PM :
You are very kind, but yes - if you get the right team anything is possible.
Alas, all too often, I've been stuck with artists who are nowhere near as
talented as Joe. The credit must go to Dave Hunt the editor. 'Johnny Red' was
fantastic - a lesser editor would have kept Joe on that story. What
impressed me about 'Johnny Red' was the incredible scenes of the Russians as
heroes. It was a tribute to their astonishing courage and suffering at
Stalingrad and Leningrad. Those graphic pictures were so moving - so
bloody moving.
Frankly, I didn't care for 'Johnny Red' himself - a Brit
leading the Russians felt a little patronising for my taste - although it
was probably the only way a comic story could have featured Russian
communists as heroes. Full marks to writer Tom Tully and Joe for doing the
story. Joe deserves equal recognition for his truly fantastic work on
Johnny Red. I would love to see Joe's 'Johnny Red'' episodes collected as I'm
sure Charley's War will be in the future.
Anyway, I'd just finished creating 2000AD and I wanted to do something new
and special. After the success of German stories such as 'Hellman Of Hammer Force', I wanted
to try something even more challenging - and so I wrote a story about a
Japanese war hero ... 'Samurai' , with artist Cruez. The publisher was even
more nervous this time, but reluctantly agreed. (He was quite reasonably
afraid that the Burma Road veterans would complain). Frankly, I didn't get
Samurai right. I couldn't get inside the Asiatic mindset and there simply
wasn't the research material available. The story was popular enough, but
Dave Hunt felt I could come up with something better and create a new
number one story. He knew World War One would appeal to me because it was
the riskiest subject of all time because it's static and non visual . To
tempt me, he suggested Joe as the artist. . This tempting process was and is
very common in comics. Thus Dave also tempted Carlos Ezquerra away from
his creation 'Judge Dredd' to draw 'El Mestizo' for Battle.
Dave was damn good
at this - sometimes , as in the case of Ezquerra, I was miffed that he'd
lured away a 2000AD artist. There was a lot of fairly friendly rivalry
going on ! Anyway, I jumped at the chance of working with Joe! I was
so impressed that Dave would take Joe off a highly popular story - 'Johnny
Red' - and put him on such a risky venture. Joe liked the idea and so we
were in business. At some point you might want to get Dave's view on all
this, although I have no idea where he is these days.
