Pageturners: Case Study – Toxic! Part 2

It was up to us to make Toxic! work as a team effort and we didn’t. Freelances have to get used to working without supervision and knowing how to collaborate.

Welcome to Pageturners, a book I’m writing in which I share what I’ve learnt – and am still learning – about comic writing, film writing, novel writing and how new writers can sell their stories. I’ll publish a chapter or a section per week, available for free here on Iconoblast. And I welcome your feedback or questions, so do leave a comment below!

Missed the Pageturners intro? Read it here.

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Illustration by David Broughton

Last week was Part 1 of my Case Study on Toxic! comic, in which I talked about how the lack of an overall leader with a strong vision ultimately led to our downfall. I also talked about the need for empathy and diplomacy when dealing with creatives.

On to Part 2!

A panel from Psychokiller, featuring the comic. Art by Dave Kendall

In the end, the ship capsized and there at least was team spirit when I organised a debt collection visit to the publisher (I wrote an account of it, which you can download: The Artists’ Debt Collection Party). We were finally all united in wanting our money.

But there is a yet deeper truth here which is relevant to aspiring creators. To use Spiderman’s lines – ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. We finally had the power, but it’s that responsibility which was often lacking on Toxic! and elsewhere in British comics. ‘Take the money and run’ is all too often the mantra I’ve seen amongst creators. They don’t have sufficient faith in their own abilities and/or the project or publishers, so they just make as much money as possible and get the Hell out. If, as a writer, you’re working with an artist, this is something you have to consider. You need to be a good judge of character to spot that your business partner may lack the necessary commitment to a project, because their flakiness may well be hidden behind charm or reticence. One way to judge is to look at their track record.

If it’s not good, walk away.  

It was up to us to make Toxic! work as a team effort and we didn’t. Freelances have to get used to working without supervision and knowing how to collaborate. And to appoint and accept some kind of leader. It’s not something we’re good at. As John Sanders, the 2000AD publisher, once said with a certain prophetic glee, if we freelances ever got what we wanted, we’d all be at each other’s throats.

The nearest we got to a leader was Kevin, our art editor, who quickly filled the power vacuum. He bravely sacked our original editor because of a printing error on Marshal Law – Kingdom of the Blind. The pages were ‘buckled’. With hindsight, I’d say that was a mistake because we had no one to replace the editor. Arguably the editor’s proven creative skills – the reason we hired them - outweighed their lack of technical skills. But that’s easy for me to say because I simply didn’t want to make such difficult editorial decisions myself. Kevin, at least, had the courage to do so, rightly or wrongly.

Kevin also turned down John Wagner’s Button Man, not because it wasn’t a great story, but because we already had Accident Man. In hindsight, when Accident Man was out of the comic Button Man could have taken its place. Readers may or may not accepted a similar story and that was Kevin’s understandable concern. These are the kind of tough decisions that editors often agonise over. The popularity of films like The Hunt would strongly suggest Button Man would have gone down well with the readers.  

And finally there was a short, ongoing cartoon strip Shit the Dog by Simon Bisley and – if I recall correctly – Alan Grant, which Kevin rejected because he didn’t think it was funny. That decision was fiercely debated and probably Kev could have used Oz to have smoothed some ruffled feathers! I never saw it, but I’m told it had a Viz-like quality. I remember thinking – even if it wasn’t great, it might be useful to attract Bisley fans, and also to keep the peace.

At least Kevin, alone amongst us, was not afraid of making tough decisions, right or wrong, and was attempting to steer our rudderless ship. But his potential ‘reign of terror’ was cut short when he had difficult family matters to deal with and sadly he had to bail.

If he’d stayed the course, Kevin might just have pulled it all together, although I know he would have agreed that diplomacy was not really his strong suit! Arguably, it would have needed a very strong and diplomatic editor to hold us all together. They do exist, although they’re rare. Dave Hunt, editor of  Battle, was a case in point. Also the original Toxic! editor, who was sacked.

Meanwhile, writing with Tony Skinner, I produced several stories for Toxic!, not least to keep the comic going, because we were running short on good material. Two of them were hits. Accident Man, the number one story in the comic, has been made into two movies starring Scott Adkins, and Psychokiller. Others – like Brats Bizarre, a serial about a group of homicidal teenage super heroes – also went down well. And it was a good home for Marshal Law. 

So what could I have done differently? And please don’t say – ‘take over the comic’. Angela had marked my card!

Maybe I should have insisted on somehow ‘breaking down’ that sense of two rival football teams on the comic. Me and Kevin on one side. John Wagner and Alan Grant on the other. But that would have required great effort and great diplomacy.  

What did we all want Toxic! to be? Were we all genuinely behind it? Was there a sense of common purpose? We never really had that conversation. Only the title (which I came up with) was the subject of a debate between us. Otherwise, we were all in our very separate creative bubbles

To achieve a strong unified voice would have delayed production by at least four months, which the publisher would have said was impossible. So he, too, would have needed talking around.  

Consequently, we ended up with a product that was brought out in a hurry,  which was not bad, but was not right either.

This is a typical story of many British comics past and present, which is why it needs telling.     

Even my talking about it now, after all these years, is breaking a rule of omerta. It’s the norm and much easier to pretend these issues don’t need considering in putting together an anthology and that comics will just magically appear, fully formed and perfect in every way.

So we lost a golden opportunity to change British comics forever, a possibility that was seriously on the horizon. I’m told 2000AD staff were shitting themselves at the time. They were fearful of our potential success and their potential demise – hence going full colour, like Toxic!, to the annoyance of many 2000AD readers. In fact, it didn’t have to be like that. The competition would have been good and healthy for 2000AD.

I believe it takes a year to put together an anthology weekly comic. That’s how long 2000AD took me. Toxic! came out in maybe four months. 

So it would be far too easy to blame the fall of Toxic! entirely on the publisher Geoff Fry, and that just isn’t the case. 

Those lines of Spiderman bear repeating:

‘With great freedom, comes great responsibility.’

The ghost of Toxic!  was very much on my mind when I decided to do Spacewarp, which I’ll talk about in a later section.

Next week: The real-life Villain that keeps on giving