A Life in Comics 7: AIEEEE DARKIE!
It’s back to the freelance life where, though I give little thought to the future, I will remain for the rest of my working days.
The freelance life! No boss, no one to dish out orders, to bawl you out when you turn up late. Wake when you please, work when you please, and if you don’t feel like working take the day off, go to the seaside, catch a movie, enjoy a walk in the countryside. Free and easy does it.
Well, sure, there’s ample opportunity to do all those things, but in truth, if you need to earn a living from it, life as a freelance requires a huge amount of self-discipline. Freelancers work, if not harder, then longer hours than most. There’s no tedious commute every day, true, but those hours just become extra working time. You start early and often work long into the night. Weekdays blur into weekends and it’s all too easy to find yourself working a seven-day week. There’s no sick pay and no employer willing to pay you to do nothing so you take fewer holidays or none at all. I often discover it’s a bank holiday only when I am unable to contact anyone in the office. And when I do take a break much of the time I’m unable to genuinely switch off and find myself mentally sorting out story problems or trying to come up with new ideas.
No one pays for research and development time, and in the case of story origination that can be extensive. When creating a war story, for instance, few comic scripters of my generation have any actual experience of war, so it requires an immense amount of reading. And there’s always a chance at the end of the day an editor will turn your feeble effort down.
Complaining? Absolutely not. It’s the life I’ve chosen – or in many ways simply fallen into – and it suits me. I’ve never been what you’d call a good employee, too naturally rebellious. I’m still young, I can tolerate living in relative poverty and in sub-standard accommodation. I got very used to that at DC Thomson.
I’m sharing a flat with Steve MacManus, still sub-editor on Battle but before too many years pass destined to don the jump suit, alien mask and Rose of Sirius of the Mighty Tharg, editor of 2000AD. At present Steve has another interesting alter ego, that of Action Man, intrepid reporter for the comic of the same name. Each week he ventures out to try new experiences like exploring the London sewers or fire-eating at the circus. They pay a pittance for the task but it’s usually fun and interesting and no doubt he’d do it for nothing.
The flat is on a busy South London road. All day it reverberates with the rumble of passing buses and heavy goods vehicles. Steve is unhappy when I take the larger room at the front so I readily exchange with him, just for some minor relief from the constant rattle.
Writing for comics can be a precarious way to earn a living, especially at the beginning, and as a money-saving measure I decide to try cutting my own hair and buy one of those razor combs that used to feature in newspaper small ads. I shave off a little here, a little there. Hmmm. Not getting it quite right so I scape away a little more, then a little more. My head soon begins to resemble a badly cut hay field. Then the first bald patch appears.
Friends, if ever inspired to try your own razor comb take my advice and resist. In the end, in despair, as more bald patches start to show I give up and decide there’s nothing for it but to shave the whole head.
The skinhead look doesn’t particularly suit my sunny personality, but – badly overweight and normally attired in t-shirt, jeans and heavy boots – I look the part. In fact I bear no little resemblance to Buster Bloodvessel, portly singer and front man of the pop group Bad Manners, the difference being that there’s a certain likeable, self-deprecating humour to Buster.
My own face on the other hand falls naturally into an off-putting – dare I say Dreddian – scowl. I could be taken for Buster Bloodvessel’s murderous twin. Coupled with the skinhead look you would be forgiven for thinking, as you see me approach, that glance at me the wrong way and the least I’ll do is butt you to the ground and stomp your head into mush. Indeed, I begin to notice people crossing the street to avoid me.
In the end, while I don’t buy a three-piece suit, to soften my appearance until the hair grows back, I do at least take to wearing a hat.
* * *
The first story I create after my escape from Valiant is Darkie’s Mob.
If ever an idea can be said to just ‘pop into my head’ that is it. Battle Picture Weekly (hereafter just plain Battle) has featured little of the conflict in the Far East apart from The Terror Behind the Bamboo Curtain, which was not a raging success, so it’s a relatively unexplored scenario: jungle war – hot, steamy, dangerous – against a resolute and implacable enemy.
Take a platoon of soldiers who find themselves cut off, marooned in the Burmese jungle, surrounded by heavily-armed units of the Japanese army – seemingly doomed – when out of nowhere appears a British officer, a big, angry bull of a man. His name is Darkie, Captain Joe Darkie. He’s Captain Hurricane without the joke persona, if anything far more fearsome than the enemy they’re facing. With sheer force of personality he whips some defiance into them – they can either die like cowards or show some guts and fight, fight for their lives.
Under his leadership the men succeed in turning the tables and making their escape. But though they escape the enemy, little do they know there will be no escape from Darkie. They are fated to become his own private army as he pursues a vicious, pathological campaign against the Japanese, who he hates with a passion.
I don’t remember giving much thought to Darkie’s name. It was the nickname of someone in the Scottish village where I spent my year’s sabbatical. It comes to mind and it sounds just right. No need to agonise over it as I often do, Darkie it is.
Why does Darkie hate the Japanese so much? Who is Darkie? His background is something I might well labour over, but in this case I don’t. I’m happy to construct an intriguing opener and figure out the details as I go along. Surprise me.
It may not suit every writer but it’s the way I like to work, partly I suppose as a result of cutting my teeth in British comics, where the normal practice is to create a story without a particular end in mind – extract whatever mileage there is in it and when it’s exhausted, or the readers tire of it, just close it down and don’t waste time about it (one of the best examples of this philosophy that I remember was in Tammy, where a major and much-reviled villain was dealt with by the simple caption ‘Siddons slunk away and was never seen again’).
So I seldom begin a story with a firm idea of where it’s going. I may have in my head incidents that could happen along the way and sometimes a possible ending, but nothing is carved in stone. All is subject to change.
I have found over the years that events have a way of diverting a story along paths I could never have imagined at the start. Characters develop lives of their own, and where they lead I am generally willing to follow. Sometimes, admittedly, this approach can backfire (as you will read in future segments!) but most of the time I do find a way out of whatever corner I’ve managed to paint myself into, often to the benefit of the story.
This method, I believe, adds spontaneity, an element of surprise, as much to me as to the reader. Just like our own lives – who knows what’s around the next corner? That’s important to me. If I know absolutely everything that’s going to happen I am apt to lose interest. As I write it I want a story to surprise me as much as it does the readers. Surprise is vital. I’d go as far as to say most of the best elements in the tales I tell are ones that just happen to crop up along the way.
My aim with Darkie’s Mob is to deliver a story grittier than anything Battle has done before, to sail as close to the line of acceptability as I can without, I hope, actually crossing it. Compared with current comic content much of it may seem relatively tame, but it is strong for the time. I know readers will like it even if their MPs won’t, and it’s all of a piece with Darkie’s character, his obsession – how hard is he willing to be on his own men in order to carry out his vendetta against the enemy?
So when men are suffering and dying of dysentery and one of the unit is discovered hoarding for his own use the drugs that would treat it, Darkie punishes him by tying him to a stake and abandoning him to the jungle. British captives are rescued from the Japanese only to find themselves not freed but unwilling recruits to Darkie’s Mob. The harshness of Darkie’s rule is heightened by the hazardous nature of jungle warfare, of disease, danger and deprivation. And all the time the unit continues to wage its relentless campaign against the Japanese, as their numbers are whittled down.
Eventually Darkie’s diminishing band of savages comes to share his mania – what I suppose today we would call a form of Stockholm syndrome, where the captive comes to identify with their captors.
At a recent comic convention someone put to me that I must know where Darkie’s Mob was going when I created it, as the opening presages the end: a bloodstained log book chronicling the exploits of the Mob uncovered at the scene of a brutal battle. To some extent perhaps, but I have no idea how many – if any – of Darkie’s Mob will survive, or that Darkie himself will die, and that the two remaining members who do make it out alive will, rather than accept the safety of repatriation, choose to return to the jungle to continue the fight.
Where are they now? Private Shortland’s log book is found but never their bodies. Could they still be out there, fighting on somewhere in the jungle, like the Japanese soldiers discovered still waging the war long after its end?
Actually, I wish I’d thought of that at the time. It would make a great story, strange ‘Ben Gunn’ figures continuing to carry out raids long after the war is over – ‘The Last of the Mob’.
In creating Darkie’s Mob I am very fortunate to have Mike Western assigned to art duties – a really good call by Battle’s editor, Dave Hunt. As well as being a brilliant artist Mike is a war veteran himself and brings wonderful power and authenticity to the piece.
I will have the good luck to work with Mike again on another Battle story many months later, HMS Nightshade, which I will come to in a future segment. But next off the blocks is the creation of the galaxy’s greatest comic, 2000AD, and another very hard man called Joe.
NEXT: TOUGH ON THE STREETS