantern & Green Arrow, about halfway through I thought “Jesus Christ! I haven’t drawn these characters eyeballs!” For three issues! Without eyeballs it’s really hard to draw people talking to each other, because without eyeballs moving, you’ve always got to have them talking directly at each other, it’s the only way you can make them relate to each other.

I mean, the good thing about Dredd, as I’m sure everyone says: it’s the world he lives in which is the interesting bit. Dredd is just the cipher. Dredd’s really fun to draw, because you can really exaggerate him, and you can make him as bloody mean and nasty as physically possible, though my artwork tends to be a bit more grounded in reality than some others. I find it hard to go over the top because my style just won’t physically let me. I enjoy drawing it; the more inventive stories are good fun to draw.

EB: How did you find working with Alan Grant?

CA: Oh, well working with Alan’s great. Doing The Hand of Fate was just a one-off. I had more experience of working with Alan on the Scarface stuff.

CA: Yes. I’ve known Alan pretty well for quite a few years, so it’s always nice to work with people you know. Some writers I’ve worked with I’ve never even communicated with at all, which I don’t like and it’s always a weird thing to do.

Scarface

CA: I think I’ve said in interviews before that I actually prefer working with people I know already, or I get to know, that I can actually get on with personally. If someone said “Would you work with” (I’ll just pick two names out of a hat) “J. Michael Stazinsky or Robbie Morrison on a big project”, I’d choose Robbie. Robbie’s a great writer – actually I think he’s better than J. Michael Strazinsky!

But, beyond that fact, I’m good friends with Robbie; I know he can do good stuff. I know what he can do, and I know that he knows my stuff, and we work well together. We know how each other works.

EB: You’ve got a kind of team dynamic?

CA: Yeah, exactly. And there’s a number of writers I’ve got that kind of dynamic with. I haven’t done stuff with Alan for ages, but of late I’ve talked to Robert Kirkman a lot, so we’ve got a bit of dynamism going there. Joe Casey I love working with and we’ve got a good working relationship. I sure there’s somebody else!

[Both laugh loudly]

Oh, Ian Edginton: I’ve worked with him quite often. It always helps if you’re friendly with them as well. If you can get on with them as a person, regardless of comics, or how good they are at writing, I find that’s a really good method…

EB: That you’ve got similar personalities; you sort of gel together?

CA: Yeah. Even though I haven’t worked with him much as a writer/artist for ages, Larry Young’s another guy I love working with, though he’s been my publisher longer than he’s been my writer now. But I love working with people like that.

Back to part 2

Onto part 4