Gerry Finley-Day Question

Ol^ Marbles · 05 June, 2002, 01:34:09 AM

I'm really enjoying Dave Bishops series on the history of 2000AD in the Meg.

I notice in the current issue he quotes Pat Mills as saying that he used GF-D's "characters for 'Battle' and 'Action' as role models" for 2000.

So my question is, what strips did G-FD write for those comics ? They were never credited in the first few years issues....

Link: http://www.frothersunite.com/marbles/fanboy/battle.html" target="_blank">Battle Fan Site

JimBob · 05 June, 2002, 01:57:11 AM

Colonel,
can't help with the question, but I've just been to your Battle site. Excellent work sir. Anyone aware of an 80s Eagle site?

Ol^ Marbles · 05 June, 2002, 03:26:50 PM

Cheers Jim-Bob,
I did look at a few 'Eagle' sites when idly surfing one day - I should put in a few links to them I guess - do you know a good one to recommend ?

jdmobius · 05 June, 2002, 11:50:34 PM

Can't help you with specifics but there's a bibliography in the back of "Action-the story of a violent comic" which would help you. I seem to remember most stories were written by G-FD, Tom Tully or Steve McManus. The bibliography only covers the first run of Action, not the relaunch.

paulvonscott · 07 June, 2002, 11:50:50 PM

Nice to here GFD getting some recognition in the Megazine rather than people talking about script rewrites and typos. The guy did some great work for 2000AD.

Jim_Campbell · 08 June, 2002, 06:44:33 PM

"Nice to here GFD getting some recognition in the Megazine rather than people talking about script rewrites and typos. The guy did some great work for 2000AD. "

Interesting take on this in La Bish's latest piece in the Meg, where he quotes Alan Grant as saying that all GFD needed was a hard editor.

I feel that the increased power of the creator since the late 70s/early 80s, whilst good in terms of fairer pay, recognition and better rights, has a fairly marked downside.

To pick an example: when Garth Ennis can say to an editor that they can either run his script without so much as a _single_ alteration to punctuation or not run it all (and that script is Helter Skelter) then there's a problem ...

More power to the editor, says I [1].

Cheers

Jim

[1] Who, sadly, can't recollect the specifics of the story about the literary editor who excised great swathes of the original draft of TS Eliot's The Wasteland and said "There. _Now_ it's ready to be published."

Ol^ Marbles · 08 June, 2002, 06:58:27 PM

Ezra Pound. TSE dedicated the poem to him as I recall.

Does anyone know what happened to GFD ? Where he now, what he's doing etc..?

Leigh S · 08 June, 2002, 09:32:52 PM

Jim I agree completely. THe idea that comics are "art" and as such any old shite is as valid as the next has led to the decimation of comics as entertainment. Its interesting to read of ex-editors who seem very proud of their ability to totally rewrite other peoples work throw a wobbly nowadays when the same thing happens to them...

Though it would have took some rewrite to have saved Helter Skelter...

paulvonscott · 09 June, 2002, 12:34:08 AM

Any chance of posting Helter Skelter in fan fic Wake? I know it's not that good, but hey, he tried.

Maybe the editors who turned up also had less experience of editing fiction. I assume the older lot came from the magazine environment, but I have no idea of what experience anyone from the nineties had, no offence meant :)

GordonR · 09 June, 2002, 02:13:09 AM

David Bishop was a journalist in New Zealand before becoming Megazine assistant editor. I think he also worked for BSB, if anyone can remember that.

I think Andy Diggle was hired more or less straight out of college as 2000AD assistant editor, although I might be wrong.

Matt Smith was a desk editor at a proper grown-up book publishers before joining 2000AD.

Alan Barnes was assistant editor and then editor of Doctor Who Monthly before joining Rebellion. He's also written a couple of movie guides for Titan Books - Bond, Sherlock Holmes and Tarantino.

In terms of previous publishing work, the current Smith-Barnes team have more experience than their most recent predecessors.

Jim_Campbell · 09 June, 2002, 06:25:42 PM

"Ezra Pound. TSE dedicated the poem to him as I recall. "

Thanks! There've been a lot of brain cells under the bridge since University ...

Cheers

Jim

paulvonscott · 09 June, 2002, 06:57:00 PM

Yeah, I just noticed Alan Barnes' name on the 'The Hammer Story Book' I bought today (?2, what a steal) Looks pretty good.

I want to be Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter when I grow up. Hmmm... you don't mention that any of these people AREN'T vampires... though their qualifications seem to be in order.

I guess it doesn't matter what experience you have if you aren't allowed to edit something in the first place. I would have cast aside the red pencil and edited it with fire... pure cleansing fire...

BURN ENNIS! BURN!

HA-HAHAHAHAHAHAH-HA-HAHAHAHAHAH-AHHHHHhhhh...

Jim_Campbell · 09 June, 2002, 08:56:56 PM

"I guess it doesn't matter what experience you have if you aren't allowed to edit something in the first place. I would have cast aside the red pencil and edited it with fire... pure cleansing fire... "

Yeah - this is what bothers me, frankly. If creators don't want to be edited, then they should f*** off and self-publish.

It's a bit rich, as the Watcher implied, for someone like Pat Mills to piss and moan when an editor tries to do something with a pile of lazy old shite like the last ABC Warriors or (dare I even mention it?) Secret Commonwealth, when he extolls his editorial re-writes as a virtue in the early days of 2000AD ...

Pot -> kettle ... kettle -> pot.

Cheers

Jim

paulvonscott · 09 June, 2002, 09:15:11 PM

I agree, and Secret Commonwealth needed something (though I though Warriors was okay), I just get the feeling Pat Mills is so sick of being fucked about. Maybe if you've been in the business that long, and just dealt with so much crap, that's just the way you begin to feel.

There is a certain amount of hypocrisy in it, but at the time as Editor of 2000AD he was trying to change the way british comics were written, and get out of a rather piss poor lazy tradition of very poor comics.

I really don't know enough about it really, I'm sure he could argue the case better himself, and say fuck a lot more to boot.

There have been quite a few series in AD that had some amazing potential that just didn't seem to be fully realised. I think Helter Skelter could only have been saved by giving the idea to another writer, but some of the other series weren't terminal cases. That annoyed me at the time, the story's themselves were innoffensive, but thats a terrible thing for a comic strip to be.

Jim_Campbell · 09 June, 2002, 10:42:15 PM

"There have been quite a few series in AD that had some amazing potential that just didn't seem to be fully realised. I think Helter Skelter could only have been saved by giving the idea to another writer, but some of the other series weren't terminal cases. That annoyed me at the time, the story's themselves were innoffensive, but thats a terrible thing for a comic strip to be. "

Vanguard? I thought that with a little pruning, a little more work on making the reader empathise with the lead character, and ramping up 'the horror of it all' the series might have worked really well.

Carver Hale (apart from a suspicion that it was a demo for Vertigo so Mr Carey could pitch for Hellblazer)? I thought that much more could have been made of London as a location - the city can be very dark and very creepy when portrayed correctly ...

At the risk of undermining my own argument about editorial control, however, I keep forgetting that there are serious time constraints here. I think it was Milo who pointed out that there used to be 8 or 9 staff in the 2000AD office, which left editors the luxury of actually having some _time_ to sit down an re-write stuff.

Since I suspect that the editorial jobs aren't the best paid in the world, I can understand a certain reluctance to take a pile of dodgy scripts home to re-write over the weekend ...

Cheers

Jim