|
by Glenn Bray
photos: Peter Anderson & Glenn Bray
Page: 1 |
2 | 3 | 4
| Next Page >
As well as comics I was also becoming influenced by album
cover art. A favorite band during my teenage years was The
Mothers Of Invention whose records became an intrinsic part
of my maturing process. In particular I really liked the
work of the band's in house artist and designer Cal Schenkel.
His inspired lampooning of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's sleeve
where he dressed the Mothers up in drag and seeded the Beatles'
hippie flower garden with rotting vegetables was, in my
warped opinion, a masterpiece.
I also loved his collage and ink work where he used a ratty
line style that would later be taken up by punk rock cartoonist/artist
Gary Panter and myself.
When I finally got to see some underground comix, the artists
whose work hit home the hardest were S. Clay Wilson, Robert
Williams and Rick Griffin. As said earlier, I also continued
to admire Gilbert Shelton's Wonder Warthog and much of Robert
Crumb's early work, but one of my favorites of the entire
underground oeuvre remains the late Greg Irons whose Legion
Of Charlies, Light and Deviant Slice comix I still find
absorbing. It was something about the teaming of Irons'
almost corrupt looking artwork with writer Tom Veitch's
scripts that powered me on to try and do my own Corpsemeat
and Dead Duck comix.
Q: What made you decide to publish Corpsemeat
Comix?
Drawing and publishing Corpsemeat Comix helped haul me
out of the quagmire of creative boredom which I had fallen
into at that time. The idea was spawned during a tedious
train journey from Paris to the holiday country cottage
that my wife Jill and I were renting. So vile was this place
that we had escaped to Paris for a couple of days just to
get closer to some civilization.
While we were there Jill had bought me a small blue sketchbook
(to gently encourage me back into drawing again) which I
had begun to mindlessly doodle in. Pretty soon I was astonished
to find that I had completed the panels for a comic book
featuring the various ultra violent adventures of a living
dead punk character called Mr. Inferno.
I fully intended to redraw the panels once I got back to
London, but there was something about the crudity of the
drawing, that made me think again. Instead I blew up the
originals on a xerox machine, pasted them into pages and
took the whole bleeding mess to a printer. A couple of weeks
later 500 copies of Corpsemeat Comix rolled off the press
and straight on to the top of our wardrobe where they languished
for years before anybody took any interest.
Later on, when the first edition had completely gone, I
teamed it up with another comic I had done called Dead Duck
and offered it to a friend of mine to publish as part of
his Shock imprint. This, I still feel, is one of my favorite
productions.
Corpsemeat 2 came out several years later. This was a far
more accomplished comic with contributions from Gary Panter,
Mark Beyer, Peter Bagge, Chris Long and writer/magician
Alan Moore who provided the script for the main story "Driller
Penis". Sympathetic Press published the standard edition
in California; and L'Atelier published a deluxe silk-screened
edition - featuring some work by French artists - in Paris.
Q: Where did you get the idea for your
Mr. Inferno
character?
Mr. Inferno was born out of the punk rock revolution that
spewed out of the UK when the Sex Pistols finally broke.
I used to go see the Sex Pistols perform at the 100 Club
(a renowned jazz venue) in Oxford Street every week. They
had a kind of residency there. You would just turn up and
wait for them to crawl on stage and plug in. Not many people
showed up in the early days, nobody really thought they
were any good, but they had an energy that was admirable,
and Johnny Rotten's stage presence was extremely powerful.
Mr. Inferno probably has a Rotten streak running through
his diseased bones. He's a total misanthrope who will kill
anybody and anything just for kicks. He knows that he'll
be executed for his crimes but he doesn't care as he's dead
already.
Q: And then you hatched Dead Duck?
Dead Duck is Mr. Inferno in a duck costume. He/it is equally
misanthropic and has a severe drug and alcohol problem which
has permanently damaged his brain and sends him into spasms
of ultra violent behavior. Cancers are eating up his ugly
bloated body, which he keeps stoking with cheeseburgers,
beer, bourbon, Cherry Cokes and heroin.
The idea for this character came from being obsessed with
Greg Irons' Gregor The Purple-Assed Baboon who turns up
sporadically in comix like Doctor Wertham's, Slow Death
and Commies From Mars. Again, I liked the corrupt quality
which he had infected Gregor with, and this wormed its way
into the greasy entrails of my Dead Duck creation.
Dead Duck took off after I had been made redundant from
this music magazine I worked for called Sounds. To keep
myself from going insane I would draw a page every day and
if it made me laugh I would keep it, if not it would be
trashed. Eventually I had enough hits to make another comic
book and so I printed off a limited edition of 50 copies,
which I gave to friends, and people who I thought deserved
one.
Page: 1 |
2 | 3 | 4
| Next Page > |
