Forever Albion
First Posted: 7/2/07
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 first 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 writers Leah Moore and John Reppion about the story.
Interviews with artist Shane Oakley and IPC's Andrew Sumner will follow soon...
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Albion #1 cover by Dave
Gibbons |
DOWNTHETUBES: John, if you had to pitch Albion to sell it to new readers, how would you do it?
John Reppion: Okay, here goes (cue gravely voice over): America has always had it's heroes but where are ours? Who, these days, has ever even heard of Tim Kelly and the Eye of Zoltec or Jim Hollis the Rubberman? It's almost as though these characters never even existed. But then, maybe that's what they want you to think... Albion is the story of perhaps the greatest comic book cover up in history; a journey into a world were what happens on the page is a mere shadow of what happens off it.
DOWNTHETUBES: Sounds good to me! How did the Albion project and this return of so many British comics characters – characters who haven't been in print in the UK for years -- come about?
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Albion #2 cover by Dave
Gibbons |
Leah Moore: I blame Shane for
everything. He was speaking to Dad [Alan Moore] and saying he really wanted
to do a comic with the old characters from British kid's comics, and Dad
being the genial old soul that he is said he'd see who owned them. Shane
had the idea that he could somehow buy the rights to the characters but
when dad spoke to [Wildstorm editor] Scott Dunbier and asked him, Scott
said that maybe Time Warner AOL (the conglomerate that owns DC comics, IPC
magazines and most other things too) already did.
Unbeknownst to Dad, Shane or Scott, Bob Wayne was speaking to Andrew Sumner
at IPC magazines. Andrew is a huge comics fan and wanted to try and get
the old characters out of the dusty old cupboard they had been languishing
in. Bob is a fan of British comics too and was happy to take the idea away
and figure something out. Scott spoke to Bob, they sorted it all out so
dad plotted it, we wrote it and Shane drew it, and even got Dave Gibbons
on the covers and the rest is history.
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Albion #1 cover by Dave
Gibbons |
DOWNTHETUBES: How much input did Alan and Shane have into the plot and script? You've mentioned Alan was throwing ideas at you at a pretty hefty rate of knots...
John: After we'd had our initial big meeting in Alan's house
and talked the whole thing through we had this basic structure and about
half an A4 pad's worth of notes to work from. Alan had already pitched
his version of the series to Wildstorm (essentially just a very basic outline
with beginning, middle and end points) so we just talked about how to flesh
that out and chop it up into issues. Alan more or less just gave us beginning
and end points for each issue with a list of important things to include
and then Leah and I were left to our own devices. The characterisation,
voices and the ways in which the characters interacted were all left up
to us with both Shane and Alan throwing in ideas here and there.
There are lots of visual references in the book that Leah and I didn't
actually write in ourselves because we knew that we didn't need to;
we just had to make sure that we gave Shane enough space to add his own
texture to the series.
It all sounds really rigid and regimented but it wasn't like that
at all; it was a very organic thing and a real team effort.
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Albion #4 cover by Dave
Gibbons |
| "Using the DC Thomson ones would have been brilliant. Imagine Desperate Dan doing porridge with Biffo the Bear... frightening after lights out...." |
DOWNTHETUBES: Were there any characters you wanted to use but found you couldn't because IPC didn't own them?
Leah: There were a few characters we weren't allowed to use, and
I think Andrew had a hell of a job sifting through them all to say which
ones we could use or not. Basically if we put someone in a major role he'd
figure out if it was okay, and if it wasn't we'd change it or
find a way not to ever say who they were. That way no-one could be put out
by anything.
Using the DC Thomson ones would have been brilliant. Imagine
Desperate Dan doing porridge with Biffo the Bear... frightening after lights
out....
DOWNTHETUBES: What prompted the decision to set the characters in the present day, some of them much older than their original versions, rather than revamp them, as Dave Gibbons did with Thunderbolt Jaxon?
John: The idea with Albion was that all these
characters had been missing from the real world as long as their comic
book personas had been out of print. Because of the sheer volume of individuals
involved and the scale of the whole thing we didn't really feel that it would really
be possible or even appropriate to try to squeeze in origins for the existing
characters; we really wanted to just "carry on" from where the
old comics left off in some sense.
That said, we did do a fair bit of re-imagining and re-interpreting in Albion and,
in the end, it is kind of an origin story. You have to acknowledge and understand
what's gone before, bring things full circle, before you can move
forward and speculate upon the future, I think.
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Albion #5 cover by Dave
Gibbons |
DOWNTHETUBES: You concentrate pretty much on the boy's comics characters; did you consider any female characters besides Bad Penny?
Leah: We tried to put as many in as we could but the
girl's comics
were even weirder than the boys! The blind ballerina would have been great,
or one of the detective ones.
I don't know how many of them were IPC to be honest; I think they
might have been mostly Fleetway.
That's a bit of a cheat isn't it? I would have loved it if Twinkle
had turned up in a fight with a sock full of pool balls, but it wasn't
to be. I love the girls we have put in, but I think most of them are ones
we can't name explicitly. That puts the kibosh on explaining how many
we used too.
I don't think that the comics that weren't "Girls
comics" were only for boys, I think they were just comics and then
there were "Girls comics" added in because girls are not much
into fighting and catapults and like ballerinas and plucky adventuring... swizz
I say.
DOWNTHETUBES: Did you remember the characters that eventually starred in Albion from reading them while younger, or did you have to immerse yourself in piles of old British comics?
John: A bit of both really; we were both more familiar with the humour
strips because those were the ones that continued to see print into our
childhoods but we also had a kind of peripheral awareness of characters
like Mytek the Mighty and The Spider.
Strangely enough, some of the very few comics that I still owned when Leah
and I moved into our current flat were old issues of Valiant and Vulcan which
I'd purchased for pennies when I was a kid. As luck would have it
though, we had a bit of a clear out about a month or two before the whole
idea of Albion came up and I sold them on e-bay.
Shane was really,
really helpful sending us tonnes and tonnes of photocopies, annuals and
comics (he's since told us that his spare room is now surprisingly
spacious whereas our office is filled with boxes and files full of old issues
of Shiver and Shake and Monster Fun).
We also discovered www.internationalhero.co.uk and
became good friends with Stuart Vandal who proved to be an absolute gold
mine of information (and a very funny and nice guy).
The research aspect of the series was really fun actually; finding out these
snippets of information and taking them as a jumping off point, working
out all these little connections or possible connections between characters.
It was really exciting trying to knit all these seemingly disparate ideas
and characters together into the one universe.
DOWNTHETUBES: If you read British comics when younger, which ones do you remember and why?
Leah: They get you hooked on the softer stuff first, and then you move
on to harder things. I began reading Pippin as a very tiny child,
and treasure my signed sketch of the gingerbread boy by Colin Wyatt (where
is he now? I'd like to say thanks!) And then it was Buttons (a
Postman Pat and friends type thing I think) and then Twinkle with
the paper dolls on the back. I used to glue them to cereal packet cardboard
so they stood up better and make my own clothes for them. You can't
have a half assed shoddy job on a paper doll you know, even if you are eight.
After Twinkle I was getting Beano, Dandy, Beezer, Buster, Topper and,
occasionally, Whizzer and Chips -- quite a comics habit for little
un. I got annuals every Christmas and still have the Beano/Dandy 50-year
anniversary one.
After I got a bit old and jaded I got Oink!, which was fantastic. Burp
the Alien used to really make me feel sick, and Pete and his Pimple was
revolting. I don't have the flexi disk anymore but I still have my
pig pack badge somewhere!
DOWNTHETUBES: What's the overwhelming feeling you get about British comics and the approach to the characters compared with writing American characters and superheroes?
| "British characters just seem a lot weirder and more unpredictable and in a way that makes them a little bit more realistic. " |
John: Neil Gaiman was kind enough to write the introduction to the Albion trade
for us and he described the book as "[...] every bit as misshapen
and unpredictable as the comics it was formed from. Something funny and
serious and nostalgic, something very odd indeed." I think that's
pretty much spot on. Even if you don't focus on the prevalence of
humour strips in UK comics, you're still left with something very "wacky" (for
want of a better word) and out there. British characters just seem a lot
weirder and more unpredictable and in a way that makes them a little bit
more realistic.
British characters like The Steel Claw and The Spider used
to regularly switch back and forth between being criminals and crime fighters,
not because of some mad doctor's evil plan or symbiotic alien costume
but because they felt like it. How cool is that.
It was great being able to write British characters and not have to worry
about Americanising everything to make it easier for our friends across
the pond to understand (although, there are those who would argue that we
should have done a bit of that I suppose). There is a certain perverse pleasure
in writing a comic book for an American company featuring only one American
in a cast of hundreds [Zip Nolan from Lion - Ed] and which is kind
of about how US comics destroyed our industry. Subversiveness is another
important ingredient in British comic books, I think.
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Albion #6 cover by Dave
Gibbons |
DOWNTHETUBES: Did you find yourself discovering favourite characters as you wrote the series?
Leah: Grimly Feendish is very cool to write because
he's like Uncle
Fester but not as wacky. He's really creepy and mad. I liked Danny
a lot, just because he's so well meaning but crap. He's a nice
lad whereas Penny is possibly psychotic. She needs a few hours of counselling
that one.
I loved writing Zip Nolan the best. His lines are class. I still laugh out
loud at him even when I'm not reading it.
DOWNTHETUBES: What kind of feedback did you get on the book as it was published?
| "Albion has a kind of Marmite type effect on people; you either love it or you hate it." |
John: I'd say that the response we've got has been overwhelmingly
positive but I think that's because Albion has a kind of
Marmite type effect on people; you either love it or you hate it. Happily
not many people have taken it upon themselves to come up and tell us how
much they hated it so we've got lots of nice, head-swelling praise!
That's not to say that there haven't been bad reviews but most
of that I've read or heard basically falls into the category of "didn't
get it". To me, if you didn't get it then it wasn't for
you in the first place so that's cool. It's a legitimate reason
not to like it; it's the reason I don't like Strictly Come
Dancing.
"We've been very pleasantly surprised at the amount of "old
school" comics fans (the people who used to actually buy Victor, Valiant and Vulcan)
who have told us how much they've enjoyed the series. These are the
people who we were worried about offending or, more accurately, disappointing
but it seems that, simply by treating the characters with respect, we've
managed not to tarnish their childhood memories. Indeed, our goal was to
make Albion nostalgic whilst adding
a new dimension to the characters and, happily, a lot of people seem to
feel that we've succeeded in that.
DOWNTHETUBES: Do you think the publication delays harmed sales?
Leah: Well, we know it did because on every comic's forum people
were saying "We like this, but where is it?", "It's
off the pull list", "It's not being ordered", it's
not this etc. The thing is, the trade is out, most people don't even
notice the individual comics they just grab interesting trades. I think
it'll do okay.
It's a shame the delays were so bad because we had a lot of momentum
there and feeling it deflate around us was very odd. I would have liked
to have had more conversations about what people thought of the comic and
less about where the hell it was and why it was so late. That kind of sucked.
DOWNTHETUBES: What's next for Albion? I gather there's talk of more mini series by the creators but will there be another Albion mini?
John: We would love to work with the IPC characters again and we've got more than a few ideas about the adventures they might have in the future. Ultimately though, it's up to Wildstorm and it seems like they're moving off in something of a different direction now that ABC is all over with. Still, if the trade does well who knows? We've certainly got our fingers crossed.
DOWNTHETUBES: What are you working on now?
Leah: Blimey, what aren't we doing... we've never been so busy. We're running about like headless chickens, to be honest.
There's Witchblade: Shades of Grey,
a six part mini with Stephen Segovia first one out this February, from Dynamite.
There's our zombie mini series Raise the Dead which
has Sean Phillips and Arthur Suydam on covers, and Hugo Petrus doing the
art duties, it's a very cool book. That's from Dynamite too and the first
issue is out in March.
We have a little serial in Dynamite's Savage Tales called "Battle
for Atlantis" with art by legendary Pablo Marcos and genius Stjepan
Sejic, which we have seen the pencils for the first eight pages of and it
looks amazing. Proper fantasy comics.
We've also have done an adaptation of an Edgar Allen Poe story for "Nevermore" for Self Made Hero with James Fletcher, it was lots of fun to do it, and James is a great artist. Plus, there's a script we've just written a script for 2000AD fan favourite PJ Holden which he is working on as we speak (we can't say who for yet, but it's very very cool!).
DOWNTHETUBES: Leah, John, thank you very much for your time.
• Interview with Shane Oakley Coming Soon!
• Interview with Andrew Sumner Coming Soon!
• 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
