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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #83: The Horrible Wills & Kate Comics Interview

Welcome to a Very Special Look! It Moves!

This week, I interview Rich Johnston about his upcoming comic books about Prince William and Kate Middleton and their budding romance, which should be published in time for the Royal Wedding this summer.

Now, there are loads of conflicts of interest here. Rich is the editor of the Bleeding Cool website, and publishes this column, where he lets me write anything the hell I want. When I found out that Rich was writing a comic about Wills & Kate, it was the funniest thing I heard since Nigel fell off the roof in THE ARCHERS, and I proposed an interview with him about it. Of course, an interview is usually a promotional tool. I was not coerced or bribed into conducting this interview. It was entirely my suggestion after I read the Guardian article. I contacted Rich and suggested we do this because I thought it would be a good laugh, I could be a lot more rambling, insinuating and horrible than The Guardian could ever be and give him a hard time. We even got a bit highbrow and intellectual. It was very disgraceful. Read on!

Rich, when the hell did your hair become red?

‪I have a reddish beard. Which I was mostly growing for Tony Lee's manly stag do. I'm thinking the cafe this interview took place in had a red tint to the lights.‬

‪It must be the light. I always thought it was dirty blond myself. So now thanks to The Grauniard, the nation thinks you're a ginger. Anyway, how did you land this gig? Whose idea was it to publish this book?

‪I instant messaged the publisher and suggested it. Well, theirs.

Who's the publisher?

Markosia.

‪Markosia? Interesting. That gives it a sort of surreal cross-Euro-US spin.‬

Where does the US come into it?

Isn't Markosia a US publisher?‬

No, British. Very British.‬ Come on, they published Tony Lee.

‪Ah, UK. I double-checked. My bad.‬ How long did you have the idea in your head?

About three minutes before I messaged Markosia.

So will this be a miniseries in singles or a trade paperback graphic novel?

‪Two single issues that will also be collected in a flipbook‬. That's the ideal reading opportunity, the stories both end with the same image represented in the flip book as a double page spread. It's a symmetrical comic in all sorts of ways. Both Kate and William see the same events from very different perspectives. There's even a phone call that you get one side of, in each comic.

‪So you're actually going to use a Royal Wedding as an excuse to explore graphical experimentation in a comic book? That is perverse. Shouldn't you be doing it as bland and straight as possible so you can pitch it as a movie to studios?

‪Yes, sadly I don't own the characters‬.

Yes you do. The entire British public own the Royals!‬ Even if the Upper Class thinks it's the other way round.

True. But the plot is frankly ludicrous, even for Hollywood‬.

‪It sounds like the exact type of plot that would star Anne Hathaway and Robert Pattinson these days, frankly.‬ Hell, Anne Hathaway played Kate in an SNL sketch the week the engagement was announced.

This is something for the Americans, who may not know as much about how things work in Old Blighty like the natives do.‬ Did you have to go to the Palace and meet The Queen to get her permission to write this comic? Share a Gin & Tonic with Prince Philip and hear him say something unthinkingly racist and pretend you didn't hear that?

‪No, like you said, we own them. And if I had heard anything racist, I'd have posted it on Popbitch like a proper Londoner.

But you are determined to write the story as straight as possible, then? No irreverence like, say, if it was written and drawn by Steve Bell?

‪It is fairly straight, but then so was Flying Friar. I take established aspects of a story and work a narrative around that.

Given that you would have to guess at certain things since we're not privy to everything that went on, how much fictionalising will you be writing?

Oh a hell of a lot. I'm writing military banter, personal royal conversations, family scenes. You know, drama.

‪Will you have scenes of Kate being stalked and chased by the paparazzi? This in light of the News of the World phone-tapping scandal?‬

‪Absolutely. I'm rather proud of a segue straight from the lions of Kenya to the crowd of paps, stalking their prey.

‪‪Might that be the mid-point in a Hollywood screenplay where the lovers have to break up because things are just too difficult? I'm remembering talk of how even the Royals' phones might have been tapped by the tabloids.

And guess what, that is exactly the point that they do break up. Maybe I can sell this to Hollywood after all. (Note, no I am not)

‪Movies imitating Life imitating Movies. It's almost as if someone was scripting it all along. Hell, why wouldn't Hollywood come-a-calling? US telly made two competing DIANA TV projects in the early 90s after all, both laughably dreadful, including one, DIANA: HER TRUE STORY, starring SHAMELESS' David Threlfall as Charles and Serena (sister of Kristin) Scott-Thomas as Di.

‪Okay, I'm off to YouTube for that.

‪I fondly recall scenes of Diana puking into a toilet.

‪See, these days that would be an East Asian CGI news recreation video‬.

Yes, though the 90s was before cheap CGI and the advent of irony. Back to the comic: what inspired you to write this? I can see how William and Kate's story can become a kind of symbolic, mythic tale of the times the same way the Charles and Diana, and Diana story ended up, though that was inadvertent. There is the sense of the Wills & Kate engagement and upcoming wedding being a kind of morale-boosting event to rally the public in the current climate of a collapsing economy and government cuts.

‪It's a classic class divide struggle. The upper class marrying the upper-middle class. It's a Romeo and Juliet for our age.‬ Sounds sarcastic, but it might also be true.

‪The class divide also echoes the Charles-Diana courtship, though she was more upper class than Kate, who seems to be proper middle class and bourgeois, which I notice has set the hoi polloi all a-flutter. And goes to show that Class is still a huge deal in Britain in ways that are alien to Americans.

We have class envy. Americans sometimes have an envy of class though. They romanticise it.

Americans see Class, aristocrats and Royalty as exotic, as you can see from how a show like DOWNTON ABBEY has US Anglophiles having collective orgasms when PBS screens it.

Not that it isn't a good show, it's as good as it's going to get, but the yearning for a ruling class with a decent sense of Noblesse Oblige is so thick you can cut it with a knife. It's such a Tory show.‬

‪Upstairs Downstairs is more a Lib Dem/Tory coalition show‬. What with it's anti-fascist emphasis‬. Like it's trying too hard.

‪

UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS was interesting for its questioning of a changing class system in Britain. Questioning, but not knocking, the class system:

Going back to Wills & Kate. Let's walk through how you went about this project, what inspired you, how you decided to structure and tell the story, pick the right artists and so on.

‪‪Had the idea to do this first. Knew Bluewater would do it anyway. Wanted to do it better.‬ And then it was looking at the story to see if a structure presented itself, and it did. Using the 70s/80s girls and boys comics as a template. So Kate's story is told like Jackie and WiIl's is told like Tiger and then they meet in the middle. And that symmetry suggested how that could be approached. So Mike and Gary were chosen as artists to fit those styles, yet have a modern accessibility and stop it looking too retro.

Well, you chose Mike and Gary, who are artists who know how to fucking well draw people properly, so that's a good start.

I've realised that I only want to write things based on something – whether that be in the news, or a twist on an existing story. ‪Holed Up, Flying Friar, Watchmensch, Civil Wardrobe, it's all there‬. My upcoming projects too, like The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne is basically Agatha Christie's Dexter. Actually, those were Markosia's suggestions.

Basically, you're a satirist, and your drive is essentially reacting and commenting on what's already out there.‬

I think that's true, but I'm only really starting to realise it‬. Everything I do is a reaction.

‪Which is a very British Art after all. It's not easy to do well, and the British has that down to a 'T', since they're not worried about being liked, and therefore not afraid to be merciless. But you're playing Wills & Kate straight, aren't you?

Absolutely, but then I did with Flying Friar too.‬ I think it's much more effective that way.

‪You reckon it's a more subtle and interesting game to play it straight?

‪In this case, absolutely. It plays against expectations. And hopefully creates something that's genuinely emotionally moving. My using comics to explore the unexplorable. There are truths about human relationships in their story that feel universal. It's so easy to treat such people as mannequins to entertain us. This comic tries to find the relatable humanity even in people who have security guards to carry their money.

‪There are also themes in their story that have become relevant in the last two decades: how can people live their lives when they've become celebrities and public figures in an era where Celebrity Culture has become all-pervading, and the process is to build them up before bringing them down and destroying them. Diana became a martyr to that culture.‬

Oh absolutely, and she's definitely a major character in this book, ‬even though she only appears in one page.

So you ARE doing social commentary after all. What plans to you have to promote the comic? I assume you're going to do your damnedest to have as many people in Britain aware of it as possible‬

Well, the Guardian interview is a good start. And I expect some response from that.

And would the comic be out around the time of the Royal Wedding?

April 2nd according to Amazon. And I understand Markosia is negotiating a supermarket distribution deal.

‪That's certainly close enough to the time. So is your dream to see the book being sold in the local Safeways and Hanley's and Marks & Spensers on top of bookshops and comic shops?

‪No Safeways anymore mate, you've been away too long.

Man, next I'll hear that Waterstones has disappeared.‬ Will there be a digital edition for phones and tablets?‬
‬

I'm not sure about digital editions here actually. This is a comic designed to be a comic. It needs to be flipped. You can't do that properly with an iPad‬. Also, if this is indeed as one wag has dubbed it, the geek equivalent of a commemorative plate, who'd even want to eat off an iPad?

‪In other words, the comic will play with the design and experience of reading a printed comic rather than be something easily ported to digital?

‪Exactly. Just as I did with my Doctor Who comic. I'd hate to make anyone read that digitally, Print was hard enough.

Wait wait wait, this is wrong, Rich, wrong! You're known as some bloke who gossips and pisses off comics companies, not someone who's genuinely interested in creating and exploring comics as a medium!‬

‪Can't I be both?

‪I put it to you that there are two Rich Johnstons in the same way Norman Bates and his homicidal mum inhabit one body!

‪I just want to try stuff. If some fools are going to let me write a comic, I at least want to try and add something to the medium with my few short attempts.
‪
That reminds me of when someone said freelance writing is like prostitution, and I pointed out to them that yes, and part of our job is to happily give the clients a disease.‬

That may be yours, I want to at least try and be a cure. I may never succeed, but I've taken a Hypocritic Oath.

Ah, but why can't it be both disease and cure in a kind of Cronenberg-ian symbiosis, creating a new life-form and era?‬

‪You are Grant Morrison and I claim my five pounds.

‪I am not Grant Morrison, I only pretend to play him on TV. Seriously though. What do you hope to achieve with the comic, in your wildest dreams? It is a very British product in both conception and execution, which Bluewater can't touch.

‪I hope to get people who would never normally pick up a comic book, to pick one up. And find something that interests and intrigues them enough to make them want to seek out other examples of the form. I'm a comics evangelist at heart. Words and pictures mate, you can do anything with words and pictures.

This brings me back to your mention of British Girls Comics, which my sisters read and I thought were pretty damn good myself. Stupid question: do you think the comic will appeal to a female readership? Will it be part of your campaign to evangelise comics to a female readership while you're at it?

I want this sold in supermarkets, so yes I will rely on a female readership.‬

And it will be uncontroversial enough to be all-ages, I take it?

Pretty much, this is a pre-watershed comic and I rescinded swearing.‬ But then again, these are characters who have a sex life because they are people. And before each other as well, there's no shying away from that. But nothing you couldn't see on Eastenders or hear on The Archers.

Only not as boring, hopefully, and with less cot deaths and baby-snatching.

True. Instead we have safaris, skiing and drugs smuggling‬.

‪Oh, life as usual, then. I bet you had to refrain from a lot of stuff given the types of crazy gossip and rumours that float about. Though I suspect in the Reality TV era, most people under 40 wouldn't find any of it shocking.

‪ It's the Royals, what are you gonna do?

Lastly, do you think this comic improves or jeopardises your chances of an OBE or a Knighthood?

‪Oh I found ways. And OBE and the like usually rely on charity work. Maybe I can get that Comic Relief Comic off the ground this year…‬

Thinking about smashing some Wedgewood with a hammer at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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