Last week’s “2000 AD” Prog 1924 was a perfect jumping-on point for new or lapsed readers looking to see what everyone’s talking about when they talk about that weekly British comic anthology. In addition to covering it in Multiver-City One, our weekly column for all things 2000 AD, we got a chance to speak with writer Dan Abnett about his strip returning in that issue: ‘Grey Area’, with Mark Harrison.
Today’s conversation subject, Arthur Wyatt, is with another writer with a returning strip in Prog 1924. That story, ‘Orlok: Agent of East-Meg One’, brings Wyatt and frequent collaborator Jake Lynch back for another previously untold mission featuring the super-spy assassin. We talk about that, as well as Wyatt’s work on the series of comic book sequels to the 2012 DREDD movie starring Karl Urban.
Although your “2000 AD” script-droid credit list is fairly short (though still impressive), you do have a pretty extensive list of independent credits prior to that with “FutureQuake”. How did you end up getting the tap to write for Tharg and what are some of the things you look back on about that time as being the most helpful in terms of preparing you for where you are now (good or bad)?
Arthur Wyatt: Most of my FutureQuake scripts were actually reworked versions of rejected 2000 AD scripts! 2000 AD has an open submission policy for Future Shocks [Note: this policy is currently on hold until September], science fiction short stories with a twist, and I was submitting stories for a while before I hit the level of being accepted. Seeing those stories drawn up in FutureQuake and getting reactions to them was actually very helpful in developing a sense of what worked and didn’t work. My advice to anyone trying to break in these days would very much be to do some short self-contained stories and get them made.
My first story to see print in 2000 AD, Cosmonaut X, was actually the winner of a pitchfest competition – a terrifying con experience where you try and sell an audience and a panel of judges on your story. Then after that was the horrifying realisation that “breaking in” actually just means you’ve got to go through the whole process again to sell your next piece.
Wow, that sounds traumatic! I hate to make you revisit it, but I don’t think we can go on without diving into that a little further…
AW:The original Dreddcon pitchfest setup was very simple: Each contestant would have a minute to pitch a 5-page story, typically a Tharg’s Future Shock, to an audience and a panel of judges. Then the judges would give feedback and and after all the contestants had pitched the audience would vote on the winner.
The winner got “a chance to be in 2000 AD” – essentially your script moved to the top of the slushpile. I think at least one winner that dealt with Judge Dredd’s nocturnal emissions failed to make it to actual publication.
I did it twice. The first time was a bit of a failure – I pitched some over-complicated thing about a cargo cult on an alien planet building things out of a bamboo-like plant that just got blurted out as “Space bamboo!!!!!” – I was so terrified to be speaking in front of that many people I thought I might black out.
Second time, I got over my crowd jitters and had the advantage of a simple, high-concept pitch I knew would go over well. It was a Past Imperfect, the Alt. History version of a Future Shock, about Yuri Gagarin with the ‘What If?’ premise that cosmic rays would give him strange powers. The crowd went for it and I won, narrowly beating out Al Ewing.
I think the experience has done wonders for my public speaking as nothing else is going to be that terrifying.
They’ve stopped doing Dreddcon since but I believe they’ve run similar events at Bristol, Thought Bubble, and the like. I’m not sure how many winning pitches have made it through to the Progs since mine. I know Simon Spurrier got his start in 2000 AD that way, and also writer/artist Simon Gurr. Spurrier, of course, went on to be a 2000 AD mainstay, and I think Simon Gurr has been in a few times since.
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As a fan of Lovecraft & Cthulhu, you’ve written Dredd stories that butt right up against that type of subject matter. What are some of your favorite Dredd stories that use other genres (or concepts) in ways that maybe shouldn’t work but do, and why do you think Judge Dredd can pull off that kind of versatility as a strip?
AW: I’ve always been a fan of the weird Dredd stories that bring in a big of a supernatural element; stories like ‘The Haunting of Sector House 9’ or even ‘City of the Damned’, a favorite mega-epic of mine despite not even its writers liking it that much. My first exposure to Dredd was an annual containing ‘The Fear That Made Milwaukee Famous’: Dredd against vengeful atom bomb ghosts, which might explain it. Based on that, and given that Lovecraft country would be part of Mega-City One’s vast footprint, a story with some Innsmouth-style fishmen seemed an easy fit.
Dredd really does seem to invite a great variety of storytelling. A crazy romp like [Wolk & Farinas’s] ‘City of Courts’ and a somber epic like ‘Day of Chaos’ both fit into the same world and it’s absolutely the same Dredd. I think it’s because he’s such a well-defined character it’s easy to drop him into situations and have them revolve around him.
I guess the true test of his genre mutability would be to somehow involve him in a nurse romance story – there’s a genre that hasn’t seen the light of day for a while.
So how did you go from 2000 AD script droid watching the DREDD movie to 2000 AD droid writing the sequel stories? And just out of curiosity, what was the showing like when you saw it? Big crowd, small crowd?
AW: I saw it after it had been running quite a while, but it was a decent sized crowd. I’m not sure everyone was ready for me cheering quite so loudly when we got to the end credits and the first thing we see are John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra in big letters.
I loved the movie, both as a Judge Dredd movie that works and holds true to the ethos of the character and because it embodies the spirit of trashy and gory yet surprisingly smart 80’s action movies – there was a Den of Geek piece recently that called it a lost John Carpenter film, and I think that’s spot-on. When offered the chance to do a story set in that universe I leapt at it.
AW: The Karl Urban voice has very much taken over for me, to the point where I am no longer certain it was anything else before. And when you write a line of dialogue for him you need to make sure it fits that, which usually means making sure its appropriately terse.
You mentioned in a Megazine interrogation that you liken the DREDD-verse to Marvel’s Ultimate line in terms of just getting to use familiar concepts in different ways. As you put together new stories for it (or as you were working on ‘Uprise’ or ‘Underbelly’), how do you keep yourself from just pitching “I want to do my version of [insert story]!”
AW: Well, it has to be something that would work within that universe, and justifies being done in that universe rather than just in the regular Judge Dredd continuity. And it has to be something that relates to right now and the concerns of the moment. Just doing a story that has been done already would obviously be pointless and no fun, so while there might be parallels between The Spit in ‘Uprise’ and the John Wagner story ‘The Pit’, it all ended up going in a very different direction.
Continued belowNow that the chances of a DREDD film sequel that you would have to compete with are, sadly, lower than ever, is there a chance you could get to do a little more long-term DREDD planning?
AW: I think it may open things up a little. If we wanted to do a big ‘Cursed Earth’ story in the style of ‘Origins’, obviously it would be more doable now, or even the ‘Dark Judges’ story that Garland has hinted at. I’m not sure those are stories I am going to go out of my way to pitch but it does mean there are more possibilities.
Handling Judge Dredd in such a high-profile gig as the DREDD movie-continuity sequels has to be pretty daunting. How much of a comfort is it (if it is one) to have Henry Flint & Paul Marshall on art to share the load with, and what do you do differently with one or the other in your writing/collaborating on the stories?
With the release of the “Urban Warfare” hardcover back in February, is it safe to say that the response to these stories has been positive enough to keep doing them?
AW: I’m hoping too, and it seems pretty likely – stay tuned!
Your new ‘Orlok: Agent of East-Meg One’ strip with Jake Lynch is the third time you two have collaborated on the character, going back to last year’s “Summer Sci-Fi Special”. Did you pitch the Orlok revival idea to Tharg, or was that one of the characters presented to you?
AW: The Summer Special was retro-themed, and I guess I got asked to do Orlok because of my previous work on Samizdat Squad, another Sov-themed strip. I really hit it off with Jake and it seemed like there was more potential in the character, who as a spy would have been on lots of missions, so I pitched a couple of longer stories. I’d love to take him right up to the start of ‘Block Mania’!
Characters that seem to work best in Judge Dredd strips are ones grounded or at least loosely based in something the readers are familiar with, then cranked up to 11. What are you pulling from for ‘Orlok: Agent of East-Meg One’?
Orlok plays an important role in Dredd history as the man who sets off the chain of events leading to The Apocalypse War, but not a particularly large one. When writing the character & these new stories, are you trying to play against readers expectations of what the man who did that would be like? Or was that one (albeit crucial) job so far in the past for readers that he’s essentially a blank slate for you to play with?
AW: I’m pretty much playing with a full-formed Orlok, albeit one we see from a different point of view as he’s the protagonist. He’s a bit younger and keener on his job than the Orlok we saw in the post-‘Apocalypse War’ stories with Judge Anderson, a little less world-weary and a little more idealistic. Still, despite that professed idealism he’s mostly in the game for the murder and the mayhem, something he’s keener on than he admits to himself.
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AW: After working with the very grounded and sober DREDD movie material, it feels good to cut loose with that kind of humour, which I think has always been a big part of the mainstream Judge Dredd universe. I think working with Jake has fed back into that and encouraged me to go a little bigger with it. For example, as soon as I saw his first designs for Oz Muntantys, the mutant terrorist organisation with the hyper-obscure pun name, I knew I wanted to do more with them so they ended up having a much bigger part in the script after that.
And then some other stuff got crazier to match, so I guess we feed off of each other there.
Favorite and/or most underrated Bond film? Favorite ‘realistic’ espionage film?
AW: Everyone’s favorite underrated bond film always seems to be On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I could go with that because it’s pretty good, and it would mean I didn’t have to admit to my weird fascination with the terrible 60’s Casino Royale.
My favorite Bond book is probably “From Russia With Love”, if you’re only going to read one of them read that one – the film isn’t bad either.
My favorite James Bond short story is this one where he basically just gets hyper fussy about the way he wants his eggs done at a hotel. That’s quintessentially Bond to me.
More realistic espionage? Well you can’t go wrong with Harry Palmer or George Smiley, there’s a lot to choose from there. I recently rewatched The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and it’s great. If you can track it down the TV show The Sandbaggers shines through cardboard sets to be amazing and bleak and full of beige and grittiness, just what you want from a 70’s spy show. It’s written by an ex-naval officer who died in mysterious circumstances, for extra fun.
And my favorite obscure Spy-Fi would probably be Cypher, the film Vincenzo Natali made right after Cube – really worth checking out for fans of mind-games and hi-tech espionage hijinx.
Now that Prog 1924 is out, do you have a favorite among the other strips you’re sharing space with?
AW: It’s pretty hard to argue with Henry Flint and Rob Williams on Judge Dredd; that’s an unbeatable team. Though since Judge Dredd is in every prog maybe “returned” isn’t quite right, so maybe ‘Grey Zone’ – it had some interesting themes when it was set in an immigration zone for aliens, and now they’ve pulled a big twist on that which is a very 2000 AD move.
You can find out more about Wyatt & Lynch’s ‘Orlok: Agent of East-Meg One’ and all the other perfect-for-jumping-on stories in Prog 1924, including the best way to read it no matter where you are, in last week’s Multiver-City One column.
