Comic career has been all write!

February 1st, 2008 | by admin |

Original Post here: Snikkkt!

ONE of the comic world’s veteran writers, Alan Grant should have had no trouble getting his head around the dual identity in his latest rewrite project, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Over the years, he’s had a lot of alter egos of his own. But the name Alan Grant is still one of the best-known in the world of comics.

Batman and Judge Dredd are probably the biggest heroes he has written for in his 40-year writing history, though he reels off a long list of others including The X Men, Lobo, The Silver Surfer, The Incredible Hulk, The Terminator and Robocop.

And there are also the totally original characters and series, such as The Bogie Man and The Last American, both of which he worked on with long-time collaborator John Wagner. Then there are the characters Alan revived too, such as American comic giant DC Comics’ The Demon and the characters he pulled out of the background – such as Judge Dredd’s female Anderson, to get a chance in the spotlight. And he has created new characters too, such as Scottish teenage mutant Middenface McNulty for 2000AD.

Alan is one of a surprisingly large group of writing and art talents in comics to come out of Scotland and show a thing or two to America, the land of the superhero. A look at why two generations of Scots are doing so well in America is just one of the discussion topics at the first-ever Highland International Comic Expo event – where Alan is a guest – this weekend at Eden Court. But it was back in Dundee that Alan first began his writing apprenticeship at Sunday Post publisher DC Thomson.

He’d already turned his back on working in a bank and being a trainee accountant when he got a job in Dundee, where one of his first jobs was writing the horoscopes for the Evening Telegraph – and a competition developed with John Wagner, who has since gone on to be Alan’s long-time writing collaborator in comics for publishers including IPC, DC Comics and Marvel in America.

“We tried to see who could write the scariest horoscopes, things like: ‘A close friend or family member may have an accident, best if you stay at home’. We’d have a pint and laugh at the old ladies who’d be stuck in their houses.”

Maybe it was one of the first signs in print of a black sense of humour and a liking for sticking two fingers up at authority from Alan who, with John, would go on to become huge figures on the UK comics scene.

While at DC Thomson he learned to become a sub-editor, his strength marked out by his bosses was his way with women’s fiction.

Dealing with submitted stories, he decided to try his own hand at a story after heading off to work at the IPC magazine company in London.

Alan was working for Loving, Love Affair and Honey and rewriting other people’s stories when he decided he had learned enough to write one under a false name – I Stole To Have An Abortion.

“It was made story of the week and the editor said to me ‘Can you get in touch with the author and ask if she’d like to write another one?’.”

Alan revealed he was the writer and went on to write others, such My Boyfriend Was A Hell’s Angel. But there was a problem.

“They didn’t want any humour in them at all and eventually that was what did for me in the end. I didn’t think I was going to be a writer, I just did it as an extra – I liked my job as an editor. But I was feeling totally strangled by the conventions of female fiction.

“Me and my girlfriend came up on holiday to visit a relation in Dingwall and ended borrowing a tent to go camping. I remember being dumped at the camping site in Cromarty – I seem to remember putting our tent up in the dark. But we saw a sign in the window of the post office looking for a caretaker for Cromarty House. I’d been thinking of packing in the job in London and going freelance.”

It was 1972 and he left his magazine job with some commissions to write female fiction as a freelance, but he never ended up doing it. Instead, he filled notebooks with ideas for stories.

It seemed like an incredible stroke of luck to find the Cromarty job, but Alan revealed that chance phone calls and little coincidences have always happened to him.

“I find that almost all my life things like that have happened – I suddenly get a phone call asking me to write a Batman story, and 13 years on I find I’m still writing for Batman.”

Alan Grant with some of the many comic books that he’s worked on over the last 40 years.

But after returning from Cromarty to Dundee without a job, John Wagner called from London to ask for Alan’s help writing for the Tarzan comic, with Alan ending up writing between one and four a month for the European market.

A meeting with the editor of 2000AD was the turning point: “I moved back to London and really I haven’t looked back since then,” said Alan.

Along the way he has become a kind of godfather for comics’ young talent, giving younger Scottish writers such as Gordon Rennie, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar into print.

He often speaks out about the way writers are treated by the comics business, the publishing companies, the – often unsuccessful – movie spin-offs that often don’t pay the original writers their dues.

On the Judge Dredd movie, Alan said: “They spent a lot of money on it, it was a $90 million movie and it was money down the drain. If the movie had been a success, then it would have been a worldwide franchise now. But Sylvester Stallone took $9 million and forgot to act!”

Though Judge Dredd is probably the character for which people would know Alan, he is not as happy as he once was with the law enforcer’s hardline philosophy.

“I’d rather be remembered for my work on Batman,” Alan replied when asked what he’d like people to know him for. “I have nothing at all against Judge Dredd. But now I’m more distanced from very right-wing politics. And he doesn’t have much humanity or compassion. Me and John Wagner used to laugh that we were making fascism funny. But now I’m older, I feel a bit guilty about that. Batman for me is more human and I find it easier to resonate with him.”

The body of work and credits Alan has built up over his career is huge.

“Me and John must have had between 12 and 14 pseudonyms when we were at IPC,” he said. “We were writing so much that the managing director wanted us to use pseudonyms because he didn’t want the readers to know we were writing everything!”

Alan shows no sign of resting his pen. Last year, he was invited to write the text for a graphic novel version of Scottish classic Kidnapped with art by Orkney-based illustrator Cam Kennedy. And Alan is just finishing the work on follow-up, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which is due to be launched by Waverley Books in February.

A chance meeting between the producer of BBC children’s co-production ACE Lightning and a friend of Alan’s, Denny O’Neill, meant Denny recommended Alan as the UK writer the project needed and he has gone on to write over 12 episodes.

He is due to finish a treatment for a movie with a new character substituted for the original one today (Thursday).

He confessed: “If I didn’t have deadlines, I wouldn’t do any work. It’s much easier not to write.”

* Alan Grant is one of the guests at the Highland International Comic Expo on Saturday and Sunday at Eden Court, Inverness.

ShareThis

Bookmark It