Scotland's Amazing Comic Book Heroes ArtWorks Scotland

There is the country where heroes are made...

Biggest comic creatives in the world right now, biggest superheroes creatives,

they're all from Scotland.

..it's home to super men

and to dastardly villains...

Without exaggerating, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar

are The Beatles and Rolling Stones of comics.

It's a weird thing to spend your days coming up with menaces for Superman to face.

..and it's a lot closer than Gotham or Metropolis. They're already here!

They live amongst us!

Out there!

EVIL CACKLE

-AMERICAN ACCENT:

-'My first gig for the Caledonian Planet, and Chief had given me a tough assignment -

'to track down Scotland's comic book heroes.'

Naw, don't need the American accent.

'Because, this country has changed the superhero universe forever.'

Scottish creatives made Batman bonkers,

and Superman a Socialist.

Writers and artists began at mild mannered DC Thomson of Dundee...

and ended up the heroes of New York's DC Comics

They sell millions around the world, Hollywood can't get enough of them

and this rookie reporter wants to know how we transformed into super-Scotland?

Hello, Scott Symbol.

Yes, Chief, I'm right on it.

Yes, sir, it's an amazing story.

I hit the streets

looking for the Lycra literati.

'My first stop - a small Glasgow comic shop.'

'The whole place seemed to besotted by one guy -

'comic writer Mark Millar.

'So I wondered if he'd ever created a hero?'

The first one I did was Wanted, it was a big Angelina Jolie movie,

and I did Kick-Ass, starring Nicholas Cage,

and I think there's about five in development at the moment.

I'm doing one with Tony Scott, the man who did Top Gun, called Nemesis,

I'm doing a new one called Superior with the director of Kick-Ass

and another one called American Jesus.

Over at Sony, I've got War Heroes

and I'm sure there's another, but I can't remember right now.

It turns out, that Scotland's Mark Millar is one-man hero factory.

His comics Kick Ass and Wanted

have both been turned into movies, and between them,

have taken over 450 million at the box office.

And when Hollywood need to give their superheroes a gallus Glasgow swagger, they call Mark.

But whilst his films have brought him fame,

he's always been, first and foremost, a comics writer.

I've been writing comics since I was 19, I've been doing the job all that time and I love it.

I got to write all these characters I loved as a kid,

and there's a tremendous joy to doing that, you know,

somebody you dressed up as, as a kid, in Coatbridge...

I made an Iron Man suit when I was seven or eight,

so to actually sit and figure out his future is really exciting.

But in comics, you can say what you want and inside a few weeks what was in your head

can be being read by someone in the world. It's the last pirate medium.

'Everywhere I looked there were Scottish comics -

'sophisticated, sad, strange and sinister comics.

'And this is no longer just for Glasgow geeks or Fife freaks.'

'We looked for legitimacy from the arts crowd in the '80s and '90s

'and now realise we don't need them, we're so much bigger than them.

'All the metropolitan intelligentsia in London and so on'

who would always be quite disdainful of graphic novels

and not put them in review sections, we sell 100 times more, you know?

We don't need them. They're the niche, we are the mainstream.

Hollywood changed the comics industry, which was amazing for guys like us,

because we went from being in a despised medium to being in something that's quite cool.

But when it comes to creating comic heroes, writing isn't the full story.

In a grubby building in the shadow of Glasgow's central station...

the Gods are made.

This guy is Frank Quitely

who is, quite frankly, one of the most sought after comic artists on the planet.

Most people would probably imagine that American comics are written and drawn by Americans.

A few times over the years I've had people's genuine reaction

when they've found out that I draw comic books, they say,

"Oh, are they drawn?!"

"I mean, I know they're drawn, but I never actually thought,

"I've never thought

"that somebody would sit and draw all those pictures."

You think, "How do you think they got there?" You know?

American publishers DC Comics only entrust a few select artists to draw their iconic heroes.

But Frank's artistry and imagination have earned him the right

to draw The X-Men, The Invisibles, Superman and Batman.

'You can't make radical changes to the costume,

'it's got to still look like Batman, but they're very good

'at allowing individual artists to let their own natural style come through.'

And Frank's got style. His artwork is in constant demand

with American comic companies

and he's gained a worldwide cult following.

There are people who are fans of my work,

irrespective of what the character is or the story is.

When you're stuck in working and stuff, and it's quite slow work you know, you do forget

that there are people out there that really appreciate it,

but most of the time, I'm just a guy in Glasgow,

working in here. Sitting drawing, you know?

Like all good superheroes,

Frank pretends to be an ordinary Glasgow guy,

but he is a superstar of comic art, having won four Eisner awards -

the Oscars of the comic world.

And Hope Street Studios is HQ for up and coming new comic talent.

A lot of comics go on here, a lot of pieces of comics get assembled here,

and then shipped off somewhere else.

Basically, people are exporting their skills and importing dollars into Glasgow.

Sometimes, I'll find myself voicing lines

that the characters are saying,

and getting right into the vibe, you know?

You'd need to ask the other people I work with how much I go, "pweooch!"

When I'm drawing something blowing up, you know?

I think everybody does, I hope everybody does.

-Is this a sound effect I've got to do?

-Aye.

'You need to think up a noise for the claw coming up his nose.'

-What about schnikt?

-Aye, schnikt!

They work for comics big and small, on both sides of the Atlantic.

And for these guys, every story,

every hero, and each individual panel, is a labour of love.

With colouring, specifically, you can really set the mood,

and it gives the colourist a lot of space to put there own creative slant on things.

Say it was a hardboiled detective story,

you might want it to look more realistic and blunt, so you don't want to make it look splashy,

you want to make it look cramped and claustrophobic.

How do you spell the sound effect?

'F-L-I-K-T.'

Do you want to draw it? Bit of hand-lettering? Cos I'm not going to...

Heroes and Villains fly across the world at the click of button

and the guys claim their rewards.

I think when I got my first cheque from DC Comics

with the big DC logo on it, that was it. It was like...

And it was in dollars, you know?

And I took it into the Clydesdale Bank, like, "There you go."

2,000, like, "What are we going to do with this?"

I was like, "I don't know, you're the bank."

But something doesn't make sense,

why was Scotland a place for comic book heroes?

Surely, the first comics came out of New York, London or Paris?

But no, it's claimed that the first comic in the world,

came from...right here.

This is emphatically, unequivocally,

the very first comic in the world and it comes from Glasgow.

This is issue number one of the Glasgow Looking Glass from June 1825.

It was a bit of a gossip sheet, it was aimed more at the literati,

it is meant to make you laugh and think.

The early illustrators were not of the best quality,

but they expanded it later,

and by the time we get to issue ten, it's quite magnificent.

So this is number 15 with the magnificent My House In Town.

Of course in old tenements, the rich people lived up the stairs,

as you go further down things become a little more middle class

then working class,

these are the porters and all that,

some of these will be servants for folk who live upstairs.

And the coal cellar, as things start to become less nice, as it were.

Down the bottom, a guy enjoying himself,

but in slightly straightened circumstances,

not got the same headroom.

It's not a kids story, it's not got superheroes in it,

it's not adventurous, but does it have regular strips? Yes.

Does it have recurring characters? Yes, it does.

Does it have word balloons? Yes, it does.

Did it appear regularly? Yes, it did.

So every single question covers any definition, I think, of a comic periodical.

'So the Glasgow Looking Glass was the world's first comic

'but the chief wants a story about Scottish comic book heroes,

'and that meant there was one place I had to go.'

Scotland's comic city -

Dundee.

For more than 75 years, Dundee's DC Thomson has published legendary comics like The Beano, the Bunty

and The Broons.

And I had a tip off

that it was once home to Scotland's very own caped crusader.

DC Thomson's did experiment with some British superhero characters.

Notable example would be Amazing Mr X.

It starred the Amazing Mr X as Len Manners,

he was very much a Clark Kent Superman prototype,

he was always referred to as a super man or mysterious super man,

he wore a little mask.

He was always leaping between sandstone buildings,

the kind you'd see in Dundee or in Edinburgh,

and it just doesn't look the same as soaring between sky scrapers.

Unlike an American superhero,

our Amazing Mr X, um, stopped people stealing lead from roofs

and maybe caught a poacher.

In one episode, he wrestles with a stag, and it just didn't really work.

That was how we operated,

it was what you would call kitchen-sink superheroes.

Tucking into a cow pie was a good conclusion for a story, rather than saving the world.

Sincere superheroes didn't really fit at DC Thomson.

Because in Scotland, what readers loved was local heroes.

We all grew up with it.

We took it for granted,

we all read Oor Wullie and The Broons when we were kids.

It was a training in the relationship

between words and pictures.

It's part of a fabric of Scottish culture that does contribute

to the way contemporary writers and artists draw on their own experience.

It's quite remarkable that all that cultural input

has come from one company.

You think of the great publishing cities for comics round the world,

you think of New York, Tokyo, London, Dundee!

When do you ever see Dundee mentioned in a list like that?

No matter what type of comic book hero you wanted to write,

all roads led to DC Thomson.

It was certainly the best training in UK,

because you would be with young guys in offices

where the talk all the time was of comics,

and of how you design pictures, what worked, what didn't work,

we were producing so many comics and magazines,

if you were on our staff, very shortly,

you would see your stuff in print.

DC Thomson ensured Scotland was a hive of comic creativity,

but I'm looking for Scottish superheroes.

And I wasn't the only one.

In the 1970s, frustrated by years of couthy comics,

a group of writers left DC Thomson

and dared to imagine an action-packed future.

They were taught in this very staid formalised environment - and once they got out of there,

their minds just explode with imagination and it was, we can't wait

to shove two fingers in the direction of anyone who tells us what to do.

They set up 2000AD, the ultra-violent punk comic...

where anything goes.

I just couldn't believe it - here was a British comic

going down the route of American comics I'd enjoyed so much as a teenager,

but had still retained its cutting edge.

You get 2000AD and suddenly it's just completely different.

It changed the face of British comics completely and utterly.

I noted the star writers, Alan Grant and John Wagner,

were both Scottish, and both DC Thomson-trained.

Their new comic allowed them to create characters like Judge Dredd...

who was a million miles from Oor Wullie.

-Why is he so popular?

-Mainly because he appeals to the bastard in everybody.

We wanted it to be funny obviously and we wanted it to be sort of true to life.

We used to buy all the tabloids, go through the tabloids looking for ideas

that we could extrapolate into the future...

This story here, "Twas the Night before Christmas".

Here comes Santa Claus and his reindeer coming into Megacity One.

He doesn't respond to the city defenders' call to

identify himself so they set off a couple of missiles...

They actually blow up Santa's reindeer.

Dredd follows the trail of blood and finds Santa Claus with his sack.

He's saying "Gotta deliver!"

So Dredd's chasing him, and he shoots Santa dead with his bike cannon.

And we end up saying a belated Merry Christmas to all our readers after we've just killed Santa.

I would say Alan Grant is one of the unsung heroes of Scottish comics, of British comics.

The material the Wagner-Grant partnership created in the 80s was stunning.

It's the golden age of 2000AD for a reason, and Alan Grant was a big part of that.

Basically we were allowed to do whatever we wanted because the comic was successful and most publishers

don't interfere if they've got a successful publication, so they just left us to get on with it.

The success of 2000AD was noted by the comic companies across the Atlantic.

At last, Scottish writers were given a chance to play in the Super League.

One day, completely out of the blue, we got a call from the senior editor on DC's Batman titles...

and basically what he said was he'd been reading 2000AD and he really liked the hard edge

we'd given to Judge Dredd and could we do the same for Batman?

For people who had grown up reading Superman, Batman and Spiderman,

the chance to go and play with the big boys' toys was irresistible.

Alan Grant wore his politics on his superhero sleeve...

and ensured that his Caped Crusader fought the good fight.

I made Batman completely different from the Batman of the 1950s...

no longer did he fight alien invasions or jellyfish

or all the rest of the stupid things that they had him doing...

I tried to make him a champion of not so much the poor but the underprivileged -

those who couldn't find justice any other way.

I think people like Alan Grant brought a kind of new take on American superheroes...

almost a kind of distance from them which many of the American writers brought up within that system,

brought up idolizing those characters, didn't have

and people like Alan Grant brought a breath of fresh air into Batman.

Not only did Alan Grant put Scotland in Batman,

he also put Batman in Scotland.

The background to the story takes us to the Highland Clearances, both Batman and Fergus Slith,

the villain, come from the Highland Clearances and have gone to America.

Batman's family, and he says at one point in this book...

some of my ancestors are actually Scottish...

but his ancestors were the landowners and they were responsible

for sending the villain away and clearing him out of his land.

And now in the 20th century, the villain is coming back to wreak havoc and to kill innocent people.

So there are very serious questions being raised about innocence and guilt

across generations... a very Scottish theme.

Batman, Superman, Iron Man...

behind every superhero, there seemed to be a mild-mannered Scot...

And there was one name that came up again and again.

A scary, mythical figure who had lived a life as dramatic as the heroes he writes.

The Glasgow writer who's been the biggest name in the comic universe for decades.

In the comics world, I mean Grant Morrison is MASSIVE, I mean he's...

seen as this huge brain, this massive intellect that he brings to his work.

This guy, Grant Morrison, is one of the most sought-after comic writers in the world.

He divides his time between LA and Rothesay...

And his love of superheroes is rooted in his own attempts to save the world.

My parents were antinuclear activists and brought me out here

as a kid to protest against American Polaris submarine presence in this very place...

Out of that came my need for something that could counteract the bomb,

and I found that in Superman and Superman comics...

you saw that guy and he would just stand there

and the atomic bomb would explode off his chest

and then he wipes his nose and laughs.

For over 20 years, Grant Morrison's wild imagination has been stunning readers across the world.

He wrote stories for DC Thomson,

then 2000AD...

then was headhunted by the big American publishers who put him in charge of Batman,

Animal Man, the X Men and a whole universe of superheroes...

I like the broad range, I like that operatic sort of range, colourful personalities.

Yu know what Superman stands for you know what Wonder Woman stands for.

I can understand the world in terms of these ridiculous conflicts in comic books.

But for Grant, it wasn't enough just to write super heroes...

he wanted to walk amongst them.

And things took a post-modern twist in his acclaimed series The Invisibles when he created King Mob,

a character fashioned in his own image.

I made myself look like him and meshed my life into him as much as

could be possible without actually becoming an occult terrorist...

I began to put him through situations without knowing what it might mean for me.

Weirdly, life began to mimic art...

I put him through a situation where he was captured by his enemies and tortured.

And he's on a torture chair, his lungs collapsed he's been shot,

he's convinced he's got necrotising

fasciatus bacteria eating through his face cause they've used a mind control drug on him

I'm blithely writing all this stuff then three months later,

suddenly I'm in hospital...

I've got a hole in cheek, lung collapsed completely,

poisoned and dying.

In the same kind of circumstances as character...

It was almost the idea that I created a voodoo version of myself,

a voodoo doll in this environment and suddenly by affecting him

I could make changes in my own life... .

There's often a grant Morrison proxy that appears in comics.

the superhero becomes an other imagined self,

tying into the great theme of doublings in Scottish literature...

And he very much preaches this idea that you can invent

a fictional character, a fictional personae and then step into it.

After year at the cutting edge of comics,

Grant has returned to the hero he first idolised...

All Star Superman celebrates 70 years of the Man of Steel...

It was me writing it, Frank Quitely drawing it,

and Jamie Grant colouring it,

and it's three Scottish guys suddenly doing the best selling superman comic in America,

but we liked the idea that this was specifically coming

completely from Scotland.

The huge success of Scottish comics writers...

at the moment is perhaps something that Scots

aren't as aware of as they should be. This is very much a big deal.

These are some of the most important and beloved characters in the world

that people like Mark Millar and Grant Morrison

are getting to play around with.

From the Mr X to Mark Millar's Kick Ass,

I'd uncovered Scotland's rich contribution to the art form...

..but I didn't understand why we were so good at it.

How did Scotland produced so many great comic creatives?

When we were kids we were all fascinated with America,

cos America was the world's number one country and it was where the culture came from...

so we took in everything we could about America

and I guess it just got mixed up with our Scottish stuff

and then regurgitated when it came to our stories.

You have writers and artists who are very self conscious

about the history of the American comics and American graphic novels

but are also very confident of their own Scottishness,

you know, not to worry about it...

What's happening is a sort of colonization in reverse.

American writers were much too interested in maintaining their

own kind of childhood vision of characters.

We came in with a lot, you know, lot more punkish and anarchic attitude.

The superhero in their world isn't this all-knowing character who

can defeat any evil with a flex of his muscles.

Very much a character who is rife with internal problems

rife with psychological problems,

he's very much ill at ease with his own authority,

doesn't wear power well,

and if you think about that in a Scottish context,

the Scottish relationship to power, imperialism

and authority is of course a very problematic one

and I think Scottish writers very much reflect that.

But after nearly 200 years of Scottish comics, The local fan boys

are getting the moment they've long been waiting for...

Mark Millar's new film, Miracle Park,

will feature characters who are 100% superhero and 100% Scottish...

'So I just thought stealing it back you know, doing a superhero idea

'but setting in Scotland could be quite interesting.

'And not to make it a really obvious jokey kind of thing that people

'imagined it would be but that's not really what my stuff's like.

'Just making it a great sci-fi superhero drama.

To bring the seriousness of something like Trainspotting

like a Danny Boyle movie...

Doing it like that, setting it in Scotland, but it's about a bunch of people who have super powers,

so there's no capes and costumes and that kind of stuff, it's a very

real gritty superhero drama done for a modern audience.

My report hit the newsstands...

I revealed to readers that our comic book heroes just needed belief.

Because when it comes to imagination We don't need anyone to rescue us.

We can all be truly, utterly and indisputably,

international superheroes!

And it's a story that looks certain to be continued...

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