Hogan's Heroes: A Conversation With Peter Hogan

He's played in Neil Gaiman's sandbox and dabbled in Alan Moore's toybox. Now TERRA OBSCURA's Peter Hogan talks to Adrian Brown about spin-off comics, fantastic worlds and comics' stew of ideas.
06 September 2004

Mild-mannered Peter Hogan reviews movies for the British music and media magazine Uncut. He was also editor of early 90s British comics anthology, Revolver, which brought us Grant Morrison's DAN DARE, Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy's ROGAN JOSH, and the comic strip life of Jimi Hendrix.

He's also been responsible for some fine quality spin-off comics - from TOM STRONG (TERRA OBSCURA, currently into its second series) and SANDMAN (THE DREAMING - plus his as-yet unpublished Sandman Presents miniseries MARQUEE MOON) so it seems that Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore trust him.

Bitter man Adrian Brown reads comics for a living, and secretly works for NHS substance misuse services. Although he claims to be only "a fan" of comics, he has edited two issues of British comics magazine JUST 1 PAGE.

Between them, they have over eighty years of experience reading comics. So is it any wonder that they've seen it all before?

ADRIAN BROWN: It seems to me that the Anglophone (aka US) comics market relies heavily on reworking and reusing the same old themes of that one genre - the superhero fantasy. Other media take a theme and hammer it for a while then have a retro revamp some years later - ironically an example is the current trend for superhero films, which were big in the 80s, and 60s, but in between, Hollywood's genre addiction has seen sci-fi, horror, western and - choke - sword and sandals. Why do you think comics stick with superheroes ?

PETER HOGAN: Because they're safe - they're known territory, and commercially proven. Of course, comics have tried other genres as well, and still do - there's Vertigo, the small press and so on. But if you look at the richness of subject matter in newspaper comics back in the 1930s, or of pre-code comicbooks in the 1950s, it does seem like the industry took an enormous step backwards that we're only just now beginning to recover from. But superheroes probably seemed a better bet financially back then, and evidently they still do.

By definition, that shunts a lot of other things into the independent arena, and there the odds are stacked in favour of the writer-artist, who can just go ahead and do their comic if they believe in it enough, even if they starve in the process. And we've had great stuff as a result : EIGHTBALL and LOVE & ROCKETS, to name but two. But for an artist or a writer to do it is a lot harder - you have to persuade someone else to collaborate with you, and possibly starve along with you. Which isn't that appealing! So, that all kind of compounds the problem.

As to why superheroes are so popular ... 'power fantasy' is the phrase that usually gets trotted out when people try to analyse it, but I don't think that really does it. I don't think everybody likes to fantasise about being Superman so much as they like to fantasise that someone like Superman might actually exist. They want to believe in the possibility of magic, and I think that's at the heart of the appeal of fantasy and science fiction as well ... and with all those genres, you can say things about the 'real' world that you can't with straight fiction.

ADRIAN BROWN: Such as?

HOGAN: Unfashionable things, like... there's more to life than meets the eye. That wisdom exists. That meaning exists. As an example: ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND is pure fantasy, but it says more about relationships than a dozen orthodox rom-coms put together.

BROWN: Surely the majority of comics choose only to say things about 'the DC universe' or 'the Marvel universe' or 'the ABC universe' being just like our own, but with super powers. In opposition to your comment above, I can accept the power fantasy, but do Superman and Spider-Man really tell us that with great power comes great responsibility - for example. Or do they say, "the people who have the power to change the world are really too wrapped up in their own business to care"? I think they are popular because they are familiar like a mother's womb.

HOGAN: And familiarity breeds content, seemingly. But we all have the power to change the world, and we do it every day, with every action and every word. That was the key point that Alan Moore made in WATCHMEN, I thought: 'Who makes the world?' You do. We all do. All of our lives are meaningful and significant. And if superheroes don't have everyday human problems, don't have something resembling a life that we can relate to, why should we care about them?

BROWN: Doesn't this mean that every work is derivative - whether it is a reboot that retains the major elements of a story - e.g. making origins more contemporary like in ULTIMATES, or updating the depth of storytelling like Frank Miller's BATMAN: YEAR ONE - or a new story using familiar archetypes. After all, how many superheroes can there be?

HOGAN: I think the issue isn't really superheroes per se, though we could certainly do with their taking up a little less shelf space. I do think it's still possible to do a good superhero story, and when they're done well they're as satisfying as any other kind of story. Perhaps even more so, if you love the genre. But the good ones tend to have a beginning, a middle and an end. The problem is that so much of what's produced doesn't - it's just this endless treadmill of monthly soap opera, which isn't a very satisfying form dramatically. It may well be that that's what keeps the industry afloat financially, but it's also what keeps it creatively stagnant. Of course, there are also still people out there doing very good work on monthly titles, and those are the stories that hang together properly when they're collected in book form.

As far as being derivative goes... you may well be right, but that doesn't necessarily mean 'bad'. Most pop songs aren't that original - what makes the difference is whether it's a good song or not. It's not so much a matter of being derivative as of building on a tradition. Terry Pratchett once compared fantasy to a stew - that if you were writing fantasy you were taking out ingredients put there by earlier writers, and adding a few ingredients of your own for the next person to play with. The same is pretty much true of superheroes... but ultimately the only thing that really matters is the quality of the writing. I'd rather read a good superhero story than a bad crime story.

BROWN: Let's take that stew analogy and apply it to the comics world at the moment. A very limited number of people seem able to make a great big pan of finest bouillabaisse. And the majority are either content to stir a pot that has almost boiled away or, perhaps the lesser of two evils, to take out some of the choicest lumps of meat and make a pie instead. The former are both the nostalgic writers and the revisionists, but every now and then a Grant Morrison pops his head out of the oven with a very nice pie. But the majority of writers just don't seem willing to do that. Every now and then a new recipe becomes popular, but not often enough to keep the comics kitchen simmering.

HOGAN: You're going to batter this metaphor to death, aren't you? The thing is, I'd welcome more variety of subject matter, but even if we got that I don't think everything would suddenly be hunky-dory, because Sturgeon's law would still apply: 90% of everything is crap. It's true of music, it's true of novels, and sadly it's true of comics as well. I learned it was true of movies when I was a full-time film critic - when you see nearly every movie that's released you realise how pitifully few good ones there are. Great ones are even rarer.

BROWN: Your own work with THE DREAMING (extract of Gaiman's goulash) and TERRA OBSCURA (derived from Moore's grand bourguignon) might be taken as two examples. The former comes (perhaps indirectly) from a landmark series that may not have broken the mould, but certainly gave rise to a sub-genre. The latter is a clear continuation of something that works, although only because it is one of the better nostalgic pot stirrers - though I would prefer new recipes from Moore.

HOGAN: Okay, there's a number of points there. As to new 'recipes' from Alan ... I'm sure we'll get them, though they may or may not arrive in comic book form. But aren't you glad we got TOM STRONG as well? I think ABC generally has been a real shot in the arm for the industry, whether the industry recognises that or not.

And it's only to be expected that publishers want to do spin-offs from successful titles. That doesn't mean they'll automatically be awful, anymore than it automatically means they'll be a financial success. If you want to do a Batman spin-off then maybe you'll get something as good as GOTHAM CENTRAL, maybe you'll get something as bad as the CATWOMAN movie. What makes the difference, as per usual, is the writing ... though I suppose we could also blame Halle Berry and the costume designer and the studio executives and...

Anyway, as far as THE DREAMING was concerned... Neil had concocted a very rich mythology with SANDMAN, and I was delighted to have the chance to play with it, and learned a lot in the process. It's not for me to say whether my stories were good or not, but I gave it my best shot at the time. Regarding the other Sandman spin-offs, I thought some of them - like Mike Carey's LUCIFER - were pretty good, some of them were pretty awful.

With TOM STRONG and TERRA OBSCURA... I don't think it's just a matter of nostalgia. Alan took all these great old toys that no one had used for years, like giant robots and talking monkeys, and proved they still worked just fine in a modern context if you did them right. And with TERRA OBSCURA we're using a bunch of obscure old superheroes to hopefully say a few interesting things about the genre as it stands, and also hopefully entertain in the process.

BROWN: Being a hoary old cynic like I am, I will accept such things as parody and satire of superheroes. The question remains in my mind, don't many of these stories amount to the writers' wish to play with the big established comics characters, but using stand-ins? Mentioning no names, but THE AUTHORITY and PLANETARY both have good and bad examples of this. How did you avoid this with TERRA OBSCURA?

HOGAN: It's not really satire ... It's being able to say something about established characters that the owners of those characters probably wouldn't let you say, because there are multi-million dollar franchises involved. Of course, it's a bit ironic if they then let you play with the real thing as well ... but at this point, nobody at Marvel or DC is going to let me have carte blanche to do anything I want with their major league characters, so this is a way of being able to have that much freedom.

In TERRA OBSCURA we've been able to kill several people off, let characters have proper sex lives and so on, and nobody's given us grief about it - and we're not particularly constrained by continuity either, which is really liberating. But of course I'd be pleased if the major companies rang me up and offered me a nice gig because they liked my work on TERRA. Can't deny it.

BROWN: Is that work there for yourself because it is safer for the couple of thousand retailers and even less editors? Is it better for them to have a stable - but stagnant - market that they can easily control?

HOGAN: You can't blame retailers for wanting to stay in business, or editors for wanting to keep their publishing company going. Frankly, it's in all our interests that they do so... but maybe what we can ask of them is that they devote just a little bit more room to stuff outside the mainstream. And that if this non-mainstream stuff sells, we can ask that the stores should re-order it and that the publishers should keep it in print - and ideally commission some more as well. On a personal level, there are all kinds of non-superhero stories that I'd like to write, but only time will tell if they turn out to be written for comics or some other medium.

BROWN: And just to hammer the final nail into the cooking metaphor, are superhero comics merely fast food ?

HOGAN: Only if you're Matter-Eater Lad.

Adrian Brown is a professional psychiatric nurse at a central London NHS substance misuse service.

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