Steve Dillon Interview

Steve Dillon: Best of British

♦Back in 2011, Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows was a regular contributor to Rebellion’s Judge Dredd Megazine. He interviewed Steve Dillon, who passed away the end of last week, so as a tribute to Dillon and with thanks to Michael Molcher and Tharg himself Matt Smith, they have permitted us to run that interview here as a tribute to Steve Dillon…

Steve Dillon has been an integral part of British comics for five decades now. Starting life drawing for Hulk Weekly for Marvel UK, he moved on to illustrate for Doctor Who Weekly and then for 2000AD. It was his acclaimed collaboration with Garth Ennis on Vertigo’s Hellblazer that led to them co-creating the award-winning Preacher series. Since then he has worked extensively for Marvel on books like The Punisher, Wolverine: Origins and Bullseye. Currently on an exclusive contract with Marvel, Judge Dredd Megazine caught up with him to find out how he got his start, why he owes a lot to Paul Neary, how his friendship with Ennis continues to this day and how he’s been lucky enough to work with writers who are on the same wavelength as him…

Dillon has been involved in creating comics quite literally since he was back at school, as he recalls.

“Me and a friend decided to get together and do some comics, because his dad happened to have a photocopier in his office and they were quite rare things in those days. So we just sold them to our school pals for 10p a shot. I did things like Planet of The Apes adaptions from the novels and then we tried to do some original science fiction stories. And that’s how I started off really.”

He read War Picture Library when he was younger and he was a reader of British comics generally as a kid but ironically it was these that got him into the American material.

“I was 14 when I got into American comics weirdly enough again via Planet of The Apes. I bought the black and white British reprints of the Marvel stuff and at the back there was an advert for mail order US comics. The problem with those days was that you didn’t have comic shops. So you had to go to local newsagents and you might find oneoff issues of various titles. They never had the next issue so you’d have a cliffhanger and you never knew what happened. So when I realised you could get them delivered every month, I thought ‘I’ll Give it a go’ and that was it really,” he remembers.

The artist’s first professional illustration job was for a Dutch science fiction magazine, where they paid him in guilders which they sent through in an envelope. He also drew illustrations for the fanzines that were around at the time, like Comics Unlimited and Richard Burton’s Comics Media News. But it was actually Marvel UK that provided him with his comics strip debut.

“My first proper comic job was a three page strip for Hulk Weekly. It was a whole strip, a tryout job. Dez [Skinn] liked it and offered me the job. It was written by Steve Parkhouse if my memory serves. It had nine panels a page. Dez’s idea was to do the American Marvel characters in a British style to make it look more like British comics.”

Dillon had drawn the Hulk strip over the Christmas break just after he’d started a Foundation course at art college, when he was only sixteen years old.

While he was at Marvel UK, Paul Neary begun to work for the company and Dillon owes Neary a great debt for the advice and assistance he received from him, he reveals gratefully.

“Paul was a great help to me. He saved me a lot of time because one of the problems I had was that I used to draw comics when I fancied it. And suddenly now I had to draw comics when I had to. So I had to do 3 pages a week whether I wanted to or not. That’d be a luxury now, just doing three pages a week. But at the time it was a bit much for me to handle and Paul helped me make a quantum leap which would have taken me months longer if I’d been doing it myself.”

At the time, Hulk Weekly was a huge seller on the UK newsstand and coming to it as a young kid made Dillon feel like he was thrown into the deep end.

“The other people in the comic were experienced creators like Steve Parkhouse and Dave Lloyd. There were some good guys in the old Hulk comic who had been doing it for quite a lot longer than me. I think John Bolton also did work for it at some point. So there was me, a sixteen-year-old learning in front of everyone and it was selling about 100,000 a week. It was scary,” he says with a laugh.

Dillon’s work on Hulk Weekly led to Doctor Who Weekly, also published by Marvel UK. Because of his association with Dez Skinn, it was inevitable that he would end up on Doctor Who. He looks back at his Who work with some fondness.

“I did a few back up strips. The one that most people remember is Absalom Daak. But the story where I feel I actually clicked and wasn’t completely ashamed any more was a backup story called The Stolen Tardis, written by Steve Moore. It was set on Gallifrey, with a young Time Lord. Like any kid in Britain at the time who had any interest in science fiction, I watched a bit of Doctor Who. And it was the Tom Baker Doctor Who at the time, who’s still to this day one of my favourite Doctor Whos,” he reminisces.

With the page structure a little looser than he was used to on Hulk Weekly, it was work that gave him a little more room to breathe as an artist, he tells us:

“It helped when I did the Doctor Who stuff that it wasn’t as disciplined as something like the 9 panel pages I drew for Hulk. Because the back up strips for Who were a little bit longer, five or six pages, so you got a bit more space. It was still weekly so it was the same frequency as the Judge Dredd stories, which were six pages.”

It was Dez Skinn again who gave Dillon his next opportunity. After Doctor Who Weekly, which Dillon worked on for a while on strips like Absalom Daak and Doctor Who itself, Skinn launched Warrior. With their long association, it would have been unlikely that the artist wouldn’t have been invited.

“Dez moved on and he decided to start up Warrior. People like Steve Moore, Steve Parkhouse, Alan Moore and Garry Leach were all getting involved and he asked me to do it. So that’s when we did Laser Eraser & Pressbutton with Steve Moore. That was fun. Warrior was monthly.”

At this point, Dillon was working regularly as a comic artist. At the same time as Skinn’s Warrior, he would meet someone who would have an impact on his working life a few years later.

“I met Bret Ewins when I was living in London. Comics shops like Dark They Were and the first Forbidden Planet had opened and you had places to gather. There was also the Westminster Comic Mart. That’s where I met people like Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Mick McMahon. I probably bumped into people like Bret and Brendan [McCarthy] there as well. So it was just through mutual friends that you ended up meeting people.”

He did end up working on 2000AD just before his work on Warrior, he remembers.

“Mean Arena was my first series, with Tom Tully writing. And then I did some Dredds. I did a few Future Shock style things with Alan Moore, Grant Morrison. I did Abelard Snazz with Alan Moore. A few bits and pieces like that. I also drew a oneoff Dredd story called Alone In The Crowd, written by John Wagner. It was whatever came in the office. You used to hang around there a lot because if the editor opened up a script while you were there, it was just easier for them to say: ‘You’re here, you take it’.”

Dillon was a 2000AD reader when he was much younger and in fact he did pick it up at the very start.

“When it had come out, about 1977, I did pick up a few issues of it. It was easier to get hold of than American comics but by then I’d gotten my regular US mail order comics. It was a completely different style to the American stuff I’d been reading. It had that punk, very British feel to it. I’d only poked my head into it a bit because at that time I was very ensconced in my American comics so the Action stuff, as far as I was concerned, was more like the comics I used to read as a kid. I didn’t realise it wasn’t. It then started appearing on the news so I thought ‘I’d better have a look at this’ .”

Dillon drew a lot of Judge Dredd stories but it was one of AD’s long epic that got people’s attention.

“I did a long series that I did on my own, the Cry of The Werewolf. With a lot of those long series, they normally gave it to different artists. But I drew the whole thing. I spent a whole summer drawing werewolves and there was my girlfriend and her mate sunbathing topless in the back garden, but I was there drawing werewolves. And there was nothing I could do about it because I had to do six pages a week,” he recalls with a laugh.

He also contributed to City of Damned and then he moved on to do a significant run on Rogue Trooper, with Simon Geller writing. He returned to the character to illustrate some of John Smith’s stories in the second half of the Eighties.

It was one of the people he had met earlier that decade who would become a more regular part of his working life. No feature on Steve Dillon would be complete without talking about Deadline, the influential comic strip and features magazine that he founded with Brett Ewins.

“Me and Brett were mates and we just got talking because Brett was working from home, and I was working from home. We both had a couple of young kids. We were talking one day and said: ‘we could probably do with an office.’ He lived in Woolwich and I lived in Haringey. So Brett wanted out because he was fed up working on his own and for me it was getting a bit crowded with the kids. So we moved in together just to share office space. We just got chatting about stuff and out of that came the mad idea of Deadline,” Dillon tells us.

Deadline came out during the comics boom of the Eighties and, even though it was a fairly stressful time for him, he admits that he still looks at it with some fondness.

“I don’t regret it even though it basically bankrupted me. I had to leave the country for a few years because I owed the tax man money. I had to leave to sort it out all. Doing Deadline was just exhausting. Neither me nor Brett were experienced editors. We got people in to help designwise, to help with advertising but you still ended up doing a lot yourself. I’d end up marking up pages on the Tube on the way to the printers. I loved the lads but they did have a habit of bringing it in on print day but right up to the wire.”

Deadline was a breeding ground for a whole slew of future artistic talent but Dillon wasn’t running it for the last few years, he reveals:

“Jamie Hewlett was doing lovely work, as was Phil Bond. I’m also really proud of Nick Abadzis’s Hugo Tate. There was lots of good stuff in Deadline and it’s great to see that a lot of these guys went on from there and made decent careers. I wasn’t at the helm for the last bit of it because I had to go to Dublin, where I was a consultant. I was still a director of the company. I saw stuff on fax and all that sort of thing. But in the end Brett was there on his own really with a couple of staff. It got a bit much for him as well. Tom Astor, the guy who financed it, stayed involved but we got people like Si Spencer and Dave Elliott in for a bit to edit.”

Dillon’s association with Garth Ennis continues to this day but the artist is unclear as to how they first crossed paths.

“Garth will remember exactly how we met. I never do because I probably met him with a load of other people around,” he says honestly. “You get introduced to people a number of times before you get to speak to them. But it was before we actually worked together. I think it was round about when Garth was working on Crisis with John McCrea. I think I’d just started up Deadline at the time Crisis was coming out.”

Their long friendship is explained very simply by Steve Dillon.

“As Woody Allen once said ‘We hate the same people’. So there’s a bit of that going on. And we both love Guinness.”

Dillon’s first work for Vertigo wasn’t Hellblazer but it was on Animal Man. First with Peter Milligan writing and then on a long run by Tom Veitch, the way Dillon came to the fast-talking Scouse magician seemed to be synchronicity.

“When Garth got offered Hellblazer, I was given the chance to work on it too. I was still on Animal Man and I said that I didn’t feel like I could let my editor Art Young down by jumping ship in the middle of the run. But weirdly enough about a month later Art Young left the company anyway. Will Simpson was then working on Hellblazer but it was only when Will stopped on Hellblazer, I got a second chance to work with Garth on the book.”

Ennis’s strengths as a writer were plain to see and that was part of what appealed to the artist.

“Garth was very good at doing the big stuff and interspersing it with the personal stuff. That’s a good balance. Jamie [Delano] was much more political, still very British, but both Jamie and Garth were dealing with universal themes but with a British accent. A demon’s a demon in anybody’s country. If he happens to be a right-wing Brit or a Yank, it doesn’t matter.”

Even though Hellblazer was published by Vertigo, a New York-based company, it was and continues to be mostly set in the UK, with a British protagonist. It was the British setting that made life a little bit easier for him but Constantine’s personality also attracted him.

“Everybody likes a bit of antihero. The fact that he was British made it easier on the reference front for stuff. I lived in Britain, although at the time I was living in Ireland. I knew Britain so I didn’t have to be constantly reffing up certain New York or certain Chicago things. I knew what British stuff looked like and that helped.”

Hellblazer is remembered not just for Ennis and Dillon’s memorable interior work but also for Glenn Fabry’s iconic painted covers. The artist recalls when he first saw Fabry’s distinctive work.

“I remember when I was working for 2000AD, they got this little self-published fanzine through, Working Class Superhero, that Glenn had sent to them. I was actually there when they were looking at it and you could tell it was by Glenn. They were sorting through some submissions stuff and it had this Moebius style thing going on. You could see the drawing ability instantly. I thought ‘This bloke is bloody good.’ So it wasn’t long after that that he ended up doing Slaine. I think I bumped into Glenn at conventions and stuff, as you’d normally do at these things.”

Dillon saw Fabry as part of the team, even though ironically the cover artist had joined the book before Dillon came on board as interior artist. The chemistry between the three of them on Hellblazer meant that, when the writer and artist decided to create something that was their own, it wouldn’t have been the same if Fabry didn’t join them.

“That’s why when we went on to do Preacher, it was like a no-brainer to have Glenn do the covers. I’m also so pleased they finally brought out a collection of his covers so he’s made a few bob out of them. Because in those days I don’t think the cover artist of the monthly got any royalties. They got paid pretty well but they didn’t get any royalties. So when they actually collected all the covers, he did get royalties on the book and he still gets them to this day, which is nice.”

The genesis of Preacher was fairly organic and smooth, Dillon remembers.

“It was in the early days of Vertigo so you felt like you still needed some sort of fantasy element to any series you created for them. Vertigo, as it turned out, moved on from that. But at the time, we thought ‘Okay it needs to have angels and demons. Vampires.’ It still worked out perfectly and I don’t think we’d have changed it even if we didn’t have to put the fantasy in it. Garth lived in Belfast at the time and I lived in Dublin so we used to meet up occasionally. I’d go up there or he’d come down to see me in Dublin. We’d have a few beers and stay over at each other’s places, talk nonsense and ideas came out of that.”

Preacher came out of a shared love of Westerns between Ennis and Dillon. Its cinematic feel was inevitable.

“My only view of the West has been through movies like a lot of people, unless you’ve been lucky enough to go there and visit places like the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley. So that’s my reference point. Garth loves his Westerns and he loves Clint Eastwood. So it all just comes in. I have joked about us hating the same things but we also like a lot of the same stuff.”

The series has been exposed to a whole new audience thanks to Vertigo reprinting it in a hardcover format. For the artist, it has an appeal that continues a decade over the series ended, a fact that he seems grateful about.

“When I was doing a shop signing yesterday, there were some people bringing up the books who I’m certain weren’t even born when I started drawing it. I started drawing it 16 years ago and I finished it just under 10 years ago. And I had 15 year olds handing over Preachers yesterday. It’s hard when you’ve done it yourself to step back and look at it but hopefully it does have some sort of timeless quality because of the universal themes that are tackled, so that many years later people can still connect with it.”

The idea of Preacher on TV or the big screen has also been mooted in the last ten years, with Mark Steven Johnson (Daredevil) and HBO attached to make it. But it has never made it out of production limbo and the artist is sanguine about whether it will ever see the light of day.

“I’ve always had the habit of not thinking about the Preacher film because it’s been on and off for about 14 years, one way or the other. I’ve always said I won’t believe it until I walk into the cinema, the curtains open and there it is. For a while it was optioned by HBO for a TV series and that would have been the perfect way of doing it. It’s about six years worth of work if you wanted to fit as much of it in as possible into an adaptation but currently it’s under option. In the current financial climate we’ll see what happens. The option might run out and we’ll see if somebody else picks it up again. But it’s really something I try not to think about. I went through a period when we’d have meetings with producers and we’d do what I call fantasy casting: ‘Who’d play Jesse, who’d play Tulip.’ So I’d spend train fare going down to London. But until somebody says ‘Okay this is official’ then I don’t even think about it.”

Preacher was a big success, Vertigo’s biggest-selling book after Sandman, but Dillon moved on to draw a title that at first glance seemed very different.

“I started pencilling Punisher for Jimmy Palmiotti to ink while I was doing the last few issues of Preacher. It was a very busy time for me because I was finishing Preacher, pencilling and inking, while just pencilling Punisher for Jimmy to ink. This was weird because I’ve rarely been inked by someone else. Kev Walker had inked me on a few Rogue Trooper things. I think that might have been it.”

The fact that Dillon wasn’t inking his own work meant that he had to change the way he drew and had to approach things in a different way, he admits.

“Because I was used to doing very loose pencils for myself to ink, I had to do loose pencils and then ink them again with the pencil so Jimmy understood what I meant. This is because normally I do sketchy pencils because I know what I need and I do a lot of the finished drawing in the ink. So on the first few Punishers, it took me almost as long to just pencil it as it would have done to pencil and ink it. It’s only once Jimmy got used to what I was doing and I knew what he would do with it, then I could ease up a bit.”

Punisher had a look distinct from Dillon’s Preacher work but, looking back on his first Marvel work, he is happy with the results.

“Jimmy gave it a different look. He gave it more of a Marvel look because, after that long on Preacher, my style developed a certain way which, while it works for that book, it wouldn’t necessarily have worked for Punisher. So he gave it that slicker brush line look and that worked.”

He began collaborating with Ennis again at Marvel but Dillon has gone on to work with other writers like Daniel Way on Bullseye and he has just begun a run on Punisher with Jason Aaron (Scalped, Wolverine). Just like working with Ennis, he seems to have found a kindred spirit in Aaron as well.

“I always end up working with writers with a twisted sense of humour and a fine sense of warped violence. And that’s right up my strasse. Now I’m working with Jason Aaron on Punisher Max. He’s a great writer and I’m not comparing him with Garth but he’s got that similar sensibility. He knows how to balance the humorous with absolutely horrifying, twisted stuff. So it’s really great working with him. I think he sees the character similar to the way Garth does only with a little less romance.”

The Punisher of the past decade has been a lot darker than the character used to be back in the Seventies and Eighties, something that suits a creator like Dillon down to the ground.

“The Marvel Knights series was a compromise between Marvel Universe Punisher and Marvel Max, in the middle ground. You could get away with more stuff in Marvel Knights than you could in the Marvel Universe but we get away with a hell of a lot more in the MAX Punisher series.”

The artist is exclusive to Marvel and he seems to be comfortable drawing Punisher for them but he doesn’t assume that he could move onto another series for them at some point, he says.

“We’ll see what happens. I think there’s a certain story that Jason wants to tell and then he might move on, in which case I might move on as well. I don’t know. That’ll be down to the powers that be at Marvel.”

His career has taken some strange twists and turns, with him becoming associated with characters devoid of any powers or costumes mostly. He sees this as pretty funny considering where he started all those years ago.

“It’s been ironic really because I got into comics wanting to draw superheroes. I used to draw superheroes for fun when I was a kid but in my career from the earliest days, I wasn’t drawing superheroes. Nick Fury Agent of Shield wasn’t really a superhero. The first thing that I did, The Hulk, wasn’t really a superhero either. If you look at Doctor Who stuff, what I did for Warrior. Then if you look at the work I did on Hellblazer and Preacher as well, that’s not superheroes either. The closest I ever got to doing a superhero comic was Wolverine Origins. The X-Men turned up in it as did some of Wolverine’s old villains. But again that wasn’t a straight Wolverine book.”

There was talk a few years ago that Ennis and Dillon would collaborate again on a new creator-owned series for Vertigo, called City Lights. Even though Dillon has spent much of his time working for Marvel in recent years, he informs us that this series may still happen at some point.

“It’s still on the back burner. When I signed the exclusive contract with Marvel, I did say to them ‘There’s only one thing I want to do outside the exclusive and that’s City Lights with Garth’ and Marvel thought ‘That’s not really up against Marvel.’ Garth had written quite a bit and then he didn’t get round to getting any further with it. So a couple of years went by, he scrapped that, as he’d got older. Garth sent me a few pages of stuff about a year or so ago which I haven’t got much further than laying them out. But again he’d probably want to change that now too. But once everything settles down and I know I’ve got time to do my regular paying bills work, then maybe.”

During a long career, there is still one series that he would choose as the apex of his work, a decade after it was completed.

“I suppose it would have to be Preacher. It’s the thing that’s the longest lasting, it’s the thing that’s seemed to have had the most effect on people. It’s also something that me and Garth came up with ourselves. We’ve been proud of other stuff we’ve done. It’s like asking: ‘Who’s your favourite kid?’ Every artist will tell you this. When you look back on your old stuff, all they’ll see is mistakes. I still haven’t reread Preacher because I’m trying to forget as much as possible so I’m trying to come to it as much like a reader as possible but I’m sure the moment I open the book, it’ll all come back to me.”

Steve Dillon has carved a fairly unique niche for himself in the comics industry but he never imagined that he would still be doing this after all these decades.

“When I was a teenager, I didn’t think I’d be alive at this age let alone still be drawing comics. Life leads you down certain paths. When I was at school and I chose what I was going to do for my O Levels, it was with the plan of going to university to do physics. And it was only when I was doing my O Levels that I decided: ‘I’d much rather draw. And I’d much rather draw than do Physics’. As much as I love Physics…And then you meet your missus, and you have kids. Your priorities change and you want regular work. I couldn’t do experiments like Deadline now. Admittedly, I did it when I had kids but I had the attitude that, if it succeeded, I could get a regular wage and have evenings and weekends off. I thought I’d be able to do it in a normal office job and then do a few hours freelancing into the evening. I now know better really. When you’ve got three kids, you need regular work.”

©2016 Rebellion.

Steve Dillon obituary www.tripwiremagazine.co.uk