Swiftly, McGregor went to work adapting the series’ promising but barely developed premise to suit his own wider concerns. Out went the by-the-numbers alien invasion plotlines; in came shocking violence, ethical ambiguity, intensely drawn characters, narrative formalism, and extended poetic digressions on love, morality, and suffering. McGregor had the perfect collaborator in P. Craig Russell, whose design-conscious and delicate psychedelic nouveau had developed from the Barry Smith school of Romanticism, with flourishes in the direction of Beardsley and Mucha that suited the series’ lofty tone and aspirations.
Typical McGregor titles “Only the Computer Shows Me Any Respect!,” “The Rebels of January and Beyond!,” “The Morning After Mourning Prey,” and “And All of Our Generations Have Seen Revolutions” were bold hand-wringing declarations that seemed to clang with conviction and portent. He was prescient too: A story published in 1975 detailed the breakdown of a Native American family whose social bonds were implacably severed by their immersion in personal virtual-reality synthetic worlds. Like the cold bad-dream clinics and dissecting rooms of the Martians, these human-built worlds of disconnected code and artifice were contrasted against the elemental heat, sweat, and fellowship best exemplified by Killraven and his crew. He ran with a surprisingly diverse gang of protopunks—Old Skull, M’Shulla Scott, Hawk, Mint Julep, Volcana Ash, and Carmilla Frost—who were a demographer’s dream, including in their number a tough older man, a black gladiator, a Native American, three women, and ginger-haired Killraven. A tribe of like-minded freaks united in their outsider oddity and defiance. Pierced, shaved, tattooed, and idealistic, Killraven’s gang were rebel heroes and role models for an embryonic alternative culture.
American Dark Age comics were deadly serious, with little room for the absurd. But there was one particular US writer who was more caustic, less tortured, and less solemn—though no less sincere and far more down-to-earth than any of his contemporaries. His work captured a strain of dark and skeptical Jewish surrealism that appealed especially to his young British fans, many of whom would bring our own strain of this sensibility back to Marvel and DC.
Steve Gerber was most famously the creator of Howard the Duck, which brought the influence of the underground comics and head culture directly into the Marvel universe. This tale of an anthropomorphic, highly intelligent cigar-smoking duck trapped in the world of “hairless apes” satirized hero comics, politics, culture, and human relationships from the ultimate-outsider point of view of its caustic mallard star. Howard, a combination of Donald Duck and stand-up comedian Bill Hicks, was drawn by artist Frank Brunner with a noncartoony photo-naturalism, which only served to heighten his poignant freakishness.
Howard the Duck was a big hit with college kids in particular. He even ran for president in 1976, only to be beaten out by Jimmy Carter, himself a living political cartoon. If Howard had set a precedent as America’s first entirely fictional president, we would now undoubtedly be living in a world where the White House was occupied by the Simpsons; perhaps it was that looming threat that made the duck too dangerous to live. It’s easy to shoot a president or smear a civil rights campaigner, but how do you go about killing a comic-book character? How do you destroy the credibility of a decent, honest, hardworking duck? A bad movie, it turned out, did the trick.
Gerber brought the same unique sensibility to the comic The Defenders, which teamed a group of Marvel’s loner heroes—including the Incredible Hulk, Doctor Strange, and Silver Surfer—and shared something of its deadpan surrealism with the humor of comedian Andy Kaufman. Plots included a self-improvement cult in clown masks called the Bozos; a bizarre game of musical minds that wound up transplanting the brain of an evil supervillain into an adorable baby deer; and a non sequitur recurring plotline about a murderous elf who was crushed underneath the wheels of a passing truck before he could make any significant impression on the story.
By that time the United States snapped out of its post-Watergate funk, celebrating the 1976 bicentennial and its aftermath with a determined confidence that was given its proper mythic expression in George Lucas’s Star Wars. With its unashamed reliance on powerful archetypes, thrilling physical action, and simple high-contrast values and conflicts, Star Wars brought comics and the movies closer together. In a fearful world, the spacemen, cartoons, and superheroes of childhood began to seem comforting. Star Wars turned the material of the pulp stories and matinee serials into mass-market entertainment. Director George Lucas obliterated the ambiguities of seventies self-interrogating, auteur-driven Hollywood cinema culture with the pitiless efficiency of a Death Star razing worlds, when he turned his cameras outward to the infinite. Escapist epic fantasies populated with relatable archetypes were here to stay, and the comic-book auteurs found their absurdist existential fables losing favor with audiences who preferred robots to philosophy and space dogfights to politics.
As American superhero comics settled into another unchallenging rut, it was as if all those clever and literate stories had never happened. The heyday of grown-up mainstream comics appeared to be over but the lessons of the auteur era were not lost. Four thousand miles away in grimy Great Britain, the unforgiving sod was incubating the next phase in the progress of superhumankind toward the real world.
It was 1978 and I was determined to succeed in the comics business somehow, particularly after humiliation at the hands of my accursed careers guidance counselor, Mr. Shields. Seated in his claustrophobic office to discuss my future plans in that last year at Allan Glen’s, I proudly produced my artwork and announced my intention to make a living as a comic-book-artist-slash-writer. The work showed some promise and skill for my age, so I expected him to be impressed and full of praise for my industriousness. Instead, and without the slightest flicker of curiosity, he handed back my lurid Hellhunter pages and told me to stop wasting my time. There were talented professional people in America who did this work, and I, a foolish boy from Scotland, could never hope to join their ranks, he assured me. I would, Shields continued evenly, be much better off considering a job in a bank.
Grimly repeating the “Fuck you” mantra in my head didn’t seem to help; I was gutted like a cod. What if he was right, and I was deluding myself? My premature attempts to get work at Marvel and DC had resulted in polite “Thank you, but …” letters.
After the three-day weeks, the power cuts, the shit music, and the morbidly accumulating years without sex, Shields’s dismissal was the last straw. Hate, that great motivator, kicked in. Nihilistic defiance became the order of the day, and my personal contributions to the ongoing psychological war of attrition between pupils and teachers developed a new guillotine edge of cruelty.
I’d applied to the Glasgow School of Art, convinced that my portfolio, based around comic-style illustrations and black-and-white graphics, would easily see me through. I couldn’t wait to get among girls and start living to draw and drawing to live. Naturally, painting and figurative work were in that year, and graphics were out.
My art school rejection letter arrived as a cold manila fist that closed around my fragile hopes. When I closed my eyes, I saw the title animation for my TV favorite The Prisoner: Patrick McGoohan’s scowling Buddha face inflating to fill the screen before two iron gates closed across it, eternally barring his escape. I imagined the walls of my room extending to the infinite horizon. I’d left a good school only to find myself washed up on the shingles of the dole queue. I was sure to die penniless, ugly, and a virgin. The Fear was practically edible. Nothing would happen unless I got out and made it happen.
Then, as if handing me the keys to the jet pack, my dad bought me a typewriter and taped a message to the inside of its case: “Son—the world is waiting to hear from you.” Whatever had gone wrong in their lives, however oddly I’d been raised in accordance with their pacifist principles, my mum and dad had always given me the praise, the opportunities, and the tools to express myself, and I didn’t want to let them down. And let’s not forget the most basic drive of a
ll: I would die or go mad if I didn’t get laid. Reasoning that rich and famous writers were surely having sex all the time, I resolved to become one as quickly as I could.
The stars were right: Something was happening all around me as the grim decade accelerated to its conclusion with a scratchy burst of sunspot activity and a reversal of polarity in the solar magnetic field. Where dying hippie embers were, the incendiaries and flares of punk began to sputter into life. As if in a magical pass, everything cool was made uncool, and vice versa. I seized my chance as the door cracked ajar and stayed open just long enough for a “wierdo” (spelling courtesy of Scottish tabloid newspaper the Sun, describing me in 1988) like myself to sneak into the party. With one magic word, the angry outsider kids had merged to become the spearhead of a generational shift.
There were still interesting sci-fi and fantasy comics that were “adult” enough to appeal to my teenage sensibilities, but superheroes were in the doldrums. Many of the mavericks had moved on, and an air of listless nostalgia was all that remained. Journeymen turned out competent work to a safe house standard that rarely broke new ground. The superhero concept was running in place, like the Flash on a cosmic treadmill that took him nowhere but back to where he was, as a trail of afterimages, fossilized empty gestures now drained of relevance to anything but their own arcane, synthetic continuities.
The real action was in other fantasy genres: barbarians, horror, science fiction. Those stories could accommodate more grown-up content and showcase time-consuming, elaborate artwork in black-and-white magazines where the new cynicism seemed more at home. The flight of the superhero was stalled in a holding pattern. My homemade hero books and those of my friends seemed more contemporary and more relevant than any American comic.
My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I’d wandered in late to the punk party—in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I’d kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I’d written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who’d cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list.
But as we all know, it’s zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo.” By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes’s The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson’s If … was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke’s fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton’s William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk.
The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured—even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music’s great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield.
This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn’t kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary—a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.
Almost at once, and with no previous or discernible talent for playing any musical instrument, I formed a band. My pals from the DIY comics weekends at Dad’s were roped in and assigned temporary “punk” names like Awesome Toys and Simply Dimbleby. We recorded our first compositions using Dad’s old acoustic guitar, with brown paper bags and cardboard boxes for percussion. Every time I painfully mastered a new chord, I’d write a new song to go with it. The others were doing the same, and our oeuvre became gradually more complex and ambitious. I never progressed beyond strumming but discovering a facility for making up original songs in any style was more rewarding to me than proficiency on the fretboard. Punk gave the pop cultural seal of approval to my efforts at self-expression. We were being told we could do anything, so we did. I still had no girlfriend, but I was learning how to make my fantasies into reality, and that was a start.
For all the lack of self-esteem that curdled in every other area of my miserable existence, I felt absolutely secure in my talent as a creator of comic books and fantastic stories. I had no doubt that I was good. Now that I had the whole stinking educational establishment telling me I had no chance, I really had a point to make.
I was given an opportunity to start making it at the first Glasgow Comic Convention. It was there, in the shabby modernist Albion Hotel, between the rail tracks and the River Clyde, that my life changed forever, and the road to this book began. I prepared my best Gideon Stargrave strips as samples and brought them with me in a fake leather zip folder I liked to carry based on a delusion that it made me look somehow “professional.”
Rob King was part owner of the Science Fiction Bookshop in Edinburgh. Run by studenty young science fiction fans—a little too old for punk; a little too young to be sixties hippies—the Science Fiction Bookshop seemed an echo or by-blow of the underground scene. In fact, the opposite was true: The Science Fiction Bookshop was a piece of the future of comics retail. The new hippies were learning from their old enemy: the ever-reliable Man. Rob’s decision to venture into publishing by assembling a new science fiction comic magazine was inspired by the sales success of France’s Metal Hurlant and its American counterpart, Heavy Metal, as well as by former Justice League writer Mike Friedrich’s anthology, Star Reach, which offered its own West Coast vision of censorship-free adult science fiction comics. This was the seventies formula in action again, with a particle-smashing collision of underground and mainstream effecting a transfer of novelty from the edges into the wilting center.
Rob King quite simply liked my pages and immediately offered me ten pounds for each one he printed in Near Myths. For the first time in my life, I was being taken seriously by a human being who wasn’t my mum or dad, or five years younger than I.
I was eighteen, I was to be published, and they were offering me real money to write and draw my oddball, elliptical science fiction stories. If only Mr. Shields hadn’t succumbed to cancer, I could h
ave rubbed it in. It seemed too easy. Just like that, the door to the future unlocked and swung open, inviting me in.
The story of Near Myths doesn’t belong in this book about superheroes, but it propelled me into the world of professional comics, which has sustained me ever since. In addition, it introduced me to Bryan Talbot, the creator of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. I aspired to Bryan’s professionalism, his command of his material, and his meticulous drawing style, which combined the etched line of Albrecht Dürer with the underground cartoon hatching of Robert Crumb. His figure drawing could be off sometimes, but his incredible eye for detail and obsessively researched costumes and backgrounds elevated his work far above its faults. He was a gifted writer, too—a better writer than he was an artist, perhaps. But I was a punk, and I didn’t need things to be slick as long as they had conviction and personality.
Nearest to my age was Tony O’Donnell, who drew lush fantasy stories with dragons and warriors. As I saw it, Tony wasn’t an out-and-out hippie like the others, so he became my anchor to the scene. Straight, uptight, and dressed in my Jerry Cornelius velvet jacket, with my No. 6 penny farthing Prisoner badge, I sat disapprovingly through dope-smoky editorial meetings that ran on and on until my head was swimming.
I’d left superheroes behind in favor of offbeat fables inspired by Moorcock, J. C. Ballard, and the New Worlds school of “speculative fiction.” These were dreamlike improvised stories, free-associating and building to their crescendos through flash cuts and symbols. I was reading Jung, too, and finding in my own dreams and fantasies new ways to tell stories about things that mattered to me, favoring tales of sexy, brooding outsiders—with guns, unsurprisingly. No story was allowed to end without at least one gorgeous fetish girl wandering through the ruins of London or New York in search of some haunted hero with high cheekbones and a burden of enigmatic guilt.