In my ever growing attempt to bring you guys cool comic book news, I recently asked Antony Johnston if he would subject himself to one of my interviews. He kindly accepted!

I really took note of Antony for his recent issue of Queen & Country, but little did I realize that I had been enjoying his writing on other books like Julius and Three Days In Europe.

Antony is a great writer with a fresh voice and one of the best ears for dialogue that Ive had the pleasure to read recently. Thats why Im so excited to have been able to talk with him. Alright, here we go!

4 color rebellion originally started off as a site about comics and was especially interested in not only broadening the appeal of comics, but bringing new blood into the industry. Being on the inside, do you think that the industry relies too heavily on franchise characters and not creating new properties? Or is it more of a necessity?

I don’t think it’s a necessity at all. There’s nothing wrong with franchises per se - you’ll find them in any creative medium - but when the dominance of such franchises means original work is barely even looked at by the audience, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

TV, for example, is full of franchises, and that’s a medium which is all about the bottom line. But even in such a commercially-led environment, the existence of (for example) LAW & ORDER doesn’t stop THE SHIELD getting made, or attracting viewers.

The difference is in the audience, and in most media you’ll find people are fans of genres or styles just as much as specific franchises. There’ll always be devoted fans of one author/show/movie series or another, but generally they’ll still give something new a go so long as it’s in a genre they like - and outside of comics, most people are fans of more than one genre. That just doesn’t happen much in comics, and it’s baffling.

With that being said, do you think there is a viable market out there for indie comics? A way for them to really break out, or is it all a big Diamond, Marvel & DC world?

Assuming by ‘indie’ you mean ‘non-superhero’, I think there’s a massive *potential* market for them. Just look at the sales for books like JIMMY CORRIGAN, PERSEPOLIS and BLANKETS. But there are many hurdles to overcome, not least of which is the continued common misconception that comics are an infantile medium.

How did you get your start in comics? Personally, to me, it seems like it would be harder for a writer to get into the industry than an artist. Is that the case?

Generally, yes. An editor can look at an artist’s portfolio in half a minute, and immediately tell whether the artist is ‘ready for prime time’. Writers have to somehow convince an editor to sit and read through an entire proposal, sometimes a full sample script, and that takes valuable time.

I still believe the best way to ‘break in’ - for a writer *or* artist - is to collaborate with someone to produce a finished comic, and use it as your calling card. It doesn’t have to be properly printed, it doesn’t have to be flash and glossy. Xerox will do fine. Hell, you could even put it up on the web. But it has to be finished, and complete. A comic can be read in five minutes, and immediately tells an editor everything they need to know about your talents.

I wrote and collaborated on a number of strips, mostly for the web, when I was starting out. One of them, an illustrated prose work called FRIGHTENING CURVES, caught the attention of then-upstart publisher Cyberosia, who offered to publish the completed story as a book. Shortly afterwards I did another graphic novel, ROSEMARY’S BACKPACK, with the same publisher - and again, worked with the artist well in advance of any payment - and those two books led to my first paying gigs with Oni and Avatar.

In the books Ive read of yours (Julius, Three Days in Europe, Q&C) You have shown quite a good ear for dialog. Whats your process for scripting dialog and why do you think that so many writers fall flat in this area?

I couldn’t possibly speak for other writers, but for my part, it’s just a case of listening to how people talk. Because you’re limited for space, dialogue in comics is always a balancing act of realism and economy - trying to keep the characters sounding distinct and natural while also getting all the necessary information in. It’s probably my best skill, but I don’t really have a process for it. I’ve just been doing it for so long, since I was a kid, that it comes naturally.

Does writing comics pay the rent?

It does for me, yes, but I’d caution anyone looking to make a fortune from comics that they could probably earn more, for less stress and effort, as an office junior…

Im not sure how the comic market is in England, but in the US it is a woefully under appreciated medium. At least until its turned into a Hollywood Movie, that is. Do you think comics themselves will ever become mainstream? Or is that possibly the worst thing that could happen to their continued growth?

I’d welcome it with open arms, but I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon, if at all. Even when comics regularly sold half a million copies, they were still regarded as a niche, fringe medium. And even a million people is less than 0.5% of the USA’s entire population. It would take a massive sea change to somehow legitimise comics as a medium in the eyes of most Western people.

What people who argue against popularity, especially with cries of ’sell out’ and ‘commercialisation’, forget is that it’s all about percentages. If we assume 90% of everything is crap, as the saying goes, and that in any given month there are 500 comics published, then only 50 of them are any good. But popularisation of the medium would by definition increase the number of books being published. So if there were suddenly 2000 comics published every month, the number of ‘good’ books would increase to 200, because so many more people would be working in the industry, at all levels.

My favourite analogy for this, mainly because it’s something I know a lot about, is goth music. Back in the early to mid ’90s, when goth was desperately unhip and survived purely through the underground, there were maybe a hundred working goth bands in the world, and about a dozen of them were actually good. Now, thanks to crossovers with dance music and heavy metal, goth is a legitimate and popular genre. And sure, there are loads of bad goth bands about, cashing in on the genre’s new popularity. But there are also far more good ones than ever before, just because there are more people working in the genre.

If the same thing were to happen to comics, I’d be dancing in the street. Probably to some dodgy goth techno.

At the end of the day are you satisfied with what you write? And in a more introspective manner, do you think that your comics can change people lives, or are you simply hoping to entertain?

I’m satisfied inasmuch as I know I did the best job I could do at the time, and that’s all any creator can realistically hope for. But every writer will tell you they’re never happy with their work. What you write never lives up to what you imagined in your head when you started, and it’s the desire to refine that process, to get the translation as close as you can, that keeps writers going.

I don’t set out to try and change people’s lives, and I’d be wary of any fiction writer who did. Could it happen anyway? Sure, but not because I had that intention. How could I, when I have no idea who’s going to be reading it?

Alright, enough with the deep questions, lets get on to Queen & Country! How much do you love what Rucka has done with the spy genre?

A lot.

No, really. Espionage wasn’t always personified by James Bond movies, and I’m glad that the needle is finally swinging back towards a taste for realism. If only because I really couldn’t write a James Bond style espionage story…

How was the artist for this arc determined? Did you get to pick, Rucka pick, etc?

James Lucas Jones (Q&C series editor) and I picked Christopher, but Greg approved him. We wanted Christopher for a number of reasons, but primarily we knew he’d do the story justice. Christopher’s a very grounded, realistic artist, with a good amount of “grit” to his work, and that was important for this series.

How much research goes into the book to make it sound factual? I mean, honestly, half the time I glaze over all the military terms, but they do add a lot to the atmosphere of the book.

Comments like that could bring me to tears, you know…(Sorry Antony, its just my ADD)

I research the hell out of all my books, but for Q&C - because I knew that the quality would reflect indirectly on Greg - I pulled out all the stops.

I learned more about the SAS, IRA and Northern Ireland than I could ever hope to put in the book. But all research, even if it doesn’t go directly into the story, contributes towards the realism. That’s very important to me. Realistic language and lingo help suck the audience into a fictional world, whether it’s the SAS or the USPS. To the best of my memory (because it’s been six months since I wrote it, now!) every military term in this Q&C story is authentic.

I read in another interview that not only are you a big fan of Queen & Country, but a fan/friend of Greg Rucka. Working on something that you admire has to have a bit of a stumbling block that you have to get over at first. How much of that was an issue for you?

It was a very big issue at first, because I put myself under a lot of pressure not to let Greg down. Eventually, though, you just have to trust to your skills and the judgement of others. Greg and James wouldn’t have asked me to do the book if they didn’t think I was capable of it, and I just kept that at the back of my mind as I was working.

It wasn’t until Greg actually read the scripts and gave me the OK that I breathed again, mind you.

Finally, if you could have the right hand of one writer you respected, and left of another, who would they be? In other words, if you could take the skills of two of your favorite writers and meld them into your style, who would you pick?

H P Lovecraft and Alan Moore. No, wait - Neil Gaiman and Jeff Noon. No, wait - Garth Ennis and Greg Rucka. No, wait…

Thanks so much Antony!
I hope everyone enjoyed this interview as much as I did. Dont forget to check out Antony’s site mostlyblack.com and his fabulous articles at Ninth Art.