Pageturners: The Lands of Might-Have-Been

“Good Times,” I explained—with a perfectly straight face—“Means it’s where the cowboys who have been on the trail herding dinosaurs can rest and relax and have some good, clean, wholesome fun."

Pageturners cover art by Mike Donaldson

So my big news this week is that the e-book edition of Pageturners: How To Create Iconic Stories From The Creator of 2000AD is now available for pre-order on Amazon. It’ll be published on 26th November after Doctor Who and the Star Beast has broadcast and the paperback will go on sale at the same time. Isn’t that a fantastic cover by Mike Donaldson? Mike is artist co-creator of Fu-tant, one of the stories from Spacewarp, and he is also the artist for The Broons. What a talent!

Pageturners is about writing successful stories. And my strongest examples are from Doctor Who: comics, audio plays and TV, with the last section of Pageturners focusing on my writing adventures in the amazing worlds of the Time Lord.

I share the inside story on one of my greatest successes: The Star Beast.

Everything you want to know about The Meep. What inspired me to create it. How it brought something new to Doctor Who comic strips by challenging sci-fi stereotypes.

And The Star Beast’s triumphant return on TV, as the first of three 60th Anniversary Doctor Who Specials, heralding the new season with Russell T. Davies back as showrunner.

Pageturners is essential reading on how to create legendary heroes and iconic stories.

All my Doctor Who posts from my Secret History post series will be collected and published in my new book Pageturners: How To Create Iconic Stories From The Creator of 2000AD.

But I’ve still got a few more chapters from the book to post here on Iconoblast before the 26th, so let’s move on!

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The Whoniverse, Narnia, Erewhon, Middle Earth, Farscape, Jurassic Park, Dune, Tatooine, Alderaan.

These are famous worlds of science fiction and fantasy we all love to escape to. Creating worlds is one of my particular fortes for which I am well known in comics. These include:

Mega City One, Termight, Tir-Nan-Og: The Land of the Young, Resurrection, Dystopia, Carver City, New Eden, Mekana, the world of Hellbreaker and more.

Science fiction worlds are worlds of magic. The magic of the Muse. We escape this reality and enter a land “far more mercifully planned than the cruel place we know.” (From The Lands of Might-Have-Been, by Ivor Novello)

Actually, they’re sometimes crueller, but they yet have a certain dystopian beauty about them as I shall illustrate. Readers often ask me about world-building and how I go about it. I guess this is because my stories in 2000AD and elsewhere are known for having particularly fully-realised worlds of the imagination. 

The short explanation is they are a mirror reflection of my inner consciousness. But, once set on paper, I have to know everything about them and how they work.

Creating worlds will reveal your own Muse, so here is a guided tour through some of my Lands of Might-Have-Been.

1. MEGA-CITY ONE

Originally, Judge Dredd was set in New York. But Carlos Ezquerra, the artist creator drew a background picture of some rather fascinating futuristic skyscrapers. I was so taken with them, I asked him to do an entire city based on this drawing. It was out of this world! I took it to my art director, Doug Church, and he said, “You can’t call this city New York. It’s got be Mega-City One, stretching down the entire eastern seaboard of the United States.”

Carlos’s magical Mega-City One in its first visualisation in Prog 2 of 2000AD has never been beaten.That city created a sense of mystery and wonder, which has never been repeated in subsequent stories. In fact, progressively over the years his strange and alien-looking starscrapers have been visually diluted by other artists into excellent but rather more rational and traditional skyscrapers that would not be out of place in today’s New York or Dubai. Why? Surely the whole point of science fiction is the wow factor? I wish I’d done more to ensure that original, joyously irrational Gaudiesque element was not dragged down to the sober and conservative reality many of us can find in our real world just by looking out our windows.

It would take too long to describe how the Judges and the inhabitants developed, but the key was that they had to live up to Carlos’s original fantastic designs.

2. THE WORLD OF FLESH

Flesh was a particular challenge for world-building. Once I had the premise that time travelling humans were farming dinosaurs for their flesh, it was so wild, it needed elaborate world-building to make it credible. Otherwise it would seem idiotic.

The high concept begat endless questions. How is the Flesh beamed back to the future? What do the cowboys’ work vehicles look like? And their uniforms? Obviously western, but they needed to be futuristic at the same time. Boix did a great job visualising the cowboys, but they and their slaughter houses were too squeaky clean. It needed later artist Ramon Sola to make them look grubby, and Kevin O’Neill to redraw Boix’s sterile abattoir into a foul-smelling, heavily polluted factory!

I used an Angus McKie sci-fi cover to visualise the fleshdozers that picked up the dinosaurs and dispatched them. Art director Doug Church designed the container system where the flesh was then beamed up to the 23rd century. I also needed lots of strange and cool vehicles, so I bought a book especially for the purpose, passing the references on to Boix as the basis for herding the dinosaurs.

Carver City is set within the world of Flesh. It’s a Wild West city enclosed by a huge transparent dome, ruled over by Claw Carver. Above the dome is a Las Vegas Cowboy statue pointing to the city. The cowboy has a big grin on his face and next to him is the caption: “Good Times”. I recall my publisher asking what the sign meant. “Good Times,” I explained—with a perfectly straight face—“Means it’s where the cowboys who have been on the trail herding dinosaurs can rest and relax and have some good, clean, wholesome fun, before continuing their epic treks.”

Flesh brings me to one of the principal dangers of world-building—the dreaded exposition that I talked about earlier. Exposition is particularly prevalent in science fiction. You build up an elaborate world and then write any number of episodes or chapters explaining your ingenious idea by having characters nattering to each other. I know lots of revered sci-fi writers do this, and buffs love it. Arthur C. Clarke with his Rama series and Larry Niven with Ringworld: both rightly regarded as classics. 

In film or comics however, this travelogue approach to world building won’t work.

I did the same thing as these revered writers on the early episodes of Flesh, explaining the involved set-up. It was a mistake, even though I know some Flesh fans will disagree with me. The episodes were reasonably popular, but that’s not good enough. The world should be revealed through a drama featuring the main characters in conflict. Thus Flesh became really popular once Old One Eye, the T. rex protagonist, and Claw Carver, the human bad guy, were introduced.

I see Old One Eye as a manifestation of the Muse who often turns up in my stories.

3. TERMIGHT

I didn’t make the same mistake on Nemesis The Warlock. I built the world up through drama. Termight, aka Mighty Terra, is an endless tube world where humans live like termites, inspired by the London Underground.

The main characters—Nemesis and Torquemada—are eternally in conflict and their world is introduced a little piece at a time. I had no idea what Torquemada meant when I gave him the immortal line, “Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave!” But I finally had to make sense of it and start world-building. I recall going for a long, long walk in the park pondering on Torquemada’s holy words. After several hours walking round and round in circles, muttering to myself, avoiding the eyes of dog walkers who were looking at me curiously, doubtless thinking, “Why hasn’t he got a dog with him like the rest of us? What a weirdo!” I finally had my Eureka! moment. Torquemada intends to cleanse the galaxy of deviants: all alien life!

“Be Pure”meant to be racially pure. “Be Vigilant” meant to be endlessly on the look-out for the alien threat. “Behave” meant to have “no truck with the extra-terrestrial”. Any human caught “trucking” faced the death penalty.

It inspired me to write the Deviatus, the battle hymn of Torquemada’s knights, based on ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’: 

Watch ye for the mark of the Deviant,

The tentacle and claw,

The scaly skin, the bug-eyes,

The hoof and the paw

With sword and axe and mace,

We cleanse and purify,

We never show any mercy

All Aliens must die!

4. TIR-NAN-OG: THE LAND OF THE YOUNG

The world of Sláine the barbarian. A map played a crucial role in the world building. I found a map of Britain and Ireland when the islands were still connected to Europe. Then a Palaeolithic event caused them to break away. So I imagined the fantasy saga that could cause this ancient Brexit. Maps are a useful tool in world building.

5. NEW EDEN

The city of my French future cop series Sha, published by Delcourt. It’s a New York re-imagined as a1930s Blade Runner world. All the visuals come from the genius ideas and designs of Olivier Ledroit.

6. RESURRECTION

This is the world of Requiem Vampire Knight. As a boy, I thought that everything and everybody in my world was the complete reverse of what they were supposed to be. So I visualised this by imagining an inside-out version of Earth. I drew a map of it with sea where there is land and land where there is sea.

As an adult, this world became Resurrection.

It’s Hell. Earth “inside out”. So everything is generated from that one principle. Time runs backwards. Evil is good. Smoking, gluttony, drugs and other vices are positively encouraged in a world of arrogant, vampiric bloodsuckers who yet see themselves as knights. Not a million miles away from the world of my boyhood! Where there is land on Earth, there is sea on Resurrection. And so on.

I relished this world so much, I even have the empire of Dystopia (based on Britain, of course) singing the Dystopian national anthem, ‘Rule Dystopia’, as this lizard race go to war with Requiem’s vampires:

Rule Dystopia! Dystopia sells slaves!

Howitzers! Rockets! Guns and grenades!

7. MEKANA

Set on Mars, in the ABC Warriors, the city of Mekana is designed as one eternal building site, a foul vista of endless cranes with buildings being constantly erected and demolished. This was inspired by seeing so much callous demolition and brutal reconstruction when I was growing up during the slum clearances of the 1960s.

Fashions reflect this theme. Mekana’s citizens wear hard hats and high vis jackets. Travel is by an elaborate crane system: “Let the crane take the strain.”

It gets worse: in this city, speech is discouraged and banned in city centres, because the authorities want to control us through our thoughts. So most communication is by “thoughtmail” and there’s little human interaction. 

Robot ‘traffic cones’ patrol the streets repeating, “No Talking! No Talking!”

It’s a reflection of today’s society and possibly the most nightmarish world I’ve ever devised, brilliantly visualised by Clint Langley.

Medusa—the Goddess of Mars—has made the architect-creator, Kroll pay for his criminal desecration of her world by psychically forcing him to endlessly daub his name in graffiti all over the buildings. Medusa is, of course, another manifestation of the Muse.

Mekana’s cops try to stop Kroll vandalising their city and he replies, “Why don’t you frag off? It’s my world. I can do what the frag I like with it.” The cops disagree, just before they kill him. “It’s our world now.”

This makes a most relevant point. Once your world is published, it is your readers’ world, too. They want to explore it and enjoy the shared experience and fantasy. It’s no longer your world alone and you can no longer do what you like with it.

This was directly inspired by some reader comments when I wrote a fairly recent Judge Dredd story. It featured elements or attitudes that a number of Dredd fans said were not correct in their somewhat restricted current Dredd canon. These often seemed to me to be at variance with the wild insanity of the early stories reflected in those very first Gaudiesque starscrapers by Carlos. Not to mention the prime role I played in developing the world of Dredd and Mega-City where I encouraged the craziest ideas imaginable. The wilder the better, as far as I was concerned. I reject any kind of orthodoxy. I was quite pissed off at the time when fans thought otherwise, hence Kroll’s response. But the fans were absolutely right.

It’s their world now.

8.THE WORLD OF HELLBREAKER

Infernals have escaped from Hell—an American-style supermax prison world, run by demons—and returned to Earth where no one can hurt them anymore because they’ve been so cruelly tortured by their alien demon prison warders the Ultors.

The London they return to is an Art Deco sci-fi world partly inspired by the film Metropolis. The cars, the fashions, the bikes and the robots are all wild Art Deco, brilliantly realised by artist co-creator Ian Ashcroft.

A specific architectural style can really help build a world.

9. NO HUMAN’S LAND

This is the story I shared with you in last week’s Pageturners. I never got around to writing it up and submitting as a possible Doctor Who, and I really should have done. If you haven’t already read it, do check it out and leave a comment to let me know what you think.