Unfinished in '88: "THAT FOOT! WHOSE IT IT?"

 The Art Department called these "Visual Notebooks" when they gave them out, as if a thirteen-year-old me was going to fill it with sketches of passers-by or bark rather than a page and a half of an unfinished Watchmen spoof. But here is all that remains of all that was started of something I seem to remember I called "The X-Ceptions". Also an obvious influence on these few frames is The Dark Knight Returns, and possibly The Killing Joke, which is why I'm dating this 1988 (and I appear to have thought that giving the Joker an upturned nose instead of a pointy one counts as pastiche). Having lovingly referenced these three core works however – note the wobbly lines around Pscychoe's speech bubble* – I seem to have immediately run out of ideas, so who knows what role in this dark epic "The Lilac Librarian", "Incy-Wincy-Splat" or whatever that Swamp-Thing-looking thing on the left were meant to have played? ("Doc God" I like.)

 

 

* Sure, I noticed that. But not the fact John Higgin's colours weren't totally boring. I think this must be why I got a B.

Heads Held at Arm's Length

 

 

 

 I'd not noticed the Medusa outside Tate Britain before. Henry C. Fehr's The Rescue of Andromeda isn't the only depiction I've seen in which Perseus and the woman's head he brandishes look identical – I don't know the reason for that (and I haven't bought Natalie Haynes' new book yet, so it might get explained there) – but it's the only depiction I've seen in which Medusa's hair is bound. I suppose that's a sensible precaution, although it's possible Fehr just couldn't be bothered with all the snakes. It's odd that Perseus is also holding a sword though: he's about to turn a sea monster into stone, what was the plan?

 Similarly bound and held at arm's length, I realised, is the head in the centre of Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Not "the Crucifixion" I now note. According to Bacon they're Furies: raging demons from Greek Tragedy broken into the Christian Iconography of a triptych. The artist decided in 1944 that pity was no longer enough I guess. Every time I walk into that room of the Tate I'm fifteen again, seeing those girning horrors in that orange boom for the very first time, and recognising the one in the middle from Swamp Thing's first trip to Hell. "Flutch" Alan Moore called him in that. Pencils by Stephen R. Bisette. Inks by John Totleben. Outside of comics I suppose it's odd for a drawing to have two artists, but I looked at those drawings a lot.

 

 Another triptych was playing in the dark round the corner: John Akomfrah's gorgeous The Unfinished Conversation, a study of the immigrant intellectual life of the Stuart Hall who didn't present It's A Knockout. And thread through the whole building, Hew Locke's mighty Procession. Two new highlights. I can't remember when I last spent as long there – I went Monday; it might be where I picked up the bug – I really recommend going.

Something Something Origins Something!!

  In 2000AD's "D.R. & Quinch go to Hollywood" two alien sociopaths steal a handwritten screenplay from a corpse at a bus-depot only to discover once their bravado has ensured the project's greenlighting that, apart from the third word of the title which might be "oranges", the script is totally illegible.

 

 Fortunately the star they've procured, known simply as Marlon, is not only an unintelligible mumbler but also, secretly, completely unable to read, and so their secret is safe, unlimited "stuff that was sort of useful-looking" is purchased, and filming begins reardless. More than "Hearts of Darkness", more than "8 and 1/2", more than "Lost In La Mancha", more than "Fitzcarraldo", Jim Shenk's superb promotional documentary charting George Lucas' making of Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace reminds me of "D.R. and Quinch Go to Hollywoood".

 

 

  I'd already seen clips in Mike Stoklasa's brilliant, infamous and quite educational 70-Minute Phantom Menace Review (here) but hadn't realised how little cherry-picking he'd needed to do. The documentary's an astonishingly candid portrait of a workforce with the power to build worlds harnessed to a mind too lazy and/or frightened to remember to say "action". Only once, at the very end does Lucas look like he either knows or cares what he's talking about, in the sound editing of the Pod Race, and it's heart-breaking because that's exactly what everyone was waiting for all this time, and it's far too late. And everyone wanted this to work. Frank Oz looked so excited to be handling Yoda again. Ewan McGregor looked so happy working his nuts off as Obi Wan, bonding efforlessly with a frightened, miscast ten-year-old Anakin whom he'd end up having next to no scenes with. And I've already wrote about Ahmed Best. But George Lucas doesn't know what to do with any of it. Shenk's "Making Of" never actually goes so far as to say "and the film was inevitably shit", it just fades mercifully to silence on an audience cheering wildly over the opening scrawl – and hey, look, if you actually like the film, then this is a thrilling account of a maverick artist's triumph over adveristy. 

 But it's really not. Enjoy.

 

Sepia Footage of Yellow Longhair

 Here's me as "Morningstar", a psychedelic re-imagining of General Custer, from Tim Plester's play Yellow Longhair, which played at the Oval House pretty much exactly twenty years ago. It was the first London play I'd performed in after finally leaving home, in 2000, at the age twenty-five, and as you can see from the photo below, I was made pretty comfortable. I thought, at first, I should play the General as Klaus Kinski in Aguirre: Wrath of God, bursting with boggle-eyed territorial ambition, but after the dress rehearsal, director Anthony Fletcher approached me in the café, and explained that he'd hated every single aspect of what he'd just seen me do, and that, as far as my character was concerned, I was actually helping people, showing them the way. We were all very into Alan Moore.

 Too... Much... Neck... (and Cristina Corrazza)

 So we fixed it. It was good advice, and I often think about it. Anthony also said the poetry would play itself, and I think about that too. Tim put some snippets up on youtube years later, and here's one of them, in which I monologue to a journalist played by Sam Rumbelow, after a particularly meticulous killing-spree. Back then I was "Simon Kain", waiting for another Kane to leave Equity, and not all the hair was mine, but it is now. I got to keep the extensions. I might even still have them, twenty years later. They might even turn up in my introduction to Act One of Henry the Fourth, when I finally finish editing that, hopefully tomorrow. Someone's hair turns up anway... I was really fond of this. It was bloody lovely writing. Happy twentieth birthday, it.

Struts and Frets

Words by Alan Moore (again) who hates this now. Art by Brian Bolland, who doesn't.

 Appropriately, Simon goes Full Shakespeare's thirteenth episode is Titus Andronicus' Act Three, featuring heaps of wailing and gnashing of teeth lightened only by a quick appearance from the most committedly evil character in English literature. There's no way it wasn't going to be knackering but still, I'm sorry my reading's not a bit more lucid, screaming iambic pentameter isn't much fun to watch. "Going mad" is such a staple of literature, and especially horror, you'd be forgiven for thinking it actually happened. Trauma can make a person feel more removed from reality but that's not the same as "going mad", and to his credit "madness" in Shakespeare was, or at last became, a quite specific idea, a liminal place whose inhabitants - those suddenly hit by trauma or depression - would react as if they've suddenly realised they're characters in a play, physically present in a work of fiction, unrecoverable by reality. So Shakespeare found the stage a useful machine for exploring grief, and even the famous tea-towel-adorning "All the World's A Stage" is spoken by a character called "the melancholy Jacques". In Elizabethan medicine, "melancholy" means "manic". It's no more a celebration than "Born In the USA".

Trigger Warnings: More mutilation, a lot of crying, and the death of a fly.

It Seems I Remain Serious In My Belief that Shakespeare's As Good As Alan Moore.

Nice to see this all set out.

 I'd forgotten how intertwined my love of Shakespeare was with my love of Alan Moore. I fell in love with the both at about the same time, when I was thirteen, and coming back to the full works of Shakespeare now, I'm struck again by how many strengths I see hims sharing with Moore's eighties output. Both writers moved from working in slaughter houses to working in a popular medium derided as poisonous trash, both took the plots and themes of contemporaraneous fantasies - chivalric love in Shakespeare's case, super heroes in Moore's - and tested them in a real world populated by knowable characters with often distressing consequences. Neither seemed particularly interested in heroes either, yet both seemed to find it easy to believe in utterly sociopathic villains, to the point where their becoming the most fully rounded characters in any story would be a given.

 

 None of this has anything to do with the fact Moore gave his final comic the same name as Shakespeare's swansong, by the way. I've only just realised that.

 Both love words, and both use loads, and equate writing with magic and magic with world domination, producing not just genre-defining but medium-defining works of cosmic ambition, beauty, fun, never forget fun - works full of lines I wanted and still want to say and references I didn't and still don't get, but also ultimately, merciless works, unmistakably angry that fantasy isn't realisable. Angry, and basically frightened. None of this has It still didn't occur to me though, that Shakespeare's first comedy might prove a more disturbing read than Defoe's account of London in the Plague, but that's because I'd forgotten why I loved him so much. Here's today's then, and after that you'll probably wonder what the fuss was all about. Soho takes its name from the hunting cry used here by Lance by the way. And I also love crusts.

S!

On the topic of under-appreciated books about supermen...

 Some people find Superman boring because he's invulnerable, but he's not, of course. He cares, which makes him extremely vulnerable. Elliot S. (later S!) Maggin's "Superman, Last Son of Krypton" – originally published in 1977 to accompany the release of the Motion Picture – was happily brought to my attention by Colin Smith here (with surprise input from S! himself in the comments below: "Of course Alan Moore read my book"). Reading nothing like a novelization – more like a very early Kurt Vonnegut – the book is careful and witty and full of aliens. One of my favourite paragraphs is the opening of Chapter 6 "The Penthouse", a beautiful and unfamiliar introduction to an archetypal megalomaniac:

"Yesterday Luthor was dressed in skin-tight pyjamas and crossed ammunition belts. The outfit was the only affectation he had for a purpose, and therefore the only one he recognized as an affectation. The penthouse hideaway four hundred feet over the city, the medieval tapestries hanging over the faces of the computers and wall consoles, the Egyptian sarcophagus whose mummy was replaced by a mattress covered with Snoopy sheets and pillowcases, paintings on the walls by Leyendecker, Peake, Frazetta and Adams, those weren't affectations. Those were matters of taste. Luthor was flying in the terrace window with his jet boots for the seventeenth time and he was running out of videotape."

"ALL THIS... I SNIFF."

Isn't he great? He's so great. 

When producer Claire Broughton sent out a list of possible authors to spoof for the third series of Ian Leslie's Before They Were Famous I can't have been the only writer excited to see Alan Moore's name on it. How much of an overlap actually exists between fans of 2000AD (I smuggle John Wagner in there too) and Radio 4 comedy is another matter, but on a purely, selfishly personal level – considering this is the first time I've performed my own stuff on the radio, and possibly the first time the great man's been impersonated on Radio 4 – I couldn't be happier with how "Alan Moore's scripts for Fred Basset" turned out. Hey, Dave Gibbons tweeted me today! The artist of Watchmen? Yeah, him: "really funny (and accurate!)" he said - JUST SAYIN'! Sorry... But this is exactly why I've left it so long to write this post - I can't write charmingly about it, I'm too obnoxiously happy! 

Anyway, it's available to listen to for another month, with great work too from Marc Haynes, Abi Burdess, Benet Brandreth and Alex Lowe as Alex Graham. 

 

 And here, for posterity and the deaf, is that bit in full:

- For one extraordinarily prolific period in the 1980’s, Northampton-based writer and cartoonist Alan Moore spearheaded a revolution in comics with such “graphic novels” as “Watchmen” and “V for Vendetta”, both of which would later be turned into big budget films from which Moore immediately disassociated himself. His correspondence with artists often ran to hundreds of pages in length, providing evidence of a garrulous polymath with a flair for the esoteric, driven to push both collaborators and the boundaries of his chosen genre to their absolute limit. One of Moore’s first correspondents was the Daily Mail’s Alex Graham, who was looking for new blood to take over writing duties on his popular dog-based cartoon strip “Fred Bassett”. Moore’s strips were never published, but his scripts survive...

Hullo Alex! 

Great to hear you’re interested in running an eye, or preferably both, over my as yet pretty much let’s face it about-as-untested-as-a-chat-up-line-in-a-bordello efforts. Shall we crack on then? Fasten your seat belts, as the actress said to the aeroplane, and eyes down for a full house..

 Panel I: 

Our hero, Fred Bassett, dog, indoors, paws on windowsill, staring glumly out at a rainy day. Thought bubble: “IT'S RAINING OUTSIDE... COLD, FAT DROPS POUNDING DOWN UPON A HUNGRY EARTH, TURNING INTO VIOLENT, BRIEF AND RECIPROCATING SOUP THE MUSTY INSECT CARTRIDGES THAT LITTER THE GOLF COURSE. THE WIFE OF THE HUMAN WHO CALLS HIMSELF MY OWNER SWERVES IN THE RAIN TO AVOID AN OBLIVIOUS FOX AND, FOR A SECOND, IS REMINDED SHE TOO IS BURSTABLE. THREE DOORS DOWN, A SLEEPING CHILD BREAKS INTO A COLD SWEAT AS HE DREAMS OF A SCHOOL OF SHARKS, EACH WEARING THE FACE OF HIS FATHER. ALL THIS... I SNIFF. DOGS CAN SMELL FEAR. IT IS 10.37 AM.” 

 Panel 2 -

Dear Alan,

Thanks very much but I don’t think I’ll be able to get all that in the one bubble. Have you anything with fewer words? I like the idea of Fred looking out of the window though.          

Yours in anticipation, 

Alex Graham

Hullo Alex! 

Uncle Alan here. Point taken. Let’s go wordless. Comics are a visual medium, and the absence of thought bubbles frees us from having to pretend a dog thinks in sentences which, to my mind at least, seems marginally less likely than a human thinking in smells. If you’re sitting comfortably then - 

 Panel I: 

Fred looking out of the rain-swept window, his nose glistening. Behind him, a newspaper torn to shreds, the remnants of its headlines still visible. The word fragments "-UCLEAR" "-MEGEDDON" and "IMMIN-". 

 Panel 2: 

We pull back. Thirty feet above the house, Fred still visible in the window. Next door a barbecue is being rained off. 

 Panel 3: Pull back. We are above the clouds now but the weather is clearing, The Swan visible in the gaps, its drunken patrons searching their pockets for car keys. On one of the clouds: a lip-stick-tube-shaped shadow. 

 Panel 4: Pull back. The Earth -

Dear Alan,

I don’t really want to draw that.

For one thing it’s a hundred and twenty seven panels long, Fred Bassett traditionally runs to three or four. For another, we’re outside the known universe as early as panel thirteen, and I’m not comfortable drawing backgrounds on the best of days. Shall we give it another go?

Yours,
Alex Graham.

Hullo Alex! 

Message received. Onwards and upwards then, here’s the new script. Roll up your sleeves, gird your loins, send the ladies out of the room, pull up a chair, hoist the main brace, check your mirrors, press your trousers, pawn the silver, hide the vicar, declog the veeblefetzers, check down the back of the sofa, fire up the engines -

Alan, Alan…

That letter was four hundred pages long and I was still on the introduction by page 103. 
In happier news: The BBC has now said they’re interested in a television show with no less a talent than Lionel Jeffries providing the voice of Fred. I hope you’re as excited about this development as I am.
Looking forward to something a bit shorter,
Alex Graham.

- Complying with Graham’s request, Alan Moore’s next letter ran to just one sentence…

Burn what we have wrought, Alex, burn it to the ground and we can but hope from the resultant scorched earth a purer form may bloom.

- Graham turned next to a fellow Scotsman famous for the terseness of his scripts. A colleague of Moore’s, John Wagner would later create the ultra-violent, twenty-second century lawman "Judge Dredd"...                              

Fred Bassett. 

Panel I: 

Owner to dog: “SAY WOOF, BOY. SAY WOOF.” Dog: “SHAN'T.”
Panels 2-4: 

Owner shoots dog in head with a complicated gun. 

Pours petrol on dog. 

Lights match. Caption: ”WOOF!”

 You’re welcome.

  

 And of course Moore was actually a wiz at the animal-based comic strip. Of course he was...

(From Philip Sandifier's exhaustive and ongoing history of Moore: The Last War in Albion.)

Fat Adolf

1992

 The novel's full title is The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, and for Joseph Conrad maybe it was, but there are definitely simpler tales. Roger Ebert declared it Conrad's most unfilmable book, but he only had Christopher Hampton's pudding of an adaptation to go on, and even Hampton's fudge threw up sparks: the uncredited casting of Robin Williams, for example, as sociopathic bomb-geek "The Professor" – one hand forever clasped around the bulb in hs pocket that would blow him up – comes years before his similarly chilling work in One Hour Photo or Insomnia. For my part, I first read the book in 1997, shortly after catching The Conversation on television – a perfect 1970's paranoid thriller, starring a mopey Gene Hackman (in a Parrot Shop Sketch mac) – and I was struck by the similarities in tone. I thought it read like a prophecy, was very filmable, and as longtime readers of this blog might know, I've been pondering how to film it ever since.

1996

 

 "It sounds like Watchmen" said Adriano Shaplin when I told him the story, which meant I was probably telling it well. The most interesting correlation is Conrad's boldest departure from the failed bombing on which the novel's based: In The Secret Agent, the bomb is not the work of terrorists, but of a supercilious peace-keeping force. The everyday anarchists in The Secret Agent are harmless. Even The Professor just makes "the stuff". He never expects anyone to use it. He's a low-rent, walking testament to the theory of mutually assured destruction. The book's most obvious villain is actually the bullying youngblood Vladimir, the celebrated ideas man of the Imperial Embassy. His ultimately ineffectual nemesis is the Assistant Commissioner, a whimsical, nationless embodiment of a comfortable respect for civil liberties, shown no respect himself by his baffled Chief Inspector. And the Assistant Commissioner is ultimately ineffectual because he loses his star witness, not to the anarchists, nor to the Chief Inspector or the agents of Vladimir, but to... SPOILERS. There are definitely simpler tales.

  1992. Poor sods.

 

 There are strange future echoes in the book too: The secret agent and his wife are called Adolf and Winnie, the Professor says "Exterminate! Exterminate!" And there are images that seem taken from the very earliest cinema, specifically comedies: a man throwing himself from a train, another man blown literally to pieces (another invention of Conrad's)...

 It is a heap of characters – a batty clash of world views on the cusp of a new century* that ends in hopeless chaos. Except there is no end. Life, or if not life, stuff goes on. That's the tone, as far as I could make out. It's not unlike the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading, which is why I like Burn After Reading. You should read it. 

 OR...

 There's this! 

 I knew there had been a television adaptation a few years before Hampton's, with a heavily mustachioed David Suchet as Adolf Verloc, and Peter Capaldi as Vladimir, and I'd been dying to see it for a over decade, but couldn't find it anywhere. Well, it's finally up on youtube, I've seen it, and I adore it. Dusty Hughes' adaptation gets everything right that Christopher Hampton couldn't be bothered to, preserving politics, consequence and tenderness. The cast is tremendous, and all seem to belong in the same film, unlike Hampton's (as well as losing Robin Williams last year, we also lost Warren Clarke and David Ryall. Both are brilliant here.) Suchet's make-up looks stupid in the photos – an obvious attempt to distance himself from Poirot – but works in action, and Barrington Pheloung's score puts the tin lid on it. That's the other thing: in my unmade head-movie, the music was vital. I knew it had to be like the solo piano in The Conversation, or the solo zither in The Third Man – it had to play against the hopelessness, be pitilessly light-hearted, and say "That's life. That's entertainment. Stroll on."

 

In my head! This scene was in my head!

  

 What I'm saying is, I can't think of a better way to open what is already looking like a terribly serious year, so let's all watch this, and if I can get you to do that, can we pretend that's the same as me actually making the film, and move on too? Great!

 

 (And if you want a shiny one, it seems to be available here.) 

 P.S. Thanks to all those who have suggested how I might stage Jonah Non Grata again. Basically, I need a producer. All suggestions welcome. Jonah, of course, is not a million miles away from Fat Adolf.
* P.P.S. I've just remembered, the book's dedicated to H.G. Wells.

Two Towers

Sorry it's all gone a bit slack here. I intended to finish my review of 2013 last week with a stirring post about the value of boredom, typed up on tour in Aberystwyth. That never happened. But I did make a film. So here - in the spirit of boredom - is a twenty-minute long home movie.

.

A cheap experiment in dread

The Aberystwyth Arts Centre (10 minutes in) was a revelation - not just the eerie, free-standing concrete seats, lone bell-tower, and silvery bellow-shaped pods of uncertain purpose all pressing my 70's scifi buttons (although they were amazing), but because it all worked: a cinema, two galleries, theatres, shops, students, performance art, discos, parents dropping by for a coffee or beer and children dropped off for ballet lessons, all coexisting in a way that seemed unprecedentedly natural and unforced. I urge anyone interested in what "Arts Centre" might actually mean to head over there and eat your heart out.
How have they managed this? There's a view, which I suppose makes the Centre a destination. (It's a mile's steep walk out of the town.) But there's a great view of London from the fifth floor of the Royal Festival Hall as well, and how often do you see families up there? The architecture's important; you can wander through (13 minutes in) and see everything laid out before you. You don't have to awkwardly poke your head round a corner and be invited in by an usher to experience what's on offer, as you might in an older room-and-corridor set-up like the BAC (no matter how many doors you remove), or the Royal Festival Hall's too many floors (and to be fair the RFH must have recognised this, which is why their lifts sing so ingratiatingly) or the windowless Cabinet Warhol Rooms* of the ICA. In fact Aberystwyth's Arts Centre may have finally worked out how to bypass one of modern art's hugest dilemmas: how to go "No, come in." It's all about the view.
Hum. Maybe, if the Barbican let its hair down a bit...
So that's in the film, and some storms, and a search for supper where it all goes a bit Jimmy's End, and two towers, and the happy discovery - accidentally made 17 minutes in - that if the audio from a home video is suddenly replaced by something from Brian Eno, you get Ben Wheatley. I make no apology for my use of Vangelis. I'm knackered and knotted from rehearsing with a new bunch of actors with actual skills, the sods. When I'm recovered, we'll see in 2014.

*I'm firing myself.

August 2013 - Power Socket 8: "My, it's cramped in here, isn't it?!"

In August we went to Edinburgh, but this isn't a post about Edinbrugh.* 

And we went to Rye - where I learnt there was once a smuggler called "Nastyface" - but this isn't a post about Rye, either.** 

No. To properly clear out August, I must finally post this: the unfinished, eighth and last ever issue of...

Sad times. Here's where it all went dark and then stopped. The obsession over detail, the cross-hatching, the bricks, all those tentacles. In 1987 there was so much for comics fan to suddenly take in - From Alan Moore alone there were collected volumes of Watchmen, Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta - As I said before, there was too much to copy. I've unearthed a few more unfinished projects from that same year, so let Operation: Fang then inaugurate the tag "Unfinished in '87".

* This is.
** No, but this is.

Power Socket 7: "Aw, sneck!"

This issue must have taken me ages. I was heavily into 2000AD by now, and who can blame me? My imagination had been pretty traumatised by a sudden move to public school at the age of nine, starved suddenly of mythology, baffled by "catalytic cracking" and "the ablative" and the absence of girls, sectioned by separate desks for every boy and separate teachers for every subject, sustained only by the scraps afforded by Mad Magazine and Oink. But then, in 1985, for just 24 pence a week, it found its salvation.

The late Massimo Belardinelli, just doin' his thing.

In fact it was struggling now to keep up. My hatred of that school had become so bad that I persuaded my parents to send me to a therapist, and of the one session I finally received the only detail I can remember now is me confessing my frustration that my imagination seemed so tiny compared to these guys'. How did they do it? Where - as Alan Moore was often asked, and possible went on to suffer a nervous breakdown trying to find out - do you get your ideas from? And it wasn't just the Alan Moore's stuff. There were the richly researched and nightmarishly illuminated worlds of Pat Mills, the surrealist panache of Peter Milligan's teen-friendly metaphysics, the aspirational shopping-mall dystopia of John Wagner's Mega-City One which teemed with poor, beaming, fad-chasing bastards seeking their fix of fun even in the cannon's mouth, and all of this served with wit - with jokes even - and monsters! So many monsters.

 

"Get off my back, Father!" Some Kevin O'Neill

There were no supermen, or at least none I was interested in. There were wanderers, terrorists, deserters, smugglers and surfers, very few of whom looked recognisably human. Everything 2000AD was teaching me was stuff I wanted to learn, and to this day I'm still playing catch-up as a writer. (The scifi pilot I've been hawking around, subtitled "Prog 1", has perhaps as a consequence been deemed "too dense" for Radio 4. Which it is, but that's another post.) Yet for some reason Issue 7 of Power Socket was to be the last I completed. I'm not sure if I gave up, or decided to wait until I was better at it, or maybe I just started enjoying school a bit more. I suspect the truth is - and my "visual notebooksW back this up - that there was just so much out there now to copy, why bother sticking with a super-hero serial? In the Autumn of 1986 Dad suggested we take Power Socket Issue 7 along to show to my new heroes at a signing. I did. "What do you think?" he asked. Alan Moore said "Um, I'm more of a writer," and was lovely. Kev O'Neil (responsible for the image above) said "Do you lay it out first? You should try laying it out." And Pat Mills, to my surprise, turned out not be a woman. I can't remember what he said. Or John Wagner. But I've got the signatures. And all have remained my heroes.
And one day I hope I'll get to show them what I've made since.