Teenage Kicks, Comics & Steve Dillon

Black and white art from Preacher, by the late Steve Dillon

Of the four ways of escape that kept me going throughout my teens – poetry, novels, pop music and comics – the comics were the one that it was hardest to justify financially, and the one that led to most disagreements with my father, who objected as much to a perceived lack of intellectual engagement as to the amount they cost. Which made them that much more alluring, to be honest.

The best of the comics I read fuelled my writing as profoundly as the high art. A line in Gilbert Hernandez'Heartbreak Soup triggered the first poem I wrote that suggested to me that it might be worth taking writing more seriously. To answer someone who had been constantly ribbing me for reading comics, I cheekily broke some lines from a passage in one of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing comics into poetic form and claimed them (briefly) as my own. The response? "This is good! How do you know so much about Sacramento? This came from a comic? Why, you...", followed by an affectionate cuff on the arm. 

Still, as I grew older and comics grew more expensive, it became less possible to afford even the best of them. I kept up as best I could when I could afford to (and sometimes when I couldn't) and Steve Dillon's art was one of the things that kept on drawing me back to the pulpier end of the genre, for all that the violent, strange worlds many of his characters inhabited were diametrically opposed to the world I want to inhabit. But that is surely the point of fantasy; to roam in realms that are unexpected, dangerous, strange or inimical, processing and exploring.

It helped that Dillon was a fine illustrative storyteller, who could shift from craziness and violence into tenderness with masterful ease. His black and white work on Warrior and 2000AD in the 80s, where I first discovered it, was full of line and expression - which was sometimes lost when washed in colour. His characters spoke to you, with or without speech bubbles. I didn't always like what they had to say, but I was always interested in the way it was said.I was very sad, then, to hear that he's died at the age of 54, far too young. Another artist lost in a busy year for the disappearance of the odd and interesting.

So here's to Steve Dillon, and to the pulp thrills and canny power of dystopian graphic science fiction and fantasy. Teenage kicks, teenage kicks…