Frank Quitely

Introduction Hey folks and welcome to the another written BGCP creator interview. We are lucky enough to be chatting today with Gordon Rennie. Gordon Rennie is an incredibly talented artist from the Scotland. He has worked in the comic book and videogame industries respectively for the last 30 years. His credits include: Judge Dredd Rogue Trooper Killzone Splatterhouse Aliens vs Predator As well as multiple other cool titles that you can find over on Amazon. Interview BGCP: Hi Gordon, thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Would you mind starting off by telling us a bit about yourself, your educational background and your career? Gordon Rennie: My education? A useless arts degree from a Scottish redbrick university, guaranteed to get you nowhere at the point I got it in the late 80s.I started doing interviews and reviews for the UK comics press – back in the days when that was an actual thing and they paid actual money – which is something that most frustrated writers end up doing. Warren Ellis was starting out at the same time, working for the same people. One of those comics press mags was Speakeasy, which was morphing into the short-lived Blast comic, that was part of that early 90s surge of (equally short-lived) ‘mature’ comics like Crisis and Revolver. I pitched some comic strip ideas to the editor and he bought just about everything I offered him.And that was it.  I was a professional comics writer.  It seemed a lot easier in those days… BGCP: You obviously began your career in the comic industry with Sewer Patrol releasing in 1991. Could you tell us how that first gig came about and what you learned from that early experience? Gordon Rennie: It was the first thing to appear in print, but it wasn’t the first professional thing I wrote. I had already by then written the first chapters of White Trash and Sherlock Holmes & The Curious Case of the Vanishing Villain, both of which would appear in the last issue of Blast and then be picked up by as separate comics in their own right by Tundra. Trust me, they were much better and more memorable stories than Sewer Patrol, which was basically a sort of dumb and disposable Future Shock thing. Sewer Patrol did have one notable thing about it; I didn’t get paid for it. It appeared in the last issue of Toxic, and the spivs in charge of that comic sent me three post-dated cheques for it, all of which bounced, of course. So early on in my career I learned a valuable lesson from it; don’t believe or work for spivs. BGCP: Just a couple of years after that, you managed to score a gig writing for 2000AD with Missionary Man. How did that opportunity come about? Did you apply for that yourself or did 2000AD seek you out? Gordon Rennie: Well, it was the Judge Dredd Megazine, not 2000AD.  I was still blacklisted from 2000AD at that time, as a result of having written too many mean reviews of it in previous years. I sometimes think Megazine editor David Bishop mainly hired me to spite his erstwhile colleagues at 2000AD, all of whom would be gone from there within a few years.I had pitched David a few things, all of which he rejected in his famously blunt style of the time. He liked Missionary Man, though – a sort of Pale Rider/High Plains Drifter apocalyptic western set in the Cursed Earth wasteland of Judge Dredd’s world. My main stroke of luck on it was David diving it to Frank Quitely as his fist mainstream comics work. Those first Missionary Man stories really aren’t very good story-wise, but – much to my chagrin, keep on getting reprinted due to the Quitely artwork. BGCP: You worked on and off with 2000AD for a good number of years following this. How was your experience working with them as a company? Gordon Rennie: Great. They pay regularity and on time – which, trust me, is the main thing after my early experience with the Toxic spivs – and I get to do a lot of hopefully fun and interesting stories in the comic I grew up reading. How we laugh at the time I was in no uncertain terms told I’d never ever work for Tharg. BGCP: Going through your body of work, I notice that you have written for a good number of licenced properties. How does that affect your creative control if at all? Are there certain rules laid out by the company that you have to stick to before you plot out your storyline? Does it vary depending on the property that you are writing for? Gordon Rennie: Have I? Warhammer, of course. Some Doctor Who. What else? Predator and some other Dark Horse stuff.It really does depend on the IP and how much control the holder wants to exert on it. Some just want the licence money and then don’t really care what you do in your silly comic, and some have very definite ideas on what you can and can’t do with their property. Games Workshop are pretty possessive with their Warhammer IPs, but the most ferocious I’ve ever encountered is – probably unsurprisingly – Lucsasfilm. I worked on a Star Wars game and while I never answered to Lucasfilm directly, their comments and directives were very much passed on to me by the games developer and it was clear they looked at everything I was doing on the game.  They seemed to like what I was doing because, rather flatteringly, they told the developer to bring me back to do some more extra dialogue work on the game that the developer had wanted to do in-house. BGCP: Do you have a favourite IP that you have enjoyed working with the most? Gordon Rennie: Judge Dredd, Doctor Who and Star Wars, which were the holy trinity of my growing-up years and which I’ve been lucky enough to all write for.  Trust