Polls Who should star as Old Stoney Face in the new Judge Dredd film? Ray Stevenson Ron Perlman Vin Diesel Jason Statham Gerard Butler Sylvester Stallone A complete unknown

RSS Feed   Small Press   Links   About 2000AD Review   Email us

Home ¦ Features ¦ Brendan McCarthy interview part 3

17th October 05

1 2 3 4

Rogan Gosh

BMC: That’s right

GH: How did that come about?

BMC: I grew up in west London next to Southall, where there’s a very large Asian community and, although I would collect American comics, I’d get on the bus down to Southall and buy Indian comics. Nobody really knew that there were Indian comics. It was similar to Marvel comics in that they were colour inside, but they had these really garish painted covers that were incredibly violent – people getting their heads cut off or being burned. So I used to read these really weird Indian comics when I was growing up. I’ve always wanted to do something with Hindu mythology just like Thor was based on Norse mythology.

What was interesting about the comics was that they were obviously written in Indian and translated into English but with a weird translation where everything would be slightly wrong, or inadvertently funny and bizarre. They also had curious titles like “Ramana: the matchless wit” – you’d think it was about a guy going around quipping wittily. At that time Indian culture was incredibly left field, Bollywood wasn’t as big as it is now.

After we couldn’t get Skin published, the editor of Revolver, Peter Hogan, approached us and asked us if we’d like to do something for them. The theme of Revolver was, as the title suggested, music like the Beatles Revolver – do it all a little bit musical, a little bit druggy. I told Pete I had a character called Rogan Gosh so let’s do an Indian sci-fi thing, but let’s not make it all sci-fi. I am strongly disinterested in comics that resemble films although I know lots of people like them. I’m not interested in cutting and panning like they do in films. It’s good for people who want their comics to be turned into films, but I’m much more interested in the analogy of music and lyrics – that relationship interests me more. With Rogan Gosh, there was a chance to do a piece that was kind of like listening to a Jimi Hendrix record. When you read it, you weren’t in a filmic narrative; you were in a musical space.

So we set about doing that. After we did Skin, a short hard direct punk thing, we decided we were going to do something quite smoky and late night, like a tapestry that floats in and out of things. That was what we wanted to do. So we would talk about it – Pete had an interest in the Raj and Rudyard Kipling, so it was both of our interests coming together to create something.

Rogan Gosh

GH: After it came out in Revolver it was republished in a collected edition by Vertigo. What was the response to that edition?

BMC: Rogan Gosh sold out as a graphic novel in America and it’s quite hard to get hold of now. In America, because they got the whole thing in one go, it was seen as quite a very out- there psychedelic piece – which it still is. When Grant recently did Vinamarama I was quite interested to see what he’d do with Hindu stuff. It was good – I liked it – but I still thought that Rogan Gosh was much more out there than that and you’d think that 15 years later we could go a bit further. I’m very pleased with Rogan Gosh, I think it’s a very substantial piece. To me it makes sense in the way Jimi Hendrix singing all along the Watchtower makes sense.

GH: You’ve done more work for British comics than you have for traditional DC comics – but you were at one point down to do an issue of Doom Patrol with Grant Morrison. What happened with that?

BMC: I’ve had incredibly bad luck with Grant. Me and Grant have always wanted to do something together and we’ve never quite made it. I saw Grant about 6 months ago. We had a great old laugh and said we must do something, wouldn’t that be great – a lot of the time we sit around plotting something that will outrage everybody or get up everybody’s noses – something to make an impact. But at the moment, Grant is writing his We3 script.

I think what happened with Doom Patrol was that a film came up and I probably had to do that, and was unavailable – something like that. I’d liked to have done Doom Patrol – although I did invent something called Danny the Street, which was their headquarters.

I was sitting in a taxi with Grant – we’d got pissed at a comic convention and he was saying he couldn’t think of a headquarters for the Doom Patrol. So I said - what about the Beatles in a Hard Day’s Night? They used to live in that house where they were all connected together. I don’t know if you remember the sequence, but the Fab 4 lived in 4 terraced houses that were basically hollow inside so it was one giant house. So I said - why don’t you make it so that they live on a street and the street moves around and hides among other streets? It fit into the surreal Doom Patrol style? We started talking about streets and I said – you know what’s bugged me all my life? It’s that that the singer Danny Le Rue – he’s basically called Danny the Street – isn’t that just a fucking weird name? Why don’t you call it Danny the Street and make it a transvestite cross-dressing street? You have to remember it was really late at night and we’d probably been doing things we shouldn’t have been doing.

GH: Someone mentioned to me that you’d also had the idea for an acetate comic?

BMC: Yes – the idea of a see through comic – I wanted to do a round one. You know – just mad shit…

Electric Hoax

BMC: I come out of a fine art background – I studied painting. I spent a couple of years painting and at the age of 22 I decided I had nothing to say and I couldn’t stand the poverty. I managed to get a job drawing comics and I kind of work as a commercial artist but with a fine art sensibility. I look at fine art more than I look at comics just because I get great pleasure looking at a painting. When you actually look at fine art and you pick up a magazine like Flash Art – the range of techniques in fine art is amazing – from installations to invisible conceptual art through collage – whatever, it’s endless and I find that very exciting. If you then take a technique like that and put into a narrative like a comic, I think it becomes very interesting.

Some people have experimented – Grant did one called Bible John which was quite interesting. It wasn’t one of his major works, but it was nonetheless and interesting experiment where he was using a Ouija board to write a script. That was at a time in English comics where you could experiment a lot. Things have got tighter now because there obviously isn’t an industry – there’s 2000AD and the Judge Dredd stuff and all the rest is reprints in terms of mainstream comics. You’ve got to go into the small press to do anything new and you’re dealing with no distribution, no money. In those days you could actually get paid to do weird shit.

GH: Have you had any experience with what’s out there in Small Press at the moment?

Daniel Clowes' Death-ray

BMC: Yes, I’m more interested in the so called alternative stuff than I am in the mainstream. All the Fantagraphics stuff. What’s interesting to me is that people like Daniel Clowes and Jim Woodring, all those guys, are now almost becoming mainstream. That whole left field stuff is almost becoming the bigger market and the superhero comics are actually becoming more ghettoised into the direct market, only on sale in comic shops.

GH: You have something like American Splendour.

BMC: Yeah, exactly – that’s a perfect example. I think that, recently, Death-Ray by Daniel Clowes is possibly one of the finest comics ever made. He’s got to be up in the top 10 with men like Eisner. Daniel Clowes is probably getting up to the level of Crumb now – a really great narrative artist. I do think that there is fantastic work being done in Superhero stuff, like Mark Millar’s Ultimates. It always reminds me of the difference between HBO writing and Network television writing, like the Sopranos. I think Mark has brought that level to the Superhero thing. I thought We3 was a superb piece of work. Frank Quitely is, in my view, possibly the best artist to emerge out of comics since Jamie Hewlett. He really is something superb. I love the fact that he’s got Dudley Watkins in there. The Desperate Dan chin still lurks in his work which I love.

1 2 3 4