Hi Kev. Thanks for inviting me over to answer a few questions. It's nice to be asked about writing in general – so, sorry if I nerd out a bit about writing process (laughs), but it's something I do most days and I don't often get a chance to talk about it. I'll try not to be too much of a boring process-dork (laughs), but maybe there might be something in there of interest to people who are just starting out or trying to go pro. There was bugger-all info when I was starting out, apart from some big ol' dry books about screenplay writing.

But before we start, there's a couple quick things I'd like to say. I'd like to thank Lee Carter (artist on Indigo Prime) for all his hard work and effort – believe me, he put his ALL into this series and rolled with some seemingly bizarre ideas and complex visual challenges. His work on this series is STUNNING. Frankly, I'm in awe of it. He also somehow managed to moved house while he was illustrating this. Getting new pages of Lee's art in my in-box has been a joy – one of the high points of this year. Writing? Pah! I had the easy bit. Thank you, Lee.

I'd also like to thank Simon Bowland, the series' letterer – and one of the best in the business! Simon's work on this is great: there's all sorts of subtle stuff that he's done with the text, fonts, placement and flow that add to the strip's richness and readability. He presents some potentially complex narrative information in an smooth, easy-to-read manner, and in a way that's synergistic with and sympathetic to both art and story. The irony of being a letterer is that if you're really good at your job then your work becomes 'invisible' and doesn't get noticed by readers. Guys, I SALUTE YOU BOTH!

How easy or difficult was it coming up with a new sci-fi mythology and high tech weapons and scenarios that haven’t been seen before?

To answer that, let's talk about ideas, generally, in the context of writing. Ideas are relatively easy to come up with. Storify-ing them (ie creating a coherent, commercial, enjoyable-to-read tale from them) is a bit trickier (laughs). And getting people to publish and read your stories is another thing altogether (laughs). Before I became a full-time freelance writer, I worked in IT for 3 decades, going back into the IMB Mainframe and early UNIX networks era, and before that I was a Microbiologist, so pulling weird real-world and pseudo-science ideas out of a hat comes fairly easy. Stuff like advances in AI or quantum technologies fascinate me, so I keep reasonably up-to-date with all that. Also, I grew up reading 1930s Golden Age and 1960s New Wave SF (as well as comic-books, wyrd fiction and ghost stories), so all of that goes in the mix too when I'm cooking up ideas for something. Black sciences and arts, conspiracy theory stuff, the occult / paranormal / hyperstitional: it all gets filtered in. If you have an interest in a broad array of subject matters and topics, then it makes it easier to access ideas, generally.

A quick aside about ideas and writing generally for any people trying to 'break in' to comics or other media. Years ago, in the pre-internet early-90s, I read an interview with 2000AD writer Alan Grant, who said as a piece of general advice that any writer worth his salt should have DOZENS of ideas stashed away in his mental sock-drawer and be able to pull them out at a moment's notice when they needed a pitch. A writer should have 5 good ideas a day! Of course, this horrified me at the time, as I would struggle and take weeks to come up with even a single Future Shocks idea! But Alan was right, and over the years I've done the same – parked ideas off to one side or in a series of notebooks until I've needed them. So, some of the things that writers seem to 'pluck from the air' are actually ideas you may have had 10 or 20 years earlier which have been sat there, waiting for a home. Discard nothing.


In Indigo Prime, Burroughs is an intriguing character...

For anyone not aware, William S Burroughs was a very significant and influential 20th century writer. For me and my contemporaries, Burroughs was an extremely important cultural figure who, arguably, helped usher in the era of Post-Modernist literature through his use of 'cut-ups' and literary recycling. The SF writer William Gibson once said: there are two kinds of writers in the world: those who have read William Burroughs, and those who haven't. I've been reading Burroughs and listening to tapes and records of his readings for over 40 years now, so his voice and character came to me very quickly while writing Indigo Prime.

I briefly corresponded with Burroughs in the early 90s before he died. One of his letters is framed and sits on the wall in front of where I write. It's not an exaggeration to say he is one of my personal 'heroes.'
If you're not aware, Burroughs shot and killed his wife Joan when a drunken party game went wrong. One of my sub-plots in Indigo Prime alludes to this and to Burroughs' life-long guilt about her death. Joan is a recurring image-motif in “A Dying Art.” Obviously, my correspondence with Bill is private, but it touched on Joan's death (he brought it up, not me) and to this day I still cannot think about what he said about her without the hairs on my arms and neck going up.



The Psychosphere is such a brilliant invention – how did you come up with it?

Well, IP's previous writer, John Smith, mentioned the Psychosphere at the end of episode two – the last part of this series he wrote. He named it, but didn't really say what it was. So I riffed off the idea that it was an “Ideas-generating Engine” – a “machine-dreaming system” (as opposed to the so-called “machine-learning systems” you may have read about about on Pop.Science sites) developed in the early days of Indigo Prime. In real life, writer William Burroughs was friends with an artist called Bryon Gysin (Google him!) who created “Dream Machines” that induced hallucinatory visions via eye-lid light-flicker. Anyone can make one at home – though don't try it if you suffer from epilepsy or are prone to fitting! Burroughs experimented with dream machines himself. It actually only took a couple of minutes to connect the various dots and make the Psychosphere a cross between a dreaming AI and a dream machine – a device that could induce “super-lucidity”, ie dreams that were real – and this would provide a route into The House of Haunted Heads – the dream-like collected consciousness of the sleeping Imagineers.



Can we expect to see more Imagineers and the return of old favourites in future episodes?

In episode Four we visit the gallery in the Haunted House of Heads – a visual manifestation of the Rembrandt Index ™ – basically, wall upon wall of portraits of every Imagineer that ever existed. Lee did such an incredible job illustrating that. He is an amazing artist. If you drill down into the detail in that image, you can see each portrait is of a different Imagineer. (Can you imagine how much time Lee must have spent doing all that! It blows my mind to think about it) Each portrait shows a different, as-yet unseen character; each picture a potential story yet to be told. Will we get to see some of these other Imagineers? Well, if – fingers crossed! – I get to write more series of IP, then: YES! New characters are something I'm keen to bring into IP, as well as exploring the inner / earlier lives of some of the core members of the cast. There are various hints, teases and asides about existing characters' back-stories as we move through the current series.



How do you plan each episode?

I have different approaches to different things I write. Generally, I plot out an entire series in advance – break down the main events of each episode – getting it signed off by editorial before then scripting individual episodes. What I do is step the characters through each scene or 'beat' of that episode – figuring out where they are at the start of each scene within each episode, and where they are by the end. By “where they are” I don't necessarily mean physically or whatever, but where are they emotionally or in terms of attaining their long- or short-term goals.

Sometimes a scene might go through a number of iterations: endless scraps of paper that end up in the recycling-bin; literally, everything gets scrawled on: old envelopes, junk mail circulars... other times, pieces come out exactly as they end up being published, on a note-book in a cafe or in my kitchen at 4am.

If they are characters that I know fairly well (ie ones I've created or co-created) then I usually get the characters to 'tell' me what THEY want to do or where they want to go next. If I'm writing characters that were created by someone else – as were a chunk of the Indigo Prime cast – then I research the characters as best I can, soaking up as much of their back-stories or character tics as I can until I get a feel for them. In the case of Indigo Prime, the previous writer never really told us a great deal about some of the characters' inner lives. Stuff is hinted or alluded to, which is part of IP's charm, I guess. In the end, I started building my own back-stories for some of them – hearing their voices in my head – and then used that to figure out how they might react in particular circumstances or a scene. Because of my current workload – writing multiple series at once – I mostly wrote Indigo Prime on the fly – plotting out a couple episodes in advance and scripting as I went along. There's a whole bunch of crazy stuff that I couldn't fit into this series, but I'm hoping Lee and I can use some of it in a future go-round.

The previous writer had left the story hanging at the end of episode two with no road-map or series notes. Since I had to come in 'cold' off of that, rather than start from a clean slate, I had to continue the 'voice' and tone of the proceeding episodes otherwise it would've been jarring if I wrote it in, say, the style of The Order. (Each series or strip you work on tends to find its own individual or default narrative 'voice'). So, the first few episodes I scripted had to be 'transitional' – they had pick up the tone, characters and plot-points left dangling from previous episodes and series. As we go along, various plot-lines are moved forward or resolved, and characters come into sharper focus. My plan was to slowly morph this into something that hopefully honours fan favourites and the stuff that came before, but which moves the strip into fresh new territory. Luckily, Lee was still on board as artist, and was able to pick up from where he left off a year or two earlier – he's done an incredible job giving the strip a consistent look during this transition period, navigating the different environments the IP agents inhabit and explore...





Which have been the most fun and challenging scenes to do so far?


Mostly, ones that the readers haven't seen yet, so can't talk about them because: SPOILERS. (laughs)

It's ALL been fun to do.

From my own point-of-view, Episode Five has obviously put the cat amongst the pigeons. Episode Seven was a personal favourite. You ought ask Lee at some point and try and get his perspective on this as an artist. I'm sure it'll be completely different to mine.



Can you see it working as a TV series? Maybe as an animated one?

Nah. It probably wouldn't. Part of what makes Indigo Prime such great fun is its seeming irrationality, its lack of respect for linearity and logic, and its constant barrage of weird ideas and cultural references. The playful use of language – as well as imagery – is very much part of Indigo Prime's heritage and something I'm continuing with, certainly in the early, transitional episodes. The 'tone' of the strip and its use of ideas and language are as much a part of the strip as the characters themselves – in the same way as mega City One is another 'character' in Dredd. It felt important to keep that tone – the 'feel', the history and traditions established in earlier episodes (and series) during my own run without getting too bogged down in it. This synergy of image and language is something that's almost unique to comics – an Indigo Prime TV series or film would be a very different animal to the comic-strip. In this instance, I don't think the use of language and text would successfully transfer to another medium. Think of things like, I dunno, the Watchmen film: Rorschach's diary entries, which look and read great on a comic-page, don't necessarily translate very well to a narrative voice-over.


Which are your favourite characters?

William Burroughs. Joan Burroughs. Fictional-entity / super-spy Mitzi Luger (and her alter-fictional other/selves). Revere.


How does this compare to say Deadworld or any of your other 2000AD series in terms of writing it?
Returning to the idea I touched on earlier that the way the strip is written is possibly an integral part of IP (true of all comics, I know, but something which is maybe heightened in IP): Indigo Prime is deliberately stylised and a little quasi-literary at points in a way that, say, Deadworld or The Order ain't. All three strips have different, distinct voices, in my view. You write – adopt a style – not only to complement your characters and the world they inhabit, but to complement the style and strengths of the artist you're working with (though sometimes you write things before an artist is assigned). The Order was designed and written in a certain way 'cos I knew I would be working with John M Burns, for example. IP is something I've inherited, along with  its own peculiar history, tropes, mannerisms, etc. I do like that old Michael Moorcock quote where he says that Jerry Cornelius “is a process, not a character.” I'm thinking that maybe something similar is true of Indigo Prime: that it's a process of sorts – or a series of techniques – I'm gonna stop now before I blow my own brain up thinking about this (laughs).

I know how, say, Anna Kohl from The Order would probably react in most situations (jeez, just read that back and realised how weird that sounded! I have a VERY strange job!), whereas for some of the IP characters I didn't create like, say, Unthur Dak, it might take me a few episodes to get a tighter lock on them.

Going back full circle to the opening question of this Q&A: I LOVE playing around with ideas – especially 'big' ones – subverting and morphing them; so, from that point of view, though IP seems very structurally different to Deadworld and The Order, all three are underpinned by big IDEAS. Buuuuut, at the other end of the scale, I love doing small-scale character-driven stuff. The people in your tales are what drive the stories forward, not an off-camera overseer puppet-master writer, not your ideas, not your use of language – but the CHARACTERS. So, I'll hopefully be gradually fleshing out some of the IP Crowd a little more, but without losing the vagueness and ambiguity that's part of their charm.


What have you got planned next for 2000AD or the Megazine?

Much craziness that I can't speak about yet. But:

Could I direct your attention to the BLACK MAX reboot by Simon Coleby and myself in the Scream! & Misty Halloween Special, currently on comic-book store and newsagents shelves? BUY IT, so we can play with even more deranged Brit Silver Age characters.

All I can say is: keep an eye on the end-of-year 2000AD Christmas Special ! Dave Kendall and I have cooked up something thoroughly appalling and nasty that we hope you might like (laughs).


//k