Doris Lessing, graphic novel writer - by David Thorpe

The great Doris Lessing died last month. Amongst the many eulogies and obituaries I've seen no reference to the book I commissioned from her, written for older children: Playing the Game. So, in memory of her, I'd like to share the story of how it came to be, and how I met her.

She was a beautiful, exceptional person. The few hours I spent with her are extremely special in my memory. She invited me into her home, we shared meals, we looked at artwork, and all the time her viewpoints were surprising and incisive. Above all, she displayed a constantly fearless, enquiring and self-critical mind.

Playing the Game is a graphic novel. For her the ideal audience was young adolescents just beginning to step out into the world. It's an allegory, a call to adventure. 'The Game' in question is a metaphor for life.

Did she think she was "writing down" by writing a comic book or for children? Quite the opposite: "Playing the Game is one of my best ideas" she said.

The book formed part of a series of literary graphic novels I put together, the rest of which were never published. This was the first to be commissioned. The fact that Doris was so enthusiastic about writing a graphic novel meant that many other outstanding literary authors agreed to be part of the series.

She urged many of her friends, including Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Jenny Diski (whom she described as her ‘protegé’) and Angela Carter, to get on board, so open was she to the concept that I had pitched to her, initially via my friend Nick Webb.

This all took place between 1991 and 1995. I had been taken on by the publisher Macdonald-Futura to put together this list, which I now consider forms a lineup of the most beautiful works of literature never published.

The concept I came up with was to match formidable literary talents with the cream of international comics artists for a line of original graphic novels. Besides Doris' friends other authors who did respond positively to my invitation included Peter Greenaway, Kazuo Ishiguro, Lisa Alther and Brian Aldiss. The books would be awesome.

I have a signed, handwritten postcard from JG Ballard. It reads: “Thank you for the invitation, but graphic novels are not for me.”

I have a similar letter from Martin Amis. But he adds: “Should [writing a graphic novel] ever seem like a good idea, I’ll keep you in mind”.

Salman Rushdie’s agent also declined the invitation, as did Douglas Adam’s assistant, giving the excuse “he is at present heavily involved in writing his novel Mostly Harmless.”

But Doris Lessing was more than enthusiastic.

The first time I went round to her house in West Hampstead was with a pile of different graphic novels so that she could choose an artist. We spent a happy hour going through them. I was gobsmacked by her first choice: the Heavy Metal artist of 2000 A.D.'s ABC Warriors and Slaine, Simon Bisley. I knew Simon - he was an iron-pumping bike-riding working-class lad who had a big fan base in Hell's Angels.

His artwork was bursting with macho energy, imaginative and attention grabbing. It just jumped out of the frame. That she picked him was a measure of her understanding of the power and appeal of the genre. He was a hot and upcoming artist.

When I put the proposal to him he rejected it outright. He'd never heard of Doris Lessing and the fact that she was a Nobel prizewinner cut no ice whatsoever.

Her next choices were artists with a similar virtuoso dramatic style: Duncan Fegredo and Daniel Vallely. They too had never heard of her, didn't like the script and rejected the offer.

I was beginning to see the problem: these working class artists were mostly anarchic types whereas Doris Lessing's appeal was to quite a different audience. It says a lot about her wide-ranging tastes that she was enthusiastic about them - but it was unfortunate that the feeling was not reciprocated.

From these artists' point of view there was also a problem with the script, for she initially had not written a conventional comics script, which is broken down into pages and panels, but something looser, leaving room, she said, to allow the artist freedom to interpret. This freedom, they felt, demonstrated a lack of understanding of the medium. I don't believe it did for a minute. She understood the medium very well. But we refined the script as follows:

Page 4 of her typed script:

What she had written was essentially a libretto for an aria for an opera and she talked passionately about wanting her friend Philip Glass to write the music for it.

She invited me round for dinner. As her son, Peter, for whom she cared most of her life, hovered in the background, a constant presence, we talked about her disillusionment with Communism and what it was really like in Brixton during the riots. Under questioning, I conveyed why my anarchist friends, including those who were 'slumming it' from higher up the social strata (just as in her novel The Good Terrorist), thought that the portrayal of the terrorist was unrealistic, and she listened without a trace of defensiveness. Always her voracious non-judgemental mind sought out new information.

Both the series and this book had a chequered history in eventually being published, which is outlined below. In the end HarperCollins, who had just bought up the rights to all of her work, said they were keen on publishing Playing the Game.

I ultimately succeeded in finding an artist, Charlie Adlard, who had cut his teeth on a few minor Marvel Comics titles, to agree to to draw it. His style was much milder than the artists Lessing originally chose, which was a disappointment to us both. By this time I had moved from London with my family to mid-Wales. Charlie lived in Shrewsbury. We would meet in Shrewsbury pubs and he would come down the Cambrian Line to Wales, to discuss the progression of the artwork.

HarperCollins appointed a desk editor for the title. Sadly she had absolutely no experience of comics or graphic novels. The book came out in 1995. I must confess I was never happy with its final form, which I don't think did the story justice. It did not garner rave reviews; but what do critics know?

A page of inked artwork:

The same page as it appeared in the book having been coloured:

Two pages that did not appear in the finished book in the same form:

More about the series

In 1991 I was a freelance commissioning editor and writer. I had already been working for a decade as a comics writer and desk editor of UK editions of such titles as Watchmen by Alan Moore, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman’s Violent Cases, plus European bandes desinées like The Magician's Wife by French comics creators François Boucq and Jerome Charyn.

Nick Webb was then MD of Macdonald-Futura. I had initially won the support of John Jarrold, now a science fiction literary agent, but then editor of the Orbit SF imprint, for my project. He got Nick excited and off we went.

The full list included, at one point, film director Peter Greenaway matched with the seminal (and very edgy) Judge Dredd artist Brian Bolland (they had long admired each others’ work, unbeknownst to one another), a work by Brian Aldiss called Her Toes Were Beautiful In the Water, to be illustrated by Italian artist Lorenzo Mattotti, and Uh-Oh City by Jonathan Carroll and Dave McKean, who had also, until I introduced them, only admired each other from afar. Dave went on to design book covers for Carroll.

You might wonder why this series did not appear other than for Doris' title.

Here is where this tale enters the realm of the gothic farce. The publishing house Macdonald, with its office near Holborn, was, like Fleetway, publishers of 2000AD, part of the vast, serpentine publishing empire owned by Robert Maxwell, then the neo-socialist arch-rival of über-capitalist Rupert Murdoch, whose own vast serpentine empire included HarperCollins. Maxwell was publisher of the Daily Mirror, which was head-to-head with Murdoch's The Sun.

On 5 November 1991, Maxwell famously slipped over the side of his luxury yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, off the Canary Islands, and his body was later found bobbing in the Atlantic Ocean. His empire imploded in a financial firestorm. Time Warner eventually bought Macdonald, but they didn’t want my series.

This situation wasn’t helped by a report from Macdonald's sales department, which was overwhelmingly negative and is worth quoting from, because the situation is so different today. They said “Reaction has ranged from disinterest to hostility...” the sales force has “a sour taste" following the “failure of Fleetway’s graphic novels”.

Fleetway's series consisted of collections of strips like Judge Dredd from 2000AD, which I had edited for Titan Books, and which were apparently overpriced for their teenage market - so were anecdotally the most shoplifted volumes on the market. “All major wholesalers have been apprised of the nature of the forthcoming list,” said the report, “and have not been interested”, even though a BBC documentary was promised covering the making of the series.

Undeterred, for several months I hawked the list around publishers both British and foreign. These expensive books largely required co-editions setting up with publishers abroad in order to make it financially possible to pay the authors and artists a reasonable fee, and the production and printing costs, and I worked hard at trade shows trying to secure these.

Editors were enthusiastic but could not make it work financially. Eventually HarperCollins, owned by Maxwell’s old rival Rupert Murdoch, accepted Playing the Game.

One of the most interesting potential titles for me was Angela Carter’s Gun for the Devil, a retelling on the Mexican-US border of the plot of Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz (The Freeshooter). Angela and I lived not far from each other; she in Clapham and I in Dulwich. We met in her favourite tea house on Clapham Common, at the time when she already knew she didn’t have much longer to live. It was very poignant.

She didn't look ill, but radiant. She told me she wanted as much of her work published as possible, in order to provide royalties for her surviving husband and son. A version of Gun for the Devil was eventually published after her death in an anthology, American Ghosts and Old World Wonders. The version I have is a treatment.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s story was The Gourmet (a fabulous ghost story that was not original alas, but an adaptation of a tv drama), which Dave McKean also agreed to illustrate.

Iain Banks was keen to be part of the series but his agent demanded too high a fee; he and Belgian artist François Schuitten, who drew the visionary Citées Obscures series of graphic novels which I love, would have been a perfect match, and François was certainly up for it.

American writer Lisa Alther was also very enthusiastic when we met in a café in central London, and sent a magical story about how all large inland lakes with lake monsters, like Loch Ness, are connected by underground water-filled tunnels, based on a monster she had seen in one of the Great Lakes which bordered her home.

Other onboard contributors to the series included science fiction writers Chris Fowler (paired with John Bolton), Patrick Tilley, Alan Dean Foster (who with Colin MacNeil would produce a book in his Spellsinger series), Grant Morrison (a piece called W to be illustrated by Bill Koeb), and a three-book series by Shaun Hutson.

My trawl of the literary scene also landed me in fascinating encounters with William Burroughs, Jeanette Winterton, Frank Herbert, Ben Elton, Jenny Diski, Faye Weldon, Sue Townsend, Umberto Eco and Terry Pratchett.

I would still love to see this series see the light of day. Nowadays, 20 years on, the market for graphic novels is very different. I believe it would welcome a list like this. I still have files of scripts or synopses in my drawers.

© David Thorpe

Comics, anarchy, chaos magick and George Orwell - David Thorpe

The founding fathers would turn in their graves. The British Library is hosting an exhibition of publications in a medium once accused of undermining literacy, decency and the very establishment itself: comics.

I haven’t yet visited Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK, which has been curated by Paul Gravett, author of Comic Art, which I reviewed last month, but I have a shrewd idea of much of its contents because of my own involvement in the industry from the 1980s and ‘90s.

A frame from the original artwork of a page of ABC Warriors
from 2000AD comic that hangs in my studio.
Story by Pat Mills, art by Simon Bisley.

Deadline 3 - which published Jamie Hewlett's Tank Girl

Previously I’ve been at pains to emphasise that comics are about much more than men in lycra, but we can’t ignore the lycra or the science fiction and fantasy, which is in strong evidence here. What deserves wide recognition, however, is the role of attitude in providing the energy of iconoclastic creativity that has seen so many writers and artists whose target audience was originally children become internationally hugely influential.

British comics and their creators have an anarchic spirit. In the late nineteenth century the 'Penny Dreadfuls' were sometimes considered so subversive and dangerous to the Establishment (in fomenting an industrial dispute) that at one point printing presses used for printing them were destroyed by the authorities, as documented in Martin Barker’s book Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics.

There is a direct line from these through Fleetway’s Action comic to 2000AD, which in the late ‘70s and ‘80s saw the work of Pat Mills and John Wagner produce strips such as Nemesis the Warlock, which satirised corrupt organised religion, and Judge Dredd, which satirised just about everything including a corrupt totalitarian state (although sometimes Dredd seemed as though it was applauding the very summary dispensation of justice which it avowedly condemned).

Action was created in 1975 by Pat Mills for publishing house IPC. Soon banned for its violent content it nevertheless spawned 2000AD, the home of Judge Dredd.

Jamie's Tank Girl - whom he called a female Judge Dredd with bigger guns on speed.  

2000AD could have been deliberately designed to be the kind of left-wing comic imagined by George Orwell in this fascinating article he wrote about the heavily middle and upper class boys’ comics like Gem, Magnet, Hotspur, Wizard and so on.

These class-ridden, patriotic comics were produced by the ultra-conservative family-owned Scottish DC Thompson publishers, for much of the twentieth century - up until the days of punk rock - as staple fare for boys, a deliberate antidote to the previous, anarchic Penny Dreadfuls. Orwell describes them in depth in the article and observes their propaganda value as follows:

“the stuff is read somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and along with it they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as hopelessly out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party.”

The cover of Revolver 1, which serialised Grant
Morrison's deconstruction of Dan Dare

That aside, there is another ideological gradation that has Leo Baxendale’s Bash Street Kids (also published by DC Thompson in the Beano) and 2000AD at one end - produced by angry, anti-authoritarian working class writers and artists - and the middle class Frank Hampton’s neo-Imperialistic Dan Dare at the other.

Common to both is the preoccupation with slapstick humour, fantasy and science fiction as a way of boggling minds and examining present-day trends taken to extremes.

Orwell himself notes the value of Sci-Fi (which he calls Scientifiction) in this fascinating sentence:

“Whereas the Gem and Magnet derive from Dickens and Kipling, the Wizard, Champion, Modern Boy, etc., owe a great deal to H. G. Wells, who, rather than Jules Verne, is the father of ‘Scientifiction’.”

You can even position later writers, influenced by these earlier names, on this spectrum, such as Alan Moore and Grant Morrison on the left, and Neil Gaiman more in centre-ground. Grant slyly subverted Dan Dare himself, imagining him as an older man morosely looking back on the glory days of space empire in the pages of Revolver in the late ‘80s.

The ‘80s was a key time, because it was then that the kids who had been brought up on the Beano and 2000AD hit adulthood and it became cool to continue reading comics. Inspired by Moore’s Watchmen and V for Vendetta, and the American Frank Miller’s Batman: Dark Knight Returns, younger artists and writers gave birth to an explosion of creativity.

The cover of Crisis issue 3 - probably the closest
ever to Orwell's dream of a left wing comic.

Pat Mills' and Carlos Ezquerra's Third World War deliberately made
very cool heroes out of disabled, black, gay or female characters. 

Eight years after my own story in Marvel's Captain Britain about the Northern Ireland Troubles was censored, Fleetway felt able to publish, in the overtly political Crisis comic, Garth Ennis' True Faith, (but even that graphic novel was scandalously withdrawn from sale, following complaints).

Crisis was, again, largely Pat Mills' brainchild. Overtly political and radical it ran the amazing anti-American Imperialism strip Third World War, which attacked CIA involvement in central and south American countries, a topic already tackled in comics by Alan Moore's and Bill Sienkiewicz's documentary graphic novel, Brought to Light.

The cover of Doc Chaos 1 by me, Lawrence Gray and
Phil Elliott published by Escape

As opposition to Margaret Thatcher and the poll tax spilled over onto the streets and while Spitting Image was on tv, independent creator-owned comics sprang up all over the place, from my own satirical Doc Chaos, published by Gravett's Escape imprint, to Deadline, from Brett Ewins and Steve Dillon, which came directly from a collision between comics and the new House music club culture, the true star of which was to become Jamie Hewlett's Tank Girl.

And most of us know what happened when Hewlett met Blur's Damon Albarn: Gorillaz, the first band in history that was made up of comics characters.

Peter Stanbury's and Paul Gravett's Escape magazine
- beautifully designed, arty and hip. 

I must given a special mention to Don Melia and Lionel Gracey-Whitman for publishing Aargh!, Heartbreak Hotel magazine with the supplement BLAAM! Because the mere fact that this anti-homophobic publication could be a comic was testimony to how far the medium had come since the days of Wizard and Hotspur weekly comics in which homosexuality was a heavily suppressed element. Here is Orwell describing a  cover image: “a nearly naked man of terrific muscular development has just seized a lion by the tail and flung it thirty yards over the wall of an arena”.

Heartbreak Hotel issue 5 cover by Duncan Fegredo

The first comic explicitly for black people, Sphinx

Repossession Blues from the pages of Blaam!

A cover of chaos magick journal Chaos International 
which shows the use of comics iconography
- the exchange of ideas went both ways.

There was a huge amount of talent around in the ‘80s, much of which will be on evidence in the British Library show, but I find it fascinating that I, along with the far more successful Bryan Talbot, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, (particularly the first two) and probably Pat Mills (although I never met him) were also at the time heavily into chaos magick. We’d discuss this when we met occasionally at the bar that used to be at the foot of Centrepoint, near Titan Books’ offices where I worked, and Forbidden Planet bookshop, and at comics conventions.

Alan only went public on this more recently, but Grant overtly used his research in long-running strips such as the intensely surreal Doom Patrol and subsequently The Invisibles, both for DC.

It is not necessary to believe in any of the gods and forces invoked by magical ritual in chaos magick to utilise its effects. The point for all of us was that Nothing is Forbidden, Everything is Permitted, to use Aleister Crowley’s mantra. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" - a phrase deliberately echoed by Mills in the story at the top of this post.

Chaos magick provided an almost limitless kit of tools to access the far reaches of the imagination. I learned my tricks from a group that met every week in Greenwich, above Bulldog’s café, from the legendary Charlie Brewster, aka Choronzon 666.

I used this massive wellspring of creativity when writing The Z-Men for Brendan McCarthy. Brendan was a maverick comics artist who started work in 2000AD, later becoming like many comics artists a film storyboarder, who was renowned for his psychedelic, mystical artwork.

All of us were also heavily influenced by Dada and Surrealism – this was the premier topic of my undergraduate degree.  It is very obvious in Grant’s Doom Patrol - just read my favourite story The Painting That Ate Paris; and how else could you come up with a superhero who is an entire street (named - of course - Danny)?

Pure anarcho-comics: Hooligan Press & Pete Mastin's
Faction File collected from the pages of
squatting magazine Crowbar -
back full circle to the aims of the Penny Dreadfuls.

Arguably, the most successful comics writers working for American publishers in the ‘80s and ‘90s were Neil, Alan and Grant – Brits all. Frank Miller, also a giant, is American of course, and, while anarchic, is sympathetic to the other end of anarchism – right wing libertarian, which approves the right to bear arms and use them against Commie radicals.

I attribute all of their success not just to their supreme storytelling abilities but to their political views and their involvement in anything occult, arcane and extreme, because in these genres of comics, what readers demand is out-there imagination – and it takes some serious head-space distorting tricks to cultivate a mind that can repeatedly and frequently, on demand, to a punishing production schedule, come up with the mind-boggling concepts, characters and storylines required.

These lessons were not lost on the more recent wave of massively successful British writers, such as Warren Ellis and Brian Hitch, the creators of The Authority, (just read Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan for a taste of his brand of anarchy).

And I believe there are lessons here for all writers and artists who aim at children and teens, that most demanding of all audiences, to help them feed and stoke the furnaces of creativity and imagination.

I could even attempt to sum them up in the following seven guidelines. Bear in mind that these are methods I am suggesting, and in no way am I advocating tackling a particular kind of subject matter. These are ways of researching, preparing to write and draw, and of writing and drawing itself:

• Feed your mind with stuff from the far reaches of experience; and apply that to the everyday.
• You can’t be too extreme.
• JG Ballard's maxim: follow your obsessions.
• Never censor yourself – leave it to someone else.
• Boggle minds.
• Maximise drama.
• Above all - don’t take it too seriously.