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Home ¦ Small Press ¦ Graham Pearce

19th June 06

I remember when I was at University in the late 1990s that in some of the bigger comic shops you could buy home-made photocopied comics but I was never inclined to buy them. I was reacquainted with the “scene” again in early 2001; it was a quiet day at work so I started reading Comics International from cover to cover. I was flicking through the “Announcements” section and saw ads for a load of small press books. They were only cheap so I sent off for some of them. They arrived a few days later and it opened me up to a whole new world of comics that I never really knew was there before.

What led you to try and make a comic book of your own?

When I left University, I decided to try and make a living by drawing cartoons. I sent off submissions to newspapers, Viz and some of it’s the lesser known rivals. I got some work for Smut: The Alternative Comic but they were only ever interested in 1 or 2 strips a month. I also found myself wanting to steer away from the sleazy jokes that the editor wanted so I decided to just do whatever interested me. I ended up producing so many scripts and cartoons but had no way of getting them published so I thought about doing it myself.

Originally I was going to print a collection of gag strips and humorous observations called Graham Pearce’s Random Thoughts but then came to the opinion that no-one would care about such a book and it would be rubbish. I’d been working on the first Sgt Mike Battle strip (Sgt. Mike Battle: Nazi Stomper!) and knew that at 6 pages long, it would be too long for Viz so finding a publisher would be tough. It was when I had the ideas for the subsequent Sgt. Mike Battle strips that I thought about collecting them into a Small Press book, Sgt. Mike Battle: The Greatest American Hero!

How did you land upon Sgt. Mike Battle? Was he a character that came fully formed, or did he develop over time?

I came up with the name “Mike Battle” in the early 1990s. I was initially inspired by Erik Larsen who was creating an entire universe and history for The Savage Dragon when Image Comics was formed. I did the same thing and went about creating hundreds of superheroes from the golden age to the present.

Mike Battle was a WW2 era character who fought alongside cheesy heroes like Captain Action, The Gold Beret and Sgt Spitfire. At that point Battle was just a name and a crude drawing. He had no powers and was a Nick Fury-type character.

I never did anything with him until I read about the film U-571 and its disregard for any element of historical accuracy. I wanted to do the ultimate Hollywood War movie but as a 6-page comic strip where the Americans storms the beaches on D-Day, kill Hitler and then get betrayed by the Reds, albeit condensed into one day with plenty of unflattering international stereotypes.

I needed a hero with no powers - only a kick-ass name. I remembered Battle from my archives, redrew him so he looked less like Nick Fury (and without realising it made him look just like Duke from Action Force) and gave him “Nazi Stomper” suffix (actually he was “Nazi Smasher” but a friend suggested Stomper which sounded much more brutal).

He hasn’t changed much since his first appearance in SMB:GAH #1. I toyed with the idea of changing his hair style with each incarnation to suit the fashion of the time but then thought it would be better to let the supporting cast reflect the fashions of the times and have Battle remain exactly the same. He may stomp different enemies but he never changes, he’s always a hypocrite who loves his country and refuses to believe that the US military or elected officials would ever do anything corrupt or unjust. I don’t think the book would be any good if he was a developed character in his own right, he works best as a 1-dimensional character that I can use as a vehicle to explore genres, stories or themes that interest me.

So it that why the book is more of an anthology than an ongoing series?

It’s one of the reasons but it’s much less daunting to tell stories in they are short and self contained rather than try and get my head around a 12 issue maxi-series. As a creator I’ve made the conscious decision to start off small and build up slowly. It’s no coincidence that I started with short 6-page chapters and gradually get the stamina for longer stories.

In SMB:GAH #1, I had four 6-page stories under my belt before I tackled a 12-pager. I did a few more 12 pagers in #2-3 and then felt confident to a 24-page story in #4 (although it was broken into four consecutive 6 pagers). #6 was a 30-page strip #7 was a 36-page story but because it was a “tribute“ to the early Image Comics, the story consisted of fight scenes and excuses to introduce loads more characters. When I’ve finished #8-9, I’ll have an epic 48-page story under my belt.

You seem to have a great interest in the history of comics: war comics, 60s superhero comic and ACTION FORCE all seem to have been influences?

I think I’ve been influenced by everything; I’m like a sponge always absorbing everything I see, hear or read. I’ve always been interested in history and I’ve always loved parodies. I’ve always felt that to do a successful parody you need to study everything about what you are mimicking to make it effective. As a teenager my Mum and Dad would always buy me books about the history of comics and I loved reading them. I was originally only interested in the eras that I was more familiar with such as the WW2 and 1960s Marvel stuff, but lately I have been reading much more about other times. I love reading about how genres come in and out of fashion and how the predominant trend in comics and films crossover and influence each other.

The beauty of SMB:GAH and the fake history that I created for him (his first appearance was in 1916) is that I can go to any month in the last 90 years and tell any story or retell any moment from history. I can do a War story in WW2, a romance comic set it in the 1950s or a superhero comic in the 1960s. The possibilities are endless and I love the freedom of being able to go from one genre/era to another. With the book being an anthology, it is possible to go from a horror story to a sci-fi story in a way that I couldn’t if the book was part of an ongoing story.

After ACTION FORCE was cancelled in the late 1980s I didn’t read much until Image comics was formed and then I started reading everything and those comics were the inspiration for BATTLEBLOOD in SMB:GAH #7.

Do you ever feel that producing your own comics can be something of a thankless task?

Yes, but I make comics for my own entertainment not other people’s gratitude. If you’re making comics to please other people then you’re in for a big disappointment. You need to put in lots of hard work for little or no reward. The worst thing is the ratio between creating and reading a book; you can slave over something for 3-6 months but it can be read from cover to cover in less than 10 minutes. It can be quite daunting when you think about it but it only takes one person to say they loved what you did and it makes it all worth while.

What do you enjoy most about producing your own comics?

Apart from having something to show for what you do with your life, the best thing is long after I finished a book, I can go back, read it again and enjoy every single page. It may sound a bit arrogant but whenever I read old issues of SMB:GAH, I still laugh out loud. I usually forget most of the jokes and references. I guess it shows that I’m making the book to entertain myself over anyone else. It’s only fair when you consider that I am the one person who spends more time with the book than reader will.

How did you go about selling your own comic, and how do you get people to notice it now?

It’s the one area of the comic that I’m usually really slack with. I certainly don’t do anywhere near as much as I should. I try and justify my own laziness by thinking that I’m still developing as a creator so I don’t want too many people watching me as I learn and make my mistakes. That said, I wouldn’t be too upset if I had 1,000s of readers watching me “learn”, as long as they were all paying customers.

For the last 5 years most of my sales come from either the “Announcements” section in Comics International or via Smallzone. I’ve done a bit more this year in terms of promoting the book; I send the book to several respected reviewers who have been able to write pieces for websites and magazines, I’ve also done the freebie comics like Saddam Stomper! and SMB:GAH #5½ (a free preview of SMB:GAH #6). I have always been a bit reluctant to push the book in comic shops; it gets a bit embarrassing when shop owners refuse to sell your book, but then most of them have trouble selling the mainstream books made by professionals. I’ve found that the shops the pride themselves in stocking small press books usually say “thanks but not thanks”, because the book isn’t arty enough for them.

I’ve try and promote the book with www.sgtmikebattle.com but with my technology (and skill) it’s never been as good as I want it to be (but if any budding web designers are looking for a project to show off their skills, give me a call). The site has recently been revamped so I expect it to get some attention.

In terms of conventions, I’ve refused to attend any until I was happy enough with the quality of my work. Each year I kept saying, I’ll go to the Bristol Con next year but I finally realised with that attitude I’d never get there. I must admit that the fact I attended Bristol 2006 is largely due to Martin Eden. I had been buying back issues of The O Men toward the end of last year and we’d been emailing each other and he asked if I wanted to share a table with him in May 2006. I couldn’t refuse the opportunity especially how Martin was planning to launch volume 2 of The O Men at the convention. The only problem was trying to get SMB:GAH #7 done in 5 months, but I managed to lock myself in a dark room and get it done 3 weeks early!

I don’t read too many comics these days because of cost and because there isn’t very much that interests me, but I know that the industry is in trouble. I’ve spoken to retailers and they are worried about the lack of new readers that are coming in. It finally hit me about how bad things were getting when my “local” comic shop closed down. I’d been buying from Kathie’s Comics in Plymouth for the last 15 years and it was upsetting, and unexpected, when they closed.

I’m still not sure about Marvel and DC doing the epic crossovers again. It’s great from the point of view that they are willing to shake things up, but you never really get any long term changes as a result, eventually the status quo will return. So what it someone dies, they’ll come back to life again and again. The other problem is with the scale of the crossovers, you need to read 25 books a month just know what is going on and who can afford that these days? I’ve found the easy way is to wait till the crossover is complete and then read a brief description on Wikipedia.

As for the industry attracting new readers, it’s a difficult situation; it can promote the younger books but then it presents the medium as being childish, but if it promotes the mature and sophisticated older books, it risks alienating itself from younger readers. The only way is to try and educate the public that comics are a “medium” and within that medium are dozens of genres and styles which cater for all ages. I’ve been reading comics for 20 years and it’s only been in the last 5 years that I’ve discovered that there was more to comics than heroes in tights fighting each other. Everyone seems to think that all comics are just like the 1960s Batman TV show.

One thing that does annoy is how cheap comics are in Europe, in particular the foreign reprints of 1960s Marvel stuff. You only have to walk into a Supermarket and you can buy these little 200-page A5 booklets of classic 60s stuff like Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, X-men and Captain America all for about 4 euros. The same book over here would be twice that amount with half as many pages. It’s never bothered me that the dialogue is in French, German or Spanish because the artwork tells the story in itself. It’s a good exercise to try and work out the story from the pictures and then track down an English version to compare the two. I bet you could get a dozen people to try it and you’d get loads of different results.

How do you see the Small Press scene today, in comparison with when you started out?

It seems as if there are more people doing small press books these days and there seems to be more people doing really good books. It’s great if you’re a reader but bad if you are a creator- I may sounds selfish but there’s too much competition and it’s harder to make a book stand out. It’s also hard because people keep raising the bar of what a Small Press book should be. There certainly are more professional looking small press books around at the moment and they are able to stand on their own compared to most of Marvel or DC’s output.

The biggest problem with small press comics is that so many of them are more expensive than mainstream books. It’s one thing to spend £3 on a comic that’s by Alex Ross or Jim Lee but it another thing buying a small press comic by an unknown quantity. The quality of small press comics can range from professional right down to unintelligible so it’s often a gamble. I try to keep the price of SMB:GAH to £1 just so there’s more chance that I might pick up a few more readers who can be curious without spending too much money.

What’s next for Sgt. Mike Battle, and do you have plans to turn your hands to anything else?

SMB:GAH #8, which is known as “The Last Admin Hero!” is essentially basically “Die Hard in a top-secret Government weapons lab”. Terrorists hi-jack a weapons lab and it’s up to one of the office workers, armed with the contents of the stationery cupboard, to save the day. Sgt Mike Battle has more of a supporting role in #8 but he still gets to stomp some terrorists.

I had planned it to be a short 24-page story that was meant to be in #7 but I was having so many problems with it that I postponed it until #8. With each rewrite the story kept getting bigger and bigger. In the first draft all the action was in the second half with the first 12 pages all about the lowly office worker who saves the day. Several drafts later it turned into a 36 pages strip with 24 pages of action, but even that wasn’t room, it’s now 48 pages with action pretty much from the beginning.

Because of the length of the story it’s too big for one issue of SMB:GAH, so the story will conclude in SMB:GAH #9. The whole story is a mixture of tribute and satire of Hollywood action movies like Die Hard, Under Siege and The Rock. One day I might have to sit down and do a “Making of” book which shows all the original scripts and layouts to see how the story evolved from a satire of my own boredom at work to becoming a homage to an action movie.

Because people really like the satirical side of SMB:GAH (REDEYE magazine said it’s the best piece of satire they’ve read about the War on Terror), and because I’ve steered toward comic-tributes in the last few issues, #10 will be about either Battle in Afghanistan hunting down Bin Laden in late 2001 or The Invasion Liberation of Iraq. For #11 onwards, it’s anybody’s guess but at some point I’ll touch on the JFK assassination, Battle teaming up with the Beatles, I want to do G-Force/Battle of the Planets story with a big Godzilla-like monster thrown in, there’s a late-1990s story with Battle taking on the ultra-violent group The Management, and there’s still much more to come from BATTLE FORCE.

I also did a few pin-ups for other Small Press creators. I did a retro fake cover for Pest Control’s Grant Springford in the style if Kirby’s X-Men #1 cover. Following that theme I did a giant Psi-Squad poster for Martin Eden’s The O Men, which was a homage to Jim Lee’s gatefold cover to X-Men #1. It was a 4-page gatefold poster and it was a challenge to treat it as a purely artistic project, rather than usual when I can cover up the mistakes with speech bubbles or use dialogue to explain what is happening if it isn’t clear.

On top of all those stories, I am planning to do a few more things by my alter-ego Rob Leningrad. To mirror Rob Liefeld going back and re-mastering the original Youngblood series (again), I want to go back and re-master the original Watchblood comic that came out about 5 years ago (an spoof comic that asks “what if Rob Liefeld had written and drawn Watchmen?”). The whole thing needs rescripting, the artwork needs rescanning and I’ll throw in a couple more pages. I want to do Rob Leningrad’s interpretation of a classic British children’s TV show but that project is currently top-secret. I also plan on doing a weird Manga comic with giant monsters and robots that will be just plain silly.

Other projects that I am looking for artists to work with involve a WW2 story about an Allied Saboteur, there’s a futuristic sci-fi story about evolution and I want to bring back Brave Dave D Davidson, a German daredevil who started off as a comedy character I performed on local radio. He does these amazing stunts which go horribly wrong but never dies. The idea is that he gets recruited by various governments to go on dangerous spying missions. But I guess I’ll worry about all those projects when I’ve finished everything else...

Battle fans can buy comics from grahampearce8@netscape.net or from www.sgtmikebattle.com or by writing to 42 Talbot Road, Penwortham, Preston, Lancashire, PR1 9QX. SGT. MIKE BATTLE: THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO! #1 is £2 whilst #2-7 are available for £1 to anyone who sends an SAE (or add 50p per comic for postage). SGT.MIKE BATTLE: SADDAM STOMPER! #1048 and SMB:GAH #5½ are free to anyone who sends an SAE.