Broken Frontier

This week, the UK’s Ambassador for Comics reveals his thoughts on the past and future of the medium. Pull up a chair, make yourself a cup of tea and settle down for a chat with Paul Gravett.

Dave: Paul, on your website , you describe yourself as “a London-based freelance journalist, curator, lecturer, writer and broadcaster, who has worked in comics publishing and promotion for over twenty years”. You first hit the comics scene as the co-ordinator of Fast Fiction, the loose collective of British small press publishers. Before we get to that, let’s hear a little of your background. What did your parents do? Did they encourage you to read comics?

Paul: Well, they didn't discourage me. My Dad was a solicitor and my Mum a legal secretary at the same firm. Dad was mad on home movie making, my Mum sang in local amateur operatic productions in Shenfield, Essex. 

Dave: What are your first fond memories of comics? 

Paul: TV21 and Look & Learn landing on the doormat. Being swept away by the epic fantasy and glorious photogravure colour of Bellamy's Thunderbirds, Embleton's Stingray, Noble's Fireball XL5, Turner's Daleks and Lawrence's Trigan Empire.  

Cover to the thirteenth issue of Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury’s
groundbreaking Escape magazine – the New York Special.
Art by Charles Burns, design by Peter Stanbury.

Dave: It’s true that the colour on those British comics of the sixties was amazingly rich. I never understood why more recent comics aren’t so well printed, until someone in the business explained to me just how complex and expensive the process was. Now of course photogravure has been replaced by faster lower quality printing. We really were spoiled. When did you actually start to collect comics and were these primarily homegrown? 

Paul: Yes, British first. I didn't properly collect comics though, as I'd destroy and cut them up, put favourite panels or photos into scrapbooks.   

Dave: I did the same with my favourite comic book covers. My copies of Steranko’s SHIELD still have loose covers and sellotape marks on the corners. When did you start to notice American comics? 

Paul: Batman TV show led me to discovering imported US comics on those squeaky rotating spinner racks or on market stalls in Romford, amid the heady fumes of malt from the local brewery. I remember coming home with a World's Finest 80-pager and thinking how special this was, so many pages, such 'long' imaginative complete stories, all in colour and all the way from America. Soon after I found Fantastic and Terrific on the newsstands, reprinting Marvel in B&W and I soon found their US titles too - and Charlton, Harvey, Tower. Alan Class comics were another route. 

Dave: I still get all tingly just thinking about spinner racks and Alan Class comics. Now, your tastes are eclectic to say the least. You’ve written extensively on European and Japanese comics in particular. I have to ask this. How big is your comics collection? Do you have any idea of numbers? 

Paul: Not really, I have one 'library' room filled floor to ceiling, but it's spilled out into other rooms. Over the years I've not kept everything. Again I don't see it so much as a collection, as a resource, an attempt to understand this amazing medium, its heritage, its creativity.  

Dave: I came across two references to you in books I was reading recently. Firstly in Eddie Campbell’s autobiographical “Alec: How to be an artist,” where you are the proverbial Man at the Crossroads. Let’s talk about that and I’ll drop in an image or two from the book. Eddie first met you at the Fast Fiction table of the London Westminster Hall comic marts. This was, of course, the beating heart of the British small press. Can you give us a brief history of Fast Fiction and the people involved?

The Man at the Crossroads meets Eddie Campbell. 

Paul: Eddie called me that first in Dead Muse actually. I remember going over to Ian Wieczorek's house in Chelmsford, where Phil Elliott also lived, and talking and talking about comics, while Ian's lovely Mum was plying us with more and more treats and food. I think it was there that I first saw Eddie's comics in a self-published zine around 1981. Eddie was an Essex boy like us, living in Southend. I'd just got back in 1979 from a post-university 16-month stay out in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And not long after I wanted to reconnect to the UK comics world and thought it would be useful for people creating fanzines to have a stall at the Westminster Central Hall comic marts to sell their new titles.

I rented the stall and invited people to bring their zines or send some to me. I wrote to loads of people, many via Mal Burns' vital columns - in Fantasy Advertiser/BEM/Comic Media News, wherever I could find names and addresses. Cheap photocopying, and the punk DIY approach led to lots of people trying their hand at comics. Fast Fiction was a name plucked from an Overstreet, just sounded catchy, like fast food. Phil designed a logo and I put out the first free FF Info Sheet with listings and news.

From the start, I didn't just want to carry UK zines on the stall, I wanted to offer things like English editions of BD and manga, like Joost Swarte's Modern Art and Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen, just started at that time.  It was Phil and Ian, with Eddie, who started to publish the Fast Fiction anthology.  
Dave: You worked for a brief time at Psssst, however the hell you pronounce the thing, but I think we can safely skip that period… 

Paul: It's a book in itself actually – “pssst!” (small p, only 3 's'es and one exclamation mark!) was crucial for me. It gave me a chance to quit deadly dull insurance broking forever and earn a (modest) living from comics - first touring the UK in a double-decker bus promoting the mag, then back in the offices as their 'Submissions Co-Ordinator', an amazing role, dealing with the floods of material sent in to the magazine.  

The UKBD giveaway promo for Escape.   

Dave: Fast Fiction evolved into Escape, which was a showcase for most young talent around at the time. Who were some of the notables you published?

Paul: Actually, Escape also evolved as much out of pssst!, or in reaction to its faults. Artists like Shaky Kane, Paul Johnson, Paul Bignell, had been showcased there, while Rian Hughes was all set to debut in issue 11, but that never came out. Escape also grew out of my not having any editorial input on pssst! and seeing amazing talents like Eddie Campbell being rejected by their editorial board. As well as Phil and Eddie, other notables would include the feisty Myra Hancock, a wonderfully fresh female voice, and the total original Ed Pinsent. Equally important was giving 'veterans' like Hunt Emerson and Savage Pencil a new platform to cut loose in. Actually, every Escape, I think, introduced somebody new, British or international, Peter and I were always looking.

The Escape manifesto – art by Shaky Kane 

Dave: I like that description of Myra. Feisty indeed. You’ve mentioned your long-time partner, Peter Stanbury who was the other half of the production team on Escape. You’ve been together since those early days and he’s designed all your publications since then. I vaguely remember meeting him once, many years ago, but I can’t be certain. Is Peter a man who shuns publicity?

Free postcards, inserted into Escape issue 1. Yes it’s that man Kane again! 

Paul: Peter's less keen on the spotlight, true, but we've been doing more promotion together lately for Great British Comics, last year's book, which we co-wrote and co-conceived together. He was a vital part of Escape, being the 'layman', not immersed in comics like me, he could bring his interest in drawing and storytelling to bear as an editor.

He actually helped several Escape Artists develop or originate their stories - for example the amazing post-nuclear tale of Tim Budden's Badgers. Peter also brought all his design and production skills, from years working on glossy magazines, and his wit and humour helped add some sparkle. We make a great team.

Paul Gravett (right) with Peter Stanbury.

Dave: The second mention of you I spotted this week was in an interview with Neil Gaiman in Mark Salisbury’s book “Writers on Comics Scriptwriting” from Titan Books. In answer to the question “So how did the big break come?” Neil talks about a man he met in a pub who was working on a comic and looking for fresh new talent. I actually remember when this guy walked into the Society of Strip Illustration followed by a dozen of these ‘fresh new talents’ and announced that the old days were over and that he and his discoveries were the future of British comics.

As Neil commented, nothing ever came of that vain boast. However it did bring him into contact with Dave McKean and the two of them were introduced to you. Neil goes on to say: “(Paul Gravett) liked what I was writing and what Dave was drawing and asked us if we were interested in doing a five-page strip for him. It is much to Paul’s credit that when we went to see him a week later and said ‘Would you mind terribly if instead we did a forty-eight page graphic novel called Violent Cases?’ he thought for a minute and said sure.”  Did you realise how important Violent Cases was going to be and the impact the team of Gaiman and McKean would have on comics? 

Paul: I'd like to pretend I was extraordinarily farsighted here. But I can say that as I saw Violent Cases evolve, from an Escape feature into a graphic novel, seeing new pages they'd bring to the Marts, anyone could see that something highly innovative was going on here.

Violent Cases - the brilliant debut of Gaiman and McKean.  

Dave: Tell us about some of the other books you published. “Alec” and “London’s Dark”. Anything else at that period? 

Paul: Well we did 3 Alecs, wish we could have done the fourth and final one. We did the trend-setting thing of getting both Moore and Bolland to pen intros for the first one. There were others, like Dave Thorpe and Phil Elliott's Doc Chaos and Phil Laskey's Alex & Ali, graphic novels of sorts even if they had no spines on them! As well as the 19 issues of Escape, we did supplements like Comic Iconoclasm for the ICA's comic art show in 1987, The Black Island for the Institut Français' show on Britain in BD, and even the programme for the Violent Cases stage play. 

Dave: Over the years you’ve gradually become known as the public face of British Comics, the go-to guy when there’s an exhibition to be curated, an interview to be conducted, a sound-bite to be quoted. I’ve recently seen a few of your obituaries to deceased comics creators in the national press. I think we can safely see you as an ambassador for comics. Is that how you like to see yourself? 

Paul: In a way yes. Perhaps it goes back to when I was on the road, or on the bus route, promoting pssst! to the media, art schools, etc. I found that I could communicate my enthusiasm for this medium and realised somebody was needed to do this here. One radio presenter nicknamed me Paul 'Mission to Explain' Gravett.  

Dave: Would you put it down to your non-judgmental approach to comics? I’ve never heard you specifically criticize any genre or publisher and your knowledge of every corner of the comics world is quite astonishing. 

Paul: I look for the qualities in everything, though of course they are not always there! In a sense I have a very judgmental approach, because I choose to write about and promote what I find the most interesting, so what I am less keen on, I tend to sideline. I can see the appeal of criticising the mediocre in comics, as The Comics Journal would do at great length. But there are simply too many wonderful comics out there that deserve more attention and acclaim, to waste time and paper slamming the rubbish.

Part of this attitude comes out of my belief that comics is a vibrant, valid art form and out of my interest in how it relates to every other art form. I was lucky to learn about art, painting and drawing, while at university, and seeing how this could link with comics. One of the big reasons why Escape got its title was that Peter and I wanted comics to break free of their blinkered, inward-looking, ghettoised mindset and explore their connectedness to everything out there.     

Dave: In 1992 you became director of the Cartoon Art Trust. How important is the Trust in the promotion of the art form? 

Paul: My nine years at CAT were a fantastic experience, I learned so much about conservation, curating, promotion, dealing with artists and the public, sponsors and archives, and saw another 'bigger picture', how comics interrelate with the history and actuality of cartoons and caricature, the whole breadth of cartoon art. I never saw any problem with including comics but there was always some tension about the role and scale of comics within CAT and what was acceptable, and to an extent there still is.

I'm happy I was able to get them to mount such amazing exhibitions, like 20 years of Viz, 50 years of Peanuts, launches for Mr Punch, Gemma Bovery, a tribute to Jack Kirby, a mega Dredd show, and more, and loads of workshops for kids and adults. Every country deserves a comics/ cartoon museum to preserve and promote this culture.

You can leave your chair now; this interview will be continued next week...