Awe and Dredd: The Wit & Wisdom of Alan Grant

Legendary JUDGE DREDD, BATMAN and LOBO writer Alan Grant talks about pulps, anthologies, and making readers laugh and cry.
21 May 2001

Alan Grant made his name writing Judge Dredd stories with John Wagner at 2000AD, then spent over a decade writing BATMAN at DC, where he also created the hugely successful LOBO. Late last year at Dreddcon in London, the ever-talkative writer conducted an hour-long question and answer session with the fans. Alan and convention organiser Kev Sutherland were kind enough to let us record the panel for Ninth Art. Presented here are the exclusive edited highlights from that panel. Transcript by Andrew Wheeler.

Q: Why did Johnny Alpha (the lead character in Grant and Wagner's STRONTIUM DOG series for 2000AD) die?

A: Johnny Alpha died because John Wagner created the character, and when he stopped writing it we talked then about killing the character off, and John said he didn't have any objections to me killing the character off on my own, so I went ahead and did it.

One of the main reasons was, John didn't want anyone else writing the strip. Because he was afraid it might not be as good as it had been in the past. I'm not saying that actually happened with STRONTIUM DOG, but I would say that it happened with another character Wagner created, which was ROBO-HUNTER.

When John and I stopped writing that and someone else... I don't know if I should mention who... When Mark Millar started writing it, for me that was one of 2000AD's low points. The way Mark wrote Robo-Hunter, it actually came out a much weaker character. I didn't like that at all. To prevent that happening to Johnny Alpha - although it hadn't happened to Robo-Hunter at the time - John wanted Johnny Alpha killed off. Not that it made any difference. They brought him back s soon as they felt like doing it even though they promised us that one he was dead that was it, we'd never see Johnny Alpha again.

I'm a big fan of continuing comic characters, but the thing for me that always set 2000AD apart from American comics was that they weren't afraid to take a chance and kill off a major character and never bring him back. Just saying, "That was his story, it's over, it's done, if you enjoyed it, great, but you'll never see him again". That would have been a really strong statement to have made, but of course, comic publishers aren't in the business of making strong statements, they're in the business of making strong profits.

Q: Why do you think there are so few successful anthology comics?

A: I don't know. All of my favourite comics have always been anthology comics. Although I read American comics from an early age, I was also raised on DC Thompson and Fleetway's stable. I was fortunate in that my parents allowed me to get any comic I wanted, so between me and my two brothers we got just about every British comic that was going every week.

I much prefer an anthology comic that comes out weekly to a single story comic coming out every month, It always seemed to me to be the British way, but fans don't seem to like it anymore. Maybe the older ones do, but the younger ones don't seem to.

When I first joined 2000AD editorially - in 1979, I think it was - most of our letters came from kids aged 9, 10, 11, 12 years old. A lot of these kids - and probably there's a lot of them here now - have grown up with the comic. But an awful lot of these kids grew out of comics or discovered music or women or whatever else, and they never came back again, and the young readership has gradually tailed away. They've got computer games and videos and so many other distractions, and basically comics are far too expensive for what they are, for what they give you now.

While I have nothing at all against seeing a 96 page comic book nicely painted and full of colour, for me that's not a kid's comic, that's a book for adults. A kid's comic should be printed on toilet paper the way they used to do with 2000AD, because then there's no feeling of it being worth something. It's something to buy, its part of the culture, and it's almost instantly disposable.

The price of comics needs to go down, and the only way to do that is to make them as cheaply as possible. You'll never get kids to buy comics now, because you can hire two videos for the night for the same cost, or you can hire a computer game for two or three days for the same cost. Why would you want to spend... I don't even know what 2000AD costs. That's one of the benefits of working for them. Because they send me a free copy every week, I don't need to buy it,

Q: Would you buy it if you didn't get it free?

A: Yeah. Yeah, I've got a soft spot for 2000AD, despite all the work I've done for America. I was happier writing for 2000AD than most of the American stuff I've had to write. I'll exclude BATMAN and LOBO. All the time I was writing LOBO I always tried to imagine that it was for 2000AD. I tried to make him into a 2000AD character, in the hopes that 2000AD would purchase the reprint rights from DC, thereby giving me a little more money and exposing Lobo to a wider public.

Q: Can we expect any more Batman/Dredd crossovers?

A: It's quite possible, but I don't know if I or John Wagner... No-one's going to take Dredd away from John, but they took Batman away from me. I have a problem with the way that they did it, but I don't have any problems about them doing it.

When me and Wagner and Pat Mills and the rest of the writers started writing for 2000AD, all the writers that had been successful on comics like BATTLE and ROY OF THE ROVERS suddenly couldn't get jobs any more. The editor of 2000AD didn't want them, they were the old generation. It didn't matter how great they were or how superb their craftsmanship was, there were no jobs for them anymore, and the same thing's happening now.

I've been told, although I don't know the truth of it, that DC have a new policy that's been introduced by stealth of shedding all artists and writers over the age of 50. Unfortunately, by one year, I fall into that category. That was the most explanation that I ever got for being taken off Batman. The first thing Bob Schreck did when he took over from Denny O'Neill was to fire everybody. Denny O'Neill obviously fired me and Doug Moench and the rest of us before this happened, but the first thing Bob Schreck did was to fire just about everybody that Denny O'Neill had hired. Jordan Gorfinkel, Scott Peterson, Darren Vincenzo, Devin Grayson, Larry Hama, they've all been fired off Batman projects. None of them are working for Batman anymore.

Q: Do you think humour and making comics a laugh for kids is important, as opposed to going for the adult audience?

A: It is for me. I enjoy reading adult comics written by other people - for instance, Alan Moore. I can't say Neil Gaiman because I don't think I've ever enjoyed a comic that Neil's written. I'm not saying they're not very well written, I'm sure that they are, but I don't rate him as a comics writer, whereas Alan Moore or Grant Morrison I would rate very highly, and they can write stories for adults. But I personally don't want to write stories for adults. There's plenty of stuff for adults, I want to write stuff for kids, I want to twist kid's minds, I want to show them the nightmare world they're getting into. Not that it makes any difference, because you lot have been reading about it for 20 odd years and we're in the nightmare world now.

I like humour, I like reading humorous material and I like writing humorous material. I consider I've written a good story if people come up to me and say, "I had a good laugh at that". Although occasionally, and especially with Judge Anderson, I've written serious stories and people have come up to me, particularly girls, and told me they were in tears by the end of the story. Well, I received my training as a writer writing for romantic magazines, and it gives me quite a good feeling to make someone cry at the end of the story, because that was what you wanted at the end of a romantic story. You want all these teenage girls to be crying their eyes out. "That's the saddest story I've ever read. Just when it looked like they were going to get married the bastard went and got cancer," or run over or something like that.

At one time John Wagner and I decided we were being paid so little writing comics - and we were writing almost all of 2000AD, plus almost all the stories in EAGLE and some of the stories in BATTLE and ROY OF THE ROVERS under a variety of names - that we decided to break out of comics. Because we had all these romantic fiction contacts, we decided to break back into romantic fiction where, unlike comics, you're allowed to keep the copyright on everything that you write. We didn't actually write any finished stories, but we wrote several synopses for stories, but with John's involvement, every one of them had this weird humour to it, and every one of them was rejected by the romantic editors. "Our readers don't want to laugh, they want to cry."

So John and I never made it as romantic writers. Not for want of trying. We put quite a lot of work into it. We were determined to break out of comics, we thought comics were a ghetto. In many ways it still is.

Q: Is pulp more vital and alive than literary fiction?

A: I'm a great fan of pulp, I love stuff that's throwaway. I used to love reading science fiction books, and when I got to the end of it, giving it someone else and saying, I don't need it back, pass it on to somebody else when you're finished. I think comics, to a large extent, have got too far away from their pulp background. This is maybe just a historical process and it may be something that couldn't have been prevented under any circumstances, but for me, 2000AD has gone too far from its pulp origins. I like to see that pulpiness, that spontaneity, that sense of fun about the whole thing, I'd like to see it back again.

Andrew Wheeler is a London-based entertainment journalist.

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