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Friday, September 3, 2010
This Month's Guest: Dave Gibbons
From the pages of Elephantmen!
Dave Gibbons was one of a handful of British comic creators who jumped out of the pages of 2000AD and into the American mainstream in the eighties. I followed his work from HARLEM HEROES to DAN DARE to DOCTOR WHO to ROGUE TROOPER, GREEN LANTERN and then to the ground breaking WATCHMEN series, and all his high profile projects for DC comics and DARK HORSE since then. Some five or six years ago, he approached Comicraft to design a font based on his pen lettering, and we cheekily asked him for a HIP FLASK pin up in exchange. I wanted something that spoke to Dave's own work, hoping that it might help raise HIP FLASK to the same level. Looking through the Graphitti hardcover of WATCHMEN, the term "Elephantmen" popped into my head, and what do you know, here we are, all these years later... Having overheard Garth Ennis referring to Dave as "The grandfather of British comics" a few years ago, it seems very fitting that he should be my second guest for our regular Father's Day feature, here in the pages of WATCHMEN... um, I mean, ELEPHANTMEN! Rich: What did your dad do? Dave: Well, my dad worked in town planning, as a control officer. He was one of the people who recommended whether a building should be allowed to be built or not. His background was in architecture; before the war he'd been a kind of apprentice to an architect in Norfolk, and I think maybe that if the war hadn't intervened and he hadn't moved to London for one reason and another, he might have taken over the practice from the architect in Norfolk. I suppose the really significant thing about his work was that, for a bit of extra money, in the evenings he would actually draw plans for local builders and so on who wanted to build houses. He would draw them a plan with the pretty sure knowledge that the council would approve it. There wasn't any skullduggery, it's just that he knew the kind of buildings that they were likely to approve. So I've got these memories, from when I was seven or eight, of my dad leaning over his drawing board in a puddle of light, with his pens and his pencils and a cigarette in his mouth, drawing these plans. I used to sit and watch him and think, this is so nice, this lovely little pool of creative light! He taught me how to put on a wash of color, because when he drew one of these big plans, he had to indicate certain areas with flat colour, and he used to let me use his really nice Winsor and Newton No.6 brush -- and we all know how much those cost -- to put on a flat wash of colour! He taught me how to keep the edge nice and wet so the color dried evenly. I suspect he gave me that to do to keep me quiet while he was trying to draw his plans! Later, as a teenager I would help him by actually doing washes and lettering on the plans. I was pretty good at school, I went to a direct grant school, a private school with some boys who were there on scholarship like me. It was really like Tom Brown's Schooldays, because there were headmasters and prefects wearing gowns and there were beatings and rugby and in the summer you could wear a boater and a striped blazer. You got caned? I never got caned, but I got slippered and all kinds of horrible detentions and tasks, but I never actually got thrashed. I was very bright at primary school, though I flattened out at senior school -- but I always had this mad idea, from the age of seven or so, that I wanted to draw comics. My parents did go to a bit of trouble to help me. I have a very clear memory -- I think I was about thirteen -- of being taken to the local artist in my village, a guy who painted water colours, and had a beard, and wore sandals and a scratchy jumper. He must have been quite a good artist, because he lived in The Big House! So we went to see him and I remember my dad saying that the guy wanted to see whatever I was drawing at the time. I didn't think this visit was a big deal at the time, but clearly it was some sort of review to see if I had it in me to be a professional artist. Anyway, what I happened to be drawing at the time was, well, I was meticulously copying, page by page, line for line, an issue of WORLD'S FINEST, drawn by Dick Sprang, and featuring Batman and Superman, and a villain called, appropriately enough, The Duplicate Man! I was copying this whole thing, just changing Superman to Atomman, and Batman to Birdman! I mean, who could possibly know that it was stolen? I remember this artist and my dad going into a bit of a huddle, and although I don't remember hearing the conversation, it must have been along the lines of "Well, he's very keen, but it's obviously copied." Just as you or I would know if something was copied, so did this guy. So it all turned out to be a bit of a setback to my artistic plans. Anyway, when I came to leave school, as I'd done science subjects, maths, physics and chemistry, it was suggested that I might become an architect, and follow in my dad's footsteps. But when I found out that the course was eight years long and that only one in ten people that started it ever finished, I realised that my heart wasn't really in it! So I decided to become a building surveyor, which was a four year course, and when you finished you had a degree level qualification. And that's what I ended up doing. Did your parents want you to train for a career that you could fall back on? I think that's what they had in mind. My dad was a lot more tolerant than my mum, actually. To backtrack, and this is very relevant and rather eerie in a way, his father, my granddad, was a customs officer, and he used to move around the country. During my dad's formative years, when he was nine or ten, they were posted to Dundee, where they used to live in the big Customs House, which had lodgers. One of them was an artist who used to draw for DC Thompson. He was a guy called H.M. Tallintyre, and he drew their Nursery comics. Strangely enough, Richard, given your pachyderm passions, he drew the adventures of Oojah, a circus elephant! My dad was clearly very impressed with this guy, who was something of a bohemian type and quite unlike a customs officer. He actually gave my dad one of his paintboxes, which I still have. It's one of those black enamel things with mixing pans and little blocks of colour. In fact, later, when my dad was in his teens, he used to do comics for his class which his teacher used to pin up on the wall. I've still got some of those. They're very polished, with science fiction text stories and articles on stamp collecting and so on. So the seed of comics was probably sown into the genes back there. He was also an early reader of science fiction pulps. My dad always used to indulge my comic reading, and I can clearly remember him regularly bringing home THE EAGLE, and also the first UK edition of MAD magazine -- ostensibly for me, but really, I think, it was for him as well. On a Saturday, I would go out for a drive with him, maybe he had to pick up some bits and pieces, and we'd stop at the newsagent's, or the local markets. I got lots of my stuff from Eddie's Books at nearby Hatfield Market. You could buy the books from him and then trade them in at half price the next week, although of course I tended to keep most of them. However, I remember I worked my way through the MAD pocket books like that. I'd buy them, read them and then take them back next week and swap them for the next one. I'd actually keep rotating through them which probably wasn't very cost efficient, but obviously I thought the material was worth it. I've also got a really vivid memory -- a 'wish I had a time machine' type story -- of standing on St Albans market with my dad and him pointing out to me a stack of copies of FANTASTIC FOUR number one. There must have been thirty of them. He said, "Oh, have you got that one, David?" And I said, "Yeah, I've got it, it isn't very good!" I'd bought it the week before from the second hand shop with a big price scrawled across the front of it. I still have that copy, but I really wish I'd spent every penny of my two bob pocket money and made an investment right there! So my dad was quite indulgent of me. His attitude was probably summed up by him saying to me when my mum was particularly despairing about what was to become of me, "Y'know, just pass your exams and keep your mum happy, then you can do what you want."  What did your mum do for a living? My mum, Gladys, was a secretary when she first met my dad. She came from a largish family from the East End of London. She was a great reader when she'd been a kid. She devoured Billy Bunter, Sexton Blake and The Magnet, and those kind of Penny Dreadful magazines. She loved a good yarn and I think she appreciated what I saw in the comics. She never threw them out or condemned them as trash; she just thought that it was impossible for someone like me to end up seriously earning any money from drawing them. Who did you get the Gift of the Gab from, Dave, your dad or your mum? My mum and dad were both great readers and good talkers; they both loved to talk, and, yeah, I can talk if I want to, as can my sister. So there was a lot of talking over each other. My dad was a thinker, but he was also a real fence sitter. He would always see both sides of an argument, like the dispute over whether I was going to be an architect or a layabout comic book artist. Something else he did outside of the town planning and the plan drawing, was that he was the clerk to the local parish council. He would sit in on, and record, all the disputes and discussions about local matters, but never actually take a side, and then he would write up the minutes of the meeting. He was very good at putting things into writing, both in these minutes and in recording evidence to be presented at town planning meetings and enquiries; he definitely had a way with words. He even compiled a crossword for a newspaper once and wrote lots of little skits and articles for school magazines and newsletters. My sister works with words too, she's been a proofreader and a book editor and things like that. I guess we were a family of words. If I remember correctly, when there were some royalty issues in relation to WATCHMEN merchandise, you were the one that sat on the fence and waited for things to work out, whereas Alan was incensed by the injustice and angrily turned his back on DC and left... The opposite was actually the case. Alan said, "You sort it out, I can't be bothered...". His later parting of the ways with DC involved a lot of other matters. The thing I would say about my mum, was that she was not a person to take anything lying down. Because I was rather clever at school, I ended up leaving a year early, as I'd gone through a year younger than everyone else. So when I came to go to college, I couldn't get the usual grant from the state, and my mum thought this was terribly unjust, because I had the same expenses and I was being penalized because I was bright. The correspondence she had with the relevant government offices was epic! Folders full of it! I think I'm a bit like that. I don't think I go looking for a fight, but if I have a just case, I will pursue it. In the case of the outstanding royalties on WATCHMEN, which were for the smiley face buttons, Alan and I felt that we should have been paid royalties for them. Although Paul Levitz disagreed with my point of view, after he and I discussed it at length, he did eventually agree to pay the money. In fairness, I've always found Paul to be a reasonable man, who will always answer my calls and always listen to what I have to say. At the same time, to some degree, perhaps I am like my dad. I don't tend to take things personally; business is business, after all. DC comics is there to make money, and there are contracts which are offered and which are signed. You might feel really badly after the event once you've signed something but if you did sign it, sorry, chum, you signed it! I feel badly about characters of mine that have been exploited where I don't believe that any legal contract did ever exist, for instance, some of the Fleetway characters, but I'm a bit disinclined to take up the cudgels on that, at least for the moment. So I guess I have a degree of equanimity from my dad, and a warrior spirit from my mum. Was your dad a man of his word? He was a very honorable man, a very clever man, but he tended to downplay himself. He tended to take rather less than he really deserved. I think my mum always felt that he settled for less than he was worth; I can remember her trying to get him to change his job to a more responsible one, which I know he could have done, but he was reluctant to do so. I think he felt quite happy in the little corner he had. There was a reserved streak about him. What did your dad do during the war? He was in the Royal Engineers. The kind of qualifications he had in architecture and so on made him ideal for them. The thing that he did do — and I don't know who tipped him off — when he knew that he was about to be called up was to go and volunteer, which meant that he got a degree of preferential treatment. He applied for officer training and he found that pretty horrific because he wasn't the kind of guy that liked sleeping under bushes or firing machine guns, but I think he quite enjoyed driving tanks and jeeps. As a Royal Engineer, you had to be able to drive everything that the army had, so he learned to drive all sorts of vehicles. The very real downside of being a Royal Engineer was that you were the poor bastards who had to get off the landing craft first to go up the beach! But he was very fortunate and he got posted to India from 1943 to 1946, which meant the he basically did a desk job, very far away from any fighting at all. I think that the worst thing that ever happened to him was food poisoning and some unspecified subtropical disease which gave him high fever for a week! But he returned from the war pretty much unscathed. They were married in 1943, just before he went to India, but I wasn't born until 1949, Shortly after that they moved from East London out to a little village near St. Albans in Hertfordshire, where he'd been offered a job and a house that went along with it. He was able to chose the house that he wanted on the council estate. So we had quite a nice house, at the end of a row on a corner with a nice garden and access to a garage at the bottom of the garden.
He was actually born in London but he moved around a bit because his dad was posted to Scotland and then to King's Lynn in Norfolk, which is where my dad spent most of his adolescence. His father, my grandfather, was a great sportsman. He played cricket and football and lawn bowls for the county of Norfolk. My dad was no sportsman, although he umpired for several teams — that sitting on the fence thing again. My mum's brothers were quite sporty but that gene seemed to pass me and my son by. There were lots of US air force bases in Norfolk and I remember my granddad would send me the Sunday comic section from the American newspapers. Most significantly, it was him that, visiting us one year, took me into the Woolworth's in St. Albans where I saw my first SUPERMAN comic, which he bought for me. I still have it and occasionally pass the very shelf where I first saw it. Maybe they'll put a plaque up one day! My other grandfather, my mum's dad, had done all sorts of things; he'd worked in the docks in London and he'd had his own shop, and at one time he had a builder's yard. He'd invented a tarmac — blacktop — process that he'd patented and he'd got a bit of income from that. Later, he used to work in one of my Aunt's newsagent shops, and he used to send me SUPERMAN comics. What we used to get in the UK at that time were Australian reprints of Superman comics, and every once in a while he used to send me one rolled up in a newspaper mailer through the post. My cousin, my mum's brother's son, Robert, was a little bit older than me and he collected comics as well. I think my granddad would also get him comics, and he also had quite a good collection, when they first started coming out here, of imported American comics. He would bring down a big stack every couple of months when he came to visit at the weekend. I'd end up swapping or buying a lot of his comics — mainly SUPERMAN, BATMAN, SUPERBOY, ACTION and ADVENTURE. He had a pretty good imagination, in the sense that he would make things up to tell me and I, being younger, would often believe him! I remember us going to a family wedding and sitting there talking about comics — we didn't have any with us because you couldn't take your comics to a wedding — and I said to him: "Have you seen this new comic, this JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA?" And he said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I've got it,..." And I said "Well, is it bigger than ordinary comics?" and he said "Oh yeah, it's bigger, and it's twice as thick!" "Wowww," I said "and has it got all the characters that are on that cover that's in all the comics?" And he said "Yeah... and they're all drawn by their own artists — the best artists!" Of course, years later when I finally got hold of BRAVE AND THE BOLD #28, I found out that it was just an ordinary comic, and it wasn't bigger, and it wasn't thicker, and I didn't think it was very well drawn — although later I did come to quite like Mike Sekowsky's work — so it was a little bit of a let down. Of course, after the wedding, whenever I went to see my cousin, there was always an excuse as to why he couldn't show this JUSTICE LEAGUE comic to me — either he'd lent it to somebody or he'd lost it or he couldn't be bothered. So you can see there was quite a family background of comics. I was into WAR PICTURE LIBRARY comics as well. In fact, I do have a memory of going on holiday to Norfolk, near my paternal grandparents, when we stayed in a place called Sheringham, in a rented flat in a row of houses. A couple of these houses were occupied by US Servicemen and their families, and we went there a couple of consecutive years, so I got really friendly with these American kids. One of the boys I remember was called Mike, I don't know what his second name was, but he had the same birthday as me so we were exact contemporaries and became great friends, at least for the weeks I was there. I was fascinated by their MY GREATEST ADVENTURE COMICS, and their Schwinn bikes, and the little red trucks with the handles that you'd see in American comics but you never got over here. In turn, they really loved my WAR PICTURE LIBRARY comics, and I remember doing swaps with them, and playing soldiers with them based on what happened in these WAR PICTURE LIBRARY comics! I particularly liked AIR ACE PICTURE LIBRARY — the best ones were drawn by an artist called Ian Kennedy — and I really enjoyed making plastic AIRFIX kits; models of Lancasters and Stukas and Spitfires and stuff like that. At that time the war was fairly fresh, and I would see bomb crater sites when we went to London. Was there a moment in your childhood when you felt that war comics had been supplanted by American super-hero comics? I tended to read mainly American comics. I stopped for a while when I was about 15. I was starting to feel a bit embarrassed about buying them, although I was still having THE EAGLE delivered every week round about then. I used to get THE LION as well, although I gave that up earlier, and BOY'S WORLD, which was kind of like THE EAGLE in that it was full colour. I always really loved those comics for the artwork, but virtually the only thing I would read in THE EAGLE would be DAN DARE and HEROS THE SPARTAN, and in BOY'S WORLD there was WRATH OF THE GODS, which was drawn by John M. Burns, and later a Frank Bellamy science fiction strip. The thing about so-called English comics, like the WAR PICTURE LIBRARY comics, was that a lot of the artists were Spanish or Italian. The best WAR PICTURE LIBRARY artist was a great favourite of mine and was also Mick McMahon's absolute idol, an Italian artist called Gino D'Antonio. He drew a lot of fantastic war comics and obviously worked in a huge studio with different inkers, because sometimes he would have a spikey style, and sometimes he'd have a really smooth style. I was exposed to quite a range of comic book art, but there was something about the way the American comics' stories tied into each other, and the fact that you had artists' credits and Stan's Soapbox and the Bullpen Bulletins, or Julie Schwarz's letters pages. There was a feeling like you were all part of a big family. My first contact with fandom was via something that I read in THE EAGLE. A guy from South Africa called John Wright wrote a letter that was published, saying that he was starting up a magazine about comics, and if anybody was interested they should write to him and he'd tell them how to get a copy. I must have been about 11 or 12, and I immediately sent off a letter. Weeks later I got back this airmail envelope with a couple of mimeographed pages in it, in purple ink, which included a drawing of THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA. There was HAWKMAN, but it was a different HAWKMAN, FLASH but a different FLASH, along with DOCTOR FATE and all these incredible characters. It was like a magic door opening. So I corresponded with John and he sent me the two issues of this magazine that he did, THE KOMIX, and through that I got in touch with a couple of other English fans, and I also became a member of Jerry Bails' Academy of Comic Book Arts and Sciences. I even had my name listed in their directory as a wannabe comic book artist. I corresponded with a few American fans as well. Those days seem unbelievable now. We used to lend each other comics through the mail. We used to give away comics that we had extra copies of. There was a guy in the States who I fell out of touch with, called Jerry Pritchett, who every month would send me a big bundle of comics that he'd read. It was a very different atmosphere in comics fandom, it hadn't become big business back then. There was no Price Guide, there was no eBay. The first thing I did when I qualified as a building surveyor was to resign from my job! Then I pissed off to Spain for a few months, and when I came back I thought, "Right, I'm gonna get into comics." By this time I'd had some stuff published in fanzines and underground comics over here, and an art agent had seen my samples and thought that he could get me some work. I got this absolutely appalling comic book to draw, which was a digest, a small 64 page comic called "The Dead are Awake and Walking!" And it was basically alternating scenes of domestic life and zombies emerging from the local graveyard chasing around young women in their nightclothes. It was very poorly paid and it took me a long time to draw. Despite all her doubts and fears, my mum, bless her, helped me out with money and I can remember when I got the final check for it — which was probably for half the book. It was £80. So I said, "Okay, mum, I've got my check now, let's settle up, how much do I owe you?" And she said, "Let me see..." and she added it up and she said, "You owe me £81.50 — but I'll let you off the £1.50!" So I hadn't made any money at it and I had to go back to being a surveyor again, which I did for maybe another nine or ten months. By that time I was drawing joke pages and doing a bit of balloon lettering and stuff for Fleetway, and I'd got to the point where I had enough money to keep me going for three or four months. So I packed in my job again — much to my mum's disgust, because she quite reasonably thought, "Okay, you've had your go, but you didn't make a go of it, so just give it up." However, it seemed to bite that time and I've worked professionally in comics ever since, and that was back in 1973. Was your dad proud of you for making a go of it? I think that they always had the feeling that it was a fluke, or that I was on a lucky streak or something. At the beginning I used to work in the shed in the garden and it could get really cold out there, a bit squalid and amateurish and I think they really doubted that I could make a living like that. Then I got married and I made enough money to get a mortgage and then, around that time, 2000AD fortunately started up. I'd done a lot of work for DC Thompson — up in Dundee strangely enough — but really 2000AD put me on the map and I worked regularly from then on. My art agent, Barry Coker, was a really nice man. It's great having an agent on your side when you're starting out, and he got me my first handshake at 2000AD, although I think Kevin O'Neill, the then art assistant on the comic, had put a word in for me. When I started working through Barry, I was paying him 20% commission and, after a couple of years, one Christmas he said to me, "Y'know, Dave, you do a lot of running around and your own phonecalls and everything, let's reduce it to 15%." I said, "Fine, thanks." Then a couple of Christmases after that he said, "Y'know, I think 10% would be more fair." When I eventually got approached by DC comics I asked him what we should do about our relationship, he said, "They approached you directly, so you don't owe me anything." An absolute gentleman. So my mum and dad did get to see me draw for DC comics. My mum died in 1995, and my dad died in 1997. They were always very interested and I'd give them copies of any collections of my stuff. They'd keep them and show them to other members of the family, and I think once that they became absolutely sure that it was now my career, they were happy for me. Perhaps out of respect for them I have, to this day, kept up my building surveyor membership subscription, and I get the trade magazine every month, so if comics does all go tits up, I could always go back to surveying. It's not a bad job, really. One particularly good thing, for me, about being a building surveyor working in London was that, when I was supposed to be looking at people's malfunctioning lavatories or cracked walls, I'd make a side trip to the second hand bookshops on the Old Kent Road and fill in some of the gaps in my comic collection. The offices I worked out of were just round the corner from Fleetway, so that was also a bonus when I was trying to break in. You once credited yourself as D. Chester Gibbons — did you once tell me your dad's name was Chester? My dad's name was Hubert Chester Gibbons. My middle name is also Chester, as is my son's too. I had this plan — which I think my son's more likely to achieve than me — to start out as Dave Gibbons, then David Gibbons, then David C. Gibbons, then D. Chester Gibbons and then, obviously, Lord Gibbons of Chester! My son is already Doctor Daniel Gibbons. He qualified last year. I felt steered a little bit by my parents, albeit in a benevolent way, so I was quite clear that whatever my child wanted to do, even it was playing the kazoo outside the train station, if that's what he really wanted to do, that would be fine. Obviously, I had high hopes that he would want to spend all day hunched under an Anglepoise lamp like me, but my son turned out to be very, very bright, much brighter than I am. He got straight A's at school and decided that he wanted to be a doctor. He gets paid good money now and actually gets to do something worthwhile in the world. Where did I go wrong? Kids today! He's not a huge comics fan. He used to love TRANSFORMERS and other Marvel UK comics when he was a kid and later, some manga. I even did a couple of covers for Simon Furman at Marvel UK so that Dan would be proud of his dad. He isn't named after Dan Dare, by the way, he's named after Daniel, an Elton John song that was one of his mum's favorites. He's got a good artistic eye, and designed lots of publications and posters at University. He's always been a real computer graphics whiz too. He's actually outdone me in the world of comics in that he was published in comics at a very, very young age. What happened was that I'd written a miniseries, the first thing I ever wrote for DC, called WORLD'S FINEST, drawn very beautifully by Steve Rude. In the story, Superman and Batman have given up hope until they go to this orphanage where the kids have drawn "My hero, Superman" and "My hero, Batman," and written things like "Superman and Batman will never let me down." That's what spurs them on to go and do the next thing. So there needed to be a childlike drawing of Superman and Batman, and I suggested that Dan could draw them. DC said, "Fine," and Steve said "Yeah, sure, and he can have the page rate as well." So Dan drew, in crayon, on a piece of pre-printed DC board, pictures of Superman and Batman. Rather nicely as well. As you might expect for someone who turned out to be a doctor, the anatomy was flawless. However, when DC received the art there was a bit of a panic, because there had to be a contract, and Dan was legally a minor, so I signed the contract for him. Then they said, "Er, since he's a minor, we can only pay him half page rate!" So, I gave Dan his check, for half a page rate, and said; "Welcome to the world of comics, son!" It may have been that that made him think he was going to go and get a job somewhere where they'd pay him properly! But he was a published comic book artist when he was just 8 years old. What are the qualities that you admired in your dad that you think you've passed on to Daniel? My dad was a very dependable man. He was a man of his word, very fair minded, a very kind man, quite imaginative and good company. After he died, the local village council had a street named after him, which shows how well thought of he was by those who knew him. I would like to think that I've inherited some of those qualities, and certainly when I look at Dan, I see a lot of those qualities. Did you and your dad spend any particular quality time with you — perhaps at a football match on a Saturday? We were neither of us particularly sporty or athletic or outdoors people, but I would spend a lot of time with my dad at weekends. We'd go for a walk or we'd go for a drive and he'd buy me a comic book or look at a new Airfix model, I think we were more interested in things like that. Dan and I turned out to like a lot of the same music and films — and we're both Mac geeks, for what that's worth! I used to kick a football around with him a bit and he used go to football class after school but he'd run around intrigued by the shape his shadow was making, rather then looking at the ball. Dan and I have always had a very good relationship. We've always been able to talk very easily. We keep in touch on the phone every week or so. He's extremely busy at the moment but we're always very pleased to see each other and we always have a good time when we do meet up. I couldn't be more proud of the way that he's turned out. And how has the experience of being a stepfather been? Well, one thing that I hadn't had much experience of until recently was teenage daughters. other than remembering my sister's screaming tantrums. But yes, I'm now the stepfather of two girls, a seventeen year old and a fifteen year old. Two very tall girls. A couple of strapping amazons both getting on for six feet tall. They go in for the typical amount of door slamming and screams of "I HATE YOOOOUUU!" To begin with, even though it wasn't particularly directed at me, I would sit there with my hands clenching the arms of the chair and my knuckles turning white. Now I just carry on reading the newspaper as if nothing's happened! I did have a sister growing up — she's called Wendy, because at the time my mum was pregnant with her the PETER PAN movie was all the rage, and I said, "If you have a girl, you've got to call her Wendy." She's five years younger than me, and when she was in the thick of her teenage years, I was pretty oblivious to her. We get on very well these days. My oldest stepdaughter, Rachael, is very arty in a painting, fine art way. She's not really into comics, although she will look at the odd one. I did give her a copy of THE ORIGINALS, and I half expected that she'd flip through it and throw it in a corner. But she read it from cover to cover and we had one of the best conversations we'd ever had with each other afterwards. She talked about the things she liked, the things she didn't like, how things were just like her experience nowadays being a teenager. She gave me a really good insight, and actually made me feel as if I'd done something which, although it was based on my own hoary, ancient experiences — and of course the important thing for me was that I'd done THE ORIGINALS with a great deal of honesty — worked for a contemporary teenager. The younger girl, Hannah, isn't arty, but she is a great reader and she loves movies. You can't be a father when you're a stepdad. The best you can hope for is to be some kind of live-in uncle, or something like that. And of course there is a degree of resistance — most children will try to contest or wriggle away from anything they think their parents impose upon them. I tend to stand back from it, and although I have tried to give Rachael advice and the benefit of my experience, I'm careful not to suggest that I have any kind of proprietorial interest in her. She's a very independently minded girl and she's perfectly capable of sorting things out for herself, but I hope she believes me when I repeatedly tell her how talented she is. She does have the hallmark of all people that have talent — I suffer from it myself(!) — which is to have great misgivings about her own abilities. I think that the minute you become complacent and think that you know it all, and you stop learning, that's when you stop. More than that, you actually go downhill. I'm always trying out new stuff. I'm experimenting with new ways of drawing pages — trying out new pens — all the time. I think you have to find ways to keep yourself interested. How did the passing of your father affect your outlook on life — did he live to a ripe old age? My dad was 83 when he died. My mum was 78. There was something about the manner of their passing, that made me think of that famous quote, "There was nothing so typical of his life as his death." My dad was always one to prevaricate about things and he basically died of old age, he sort of faded away really. My mum, who was much more impulsive, just went out like a light in the middle of the street. I think there's a sense that, when your parents die, you move up to the front line. It's a common experience, y'know "You're next!" My dad was a great hoarder of things. He was a lifelong stamp collector, mainly British stamps, and it was rather strange breaking up his effects, all these things he'd carefully saved all his life. I know nothing about stamps; very few people seem to collect stamps these days and in the end I took them to a dealer who seemed to me to be quite reputable and I accepted what he offered me, which was about 450 quid. I have no idea if that was the real value of the collection, it may have been ten times that. And that did make me reflect on the wisdom or otherwise of collecting and hoarding things — although I still have my stacks of comics that I've been holding onto for fifty years. But I guess if I was going to part with my comics I'd want them to go to someone that actually appreciated them rather than have them end up on eBay or in some car boot sale. Their deaths weren't my first experience of mortality. In my late teens and early twenties I had actually worked in the holidays in an old folks' home, so I was quite used to it. I was familiar with people aging and being ill and over the years I've developed a philosophical outlook that has helped me through these things. My first wife died in the late nineties, as you know, and by then I'd thankfully developed some equanimity which helped greatly. I think my dad had a good life, he lived to a good age and got to see his grandchildren. Do you have grandchildren now? No, Daniel has no children yet. That's the next click of the big wheel, isn't it? I look forward to that, and I look forward to having as long a life as my dad as well. I overheard Garth Ennis referring to you as the 'Grandfather of British Comics' once, so I think you have enough kids to worry about! In fact, at one point I used to knock around a lot with Mick McMahon and Kev O'Neill, who are rather short and slight in stature and, at one comic mart, someone said, "Oh look, it's Dave Gibbons and his sons!" It's strange, because I went through school being younger than everyone else, and I always thought of myself as being "The Lad," but now I look around and I realize that I've become "The Dad"!
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
