How do you begin to describe Dave Sim, and Cerebus, the comic that he put out 300 monthly issues of? A middling sword and sorcery parody when it started, within a year or so Cerebus started to find its feet and became a hugely accomplished and ambitious tale taking in politics, religion, relationships and gender.

Cerebus is an amazing, frustrating, complex piece of work, sometimes magnificent, other times wildly self-absorbed. For the first 200 issues at least though, it was following a clear course, and its sometimes obscure subsequent waywardness can be forgiven: no one else has tackled something as ambitious as Cerebus in the world of comics, at least in terms of scope, and perhaps they never will.

Sim’s lettering portrays personality beautifully, and after a while he was joined by collaborator Gerhard, whose input ensured that the comic’s backgrounds were as striking as Sim’s rapidly improving character work. And if that weren’t enough, Cerebus became the focal point of the small press revolution, inspiring countless people to self-publish their own comics. Many failed, but those that survived helped redefine what comics were capable of. Bone, Strangers in Paradise, Kane, A Distant Soil, Bacchus: all undeniably influenced by the success of Cerebus and its creator.

I interviewed Sim and Gerhard in 1993, and found them hospitable, intelligent, and fascinating company. This was before Sim’s infamous anti-woman outburst in issue 186 of his comic, and it may be that the interview would have taken a different tack had it been published before we met. That said, it’s arguable that his views have been stereotyped by people eager to shout misogyny but silent when it comes to putting them in the context of Sim’s historic mental health problems (I say this based on experience of working with people with mental health issues). It’s also the case that his beliefs didn’t get in the way of Sim creating some of the most compelling and three-dimensional female characters to be found on the comics page.

One issue of particular concern was the balance of left and right brain, of the linear and non-linear, in creating a project as vast as Cerebus. I asked what the blend of planning and spontaneity was in the comic:

Sim It’s a nice mix. As Neil Gaiman put it, it’s as if you’re building a bridge, but you’re not building a bridge sequentially, the way you have to do it in the physical world. The moment you start building it on this side, it starts growing from the other side. And you just start trying to predict where all the curlicues and whatnot are going to be, and all of a sudden one of them shows up, and you’ve got a chunk of the bridge about 30 feet out in mid-air that’s about 15 feet higher than you thought it was supposed to be.

AR And you don’t know how the hell it’s going to work.

Sim You don’t let that trouble you. You just start building the rest of it, and eventually some dramatic curve comes in and you go ‘Oh, alright, it’s going to rise up in some way and hook up with this side. And I can see now looking at all this stuff that’s getting built on the other side in my unconscious mind that yeah, this could be quite attractive when it’s done. You know, it could be quite symmetrical.’

Which is as good an answer as you’re likely to get, and accords with my own experience of planning and writing scripts. However much you plan them – and you need to if you’re going to feasibly bring in a workable story within however many pages you’re working to – there are and always will be elements that find a place in the script without you having intended them to be there. And quite often they’re the ones that make the whole thing shine. But that magic doesn’t happen without planning: you have to prepare the ground carefully before something unexpected will grow from it, fly over it, or tapdance in the centre of it all.

If you’d like a copy of the interview I did with Sim and Gerhard, please get in touch: it runs to 20 pages and hasn’t been published. And keep an eye out for Judenhass, Sim’s forthcoming solo story about the Jewish Holocaust, which advance reports are saying is very good indeed: see www.judenhass.com. There’s also Glamourpuss, just starting, an ongoing series that’s a curious hybrid of homage to womens’ fashion and photorealistic cartooning: www.glamourpusscomic.com.

Steve Whitaker is dead, and none of you know who I’m talking about.  Which is a shame.  Steve was an immensely talented artist, and a genuinely lovely man.  I came across him at the London Cartoon Centre in the late 1980s, his lanky frame and mop of hair a good example of the theory that comic artists tend to look as if they’ve drawn themselves. 

Steve was clearly very intelligent, at least in the Stephen Fry sense of that word: someone who has drunk widely from every source that culture has to offer, from knowledge of Greek myth to obscure jazz musicians.  And in other senses his intelligence was limited: a harsh way to put things, but I don’t know how else to account for his inability to translate his undeniable gifts into a reliable way of supporting himself.  But I’m very much a pragmatist, or at any rate have something of an entrepreneurial streak, and Steve danced to the beat of more elfin drums, like those you can imagine his beautifully depicted characters playing.  Steve’s characters came complete with a sense of art history being paraded in front of you effortlessly, a touch of Art Deco here, of classical painters I don’t even know the names of there, and it’s that evident quality that made his work both distinctive and ill-suited to the demands of a market that primarily traffics in cheesecake illustration.

Just 52 when he died unexpectedly the other day, Steve’s death is the second from the world of the Cartoon Centre.  The other was cartoonist and musician Andy Roberts, who died maybe a couple of years ago.  Andy was someone else who looked like one of his own drawings, and opened my eyes to words, pictures and sounds that made my life that bit richer.  Andy was the punk to Steve’s beatnik, and it was a pleasure to spend time in the company of either – and even better when both were in full swing, swapping stories and dreaming out loud. 

I was less sure of myself at this point, and a bit embarrassed about my tastes in comparison to theirs, but they both had time for me.  And that led to me editing and publishing an anthology comic, Discordia, one review of which captured what I and the Cartoon Centre were about when it said words to the effect that the comic was proof of the Centre succeeding in a way that nobody could have anticipated.  Looking back, that remark makes a lot of sense to me: Discordia was a comic that favoured narrative over style, and had no special regard for genre, and that describes the evolution of my writing subsequent to the Cartoon Centre pretty well.

Discordia was named after the Roman Goddess of Chaos, known to the Greeks as Eris, and Steve and Andy’s deaths are further confirmation that death is part of her beat as much as anything else.  She continues to crop up for me in one form or another, and I’ll end this piece with something that started in one place – about NLP trainer Michael Breen and performance poet Murray Lachlan Young’s excellent Captivating Communication course, created using the methods we learned that weekend – and becomes something like a prayer.  At any rate, the kind of prayer that even Andy and Steve would be happy to be said in their names.

DIVINING WITH M&M

We flirted with muses and courted attention
Abandoned excuses and even intention
Found ways of speaking that aided retention
All in pursuit of verbal invention

Make an impact — learn to rupture
Liven up the surface structure
Alpha-bet your life it’s fun
Making meanings of the pun
That punctures, from above
Why punctu-hate when you can punctu-love?

Abandon the planned and
Glad-hand the random
Conscious, unconscious, steering in tandem

The day-to-deity here is Eris
Goddess of Chaos, succulent mistress
Benevolent minx, Hex in the City
Whoop-de-doo wyrdplay, pearls from the gritty

I’ve had a lucky relationship with some of my writing mentors. At the age of 8 or so, I saw a play that captivated me, if only because one of the characters had a swordstick. I remembered it as being a version of Ice Station Zebra, but it wasn’t: it merely shared a genre (thriller) and location (one of the poles) with that film. How did I find this out? Through attending scriptwriting workshops with Jon Wood some twenty years later, who turned out to be the man who’d written that play. I learned a lot from Jon, and he recognised that I was both serious about writing and had potential to succeed if I kept at it.

Another big early influence was Steve Gerber. It was his comics that made me realise comics could be used to tell all kinds of stories. While remaining captivated by the adventures of The Avengers, or Captain America and Falcon, I found in Steve Gerber’s comics an altogether different world, one that both more closely resembled the one I lived in, and had differences more intriguing than the presence of alien warriors and supervillains.

Nowhere was this more true than in the pages of Howard the Duck, which Gerber created for Marvel in the seventies and was beautifully illustrated by Gene Colan, with other strong artists on the series including Frank Brunner. ‘Trapped in a world he never made’ was the comic’s strapline, and I feel it served equally well as a summation of Gerber’s stance: here was a writer who was fascinated, bewildered, perplexed and angry about the world he lived in, and whose work captured those and other feelings convincingly.

I think of Steve Gerber as being Marvel’s own Woody Allen: a neurotic satirist with ideas too big for the medium he was working in. And like Allen, many people will tell you his best work was his early funny stuff. Howard the Duck is as much a commentary on the seventies as the songs of Steely Dan, with stories poking fun at kung fu, Moonies, election campaigns, and changing gender dynamics. All this through the ongoing adventures of a duck wearing trousers – apparently Disney threatened legal action if Marvel stepped onto their territory by having a bare-assed mallard – and his companion Beverley.

Gerber wrote plenty of other comics, and injected even mainstream superhero titles with a touch of the bizarre, but his heart was clearly there for all to see in Howard the Duck. Some of his other work carried on in the same vein, notably Nevada, the story of a showgirl and her ostrich. And more recently he did a great job on Hard Time, about a teenager imprisoned for his participation in a school shooting.

I interviewed Steve Gerber a few years back – anyone wanting a copy of the piece please email me and I’ll be happy to send it to you. His maverick intelligence was apparent, and he was sharp as he described his feelings about the moribund state of the contemporary comics scene, his experience working in television, and more.

More than anything, Gerber blazed a trail for the wave of writers who read him when they were younger and were influenced by his experimentation, his social conscience, his emotional honesty. Without Steve Gerber, would there have been an Alan Moore, a Neil Gaiman, a Grant Morrison? They’re just three of the writers who’ve admitted their debt to Gerber’s work – and pioneering stance on creators’ rights. And somewhere inside me, too, there’s a teenager who still relishes the all-text issue of Howard the Duck, when Gerber was late with the script and instead wrote a series of essays and short fictions addressed directly to the reader, and which captures a lot of what it’s like to be a writer.

If there’s anything good to come out of this – Steve died yesterday after succumbing to pneumonia while awaiting a lung transplant – it’s that at last he’ll now know the answer to a question that runs through his work. Seemingly agnostic in outlook, Gerber was still fascinated by the idea of the soul, and in his stories people lost track of theirs quite easily, as their heads are transplanted onto other bodies, or they experience cosmic revelations. The satirist in him couldn’t resist digging at New Age beliefs, but there was too a genuine curiosity about matters of the spirit in his work, and I hope he’s found peace, wherever whatever remains of him is now.

A few days ago I mentioned the Shadowline/Image ‘create a superheroine’ contest. Which I didn’t win. Hey ho. So, here are my three entries for your entertainment. Your thoughts are very welcome. I may yet do something with these concepts another day, should the world of comics open up to me…

TROUBLE MAGNET

There is zero way that I can be pregnant. The last time I even saw a naked man was when I caught Bishop Simian trying to pass himself off as a howler monkey at the city zoo. Before that, I don’t like to think. Well, OK. That party the Action Faction had for their new HQ? I did lock tongues with some random mutant, but I swear there was spandex covering everything that matters. Dad says I shouldn’t have called myself Trouble Magnet, but if it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have inherited the powers and everything — if you can call making being really unlucky work for you a ‘power’ — and as far as I’m concerned that includes the name. And I so don’t have the time for dealing with a foetus. Not when The Fabulist is threatening to mesmerise all of Nixburgh into voting him Mayor on a ‘Repeal the law of averages’ ticket. But hey, I’m a tryer. The Chronicle called me feisty the other week. Even if they did print a picture of that bitch Sheila-Na-Gig.

ZOMBINA

Being undead, you get to find out who your friends really are. Some of them haven’t come near me since I came out, others have been real supportive. Like Wayne, who’s been so compassionate I could throttle him, but hasn’t once touched me since it happened. Which is one more reason for me to get revenge on Commander Skull, once I figure out how. Having the powers of a corpse and an appetite for flesh doesn’t give me much latitude when it comes to dealing with a full-blown supervillain. But I’m pissed, I’ve got contacts on the undead scene, and I know just where the bonehead bastard will be tomorrow night, which might just give me the edge I need to take him down. I’ve even got a name, Zombina, and a costume, to help me feel I’m up to it. Wish me luck, huh?

INAMORATA

A friend told me once that ‘your greatest strength is your greatest weakness’. Then he tried to kiss me. Which was maybe the fifth time that day someone had tried to taste my tongue. ‘Inamorata: to know her is to love her’ is the line the papers tend to run when I crop up. Which I do quite a bit because, well, they love me just like everyone else. Making the business of finding someone I might actually want to love a bit of a drag. And now Canis Rex is on the scene, I have icky proof that I don’t just appeal to humans. He’s threatening to conquer the planet if I don’t consent to be his queen. And if I do marry him, he wants to give me the planet as a gift anyway. Which gives you some idea of the predicament I’m in.

My first contact with superheroes was when Batman guested in an episode of Scooby Doo way back when. I was fascinated by this cowled and ominous figure, like no fictional character I’d seen before, and Batman entered my dreams that night.

Next, I found Batman in a box of American comics that one of my grandmothers had stashed away from when my uncles were younger. I could make little sense of what I read – no surprise, given that it was the team-up of two groups of superheroes from parallel worlds who for that reason each had a near-double in the story – but I was captivated by everything about the comics. I learned more about Batman, who didn’t just hang out with the Scooby Doo characters but also associated with other costumed good guys. Sometimes he’d be in Gotham City, sometimes in space, but wherever he was adventure would surely follow, and he’d tackle it using his wits and his fists and whatever gizmos he had to hand.

As it turned out, I became more of a Marvel Comics fan, perhaps because in Hulk, Spider-Man, and X-Men their characters had more messy stuff about alienation and growing up different that teenagers can easily latch onto. DC’s characters were…purer somehow. Which is maybe why an icon like Batman is so malleable, equally at home tackling an alien invasion at Superman’s side, and tracking drugs kingpins in shady alleys. And I was happy to read either kind of story. It was only after I’d read a fair few of them that I started to filter for quality, and recognise what that meant. And when I’d worked that out, I was able to seek it for myself, dropping titles I’d read uncritically and heading towards those written and drawn by creators I respected.

Walt Simonson’s run on Thor. Claremont and Byrne’s X-Men. Howard Chaykin’s seminal American Flagg. The unfinished-looking but still compelling Thriller (Robert Loren Fleming and Trevor Von Eden). And finally, after the weird-looking Ronin, which was too much for me at the time, Batman got the creator he deserved in Frank Miller. The Dark Knight Returns is a stunning piece of work, sprawling and ambitious and knowingly mythic, and I’ve read it many times over the years. But in many ways I prefer Miller’s other tale of the Caped Crusader, which he wrote but didn’t draw. Batman: Year One has a narrower scope than TDKR, and David Mazzucchelli’s minimal artwork hasn’t got the grandeur of Miller’s, but it’s a more disciplined and affecting story. It’s like the difference between Apocalypse Now and The Conversation: both Coppola in fine form, but one operatic in scale and the other intimate.

My first training in scriptwriting was at the London Cartoon Centre, and at that point in my life I’d have done anything to write a comic. Thankfully that didn’t happen – I had raw talent then, but nothing like the craft and tenacity required to make a career out of it, so it’s for the best that my career went in other directions. But I still love comics, and have been thinking about them more of late given the impetus of a competition to devise a superheroine for Shadowline and Image Comics, with the incentive of a guaranteed three-issue series co-owned with the artist.

How do you go about devising a superheroine then? For one thing, I wanted a character who was distinctly female, and not merely a hero with breasts. Which I did, but then found that a couple of the concepts I had were good on paper, but not ones I’d be wise to write…both were similar enough in some respects to Alan Moore’s Promethea that I chose not to proceed: you don’t win any favours by playing on the home ground of the medium’s finest writer in your first outing. So instead I went for another couple of heroines with a lighter feel to them, meaning I’ve come up with three pitches that I know would be a joy to write. Much as I’d like to tell you more, I can’t until the competition results are announced. Sorry.

I was 12 when I came across 2000AD, reading the fourth issue on holiday. Until then, comics had meant British humour titles when I was younger, which I enjoyed but didn’t feel compelled to buy every issue of. And war comics never quite hit the spot for me. 2000AD though…this was clearly a title custom-designed with me in mind. I’d already latched onto science fiction as a genre I relished, and here was a comic promising tales of futuristic and otherworldly adventure on a weekly basis, and I was hooked.

Initially it wasn’t any particular story that had impact: the comic really did deliver on its promise of thrill power, and I rattled through every issue jolted by the concepts and images on pretty much every page. Time travellers going back to the era of the dinosaurs to hunt them for their meat. Brilliantly realised futuristic cities with motorbike-riding Judges dispensing justice. Truck driver Bill Savage tackling the dastardly Volgs with his trusty shotgun. You didn’t get that range of ideas and action anywhere else that I ever heard of. Let alone with the occasional free gift on the cover.

Over time, 2000AD spawned rival titles, and as they wavered in the market, before dipping and disappearing, they were absorbed into 2000AD. My favourite was Starlord, which seemed to me to have a more sophisticated approach to art, probably meaning they hired European artists. If you were lucky, your favourite strip from the absorbed comic would continue running in 2000AD. In my case, that was Strontium Dog, a bounty hunter drawn by Carlos Ezquerra, who had a wonderful way with faces and footwear in particular.

Ezquerra was also the artist on another favourite, The Stainless Steel Rat, which I’d loved in the form of Harry Harrison’s novels, and worked well as a comic too. By this time I was fairly aware of who my favourite artists were (which definitely didn’t include Belardinelli, whose aliens were actually pretty good but who had never apparently seen a human), but didn’t have much sense of the writers. I knew which characters I liked, without making the association to the writers who charted their adventures.

It actually took an American comic, Steve Gerber’s mordant satire Howard the Duck, for me to appreciate the role of the writer in comics. His style was unlike anyone else’s I was reading in comics, and I became fascinated by it. By that time I was reading pretty much anything I could find in comic form, as long as it was 2000AD or American. I also had an appreciation for the more underground delights of Hunt Emerson, thanks to Large Cow Comix and other small press work that he was putting together at the place my father was then working, and which he brought home rightly suspecting I’d appreciate them.

Gerber has been namechecked by some of my favourite British comics writers as an influence on their own work, some of which started to appear in 2000AD. Alan Moore’s Future Shocks – short stories with a twist ending – were a cut above most other peoples’ attempts, and he went on to develop the fascinating and unfinished Ballad of Halo Jones, which begins as a tale of a woman shopping in a brilliantly realised future world depicted by the wonderful Ian Gibson, and unfolds into a saga of space war.

Fingers crossed, I’ll find my own space in 2000AD one day. Yesterday, I was at an event organised by Leicester City Library featuring 2000AD editor Matt Smith, former Marvel UK editor and now mobile phone content provider John Freeman, and small press publisher Jay Eales. And I got to pass on a pack containing two Future Shock proposals and two series proposals to Matt, which I very much hope he likes. If he bites, then believe me I’ll be letting youdothatvoodoo’s particular brand of thrillseekers know about it.

Grant Morrison is a name you’re unlikely to know unless you read comics. That’s hopefully going to change in the nearish future with the release of We3, a film he scripted based on his own comics story about animals that are experimented on to become weapons for the military. He’s a fascinating writer, able to concoct the most outrageous stories, that inevitably have a real spark of humanity at their heart, and I’ve been rereading him of late in an effort to understand how to write mythic stories in the modern age.

The recently released collected edition of JLA: Ultramarine Corps serves to demonstrate Morrison’s approach: he thinks on an epic scale, with whopping great seven-league beats to tell enormous stories about larger than life heroes. And, it’s done with a real sense of joy and humour.

The Ultramarine Corps of the title were invented by Morrison some years ago when he was the regular writer on JLA (which stands for Justice League of America, fact fans). They’re a group of supersoldiers in essence, experimented on by a military madman. At the start of the story they’re taking on Gorilla Grodd and his legion of super-apes, and they reckon they’re winning. But Grodd is a tough cookie, and he’s allied with another baddie, the sinister Neh-Buh-Loh, who tells us “My original country is in the cold region of the Vampire Sun. I was born of the Eternal Fogs, there in Last Country…I prepare the way for my Queen of Terror.” This injection of what sounds like legend injected into the hyperreal superhero world is typical of Morrison, who stripmines myth and legend for its potential in telling new stories.

And let’s not overlook the myth of the superhero. In this tale, we’re presented with a quantum keyboard that can rewrite reality. Robot duplicates of Superman and Wonder Woman and other JLA members to activate when the real ones are otherwise engaged in a parallel dimension, in this case the infant universe of Qwewq. Even Aquaman, so often a lame character in the hands of other writers, grows in stature under Morrison’s guidance, “with muscles that permit him to swim Niagara Falls upstream.”

Batman’s role in all of this is particularly interesting, Morrison writing him as the brains of the outfit, with a plan for every occasion. But this is the same Batman known in other comics for patrolling the streets of Gotham City. Are they really one and the same? Morrison has an explanation at hand, as Batman reveals a cupboard full of futuristic gadgets to his faithful butler: “I’m opening the sci-fi closet, Alfred. Don’t tell my friends in the GCPD about this…did my flying saucer arrive from the factory?”

Gorilla Grodd has managed to triumph over and control the minds of the Ultramarine Corps thanks to his alliance with Neh-Buh-Loh. The JLA arrive just in time to prevent Batman being eaten by the fascist gorilla, and then proceed to give a beatdown to everyone else involved.

When the dust is settled, there’s the question of how to deal with the Ultramarine Corps, whose triggerhappy ways have led to a lot of problems. It’s left to Superman to explain: “These ‘no-nonsense’ solutions of yours just don’t hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time travel.” Their punishment? The Ultramarine Corps are banished to the infant universe of Qwewq, which has evolved without superheroes to protect and guide it. They get the chance to redeem themselves, and Earth is rid of a bunch of characters designed to lampoon the violent excesses that many contemporary comics creators are driven to in the absence of an imagination as exotic and generous as Grant Morrison’s.

So, where next, Wes Anderson?

The Darjeeling Limited is a pleasant enough diversion, though not from Anderson’s concerns. Once again – see Royal Tennenbaums — he tells us a story about a dysfunctional and emotionally constipated well-to-do family, in this case three brothers led by Owen Wilson on a self-conscious spiritual quest by train through India in the hope of the sort of catharsis that you just know Anderson is going to pull away from you before feeling kicks in, after offering just a glimpse of it.

Last time round, in The Life Aquatic, I really thought Anderson had started to develop a new shtick, but it looks like once again I was glamoured by the whimsy and the ever-ravishing visual treats. The Darjeeling Limited is very linear, as you’d expect a train journey to be, and there are certainly some interesting stops along the way as the brothers fail to get to grips with each other or the culture they’re travelling through.

There’s a hint of something different when the brothers are exited from the train and get involved in the lives of some villagers after saving the lives of two out of three young boys from drowning, but pretty soon it’s back to business as usual for the siblings. Which, I suppose, is Anderson’s point. This is emphasised by the fact that one of the brothers is a writer who writes obviously autobiographical stories, and the ominous dialogue line ‘to be continued’: like the characters, Anderson has taken himself to India, and found only himself. Which is no surprise, as fans of Buckaroo Banzai will be aware: ‘Wherever you go, you’re always there’.

How then, does one account for the groove that Wes Anderson finds himself in, compared to the myriad of story types that someone like filmmaker Michael Winterbottom or comics writer Alan Moore gets involved with? In the case of the latter, he’s very conscious of his writing being part of a whole imaginative realm he calls Ideaspace, which all stories belong to, and which in Moore’s case he travels in freely to produce graphic fictions as varied as Top 10, Promethea, Swamp Thing and From Hell.

You may or may not believe in Ideaspace to the degree that Moore does, but I’d argue that his belief in it provides him with an endlessly rich source of potential material to work with. And that’s the important thing. Wes Anderson’s work clearly delineates a narrow range of concerns with a small palette of stylistic tics, both of which, if The Darjeeling Limited is anything to go by, he’s in danger of exhausting. He’s self-aware enough to know he’s in a box, but – at the moment at least – he can’t seem to get out of it. Moore, by comparison, is immersed in the wider world of story, and of the parameters which different genres and story types place on stories he’s interested in telling. That knowledge gives him the freedom to play with abandon in what seems to be the most limited of toyboxes, such as superhero comics.

Take a look at WildC.A.T.S, a collected edition of which is available. Not one of Alan Moore’s finest hours: it’s work for hire, a job he was given by publishers Wildstorm in the nineties and which he took on knowing he had the craft skills to accomplish thoroughly and with finesse. And that’s exactly what he does. Only, he does more than that. His awareness of the rules governing writing extends to his willingness to play with them, something that Wes Anderson and many other writers and film makers, could never do.

As an example, there’s a riff in WildC.A.T.S about a hotel on an alien planet with a low-level probability field: “You’re staying in Coincidence Mansion. Go between the fountains, straight across the plaza. If two of you start humming the same tune or speaking the same sentence, then you’ve found it. Have a pleasant stay.” It’s a neat background detail, the kind of thing Douglas Adams would come up with. But, of course, as writers we know it’s important not to use mere coincidence to move the plot forward. Only, Alan Moore does exactly that, using the notion of the coincidence field to generate a solution to the problem of a dying android his team mates can’t help: one of the other guests has been trained to repair just such a model of android. It breaks every rule in the writing handbook to use this device, and that’s precisely why – on this occasion — it actually works and why Alan Moore is celebrated as a shaman genius writing century and genre spanning narratives and why I get hired to write plays to train prison officers and brochures to promote kitchens sold by silver foxes who will seduce your wife with the promise of the kitchen of her dreams by painting a watercolour of it in the showroom. Harrumph.

So, how do you get out of the Wes Anderson rut and head for weirdbeard Moorish genius? For one thing, by becoming aware of the presuppositions going into your work, even before you’ve put a word on the page. For another, by learning to recognise your default settings, and opting to do something different. The more familiar to you the word is that you put after the ones you’ve already written, the less chance there is of surprising yourself – and your audience. Not that audiences want to be surprised every time, as the popularity of James Bond films bears out, but without something new in the mix, you’re not going to be pulling them in on a regular basis.