KIERON GILLEN
When I was a proper kid, with chirpy optimism and undescended gonads, I read whatever comics I could find. I’d read anything, especially if it involved a dude’s head exploding. Or emotions. Always up for head-exploding and emotions, me. Still am, which is why I’m writing this list.
Anyway, this is everything you need to know about three great British comic characters that you probably haven’t heard of, unless you have, in which case, well done you.
1 Oor Wullie. The eponymous character from Oor Wullie crashed into my life as a preschooler, thanks to my mum’s Scottish relations. And these comic portraits of Scottish family life in the 1960s absorbed me. They were alien artifacts, in a setting stranger than Krypton or Asgard. Why does glue look like a chocolate bar? This haunts me to this day. More importantly, it was written in Scottish dialect, which made it my prepubescent Trainspotting. And educational (probably).
2 Johnny Red. If you mention Battle to Americans, they’ll mostly say “What?” If they fancy themselves multicultural titans, they’ll probably say “Oh—Charley’s War.” But if you’re me, you’ll go for Johnny Red, because it prominently features a Hurricane fighter, and I have nothing but crazy love for the Hurricane. Johnny Red is a British fighter pilot who gets sent in that lovable snub-nosed flying brick of a plane to fight on the Eastern Front. He meets the Huns! He shoots them! It’s great fun!
3 Hook Jaw. The wonder of kids’ comics is that they’re offensive enough to thrill a kid with evil transgression but simultaneously not offensive enough for a horrified parent to tear it away and set fire to it. British comics always walk that line, and when they do…well, occasionally they overstep it. The infamous Action comic—what Mills did before 2000 AD but after Battle—pretty much made a career out of straddling that line.
What was Hook Jaw about? For a brief time, it was a shameless remix of Jaws, starring a killer shark with a hook embedded in his jaw. But at its core, it was really about showing people being torn into pieces in the sort of loving detail that would make the average Avatar Comics devotee wince. And the writers were so imaginative! When rediscovering Hook Jaw recently, I became transfixed by how they managed to off someone smart enough to use a shark cage. One of the sharks gave birth, and the diver was torn into pieces by a shoal of tiny baby sharks, fresh from the womb, hungry for flesh. In summation, there is nothing that is not good about Hook Jaw (except ethically).
A longtime journalist in the world of games and music, Kieron Gillen broke onto the scene with his acclaimed independent series Phonogram with artist Jamie McKelvie. Currently, Gillen is the writer for one of Marvel’s flagship titles, Uncanny X-Men, as well as an acclaimed run on Journey into Mystery.