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Lee Carter joins Durham Red!

4/10/2018

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My team-mate – artist Ben Willsher – has been stretchered off our Durham Red project, but fear not. Indigo Prime and Dredd supremo Lee Carter is joining the team!
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Panel from 'Angelic' by Gordon Rennie (writer), Lee Carter (artist) and Simon Bowland (letterer)
Sorry to report that the Durham Red revamp I’ve been scripting for 2000 AD has hit a spot of behind-the-scenes bother, resulting in an injured artist and a minor delay. A few weeks ago, my project team-mate – Judge Dredd artist Ben Willsher - badly scalded his hand (on one of those fancy boiling-water taps) resulting in a severe burn that required hospital treatment. The injury was compounded by the fact that Ben made the mistake of trying to soothe the wound with a bag of frozen peas! As his nurse apparently went to great lengths to explain, never ever cool a burn with ice or iced water! (Instead, run it under cool or lukewarm running water for 20 minutes.)

With his hand strapped up during recovery, Ben has been unable to work at his usual capacity and has therefore been forced to step down from Red at the risk of missing his allotted deadline.

I want you guys to know just how hard Ben has worked on this project. Durham Red and the Strontium Dog universe mean the world to him, and this project has been a genuine labour of love. Ben came to this with a distinct vision in mind from the very beginning, which he’s been seeing through by colouring his own pages and spending several weeks obsessing with me over Red’s new design.

Ben has managed to get four episodes of Durham Red: Born Bad in the can, leaving another four to go. “I am absolutely gutted to have to step away from Red, especially over such a silly and avoidable mishap,” says Ben. “But ‘C’est la vie’, as the French Esther Rantzen fans say. Despite the disappointment of leaving the series, I am overjoyed to have Lee Carter take over!”
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Panel from Indigo Prime: Perfect Day by John Smith (writer), Lee Carter (artist) and Simon Bowland (letterer). Click to enlarge...
If you’re unfamiliar with Lee’s art, go check out his website this instant! His dynamic work on strips including Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper, Angelic and Indigo Prime are something to behold. His pages boil with mood and atmosphere, his action scenes have thump and grit, while his flights into psychedelia are mind-blowing! In short, he’s perfect for this new version of Durham Red. Ben adds, “Honestly, I couldn’t be leaving Red in better hands – and both of Lee’s hands work! He’s an incredible artist. I’m so glad he’s joined the team. You’re all in for a treat when you see his pages!”

Our strip was originally intended to run in the recent ‘jumping on’ Prog #2073 in lieu of John Wagner, Carlos Ezquerra and Ellie De Ville’s Strontium Dog: The Son. The two strips have now switched slots.

The first episode of Durham Red: Born Bad will now be published in Prog #2082, out on 23 May 2018, available at all good newsagents and comic book stores, plus digitally from the 2000 AD webstore, along with the official 2000 AD apps for iOS, Android and Windows.

Get 3,000 coffins ready...
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Panel from Durham Red: Born Bad, art by Ben Willsher
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DURHAM RED - PREVIEW PIC RELEASED!

1/8/2018

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A preview pic for the new DURHAM RED revamp by me and artist Ben Willsher got released last week in 2000 AD.

​And here it is...
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Click to enlarge.
Regular 2000 AD readers will know Ben from his long-time art duties on JUDGE DREDD, but he’s also worked on various other comics, including several DOCTOR WHO projects, and has recently been drawing attention from overseas... Combining sharp design with dynamic linework and fluid storytelling, Ben’s the perfect artist for a cinematic action-adventure series like this.

​To see more of his work, go check out his website.
 
Rest assured, Durham won’t be spending the entire series in her underwear! Her final redesign has been approved by the Mighty Tharg, but is yet to be revealed...
 
This new look needed to land somewhere between the original version by Carlos Ezquerra (which first appeared in Prog 505, back in 1987) and the far-future rebirth devised by Mark Harrison and Dan Abnett in the early 2000s - although we favoured the Ezquerra version, since those adventures are closer to the timeline of our story.
 
We wanted something fresh that would appeal to a new and contemporary readership, while remaining instantly recognisable to old-schoolers. Balancing the two is a tricky proposition, but such revisions have been achieved with aplomb recently, notably by DC’s NEW 52 BATGIRL by artist Babs Tarr and writer Cameron Stewart, as well as Nicola Scott’s redesign of VAMPIRELLA...
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From this Batgirl (by David Finch)...
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To this Batgirl (by Babs Tarr).
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From this Vampirella (by Jose Gonzalez)...
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To this Vampirella (by Nicola Scott).
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From this Durham Red (by Carlos Ezquerra)...
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To this Durham Red (by Mark Harrison)...
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To God knows what!
However, form must also follow function. The redesign had to reflect where this series sees Durham as a character, that is, a down-on-her-luck bounty hunter struggling to maintain a moral compass against her vampiric nature. (Everyone in the STRONTIUM DOG universe is terrified of Durham; in this series you’ll see exactly why...)
 
Me and Ben went back and forth for WEEKS about how best to convey everything we wanted to say about her. As a baseline, I always start by ‘casting’ a character, just to get a vague visual sense of who they are and how they’ll look on the page. I was thinking someone with the smarts and venom of Lauren Bacall in TO HAVE OR HAVE NOT and Linda Fiorentino in THE LAST SEDUCTION, but who could throw a punch like Gina Carano and Ronda Rousey, while Ben was petitioning for someone lithe and snakey like Jaimie Alexander from THOR and TV’s BLINDSPOT. And so it went on, week after week, covering everything from body type, hairstyle, clothes, weapons, the whole shebang!
 
All will be revealed in 2000 AD March 2018.
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DURHAM RED – REVAMPED!

12/14/2017

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Created by John Wagner, Alan Grant and Carlos Ezquerra for the legendary 2000 AD strip Strontium Dog, DURHAM RED returns in a new solo series BORN BAD by me with art by Ben Willsher (Judge Dredd, Doctor Who).

This eight-part series sees the mutant vampire bounty hunter struggling for work following the closure of the Search/Destroy Agency. Forced to take on whatever job may come her way, Durham is hired by a dying gangster to track down his long-lost mother – a woman prepared to take deadly measures to cover her tracks.

Now here’s the thing, guys... This is a BRAND-NEW take on Durham!
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New direction! New costume! New readers welcome!

Scary, huh?

But fear not, old-schoolers, I’ve been working on this for the best part of a year – and been gearing up for even longer to take a shot at writing this. In that time, me and Ben have been working our buns off in terms of research, getting the re-design just right, figuring out what makes Durham tick and seeing where we can take her next.

Rest assured, we’ve done our homework.

I’ve seen the artwork for the opening episode and it’s unlike anything I’ve seen Ben produce before. No hyperbole here, but it’s freakin’ amazing! I can’t wait to give you a sneak peak...

Anyway, the first part of DURHAM RED: BORN BAD will be published in 2000 AD #2073, available in stores and online from 21st March 2018.

There will be blood...
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Freeway Fighter: The Comic (a quick review)

3/7/2017

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I’ve got a free hour and a new comic on my hands, so here’s a quick review...
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I’m a huge fan of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, created back in the day by Games Workshop founders Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. This seminal choose-your-own-adventure series originally totalled almost sixty titles, from The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in 1982 to Curse of the Mummy in 1995. I was primarily a TV/video kid, but these books got me and plenty others reading. It’s perhaps not an overstatement to say they were the Harry Potter of my generation.
 
Fanboy that I am, I badgered the good folks at Titan Comics for an advance copy of Freeway Fighter, a four-part mini-series inspired by the Ian Livingstone book of the same name, first published in 1985 and the thirteenth in the original series.
 
Set in 2024, in a familiar post-apocalyptic desert (this one devastated by a virus rather than atomic war), the source-book sent the reader/player into the hazardous wastes to scavenge supplies and save their frontier town. Clearly inspired by the Mad Max movies (the third of which – Beyond Thunderdome – was also released in 1985), the book introduced the post-apocalyptic cars-and-carnage genre to a readership far too young to be watching ‘80s Mel Gibson movies. (The book was also part of a lively sub-genre of tabletop/roleplaying games that included Car Wars, Battlecars and Dark Future.) However, Freeway Fighter the comic – published almost thirty years on and featuring a ruthless, whiskey-slugging heroine happy to beat scumbags to death with a crowbar – perhaps doesn’t feel entirely child-friendly. In a good way.
 
Described as an ‘origination’ rather than an adaptation, the comic follows former racing driver turned post-apocalyptic wanderer Bella De La Rosa, who runs into trouble in a deserted town while scouting the wasteland in search of supplies.
 
The first issue is sparse in terms of plot, but otherwise brims with hot car-on-car action. Writer Andi Ewington has got a filmmaker’s eye for the punch and rhythm of high-octane action sequences. The whole book simmers with atmosphere too, thanks to Simon Coleby’s brooding artwork, which gives this desolate landscape an appropriately diesel-splattered feel, complimented by Len O’Grady’s sweltering colours. Kudos too to Jim Campbell’s lettering.
 
This is the first time the Fighting Fantasy series has come to comics and, as an official spin-off, Freeway Fighter feels both authentic and committed. Original author Ian Livingstone is on board as Executive Producer, while editing is handled by Jonathan Green (himself the author of three Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, as well as You Are The Hero, a highly recommended history of the series). Ewington (a prolific yet underappreciated writer who deserves greater attention) also comes with a fitting pedigree, having previously worked on Hollywood-branded comics for Michael Bay, Rob Cohen and George Pelecanos. Freeway Fighter issue one feels like a genuine event – and the lime-green back cover with the zig-zag header is a stroke of design genius that fans of the series will appreciate.
 
The book’s creative team could have settled for pastiche and fanservice (as do far too many old-school geek franchises these days). Instead, the team has dug a little deeper into the original (if admittedly well-worn) concept, giving us a glimpse of Bella’s pre-apocalyptic past (the switch from past to present pulled off with a zinger of a page-turn). This not only brings a fresh angle to a character that would otherwise be your archetypal wasteland badass, but also gives us a crucial sense of the civilised world that’s been lost to barbarism.
 
An intriguing first mile in a post-apocalyptic road-trip and a must for Fighting Fantasy fans, Freeway Fighter is worth a look for the widescreen action and scorching artwork alone. One issue in and this series is already burning rubber.

Artwork by Simon Coleby

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The Social Justice Ninja: Writing Without Fear in the Age of Outrage

12/22/2016

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As anxious a year as this has been, 2016 has left me downright fearful about what’s waiting around the corner next year. I put together this silly two-page comic (above) not so much for my own amusement (although it’s always fun to take the Mickey out of Newsnight Review) as to articulate the jitters I felt during the run-up to the E.U. referendum. This was a time when the British media was generally encouraging the voting public to base a momentous decision on a fog of hysterical reactions, outright lies and fearmongering, and a terrifying absence of facts.
 
We joke about how such mania is commonplace within the vacuum of social media, but here it appeared to have spilled out into national discourse. And would do so again elsewhere, of course.
 
The appeal of social media lies in its powers of reduction, to condense an ocean of information into a manageable stream. But when one views the world primarily through such a lens it can reduce the most nuanced argument to a binary option: yes/no, black/white, good/evil. If you’re not 100 percent on my team, then you’re 100 percent against us.
 
Social media prioritises impassioned response over rational engagement. It fosters paranoia, the assumption that unless the person standing next to you is announcing their fealty to the cause at every opportunity then they’re probably batting for the Dark Side. It encourages an almost sociopathic lack of compassion. It erodes generosity of spirit, the moral imagination required to consider without endorsing – just for a moment – a view that you may not share, rather than dig a little deeper and ask why does that person think that? It encourages readers to skim information, to ignore anything below an often-inaccurate headline, to share articles out of confirmation bias, to brand ourselves as standing unequivocally in this camp or that, two sides calling each other Hitler, each getting angrier at the others’ inability to see the truth, each feeding off each other, needing each other, creating an almighty yin and yang of idiocy, extremism begetting extremism.
 
Creativity flourishes not on timid conformity, but on fearlessness and rebellion. Great stories thrive not on comforting notions of good guys and bad guys, but the dramatic conflict generated by moral ambiguity, compromise and paradox. But social media has taught readers to be on high-alert for anything they may deem offensive, i.e. challenging, and to punish any such perpetrators accordingly. Today anything, from making an ignorant remark to proposing new ideas, can cause a backlash that damages a working writer’s reputation and livelihood. So can writers be blamed for being tempted to retreat into orthodoxy? Never did Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, that bitter cautionary fable about the ruinous paranoia of McCarthy-era America, feel so prescient.
 
I’m reminded of a passage from author H.E. Bates’ critical survey The Modern Short Story, first published in 1941: “The notion that literature, and the novel especially, should teach something, that it should carry a lesson, a moral, or a message, and that its results should not give purely aesthetic, sensuous, and recreative pleasure, is one that dies very hard. This notion almost invariably springs from and is fostered by the public and not by writers, who nevertheless in Victorian times often succumbed to the weight of public demand. It seems ludicrous now to think that in its serial form (to be read by the sacred fireside) the passages in Tess where Angel Clare carried [author's italics] the girls across the stream had to be altered so that these girls were decently wheeled across in a wheelbarrow. --- It seems incredible and ludicrous to us that Tess should have been banned, and Jude burned, when to-day their actions, which once brought the thunder from the pulpits, seem only mistakes of timid triviality. The lesson there is clear for all writers: that they should never, from first to last, pay the least attention to public opinion, or to what is worse – public taste.”
 
However, today we have never been more aware of what we must oppose. Thanks to camera-phones we can see all manner of loathsome behaviour autoplayed on our social media feeds. It’s no wonder that appalled writers feel the need to pick up their trusty weapon – whether pen, pencil or keyboard – and fight back. But when it comes to the type of stories that I write – good old-fashioned, rip-roaring melodrama full of heroes super and otherwise – no one wants to read a bash-you-over-the-head social justice agitprop full of clunky one-note archetypes defined solely by their gender, race or sexuality, all of whom are likely preaching to a readership already converted. Besides, you don’t change the minds of bigots by screaming at them. There are subtler ways of fighting the good fight (whatever your fight may be). A precise whisper can be deadlier than the shout. How about less ‘social justice warrior’, more ‘social justice ninja’?
 
Progressive writing is often just a case of writing well, of engaging best practice in terms of modern storytelling. So please don’t expect a pat on the back or a bucket full of brownie points for just doing your damn job!
 
We avoid the default of ‘straight white middle-class male’ and seek fresh perspectives because we need to find a fresh hook, something that can spin an archetypal story off in a new direction. Consider how the Netflix show Luke Cage (despite going into a tailspin in the last few episodes) put an invigorating spin on the superhero story by telling it through the lens of the African-American experience. I also love the ‘stealth diversity’ of things like Star Wars: Rebels and Big Hero Six, which have multiracial/multigender casts and don’t make any kind of fuss about it.
 
As a writer it’s your responsibility to give your exposition a decent burial, to let the reader discover your theme rather than spell it out for them. (Andrew Stanton of the Pixar braintrust calls this “the unifying theory of two-plus-two”, i.e. don’t show the audience ‘four’. Give them ‘two’ then ‘two’ and let them figure out the rest for themselves.) The movie Zootropolis wouldn’t be half as brilliant if it had settled for the simple message of ‘Racism. Is. Bad.’ It assumes the audience of children – of children, dammit! – are smart enough to understand that even those with the best intentions struggle with prejudice of some kind. That’s a dramatic paradox, right there!
 
It’s the writer’s job to create rounded, nuanced characters, of which gender, ethnicity, sexuality, spirituality and political views are just a few aspects of the myriad that makes that character who they are. Readers want characters with whom they can relate, whose flaws are more interesting than their strengths. (By the way, we want female characters who are ‘strong’ in the sense of ‘vivid’, not ‘strong’ in the sense of how hard they can punch someone.)
 
Might it be argued then that good writing is inherently progressive? I dunno. But I do know that good writing and progressive writing are at their most effective when they’re drawing the least amount of attention to themselves.
 
“When the work is done, and one’s name is becoming distinguished, to withdraw into obscurity is the way of heaven,” wrote Lao Tzu. Only he was lucky enough to be speaking two and a half thousand years before writers were fighting to wrest their readers’ attention away from Netflix, Twitter, and the Xbox. It’s no longer good enough to be good, today’s writer must be heard as well.
 
I wish I could conclude this blog with something nice and comforting, along the lines of ‘just do XYZ, readers, and everything will be fine.’ But I’m afraid December 2016 has found me all out of homilies. I’m left to venture into 2017 armed with nothing more than a handful of slogans: progress fearlessly, be better than what makes you angry, and – in the words of the late great stand-up comic Bill Hicks – “Read! Listen! Think! Shut the f*** up!”
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Age of the Wolf trivia

12/20/2016

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Another piece written in 2010 and excavated from my old website. It's called 'recycling'...
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Age of the Wolf: She Is Legend teaser art by Jon Davis-Hunt
# The title ‘Age of the Wolf’ comes from the Völuspá, the first poem of the Poetic Edda (a collection of Old Norse poetry that provides our chief source of information about Norse mythology). The poem concerns Ragnarok, the death of the gods, when the giant wolf Fenris will burst his chains and devour the sun.

# The events of the story begin on 14 November 2016, which (in the real world) is when a full moon will orbit the earth some 28,000km closer than usual, appearing 14% bigger and 30% brighter than normal.

# On page one, the references to doctors Carter, Jordan and Patterson are a reference to the writer, director and star of The Company Of Wolves. There’s other werewolf movie easter eggs in there, but I can’t remember them all.

# The heroine, Rowan Morrigan, is based on the doomed and beautiful Norse god Baldr (the ‘bleeding god’). Physically, I based her on Doctor Who actress Karen Gillen, who struck me as having just the right combination of fearlessness and girl-next-door practicality.

# The words Rowan uses in the story to ignite the runes are Old Norse.

# I actually wrote a feature on werewolf comics for the Judge  Dredd Megazine #294 (March, 2010), which probably contradicts just about everything I wrote in Age Of The Wolf.
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Writing Age of the Wolf

12/20/2016

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Why werewolves don’t take over the world very often, how classical myth got it wrong, and why it’s never a good idea to make fun of an undercover policeman when researching your story (post written in 2010; taken from my old website)
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Age of the Wolf teaser art by Jon Davis-Hunt
Towards the end of 2009, pop cultural commentators everywhere seemed to have agreed that werewolves were going to be ‘in’ in 2010. According to all those ‘Next Year Preview’ features I was reading at the time, it was something to do with the continued popularity of Twilight and shows like Being Human and True Blood. Apparently, zombies and vampires were going to be sooooo last season. I’d been gathering ideas for an ‘I Am Legend with werewolves’ story for a couple of years, now it seemed as if everyone was about jump into my seat. Since Richard Matheson’s seminal vampire novel I Am Legend and George A. Romero’s equally seminal zombie movie Night Of The Living Dead (directly inspired by Matheson’s book) movies and comics have been full of stories in which the world is overrun by vampires or zombies. But no one had ever told a supernatural apocalypse story with werewolves. It seemed such an obvious choice.
 
Problems with the ‘wolfpocalypse’

The reason why werewolves don’t take over the world very often in books and movies quickly became apparent once 2000 AD’s editor Matt Smith had green-lit the series for development. To put it bluntly, werewolves are rather too good at killing things. If I unleashed a horde of nigh-indestructible lycanthropes on an unsuspecting human world, my entire cast would most likely be dead within a week if I hoped to maintain any semblance of believability.

I was also after something rather more epic than the usual ‘band-of-doomed-survivors-holding-out-against-the-supernatural-hordes’ scenario. Then there was the small matter of how to maintain a full moon long enough for the werewolves to not only overrun humanity but also be prevented from changing back into human form the next day. Imagine a scene in which thousands of naked people wake up on the streets of London with a hangover and a full stomach.

The story

Age Of The Wolf takes place in London 2016. The moon has been mysteriously glowing for over a week. Scientists are baffled and the world is sliding towards mass hysteria. On the ninth night of this so-called ‘perma-moon’ a third of the population inexplicably turn into monstrous wolves. Caught on the London underground in the middle of the outbreak, a young Anglo-Irish woman named Rowan Morrigan flees to safety.

Visited by the ghost of her dead mother, Rowan learns that an ancestor has written her into an ancient Nordic prophecy that singles her out for sacrifice in order to bring about a new world, one in which mankind’s existence is at an end and wilderness rules. However, unlike the sacrificial maidens of myth and fairy tale, Rowan doesn’t feel much like doing as she’s told. She must now find a way to defy the prophecy and escape the monstrous leader of the werewolf pack.

The roots of folklore

I wanted to tell a story that tapped into forgotten werewolf folklore and dramatised exactly why these supernatural icons remain such a vital part of popular culture. I didn’t want the werewolves to end up being merely hairy cannon fodder for the heroine. Despite having grown up on werewolf movies like An American Werewolf In London and The Company Of Wolves (two films with which I was obsessed as a teenager), I didn’t want Age Of The Wolf to turn into yet another game of ‘spot-the-movie-reference’ (although there were times when I just couldn’t help myself). From what I’d read about lycanthrope lore (namely Sabine Baring-Gould’s useful 1865 study The Book Of Werewolves), the concept of the werewolf was a lot more complex and frightening than most modern stories give it credit for.

When someone says ‘werewolf’ you think of the full moon, the infectious bite, the agonising transformation, and the silver bullets. However, these trappings never really coalesced in the public imagination until Curt Siodmak’s script for the 1941 horror movie The Wolfman, in which Lon Chaney Jr tiptoes through the smoke-carpeted forests of the Universal backlot, looking like a furry pubgoer who missed the last bus home. As fondly remembered as the movie is, it’s no classic. Even as a kid, I thought it was odd that a monster as savage and untamed as the Wolfman would choose to strangle his prey. The full moon gave you fangs and claws, dummy. Use ‘em!
 
Housetraining the werewolf

Rewind several centuries to medieval Europe and werewolves stood for something infinitely more terrifying. The term ‘wer-wolf’ (the word ‘wer’ being Anglo-Saxon for ‘man’) meant ‘outcast’ or ‘godless man’, and was generally applied to perpetrators of the inhuman: murderers, pederasts, cannibals. The werewolf stood for an evil inherent, not inherited.

Today, the idea of transformation, from man to beast and back again, has become central to the werewolf myth. Indeed, it becomes the centrepiece of movies like American Werewolf and The Howling. As critic Peter Nicholls points out in his book Fantastic Cinema, “In modern horror films these metamorphoses – all popping joints, lengthening bones and writhing muscles – become the subject of the film. The central figure is no longer the human, nor the animal he becomes, but the agonised half-and-half thing who belongs to neither world, like a victim of God’s wrath in the Hell of Hieronymus Bosch.”

And yet this idea of duality makes the werewolf ultimately less frightening. It distances us from the terrifying possibility that just about anyone can harbour bestial desires or commit unconscionable acts. Fatalism is common in modern werewolf movies, as Nicholls again points out. “The hollowness of the werewolf story, perhaps, is its fatalistic view that a good chap, through no fault of his own, can become a beast. There is not much dramatic pith in this arbitrary cosmic injustice. The beast-in-man idea is done far more interestingly in [Jacques Tourneur’s 1942] Cat People where the beast stands for something already implicit in the person.”

The Not So Big Bad Wolf

The humble wolf (canis lupus) was a symbol of terror within medieval society for reasons we can barely comprehend today. To the rural communities who relied for their very survival upon vulnerable livestock, the wolf stood for nothing less than the devil incarnate. The animal’s (entirely imaginary) capacity for greed and ruthless evil was immortalised as the Big Bad Wolf of fairy tale. ‘Wolf’ became a byword for malevolence, signifying all forms of ravenous hostility, from famine to grasping landlords.

Today, in more enlightened times, the wolf is an often sentimentalised symbol of nature’s mystery and dignity, an emblem of conservation. The only animal to inspire the same hysterical degree of awe and dread as the wolf did in the Middle Ages is perhaps the Great White Shark, another victim of mankind’s overactive imagination. While wolves were hunted to extinction in the UK by the Anglo-Saxon kings, Great Whites are now protected in several countries, having for decades been the target of trophy hunters. In both cases, there’s acres of difference between the animals themselves and the monsters we have mythologized.

Mythbusting

In Age Of The Wolf I tried to stir in wolf iconography from myth and fairy tale, but I also wanted to challenge those classical sources that have provided the foundation for so much western storytelling. We all know how Star Wars was built upon a mythological Jungian template. (Following the movie’s success, Hollywood attempted to distil the works of the great mythologist Joseph Campbell into a recipe book for blockbuster success.) But how many action-adventure stories stop to question the classical foundations upon which they are built?

Take the archetype of the sacrificial victim. You know the sort. She’s the drop-dead gorgeous maiden who has to give herself up to prevent the dragon from laying waste to the town. In the legend of Perseus, for example, the princess Andromeda is offered to the sea monster that threatens to destroy the city of Philistia. In the story of Beauty and the Beast, Beauty is ‘given’ to the Beast. Given? On who’s say-so? Does Beauty not have anything to say about this? What if the girl refused to go along with what the story wanted? Better still, what if she went out to deal with the monster herself, instead of waiting around for a Perseus or some other princely ponce to come along and do the job for her? And how might she overcome her own preordained destiny? By now, Age Of The Wolf was becoming much less a horror story and much more an earthbound epic fantasy.

Like so it is written…

A siren goes off in my head every time I hear the word ‘destiny’ or ‘prophecy’ in a fantasy story. It usually heralds the sort of narrative iceberg that often sinks fantasy stories. To my mind, the words ‘destiny’ and 'prophecy’ usually amount to dramatic kryptonite. Take the movie The Dark Crystal, in which the hero learns of a prophecy that says he will save
the world, effectively revealing the movie’s climax halfway through the picture!

In trying to avoid pre-empting my own story, I had an idea: what if destiny was something tangible, like words on a page that could be edited, like a story, something you could rewrite or defuse like a bomb? Hence, I worked out the idea of ‘the Wyrd’, infinite patterns within quantum uncertainty that can be picked out and brought into being if you know how. In this case (in keeping with the Norse mythology vibe), by using runes, magical letters that can shape the future if you can learn how to write them and invoke the correct enchantment. I wanted my sacrificial heroine to literally write her own story.

Research

With a terrifyingly short deadline and several other clients suddenly popping up out of the blue and throwing work at me (Where were you guys last month?), I inevitably didn’t have time to read every scrap of research I wanted. Before writing, I managed to get in a research trip to the centre of London, taking photographs to help me visualise the action as I walked the route Rowan takes within the story, from Tottenham Court Road through Soho down Whitehall and along the South Bank to Tower Bridge. I tried to imagine what the place would look like covered in snow and full of hungry werewolves. Given the fact that Londoners practically begin contemplating cannibalism the moment they see so much as a snowflake, the idea of adding werewolves to the mix almost seemed like overkill.

Wandering around Tottenham Court Road underground station (which has changed a bit since they filmed American Werewolf there), snapping away with my camera at 7:30am, it’s perhaps no surprise that I was stopped and questioned by an undercover policeman. I have no idea what to tell people at parties when they ask me what I do for a living, let alone one of Her Majesty’s finest. And it probably wasn’t a very good idea to crack a joke along the lines of “Illegal photography! Thirty years, creep!” Clearly not a fan of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic.
 
Artwork

The finished script handed in, amended, signed-off and invoiced, I had nothing left to do but fret about what it might look like once it appeared in the comic. The script was passed into the capable of hands of Jon Davis-Hunt, an incredibly talented young artist fresh from drawing Al Ewing’s Tempest for the Judge Dredd Megazine and well-known for his work on Transformers comics for IDW and Titan. Jon’s precision was perfect for detailing the architecture of Rowan’s world, rooting the fantastical action within a recognisable and realistic setting. He’s also a brilliant conceptual designer with a flair for experimentation not unlike Frank Quitely. That gory splash page in episode eight, which everybody loved? That was Jon’s idea. You can find out more about Jon and his work on his official website: www.jondavis-hunt.com

Postscript 2016

Jon and I created two more series of Age of the Wolf: She Is Legend and Wolfworld. The entire trilogy was collected in trade in 2014, and you can pick it up from Amazon UK, Amazon US and the 2000 AD webstore.
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Cover art by Jon Davis-Hunt
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Age of the Wolf interview with Mass Movement

12/8/2016

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Interview with Mass Movement magazine #41 about the collected edition of Age of the Wolf.
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Judge Anderson interview with Holy Frittata

12/8/2016

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Here's a couple of 2014 interviews talking about Judge Anderson: Heartbreaker with the Abaddon Books blog and the awesome Judge Dredd Tumblr Holy Frittata.
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Robo-Hunter / Age of the Wolf interview

12/8/2016

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A 2014 Q&A with Everything Comes Back To 2000 AD on Robo-Hunter and the Age Of The Wolf trade paperback.
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    I'm Alec Worley.
    ​I write comic books and fiction, including Judge Dredd, Judge Anderson, Star Wars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Warhammer.

    Here's where I blog, mostly about about writing...

    You can also follow me on Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter (@alec_worley).

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    Judge Anderson: Year One

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    Available June 2017 from Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Waterstones.

    Warhammer 40k: Stormseeker

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    Available from the Black Library webstore, iTunes, Amazon US and Amazon UK.

    Dandridge

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    Paranormal action-comedy available from the 2000 AD webstore.

    Age of the Wolf

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    Trade collection of the 2000 AD werewolf saga, available from Amazon UK, Amazon US and the 2000 AD webstore.

    Empires of the Imagination: A Critical Survey of Fantasy Cinema

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    Critical survey of over a century of fantasy cinema, available from Amazon UK, Amazon US and McFarland.

    Sharkpunk

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    My short story Sharkcop 2: Feeding Frenzy features in this shark-themed anthology. Available from Amazon UK, Amazon US and the Snowbooks webstore.
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