The Naked Artist
Comic Artist Legends
by Bryan Talbot
Illustrations by Hunt Emerson
Copyright 2007, 2011 Bryan Talbot. This expanded edition includes stories not in the original edition published by Moonstone Books.
Production by Combustoica, a prose project of About Comics. www.Combustoica.com.
Smashwords edition.
To Matthew
A big tip of the hat to some of the folk from whom I’ve heard these stories or who’ve provided relevant information: Donna Barr, Leo Baxendale, Norm Breyfogle, Kurt Busiek, Al Davison, Jamie Delano, Hunt Emerson, Garth Ennis, Glenn Fabry, Neil Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, Igor Goldkind, Archie Goodwin, Alan Grant, Steven Grant, John Higgins, Bob Ingersoll, Barbara Kesel, Lovern Kindzierski, Todd Klein, Bill Knapp, Ilpo Koskela, Dave Langford, Garry Leach, Tony Lee, Steve Leialoha, Heidi MacDonald, John McCrea, John McShane, Frank Miller, Gary Spencer Millidge, Leah Moore, Grant Morrison, Michael Netzer, Lee Nordling, Frank Plowright, John Reppion, Eric Reynolds, Mike Richardson, Trina Robbins, Jouko Ruokosenmäki, Will Simpson, Dez Skinn, Robert Sprenger, Jim Steranko, Colin Upton, Rick Veitch, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Shannon Wheeler, Marv Wolfman, Steve Yeovil
The rest are lost to my rapidly deteriorating memory, purveyors of comic book legends all.
A great big sloppy thank you to novelist Chaz Brenchley for test-driving the almost finished book and turning the vast majority of typos into road kill.
For those of a sensitive disposition and to those who are easily offended, just bugger off.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is unintentional and purely coincidental.
Introduction: Pros and Cons
The British satirical cartoonist Steve Bell, talking about his Guardian newspaper strips, once said that artists must live in a world of their own. And, for the most part, we do. For most comic creators, it’s a pretty solitary existence. Working from home, we spend entire days in our own company, perhaps just seeing family or friends at night, lost in the lands of our own imagination. If there’s an imminent deadline we’ll work till the small hours of the morning or all night, if necessary. If I’m at home I work every day of the week till nine at night. It’s all I can do to make it out of the house to the gym three times a week. That’s the trouble with being self-employed. The boss is a total bastard.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining. I love it. I love getting up at whatever the hell time I want to. After working at jobs in the distant past where I’ve had to travel an hour and a half to get there in the middle of winter at seven in the morning, I love being able to just walk downstairs to arrive at work. I love spending the whole day creating stories, surrounded by my books and junk, with no jumped-up muppet of a manager breathing down my neck. And, generally speaking, I love the comic business, the people and the events.
Perhaps it is because we spend all this time on our own that, when we do get out to conventions, some of us tend to let rip a little: drinking too much, staying up far too late chatting with colleagues whom we haven’t seen for ages or ones that we’ve only just met, networking, newsgathering and telling stories, often stories about other pros at other conventions who’ve drunk too much and stayed up far too late. Incestuous? You bet.
Like the novice private dick who’s trailing Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister who feels an affinity with Marlowe and happily supplies him with inside information because they’re both “in the same racket”, we seem to have this bond because we work in the same medium. We all know its characteristics, its grammar, its history and the people who populate the industry.
Sometimes – rarely now but utterly transcendental when it happens – I’ll be at a convention or comic festival in some foreign town and suddenly, out of the blue, I’ll get an intoxicating rush simply from being part of this international community of comic creators, a sort of involuntary and unexpected tribal ecstasy. I can recognise it when I see it in the eyes of other creators when it hits them. It’s easy to spot. They look like they’ve just had a spontaneous frontal lobotomy.
I’m not claiming that we all love each other like the sibling pinheads in Tod Browning’s Freaks. In fact some pros hate each other’s guts with a passion, usually through some past business or creative dispute, though often it’s down to pure personality clash. In a very, very tiny percentage of cases it’s because someone has a personality that’s about as attractive as a giant incontinent zombie slug with a penchant for projectile vomiting. That’s very rare. On the whole, comic people are sociable, funny and interesting and the industry is certainly a lot nicer business to be in than the movie and TV industry or the world of popular music, going by my limited experience.
But, yes, get us together and we’ll talk about each other, whether to hear gossip, enquire about old colleagues, spread news or tell classic yarns.
It’s these stories, the urban legends of the comics community, that this little book is about: the tales that are told late at night in the convention pro bar, the anecdotes, outrageous, funny or downright weird, that deserve to be documented for posterity.
These stories aren’t usually reported in comic fanzines, nor are they the fodder of the online comic gossip columns, which seem to be mainly concerned with industry business rumours. They are modern myths and should be read as such. They evolve in the telling: events are exaggerated, details conveniently morph to plaster over half-remembered plot points and sometimes even the protagonists or locations are substituted for ones that just sound right at the time, sacrificing historical veracity for rhetorical effect. Some are demonstrably based on real situations and must be very close to the truth, whilst others are gross caricatures or distinctly apocryphal. It’s up to you whether or not to believe that any of them are true, but it is true that they are told, and told again; the common currency of pro bar badinage, the raw material of the comic industry raconteur.
A couple of the stories have been covered by the fan press, such as the widely reported “feud” between Dave Sim and Jeff Smith but here I condense it and have an epilogue that isn’t as well publicized, if at all.
A disproportionate number of these narratives are, of necessity, anecdotes about myself but I think that’s perfectly legitimate: these are the stories that I tell in the pro bar and I know that some are repeated as I’m often asked to recount them by people who’ve heard second-hand versions.
I’ve avoided salacious tales of extra-marital affairs, strange sexual practices, such as the writer who has prostitutes dress up as his superheroines, and private sexual shenanigans, like the time a comics publisher had sex with a famous superhero artist on her desk while the intercom was still switched on and broadcasting to the main office. I’m mostly not concerned here with private lives. Mostly.
Neither have I included accounts of activities verging on the seriously criminal; such as publishers blatantly ripping off creators or the time a Vertigo artist spiked a rival artist’s drink with acid. He never worked for the company again, by the way. If you want an account of how Bob Wood, ironically enough the artist of Crime Does Not Pay, murdered a woman in the late fifties and was subsequently murdered by some ex-cons, or how Greg Brooks, artist of The Crimson Avenger, battered his common-law wife to death in the eighties, do a websearch.
With one or two minor exceptions, you won’t find the stories in this book on the internet. One of these exceptions is the scandalous Granada Comic Festival incident which, although reported in detail by Eric Reynolds on the Comic Journal website, demanded inclusion here nevertheless. You’ll see why when you read it.
Although they are embellished for print, I’ve striven to keep the pro bar anecdotal style, switching tenses and often being intentionally vulgar. Readers who only know my work from The Tale of One Bad Rat or perhaps my new graphic novel Alice in Sunderland may be shocked at some of the language and subject matter of some of these legends but, apart from recommending that this tome be eschewed by persons of fragile sensibilities and that it certainly should be kept as far as possible from the eyes of babes and maiden aunts, there’s bugger all that I can do about it. I’m afraid that I worked in underground comics for my first five years in this business and am, perforce, as common as muck.
To any creators who, to their horror, discover that they are the subject of one or more of these tales, take heart from Oscar Wilde’s famous epigram: “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” To those who feel disappointed because they’ve been left out, tell me your stories next time we meet. If the book, by some freakish fluke of the free market, becomes an international best-seller, I’ll write another and include them in that. After all, we’re both in the same racket.
Bryan Talbot
Sunderland, November 2006
Chapter One: Beer! Sauna! Naked Men!
There are proportionately very few creators around who’ve made a fortune creating comics. The vast majority of pros just make a regular living, one that might vanish at any time if a publisher who owes you money goes bust or, for some reason, the comic company you’ve worked for solidly for a few years suddenly decides that you’re passé and stops giving you work. This has happened to more of my colleagues than I care to contemplate.
However, there is one big perk that comes with the job: several times a year (with any luck) you’ll be invited to a foreign convention or comics festival as a guest or by a publisher to promote your books. Admittedly you have to actually enjoy these things to think of them as a perquisite. I do and regard them as free holidays and very often the organisers do make sure there is some tourism or time to chill out built into your schedule.
Conventions are usually commercial events organised by small groups of fans or industry professionals that usually take place in one venue, often a hotel, and tend to last for just two or three days. As well as comic retailers’ rooms, there’ll be at least a few talks, panel discussions and perhaps a movie programme.
Festivals tend to be non profit-making and hosted by the arts council or municipality of a town or city and take place in several venues dotted around the center, the idea being to bring in tourists who help the local economy by spending their cash there. They last from three days to, in the case of Amadora in Portugal, three weeks. As well as comic dealers and publishers, they’ll also have at least one exhibition of comic art plus talks, discussions, films and often an award ceremony.
The biggest convention is the San Diego Comicon, held in that city’s convention center – a huge airplane hangar of a joint about an eighth of a mile long - and the con fills it. With an attendance of over two hundred thousand fans and pros every year, and rising, it’s become somewhat a victim of its own success, with big movie and computer game companies starting to dominate the center by taking massive booths to promote their products. True, comic publishers such as DC, Dark Horse, Image and Marvel also have large and impressive booths, complete with banks of TV screens, life-size models of superheroes and other props but, rightly or wrongly, there’s definitely a perception of the event being hijacked.
Still, it’s held in a nice city with nice palm trees and a nice harbour and the weather’s baking hot. At night you can watch cockroaches scuttling around on the sidewalk outside the posh restaurants on the waterfront. And it’s a great event at which to meet people, including famous comic creators.
The first couple of times I attended in the eighties, I met a personal hero, the artist Jack Kirby, the prolific co-creator of Captain America, the Fantastic Four, X-men, and hundreds of other characters. He was such a lovely old guy I wanted to give him a hug. In fact I did. A young kid came up, seven or eight years old, and asked him for an autograph, which he happily supplied – in marked contrast to Bob Kane, creator of Batman, who arrived five minutes later and had a brief word with Jack before passing on. He was surrounded by four black-suited minders wearing shades who pushed fans away if they tried to approach him.
“Stay away from Mister Kane!” they snarled. “No autographs!”
San Diego was the first time I met classic artists such as Gene Colan, Gil Kane and Will Eisner. I got to know Will much better over several years after being guests together at the same festivals, from France to Brazil. To my utter amazement, he spontaneously wrote me an exceedingly complimentary letter after he read The Tale of One Bad Rat on the subject of its storytelling techniques. At one of the London UK Comic Art Conventions, I asked him if he could give me a quote that I could use on the back cover of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright.
“Write whatever the hell you like,” he said, “and I’ll swear I’ve said it!”
I was once brought over to San Diego by the short-lived and laughably badly managed company Big Entertainment, for whom I was drawing Teknophage, created by Neil Gaiman and written by Rick Veitch. Another of their titles was Mike Danger, based on an original 1950s story by the internationally famous crime writer Mickey Spillane, whom I was astounded to actually meet there. He was just like I imagined him to be – a tough, wiry, white haired old guy with the manner of an ex-prizefighter who talked like a Brooklyn cabbie. That week, he was on a panel with The Dark Knight Returns and Sin City writer and artist Frank Miller and the loquacious and eloquent SF writer Harlan Ellison. Every time Harlan was holding forth, Mickey kept nudging Frank violently in the ribs and muttering to him “Big woids! Why does he keep usin’ big woids?”
Cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman, the founding editor of Mad, probably now best known for his long-running Playboy sex comedy strip Little Annie Fanny, was actually a very shy man. One hot San Diego night in 1977 Lynn Chevely and Joyce Farmer, the publishers of a feminist erotic comic, the whimsically-titled Tits and Clits, and Lost Girls artist Melinda Gebbie jumped into the swimming pool at the El Cortez Hotel fully clothed. They were horsing around when they spotted Harvey walking by through the crowds of attendees surrounding the pool. Grabbing him by the legs, they unceremoniously pulled him into it. At this point a fanboy heard the splash and looked down from his hotel room balcony.
“Hey! It's Harvey Kurtzman!” he shouted, loud enough for all to hear. “He's in the pool with three chicks! And they all have their clothes on!”
Harvey was mortified as everybody crowded over to gape at him.
Other versions of this story have them naked but I heard this from eyewitnesses Trina Robbins, now a comics historian, and Fables inker Steve Leialoha.
At a UK Comic Art Convention in the eighties, as I had done with Will Eisner, I asked Harvey for a quote for the Luther Arkwright book. The third volume was yet to be published and I was collecting quotes for the back cover blurb. He perused the first two volumes, then wrote on a piece of paper “Bryan Talbot…super!” Succinct, but to the point, I thought and went away quite happy and the quote subsequently appeared on the cover. It was only after this I saw that every single Kurtzman quote promoting other artists at that time consisted of “(insert name of artist here)…super!”
Many comic artists have a skeleton in the closet – literally. I have one twelve inches high and a life-sized human skull, both made from plastic kits. I also have a life size skeleton made out of a cardboard kit, sold as an aid to medical students. As figurative artists we have to have at least a nodding acquaintance with human anatomy, something that no longer seems to concern so-called fine artists. I’ve even heard comic art described as the last bastion of figure drawing…but I’m wandering seriously off topic here.
So, anyway, Watchmen and The Originals artist Dave Gibbons, in San Diego for the Comicon is given a half life-size, anatomically perfect and realistically articulated plastic skeleton - a present from Frank Miller, bought at a medical store. Aimed at hard-up medical students who couldn’t afford the life-sized model, it was marketed under the brand name Mister Thrifty.
On the last day of the con, Dave’s sitting on the steps outside and wondering how he can manage to carry the three foot box containing this wonderful drawing aid and his other luggage which, going from personal experience is, by this time, weighed down with dozens of books and comics acquired at the con. Paul Chadwick, writer and artist of Concrete, magically produces a spare pair of disposable carrying handles he happens to have in his briefcase. Gibbo loops the string attached to the handles around the box and voila, his problem is solved. Which is all fine and dandy until he’s passing through LAX airport security a few hours later and he places the box containing Mister Thrifty onto the carry-on luggage conveyor belt.
The overweight lady watching the x-ray monitor, bored out of her skull, suddenly does an eye-popping double-take and screams, leaping out of her chair and sending it flying.
“Jesus-Fucking-Christ-What-The-hell!” she shrieks, clutching her heaving bosom. “How…how old was it?”
Dave explains that it’s not really a dead child and saunters off as the relieved security guards put their guns back in their holsters.
Denys Cowan, artist on The Question and one of the founders of Milestone Comics, a DC imprint designed to redress the balance in regard to the under-representation of African-Americans in comics, is an exceptionally cool bloke. At one San Diego, he’d made quite a bit of money selling comic artwork and drawing sketches and thought it would be a good idea to get some of it off his hands by settling his hotel bill in cash. Returning to his room, he was packing to leave when he heard a strange noise outside his door. He immediately whipped it open to find a Highway Patrolman pointing a gun straight at his face. It transpired that the hotel figured that a black man with cash equalled a drug dealer and had reported him. It took Denys a good twenty minutes to convince the cop that he’d earned the money honestly.
In the eighties, Canadian cartoonist Colin Upton attended a well-known publisher’s party one night during the con. The company’s public relations man repeatedly approached him, bottles of beer clutched in his hands, urging him to help himself.
“Hey, go for it!” the PR guy urged. “It’s all free!”
Colin repeatedly declined the offer, as he doesn’t drink. Eventually getting the message, the guy asked him where he was from. On discovering that Colin lived in Vancouver, without hesitation he asked him to buy some China White heroin when he got home and post it to him. China White had been in the news at the time because of the astonishing rate of fatal overdoses it had meted out to the junkie community of Vancouver’s skid row. Apparently it was exceptionally pure and therefore devastatingly strong. Shocked, Colin informed him that it was responsible for several deaths but, to this dork, that only meant it was “good stuff”.
“Those assholes are amateurs!” he sneered.
When Colin informed him that he wasn’t about to become a drug dealer, the guy just couldn’t understand his reluctance.
“Look, “ Colin continued, “ I don’t even know how or where to buy any drugs, never mind heroin!”
He stared at Colin in utter amazement.
“I don’t believe it!” he said with unconcealed disgust. “You’re an artist, right?”
Colin later produced a cartoon based on the incident for a Vancouver newspaper.
Colin was recently invited to a con in Victoria, British Columbia. The organisers had spared no expense flying in guests, covering their hotel bills and even giving them spending money and punters were accordingly charged twenty dollars a day entrance fee and extra for some programme items. The problem was, as far as Colin could discern, the con hadn’t spent a single penny on advertising. The exhibitors easily outnumbered the fans. Colin was required to be at his table for twelve hours a day and he dutifully sat there, bored rigid, lucky if he sold one comic every few hours. Flipping through the events programme, he was astonished to discover that he was scheduled to give a talk on porno comics. Luckily, no one was attending the talks, so he just skipped it. The wrap party on the Sunday night had a distinctly surreal air as the organisers tried to pretend that the con hadn’t been the most complete and utter disaster since The Titanic’s last dance party.
Writer and artist of the graphic novel Faith, a Fable Bill Knapp also had an exceptionally crap con experience in the late nineties when he’d booked a table at the annual Mid-Ohio con to sell his self-published comic The Furies.
Arriving early to see where he’d been allocated a space, he found that he’d been placed in a corner, next to Uncle Scrooge artist Don Rosa and with Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson at right angles to him - there to sign their best-selling Astro City.
“Great!” thought Bill, “I’m in with the comic stars! There’s bound to be a hell of a lot of traffic through here!”
Picturing himself picking up lots of passing trade, Bill cheerfully set up his table and prepared to deal with the rush of fans when the big names arrived. A little like Astro City, his comic series had a realistic take on superheroes so their fans might possibly like it.
The room was pretty quiet till Kurt and Brent arrived late morning and sat down to sign. Immediately the room was inundated with hundreds of superhero fans, surging to their corner and forming a huge line that stretched from there to the entrance – a line that had its apex practically right in front of Bill’s table, immediately cutting him off from any of the other punters wandering around the room.
To begin with, Bill tried to engage the fans in the line in conversation, trying to show them his comics. He tried any and all means of attracting their attention short of jumping naked onto the table and juggling burning groundhogs while whistling The Star-Spangled Banner. They just weren’t interested. They were queuing to see their heroes and were totally focussed on their imminent audience with these godlike beings. The few superhero fans that did give The Furies a cursory glace could immediately glean that it wasn’t their cup of tea. For one thing, it wasn’t published by Marvel, Image or DC. For another it was in black and white and, anyway, the female characters didn’t have tits the size of Nebraska.
When Don Rosa turned up in the afternoon it got even worse, the Disney fans forming another line at right-angles to the first, effectively trapping Bill in the corner and sealing him off from the rest of the known universe. It was a long day.
That night Bill asked the organisers whether he could move to another table but it was impossible – they were all booked. On the Sunday morning it was clear that the same thing was going to happen again and by noon Bill gave it up as a bad job and went home.
At a con in Dallas, Batman and The Bogie Man writer Alan Grant spent an evening with Batman artist Kelley Jones and comic artist and cover painter Bo Hampton (though in some versions, it’s his brother Scott). After dinner, they carried on drinking expensive Chablis long into the night until an argument broke out between Alan and Bo about the artistic merits of comic art. Sozzled, Alan was being deliberately provocative, insisting that all comic artists, both good and bad, were hacks. Taking great exception to this, Bo picked up his wine and poured it over Alan’s head. A scuffle ensued until Kelley Jones separated the pair.
The following morning, each sheepishly apologised to the other.
“You see, I’m a redneck,” said Bo. “I’m not used to drinking wine, only beer.”
“Well, I’m Scottish,” said Alan. “We’re not used to drinking at all.”
From 1985 to 1998 the premier British convention was the UK Comic Art Convention or, as it was known, UKCAC, run by Frank Plowright and Hassan Yusuf. During its heyday it was the best con ever. For pros, it was be there or be square and at night the London hotel bar was usually filled with as many as two hundred comic professionals including most of the Brit pack and many big name artists from America and Europe. It was so successful that for several years in the nineties, Frank and Hass ran a second convention in Glasgow, GLASCAC.
It was at one UKCAC that Alan Moore was so doggedly mobbed by fans that he refused to go to any comic convention again. In an incident infamous in the comic industry, the fans were so insistent that they followed him into the bathroom and lined up outside his toilet cubicle, shoving comics under the door for him to sign.
This is the point when he raised his eyes heavenwards and mentally screamed “What the FUCK am I doing here?”
Later, in the con’s green room, he was waiting to appear on a Watchmen panel with Dave Gibbons and talking with Sandman writer and now famous novelist Neil Gaiman to arrange an interview. At that time, Neil hadn’t begun his comic career and was still a journalist. Neil admitted to Alan that he’d like to become a comic writer and Alan looked back at him in horror.
“Look,” he said, “out there is a dealers’ room. It’s full of comics. I’d love to go and buy some. But I can’t. There’s a thousand people out there and they all want to talk to me.”
At the same con, Neil spotted Frank Miller emerging from the bathroom, visibly shocked. He’d been relieving himself at the urinal when a teenage fan held a copy of Dark Knight between him and the porcelain and asked him to sign it.
“What did he want me to do? Sign it with my dick?” said Frank incredulously.
A danger for foreign guests was the London traffic, a major road being in-between the convention site and the pro hotel. In Britain we drive on the left side of the road. Most other countries drive on the wrong side of the road. When Roy Thomas, writer of Conan the Barbarian and X-Men and one time editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, was crossing to the hotel, returning from an early morning jog, he looked left to check for oncoming traffic. The road was clear so he stepped out – directly in front of a motorcycle coming from the right. His leg was broken and he spent the remainder of his time in the UK in hospital.
One event at UKCAC still remains vivid in the memory of dozens of now ageing and most probably senile fans. This was the occasion when a glamorous American publisher was on a panel discussion, resplendent in full power-dress, with wide padded shoulders, high heels and immaculately coiffured hair. She was also wearing black lace panties and black nylon stockings with a garter belt, as all the fans in the ground floor audience could clearly see as she unselfconsciously sprawled her legs in a most unladylike manner. She just didn’t realise that the sheet covering the on-stage table she was sitting at didn’t hang down on the side between her legs and them. There was a minor commotion as pop-eyed fanboys fought each other off to get to the front of the crowd. Apparently photos of the spectacular view were circulated next day. I was on the balcony at the time so can’t really claim to be an eyewitness.
The UKCAC hotel bar closed late, somewhere approaching breakfast time. In fact it was not unknown for some con attendees to spend the night in the bar, rather than pay for a room. Some fans, of course, would book a room and reduce the cost by splitting it with a dozen others, bodies covering every inch of the floor and the room reverberating with snores and farts.
At the bar one evening, Dave Gibbons, Alan Grant and DC editor Mike Carlin were chatting when Alan mentioned that his preferred method of relaxation was the sensory-deprivation floatation tank, positioned just where the altar used to be in the twelfth century church he was then living in. For some reason, Dave found this highly amusing and started ragging him about it. Alan responded by being equally disparaging about Dave’s long standing practice of the oriental discipline of Tai Chi. The argument became heated as the insult stakes cranked up until it seemed as if the thing would come to blows. Mike Carlin knew exactly how to calm things down. He went to the bar and returned bearing fresh pints of beer, thus quelling the rages of these two experts in the art of relaxation.
Judge Dredd and Doctor Who novelist Dave Stone was, for some reason perhaps connected with what some people perceived as his insufferable manner, almost universally disliked - hence the pro bar motto “David Stone sits alone”. Perversely, he seemed to invite and enjoy the irritation he stimulated by being deliberately exasperating.
One night, under the influence of an inordinate amount of alcohol, he passed out in a chair in the bar. His handkerchief was hanging out of his pocket and was noticed by Preacher artist Steve Dillon who whipped out his zippo and set it on fire. As his hankie went up in flames Dave slept on until Steve picked up somebody’s pint of bitter and doused him with it, putting out the conflagration. I say “somebody’s” because I just can’t imagine Steve wasting his own in such an irresponsible manner.
A different version has Steve putting the fire out with his hands and burning them in the process, though I prefer the above.
On another occasion Dave passed out again after getting completely rat-arsed and, while he was dead to the world, Preacher writer Garth Ennis used an indelible marker to write, backwards, an extremely rude word relating to female genitalia across his forehead – an explicit message to him every time he looked in a mirror for the next few days. John McCrea then used the pen to decorate the rest of his face with obscene doodles.
When John had finished, Garth took a close-up photo of the comatose Stone and next morning had a few dozen copies made and sold them to fans at the con.
After a very long stint in the con bar, John, artist of Troubled Souls and Hitman, decided to call it a night. He returned to his room a little concerned, as Marvel editor Joe Quesada, whom he’d arranged to meet there, hadn’t shown up. Stripping off to go to bed, he suddenly heard Joe passing by, chatting to someone in the corridor outside. Anxious to have a word, he dashed to the door and cracked it open but they’d passed on around a corner. He took a few steps out to peer around it and was about to call out when he saw that it wasn’t Joe after all. He turned back, only to find that the door had closed behind him, leaving him stark bollock naked and locked out of his room. Tiptoeing along the corridors in the middle of the night, he managed to make it all the way to the lobby without being spotted and made for the cover of a potted palm. The reception desk was only accessible across a wide expanse of open foyer, stranding John behind the plant for quarter of an hour until a doorman walked by and John could whistle him over to request a key and something to cover his assets.
In 1990, a group of creators from Britain and Finland were taken to Murmansk in the then Soviet Union on a sort of comics cultural exchange visit. This involved an interminable and epic journey over freezing seas and snowbound roads that I’m not even going to begin to recount. The hotel in Murmansk was grim, to say the least, and the food even grimmer, leaving the invitees nothing to do but drink vodka and cheap Russian champagne. I met the British contingent of the party as they arrived back in London, still laden with their baggage, for the last day of a UKCAC. They resembled a group of shell-shocked refugees from the Russian Front.
After one Murmansk evening of record-breaking vodka consumption, top British cartoonist Hunt Emerson retired to his bed exhausted as the party raged on. In the middle of the night he was suddenly awoken by an insistent hammering on his bedroom door.
“Hunt! HUNT! Quick! It’s an emergency!”
He recognised the voice of Kristina, the very attractive Finnish PR person.
“Oh my God!” he thought, reeling from his bed, still drunk and half-asleep. “The KGB have come for us! The gulag awaits!”
Stark naked, he flung open the door to be confronted with Kristina and a large group of her colleagues.
“W-What is it?” he asked.
“I need a bag for my shopping,” she said. “Do you have a spare one?”
Dazed, Hunt staggered back inside, dug out a plastic bag and, still naked, handed it to her.
“No,” she said. “It’s too small. Thank you.”
One GLASCAC, on the morning of a night before, Dave Gibbons and a few other 2000AD stalwarts are nursing their hangovers in the hotel breakfast room when the art editor of the comic, Robin Smith, breezes up to the table and joins them. He’s remarkably perky for this ungodly hour and saunters over to the breakfast bar to get some nosh. I’ve always been astonished at the way con hotels can magically turn bacon into something resembling shoe leather, transmute sausages into reinforced rubber and cook eggs in such a precise fashion as to render the egg whites runny while baking the yolks rock-hard. Anyhow, Robin returns with a plate that’s positively heaving with anything that he’s managed to pile onto it: eggs, bacon, sausages, black puddings, fried bread, hash browns, tomatoes, mushrooms, beans, ketchup, mustard, you name it. He plonks it down on the table, making light of the meagre rations the assembled afflicted are prodding at disinterestedly with their forks.
On sitting down, he down he performs what seems like a consummate juggling trick that’s guaranteed to cheer them up: his elbow catches the plate in such a way that it does a perfect hundred and eighty degree flip and lands directly on his lap with a disgusting squelch. This caused so much hilarity that it did indeed lighten the sombre mood of the whole group. He was wearing the only pair of trousers he’d brought so, for the next couple of hours, was imprisoned in his room while he scrubbed his jeans and blasted them with the hair drier.
Sometimes comic creators are invited to “memorabilia” conventions. These are usually huge events dedicated to “media” and feature stars from cult movies and TV shows. You’ll get original Star Trek veterans and Hammer Horror scream queens signing alongside the out-of-focus fourth guy along the Death Star control console from Return of the Jedi selling autographed photos of himself for twenty dollars a hit. I’ve met the likes of Lou Ferrigno – TV’s Incredible Hulk - and James Marsters – Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer - at these sort of events. James’s female fans screamed the place down every time he hit the stage in a re-enactment of Beatlemania at its height.
At a memorabilia con in London a couple of years ago, Albion co-writer John Reppion was paying the price for eating a very dodgy curry the night before. His guts in horrific turmoil, he sought out the only available toilet in the guest reception lounge and parked himself there for a good half hour until his bowels were empty and his rectal rebellion was quelled, despite an intermittent but polite knocking on the door of the cubicle. On opening the door, he was confronted by the glamorous Charisma Carpenter – Cordelia from Buffy – who was apparently also in dire need of urgent relief.
So glad was she that John had vacated the hot seat, she hugged him, a total stranger, there and then before rushing into the confined area before John had a chance to say “I’d leave it a couple of minutes if I were you!”
Comic creators are often invited to science fiction or fantasy cons, or specialist events, such as Doctor Who, Discworld or Star Trek weekends. These specialist dos always seem to have more much money to spend than UK comic cons. At the time he was drawing the Red Dwarf comic, Alan Burrows was invited to a Trekkie convention. He arrived at the large, posh hotel and was shown to his room by one of the organisers. The room was clean but small. There was hardly any furnishing, and instead of a bed there was just a couch. He decided that he wasn’t going to spend much time in this poky little place, so he dropped off his bag and went down to the bar for a solid night’s boozing. It was around five o’clock before he returned to the room in a state of total inebriation, so squiffy in fact that, despite being a big bloke, he crashed out on the couch no problem.
He’s rudely awoken in a few hours’ time by an insistent hammering on the door and the cries of people yelling his name. Not exactly compos mentis, but still dressed from the night before, head spinning, he staggers to the door in his crumpled suit where he’s confronted by two angry-looking organisers. Before he can open his mouth to ask what’s wrong, they drag him out of the room and, one on each arm, frogmarch him down the corridor and into the lift. They arrive in what appears to be a basement, where Alan’s dragged through increasingly dingy passages. All enquiries as to where he’s being taken are fobbed off. With a sinking feeling he figures out that he must have done something incredibly stupid the night before and was being taken for a good thrashing. After around midnight, his memory is a complete blank. What did he do? Pee on Mister Sulu or something?
“Aaaargh!” Let me go, you bastards!” he screams, violently trying to twist out of their grip as the two guys struggle to force him through a door. Still swearing and screaming, he’s propelled through it into what seems to be the pure white light of the void. As his eyes become accustomed, he finds himself standing on a stage, blinking past spotlights at a couple of hundred gawping people as an announcer says “Ah, here he is! Please give a warm welcome to Alan Burrows!”
After struggling through what turns out to be a Red Dwarf panel, the convention organisers lead him away again. By this time, he’s come round a little and complains about the poky hotel room, pointing out that he’d not expected the Dorchester, but them expecting him to sleep on a couch without bedding was a bit much. The organisers are puzzled, but Alan’s insistent, so they accompany him back to his room where he points out the couch in question and other deficiencies. One of the organisers takes him to the door Alan presumed led to the bathroom and shows him the sumptuously furnished bedroom beyond. At the last minute, guest of honour Gerry Anderson couldn’t make it and they’ve given Alan his suite of rooms. He’d spent the night in the lobby.
Many thanks to UKCAC’s Frank Plowright for sending me that story, verified by Alan himself.
Though it was the biggest UK con, with an attendance of two or three thousand, the UKCACs were much smaller than their American counterparts but correspondingly more intimate. Since UKCAC, the main British cons are the British International Comics Show (BICS) held in Birmingham around September, the Bristol Comic Expo each May and the Thought Bubble Festival in Leeds each November. Others include the annual small press convention, Caption, held in Oxford in August. Again, its American counterpart, Washington’s SPX con in October is much larger but even most US cons are small events when compared with the biggest European Comics Festival, held in Angoulême near Bordeaux, which attracts over a quarter of a million visitors every January.
Now in its thirty-third year, Angoulême really is a phenomenon, with the whole town taking part. Apart from the large marquees filled with international publishers’ booths, distributors and retailers, there seems to be exhibitions everywhere – from the post office, town hall and cathedral all the way down to bars and cafes and comic displays in shop windows.
Because of the festival, Angoulême is also home to the imposing Centre National de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image – the purpose-built French national center for comic art, with its large exhibition spaces, library, comic album store and workshops. The Angoulême theatre in the center of town hosts the prestigious festival award ceremony. Signings by comic artists are announced over loudspeakers in the streets, many of which feature permanent murals designed by top European comic artists. Even the street signs are in the shape of speech balloons. If you’re seriously into comics, this is the place to go.
Every year the French media covers the event extensively, with TV crews filming documentaries and interviewing fans and creators and the national newspaper Liberation featuring a special pull-out Angoulême supplement. Yes, it’s a big cultural event. In France the comic medium is referred to as L’Art Neuvième – “The Ninth Art” – and some French comic artists are awarded their Medal of Honour for services to art. This is quite different from how comics are perceived in the UK, where they are still thought of, on the whole, as having only marginally more artistic value than patterned toilet roll paper.
Each year a country is chosen as a theme for the festival, which hosts many of that nation’s comic creators and stages a major exhibition of their work. The first time I attended was nearly twenty years ago when it was British Year. The exhibition was titled God Save the Comics! and dozens of UK writers and artists were invited and flown over for the event.
I don’t know whether the jet taking us over had been specially chartered or not but it was completely filled with Brit comic talent. I remember thinking at the time that, if the thing crashed, it would have been the end of the British comic industry. With writers such as Alan Moore, Jamie Delano, Pete Milligan, Alan Grant, John Wagner and Grant Morrison on board, along with artists the likes of Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Steve Dillon, Glenn Fabry and David Lloyd and the editors and publishers of many comics including the British SF weekly 2000AD and the monthly magazines Deadline and Escape, the landscape of comics today would be very different if they’d all suddenly perished. As the plane was taxiing towards the runway, it suddenly and startlingly slammed to a halt. After a few minutes it carried on and the captain’s voice came over the speakers to apologise. His explanation was that he’d braked because a field mouse was running across the runway in front of the plane. I don’t think that anyone believed him somehow.
During the festival, Grant Morrison was being interviewed on stage. The French translator had so much trouble with Grant’s Glaswegian accent that he required a second translator to put Grant’s words into a version of English he understood.
Oddly enough, many of us were guests again a couple of years later, when it was American Year, as most of us were then working for American publishers. Since then, I like to attend Angoulême every two or three years. I space out the visits because I’m very fond of the ancient town and the event and don’t want going there ever to turn into a chore. It can be very hard work, especially when you’re doing sketches at publishers’ booths for hours at a time. Everybody there seems to want a free drawing, whether they’ve heard of you or not.
One Angoulême, Hunt Emerson is doing les petites dédicasses for a line of punters. A teenage girl is next in line and asks Hunt for a drawing.
“Do you have a sketch book?” he asks.
She lifts up her tee-shirt and points to her right breast.
“Draw on here.”
Hunt conscientiously responds by drawing his Firkin the Cat character on her bare boob with his indelible marker, employing her nipple as Firkin’s nose.
A big difference between European and Stateside comic events is that, on this side of the pond, the punters expect, and get, sketches from their favourite artists for nothing – even from really big names such as Moebius, who’ll sit drawing for them for hours. In the US most artists charge, though a distinction is made between a pencilled and inked illustration and a quick scribble, which is, generally speaking, free.
Jim Steranko who, in the sixties, was the hugely influential artist of Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD and, more recently Chandler: Red Tide abruptly stopped doing sketches for free back in the early seventies. His epiphany happened at one con when he faced a line of fans so numerous it was obvious that only a small percentage would actually come away with a picture. He completed inking a sketch of Captain America and handed it over to the grinning fan at the head of the line who promptly turned around and held it up.
“Steranko sketch, fifty dollars!” he shouted and quickly sold it before Jim’s astonished eyes.
As incredible as it is, this story can be counterbalanced with another, and both are apparently true: at a San Diego Comicon in the nineties, Jim was at his booth, besieged by fans. At he chatted away, telling anecdotes and signing books, a guy suddenly materialized from out of the crowd before him, thrust a portfolio-shaped brown paper parcel into his hands, abruptly turned and disappeared into the mass of humanity that always packs the aisles of this event. Jim jumped to his feet and scanned the teeming multitude, just managing to catch a glimpse of the dude zigzagging away through the crowd with alarming rapidity before being absorbed by it. Jim looked down suspiciously at the package on the table before him and cautiously unwrapped it. Inside the brown wrapping paper were a dozen pages of vintage Steranko art, Marvel comic pages that had gone missing from their offices in the sixties that were now worth several thousand dollars. Who the guy was remains a total mystery.
About three years ago at San Diego, an English guy stopped before Jim’s table and asked how much the original Captain American cover on display there would cost.
“Forget it,” Jim grinned, “You couldn’t afford it.”
The punter simply turned around and walked away. It was Simon Powell, the multimillionaire comic art collector.
The free sketches that many of us do for fans frequently end up on eBay, one reason why I always dedicate them to the person requesting the drawing. I’ve several framed sketches myself, by greats including Moebius, Hugo Pratt and Will Eisner, but, of course, would never part with them. Offers considered.
During one Angoulême, Donna Bar was having coffee with underground legend Robert Crumb and his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Crumb is notoriously eccentric and can be extremely cranky. I watched him doing a signing there one day and every time someone asked for a sketch, he proclaimed “I DO NOT DRAW TO ORDER!” Anyhow, in the café Donna decides to show him some of her comics. He flips through them, incredulously.
“What…” he gasps, “…what makes you DRAW this stuff?”
Donna shrugs.
“I dunno.” She replies “What makes you draw big-titted women with no heads?”
For a second or two, Crumb looks as though he might explode. He slowly puts her comics on the table and a large smile spreads across on his face.
“Touché” he grins.
To this day, one of Donna’s catchphrases is “YOU think I’m weird? ROBERT CRUMB thinks I’m weird!”
As I said, Angoulême is the big one but there are other French festivals, such as Grenoble, Blois and Lille, and many others around Europe, the largest being Germany’s Erlangen Festival and the one at Barcelona in Spain.
One of my favourites is the Lucca festival in Tuscany, the first foreign convention that I was invited to over twenty years ago and one I’ve attended a few times since, once having an exhibition of my Bad Rat artwork there. Lucca’s a beautiful walled medieval town with a magical atmosphere and great restaurants.
I met Brat Pack and Rare Bit Fiends writer and artist Rick Veitch at Lucca on my first visit. He’d recently done his first graphic novel, the comic adaptation of Speilberg’s movie 1941 with Steve Bissette, while still a student at the Joe Kubert Comic Art School in New York.
This was the first time Rick had been outside the States and Joe, without mentioning it to him, phones his old compadre Hugo Pratt. Hugo, primarily known for his Corto Maltese stories, was a comic artist and writer of not only great stature in international comics but also in physical terms.
Joe says to him “Hugo, one of my boys is going over to Italy. Can you take care of him while he’s in Lucca?”
“Sure,” says the man.
Anyhow, the week goes by and Pratt doesn’t say a word to Rick, never even approaches him. On the Saturday night, a bunch of us are in the lobby of the Hotel Napoleon, having drunk dry the free booze at the tequila sunrise party laid on by the festival. Dave Gibbons had disappeared to his room and returned with the bottle of duty-free brandy he picked up on the way over and is passing it around. Groo artist Sergio Aragones is drawing, in fact we all are, in each other’s sketchbooks.
At this point, the imposing form of Hugo Pratt looms into the lobby. He walks straight over to Rick and clamps his big hand on Rick’s shoulder. Rick turns around, startled.
“Veitch?” enquires Pratt.
Rick confirms, Hugo jerks his head in the direction of the front door and marches off outside.