Albion Man
First Posted: 12/2/07
Titan Books have just released their edition of the collected Albion, Wildstorm's welcome revival of many British comics heroes owned by IPC. The trade offers the complete story – with some sprucing up of some of the art in places and a wonderful collection of original stories featuring some of the characters in the new adventure, culled from various annuals and other sources.
In the second part of an extended feature marking the release of the Albion collection from Titan Books (hot on the heels of Wildstorm's edition last December), John Freeman talks to IPC's Andrew Sumner about the project
An interview with artist Shane Oakley will follow soon, while our interview with Leah Moore and John Reppion can be found here...
DOWN THE TUBES: The Albion collection has just been published in the UK by Titan, and it looks great. What shaped your choice of classic strips for this?
ANDREW SUMNER: Choosing those strips turned out to be less easy than I expected. I knew that I had 30-odd pages to fill and that I wanted to include a representative sample of the best IPC characters featured in Albion - but it rapidly became obvious that excerpting the best weekly strips from Lion, Valiant, Smash wasn't going to work, thanks to their months-long story arcs (that are just impossible to jump straight in and out of for anyone who isn't familiar with the strips in the first place).
The answer, of course, was to go back to those self-contained 6-8 pagers contained in the mid-60s/early 70s annuals. Right off the bat, I knew that I wanted to use that superb full-colour Carlos Cruz House of Dolmann from the 1969 Valiant annual, the "War of the Worlds" Steel Claw from the 1967 Valiant annual (although, as lovely as Tom Kerr's art is, I would really loved to have included a Blasco-drawn strip if we'd had more space) and that infamous "Tim Kelly survives an A Bomb" story from the 1965 Valiant annual.
The rest came together as a result of just combing through our archive and finding the most representative stories that fit the page length.
I'm happy with all of them: the Janus Stark isn't the best story but a it's great colour art job from Solano Lopez, the Captain Hurricane is an archetypal Nazi-stomping adventure full of classic Charles Roylance "ragin' furies" and I'm really pleased that we could end on a Spot the Clue with Zip Nolan where Nolan is sporting his classic early 60s peaked cap look (although, if I'd had more pages, I'd have run the colour story from one of my all-time favourite annuals: Lion 1972 with the classic Elektra Glide in Blue-style Zip cover). I'd also cued up a colour Robot Archie and a Bad Penny but I couldn't fit them into our final page allowance.
DOWN THE TUBES: Now Albion is complete, was it worth all that hard work getting this project off the ground?
Andrew: Yeah, most definitely! The truth is
that, as a direct result of our hands-across-the-seas partnership with Bob
Wayne and the boys at DC, we're doing more with the IPC comics library here
at Kings Reach Tower than we have done for 25 years. IPC's information manager
David Abbott shares my enthusiasm for the comics library and he's putting
together some great deals (such as the upcoming audio adventures, Prion Books'
Best of Girl and Prion's soon-to-be-published "Mother
Tells You How" compendium,
which is the funniest thing I've read in ages!)
DOWNTHETUBES: What's been the best thing about the project so far?
Working with my old mate Bob Wayne at DC, Scott Dunbier
at WildStorm and Dirk
Maggs on his audio adventures: great blokes all.
Plus co-ordinating the Steel Claw and King of Crooks archives with the
guys and gals at Titan.
DOWNTHETUBES: And the worst?
Andrew: Ask me in person at the next Bristol con and I'll tell you!
DOWNTHETUBES: What's next for the IPC character range? Can you tell us which characters will be revived next?
Andrew: The short answer is no! Further WildStorm revivals are all dependent on the sales performance of the Albion, Thunderbolt Jaxon and Battler Britton trades. Obviously, Dirk's Steel Claw and Sexton Blake audio adventures are on their way [see news story - Ed], while Titan are currently planning a third reprint archive (which may feature more than one character this time around). There's some other stuff in the pipeline also...
DOWNTHETUBES: Several UK publishers have had considerable bookshop success with Christmas-oriented collections of classic comics material - I'm thinking here of Carlton's Commando collections in particular. Do you have any plans for similar collections given that IPC has a huge war comic library?
Andrew Sumner : This is something that I would love to do.
Carlton have done a great job with their DCT Commando collections
and our harder-hitting war digests would be utterly suited to the same beautifully-presented
treatment. David Abbott and I talk about this constantly, so watch this
space!
DOWNTHETUBES: IPC recently sold rights to Look and learn but you retained the rights to some key strips, such as Trigan Empire. What was the reason for this?
Andrew: Trigan Empire is a valuable slice of steady-earning intellectual property for IPC, we'd be crazy to sell the rights on to a third party. As I've said before, if I could nip back in a time machine and undo the work of a previous administration, I would never have sold off Dan Dare and Eagle.
DOWNTHETUBES: You've now seen publication of three IPC character US comics. Which one has been the most commercially successful?
Andrew: Albion, followed closely by Garth Ennis and Colin Wilson's Battler Britton. Dave and John's Thunderbolt Jaxon was great fun but I think that it had it's work cut out for it on the shelves because the original character was so obscure. Hopefully, it'll find a wider audience as a trade (it deserves to, because John Higgins' art is lovely).
DOWNTHETUBES: Do you think the publication delays on Albion harmed sales and has this had an impact on Wildstorm's plans for more IPC-inspired comics?
Andrew: The delays undoubtedly had a negative impact on sales (particularly for issues #5 and #6). Having said that, Albion was a profitable book from beginning to end and WildStorm's plans for further revivals have always been contingent on the success or otherwise of the trade collections. Let's see!
DOWNTHETUBES: If there was one character you could revive tomorrow, who would it be and who would you like to see drawing it?
Andrew: The Steel Claw - in my opinion, the greatest strip IPC ever produced. Who would I like to see draw it? In an ideal world (i.e. one where the project is happening and he wants to do it), Chris Weston would be the only man for the job.
DOWNTHETUBES: Thanks Andrew!
• Interview with Shane Oakley Coming Soon!
• Read our interview with Leah Moore and John Reppion
• Buy Albion from
Amazon.co.uk (Titan edition)
• Buy Albion from
Amazon.com (Wildstorm edition)
Creator Links
• Leah Moore
and John Reppion's Site: http://moorereppion.com
This site includes discussion boards including one devoted to Albion
• Read Publisher's Weekly's interview with Leah
and John, published 16/1/07
• Read Joe Gordon's January 2007 interview
with Leah Moore and John Reppion on the Forbidden
International blog: forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/?p=2350
• Shane Oakley's web site: shaneoakley.blogspot.com
Shane is now selling off some of his original Albion pages
as well as some of his concept artwork for the series. E-mail Shane at essoakley@hotmail.co.uk
for a full list of items for sale and prices.
• Read
John Freeman's 2005 interview with Andrew Sumner about the Albion project on Comic World News
Albion Links
• In The Fifty-Pee Box
Link: http://www.comp.dit.ie/dgordon/Albion
An Albion fan site which
includes detailed annotations of every issue,
offering background information on both script and art by Damian Gordon and
others, identifying some of the many visual references inserted into the
story for the sheer fun of it by Shane Oakley. (And not just comic references.
Look out for Jack Jones – Butcher, straight
from Dad's Army, in the TPB for example)
• Comics Should be Good offers a quick Albion primer called " An Unnecessary Guide to Albion"
• International Hero
A terrific guide to British comic characters
