The major challenge has been finding a distributor willing to handle the comic. Were there challenges in getting an 18+ comic published? If so, how did you get past them?
Actually, it would be easy for me to provoke extreme adverse reactions, but I’ve held back from doing so (at least till now) because I’m not sure Bad Press is strong enough to withstand an assault from the tabloids, organised religion and the anti-drugs field. But my fingers are crossed – we could use the publicity. Have you experienced any adverse reaction/controversy over the book’s sexual and/or drug-related content? I discovered Marvel Comics when Stan lee announced the Golden Age, when I was 11, and I built up a massive collection. I was lucky enough to have parents willing to buy me the Beezer, Topper, Buster, and Boys’ Own Paper.
My grandmother taught me to read, pre-school, using the Beano and Dandy as her textbooks. Through Bad Press, you’ve already been involved in a few similarly underground humour titles, such as Shit the Dog and Northern Lightz what draws you to this genre? I’ve been a comic fan as long as I can remember. It was a small step to start writing the odd story for them – and it was this tiny beginning that eventually led to Wasted. I’d been sporadically involved with the Scottish dope humour comic Northern Lightz, and became friendly with its production crew. Humour has always been an essential part of almost every story I’ve ever written…so it wasn’t really much of a leap from DC or 2000AD to Wasted. Both books enabled me to not only have a laugh, but often to have a laugh at established superhero characters. If anything, characters like Lobo and Etrigan the Demon are supervillains – but I couldn’t have written them at all if DC had asked me to NOT make them funny.
Anyone could emulate what Bruce Wayne did, if they had the necessary motivation and endurance, without the need for radioactive spider bites, birth under a red sun, being splashed with unknown chemicals or being given an alien magic lantern that’s powerless against the colour yellow. On my DC titles, I never considered Batman to be a superhero – my take on him was always that he was an ordinary man who made himself into something extraordinary. None of our 2000AD or other UK comics were about superheroes – Judge Dredd, Ace Trucking, Strontium Dog etc…all were peculiarly British, and all involved liberal doses of humour. If you look at the genre stories I’ve written, very few of them could be classed as “superhero”. I’ve never been what you’d call a “superhero fan”. What was the catalyst to make you change your focus from superheroes to the more comedic Wasted stories? 2008’s Wasted find Grant re-committing to the black humour that hall-marked the best of his Dredd output, and DoG was lucky enough to have a chat by e-mail with him recently…
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