Ian Rankin on his Hellblazer OGN and plugging 2000ad

[ukdane]

Crime novelist Ian Rankin iswritting a comic for Vertigo's new Vertigo Crime Line.
It's an original graphic novel called Dark Entries, and features John "Hellblazer" Constantine.
He talks about it to Newsarama here: //http://www.newsarama.com/comics/030925-Vertigo-Rankin.html

And he plugs 2000ad about ½way down (although some of his facts might not be 100% correct- such as Alan Grant writing with Pat Mills (I thought it was John Wagner)). For those too lazy to click the link above and read the entire interview, here's what I said about 2000ad:

NRAMA: Well, what do you feel it is about that European perspective that works so well for horror comics?

IR: A lot of them came out of a comic called 2000 AD. And that it did was, up until then the British comic had been a lot softer – war stories and cop stories and funny stuff, things like that. It was realistic. It hadn't involved superheroes, people with superpowers. And what 2000 AD did was look at the American model, and then bring a British perspective to it.

So there's a little bit of grit and a little bit of humor and a great bit of satire. You look at something like Judge Dredd, there's a lot of satire in that one. I think that's what helped make 2000 AD successful. And it was a good training ground for writers. Alan Moore and Pat Mills and all sorts of people got their start there.
It was one of those things where you could just go to London and knock on their door and go, "I'm interested in writing for you." This one Scottish guy I know really well, he used to write for Batman, Alan Grant – he wrote half the stuff in 2000 AD! He wrote it under a series of pseudonyms. And I didn't know that, I thought it was all these different people, but half of them were him, working with Pat Mills.

Alan's great, and he lives in Southern Scotland, and we meet up two or three times a year, I've interviewed him at festivals and things. He's an interesting guy to talk to, because he has been around in the comic book industry for decades, and he knows the difference between writing prose and writing for comics. He knows that you're using a different part of your brain as a writer, that you're having to visualize a lot more than you would (in prose).

And he knows about visualizing it – "Where are we seeing the action from? Are we standing in front of the characters? Are we looking down at them from the ceiling or sky? Are we looking up at them?" You know, these are things novelists never think about. We never think about what angle the camera is shooting from.