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Home ¦ Features ¦ John McCrea interview part 2

11th May 05

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Onto part 3

Chopper

JMcC: That was in the first issue of the Megazine wasn't it? I think Garth and I had just been over in the Fleetway offices, and we went out on the piss with John Wagner and a few of the guys. Crisis was grinding, or had ground to a halt; Wagner turned to me as we were heading down to the pub and said, 'John would you and Garth like to do this thing for the first issue of the Megazine?'

I though wow! It was pretty cool to be in the first issue of a new launch.

I think Certain bits of it were reasonably done on my part, I don't think Garth is particularly happy with his writing in it. Some of the writing's not up to scratch, but then neither is some of my drawing.

I enjoyed it, but it was more painted artwork. God knows I was getting highly sick of it. I never got into the business to do painted art. I grew up reading Marvel and DC, that's what I liked, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

PJ: You were talking to Glenn Fabry about that time; he was helping you with the painting?

JMcC: Well, no not really. I was just ripping Glenn off! Just looking at his artwork and trying to analyse how he did it, and turning out inferior copies of it. As were many people at the time. Dermot Power created his entire career out of that. Glenn rang him up one time, and said, 'How about introducing me to some of the movie guys you're working for,' and Dermot said, 'No.'

So no-one thought too highly of Dermot after that. I don't think he talks to any of us anymore, now he's living on his Lear jet.

So anyway, I really was sick of painted artwork, and I still to this day don't think comics should have any painted art. Maybe the cover, some Preacher covers were awesome. But comics painted aren't comics, it's not what the medium's about. It slows things down, it distracts from the story. The Megazine actually wanted Middenface McNulty to be painted, and I managed to talk them into not making me paint it. Then I really put the nail in the coffin by doing it so cartoony.

Fast Forward (Future Shock)

PJ: You did a Future Shock that was really cartoony. You said, 'I don't think they want it this cartoony, but I don't care!'

JMcC: Oh yeah. I did some samples for Burt (Richard Burton).

So I did all these realistic samples, and when he said yes, I drew it and waited until they day of the deadline and sent it in, so they had no choice but to run it. He did tell me that if he'd got it any earlier, he'd have made me redraw it. And told me I was never working for 2000AD again. I was like, 'Bollocks! Shot myself in the foot there.'

PJ: But you kind of knew that was going to happen...

JMcC: I did, didn't I? I have a habit of doing that. My career is littered with these sort of mistakes. Which is why I did a talk one time at UKCAC, about how not to break into comics.

PJ: You had that lovely panel of someone walking up the stairs, and it was sideways. It was a really well drawn picture, it was just such a weird angle.

JMcC: It was She-Hulk, walking up the stairs in my Avengers samples. It was sideways, because I couldn't figure out how else to cram it all in!

Demon pencils (view larger image) Demon inks (view larger image)

RC: You did the Demon. You mentioned Kirby earlier. If there's one character you automatically associate with him it's that one. What was it like taking that over?

JMcC: You know, to a degree, when I took it over, I'd kind of forgotten that Kirby had created it! I remembered Matt Wagner's four issue series, but really I was looking at Val Semeckis' stuff, and I thought that while Val's a very good artist, he made him look like a big teddy bear. So I went in with no desire to keep it looking like it was looking, I wanted to shake it up completely. The comic was going to be cancelled, so our proviso when Garth and I went in was just to shake it up as much as possible.

So we just did whatever the fuck we wanted, and as we went on, it just got crazier. And we built the readership up a little bit. In fact in 'Zero Hour', issue 0 of The Demon it sold incredibly well, but it still wasn't selling well enough for those days.

PJ: Where would it be now?

JMcC: Certainly top forty. It's ridiculous, back then it was #150 with a bullet. It was fun, we had a great old time doing what we wanted as seeing if we could get away with it. And of course creating Hitman.

RC: Was that always intended to be a spin-off?

Hitman

PJ: Arse Force Five!

JMcC: God, I mean how stupid could you be? They're always going to find some other combination. I guess the writing on the wall was 'Speedball'.

PJ: Crackhead?

JMcC: No we had no idea... we just created a character we both wanted to draw. We're huge fans of Chow Yun Fat and The Killer. I've fond memories of heading down to Will Simpson's house drinking into the small hours and watching The Killer on video. We just wanted to do an homage to it, and didn't think it'd spin off into its own title.

I remember when Garth first said to me that DC wanted to pick it up as an ongoing series. I thought to myself, 'Well, I'll sign up for the first twelve.'

I honestly couldn't see it lasting more than that. I could not see how Garth could manage to make it interesting longer than that. I did say to him that if it didn't last as long as Gunfire, which was another one of the Bloodline spin-offs...

PJ: Which we all remember...

Hitman & Superman

JMcC: Well, exactly! I mean, it was the shitest comic ever. Gunfire basically was this guy, and whatever he picked up became a weapon, so you had these pictures of him with a wrench in his hand. It was just the shitest fucking thing on the planet! We did parody Gunfire, where at the end of it he turned his arse into a hand grenade and blew himself up.

As it turned out I stuck with it a while longer than twelve issues, because Garth kept writing better and better stories, it was a scream. It did alright, it had its run. We always had it in mind that it would be a finite series. You can't write about an amoral killer for too long without people going, 'You know, maybe if this guy is living by the gun, he should be dying by the gun.'

We just had to wrap it up a little earlier than we expected, because sales were getting a bit low towards the end. They said to us, 'You could keep going and do the last incidental stories you want to do, but it might get cancelled before that, or you could wrap it up by issue 60 and be sure of it getting out there.'

Which was very decent of them to give us that option. They did the same with The Demon. They said, 'It's going to be canned, and we should be doing it now, but we'll keep it going until you've finished this major arc and wrap it up the way you want to.' DC and indeed every comics company, has a history littered with occasions where things like that did not happen.

I remember when Hitman first came out, I was signing at a table in the NEC in Birmingham beside John Wagner, and John asked me what I was up to. I showed him an issue, and he was looking through it. He liked it, and he asked how many copies it had sold. I told him 45,000/50,000 or something. He said, 'If this had come out five years ago, it's be selling 150,000 copies, and you'd have made a ton of royalties.'

'John, I don't want to hear that!'

PJ: Do you think comics will ever claw back to that level? The quality's a lot better now.

JMcC: The quality is better, but there's so much competition. Sales went up in the past year, the top ten now are all over 100,000 copies. But I don't know if that's because there are more readers, or that they are just buying less of the smaller titles.

But now there are not enough comics in newsagents. There's the Spider-man and X-Men reprints.

PJ: But there are more in newsagents now than there were a few years ago.

Batman

PJ: I've got an old issue of 2000AD with your picture of Judge Toyah in it.

JMcC: What about my Rogue Sucker? I earned some more Galactic Groats for that one!

But I was reading the letters in the Batman comic, and someone had written in say the last storyline wasn't very good, and the art wasn't up to its usual standard. The single line reply was brilliant in its arrogance. '3,000,000 people can't be wrong.'

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Onto part 3