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¦ Features ¦ Brendan
McCarthy interview part 2
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Dredd
gets cosy with the Brits
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GH:
Moving back to 2000AD, with regards to your “pointy helmeted” Judge
Dredd. For me, that was the first time I saw something in 2000AD where I thought
– Ah, there doesn’t have to be a photo realistic style. How did you
present this to editorial and what was the reaction of the readers?
BMC: I was quite self-consciously trying to do my Dredd. I saw
was that Dredd was a bizarre version of Batman – there’s that grittiness
to Dredd. I looked at the Neal Adams Batman and the Bill Sienkiewicz Batman, where
he has these curly ears. It was all about the ears - Frank Miller makes them small,
someone else makes them big again – there was all that kind of thing about
how to muck around with Batman and stamp your own cheeky style on him.
So with Dredd,
I was just looking at Japanese and Samurai helmets, thinking I was going to splay
it out that way. I actually hated how some people drew Judge Dredd’s helmet.
I thought it was too small. I just exaggerated Mike McMahon. McMahon slightly
flares the helmet, I do it more. McMahon does huge boots because he’s a
football supporter, so I thought I’d do that too. And then I started to
add all those eagle captions in - like they used to do Batman captions: “meanwhile
in Gotham City…” in a black bat shape. I thought why not just nick
that and do it in an eagle shape. I never got any bad reaction and I think because
it was getting this good reaction from the readers, in the heady days of 2000AD
when it was selling 100,000 copies, [editorial] were quite happy with it.
GH:
Alan Grant allegedly claims that the Dredd Epic Oz and the characters that came
out of it were a results of sketches that you sent during your trip to Australia
and by the time you got back you’d forgotten about them. Did that happen?
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Dredd
in Oz
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BMC:
Ok, Judge Dredd in Australia with Chopper surfing. I’d gone to Australia
and seen surfing before surfing was like it is now, as everyone’s doing
it. Then, it was a really obscure thing that you got in Hawaii or Australia. I
didn’t actually send sketches. Instead, I came back from Australia with
some drawings. I wondered what had happened to Australia in this future world
where there were things like the Cursed Earth. I thought of the Idea of Mega Sydney
and wondered what would the judges be like – probably a bunch of lazy bastards
wearing shorts who don’t do anything.
I had that idea about the
Judda, a cloned strain of judges who go astray and gave them the idea of surfing
in the air. Really, I just spoke to John Wagner about it and forgot about it.
Later they phoned me up and said “we’re doing this Australian Dredd
thing that you’re drawing”. I said “am I?”
I was originally going to
draw the whole thing, but something came up and I only drew a few episodes –
I think Garry Leach drew a few?
GH:
I believe you did most of the Judda episodes set in Australia itself?
BMC:
That’s right.
GH:
Another thing you did for 2000AD was Sooner or Later, which ran on the back cover
for 30 or so issues. How did that come about and how was the decision for the
format reached?
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Sooner
or Later
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BMC: By
that stage, the whole comic thing in the 80’s was really happening. Wham!
Pow! Comics aren’t for kids anymore – you saw about 3 billion articles
written about it. There was a good buzz about it. Comics were selling, they were
appearing in magazine articles, you were getting on the Tube show and people were
interviewing you…
2000AD was really part of
the cultural fabric of England at that time. There’d be questions in the
House of Commons and the Sun would do articles. There was a strong street feeling
to 2000AD – that it was current and it was happening and that it was part
of the magazines like the Face that you looked at. People from Madness read it,
Jonathan Ross was a big fan, people like Alan Moore were being interviewed by
Jools Holland. There was a buzz around it all.
So in that more open and
heady atmosphere, where people who hadn’t been hip before in their lives
were suddenly hip, you could suddenly do almost anything. Steve McManus was the
editor [of 2000AD at the time] and he was up for it. He wanted me and Pete to
do something but I didn’t have the time to do something big. So we ended
up doing a page on the back. What was it about, I can’t remember…?
GH:
Er…
BMC:
Swifty the unemployed guy?
GH:
Ed you might know this more that me…
Ed Berridge
(in the audience): Yeah, that was it…
BMC:
So remember, at that time it was all about the Smiths, Job Centres, misery. Swifty
goes down the job centre and gets a weird job in the future. That was it –
they’re sending the unemployed into the future! It was a bit of social street
grit about the misery of Margaret Thatcher. Things seem strangely disconnected
from anything now. Maybe that’s the advent of the game culture where there’s
no narrative or social content in games. It’s just blowing stuff away except
in Grand Theft Auto where it’s “how much money can I make pimping?”
There’s no comment or satire.
GH:
You moved from 2000AD to Crisis and Revolver, which was very much in the vein
of trying something different. How do you describe your involvement with those
publications?
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Detail
from a Crisis Artoon
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BMC: Both
Crisis and Revolver came from the 80’s “adults want to read comics
now” scene. The big problem that happened were that there were a load of
people who didn’t work in comics thought a.) there was money to be made
and b.) it’s hip, so let’s get into it. They are no longer in the
industry – they just went in and out very quickly. A lot of these people
who didn’t understand what they were doing managed to talk people into [going
along with them]. Crisis was an example of a left wing agitprop right on comic
that, as far as I am concerned, didn’t work due to poor artistic choices
in both writing and art.
Crisis was a venue where
someone could do something a bit more radical and political and that’s where
Skin, the story about the Thalidomide skinhead was supposed to appear. After Crisis
folded (I think Revolver started after Crisis folded) Revolver was less connected
to politics but more connected to music and the subtext of drugs. So Rogan Gosh
fitted into Revolver. In both instances, me and Pete Milligan were approached
by the editors of those magazines.
GH:
Going back to Skin, this was perhaps one of the most controversial comics of the
time, leading to “ban this filth” type stuff from the Sun. It was
originally supposed to be published by Crisis, so what actually happened in that
situation?
BMC:
This is a good story – this is one I’ll trot out on Parkinson next
time I’m on his show. That was ridiculous – it was hideous reality,
good anecdote. I was trying to earn a living drawing comics and when you’ve
just drawn an entire comic and you get fucking banned – you don’t
get any money. I was very close to getting a job in the Wimpy bar so it was actually
very much a pain in the arse at the time. But at the same time it’s fun
to be banned.
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Skin
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The story of Skin
was that when I was younger, about 12 or so, skinheads were happening. They were
an outgrowth of Mods and Caribbean Rude Boy culture – listening to Jamaican
reggae and all that sort of stuff. What was interesting to me is that it wasn’t
hippies – it wasn’t the 60’s thing and part of the generation
after that. It was the opposite of hippies with shaved heads, giant boots and
thin trousers rather than flared trousers, sandals and long hair. So it was a
complete antithesis to that culture.
When I was a kid, I was
hanging around with skinheads who were basically a bunch of idiots. [At that time]
I’m pretty much like that too, except I’ve got a bit of awareness,
and remember I’m only 12. I remember seeing a Thalidomide kid wearing a
Ben Sherman t-shirt. And you just think it’s a weird thing, but you forget
about it. But it came back to me and I was speaking to Pete Milligan and I though
it could be a great story. It would be about this kid who’s engaged in anti-social
behaviour, and while we’re tut-tutting about the fact that he’s kicking
in library doors and whatever, the fact of the grotesqueness of his deformity
is not commented on. Three seemed to be a different standard – corporate
violence vs social violence that could be an interesting thing to explore.
We decided we could approach
this in one of two ways. We could either go the sensitive poet way and make him
a Thalidomide who lives in Hampstead and writes sensitive poetry and that would
be acceptable to the middle class readers. Or we could make him completely middle
class. He’s 14 years old, he speaks like a working class kid and let’s
just completely do it in that mode. I said, you write it in this “Fuck this,
fuck that, I’ll fuckin’ fuckin’ have you, you fuckin’
cunt”. Write it like that and I’ll draw it in a crude way like a 14
year old had drawn the comic. Let’s get rid of panels, let’s just
do it crude and nasty so people think this is really badly drawn. Let’s
just go the whole hog with it. Let’s not back peddle. Let’s not make
it acceptable. Let’s not buff it all up for the nice middle class people
who would think “how lovely what they’ve done with this tragic story”
It wasn’t
the idea that it was shocking – we didn’t think that it was shocking
when we did it. I was about into the third episode when Steve McManus, who was
the editor [of Crisis] at the time, said that it was pretty hardcore but let’s
go with it. It went to the printers of Crisis which, at that point, was owned
by Robert Maxwell, the guy who pillaged all the pension funds – Mr Integrity.
The printers used to print stuff like Reader’s Wives, these kind of ridiculous
porno mags, and these people were going “what the hell is this? I’m
not printing this filth!” The printers shut down the presses and basically
went on strike. Maxwell’s lawyers came down from the top floor of the building
saying “what the fuck is this?” Steve Mc Manus got pulled in and asked
“what the hell are you doing? – this is outrageous” and it was
just a farce. It even went up to Robert Maxwell who almost closed Crisis down
– but he didn’t last very much after that.
So you’ve
got the guy at the top who’s pillaged the pensions, you’ve got the
lawyers running around shit scared, the printers who print soft core porn for
the top shelf. It was a wonderful array of lunacy with all these people objecting
to Skin. It was high comedy.
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Skin
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GH:
How did it eventually get printed?
Well, Time Out
magazine did a double page spread – “Banned, the story they don’t
want you to see” and printed bits of the art. At the time comics were getting
right on, Watchmen was out so comics were suddenly “graphic novels”.
Penguin Books said, we’re going to publish it, fuck it. Then we gave it
to them to read and they said – “get lost!” John Brown who publish
Viz said Penguin had no balls and they’d publish it – then “get
lost!” People wanted to do it because it was so controversial but when they
read it they thought it was too insensitive or something. Radio 4 had a show at
the time called “Does He Take Sugar”, a teatime radio show about disabled
people. Someone appeared on it and said it was disgusting - the person saying
this wasn’t disabled themselves.
Eventually, Kevin Eastman
of all people, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles dude, was setting up Tundra publishing
in England and said “fuck it, I’ll publish it” because he had
loads of money. So in the end, Tundra published it and we got a young Thalidomide
guy who was a punk who loved it and hit all the radio shows [telling them] it
wasn’t insensitive and, in fact, it was liberating.
So that was the
story of Skin – it was high comedy, farce and all the rest of the usual
nonsense you get in these situations. But as a working artist and writer it took
me three years to get any money from Skin and it was a pain in the arse at the
time. But it was also nice to be banned because of the notoriety.
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