the following interview originally published in
Ptolemaic Terrascope issue 8, 1991
PT: When did you recognise that you actually had a
talent for drawing and writing?
AM: I wouldn't say that I ever recognised a talent, only
that I enjoyed doing it. Ever since I was a kid I've had an extremely heavy
fantasy life. I've always been interested in dreams, mythology, science
fiction, super-heroes and the rest of the physical real-world around me I
paid very little attention to. I remember the hippy period. It seemed like
everyone was harking back to an earlier agricultural time, or some sort of
mythic past, but what it really was, was a Peter Pan generation which had
reached the point where they were going to have to grow up. It was an age
when you were almost encouraged to indulge in your fantasy life - it suited
me perfectly.
And I suppose I just liked creating things. I really like
being around other people who are creating things, and at the Grammar school
then there were a lot of creative people around. There was the Northampton
Arts Lab - that was a massive part of my development. It encoraged me to
experiment so much. It gave me an attitude to Art that lasted me for the
rest of my life, taught me a lot more than any of the lessons at school did.
PT: Then there was the 'Embryo' magazine...
AM: Yeah, I've read a couple of issues since and not
without some embarrassment! There were some good poets in there.
PT: I've got them lurking in the attic somewhere....
AM: Don't drag them out and print them, Gerald. It's more
than your life's worth! I'm earning enough now to have you killed! [Laughs].
'Embryo' was good fun to do at the time, though. I think probably that
somewhere in it was a vehicle for chatting up the girls at Notre Dame
School, if I'm totally honest!
Alan went on to get himself expelled from school on a
trumped up drugs charge and "for wearing a green wooly hat to school". He
got himself a job in a hide and skin yard taking the wool off of sheepskins
with chemicals for two months, got fired for the same reason as he'd left
school, cleaned toilets, worked at a stationers, got married at 20 and "at
one point was involved in the building of Milton Keynes, for which I'm going
to burn in Hell" - and eventually ended up on the dole and decided never to
work at a job again, concentrating instead on doing something creative. "I
did that for about a year without actually doing anything, and then suddenly
something clicked and I thought right, I'm going to interpret this into a
comic strip". The next step was to submit, unbidded, a "bizarre alcoholic
detective strip about a character who thinks he's Sam Spade and talks out of
the side of his mouth' to the now sadly-defunct 'Sounds' weekly music paper.
A telegram was received in return agreeing to run it each week.
AM: It was a couple of months before I could afford to go
legit and sign off the dole, which is why I was using the Kurt Vile
pseudonym at the time. Then there was this really strange story.... my local
newsagent shop knew I had a strip in 'Sounds' and there was this rep. from
the Northants Post [newspaper] who went in there who said they were looking
for a strip. I worked hard and did a sample strip called 'The Nutter's Ruin'
which was a parody of The Archers [radio show] - very strange and surreal.
The rep had meanwhile been fired because he was going around telling lies to
people; I 'phoned them up and they said 'Oh, bring it in anyway and let's
have a look' so I took it in and they didn't like it, said "If you can do
something geared more towards children, perhaps a strip about a little cat
or something....". I didn't really want to so a strip for children about a
little cat but I did something, 'Maxwell The Magic Cat', which was sort of
based on a cat we had at the time called Tonto. The first few episodes were
more or less children's fare and then I started sneaking things in... it
just got stranger and stranger and eventually they moved it off the
children's page and onto the entertainments page. I'd do ones about tins of
cat food waiting on Death Row. Liver chunks in oyster sauce and scenes like
the one from that Cagney movie where he screams all the way to the chair; I
had one of these tins of cat food screaming all the way to the can opener.
PT: What about the pseudonym 'Jill de Ray'?
AM: I just like using pseudonyms. Kurt Vile, although it
was spelled 'Vile' was obviously Kurt Weill and Jill de Ray is a corruption
of Gilles de Rais who was a notorious French child murderer. It was because
I was pissed off with them for asking me to do a children's strip. Maxwell
The Cat was fun though, I carried on doing it long after it was profitable
for me to do so.
PT: And you were doing the 'Sounds' strip, 'Roscoe
Moscow'?
AM: When Roscoe Moscow finished I did another strip
called 'The Stars My Degredation', science fiction parody script. That was
very good but mainly I was doing an apprenticeship in public, learning the
ropes and getting paid thirty five quid a week for it. With the ten quid I
was getting for Maxwell, that put me over the forty-five quid so I could
sign off the dole and I was actually making a living doing something I
wanted to do.
PT: In 1980 you started to do some scripts for 2000 AD
and the Dr. Who comic?
AM: I was starting to realise that basically I couldn't
draw well enough, or fast enough, to make a living out of it and at the same
time I had picked up an awful lot about how to tell a comic book story.
Since script writing seemed to be something I could do a lot faster and a
lot quicker I got hold of a friend, Steve Moore, who was working at British
Comics at the time and asked him how to lay out a script and who to send it
to. They rejected the one I sent in but said they liked the way I told a
story so I wrote another which was accepted, so I was supplementing my
income from the sale of the strip and Maxwell the Magic Cat with the
occasional script for 2000 AD and Dr. Who Weekly, and slowly I got more
script writing work.
PT: So do you see that as really the beginning of your
career?
AM: I don't know, it's all an evolution, there's no point
where it starts. I stopped drawing altogether and I've been doing nothing
but script writing for the best part of ten years now, and it's been really
rewarding. I don't know though, I may take a break from doing comic writing.
PT: There's been lots of notable quotes about you from
quite famous people. Michael Moorcock said you are to comics what Verdi was
to opera, and there's been all sorts of quotes from people like Brian Aldiss.
As a comic writer and strip writer you've won may awards. Let's just take
you through the years when it really started to happen for you; in 1981 for
example you were approached to do 'Warrior' magazine. How did that come
about?
AM: It was basically at the point where I had been
working for 2000 AD, I had been working for Dr. Who and it was nice doing
stories I enjoyed doing, but they were only basically little background
fill-in stories, nobody had offered me the chance to do an extended series
with one character that I could develop. With 'Warrior' the deal was with
was a sort of comic entrepreneur, a bloke called Des Skin who was quite
notorious in the industry at the time as a bit of a shark - he offered us a
deal whereby we wouldn't get very much money but he would allow us to do
what we wanted which was a very heady and inspiring idea. I think all the
people who worked on 'Warrior' turned out some of the best work of their
careers to date. The strip I was mostly involved in was 'Marvel Man' which
was an update of the dopey 1950s British super-hero of the same name.
PT: Was there copyright on that?
AM: No, it had gone out of copyright when the company had
gone bust. It was in the hands of the official receiver, so it was up for
grabs. We tried to do comics as we wanted them to be, it was the artists and
writers being allowed to do the sort of comics that they wanted to do.
PT: Were you in contact with other writers?
AM: Yeah, it was really a good feeling of cameraderie
then - one which I've not had since. There were seven or eight writers and
we'd go down to London and meet up and have a drink and try to impress each
other. It was friendly competition.
PT: Were you working with a particular artist at the
time?
AM: I was working with two or three artists. Mainly with
Gary Leach and, following that, Alan Davies and on 'V for Vendetta', the
other strip I started on, with David Lloyd who is a very, very good artist.
PT: How did you communicate with one another?
AM: Mainly by telephone, postal, or sometimes on rare
occasions we would meet up and talk face-to-face. So there was still that
sense of cameraderie. To me, one of my greatest skills as a writer is
nothing to do with how I write, it's how I relate to artists. It's a very
intense, almost emotional relationship with an artist. It's like having
babies, creating something that is important to both of you and which is
going to have something of both of you in it. There's not many arts that
allow that sort of collaboration, and I've always tried to put the
relationship with artists first and foremost; I want the artist to be happy
with what they're drawing. My scripts are the longest and the most detailed
in the industry, for one page of actual comic I've probably written three to
five pages of script. Working with different artists, they're all creative
people in their own right, they've all got their own viewpoints, their own
ideas. Working with Melinda Gebbie (on 'Lost Girls') has taught me more
about colour than I have ever known before. Working with Bill (Sienkiewkz,
on 'Big Numbers') has taught me a lot about style and light. Every artist,
every collaboration, ought to teach you something. It's a really healthy
process, you feel good after it.
PT: After you did the 'Warrior' comic, the Americans
started to take an interest?
AM: I started to get 'Eagle' awards for the Warrior, the
name comes from England's most famous comic, The Eagle, and they're voted
for by a couple of hundred comic fans... it's no indication of quality, but
I won them for two or three years running which didn't mean anything really.
I don't like the awards system, there's too many losers and only one winner,
but the Americans are very impressed by awards, they thought "Gee, there's
this award-winning English author, let's get him over here". I didn't
actually get over there, I was working in London and sending the scripts
over. I was given this book called 'Swamp Thing' which was really the pits
of the industry. At the time it was just on the verge of cancellation,
selling 17000 copies and you can't do comics beneath that level.
PT: Who was it originated by?
AM: It was a DC comic originated by two guys called Len
Wein and Bernie Wrightson back in the '70s. It had been a fan favourite at
the time, but after they left it had gone downhill and wasn't very
interesting. They had revived the title because of the first Swamp Man
films; somehow they had sold the rights to do a movie which they thought was
going to be a smash hit. As it turned out it was a complete flop, one of the
most awful films I have ever seen in my life. You could even see all the
zips running down the back of the creature's legs! So they were stuck with
the comic book, it was losing sales so they had nothing to lose and sent it
to me. I was lucky enough to be working with two brilliant artists who have
since become close personal friends, Steve Bissette and John Totleben. There
was a lot of enthusiasm between the three of us and we really had fun doing
Swamp Thing. We changed the whole character around and it started picking up
readers, became really popular and started winning awards. It pretty well
cemented my reputation in America.
PT: You did the 'Watchmen' with DC comics - you got a
lot of mainstream interest, a kind of credibility evolved and your
international fame started to happen...
AM: All of a sudden I didn't just get recognised if I
walked into a comic shop, I was getting recognised by people in the street
who had seen me on telly or had seen my photograph in 'The Observer'.
PT: Then there was a big bust-up with DC Comics?
AM: What basically happened was that there had been
trouble brewing ever since we did 'Warrior' - the comic creators of the past
had been people who looked upon it as a job, "I'll write a few silly stories
for kids, I can do that easily and make a bit of money". When I started
writing for comics I would have said that my average readership would have
been around nine to thirteen year olds. Now, I remember that when I was that
age I was a pretty smart cookie, so I would always try not to write down. I
vowed I would never do anything that I didn't enjoy because that would have
been worse than carrying on cleaning toilets or dragging sheep skins out of
vats of blood. It would have been compromising. Now I'm a grown-up I cannot
indefinitely enjoy childish stories, I've got a very low boredom threshold -
I wanted to do stuff that was interesting. When I started talking about
things that were more grown-up, more adults started to look at the strips
because there were things in there that they could relate to. So by the time
I did '2000 AD' a lot of the readers were not 9 - 13, they were 9 - 18, and
by the time I was doing 'Swamp Thing' we were getting letters in from 25
year olds as well. That struck me as great, now I put my readership
somehwere between thirteen and forty year olds, and that's how I want it.
PT: It's never existed before I suppose?
AM: Comics have changed. As I say, the guys who used to
work in the medium just picked up their pay cheque, they hadn't got any
artistic potential. People of my generation, mostly a bunch of ex-hippies,
got into the medium because we liked comics, we thought there were
possibilities in comics. To me, comics is an art form that is just as
capable of producing great work as the cinema, literature, conventional
painting and music. The tragedy with comics is that it's been kept in the
nursery for too many years, it's only seen as a children's art-form. Now
you've got a whole generation of cartoonists who want to address concerns
that they, as adults, are interested in. When 'Watchmen' came about there
was Frank Miller's work on 'Dark Knight', there was the Fernandez brothers
working on 'Love And Rockets', there was Art Spiegelman doing a brilliant
retelling of the Holocaust in terms of mice and cats entitled 'Maus'. And
all those things were very personal visions which all came about at roughly
the same time, about 1986; all of a sudden there looked as if there was a
renaissance in comics.
PT: But then DC said 'No'.
AM: Well, no they didn't. Because it was making DC money
they went along with it, but they were a company who had been in the
business since the 1930s and hadn't changed significantly since. In the
mid-80s the whole comic world changed upon its axis, they were getting
attention from reputable magazines, getting television attention and being
taken seriously. 'Watchmen' is now a set book in two American universities
and I've got loads of dissertations at home ripping it apart; it was that
sudden change, that quantum jump, that threw DC into a panic. For the first
time in 15 years they had passed Marvel comics in terms of sales which they
were ecstatic about, but they increasingly found themselves in a foreign
landscape, they were getting worried about the adult content of the books.
What happened was, two people, one a retailer and the other a distributor,
sent letters to DC Comics requesting a rating system. DC were so worried
about losing the moral majority or having a stink kicked up in the
newspapers about 'Satanist comics corrupting our nation's pure bodily
essences', that they brought in a rating system without consulting the
creators. Unfortunately the creators were not willing to take DC edicts at
face value. Frank Miller and I and a bunch of other creators took a
full-page advert in the main trade paper, The Comic Buyer's Guide, just
saying that we were very alarmed about DC's stance, that we couldn't go
along with DC bowing to pressure from what we saw as a cranky extremist
religious pressure group. DC responded by simply reiterating their position,
in which case I said I couldn't work for them any more.
PT: What happened - are they still going?
AM: Of course they're still going - they own Batman,
Superman, WonderWoman...
PT: And have they got a rating system?
AM: Well, they brought in a half-hearetd rating system
but really Frank and myself made nearly half their profits that year, and
since we walked out of the door they've had more creator's rights. It's
helping people in the industry, they're now talking about giving people
their copyright but the comic industry's history is one of complete
inequity. I don't own 'Watchmen', I don't own 'V for Vendetta', I don't own
'Marvel Man', I don't own 'Swamp Thing'. I get royalties from it, but that's
a pretty recent innovation. 'Watchmen' has made me hundreds of thousands of
pounds, but that's not a fraction of what DC made out of it. I'm one of the
lucky ones, I'm somebody who became famous and have got enough financial
clout to have some say in what they did with their lives. Most creators have
got no choice other than to keep on labouring away month after month after
month and never getting and royalties. There are young artists, working for
Marvel, who are not getting a lot of money, they really want to do comics
though so they spend two weeks existing on coffee and cigarettes and then
die of a heart attack. That's too high a price to pay. There just came a
point...
PT: Where you decided to get out of it, to rethink
your career?
AM: At that point I was the most successful comic writer
that had ever been. I felt weird because with the best will in the world you
can get cut off from people if you become a success; all of a sudden your
time is taken up doing TV things, doing interviews - not like this one, but
interviews with some magazine in Holland, another in Germany, another in
France; you're filming documentaries about your life... I suddenly had a fit
of complete disgust at the practices of the comic industry and decided that
if there was a future in comics it would have to be with the artists taking
control, that the artists would have to publish their own work and not trust
to publishers who cannot be trusted.
PT: So then you were on your own again, rather like
being expelled from school I suppose...
AM: Yeah.
PT: And you were visualising what to do and how you'd
retain some anonymity when Clause 28 came out. Can you explain a bit about
that?
AM: What happened was, after I left DC I burnt my
bridges, I wouldn't work for Marvel on principle and it had got to the point
where there were very few comic publishers that I could work for. One option
was to work for a reputable book publisher like Gollancz or Penguin who
would at least treat their creators as proper individuals, the other
possibility was self-publishing. What pushed me into self-publishing was
Clause 28 which was a piece of anti-homosexual legislation that the
Conservatives successfully brought in in 1988 - as far as I know it's the
first piece of British legislation aimed at suppressing a minority group.
Quite unique, and very vicious and I couldn't countenance that, I really
felt it needed a voice in opposition. The logical step was to produce a
comic anthology that was addressing these issues.
PT: And this was when 'Aargh' came out?
AM: That's right, 'Artists Against Rampant Government
Homophobia'. We 'phoned up everyone we knew, including big-time comic stars
like Frank Miller, Art Spiegelman, the Hernandez Brothers, Dave Sim, Dave
Gibbons, Dave Lloyd and also people outside the field like Alexei Sayle and
Kathy Acker, friends who said they were willing to do a page or so and we
put together all our money... it was a non-profitmaking thing so we made
sure all the money went to Gay Action. We published it ourselves because we
were the only people we could trust to make sure all the money went where it
was supposed to be going. And then we thought, 'Why don't we keep it going,
why don't we keep on self-publishing?'
PT: Was this when your 'Brought To Light' project
began?
AM: Yes, 'Brought To Light' was going on at the same time
as 'Aargh'. In the morning I'd be researching sodomy and heresy in early
modern Switzerland, and in the afternoon I'd be researching heroin smuggling
in Thailand during the 70s. I'd put super-heroes, fantasy and
science-fiction firmly behind me at the end of my career at DC and I decided
that I wanted to do something where you don't have to have a guy dressed in
tights coming through the window half way through and I found that research
was really enjoyable, perhaps 'enjoyable' is too strong a word in the case
of 'Brought To Light', it was exhiliarating though compiling all that
information, making it fit and then finding a way to convey it to the
readership in an interesting and entertaining way. At the same time it was
harrowing. I mean, I've written a lot of horror comics but Oliver North is a
much more horrifying being than any of those.
PT: Did you ever get any come-back from 'Brought To
Light'?
AM: The thing is, it exposes a collaboration between the
CIA, the Mafia and various right-wing groups around the world and I had to
think long and hard before accepting the job; I'm not a brave man
necessarily. Originally 'Brought To Light' was going to be published by
Warner Books and then all of a sudden we got the word that Warners had
pulled out. There was a speculation that someone at Warner's had seen that
we were bringing out this book about the CIA's dealings with the Mafia and
decided it wouldn't be a good book for Warner's to produce, so it ended up
with Eclipse Books producing the whole thing. It was made into a stage play
over here, a monologue by a guy called Phil Judge. Phil did a great job of
it. It was a big jump for me, a long way from talking about super-heroes.
PT: Let's bring you right up to date now; what are you
working on at the moment?
AM: I'm working on 'Big Numbers' part 4, which is part of
a 480 page book, and after that I shall do the final chapter of 'A Small
Killing' for Gollancz and then another chapter of 'From Hell' for Eddie
Campbell then a bit of 'Lost Girls' and then I'll go back and do 'Big
Numbers' part 5. They've all got a structure, I know exactly what I'm doing
with them. I've got the skeleton there before I write the first word.
PT: Do you ever change it at the end?
AM: I modify it slightly sometimes. In 'Watchmen',
half-way through I realised that one of the characters was definitely going
to have to die because there was nothing else the character could do. I have
to leave myself space for that sort of thing. The flesh changes and doesn't
look how I expected it to look, but the skeleton remains the same.
PT: When do you envisage 'Big Numbers' finishing?
AM: A couple of years, it's taking a long time to write
and draw. But when it's finished it's going to be a magnum opus I think. I
wanted to do something more complex than 'Watchmen' but at the same time
much more accessible. 'Watchmen' is quite a daunting piece of work, a lot of
it is obvuiously just showing off, there's a lot of cleverness on the
surface because I wanted to show what comics are capable of and what I am
capable of. With 'Big Numbers' I want to be quieter, there's a lot of
cleverness there but we're trying to make it more ordinary, just ordinary
conversations that haven't got any dramatic meaning.
PT: There's two parts out at the moment and there's
going to be twelve - when do you think it will all start adding up in
people's minds?
AM: I think around about Issue 4. It snowballs from
there. In issue 3 Christine Gathercole does an interview with the local
paper, just as a minor local celebrity, and they get her name wrong and the
name of her record wrong and all that stuff that local papers do. In issue 4
the paper is published with the interview in and you see that various
characters have got copies of the paper. Her old boyfriend sees it, and it
turns out that he's this particularly nasty police officer who was the
father of her aborted child; you also see Mr. World the psychotic who has
wild fantasies of mutilation carefully cutting out Christine's picture and
folding it and putting it into his wallet - you start to see the strands
coming together. The little plastic figures on the station platfrom, they've
got a continuing story. You see their world becoming stranger and more
surreal as the story goes on. There's a role playing game that some of the
children are playing and their characters have got stories that are parallel
to the children's stories and it's just this sort of complex tapestry of
people's lives which builds up into what I hope is a picture of the real
town. Because the real town of Northampton is not just what happens and who
we are and the buildings and streets, it's what's in our heads as well.
PT: Is it a universal metaphor for a lot of places in
the Western world?
AM: Yes, I'm trying to write specifically about
Northampton in order, in some weird way, to write about everywhere.
PT: As an art form, as a form of expression, there's
been nothing like it, has there?
AM: Well, I'm trying with 'Big Numbers' to create a
comic-book mainstream. We've got scientific comics, detective comics,
super-hero comics, romantic comics - but no mainstream. Comics are at the
same stage now as films were in the 1920s. All the great comics are yet to
be written, all the masterpieces, all the Citizen Kane and stuff. It's
really exciting but very nerve-racking because you have to build the ground
in front of you. Also, there's a charm and innocence which has gone from
comics and a lot of that is my fault, I feel bad about that. There's a lot
of very cynical and nasty comic books being done now which have taken their
cues from me. On the other hand comic books are starting to break into all
sorts of areas, anything can be done with them. Like in 'From Hell' which
I'm doing at the moment with Eddie Campbell, that's an historical piece
that's based around the Jack the Ripper murders; an historical investigation
of all the different threads of events and myth that led from the
Whitechapel killings. Like, the Elephant Man was in hospital 50 yards away
from the first killing, Buffalo Bill was in town and was interviewed by the
police, Oscar Wilde lived just down the road from one fo the prime suspects;
then there's all this weird Masonic stuff relating to the arhitecture of
London, Hawksmoor and his churches, a lot of pagan mysticism that seems to
be inbuilt into the City of London which I'm trying to explore. I've done
150 pages already and I haven't got to the first murder, I've just been
building up the characters. It's really facinating to actually try to use
comics as an historical tool because although I'm only doing it as fiction,
there's a great application there. It could be a tremendous teaching medium.
PT: What else are you working on at the moment?
AM: The only one I haven't mentioned is 'Lost Girls'.
That's an interesting project... I'm trying to do a work on pornography.
Well, more erotica. I don't know what the difference between the two is
apart from the income bracket of the person reading it quite frankly but
it's undoubtable that most pornography is ugly, it sort of makes you feel
ugly when you read it. The way I see it though is that if you can devote
energies to detectives and super-heroes and science fiction and horror, they
are relatively rarified areas of human experience, but all of us think about
sex and it seems like there's something wrong if sex cannot be spoken of in
the same way as any other subject. So what Melinda Gebbie and I are trying
to do on 'Lost Girls' is to come up with an erotic novel, a graphic novel
about 240 pages long, which is beautiful and dreamlike and has an air of
reverie about it and real emotions in it, saying something about what it
means to us.
PT: Is any of it published yet?
AM: No, it'll be serialised, in colour, in a magazine
called 'Taboo' issue 5 (which is also where 'From Hell' is appearing).
PT: Are the pictures very different to Bill's?
AM: Bill's got a very photographic realistic style, Eddie
Campbell has a very scratchy, expressionistic style, with Melinda Gebbie
it's all done in beautiful colour, there's no black lines - the nearest
thing is like old Disney films, the way you remember them, the colour of
them, that warm inviting feeling and incredible sense of texture and light.
I'm writing each strip for the artist, I'm writing 'Lost Girls' for Melinda
because I know what her art's capable of and I want to express that. I'm
writing 'Big Number's to show what Bill's art's capable of and like all
these books, they're all very different but what they all hang together on
is that they're all about human beings and human events.
PT: Are they all timed to finish in a sequence and
then you'll start a new work?
AM: I've nearly finished 'A Small Killing', after that
the next book I finish will be in about a year's time will be either 'From
Hell' or 'Lost Girls', and then I will finish 'Big Numbers'. After that I'm
not sure what I'm going to do. I want to take a year off from comics at
least - I've just been cutting some tracks with a band at the moment, and
I've really enjoyed that, going into a studio with a bunch of guys and
having fun.
PT: Who are the people you've been working with?
AM: There's Curtis who used to be in Venus Flytrap and
before that The Gift, he's really ace. There's Chris Barber on bass - I've
known him since I was 17, he used to be in the Arts Lab. Tim Perkins who's
currently also playing with Eric, he's a brilliant violinist. Then there's
Kevin Haskins on drums from Love & Rockets. It all came together by
accident. I was asked to do a track on a compilation of local bands, they
wanted me on it because I was a famous cartoonist and they figured it would
be good to have a famous somebody on the album even if it was a famous house
decorator or something. But we enjoyed doing it and did some more and now we
have two or three tracks in the can and we're really happy with it;
excitement is a good chemistry. RCA are apparently interested in bringing
out the album so that looks nice.
PT: You've found a singing voice for these tracks as
well?
AM: Well, I'm still staggering towards one. I think the
worst thing about the band at the moment is my voice because all the other
guys are very proficient at what they do and I'm like the poor relation. But
I'm working on it, you know. I don't know if I can be a singer, I don't know
if I can be an artist, but I'm so smugly confident about my abilities as a
comic writer that I know I can do anything I want to do. I'm starting to get
bored, starting to set myself ridiculously higher hurdles each time just to
keep interested. 'Big Numbers' is an insanely complicated piece of work and
it's also an indication of the encroaching boredom of the creator I think.
PT: How are your critics keeping pace with your work
at the moment?
AM: To tell the truth I don't read reviews any more
because very seldom does criticism actually mean anything to me. 'Big
Numbers' hasn't got as many readers as 'Watchmen', but it's still 60,000.
It's obviously a much more difficult work than 'Watchmen' on some levels -
especially because it hasn't got any super-heroes in it. In any other field,
not having super-heroes wouldn't present a problem, but in the comic world
it's difficult to imagine something without super-heroes. So a lot of people
have gone into shock over that. I think I'm probably regarded in the same
way as Eno was after he stopped doing songs on his own and started doing
that funny ambient music; I don't know, I may be drifting off into some sort
of stratosphere. The reviews are still very good when I bother to read them,
but that's not what interests me. I know I'm doing the best work of my life.
I used to think I was working towards something, some imagined perfection in
my head - and that is sterile. If you ever became perfect you would just
have to kill yourself, wouldn't you? It's the journey towards perfection
that's the interesting thing, not ever reaching the destination because the
destination is the end.
(c) Ptolemaic Terrascope, 1991 |