Tripwire Talks To 2000AD And Vertigo Writer John Smith

Exorcising Demons

Tripwire’s contributing writer Paul N Neal just interviewed writer John Smith about a career that has included writing for 2000AD, Crisis and DC’s Vertigo…

TRIPWIRE: Can you recall the very first comic you read and enjoyed? Or perhaps what was the first comic you bought for yourself? ….Or as a writer, were comics not your immediate inspiration?

JOHN SMITH: Like most kids I read the comics that we’d swap around.  So that’d be Whizzer and Chips, The Beano, The Dandy, Buster and Monster Fun.  I’d come across the odd American superhero comic on holiday, maybe, but they never really interested me. There were Christmas annuals too, with horror stories in them, though the names escape me.  I was mainly interested in Doctor Who (on TV) and all the groovy creepy 70s kids’ TV stuff around at the time.  I can’t remember reading much for fun before I had a road accident which put me in hospital for six weeks, so during that boring stretch my mum would bring in Doctor Who books/novelisations from the library.

TW: Can you mention or cite any novelists that may have inspired your writing? Your scripts suggest you are well read. Would that be true?

JS: Well read?  Hah!  Well, apart from comics and annuals and the stuff you had to read at school, I didn’t read anything much for pleasure.  Then as I said I was run over when I was about six (I think) and had to spend six weeks in a hospital bed.  Not the most stimulating place to be, a children’s hospital ward, with its tyrannical matron and lack of bedside manners.  But I loved Doctor Who (still do, despite the latest few series), so my mum brought me in some of the Target novelisations to alleviate the boredom.  Then I discovered the local library and bingo!  Books for free!  Actually, at primary school, the book we had to read was Stig of the Dump – which I just loved!  The sense of children discovering something… that feeling of a lazy English country summer shimmering with meaning… a fucking caveman living in a dump then meeting up with his Neanderthal mates to throw up a stone circle like the Amish building and that barn in Witness!  That book was a big influence on the “Dead Eyes” story I wrote (although I mainly ripped off the works of Stan Gooch).  I think it says that Uther is Stig of the Dump…

TW: Please tell me more.

JS: And as a kid I loved horror.  And science fiction and fantasy – but mainly horror.  Especially horror anthologies and short stories, writers like Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch (who’s kind of forgotten now but is brilliant at twist endings) and Lovecraft, of course.  I think the first proper novel I read was Salem’s Lot, because my dad finished reading it on a holiday at a caravan park in Fleetwood, and I liked the cover.  Then I read pretty much anything…  Raymond Chandler, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Ian McEwan, Hemingway for his super-clean prose, Elmore Leonard for the same, Peter Straub, John Wyndham, Clive Barker…  Strangely, I barely read fiction at all now.  I’ll have to rectify that.

TW: How did you first come under the radar of 2000AD? What pitch was it that first caught their attention? Who was your first Tharg?

JS: The first comics I had published were a few issues of D.C. Thomson’s Starblazer, which had a really encouraging editor.  I think that gave me the nerve to start submitting to 2000AD, so then I’d just bombard them with “Future Shock” ideas every week.  Steve MacManus was the editor at the time, and he was quite encouraging too with his criticism, which you really need when you’re starting out.  Then I met him in person at a convention (can’t remember if it was Birmingham or London or Glasgow… maybe Birmingham, as that was the first one I ever went to – where I heard that Grant Morrison and me had simultaneously pitched an Arkham Asylum story!) and the next script I submitted, he accepted.  Something about putting a name to the face, I think.  I did the usual apprenticeship on “Future Shocks”, but it was that first Tyranny Rex strip that I think caught Steve’s attention… perhaps because 2000AD was rather short on female characters, and I jumped on the cyberpunk bandwagon early on.  Then Steve Dillon’s art brought her to life.

TW: I recall David Bishop said once to me that your scripts are almost novel-like in the detail you provide to an artist. If that is potentially the case, would you argue all comic writers are frustrated artists?

JS: No. That’s too absolutist a question!  “All”!  Some, maybe; some not.  I can only speak for myself.  I love the written word, the way words sound, turns of phrase and imagery, but I also think quite visually, so it seems an obvious medium to work in.  As a naive teenager, my interest in comics had waned and I was submitting scripts to the BBC and Hollywood!  I still have a fantastically snarky letter from Warner Brother’s legal department warning me off for submitting a script to Superman 3!

TW: Tyranny Rex is a very cool and memorable character. I’d love to see more of her. Is that likely to happen?

JS: You can’t tell anyone this, but I’ve just written a one-off Tyranny story that’s being drawn by Will Simpson for a charity comic coming out of Ireland.  (It’s a kind of ‘fuck you!’ to 2000AD) It’s actually got me thinking about the character for the first time in ages, and I realise there’s still a lot of potential there – both with the character and the universe she lives in.  I’m thinking of having her (and some of her clone alternates) being hunted down by an alien consciousness-snatching bounty hunter called Black Mariah… but we’ll see, eh?  I think 2000AD want me back, but do I want to work for them again?

Note:  John said “Publish and be Damned.”  All on the record and with permission.

TW: Do you enjoy conventions and meeting your fans?

JS: Who doesn’t?  It’s a bit of a solitary job, writing, so it’s always good to go out there and meet old friends and fans.  Actually, I’m a bit apprehensive about going to conventions at the moment, not having written anything new for a long time, but hopefully that’s going to change!

TW: Revere is a storyline that I believe is fondly remembered by many 2000AD fans too. Can you describe the inspiration behind that story?

JS: As far as I remember, it was purely because I wanted to work with Simon Harrison.  I know his art divides people, but I love his stuff.  And we really buzzed off each other when we got to meet, so it was a no-brainer to work together.  I think most of the inspiration – certainly for the character and many of the themes, the Tarot stuff, the ecological collapse, the arcane symbolism – most of that came from Simon.  I remember that he’d come up with these fantastic visuals and character designs and we structured the story around those set pieces.  He should really get a co-writer credit!

TW: When it comes to 2000AD, Indigo Prime may possibly be the “universe” (or more) you are best known for creating. Where did all that madness come from?

JS: What do you mean, “madness”?  It was mainly a coathanger on which I could hang other stories.  Rather than just writing one-off throw-away Future Shocks, I figured the individual stories would be more interesting if they were part of some kind of consistent backdrop.  It really developed naturally from that first story.  Plus – fuck!  They patrol time, space and sanity!  The multiverse is their obvious stomping ground!  I’d also read Michael Moorcock and discovered Bryan Talbot’s brilliant Luther Arkwright graphic novel early on in a shop in Preston (turns out we were practically neighbours, since I was in Blackburn), so all the inspiration was there.

TW: Many of your fans may think you may be annoyed about Indigo Prime having a new writer. Can you spill the beans. Does it upset you?

JS: No.  Kek-W came up and told me he was writing it at the 2000AD birthday bash, and I gave him my blessing.  In a way, I wish I’d ignored all the organisational stuff at Indigo Prime HQ and wish I’d just concentrated on new individual stories with a different pair of agents each time,  a bit like Sapphire and Steel or Scully and Mulder, etc.  They could also have thrown it open as a playground/testing ground for new writers.  I think I would have enjoyed reading that!

TW:  Devlin Waugh is perhaps your greatest 2000AD creation. Do you have stories and tales of the fine gentleman that are left untold?

JS: Many!  But a dog doesn’t return to its vomit…

TW: Oddly my Jack Russell used to do precisely that, but can I ask you to explain that comment? (the following was John’s answer.)

JS: https://augustinenyongesa.com/as-a-dog-returns-to-its-vomit-sermon/

….Now you know the Biblical parable I was paraphrasing, you probably have a better grasp of what I meant when I used that phrase.  I consider the “new” faux Devlin stories absolute garbage (excepting Mike Dowling’s fantastic artwork).  As far as I’ve seen, they’ve ruined his backstory and broken all the toys in the toybox so I can’t play with them anymore.  Which is a shame, because I had a lot more stories planned.

TW:  Can you talk about issue 51 of Hellblazer please? It is the only issue of the series I recall you writing.

JS: Regarding Hellblazer…  I can’t remember if we were told about it, or if it was hot news going around a comics convention, but we all knew that Jamie Delano was leaving the book, so I think all of us young keen British writers were asked to pitch for the job.  I think it was then-editor Stuart Moore who rang me up and asked me.  So, I planned out a years-worth of stories (I imagine we all did) and crossed my fingers.  Garth got the gig, of course, but later on they needed some fill-in issues, so that’s how “Counting by Numbers” came about.  There were more straight-up horror ideas, but for some reason Sean and I settled on that one.  I think probably because I was staying at his in Peckham at the time, and there was a launderette around the corner, so we just went there, and Sean took some photos then sent me duplicates so we both knew the layout of the place.  Constantine is one of my favourite characters, and I’d love to have a proper go at him!

TW: In CRISIS I found Straitgate very moving personally. Sean Phillips’ art for that story was astonishing to me at the time. Can you comment on the storyline please?

JS: Well, we both wanted to do something realistic for Crisis.  Turned out Sean and I got on really well, and we’d read some of the same books (he’s the only straight guy I’ve ever met who’s read Edmund White! – you won’t know him!), so we talked about a kind of coming-out story told from the point of an unreliable narrator with mental health problems.  (Apart from the Biblical quote, the title “straitgate” was code for straight/gay.)  The story was inspired by the so-called Hungerford massacre, which had just happened at the time, where Michael Ryan went berserk with a shotgun.  Funny how you always remember the killer’s name but not the victims, isn’t it?

TW: Can I ask what John Smith is working on these days? Do you have any projects to promote currently.?

JS: I have shedloads of ideas.  Maybe too many, if that’s possible.  But they’re all jostling for position in my head, and I find it hard to pin down what I really want to concentrate on.  One is a big world-wide eco-threat blockbuster-type strip called “Human/Nature”, but it’s a bit too adult for 2000AD.  I’ve got a not-really-but-sorta sequel to “Cradlegrave”, tentatively called “Cripplegate”, which is a real-world horror story set not kids on a council estate, but even more claustrophobically, a young pregnant single mother in a block of semi-derelict flats.  Mainly I’m concentrating on an alternate history series called Feral Flynn, a sort of steampunk science fiction series set exactly a hundred years ago, which allows me to comment on modern society from a safe distance, so I don’t get cancelled!  The parallels between the 1920s and the 2020s are very striking.  Plague, world war, famine, pestilence…  all the good stuff… culminating, of course, in the Great Depression.  History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes and chimes!