The Comics Bureau

Usu­ally the man ask­ing the ques­tions, Alex Fitch runs the UK’s only weekly show about the world of com­ics, Panel Bor­ders. If you aren’t aware of the show, head over to the site and check out the archives and sub­scribe to the pod­cast feed. Alex kindly agreed to share his insights into the com­ics world with me. Image thanks to Craig Grobler.

How would you like to be introduced?

“Mr Spiel­berg, your after­noon inter­view is here…”

What was your first expos­ure to comics?

I can’t remem­ber the very first comic I was bought. I did read a few cop­ies of humour com­ics like Whizzer and Chips and The Beano but they never really struck me as some­thing I wanted to col­lect. The first comic I did col­lect right from the first issue was the relaunched Eagle in 1982 – a few weeks before my 7^th birth­day – and I really enjoyed the mix of hor­ror, SF and action strips in the comic, par­tic­u­larly the weird fumetti (not that I knew that term then) Doom­lord story. I watched a lot of car­toons when I was a kid and so also col­lec­ted the licenced com­ics based on Trans­formers, Zoids and Thun­der­cats. I picked up the odd issue of 2000AD in news­agents with my pocket money from time to time, but was put off by the hor­rible news­print it was prin­ted on, how­ever when ‘prog’ 500 came out with a glossy cover I star­ted col­lect­ing it and only had to put up with news­print for another 19 issues before they improved the paper stock. The two strips I really enjoyed in the comic were Bad Com­pany and Nemesis the War­lock but the story that has kept me buy­ing it to the present day is Judge Dredd, which while some­times not neces­sar­ily the best strip in the magazine, is always enter­tain­ing even when the comic is going through fal­low periods.

It’s nice dig­ging out these old Brit­ish com­ics as they were delivered by a paper­boy and so while the back cover and occas­sion­ally the front are spoiled by my par­ents’ address writ­ten in biro, it means I have a record of every­where I’ve lived since I was young.

It’s nice dig­ging out these old Brit­ish com­ics as they were delivered by a paper­boy and so while the back cover and occas­sion­ally the front are spoiled by my par­ents’ address writ­ten in biro, it means I have a record of every­where I’ve lived since I was young. That said, my par­ents can­celled my 2000AD reser­va­tion when I went to film school in New York in 1999 without me know­ing, so hav­ing waited ten years for the final Nemesis book, I missed it until the reprint book came out! A story from 2000AD was also my first graphic novel, or trade paper­back reprint if you want to quibble about the defin­i­tion of the phrase. I’d been taken to Har­rods for the first time as a spe­cial treat for my 9^th birth­day and was told to choose a birth­day present. I found my way to the book deptart­ment and picked up the Judge Dredd: Apo­ca­lypse War reprint book by Titan. Unfor­tu­nately this coin­cided with a fire alarm going off and vari­ous shut­ters com­ing down between depart­ments, so I found the whole exper­i­ence a bit trau­matic, but I guess it still led to a love of the medium as I went on to buy or get given as presents every graphic album and graphic novel Titan prin­ted in the late 1980s.

I was fam­ilar with Amer­ican com­ics through the Mar­vel car­toons on TV and the Brit­ish reprints of Amer­ican com­ics, par­tic­u­larly Spi­der­man. It was also quite com­mon to find genu­ine Amer­ican com­ics in Brit­ish news­agents back then, albeit with no pat­tern to what they might have one month to the next. I  picked up quite a few of those, includ­ing my first ‘adult’ comic, Saga of the Swamp Thing #29, which iron­ic­ally was the first to go out without a ‘com­ics code author­ity’ stamp on the front due to the extreme con­tent inside – good­ness know what that did to my 9 year old mind!

What is your background?

I stud­ied Fine Art and His­tory of Art at Gold­smiths Col­lege and then 16mm film pro­duc­tion at film school in New York. Per­sonal trauma in my fam­ily led to me leav­ing the lat­ter course a couple of weeks before the end of the second semester and while I star­ted doing an MA in Media Stud­ies at the Art School in New York I’d been plan­ning to move on to, it proved too dif­fi­cult to con­tinue with long dis­tance after a few terms of being given the wrong info and doing the courses in the wrong order – I’d like to fin­ish it one day or move onto a PHd as there’s at least one book on film I intend to write. After film school, I found myself work­ing in video / DVD rental shops for five years and in order to con­tinue doing some­thing cre­at­ive, designed and wrote in house magazines and web­sites for a couple of those shops includ­ing the one I man­aged in South West Lon­don. Unfor­tu­nately the bot­tom fell out of the industry, so just as I was get­ting bored with work­ing in the field, there were no jobs left there anyway.

How did you come to host the uk’s only weekly show about comics?

My flat­mate was doing a degree in Music Tech­no­logy and as part of his course did a work place­ment at Res­on­ance 104.4 FM, the Arts Coun­cil radio sta­tion in Lon­don. He moved up through the ranks as an engin­eer to a show pro­du­cer, becom­ing the co-host of a fort­nightly ‘agony aunt’ / advice show called Mid­night Sex Talk. He enjoyed the film reviews I’d been doing for the local video shop and so asked me onto the pro­gramme a few times to talk about vari­ous cinema releases. The sta­tion man­ager in turn liked how I came across on that show and men­tioned at the begin­ning of 2006 that he was launch­ing a new weekly film show – I’m ready for my close-up – and asked if I’d like to present it from time to time. I did so monthly from Feb­ru­ary to July that year and then weekly until the end of 2007. Dur­ing that time he men­tioned that Res­on­ance was happy to expand the film show’s remit to include all visual media, so I sug­ges­ted com­ics, obvi­ously, and did inter­views with Kev Suth­er­land  in Autumn 2006 and with Matt Smith (2000AD), Pat Mills, Alan Moore, Paul Gravett and Charles Brown­stein (CBLDF) in Winter / Spring 2007. I seem to remem­ber meet­ing Kev, Pat and Paul for the first time at the pre­vi­ous year’s Com­ica and I got the inter­view with Alan by going up to him at a sign­ing after he’d done a talk on stage at the Uni­ver­sity of Lon­don and just ask­ing him if he’d be up for it!

The inter­view with Alan opened a lot of meta­phor­ical doors as when I then went to the Bris­tol com­ics expo in May 2007 with my co-host Duncan Nott, we asked vari­ous people for an inter­view — David Hine, Frazer Irving, John McCrea, Glenn Fabry, Steve Yeow­ell, Simon Fur­man, Geoff Senior – and many of them had down­loaded my chat with Alan and enjoyed it. How­ever the amount of inter­views we came back from the expo with meant that I’d have had to give over the film show entirely to com­ics based inter­views for the next three months, which I thought was break­ing the format a bit too much, so I sug­ges­ted I might do a seper­ate com­ics show as well…

Panel Bor­ders star­ted off as a 15 min show – which com­bined with IRFMCU, made a total of ¾ hour a week of broad­cast radio I was pro­du­cing – and then that autumn I was asked to rename it Strip! (which I dis­agreed with and kept the name of the pod­cast as Panel Bor­ders) and make it an hour in length, doub­ling my weekly out­put! As I’d just star­ted a new full­time job, this would have killed me, so I got per­mis­sion from the ICA to fill the second hald of each hour of Strip! with a half hour record­ing of talks from Com­ica, as long as I didn’t pod­cast that mater­ial. In Autumn 2008, Strip! / Panel Bor­ders settled at its cur­rent length of half an hour, and I also do occas­sional one hour ‘Clear Spots’ and epis­odes of I’m ready for my close-up when I fancy it.

Tell us about your work with Elec­tric Sheep Magazine.

Vir­ginie, the editor of Elec­tric Sheep, approached Res­on­ance in early Sum­mer 2007 as she’d heard I’m ready for my close-up and wondered if the show needed any other con­trib­ut­ors. This didn’t hap­pen as often as you might think, hence my present­ing nearly every epis­ode for a year and a half! Vir­ginie had been doing Elec­tric Sheep as an online magazine for a few months and recor­ded some inter­views for tran­scrip­tion via dicta­phone and wondered if we could broad­cast a recent one she’d done with Ale­jandro Jodorowski. We became friends and our meet­ing conin­cided with the Curzon cinema decid­ing not to go ahead with a cinema pod­cast that I’d done a couple of pilots for them. Frus­trated about this I decided to keep going with the pod­cast any­way with Vir­ginie join­ing me and comedi­enne Jes­sica Fostekew as co-presenters, renam­ing it the quartlerly ‘Art house cinema pod­cast’ and even­tu­ally the monthly ‘Elec­tric Sheep magazine podcast’.

In August 2007, Vir­ginie cre­ated a print ver­sion of Elec­tric Sheep, a bimonthly A5 stapled magazine that was dis­trib­uted for free in Art House cinemas before get­ting fund­ing from Wall­flower Press in Sum­mer 2008 to turn it into a lar­ger per­fect bound magazine that was sold in book, art and cinema shops. I moved from being an (anime) reviewer to an assist­ant editor of the magazine and with the Wall­flower ver­sion, Vir­ginie and the designer Emer­ald wanted to include illus­tra­tions as well as stills from movies, so hav­ing become friends with many mem­bers of the UK small press scene by this point, I sourced 80% of the new illus­tra­tions for the magazine, with the likes of Tom Hum­ber­stone, Oli Smith, Sean Azzo­pardi, Mark Stafford, Lee O’Connor, Emma Price, Daniel Locke, Julia Scheele and James Stringer illus­trat­ing reviews and articles.

I don’t know who first sug­ges­ted we do film reviews in comic strip format, it think it just came from a gen­eral dis­cus­sion I had with Vir­ginie as she’s a fan of com­ics too (and indeed inter­viewed Jamie Delano, Mar­jane Sat­rapi and Charles Burns on my behalf for Strip! / Panel Bor­ders), or it may have been Mark Stafford’s idea as he’d been look­ing for a way to com­bine his interest in both media, but the first comic strip film review we ran was actu­ally by Dan Lester as I was chat­ting to him one time and he men­tioned that he did Asian film reviews as com­ics (which was a white lie, as his first – Big Bang Love for Tres­pass magazine — was still on his to do list!), so he became our first reviewer in com­ics format. In sub­sequent issues I com­mis­sioned comic strip reviews by Daniel Locke, Douglas Noble and Han­nah Berry. Regard­ing the lat­ter, we were hon­oured and proud to print her first new comic strip since the pub­lic­a­tion of her ter­rific graphic novel Brit­ten and Brü­lightly. Stafford and Lester are our most pro­lific comic strip review­ers with three each under their belts, but since the print magazine fol­ded we now do a monthly comic strip review online and I’ve com­mis­sioned new work by Chris Doherty, Julia Scheele, Philip Spence, Karen Rubins and Adam Cad­well (and also print art­icles by Julia’s We are words + pic­tures col­lab­or­ator Mat­thew Sheret).

I’m a big fan of the UK small press and it’s been great to have them cre­ate new work for us; I hope the print magazine and web­site have given each of our con­trib­ut­ors addi­tional expos­ure. Elec­tric Sheep will be return­ing to print in the Winter with our first annual to be pub­lished by Strange Attractor press and Tom Hum­ber­stone is illus­trat­ing the first comic book strip I’ve writ­ten (on mod­ern zom­bie movies)!

How do you see the cros­sover between film and comics?

Inev­it­able! Cer­tainly Hollywood’s obses­sion with super­hero movies at the moment can’t last forever as every block­buster fad, whether it’s SF or buddy movies, only dom­in­ates the box office for so long, but when I was a kid, the Super­man movies were show­ing at the cinema and I remem­ber read­ing then how artists like Mobius influ­enced films such as Alien and Dune.

I think it’s a great shame that some of the best comic adapt­a­tions of recent years aren’t noticed as such – for example Road to Per­di­tion and A His­tory of Viol­ence – but with dir­ect­ors hir­ing comic book cre­at­ors to design and story­board movies it’s about time that artists who pro­duce ‘widescreen’ visu­als on the page are get­ting work in Hol­ly­wood. Geof Dar­row and Steve Skroce work­ing on The Mat­rix was a great early example for this generation’s cinema while the plot of the film with Neo as mes­si­anic super­man was obvi­ously indebted to com­ics as well. It’s dis­s­ap­point­ing that people like Brendan McCarthy haven’t been util­ised prop­erly by the film industry yet — High­lander, Teen­age Mutant Ninja Turtles and Lost In Space dis­play little of his sur­real­istic anarchic humour, though I haven’t seen Con­e­heads, yet…

What are your thoughts on devices such as the iPad for dis­trib­ut­ing and read­ing comics?

If I owned an iPad, I’d cer­tainly down­load com­ics to it as it seems the best digitial device so far for dis­play­ing the medium. I’ve read a few web com­ics over the last few years but I don’t par­tic­u­larly enjoy the activ­ity of read­ing com­ics on a screen or the vari­ety of inter­faces to get from one panel to another. Hav­ing seen a few com­ics on the iPad, it seems a lot closer to the exper­i­ence of read­ing a print comic.

I sus­pect the rais­ing of the price of monthly Amer­ican print com­ics to $3.99 may be the final nail in the coffin of dwind­ling sales. The idea of down­load­ing a monthly comic for say $0.99 – although Marvel’s $5.99 pri­cing of an upcom­ing Iron Man annual seems insane – is a great idea that would put com­ics back into the realm of pocket money prices and more of an impulse buy, but it’s not going to attract younger read­ers due to the price of the iPad as a machine and I doubt few par­ents would trust kids not to lose, dam­age or be robbed of such an expens­ive device.

I think it’s poten­tially a great medium for com­ics, but it’ll take a cheaper col­our device – the much lauded flex­ible elec­tronic paper may be a cheap mass mar­ket product in 5 years time – to make iPads or their equivilent the ideal replace­ment for print. Also, like a lot of people, I love books and would hap­pily spend all my dis­pos­able income on graphic nov­els. To quote Neil Gai­man, I’ve not yet seen any­thing “as good as being a book as a book is”, and as nice as the iPad is, it’s not even as big as a monthly Amer­ican comic in terms of page dimen­sions, let alone a Brit­ish weekly. Hav­ing an iPad would encour­age me to con­sume more web com­ics if they release a legal web comic aggreg­ator and indulge in more impulse buys of the digitial equivilent of ‘flop­pies’ – I read and enjoyed The Middle­men for the first time on my iPhone – but the machine itself still seems too much of a lux­ury toy until they release a model I can do pro­fes­sional sound edit­ing on as well…

Whose work excites you at the moment?

Darryl Cun­ning­ham kindly swapped a copy of his book for mine (World Cinema Dir­ect­ory: Amer­ican Inde­pend­ent, Intel­lect Books www.intellectbooks.co.uk) and so I’m really enjoy­ing Psy­chi­at­ric Tales at the moment.

I thought Dave Lander really deserved his prize in the Manga Jiman com­pet­i­tion for Last Drink and would love to see a graphic novel col­lec­tion of all his work so far.

I’m really glad to see Tom Hum­ber­stone cre­at­ing new work! He’s done an amz­ing job edit­ing two volumes of Sol­ipsistic Pop so far and hope it gets recog­nised out­side of the blo­go­sphere as an indis­pens­ible col­lec­tion of UK creators.

Sight­ings Of Wal­lace Sendek by Sean Azzo­pardi and Douglas Noble has come to a head scratch­ing end, but it’s a bril­liant comic and one that stretches Sean immensely, show­ing his incred­ible range as an artist. It’s just a shame it wasn’t twice as long, but then the wait for a con­clu­sion would have been impossible to stand!

Julia Scheele’s new comic Every­one is talk­ing about the weather is excel­lent and I think more cre­at­ors could bene­fit from mak­ing news­pa­per com­ics – it was after all the best thing that DC pub­lished in the last year… (Am cov­et­ing the big Wed­nes­day Com­ics hardback)

Speak­ing of the main­stream, I’m sad to see the end in sight for Ex Mach­ina which I’m a big fan of but look for­ward to whatever ori­ginal new series Brian K Vaughn does next. I’m a fan of Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente’s Mar­vel work so a guilty pleas­ure has been buy­ing all the vari­ous Hulk and Her­cules titles, which are gradu­ally becom­ing the only monthly com­ics I buy.

Who have been your favour­ite interviewees?

It’s been bril­liant to inter­view some of my her­oes. My first Alan Moore inter­view was a great hon­our and proved what a kind inter­viewee he is – Alan hap­pily chat­ted for over an hour an a half –using my hand­ful of ques­tions for going off on intriguing tan­geants while Melinda brought him cups of tea! Eddie Camp­bell was a pleas­ure to talk to and the first time doing an inter­na­tional phone call felt like some kind of time travel, as I was talk­ing him at night in Lon­don and he was on his ver­anda in Aus­tralia in the morn­ing with all the sounds of local wild­life in the distance…

Jill Thompson, David Lloyd, Pat Mills and many more all proved to be really nice people and a joy to talk to. Hope­fully one day I’ll have the kudos to get more than ten minutes with Neil Gai­man or Phil­lip Pull­man, but in the mean­time I’m doing all right with the guests I’m getting!

Out­side of com­ics it’s been amaz­ing to talk to act­ors like Mal­colm McDow­ell, Bruce Camp­bell and Susan­nah York and favour­ite dir­ect­ors like Stu­art Gor­don, Dario Argento and Joe Dante…

What are you work­ing on at the moment?

Well the the­ory this sum­mer was to catch up on my sleep, but haven’t had much luck yet! I’m just about to start record­ing some inter­views for a spe­cial on Latin Amer­ican com­ics and am look­ing for­ward to inter­view­ing Splice / Cube dir­ector Vin­cenzo Nat­ali… I’d bet­ter start writ­ing that zom­bie comic for Tom Hum­ber­stone to illus­trate this week as well!

Is there any­thing you’d like to plug?

If you’re based in Lon­don, please come along to one of our Elec­tric Sheep screen­ings at the Prince Charles cinema and else­where! Last month we showed For a few dol­lars more with an intro­duc­tion by West­erns in comic format expert (and writer of The Pris­oner), Ian Rakoff and over the next couple of months we’re show­ing Foxy Brown and Hero… www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/events

Thanks, Alex!