THE SHADOW OF NEMESIS
Special thanks to comic artist Dave Broughton who recently drew this picture of me looking surprisingly youthful. And with an old-school typewriter to match!
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It’s good to see Nemesis is still watching over me. I still miss him greatly.
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But there are new demons and new villains like Torquemada in the pipeline. Notably SLAYER and the LORD PROTECTOR DROGEDA in SPACE WARP. See millsverse.com/spacewarp.
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Current ETA on Space Warp?  I’d say Spring next year.
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Well said, Andrew. I like your metaphor. And the evidence is the way that it’s mostly Golden Age material that gets collected now. More recent work rarely gets a look in. Maybe they’ll try fracking next!
Hi Pat,
Apropos of nothing (but possibly inspired by this page’s excellent portrait by Dave Broughton), it occurred to me that it would be fascinating to read a post from you about how it feels once you leave the editorship of a comic that you’ve created.
Having expended so much creative energy to bring it into existence, is there an editorial version of post-partum depression, or are you more than happy to pass the infant on before she, inevitably, starts shacking up with another comic who doesn’t meet your parental expectations?
‘Tornado’, for example? I’d have dug the shotgun out for that lad, I tell you.
Hi, Andrew, that’s very observant of you. My original plan was to keep my distance from 2000AD, just as I’d kept my distance from Battle and Action. So I had zero contact with 2000AD after I left for maybe 3 months. But they slowly lured me back with one story and then another – helping John on Dredd by writing Rico, Cursed Earth, working on Starlord and so forth. My way of coping with things like Tornado was never to look at them and that’s something I’ve sustained over the years. So, for example, I never saw the Junior Judge Dredd (ugh!) or, more recently, the younger 2000AD. If I had, I’d probably have commented and perhaps in the way you suggested! I know many other long term 2000AD creators have dealt with their subsequent departure from a comic they loved in similar ways. They cut themselves off from the comic and so it’s often – very understandably – a taboo subject in conversation. It’s a shame but that’s what happens when all rights are sold. On an all rights comics, you either piss stuff off and don’t care. Or work in a very tight creative bubble. Or ultimately leave and cut yourself off from your past. None of this does the comic any good, of course, although this doesn’t bother Rebellion or any of its predecessors in the slightest. Possibly because they think there’s always a new creative generation to take our place – although that’s increasingly unlikely these days. Or, if things go sour, and ‘the goose stops laying the golden eggs’ (to quote one of them from Egmont days) well,their jobs and pensions are still secure.
Thanks for your reply, Pat.
The quote ‘the goose that lays the golden eggs’ is very illustrative. I suspect, however, that successive publishers of 2000ad have chosen the wrong metaphor, with evidently-disastrous results: 2000ad was never a gold-laying goose, it was a mother-lode created by yourself and other writers decades ago, which has been mined (almost to depletion) for inspiration ever since.