NBC's advertising chief Dan Lovinger considered the ads to be a way to "enhance the excitement" of the presentation for families.

(meta data) TITLE: Walmart Ads for NBC's "Sound of Music" Will Sound Just Like the Show – Variety

Read Next: Kirsten Dunst Talks 'Little Women,' 'Interview With a Vampire' Reboots

# Walmart Ads for NBC's "Sound of Music" Will Sound Just Like the Show

## NBC creates special Walmart ads that use the famous play's tunes - in moments just after the songs appear in the show

Tonight on NBC, some of the ads will be alive with the sounds of "The Sound of Music."

As the Peacock makes an attempt to draw eyeballs this evening at 8 p.m. ET with a live broadcast of the famous 1959 musical, retail giant Walmart will air customized ads featuring the Brooks family of Gardner, Kansas, which has 12 children, all doing activities to the strains of the popular tunes from the play.

Indeed, Walmart will air five thirty-second ads in all, each timed to run just after the song being featured in each spot has been sung in the show.

NBC hopes the show will bring families together and "kind of wanted this to enhance the excitement," said Dan Lovinger, exec veep of entertainment ad sales at NBCU.

"The idea is to create these customized vignettes around this real-life family that correspond to and mirror what is going on in the show."

The ads will use oft-sung tunes such as "My Favorite Things," "So Long, Farewell," and "Do-Re-Mi" – all featuring the Brooks clan using products from Walmart.

In one ad, the family will be shown cooking in the kitchen while a bag full of groceries purchased at Walmart is on display.

The last spot of the evening will feature the parents trying to get the kids to sleep as they all use electronic devices available for purchase at Walmart.

"So Long, Farewell," will play as the scene unfolds.

NBC was not able to say whether the Walmart ads will run immediately after the broadcast cuts to an ad break – where they would have the most relevance – or deeper in the mix of promotions that run in each commercial interruption.

Viewers will be told at the outset of the program that the live broadcast of "Sound of Music" is being presented by Walmart.

NBC created the ads internally, Lovinger said.

Walmart showed interest in the program after NBC announced it would run a live broadcast of the play featuring singer Carrie Underwood in the lead role during its upfront presentation to advertisers last May.

NBC actually went out and found the family after a four-day casting effort in September.

NBC and Walmart have teamed up previously on family-friendly fare: In 2010, the retailer and Procter & Gamble joined with NBC to create a TV movie, "Secrets of the Mountain," that aimed to offer an alternative to what the advertisers viewed as an increase in risqué fare on the boob tube

After "Mountain" ran in April, a similar effort, "The Jensen Project," aired in July of that year.

Broadcasts of the films featured both ads from each company as well as placements of their products and logos in the content itself.

The three-hour live broadcast of "The Sound of Music," set to take place from a soundstage on Long Island, N.Y., is an ambitious project for the Peacock in the weeks before Christmas.

It is one of a number of live "spectaculars" being mounted by TV networks in an attempt to draw in the broad audiences that have become more difficult to find as viewers use new technology to watch the programming that interests them at times of their own choosing.

Discovery Channel found success earlier this year with a live broadcast of aerialist Nik Wallenda walking a tightrope over a gorge in the vicinity of the Grand Canyon.

The soundtrack for the live broadcast has been pre

recorded and the commercials afford the show, produced by Craig Zadan and Craig Meron, a comfort zone of sorts for costume and set changes.

Walmart's ads would be hard to use in any other program, but marketers have demonstrated an increasing interest in crafting commercials for very specific occasions, when the circumstances warrant.

During ABC's 2010 broadcast of the series finale of "Lost," for example, Target ran commercials that played off popular elements from the enigmatic series.

One Target spot made reference to the popular "smoke monster" that inhabited the island at the center of the drama, then reminded viewers a smoke detector at Target cost as little as $10.99.

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He also praised the involvement of Underwood as the star of the production, believing that she was a quick learner, and "has all of the qualities of Maria." Greenblatt was highly supportive of the project, as he was, in the words of Zadan, a "passionate devotee of theater". Zadan considered the production to be "one of the profoundly complicated, amazing experiences we’ve ever had", noting the additional challenges created by the live broadcast.
 Promoted by NBC as a "three-hour holiday event", "The Sound of Music Live!" was aired as part of a push by NBC to air more live entertainment specials. Among its most popular programs in recent years have been those with live components (such as "The Voice" and "Sunday Night Football"); NBC's Jennifer Salke believed that the increased level of social network interaction possible in a live broadcast, along with the feeling of being part of an "event", would encourage viewers to watch the special live instead of on-demand or from a recording. NBC's previous attempt at event television, "The Million Second Quiz", was met with mixed reviews and viewership, but NBC did indicate that Subway's advertising throughout the series brought a higher level of awareness to the brand. The television special was also the first live musical special in almost fifty years on NBC. Retail chain Walmart served as the presenting sponsor for "The Sound of Music Live!". NBC also produced five themed Walmart commercials to air throughout the special, featuring scenes of a family using products from the store set to songs from "The Sound of Music". The five ads were timed to air during the commercial break following the scene where the song was featured.


(meta data) TITLE: Mavericks Release Rashad Vaughn, Donte Ingram | Hoops Rumors

Damian Lillard, DeMar DeRozan Out Of World Cup

Spurs Hire Tim Duncan As Assistant Coach

# Mavericks Release Rashad Vaughn, Donte Ingram

October 11th 2018 at 4:23pm CST by Luke Adams

Three days after signing them, the Mavericks have waived Rashad Vaughn and Donte Ingram, both of whom were on non-guaranteed contracts.

Dallas confirmed the cuts today in a press release.

While Vaughn and Ingram didn't spend much time with the Mavericks, they could be in line for a stint with Dallas' G League club, the Texas Legends.

Unless another team signs them once they clear waivers on Saturday, Vaughn and Ingram are eligible to become affiliate players for the Mavs and could earn bonuses worth up to $50K.

Vaughn was the Bucks' first-round pick in 2015 and has played a total of 139 NBA games since then.

In 28 games for the Bucks, Nets and Magic last season, Vaughn averaged 2.3 PPG in 7.6 MPG.

He played for the Heat's Summer League teams in Las Vegas and Sacramento this offseason.

Ingram, meanwhile, went undrafted in June after playing four years for Loyola University Chicago.

He started 38 games as a senior and averaged 11.0 PPG and 6.4 RPG in 30.6 MPG.

He also appeared in five games for the Bulls' Las Vegas Summer League team in July, averaging 6.0 PPG, 4.8 RPG and 1.4 APG in 26.8 MPG.

Dallas' roster now sits at 17 players — 15 on standard NBA contracts and a pair on two-way deals.

Categories:Dallas Mavericks Donte Ingram Rashad Vaughn Transactions

Top StoriesNBA Conducting Investigation Of TamperingBrian Wright Becomes Spurs GMSagaba Konate Signs With RaptorsDamian Lillard, DeMar DeRozan Out Of

World CupJaylen Brown, Julius Randle Invited To Team USA CampRockets Sign Ben McLemoreInside Kawhi Leonard's Path To The ClippersSpurs

Hire Tim Duncan As Assistant Coach Recent Posts

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Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Primed To Be OKC's Point Guard Of The Future

Brandon Goodwin, Hawks Agree To Two-Way Deal

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And-Ones: Zion, World Cup, Schedule, Marinkovic

Raptors Sign Oshae Brissett To Exhibit 10 Deal

Rookie Scale Option Decisions For 2019/20

Desktop Version | Switch To Mobile Version

Professional career.:NBA G League (2018–2019).

On October 8, 2018, the Mavericks announced they signed Vaughn to a training camp deal.


(meta data) TITLE: Mavericks Release Rashad Vaughn, Donte Ingram | Hoops Rumors

Damian Lillard, DeMar DeRozan Out Of World Cup

Spurs Hire Tim Duncan As Assistant Coach

# Mavericks Release Rashad Vaughn, Donte Ingram

October 11th 2018 at 4:23pm CST by Luke Adams

Three days after signing them, the Mavericks have waived Rashad Vaughn and Donte Ingram, both of whom were on non-guaranteed contracts.

Dallas confirmed the cuts today in a press release.

While Vaughn and Ingram didn't spend much time with the Mavericks, they could be in line for a stint with Dallas' G League club, the Texas Legends.

Unless another team signs them once they clear waivers on Saturday, Vaughn and Ingram are eligible to become affiliate players for the Mavs and could earn bonuses worth up to $50K.

Vaughn was the Bucks' first-round pick in 2015 and has played a total of 139 NBA games since then.

In 28 games for the Bucks, Nets and Magic last season, Vaughn averaged 2.3 PPG in 7.6 MPG.

He played for the Heat's Summer League teams in Las Vegas and Sacramento this offseason.

Ingram, meanwhile, went undrafted in June after playing four years for Loyola University Chicago.

He started 38 games as a senior and averaged 11.0 PPG and 6.4 RPG in 30.6 MPG.

He also appeared in five games for the Bulls' Las Vegas Summer League team in July, averaging 6.0 PPG, 4.8 RPG and 1.4 APG in 26.8 MPG.

Dallas' roster now sits at 17 players — 15 on standard NBA contracts and a pair on two-way deals.

Categories:Dallas Mavericks Donte Ingram Rashad Vaughn Transactions

Top StoriesNBA Conducting Investigation Of TamperingBrian Wright Becomes Spurs GMSagaba Konate Signs With RaptorsDamian Lillard, DeMar DeRozan Out Of

World CupJaylen Brown, Julius Randle Invited To Team USA CampRockets Sign Ben McLemoreInside Kawhi Leonard's Path To The ClippersSpurs

Hire Tim Duncan As Assistant Coach Recent Posts

Northwest Notes: Wiggins, Coaching Additions, Bradley

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander Primed To Be OKC's Point Guard Of The Future

Brandon Goodwin, Hawks Agree To Two-Way Deal

Karl-Anthony Towns Talks Changes In Minnesota, False Narratives Off The Court

And-Ones: Zion, World Cup, Schedule, Marinkovic

Raptors Sign Oshae Brissett To Exhibit 10 Deal

Rookie Scale Option Decisions For 2019/20

Desktop Version | Switch To Mobile Version

On October 8, 2018, the Mavericks announced they signed Vaughn to a training camp deal. He was waived.


He earned a two-year World Snooker Tour card.

(meta data) TITLE: Xu Si - World Snooker

2018 International Championship Last 128

The Chinese prospect reached his maiden ranking event semi-final at the 2017 Indian Open.

He won five matches before a 4-2 defeat against eventual winner John Higgins.

Xu became World Under 21 Champion in 2016, beating Switzerland's Alexander Ursenbacher in the final.

The victory secured him a two-year card on the World Snooker Tour.

2017 International Championship Last 128

Prior to turning professional, Xu began playing in minor-ranking Asian Players Tour Championship from age 15, and his first appearance at a ranking event was in the wildcard round of the 2014 Shanghai Masters where he was whitewashed 5-0 by Ryan Day. He also made a wildcard appearance at the 2016 World Open where he defeated veteran James Wattana 5-3 or progress to the last 64, where he lost in the next round against Daniel Wells. He made a further appearance at the 2016 Shanghai Masters wildcard round where he lost 5-1 to Michael Holt. He then won two matches at the 2016 International Championship, defeating professionals Wang Yuchen at the wildcard stage, and two-time world champion Mark Williams in the last 64 before losing to Wattana in the last 32. He lost out in the first round of qualifying for the 2017 World Snooker Championship, losing 10-5 to Rod Lawler.
 In August 2016 Xu won the 2016 IBSF World Under-21 Snooker Championship by defeating Alexander Ursenbacher 6-5 after being 5-3 down.


Prior to turning professional, Xu began playing in minor-ranking Asian Players Tour Championship from age 15, and his first appearance at a ranking event was in the wildcard round of the 2014 Shanghai Masters where he was whitewashed 5-0 by Ryan Day. He also made a wildcard appearance at the 2016 World Open where he defeated veteran James Wattana 5-3 or progress to the last 64, where he lost in the next round against Daniel Wells. He made a further appearance at the 2016 Shanghai Masters wildcard round where he lost 5-1 to Michael Holt. He then won two matches at the 2016 International Championship, defeating professionals Wang Yuchen at the wildcard stage, and two-time world champion Mark Williams in the last 64 before losing to Wattana in the last 32. He lost out in the first round of qualifying for the 2017 World Snooker Championship, losing 10-5 to Rod Lawler.
 In August 2016 Xu won the 2016 IBSF World Under-21 Snooker Championship by defeating Alexander Ursenbacher 6-5 after being 5-3 down. He earned a two-year World Snooker Tour card.


Wagner asked Grant if he could help him write the "Tarzan" comic he was working on.

The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls.

At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer.

View the web archive through the Wayback Machine.

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The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20120213134202/http://www.2000ad.org/?zone=droid&page=interview&choice=6

Alan Grant is one of the comics industry's most respected writers.

amiable but forthright Scot with a wicked sense of humour, he first rose to

prominence writing Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog for British

weekly 2000AD with his friend John Wagner.

for his work on Batman: Shadow of the Bat and Lobo.

I tracked his down to his home in Essex - a stunningly beautiful 14th century

converted church, complete with stained-glass windows and a sensory-deprivation

tank in the sanctuary (I kid you not) - and started off by asking him how his

I answered an ad in the papers for "trainee journalists".

DC Thompson was a very patriarchal company to work for.

work there for life, and in return they would really look after you.

Wagner, Pat Mills and I all benefited from the fact that they gave you a

thorough training in all aspects of editorial work.

around from department to department; you were encouraged to learn other

people's jobs rather than just doing the one

My very first job in journalism - I was 18 years old - was working for DC

Thompson in what they called their General Fiction Department, and the first

week that I worked there, I was given the horoscope column to write for the

So I was Madam Gypsy Rose Lee or whatever it was...

guess it's quite a good way to learn, because it requires a certain creativity

And I know that Wagner and several other of my

friends who went through the Thompson set-up - we all ended up doing the same

You start slipping little messages in like, "Pisces: a close relative is

in danger" or "Taurus: it may be unwise to leave the house today..."

Another of my early jobs was, I was given a 75,000 word paperback novel which

they had for serialisation in their afternoon newspaper, but it was serialised

in like ten chunks of 750 words - so my job was to cut 75,000 word novel down to

wants to be a writer - they should start doing that.

any Stephen King book is always a good start, and go through it and cut it by

Then read it again, and see if it still makes sense as a story.

Okay, the early days of 2000AD - what was it like behind the scenes?

Well, not only was I behind the scenes, I was behind the scenes approximately

500 miles from where it was happening, because I was living in Scotland at the

time, and I didn't have anything to do with 2000AD other than the fact that I

was a friend of John Wagner and Pat Mills.

American comics, and had been for about the previous ten years

and Jack Kirby started the Golden Age of Marvel, I had been a Marvel Comics fan,

So John and Pat visited me with a view to

looking through all the American comics to see if there was anything that they

And it was quite funny because they went though -

I'm not saying they read them all, but they certainly flicked through many many

hundreds of American comics, and at the end of the day they said that there's

nothing there that they could use in 2000AD!

the thing that actually came closest to being any kind of consideration for a

2000AD-type story was 'Deathlok The Demolisher', which was actually very

intelligently done when it first came out.

When I was kid, I grew up on a mixture of British and American comics.

when I was eleven years old - 1960 I think it was - Marvel launched The

Fantastic Four, The Sub-Mariner, The Avengers, The X-Men and everything, and I

gave up all other comics and became a Marvel comic reader.

British comic again until 2000AD actually came out, so I never saw any copies of

John and Pat were working in comics, because when they left DC Thompson, they

went down to London and started working on the humour division at Fleetway or

IPC, whereas I had ended up somehow at DC Thompson at Romantic Fiction

went down to London, I ended up working for magazines like Honey and Loving and

Love Affair and Mirabelle and Valentine and God knows what else.

So when I eventually left IPC to go freelance, it wasn't

comics I was thinking of writing at all.

myself - how to write women's fiction, and I became a women's fiction writer, I

I wrote stuff like 'I Stole To Have An Abortion', 'My Boyfriend Was A

Hell's Angel', 'I Threw My Baby Off The London Train'... These were all first

My first ever comics story was printed round about then, I think it was in a

It was a romantic story, although even then there was

traditional romance story with a touch of horror, so people get stabbed and

It wasn't a normal story - which was I guess why they bought

The British 'Action' comic was withdrawn for being too violent, even

though they'd hit on a hugely popular formula.

carry-through from Action to 2000AD - like, 'This time it's got to be science

Well definitely, but I think the 'It's got to be science fiction' came from

Kelvin Gosnell, who worked quite closely with Pat.

involved in the creation of 2000AD, or he came along very soon afterwards.

was already working for something like Buster as what they would call an 'art

If the artist had tried to slip something through, like in the

background drawing a pair of breasts on a statue, it was the bodger's job to go

through it and white out things like that, or if the artist had signed the work,

it was the bodger's job to go through looking for signatures and white them out.

So Kevin was doing that kind of thing on Buster when 2000AD was started, and he

soon gravitated on to become Art Assistant.

Gosnell and Kevin O'Neill, although I believe it was Pat's brain-child and he

was the carry-through between Action and 2000AD. Because, having been the editor

of Action, he saw what the right type of story could do.

Now, almost all if not all of the stories in Action, as I recall, were based

on things which were culturally popular at the time, but which weren't

necessarily available to kids of Action-reader age.

instance, was their version of Jaws, and of course it was actually much more

But the kids weren't allowed to see Jaws because it

had an X or an A certificate, I dunno how they work these things.

tough cop in the manner of Clint Eastwood in the Dirty Harry movies, for

instance, which again were forbidden to kids

tie-up between things that were forbidden to kids and what was going on in

popular culture, and when they switched to 2000AD, I think it was Kelvin who

pointed out that the Star Wars movies were being made at that time, and that

they were expected to be huge, and that they should go down the path of science

It's remarkable that 2000AD has lasted almost 20 years, you know,

particularly with the amount of bitterness they've caused between themselves and

nearly everybody who's ever worked for them...

You've done a lot of writing in partnership with John Wagner.

I got a job working editorially on 2000AD when Steve McManus was the editor,

and John was writing Dredd and Strontium Dog and Robo-Hunter at the time.

sharing a house with him, so he was using me as a sounding board for his ideas

When I left Fleetway, I didn't actually leave to go freelance.

was offered another job with a guy who published puzzle magazines, and it wasn't

a great job but the money was 50% more than Fleetway were paying me.

turned up on the Monday morning at the offices to start this job, and there was

a guy I didn't recognise there, and I said "Hi, I'm Alan, I'm looking for

And the guy had sold out the week before,

That was how I ended up as a freelance writer.

freelance writer, but I had just arrived to start my job and there's no job.

And as fortune - or ill-fortune - would have it, at the

time John Wagner was suffering from some kind of illness, and he wasn't able to

maintain his obligations to write for 2000AD, so he asked if I could help him

We were sharing a house, so we were sitting around at night talking about

It made sense to formalise it and that was it, we started

We had been friends for, I dunno, a decade before that, so we

knew each other quite well, and I have to say that although I've tried writing

with several other partners, since John and I ceased writing together on a

regular basis, it's never worked out as well.

Is there a significant difference in the work you produce with him and the

Humour material is always better when there are two of you working on it.

That's why so many famous TV shows and funny movies were written by two people,

not because you get an instant reaction. Whereas if you're working on something

of a serious nature or something that means something to you or has a message

that you personally want to say, if another person is involved in the writing of

that, then the whole work becomes a matter of compromise, and you end up saying

I think John and I can pinpoint the exact moment our partnership... it didn't

fail, we stopped before it failed, but it started to falter.

Last American for Epic, with Mike McMahon as the artist, and we spent a whole

day working on something, and at the end of the day we had actually written two

pages less than we had when we started, because we had argued so much

At the same time we were writing the end of the Chopper in Oz story, and we

had - very unusually for us, because John and I don't usually disagree - but we

had a vehement argument about what should happen at the end of Chopper.

wanted Chopper to win the race, and escape from Dredd.

the race and for Dredd not only to shoot him dead but to shoot him in the back

And John's agenda was, he wanted Chopper brought up as a hero, whereas my agenda

was that I wanted Dredd painted as even more of a bastard than he already was.

And shooting Chopper in the back - I don't think he would ever have been

Anyway, we split up at that time and John actually

wrote the last instalment of the story himself.

Do you think the younger readers pick up on the irony in Dredd - the fact

Sometimes it seems to me that the irony escapes the older readers as

well! It's a really hard one for me to comment on, because when me and John

write the story, obviously we know exactly what we are getting at, and obviously

we know that there are two layers to it, and obviously we know if we're being

But we can't interpret it through anyone else's eyes.

But as you say - and I suppose it is particularly

with younger readers - the irony escapes them.

what makes Judge Dredd popular, and I figure it's because nearly everybody would

like to break many of the stupid laws which we have, but they're afraid to do

And instead of that fear translating into rebellion, it's translated in a

more politically correct way which is enjoying other people being

And it's like, watching criminals being punished has now become the major

It's like every channel, every night, you've got

programmes where the hero is our drug squads or the bill or customs and excise

men - anybody that wears a uniform is a hero.

are always shown to have no redeeming graces, like for instance if they're after

heroin guys, these guys are smuggling in forty tons of heroin and it's gonna

kill all the children in Europe and stuff like that.

With Judge Dredd, we used to think that it was a satire on that sort of

used to say, "Well, Dredd is a pointer towards the way the world's going, and if

you're not careful, that's what we're going to end up with."

Dredd's set up in something like the year 2115, the horror is we've actually

come up with Dredd laws now - almost all the world is under oppressive

I don't know if something like, say, the Internet can prevent this, with the

Information can spread faster than the authorities can

The authorities are all in the business of stopping the

spread of information, so they can control it.

because then the worst excesses of Judge Dredd would be avoided.

For instance, at the end of The Apocalypse War, we had Dredd do a really

He forced the East-Megs to select the centre of their city and

then detonate a nuclear device in it, killing millions, as if the lives of all

And actually, the way the world is, to the

authorities - to all authorities - lives don't mean anything at all.

They will kill all of us if they have to,

if they thought that it would do them any good.

Never mind all the rhetorical "do it for the good of

I saw Howard Chaykin's got a new comic out called Cyberella, and I saw that

he starts the story off with a quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger, saying that 95%

of the people in the world are sheep, and need to be told what to do.

Now, to a certain extent I can accept that.

the people who think they should be telling the other 95% what to do are people

That's where the horror comes into it, because

people like him believe that they have a right to tell other people what

Nobody has a right to tell anybody what to do, as long as their action

What did you think of the Judge Dredd movie?

Well, now you're asking... Firstly, I feel pissed off that by the time they

got around to asking John Wagner and I if we were interested in having a go at

writing a screenplay for it, they had already had fourteen screenplays written.

When they called us, we spent six weeks working on it, and we finally figured

out what we thought was the way to make Judge Dredd palatable to a mass

So we called the studio, and they immediately said, "Fax it to us,"

and we said, "Well, we've spent six weeks working on this, we wanna know if

"We'll talk about pay after we've got the idea," and

we said "No, that's what you're paying for, the idea," and they said "Well, fuck

I have lost count of the number of times that I've been phoned up by people

from the film world saying, "I've got a great new 'in' to this studio, I've got

a great new source of finance, or whatever, and we need ideas to get it started

At the moment, the people who have the option to the Lobo movie have had at

least three screenplays written, and all three of them - which I have seen,

although I'm not supposed to have - are total shite.

first twenty minutes of the movie, Lobo's a really bad bastard, doing all the

And then you get a scene of Lobo in a hospital

where his grandmother is dying, and it turns out that the reason he's committing

all these crimes and carnage and atrocity is because he loves the old lady so

much, and she's on this rarest drug in the galaxy...

So Keith Geffen and I decided we'd had enough, and we've done a treatment for

a Lobo movie off our own backs, send it in to the studio, and the feedback that

we got back from everybody except the executives is that it's great, this is the

But the feedback that we get back from the

executives is "Oh, well, we're not sure about this.

we're used to working with professional movie writers."

the editors I was talking about earlier.

purpose is to justify their own existence rather than to make money or produce

(laughter) Right, the finished product, the Dredd movie! I thought

that visually it was very good, I thought Kevin Walker and the guy who did Mean

Machine, Chris Halls, they did a marvellous job, it looked really great.

kernel of what was wrong with the movie is the fact that, instead of telling Sly

Stallone, "You're being paid nine million dollars for this, Sly! Act the part of

Judge Dredd!" - Sly said, "I'm being paid nine million dollars for this - write

Judge Dredd to fit my pre-existing character."

tough-guy, Judge Dredd had to be a nice tough-guy.

I mean you can put it another way and say, what

they were trying to do was gloss over the fact that Judge Dredd is a fascist,

because they figure you can't have a fascist as a hero.

Now, I haven't seen the Tank Girl movie, but I've read the comic adaptation,

and they changed the essence of Tank Girl.

shit which she'd never had, and it made her into something which she wasn't.

Tank Girl was Tank Girl because she was anarchic, and they tried to give an

anarchic character a structure, and of course the movie was gonna be a failure.

If you look at the one character that has been a consistent hit in the

movies, it's Batman, and that's because they haven't changed the essence of

Batman. Batman is still an obsessed loner who fights crime because his parents

were killed in front of him when he was a child.

They made the Joker the guy who did it, but that didn't matter - the

basic kernel of Batman is at the centre.

, they changed what was at the core of Tank Girl.

any of these versions of Lobo that they've got scripts for so far, they'll have

changed the essence of Lobo, and it'll be a failure.

It's like Hollywood trying to cash in on teen crazes - you just know, you

just need to hear the title of it to know they're not in step with the audience

happened in the Dredd movie, they didn't get it.

and it's hard to do, but had they come to John and I at the start, when they

first decided to make a movie - if they'd said, "Do you wanna have some input on

this," we could have corrected every mistake that they made all the way along.

Instead of an eighty-five million dollar failure, they could have had an

But there you go - as I say, it's easier to say

that, and it's a lot harder to have proved it at the time.

with Lobo, and it'll be a lot harder to do it.

The Bogie Man was an extremely funny independent comic about an escaped

lunatic who thinks he is Humphrey Bogart, set in modern-day Glasgow.

You'll have to forgive my perception of time, I can't tell you what year this

was, but the first year that DC started looking for British talent, they sent

Dick Giordano over to this country to interview people who might want to go to

I think they called people like Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons,

John Wagner and I decided that we should get in on this trend as

well, and we came up with this character who was a detective.

actually set I believe in New York, and it was The Bogie Man.

I think that at that time Ian Gibson, we wanted him to be the artist on it,

but he read the script and he wasn't amused.

"No, we don't publish this kind of thing."

O'Neill, and he said, "No, we don't do this."

Vertigo, I guess that it could have been published by Vertigo.

Anyway, it just languished in a file, and we thought no more about it, until

it was announced that Glasgow was going to be the European City of Culture.

Robin Smith and John McShane, who owned AKA Comics in Glasgow, were talking, and

John McShane was saying that Glasgow was gonna get world-wide publicity because

and really they should publish a Glasgow comic.

bright idea - he remembered this Bogie Man thing that John and I had done and he

said, "Would that work if you set it in Glasgow?"

It probably worked much better in Glasgow than in New York.

It was much funnier than it would have been if we'd done

John McShane with his partner George set up

a company called Fat Man Press, and they published the first Bogie Man

However, because of a series of misunderstandings and the fact that

they didn't realise that publishing is as hard as it is to make a profit in,

I believe that at 28,000 copies, The Bogie Man's

still the best-selling independent comic ever in this country.

50,000 copies were stolen from a warehouse, the comic shop

was broken into and thousand Bogie Man T-shirts were stolen - y'know, just a

whole load of things like that, and the publisher's budget ran out.

didn't actually appear until a year after issue 1, and nothing is hot enough to

Channel Four, BBC and Scottish Television approached us to

buy Bogie Man for television, and because the publisher was acting as our

agent - that was normal in these cases - and as we didn't have any

first-hand knowledge of either STV or Channel Four, we chose the BBC.

Bogie Man as you know is a farce, and it is impossible to translate

But at the time, Robbie Coltrane wanted to escape his comic actor

image and he insisted that Bogie Man be written to give emotional depth to

So that instead of just being a lunatic, he was a lunatic

with a purpose, a lunatic for a reason, or a lunatic with a cause,

whole search for his father's death and all that sort of nonsense.

totally lost the farce-like intensity of it - and having watched the first

episode of Cracker, it was obvious from that that Robbie had found what he

just fucking left Bogie Man alone, ya bastard,

Because, like the Dredd movie, it turned into a hybrid.

and half of it, you're going, "What's all this about?" Whereas they should have

Because the first one was a flop in the ratings, it

meant that they didn't pick up on the Chinatoon story and they didn't pick up on

the Bogie Goes To Manhattan, and the fourth and final Bogie Man story - Return

To Casablanca - is still languishing in our Bogie file.

because we don't have a publisher for it.

We got excited about two years ago - Andy Helfer's Paradox Press decided that

they would like to publish Bogie Man in their little format books, and they told

us that if it was successful, they'd then commission Return To Casablanca for an

original Bogie novel, which is all we want to do.

that we want to tell, and just leave it there.

And the contract stipulates that we can't do a new version for any other

publisher until they've done their version

Although I can complain that I'm one of the only three people in the country

who's had a show on the BBC and hasn't been paid for it.

went bankrupt, so John and I haven't even got our writer's fee from the BBC!

A lot of your writing includes references to old movies.

I guess these were movies that we were brought up on, black and

From a writer's point of view, almost any movie which had Humphrey

Bogart or Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney, just having these people in them

did something to lift it above the normal quality.

say, the Three Stooges, although they're a bit slow compared to comedy now, and

Laurel and Hardy - if you can slow yourself down to that, in essence they're

much funnier than almost anything that I see now.

I was a kid that's the sort of thing I was seeing at the Saturday morning

matinee or whatever, but I've always had a great love for black and white

I was gonna say it's not just the nostalgia, but it might just be

I prefer black and white comics as well.

comics and to me a colour comic is an American comic, and when I see 2000AD now,

and I see that it's all painted colour, it looks like segments taken out of a

graphic novel rather than a vibrant, spontaneous weekly comic

feel that sort of put it in tune with the readers.

Well, Batman's always been my favourite comic character, even though I gave

up on DC Comics when Marvel launched The Fantastic Four etc. I didn't buy an DC

Comics for at least the next 20 years, so I'd no idea what was happening with

Batman, I learned about Neal Adams and stuff in retrospect.

and I had tried to get DC Comics interested in us, and DC Comics weren't

The first was Bogie Man, the second was Bob The

Galactic Bum, which they finally got around to doing last year, and the third

one was, I think, The Chronicles of Ghengis Grimtoad, which eventually was

mutated into a thing that Ian Gibson illustrated and that Marvel UK put out.

Anyway, they had turned them all down and John and I were at our wits end.

Totally out of the blue we got a call from Denny O'Neill saying, "I've just

taken over as Editor on Detective Comics, I'm looking for a new writing team.

I've read your Judge Dredd, we think you could do Batman in that kind of gritty

So we did The Ventriloquist story, and he said okay, you've got the job.

John and I wrote another three together before John decided to pull out.

Sales of Detective were below the break-even point, and I believe that even

though it was DC's oldest comic, they were considering closing Detective Comics

down at that time, because it was selling so badly

But then the first Batman movie came out with its

attendant hype, and sales of Detective Comics went up by close to a thousand per

From that high point they fell gradually over the next couple of years,

but then they took off again when the Knightfall thing started in Batman.

I like it because Batman has always been my favourite character.

surprised that I'm still working on it after all this time, and in an ideal

world I would actually have gone to work on something else, but like everybody

else I've got the rent to pay, and it's not easy to give up a job if you haven't

So what kind of story would you like to do ideally?

Well, ideally I would like to do my own comic.

it is the way of the future for anti-authoritarian freelancers like myself, who

find that many editors are so fucking stupid that they could do it themselves.

believe that self-publishing is the real answer.

spent my entire working life, or almost all my working life, as a freelance,

which means that I am dependent on other people coming to me with characters and

saying, "Could you write a story about this character for us?" To self-publish

something means that I've got to come up with a character of my own, which is

And I think it would be easier to do that when

you're young and at the start of your career rather than suddenly having to do

it - not when you're thinking of retiring, but you know what I mean?

years old, and the older you get, the harder it gets to make any kind of change

So ideally, I've got things worked out for it, I've got artists planned, I've

spoken to artists, and they keep trying to gee me into doing it, I've got plans

And it would not be to please anybody except for me.

If people don't like it, they could fuck off and not buy it.

it, that would be okay, but at the end of the day I would still be able to say,

have been partially developed, but because of my regular work, which I've got to

do to make a living, I don't have the time to devote to it that I would like to

However, I'm hoping that after this summer...

I'm doing the junior novelisation for the new Batman movie, and they've asked

have always been on the lookout for alternatives to comics, and we have tried,

you would not believe how hard we've tried.

stories which are published by Hamlin and Purnell and various other publishers.

We tried doing some stuff for radio which didn't work out, we tried doing some

stuff for TV which hasn't worked out yet, although we've got a brilliant idea

for a situation comedy, the best sitcom since The Young Ones, in fact.

well-developed, there's only the last part of it to be done, but every time we

sit down and start on it, something seems to happen.

We've tried a gag strip for The Daily Mirror and The Sun, both of which had

the same reaction to it - "We thought it was hilarious, it made us laugh out

it would upset too many of our readers."

because I've been involved in this business long enough to know that ideas are

Everybody who works in this business should have a hundred ideas a

The hard part is firstly, finding a good idea, and secondly, putting that

And this gag-strip that John and I did for the

newspapers, I'm not saying it would be a phenomenon, but it would be very

popular, just because of the nature of it

first it sold something like 250 copies and they were doing it as a home

It required the marketing deal to expose it to the audience that it

Instead of comics fans it was kids; obviously

It's galling that, having had an idea that has global potential, we can't

even get it published in this country because they're afraid that it'll upset

Although they themselves - they the editors - think it's funny -

so funny that they laughed out loud - they are trying to do it for the sake of

If they think it's funny, other people will think it's funny as well.

Anyway, it's not just cynicism, that - there's truth to it.

organisation has been set up - any group - it's almost impossible to get it to

close down again, whether its objectives have been achieved or not.

a life of its own which seeks to kill competition off at the roots.

It's what makes it harder for lots of these young kids to get into

comics now, although there are so many people looking for work that you could

almost put out a proper little comic aimed specifically at people who wanted to

I've thought about writing a book - "How I Made A Million

Writing Comics" - although I could call it "How I Made A Million Writing A Book

Called 'How I Made A Million Writing Comics'"!

It's interesting to hear you talk about self-publishing, because Alan

Moore has been talking about producing his own magazine...

I think that would be great, and it would be the perfect way in which to view

Alan and Alan's views, rather than filtering Alan through the medium of Image

Yeah, I sincerely believe it's the way of the future.

just that for anybody who's set in their ways, it's really difficult to break

out of them and break into self- publishing, and to a large extent economic

necessity is what's gonna drive people into it.

If you did do an anthology comic, what sort of stuff would you want to

I'm not telling you that - because then you'd go and do it! (laughter)

It's really easy to sit around and talk about something like that - the hard

However, let me put it this way - it wouldn't be a

case of "get the old guys together again to show what we could do".

a case of utilising the wannabes and the people who are on the point of making

There comes a point in everybody's would-be career

where, if their confidence isn't built up, everything goes downhill after that.

Now for me it was when that editor rejected my first comic stories when I was 17

He cost me ten years worth of comics writing.

I never tried comics writing again for ten years.

not what we want - but if you did this and that in the next thing and tried

something else", gave me encouragement, hope, optimism, it might have changed

I might have been writing Batman ten years before

So I feel really bad when I see other people

having difficulty, when they have talent.

Isn't this a risky time to develop a new comic?

greatest depression that the greatest opportunities arise.

off a successful comic, or successful line of comics, could be in at a turn of

, and they will be first, and they will make the most money out of it.

Fleetway in particular - and this isn't just their comics division - Fleetway is

renowned for being a follower rather than a leader.

motto, "Wait until somebody has a success, and then we put our vast resources

If you look at what Fleetway have done over the years,

they've hardly ever started any trends, but when a trend has started, they jump

Whoever starts the next trend, or whoever's in there at the start of the

next trend is gonna make a fortune out of it.

Even if you could predict it, it has to be something which

For a while it looked like Manga was going to be it,

but I watched half a dozen Manga movies, and figured, that's enough.

all that I ever want of it, so for me, it didn't really work.

What advice would you give to would-be comics writers?

First, if you believe in yourself, don't let anybody else put you off.

doesn't mean to say, don't listen to other people's advice, but don't let

anybody talk you out of it if you have a sincere belief in yourself.

Quite often when I write back to people who are trying to

get stuff accepted into the market, I use the example of a crime writer called

John Creasey, who did a character called The Toff, who you may not have heard

of, but he was quite popular I think in the 1950s.

tens of millions of copies in languages all over the world, but Creasey had 450

rejections from publishers for various stories before he got his first Toff

I don't know why it sold tens of millions of copies, but the point is he

believed in it enough to keep on doing it, and if you believe in your stuff then

It's very easy, and I speak from personal

experience, it's very easy to be put off.

A lot of the characters you've written tend to be outsiders.

part of yourself your own character coming through?

I love people in general, I love the idea of people and

I love the idea of Mankind living in harmony... but I find that on an individual

ideally, I would like to live on a secluded cliff-top fifty miles from the

nearest civilisation, and once a month I would go and get my groceries and that

The only people I would see would be the people who considered it

worth making the effort to make the journey.

So instead of some rocky island in the Atlantic, I live in

Do you feel a moral responsibility towards your readers?

I wouldn't write any story with a moral contrary to what I believe

(pause) I'm just trying to reconcile that with Lobo...

(laughter) You've got to treat Lobo the way that I treat him - he's a

He's a cartoon character, and DC don't accept this.

Lobo's part of the DC Universe and that he's a superhero, whereas I know that

Lobo's like Bugs Bunny, that's what Lobo is.

that, and consequently a lot of the stuff I write that is parody gets censored.

I don't know if you saw Lobo Goes To Hollywood, but that had to be re-written

Under American law, if something is stated to be a work of parody, for

instance National Lampoon or Mad Magazine, they have then got some amendment

under the American Constitution which protects their free speech to make parody

But unless DC announce that Lobo is a parody, Lobo doesn't enjoy

At the moment I believe that DC is being pursued by Johnny and

They're blues guitarists who were also pop stars during the late

They're albinos, they've got white hair and pink

eyes, and they're shit-hot blues guitarists.

Anyway, Joe Lansdale - I think in a Jonah Hex comic - as a tribute to

the Winter Brothers, used a pair of villains called the Winter Brothers who were

- and I quote, I think - "Pig-fucking cannibals".

course when this came out in print and the Winter Brothers saw it, they failed

to see it as the homage which Joe Lansdale meant it

I got a call from the editor of Lobo to say that he was in a bit of a

quandary because in an issue of Lobo that I did with Martin Emond, I had called

them Johnny and Edgar Summer, and although they weren't cannibals and they

weren't pig-fuckers, they were remarkable mainly for their stupidity...

(laughter) But the DC lawyers had sent a memo around asking everybody if

they had ever mentioned these brothers, and to let them know.

handed over, and since then Lobo scripts have been subjected to quite a lot of

There's one Lobo script - which was originally called "The

Hand-To-Hand Job"... (laughter) ... which was changed to something like

"It's A Man's World" and famous artist Frank Quitely who is doing the Flex

Mentallo stuff with Grant Morrison, he was the artist on it, so he did all the

They have got a 22-page Lobo sex story, which they refuse to

The guy gets kidnapped by this male-liberation

group because his exposure of the female body is responsible for female lib

This is one of these Iron John male-bonding groups who kidnap him and they're

gonna torture him, and Lobo is hired to get him back.

funny, but it's never going to see the light of day!

into quicksand, and he's in danger of drowning - even his great powers can't get

out of quicksand - so he gives the dog these detailed instructions - "You've

gotta go do this, get that and save me".

over the page, the dog's seen this female dog (laughter).

, and anyway, it gets involved its own adventure, and it's only on the

second to last page it remembers it has to go back and save Lobo.

artist drew the dog complete with bollocks in every picture, and in the pictures

where the dog has a secondary role, like something else is happening, he's drawn

the dog just sitting casually scratching itself and licking itself!

paid for it, but now they've binned it - they're never going to put it in an

You've described yourself as anti-authoritarian.

The way I see things, only an anti-authoritarian is capable of any

Almost all authority in today's world is corrupt.

The people in positions of power use deceit to get themselves elected,

manipulation to keep the masses enslaved, and force or threat of force to keep

Unfortunately, the example they set means that their evil

has spread to almost every part of life today.

How can anyone whose existence depends on deceiving or threatening or

assaulting other human beings possibly feel any sense of responsibility? Of

course, all authorities trot out the same irrational reasons for their psychotic

behaviour - they claim that everything they do is for the good of 'the state',

or 'the country', or ' the ruling ideology'.

reasoning which allows Deng to crush protestors with tanks, or Yeltsin to

slaughter 80,000 Chechenians, or John Major to keep the war alive in Northern

Look at it this way: when Fred West killed a dozen innocent people, he was

branded one of the most evil men in history.

speaking - behaviourally speaking - speaking from the point of view of all those

innocent dead people - which man is the more evil?

Or take the right-wing president of Albania, whose Shik secret police have

tortured and slain many tens of thousands of innocent people

been given billions of dollars by Britain, Europe and America, whose governments

were all aware that money would be used to kill his political opponents.

they gave that money anyway - they took it from honest, hardworking Brits like

you and me, gave it to a psychotic mass-murderer, and now they profess shock

The truth is, the authorities don't give a

shit how this dictator treats his 'subjects'.

them share a terrible secret - they would just as happily torture and kill their

own people if they thought that they had to.

In his book "The Insanity of Normality", America's top psychologist Dr Arno

Gruen remarks that he applied the test for psychotic behaviour used in mental

institutions to American presidents Bush and Nixon

Gruen concluded that, if they hadn't been politicians, they'd have been forcibly

Do you get the feeling that comics are diversifying now to seek out new

Oh yeah, yeah, and I think that quite a good job is being made of it in the

Although I used to be a science fiction fan, I'm not

particularly a science fiction fan any longer.

superhero fan, I'm not particularly a superhero fan any longer.

the soap opera which most superhero comics are

I'm 47 years old, I should be tired of it, y'know?

But the whole thing needs a fresh slant on it, in

the way that Frank Miller and Alan Moore gave the whole market a fresh slant

Miller's take on Batman took it back to its roots

but in a context that we could relate to.

Having said that, the other side of that coin is, very few people are

character creators, and you notice that characters like Batman and almost all of

the Marvel characters and almost all of the 2000AD characters were created by a

Wagner and Mills for 2000AD, Kirby for Marvel, and

Bob Kane and Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson on the Batman stuff.

that very few people have, to continue to spew out new characters and make them

And what I do and what most other people in this

business do is to interpret characters that these few character creators have

I mean, both Miller and Moore fall into the category of character

interpreters rather than character creators.

Alan Moore's ever done, there's only one comic still going, at least for DC,

that has his stuff in it, and that's Hellblazer with John Constantine.

they've been using ideas that Alan gave them.

The whole of Vertigo is based on his ideas, isn't it?

The guy's a fucking volcano of ideas, they

should never have let him go in the way that they did.

Because they would rather bite off the hand

that feeds them than allow the hand to have any kind of share in the profits

Have you ever been tempted to tell a company or an editor to get lost?

Ah... Yes, I have told editors - it's not anything I would want to talk

about, but yes, I certainly can be a fairly forthright person.

When I first started off as a freelance,

I was the National Union of Journalists Freelance Organiser, and had several

brushes with management which may have coloured their attitudes towards me in

It was the same people who fired me that I came up against fighting

But I quarrelled with the Union as well - I quarrel with all

and basically the Union fired me as well!

they didn't fire me, but I resigned from the Union.

the same as the employers, in different ways.

purports to tell you what to do, if you're not harming anybody else in what you

do, everybody who purports to tell you what to do is wrong.

but I don't know how entertaining it is.

Norm Breyfogle where I'm attempting to have Anarky espouse my own political

At the time that I created Anarky, I thought I was more or less an

I realise that I'm not an anarchist, I'm something else.

sure that there's a name for it, but like I said earlier, my observation is that

almost everything in society is based on deceit, and the ones who commit the

greatest deceit have to have armed force to back them up.

apparently live in a democracy, if there's anything that you don't agree with...

Let's say that you don't agree with your Income Tax being used to subsidise

arms companies that are selling arms to the Indonesians that killed 300,000

If you don't agree with that you've only got one option - vote Labour at

Which won't make any difference, because they give the same

So there's something evil going on here.

Money is taken off us - because if you refuse to pay it, you are put in jail,

and they'll take whatever you've got anyway - so we are being forced to

give money to make guns to shoot innocent people on the other side of the world.

make a living out of deceit have got any reason for doing anything at all like

that. Sue forbids me to watch the news or current affairs programmes or anything

else like that on the television any more, because it is a constant stream of

outright lies, sly deceits and subversive non-sequiturs.

I read The Guardian, and The Guardian has been raving about this new sitcom

But I watched it, and all I want to do is hit these people.

have a big chain around my fist and just pound it into their stupid, lying,

And yet, according to The Guardian it's the high-point

, and it's like life has been reduced to a series of fucking

one-liners, and there's no context for any of it.

context, and hopefully I can put it over via Anarky.

Alan Moore has said that he doesn't want to use superhero stories to

discuss important issues - whereas you don't seem to have a problem with

Maybe Alan's just quicker on the uptake than I am.

that it's impossible to deal with many real-life situations in comics for the

simple reason that all comics are founded on irrationality.

It is not possible to use irrationality as a

foundation for the rational treatment of story subject material.

if there really was a Batman, he'd have used his incredible detective brain to

have figured out exactly what is wrong with the world.

Superman, he'd immediately be able to see through the web of lies that enmeshes

If there really was a Green Lantern, he'd fuck off and live on

However, never let it be said that I don't enjoy butting my head against a

Do you feel like you're trying to 'teach' people--?

No, no. Fuck, I'm a hopeless teacher, but through the medium of what I hope

is an entertaining story, I want people who read the story to think about it,

I believe - and I'm not alone here, this

isn't any sort of elitist nonsense, in fact it's anti-elitist nonsense - but I

believe that I have seen through something that, so far, not many people have

seen through, and that in that the near future, an awful lot more people are

going to have to see through, because we cannot go on the way that we are.

speaking globally, where tens of millions of people are dying every year, for no

these people that are dying could be buying my comics, you know?

making me rich and instead they're dying!

the more that I look into it, the underlying reason behind all of it, and I

don't want to be too simplistic, but... Ah fuck, there's not any way of me

telling you this without going into the whole fucking thought behind it, okay?

It's generally accepted that consciousness has been evolving since Man first

evolved as a separate species around two million years ago, and that

consciousness is supposed to have evolved gradually since then.

Julian Jaynes, about twenty years ago, came out with a radical theory - that

consciousness was only invented less that 3,000 years ago, as a result of

Prior to that point - and he has given evidence that

has swayed me, I believe him - prior to that point, man was an unthinking,

unconscious animal who was capable of arithmetic, hieroglyphics, reasoning,

astronomy, astrology, but he did not have ego-consciousness that allowed him to

think in blueprints and maps and metaphors the way we do.

society became so complex around 1,000 BC that the old ways of doing things

could no longer stand the sheer pressure, society collapsed and

ego-consciousness was born out of that collapse in society.

Now the extrapolations from Jaynes' theory is that for the last two and a

half thousand years approximately, since the golden age of consciousness in

Greece, we have been living under a particular paradigm which is wrong.

In ancient Greece the two philosophical schools basically were Plato's, which

held that Mankind was by nature a brute and an animal, and needed an elitist

government to look after it - much as Arnold Schwarzenegger would say - and

Aristotle, who said that Man is basically good and kind and decent and gets on

okay with other men, as long as some bastard doesn't come along and try to

impose an external authority on him, which is basically what my philosophy would

For the last 2,500 years, the Western world has followed Plato's ideas.

form the ideological bed on which all government by force or coercion is

he 'reasoned' that some men have golden souls, and that this entitles

them to rule the men with 'silver souls', who still get to lord it over Joe

Public, who only has a crappy bronze soul.

country/flag/ideology/religion is always worth more than the actual human

This allows Marxism, fascism, Catholicism, Islam to slaughter anyone

who refuses to accept the 'one great truth' which they always profess to have.

If I can divert us again for a moment; in the harshest economic terms, there

are only two kinds of people in the world.

and values to sell or exchange with others... and Non-producers.

recognised that certain non-producers (the sick, old, young) must be cared for.

But there is a class of non-producer which seeks deliberately to live off the

producers; call them parasites, or leeches.

facets of life produces some interesting results - chiefly that politicians,

royals, religious leaders, lawyers, bureaucrats, gurus, and many journalists,

Since the discovery of rational consciousness, they have constantly abused

rational consciousness to provide their own unearned livings - only possible by

Now, for the first time in recorded history,

there are more leeches than there are producers.

global civilisation continues to become more complex, at an ever-increasing

The mumbo-jumbo voodoo answers given by all politics,

religion and philosophy are found to be wanting.

spreads, the parasites are increasingly revealed for what they are.

In a perfect world, the parasites would all just fade away and die.

real world, it is evident they will never give up their unearned privileges.

They have now embarked on the greatest feeding frenzy in history in a desperate

attempt to grab what they can before the planet goes down the drain.

this is also totally irrational behaviour.

thought that keeps me going - one by one the people of the world are going to

They're going to realise - there are no Messiahs, no Gods,

any more than there is a need for force-backed government.

I'll tell you, though - it's really hard to get that across in a comic book!

Alan Grant first entered the comics industry in 1967 when he became an editor for D.C. Thomson before moving to London from Dundee in 1970 to work for IPC on various romance magazines. After going back to college and having a series of jobs, Grant found himself back in Dundee and living on Social Security. He then met John Wagner, another former D.C. Thompson editor, who was helping put together a new science fiction comic for IPC, "2000 AD", and was unable to complete his other work.