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Rob Nott kinda just appeared outta nowhere. Well, not really. For years he's been over in the UK, where no one could find him. Curse the internet for breaking through his cover and exposing his madness to the world!
Seriously, Rob is one of the latest writers at DCFutures. His series, Black Canary (which has recently been bumped up to 'ongoing' status) mixes a very Vertigo-ish feel with the mainstream, similar to DCF hits like HellBlazer and The Suicide Squad... it also happens to be so well-written, we should be paying for it.
We're not, of course.
But we are asking you to check out Black Canary and revel in it. Yes, it's for mature readers... but that's beside the point.
Rob recently sat down for an interview... well, actually, it was done over email. He could have been standing. He may even have had someone else answer for him... but that wouldn't be very fair now, would it? No, it wouldn't. Back to the point, I gave Rob ten simple questions, he returned ten very long and detailed answers, as well as some artwork from an as-of-yet unpublished comic book he's written... indeed, this could have been the door to Vertigo and success. Instead, his setback is fanfiction's coup (however temporary it may be.) Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce... Rob Nott.
HEROES: How long have you been writing - not just fanfic, but in general?
Rob Nott: Well, if you ignore school and stuff like that, I guess I started when I was 18. I used to run various role playing games both face to face and postal. After a while I began to write up narrative reports of the games for my players, and of course the postal side of things required written communication by definition. Gradually I progressed from simply writing ‘this happened and that happened’ and I began to intersperse lots of dialogue which I felt the players would have used had they had the luxury of scripting their lines in advance. I guess that’s why my fiction tends to be very dialogue heavy.
H: What have you written?
RN: I ran my own fanzine in the mid to late eighties, called the Lankhmar Star Daily. It ran for 28 issues plus a few specials. Compared to fanzines these days it was quite a primitive affair, photocopied booklets produced on a typewriter, with artwork stuck down with glue. Still, it was fun and it taught me a lot about writing in general.
Among other things it included a shared world interactive fiction experiment called ‘Hurry on a Sundown’. The basic premise was that sometime in the early 80’s a group of friends at university obtained an experimental drug called Blue Sunshine which put them all in a coma. This was a plot maguffin to give them the abilities (when they recovered) to travel through time. The ability was limited: no one could travel back before their birth date and no one could travel past a certain date in October 1989 (the implication being something bad happens at that point) Everyone who contributed was by default one of the ‘Sundowners’. The idea was to explore the concept of what would you do if you and your closest friends (and not so close friends) could move through time and space? Would you make yourself rich? Would you go to all those concerts you missed out on when you were too young? Would you try to make the world a better place? And what if you all disagreed on what a ‘perfect world’ should look like? We got into some interesting aspects of morality and freedom of choice as everyone’s personal politics came to the fore.
I’ve had a few articles published in various professional games magazines, and I was briefly appointed as a freelance games reviewer for Imagine magazine (TSR’s English equivalent of Dragon magazines), but the first issue to carry my reviews was also the last published.
In 1989/1990 I put together a proposal based on the Sundown concept, which had the working title ‘Blue Sunshine’. It took the civil war aspect of the stories and made it into a mini-series, which I sent to several indie publishers. One of the publishers, Trident, (now only remembered for printing Grant Morrison’s ‘St Swithun’s Day’ and giving Marc Millar his initial break into comics with ‘Saviour’) signed it up. My big break in comics! Solicitations were sent out, but Trident went under as the first issue was due to be printed. I didn’t write anything for quite some time after that. I guess I quit too easily. I still look at those finished pages of the first issue from time to time and wonder what it could have led to.
H: Where are you located?
RN: I’m Cornish born and bred (though I lack the accent), but also lived for three years near Liverpool (important in order to establish my Hellblazer credentials). In 1982 I moved to Bournemouth to study at college. I liked the place and here I am now.
H: Where did your Black Canary concept come from?
RN: I’m obviously a late comer to the DCF world, in that most of the big names had already been snapped up. It was, like, is there any character not taken other than Congo Bill and The Inferior Five?
But I have always liked the Black Canary. Yeah, I grew up with Batman and the Avengers and the JLA, but deep down I’ve always had a preference for some of the more minor characters. Do you remember that early 70’s run of Ant Man in Marvel Feature (?) which ripped off the plot of the Incredible Shrinking Man? Y’see, I do that’s me and minority appeal characters to a ‘T’. Only ever found one issue of it when I was a teenager, but I loved it. If I had been submitting to a Marvel site, I would have probably tried to get hold of either Hawkeye, Black Widow, the Scarlet Witch or Ant Man and the Wasp.
With the Black Canary, I was conscious that I didn’t want to write a very powerful character. The ideas I have don’t really work with heroes like Superman, Green lantern and Wonder Woman. I wanted to write a character that is intrinsically you or me, in a costume.. That’s not to say I can’t write epic conflicts on the JLA level. I just wanted something more low key to begin with.
If I’m being honest here I’ll admit that the Canary first caught my attention when I was a hormonally confused 13-year-old. She was wearing that costume - and I liked it! That was in the days when me and my mates would scrutinise copies of The Savage Sword of Conan and point out all the panels where you could just about see some girl’s tits, if only her gravity defying hair wasn’t in the way (which somehow it always was, even if she was hanging by her feet). Sad, you say? Well, glossy top shelf magazines didn’t seem to be available to adults in tiny Cornish fishing villages in the late 1970’s, let alone to 13-year-old kids. We had to make do with what we could get, and just hope that John Buscema would slip up drawing the hair. Unfortunately Marvel editors were pretty sharp in those days.
It was the inspired Chuck Dixon revamp of the character in the pages of Birds of Prey that reminded me that Dinah was a character I always thought had a lot of potential. It’s a well-written and well-drawn mainstream super hero book, and Dinah does now have the coolest costume in comics today. I’m sure the 13-year-old me would still prefer her original one though.
I have a lifetime love of the super hero genre. Yes, it’s cliched and ridiculous, and absurd, but I do love it. I want Black Canary to be on one level a homage to the super hero genre, and on another level poke a little fun at it simultaneously. I’m not talking about slapstick humour; I’m talking about highlighting some of the natural absurdities that would arise if we really did have a world full of super heroes and villains. I guess I’m looking at something like Grant Morrison’s ‘Zenith’ series, something halfway between the 1980’s Justice League and Alan Moore’s Marvelman series. It’s a difficult line to tread. JLI suffered because it was too ‘bwah-hah-hah’ at times, though in its defence it never had any pretensions to being anything else. And it did have some great gags. I want people to hopefully find some of the dialogue and situations in Black Canary amusing, but hopefully not absurd (leaving aside for the moment the issue of whether it is actually possible to write about super heroes without being, by default, absurd).
The bottom line is, Elenor Haines is an ordinary person, a bit naïve to begin with (though she does eventually toughen up), who finds herself inhabiting a social structure peopled by iconic heroes and villains. How would you cope if you were suddenly thrust into the limelight, to rub shoulders with Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman? It’d scare the living daylights out of me.
H: How long have you been into comics?
RN: I think I was 7 years old when I first started reading American comics. All I’ve got to go on is the cover date on the first two comics I bought, early issues of the Teen Titans and the Phantom Stranger. American comics in the early seventies were often shipped over as ballast, especially to ports like Liverpool, where crate loads of them would turn up every week. As most of the comics were ‘returns’ from the US, you never knew what you would find. There would usually be new comics spanning two or three years of age in any one week. Forget about following a story in sequence, there was none of that. I bought a lot of my collection second hand for the princely sum of 3p each at a dodge second hand shop in Ellesmere Port called Broadway. Unknown to my innocent eyes (I was probably 10 at the time) it sold shed loads of adult magazines in addition to the cardboard boxes of Marvel and DC titles. My Dad told me that years later. I did at the time wonder why there were so many lonely old men in raincoats flicking through the merchandise every week. I don’t think you’d get away with it these days, having half a shop devoted to kids, and the other half catering to the dirty raincoat brigade.
My favourite titles at the time were Batman, JLA, Avengers, Conan (esp the Barry Smith issues), Shield (well, the Steranko ones, I remember being amazed by his covers) and Thor, though to be honest I bought just about everything I could lay my hands on. My pocket money was nothing more than average for the time, but I remember it could always buy me 7 or 8 new American comics every week, or twice that in second hand copies. I doubt that’s the case anymore (though I confess to not knowing what kids get given these days). I even bought a copy of Night Nurse #4, as I wrongly assumed that if it was a Marvel it must be either a super hero or horror titles. ‘This is for girls!’ I raged when I got it home. I felt personally betrayed by Stan Lee. I still have it in a box somewhere. None of my friends were stupid enough to swap anything for it. They wouldn’t even swap it for a Lois Lane comic (everyone had one no one wanted one) which shows how duff Night Nurse must have been.
After college I sort of stopped buying comics for a while until that mid eighties new wave of post modern writers sprang out of the wood work. I remember reading Alan Moore’s Marvel Man and V for Vendetta in Warrior magazine and thinking, "This guy is a real writer". The potential of writing super hero comics in that fashion had always been there, but no one had really tried it before.
The pre-Vertigo ‘suggested for mature readers’ titles locked me back into collecting and reading comics (can you do one without the other?). By then I had foolishly swapped many of my old comics for records, and now I’m gradually buying my old collection back at considerable expense. Anyone out there got cheap copies of Avengers 99 and 100 that they don’t want? I’ll part exchange Night Nurse 4 for them.
H: What influences your writing? (Specifically, what books, movies, writers, music, events...)
RN: A lot of my influences are non-genre. Obviously I draw on a love of comics and a long history of reading them (though I must confess at this point that I never did read Crisis on Infinite Earths or Zero Hour, this may effect my understanding of DC continuity a bit), but outside of comics my tastes are more geared towards what I call ‘contemporary fiction’. At the risk of descending into Nick Hornby top 5 list territory, I’d say my favourite books are: The Magus by John Fowles, American Psycho and Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis, 1984 by George Orwell, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino, 1982 Janine by Alasdair Gray, Faust by Robert Nye, High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, London Fields by Martin Amis and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. I used to read a lot of SF and Fantasy when I was a teenager, but I’ve gone off it these days. I used to devour the more experimental SF (Moorcock, esp his Jerry Cornelius stories, Roger Zelazny, Philip Dick, Harlan Ellison). I still have very fond memories of William Nolan’s book ‘Logan’s Run’.
Films: my favourite film of all time is Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Other films that make my top 10 include Apocalypse Now, Withnail and I, Brazil, Sex Lies and Videotape, Singles, Before Sunrise, Oh Lucky Man, A Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner, The Matrix and The Wicker Man. And I know that’s more than 10.
Music: Well, I’ve got nearly 1400 records and CDs. I like Psychedelia, Punk, Ambient, Trance, Techno, Sixties Motown, Progressive Rock and Indie, preferably all on the same album. If I had to choose a favourite LP it would have to be The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway by Genesis. Don’t ask me for a favourite song though. Today I’d probably say Walk On By by Dionne Warwick, or Song 2 by Blur, but next week it’ll probably be something different. Possibly Say a Little Prayer by Aretha Franklin or Teenage Kicks by the Undertones.
H: What do you do when not writing?
RN: Drink! (laughs) Lots! I spend a lot of time just going out with mates. Um... I’m not an active hobby person. Yeah, I still dabble in role playing games and wargames, but that’s once a month at best. I dunno, hobbies, I don’t really have any. Um, did I mention drinking? Oh yeah, I go down to the gym a couple of times a week, just to counter the effects of drinking really.
