Posted in: Comics, Dark Horse Comics, DC Comics, Image, Netflix | Tagged: Dave Gibbons, FLCC, martha washington, The Originals, Watchmen

Dave 'Watchmen' Gibbons Was Originally Asked To Draw Jupiter's Legacy

Talking to Dave Gibbons about his autobiography Confabulation, he says he was originally asked to draw Jupiter's Legacy but stuck with Kingsman.

At the last London Film And Comic Con, I found myself emergency-hosting The Dave Gibbons Autobiography Panel with Tim Pilcher, looking at the new book, Confabulation: An Anecdotal Autobiography By Dave Gibbons. It has now been published from Dark Horse Comics, and I have finally managed to make some sense of the very low-quality audio recording I ended up with. Apologies for the delay but I hope it's all worth it. I started asking Dave "I hear you've got a book coming out?"

But it's not a normal autobiography. It is a series of anecdotes and analyses arranged alphabetically, alright? As Dave Gibbons says, "none of that slog through the early years… it's all good stuff. I had a little black book, as things occurred to me, what happened in my life, I could just write them down… you can write away at anything you want. Which interesting thing do I feel like writing today… eventually it came to a hundred thousand words." Tim Pilcher blanched.

For inspiration, Gibbons referred to a panel he went to at New York Comic Con where someone would pull out a letter of a word from a box and would then tell an anecdote based on that. He also referenced Comics Between The Panels by Mike Richardson as "excellent, a history of comics in an anecdotal way, it gives you some editorial control, and I liked the idiosyncratic way of doing things" he elaborated. As for working with Tim Pilcher, he told us "I like collaborating with people. I'd never have done How Comics Work without Tim, he's very good to work with, suggesting things I may not have chosen."

Regarding the title of the book, Gibbons says that over the years, he's been used to telling stories at shows, so much so that he's become like a stand-up comedian. The comparison between Dave Gibbons and Ben Elton has been a common one. So some of the stories in Confabulation he has practised and told out loud many times over the years. "What you tend to do with stories is you tell the truth the first time and then the next time you leave out the bits that don't work so well, or you make it a little more funny. You add a detail, or you connect it to something else and it kind of evolves. Confabulation is a story that isn't true but you think it is true", Gibbons eplains before clarifying further. "I did find myself stopping myself, saying hold on, my memory is that one thing happened before another, but it obviously didn't. So you have to reconstruct it, pull out the comics to see what people were actually working on in 1987… it made me think of things I wouldn't have remembered."

Dave Gibbons is best known as a comic book artist, but is also an accomplished comic book writer. "I got into comics by drawing, but I always wanted to write. The good thing working with Alan Moore on Watchmen is he, and it, became so well known, that anything with Watchmen on it got a certain amount of success. I was offered lots of things to do because I worked on Watchmen, it didn't matter if I was writing or drawing." Gibbons recalled, but he wanted to make something clear, "I have collaborated as a writer or an artist, and I've done a few things on my own, but it's my least favourite way to work," Gibbon notes, explaining that he prefers the collaborative process over working on his own. "Because I didn't just draw Watchmen, I had a lot of involvement in the story, and with Green Lantern Corps, a lot of to and fro."

I did point out that there was no "W" entry in the book, despite it being the entry that most people browsing in the store would instantly flick to. "Absolutely intentional", Gibbons said, adding "If you want behind-the-scenes stories that haven't been told, have to search through the book. Well spotted Rich."

And the book looks at all aspects of his life, including his day as a professional cosplayer for a comics publisher. "I dressed up as the comic book mascot, The Big E, a superhero, and larked around the offices for the day, they paid me for the same as drawing", Gibbons remembered, and says that when people come up to get their copies of the comics featuring him as The Big E, "I'm completely at ease with it." It's certainly in the book, as is a letter from then-comics-editor Neil Tennant when he was drawing 1977's Fury for Marvel UK. I mentioned that Neil Tennant gets asked to sign a Spider-Man comic book once or twice a year and he's completely at ease with it too.

And that includes Gibbons' earliest comic book drawings of Superman from 1957. "I used to get a Superman Annual every Christmas and this was dated Boxing Day" he remembers in a proud fashion and includes it on the cover of the book. "But it's not a bad drawing, I didn't go over the lines much. Labelled Superman AKA Clark Kent. It's really interesting to discover things like that and contrast it with what I chose to do later."

There's also a story about a special present. "Frank 'Sin City 300' Miller used to have lots of interesting conversations. One year at San Diego Comic-Con he gave me a big box and said, 'this is for you'" Gibbons excitedly told us. And inside was a half-life-sized human skeleton that hung on a stand. "He's anatomically very accurate. About three feet long. I get to security at San Diego International Airport, and I put my bags in. One of the security guards, looking at the TV monitors, she's seen everything come through, but she went 'jesus f-cking christ!' I still have it; it's some kind of voodoo god for me, it sits in the corner of the room and occasionally chuckles."

Co-author of the book, Tim Pilcher, talked about how he repeatedly encountered Gibbons's work without realizing it, such as early Jet Jason strips, Green Cross Code Man adverts and a Kula Shaker album cover. So Gibbons got to talk about that as well. "I'm a little bit older than their demographic, but I was at San Diego with my son, and wife called up, wanting to know if I'd be interested in doing an album cover and saying the words 'Kula Shaker'" noted Gibbons, as well as what happened next with his son. "My son reacted massively, so I called them back. The band had said they'd like to get someone like Dave Gibbons to do it… so they asked Dave Gibbons. The album had as many characters on it beginning with the letter K, they kept adding them, eventually I had to tell them the ship has sailed! Actually, they got my son backstage access, all area passes, he was absolutely over the moon." Gibbons also talked about chatting with the band Bomb The Bass after they "appropriated" his Watchmen smiley face for their covers, and told him how it was a tribute.

Then I brought up my own favourite work of Gibbons, Give Me Liberty and the tales of Martha Washington, written with Frank Miller. "It was a series that we started way back in the late 80s and over the years, and we added bits to it, and we ended up with like a 500-page story, almost twice the length of Watchmen" Gibbons recalled. "The Adventures of Martha Washington, a poor girl from a black ghetto, and it's like the Perils Of Pauline; she's a perfectly sane, perfectly admirable honourable woman in a mad, crazy world she tries to cope with, she has a very long character arc. We finished her story in about 2005, and it's amazing things how have developed in the real world., like we knew what was going to happen."

As for the future of Martha Washington, Gibbons told us "There are certain legal protocols that I'm somewhat inhibited by what I can say, but I could say it would be a very fond hope of mine that more people would see Martha either on the TV or in the movies. The story for this particular time could seem to work very well and be very happy so, yeah I would like to see such a thing." Once upon a time, Bleeding Cool reported that Frank Miller was told Martha Washington could not be made into a film if the character remained a black woman. This does suggest, at least, that some things may have changed since then.

He also talked about another collaborator, Mark Millar. About how Mark Millar started comics as a fan of Gibbons, but also how Gibbons became a fan of Millar with The Ultimates. Their collaboration, Secret Service, later known as Kingsman, was first reported on Bleeding Cool's very first day back in 2009. As time went on, Millar asked Gibbons if he fancied drawing a spy story, as Millar had come up with one with Matthew Vaughn when they were working on X-Men, and they had the bare bones. "So Mark went away and wrote it as a series of comics, and Matthew did it as his next movie, so they developed the same concept in a different way," and Gibbons recalls a different experience from seeing other adaptations. "The comic and movie are cousins; some characters are completely different. One isn't an adaptation of the other, which is a freeing thing."

Dave Gibbons also remembers when drawing The Secret Service might not have been on the cards. "We did get to a point where we didn't know if the film company would let us proceed with the comic" so Millar asked Gibbons if he wanted to draw a superhero comic, Jupiter's Children instead. However, Gibbons wanted to stick with The Secret Service. Frank Quitely went on to draw the then-renamed Jupiter's Legacy. As to what became Kingsman, Gibbons found it "amazing to see the film and see the differences without thinking that this wasn't accurate."

He also talked about the graphic novel he did write and draw solo, The Originals, a sci-fi graphic novel that reflects British gang culture between the mods and the rockers of the sixties and seventies, epitomised in films such as Quadrophenia. "Back in the day, I was a mod, and Karen Berger at Vertigo had been pestering me to write and draw something" Gibbons recalled. "I would have to do something that means a lot to me to sustain the interest. I was out in my car driving one day when I was overtaken by a guy with a leather jacket on a motorbike. After all these years I had a terrible desire, wanted to say "oy grease" and knock him off his motorbike. I wanted to investigate why I had a desire to kill him."

This got us talking about more of his mod days and how he had to change things in the book to make them more believable. "Me and my friend John and our friend Sue were walking down the high street in our local village. in our parkas when someone threw a rock at us, and it was the local grease" by which he means the local rocker gang. Gibbons recalled, "Sue was about four-eleven, she turned around and said 'you kids, you stupid children, just piss off', and they did, but I thought if I wrote that, no one would believe it."

The Originals has been taken around Hollywood too, with slight interest after the recent Quadrophenia revival, and it is something he'd like to see. And maybe there's a sequel. "I have an idea, after working in an old people's home when I was younger", Gibbons elaborated, "a story about them as very old people, as a bookend to the original, I can't stop thinking of it. Talking to Pat Mills, he told me you are going to write it, or it will haunt you."

Confabulation: An Anecdotal Autobiography By Dave Gibbons is published by Dark Horse Comics. The next London Film & Comic Con runs at London Olympia from the 7th to the 9th of July.

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