I was inspired by two other memoirs, Grant Morrison's Supergods and Phil Hall's My Monthly Curse, and—seeing as this year is Vertigo's 20th anniversary—I figured if I didn't launch the book in 2013, I never would. The book recounts my life, how it has been shaped by my passion for comics, and how I ended up as DC Comic's first British member of editorial staff, back in 1993.
Some of you may have read the interview I did for Sci-Fi Now where I said: "It was an incredibly exciting time to be working in comics and anything seemed possible." And that remains true to this day. When I was at the Vertigo London office, with my boss Art Young, we were given the keys to the kingdom in the form of unwavering expesenses. And we fully abused this privilege as much as possible. What followed was two and a half years of unbridled decadence and creativity that resulted in books like Face, Enigma, Rogan Gosh, Kill Your Boyfriend, Flex Mentallo, and Ghostdancing, and excessive amounts of booze and drugs being consumed.
This book blows the lid off the comics scene in the mid-Ninieties, at the tail-end of the Rave scene—when ecstasy was still rife—and when Britpop was burgeoning. What's been really hard about writing this book is that I wanted it to appeal to both comic and non-comic readers. Trying to write about comics without the minutiae that could bore the arse off the uninformed, whilst bringing something new to the informed fans, while simultaneously trying to entertain both, is no easy matter! I hope I've struck a happy medium.
Meanwhile, Rich Johnston is serialising the first chapter of the book on Bleeding Cool, but if you can't be bothered heading over there, below is what's been serialised so far.
There are three versions of Comic Book Babylon available: eBook (with additional images); the paperback (h 20cm x w 13cm); and 200 limited edition hardbacks with jacket (h 23cm x w 15cm).
All the very best,
Tim.
Prelude:
“Oh my God. Oh wow. Everything’s all full
of light. It’s beautiful. This is the most amazing thing. I can’t stop
talking.” That’s the girl’s reaction when she first takes Ecstasy in Grant
Morrison and Philip Bond’s 1995 comic, Kill Your Boyfriend.
My own initial experience with the drug, in
a small basement flat in Paddington, was not dissimilarly inarticulate, “Oh
fuckin’ hell. Shit. That’s so—Fuck. Ha! I can’t believe it.” Et cetera. It was
an evening that opened up my eyes to an alternate universe. A universe of
infinite colours and possibilities. I was seeing patterns on the walls. The low
level lights sparkled and twinkled, as if through a starlight filter. I looked
at my friends, Art, Paul and Ellie, and tribal tattoos were appearing on their
faces and arms. Intricate swirling patterns that morphed and changed.
I was smiling. I couldn’t stop smiling. I
was smiling so hard it hurt. I wanted to strip off and dance and shout. I had a
deep, overwhelming love for everyone in the room. Not just for being my
friends, or for introducing me to this new reality. Not even because they’d
allowed me into their inner circle, but simply because they were fellow human
beings, made of the same beautiful light as I was.
We stayed up till sunrise, talking, dancing,
sensing, while the MDMA worked its magic on our synapses. This was fantastic. I
was on top of the world and embraced in an all-encompassing, unconditional
love. I had entered a living comic book world, where anything was possible.
It would never get that good again.
Chapter
One: Description of the Writer as a Young Man
“I can tread on the heels of his memories,
see through his child’s eyes and feel the early blossoming of his
self-awareness.”
- Millennium Fever
My dad held me tightly by the hand as he
strode through a crowded, noisy, smelly London fruit’n’veg street market. The
road was littered with banana boxes, discarded orange tissue wrappers and
abandoned grapes. My little legs struggled to keep pace with his determined
stride, while simultaneously trying to dodge through the labyrinthine crowd.
His long, dark, Seventies-style hair blew in the summer breeze, as I looked up
at his Zapata-moustachioed face. Where we were going, I didn’t know, but when
we got there, there was a hushed reverence about the place.
The shop was a rag-tag mess of piles of
magazines, stacks of Hawkwind albums, musty old science fiction paperbacks and
bins of bargain basement comics. Various hairy, young men shuffled about the
place rummaging through the endless publications, panning for gold. The place
reeked of patchouli oil, presumably to mask the mustiness of old paper and poor
personal hygiene.
The most impressive thing there was a huge
wooden cut-out figure of Captain America by Jack Kirby on the wall, just above
the stairs to the basement. His dynamic pose, leaping towards the viewer in the
bright red, white and blue of the costume, as he brandished his giant shield,
seared itself into my brain. From then on I was hooked on comics. I was five
years old. The shop was Dark They Were and Golden Eyed.
To non-comic fans it’s hard to describe how
important Dark They Were and Golden Eyed was to the modern British comics
industry. This was where it all began. It was the first proto-comic shop in the
UK. British Comics Fandom had its roots here. Mike Lake and Nick Landau met
here and formed the legendary conflicted powerhouse duo that would set up the
Forbidden Planet retail chain, Titan Distribution and Titan Books publishing
house. Paul Hudson worked here and would go on to run three successful Comic
Showcase shops in London, Cambridge and Oxford. Josh Palmano used to visit here
and eventually set up his famous Gosh! Comics—possibly the best loved comic
shop in London today. It was the clubhouse of what were to become some of the
most influential comic creators the UK ever produced. Brian Bolland, Dave
Gibbons, Alan Moore and Bryan Talbot all hung out here. As did Marvel UK and Warrior
founder Dez Skinn. And a teenage mop-haired, leather-jacketed Neil Gaiman would
frequently pop in, before heading off down the road to catch the latest bands
at The Marquee, whenever he got into London. This was the nexus point. Genesis.
Ground Zero. THE BIG BANG. In musical terms, Dark They Were… was the Sex
Pistols playing at the Manchester Free Trade Hall on 4 June 1976.
Dark They Were… was run by Derek “Bram”
Stokes and took its convoluted name from a Ray Bradbury short story. Some kids’
dads take them religiously to football matches every Saturday and inspire a
life-long tribal loyalty to the sport. My dad was different. For the few brief
years we lived at the Toc H men’s hostel in Fitzroy Square, London, every
Saturday morning, he would take me down to Dark They Were… I’d check out the
comic bins, while he’d look through the endless science fiction paperbacks,
like Michael Moorcock’s Elric series and William Tenn’s Of Men and Monsters. The latter had a profound effect on me as a child, with its evocative cover of a tribal man with a spear fighting a giant crab-like
creature, painted by supreme fantasy artist, Boris Vallejo.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, upstairs was
also the first semi-official offices of The Fortean Times where Bob Rickard, Paul Sieveking and Steve Moore would meet “every
Tuesday afternoon”, to discuss everything from Spontaneous Human Combustion to
frogs found alive inside sealed stones. Steve Moore also wrote comics and would
become a mentor to his namesake, Alan.
After several years of moving around
between London, Cornwall, and Kent, my parents finally settled in Virginia
Water, on the Surrey/Berkshire border. My mum was employed as a live-in housekeeper
and we had a large house to ourselves, next to an even larger house that she
had to cook for, clean and manage. I was seven.
The first comics I consciously remember
wanting and buying with my own money weren’t the Beano and Dandy (I was already a member of
the former’s Dennis the Menace fan club, with its furry, goggle-eyed Gnasher
badge). I was more cutting edge than that. My best friend, Andrew, and I both read
Krazy. Launched by IPC in October 1976, Krazy was a humour comic that had a more contemporary, anti-establishment
feel to it than anything the distinctly conservative Dundee-based DC Thomson published.
We were entering the age of punk, after all. The back cover was always
disguised as something innocuous like a schoolbook, a newspaper or some
highbrow literature, so it could be flipped over at a moment’s notice, whenever
a parent or teacher strolled by. The lead story was the Krazy Gang, featuring Cheeky, and their battles with their nemesis, the fetid
Pongo Snodgrass. I loved it with a passion.
The mid- to late-Seventies was a fantastic
boom time for British comics. In the space of four years, four publications
were launched that were to change my life and inform my comics reading for the
next 20 years. I was into the new wave of edgy comics being put out by
writer/editor Pat Mills and his cohorts at IPC. Those titles were Battle, Action, Starlord and 2000 AD. 1975’s Battle was a war comic and—along with Commando Picture Library—taught me all the German I’d ever need to know, from “Achtung!”
“Schell!” and “Donner und Blitzen” to “Gott im Himmel!” and “Nien! Nien! Der
Englander Schwien!” However, unlike DC Thomson’s Commando series, Battle was brutal in its
depictions of war. Darkie’s Mob—apart from
having unfortunately unintentional racist connotations in its title—was a
savage story of WWII in South East Asia. One issue saw the eponymous hero
nailed to a corrugated steel roof by the Japanese, in all its bloody glory.
And Action
wasn’t much better. Here, we had possibly the most subversive comic of the
Seventies. Issue #1 was cover-dated Valentine’s Day, 1976 and it massacred the
competition. The comic lifted concepts—or “dead cribs” as Mills called them—from
all the cool films that were out at the time and turned them into strips for
kids. Jaws became Hook Jaw, Rollerball became Death Game
1999 and Dirty Harry
became Dredger. It was a masterstroke. All these
were films I, and my friends, wanted to see, but were far too young to get into
at the cinema. But now I could get my own versions on the comics’ page, for a
mere 7p! Every story was bloody, violent and subversive.
The very gore and brutality that made Action popular with me and all the other kids, also acted as a red flag to
“concerned citizens”, with The Sun newspaper
calling it "the seven penny nightmare". Action became the centre of a campaign led by do-gooding busybody Mary
Whitehouse and her evil cronies, the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association,
as they tried to ban the comic. IPC sensed trouble on the wind and tried toning
the content down.
By September 1976—less than seven months
after launching—they even sent Action’s editor,
John Sanders, on to the primetime TV show Nationwide, where he tried to defend the comic from a forceful attack by
interviewer Frank Bough, who condemned the comic for corrupting Britain’s
youth. This was the same Frank Bough who was later vilified in the tabloids in
the ‘90s for taking cocaine, wearing lingerie at sex parties and visiting dominatrixes.
Nothing wrong with any of that, of course, but if the tabloids have taught us
anything, it’s that self-righteousness is a double-edged weapon that’s
dangerous for those in the public eye to wield.
Bough’s fall from grace paradoxically
happened around the same time as Martin Barker’s excellent book Action - The
Story of a Violent Comic was released. History
loves irony.
Although Action remained popular, its days were numbered and it eventually was
watered down so much that it was merged with Battle to create Battle Action, before the Action part was finally removed.
However, creator Pat Mills learnt a lot
from creating Action and put all this knowledge
into his next opus. When 2000 AD launched on
26th February 1977, punk rock was flourishing and the magazine borrowed
liberally from the culture with characters like Spikes Harvey Rotten. The comic
was a revelation to an eight-year-old me. Mature, radical and unusual, it
became my favourite comic after Action had its balls
cut off by the media. Although, admittedly, it was initially all about the free
gifts. Prog 1 (they didn’t call them issues) came with a cheap red plastic
mini-Frisbee or “Space Spinner” as they called it. My friend Andrew and I
bought multiple copies of Prog 2 to get the M.A.C.H. 1 stickers. M.A.C.H. 1 was a Six
Million Dollar Man rip-off—sorry, “dead crib”. The
TV series was the hottest show around and one of our favourites. The stickers
depicted bits of wiring and electronics you were supposed to put on your body
“revealing” your bionics underneath. I recall being in a restaurant with
Andrew’s parents and us, bored, covering our arms in fake digital circuitry.
Incidentally, Andrew had on his bedroom wall a similar cut-out of Captain
America I’d first seen in Dark They Were. Only this image was taken from the
cover of Captain America #193 (January, 1976) by
Jack Kirby and John Romita Snr. I coveted that almost life-size wooden figure
for years.
2000 AD was
“edited” by Tharg, a green alien with a telephone dial ("The Rosette of
Sirius") stuck on his forehead, who apparently had nothing better to do
than mess around with Earth’s periodical publishing industry. “Borag Thungg,
Earthlets” he greeted us, introducing a generation of boys to a new “Zarjaz”
language. The rest of the editorial and creative staff were all robots with
names like Burt (Richard Burton—not the actor), AALN-1 (Alan Grant), Mac-2
(Alan Mackenzie), Bish-OP (David Bishop) and Dig-L (Andy Diggle). It was a bit
of a crap in-joke, but we went along for the ride anyway, our tongues firmly
planted in our cheeks. It’s a daft joke that 2000 AD insists on pursuing to
this day.
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