The new Spider-man/Doctor Strange series Fever is your first work for Marvel Comics. How did it come about?

BMc: I created the final issue of Solo for DC Comics some years ago and it re-introduced me to the comics’ scene, as I hadn’t been active in comics for about 15 years. I suppose Solo 12 was a pretty bizarre calling-card, but nonetheless, Steve Wacker, an editor at Marvel, made the call…

I always wanted to write and draw a new Dr. Strange series. He said that if it featured Spider-Man, we could probably get a green light from Marvel without too much sweat.

There is a lovely Spider-man Annual story from 1965 that featured both characters drawn by Ditko. There’s a slight ‘throwaway’ feel to the story from Stan Lee, but artistically, it’s Steve Ditko on top form. It opens with what is probably, the single best drawing of Spider-Man ever made by Ditko. Before I got into drawing Fever, I did a ‘digital remix’ of that picture to warm up and to try getting my head tuned further into psychedelic ‘Ditko-mind’. I think it’s best to create from as close to the original source as possible!

What was your approach to the characters?

BMc: I see Spider-Man as a brash, intelligent teenager, over-compensating for his geeky Peter Parker alter-ego with wisecracks and a fearless bravura. But there is also a deep psychological trauma buried inside him: He is responsible for the death of his foster-father because of his self-centred indifference to others. He ignores an armed thief who is running by, as he sees no personal advantage in intervening. I examine the psychological consequences of his moral inaction.

Dr. Strange on the other hand, I portray as an older, more cerebral, ‘Sherlock Holmes’ type of character. He’s an urban sorcerer, a 1960’s update of the classic comic strip, Mandrake. I like how Steve Ditko set Dr. Strange in Greenwich Village – which, in the early sixties was a byword for “bohemian”. Ditko even situated Dr.Strange in a grand gothic house, right on Bleeker Street. I assume Steve Ditko as a younger man in the early 60’s, must have wandered about these vibrant streets himself. I’d love to talk to him about all that period of his life.

One of the main criticisms of the Dr. Strange character is that there are no defined boundaries to his magickal powers. So I make it clear in a few sequences that he is out of his depth when up against the dark Harrah-Harrah magick deployed by the Arachnix, a tribe of evil spider-demons. He doesn’t understand how the insect-magick they use works. He has to use his wits as much as another spell.

The other thing I like to do is repeatedly refer to other people we never meet. I think it adds another current to the surrealism that we’re reading.

Also, I created a few new characters for the book, just to add something personal to the Dr. Strange pantheon. I know Marvel will own them forever, but I don’t mind. I’ve got thousands of unused characters lolling about! There just wasn’t enough room to feature the classic cast, like the sorcerer Dormammu, the beautiful Clea and the meta-being, Eternity. But if Fever does alright, I have a good idea for a sequel involving them all.

There’s a strong occult tone to the Fever story. Are you another comics ‘magician’?

BMc: Nah, I think I’m more like the non-musician Brian Eno. I’m a non-magician. When I was younger, I had a big interest in the ‘black magic’ books in my local library’s occult section and those wonderful Lobsang Rampa paperbacks that were in every newsagent at the time. I remember reading the sublimely named Sylvan Muldoon on techniques for Astral Travel.

There are great story ideas buried amongst all that stuff: From crop glyphs to ancient Egyptian magick, cosmic stargates, MKULTRA, lucid dreaming, wiccan, spells, esoteric Christianity, freemasonry, celtic and megalithic tombs and circles. Australian Aborigine sorcery.

When I began writing and drawing Dr. Strange, I looked at those occult books again and because Dr. Strange is a seasoned magician, I guessed he would have an interest in other magi, like Aleister Crowley or Austin Osman Spare, especially their art and writings. The British magickal tradition had been a very strong esoteric thread in the last century and I thought it was about time it was properly connected to Dr. Strange’s mythology, albeit in disguise.

How did you find writing and drawing the whole thing yourself?

BMc: It’s one of the best artistic experiences ever. When you write and draw it yourself, you can keep changing or finessing right up to the last moment. You can radically alter what you’ve written or drawn. You can spontaneously do what the moment dictates. It’s exciting and I really like it, but it’s a very intense way of working. Finding the story and making sure it doesn’t follow obvious routes was the challenge. All writers know about that glorious moment when the characters start to ‘talk back’ to you. That’s the point when you absolutely know what they would or wouldn’t say or do.

I’ve never been an artist who enjoys being ‘directed’ too much by a writer. It can stifle me, as I’m not really an illustrator, I’m a writer and a fine artist at heart. My previous work with Pete Milligan in the 80’s was a true collaboration, which now I see was a very unique way of working.

I know from doing both writing and drawing that the art is the really hard part. It takes me about ten seconds to write a picture description like; “We see three hundred blue dwarfs running down a crowded Fifth Avenue in the rush hour. Shoppers panic, taxis swerve, cops draw pistols.” But it would take me about three months to draw it.

What are you enjoying in comics, or in any other medium, currently?

BMc: In mainstream comics, anything drawn by Frank Quitely, I will buy. To me, he’s one of the most interesting artists working in comics these days. WE3 was fluffily excellent, All Star Superman was a Sexy Curt Swansong and his recent Batman three-parter was really rather nifty. I like that chap drawing Amazing Spider-Man, Marcos Martin. And I’ve been looking at Joe Kubert again too. He’s really ‘in the zone’ all the time -- he’s reached a kind of zen perfection in his brush art, which to me, is exceptionally beautiful.

Mike Mignola is always great and I enjoy him drawing Hellboy. I like Jason Pearson’s art as well. Scalped is a strong comic too, well written. And Tomer Hanuka’s art is so good it makes me want to give up. There’s a lot of people, doing a lot of great work out there.

Re-reading the OMAC reprints, I can see that Jack Kirby’s later work, which looked so weird and simplistic in the mid-seventies, now looks better and better as each year passes. He was great all his life, right up to the end. What an incredible force of genius. I like how DC is printing these Kirby book collections. Nice, subtle inks and decent ’newsprint’ type paper. I wish Marvel would use better inks and paper for their editions. I would love to edit a book of the best of those Marvel pre-superhero Lee and Ditko short stories, scanned off the original pages. They are sublimely brilliant.

I’ve also rediscovered Lou Fine, especially The Flame, done under the pen name of Basil Berold. I like those period 1940’s panel layouts and the elegant linework.

I’ve been looking at more ‘superhero’ material over the last few years, mainly because I was drawing a Marvel comic for the first time and wanted to recapture the flavour of the classic Marvel comics I read as a boy. That’s why Fever was written with a ’younger’ PG tone to it. It’s aimed at an intelligent, 14 year old reader.

I’m glad there’s a new Shaky Kane comic coming out soon. That’ll cheer me up.

I like the work of Tobias Tak. I think he’s a genius. He creates genuinely strange comics, with a great set of unique characters, like Klazeena from Upside Down Comics. That new Swedish Troll King comic from Top Shelf looks nice too. I like looking at some of the so-called ‘pop-surrealist’ artists in magazines like Hi-Fructose: Artists such as Ray Ceasar, Ron English, Jim Woodring and Todd Schorr.

I recently bumped into my old pal Brett Ewins, who created Deadline Magazine. He’s still producing nice paintings and comic strips

Steve Cook, who worked on the coloring and digital FX for Fever with me, produces those famous Alternity Chronographs that play around with time and place in a sepia sci-fi ambience.

So what about movies, TV?

BMc: Seeing Avatar was quite an emotional experience for me. About 18 years ago, I created the visuals for the world’s first long-form cgi animation, for the TV series Reboot, which predated Toy Story and Shrek. It was a very pioneering show at the time, when personal computers weren’t as common as they are now. Bob, the hero in Reboot, was blue-skinned and chrome-haired and was the first hip, iconic digital character of the computer age. Seeing how far things have progressed in cgi over this short period has been pretty amazing, culminating in a new blue-skinned hero in Avatar.

I am over here in Hollywood for a little while, doing the rounds of the studios and pitching new animation projects. I had an interesting discussion at Disney recently about Dr. Strange, who in my view, should be developed into an ‘Avatar’-style animated Marvel feature (seeing as Disney/PIxar own Marvel now). I think that’s the best way to handle those surreal Ditko dimensions and weird characters like Dormammu and Eternity. That’s an animated project I’d certainly want to get involved in. Del Toro or Tim Burton directing a mo-capped cgi Johnny Depp as Dr. Strange would be fun. I think everyone would fall in love with a sexy cgi Clea. And who could resist actor Sean Penn playing a Mindless One? If playing a ‘retard’ is a sure way to an Oscar nomination, then portraying a Mindless One must surely land a Nobel Prize.

I also had some talks about Paradax! a few weeks ago, to see if a risque cable animated TV series might be possible. For those who don’t know, Paradax! is one of the great superheroes of British comics: He’s the missing link between Alan Moore’s Marvelman and Grant Morrison’s Zenith. Paradax! is the original media-savvy super-brat. The strip asked what it would really be like if there really was a superhero in the real world -- when that was almost an original idea, way back in the early 1980’s! I think that Kick-Ass is probably that kind of hero today, for post-Tarantino, YouTube geekdom.

On television, I thought The Wire was classic and more recently I enjoy Mad Men. Some Doctor Who episodes have been good as well. I don’t watch much mainstream TV, though. I’m more of a podcast man.

In the UK, we are legally compelled to pay a fee to fund the BBC if we own a television, otherwise it’s endless fines or go to jail! Personally, I think the British Brainwashing Corporation ought to be a voluntary subscription channel, along the lines of HBO is in the USA.

What’s coming up for you next? Isn’t there a Mad Max 4 movie in the works?

BMc: Yes, it’s back in production. I co-wrote a screenplay with George Miller, the director of the original trilogy, quite a while ago. I created and designed a lot of the tribes and new vehicles. I really enjoyed working on it, as I’m a big Mad Max fan and really understand that world. But I don’t know how much of my script or design is still there, I’ve had no involvement in Fury Road for ages. As it’s no longer Mel Gibson as Max, there’ll have to be some major changes for sure. But I’m looking forward to seeing the finished film, to see how it all comes together with Tom Hardy as Max…

You know, I remember what an awesome film Road Warrior was -- it blew everyone away when it first came out in the early 80’s. Above everything else, that was my inspiration while working on Fury Road.

Movie people generally love comic creators, because we can write the story and then visualise it all as we go along.

How do you find the comics industry these days?

BMc: Let’s face it: comic books are a dying medium. Most kids would rather play video games than pick up a comic…and many of them have no idea how to even read one! But for teenagers and beyond, the re-branding of comics into graphic novels has helped the industry enormously: Karen Berger has steered Vertigo into being a formidable publishing force, with its own distinct identity. Fantagraphics is a very good imprint.

But there are downsides to the gentrification of what was once a ‘cultural ghetto’ artform: In the UK, librarians increasingly influence what is likely to be published, because whether or not the libraries will likely take your book is a big factor in getting your stuff into print. My advice to aspiring graphic novelists is to put plenty of references to “literature” in there… Make sure you drop in a bit of Shakespeare, they like that.

The problem with the “graphic novel” marketing concept, is that it assumes comics are like novels, that they are an outpost of ‘literature’. Personally, I look at comics as much as I read them: I can’t read a comic with crappy art.

A graphic novel is also a good way of getting Hollywood to pay attention. So at least there are big bucks to be made in the medium now. Creators don’t have to put up with the exploitation of the past. My tip to new creators is: Be talented, work hard -- get yourself a lawyer!

I’m not sure what I think about “motion comics”…It’s not quite there, is it? They have that stilted animation look. But give it five years and who knows how it will have progressed.

Web-comics aren’t quite working for me either. Although we all know the future has got to be digital, it hasn’t been perfected online yet. I spend more time looking at a screen than I do a page these days, so it’s a creative development that interests me hugely. For I aspire to be the “Shamandy Warhol of comics”.

None of your earlier work is in print: any chance of ‘Skin’ or ‘Rogan Gosh’ getting reprinted?

BMc: As I said elsewhere, I think that me and Pete Milligan will have to die first. Then somebody can collect that slim and sexy body of work into one volume. I’d love to revisit those old characters one day, especially Captain Cracking and Rudcliff and Williams…and dear old Mirkin The Mystic too. I’d like to put them all into one great big, ludicrous, adventure…Have thalidomide skinhead Martin Atchitt and Paradax! get totally drunk and stagger into a futuristic India for loads of mayhem and a rogan gosh curry…

And finally, will there ever be a new edition of your visual autobiography ‘Swimini Purpose’?

BMc: Soon my friend, when the time is right, I’ll get round to producing a new version. It will be quite different to the previous ones, but it will be the ‘definitive’ edition. There will be some revisions and new pages. I hope Fever expands my readership enough to make a new Swimini Purpose book a popular pick.

FEVER is available at comic book stores around the world on April 7th.

cover - issue one

for more information about Brendan's previous comic work click here