Interview: Honor Vincent & Lee Milmore – the Thought Bubble talent search winners unveil ‘Relict’!
27th April 2022
Every year, 2000 AD goes to Thought Bubble and holds its talent search to find the latest of Tharg’s script and art droids. And this year the winners were Honor Vincent and Lee Milmore.
You can see the videos of the talent search right here and, even better, you can see both their prize for the contest and their very first published 2000 AD work this week in 2000 AD Prog 2279!
With Future Shock: Relict, Honor and Lee tell a magnificent 4-page tale of time travel, eco-disaster, and the dangers of humanity taking nature for granted, all told through the eyes of Steven, a particularly resourceful mouse. It’s a great Future Shock and surely just the first of many, many strips we’ll be seeing from the pair of talented droids (in fact, Honor’s second strip appears just a week later in 2000 AD Regened Prog 2280!)
Honor, Lee, welcome to the wonderful world of 2000 AD!
You’re just the latest winners of the 2000 AD Thought Bubble talent search competition, with you valiantly defeating all comers for the 2021 competition and surviving the grilling of the panels to be crowned the latest new writer and artist winners!
And in this weeks’ 2000 AD, you get to see the fruits of your labour, with your first 2000 AD strip, Future Shock: Relict in the pages of Prog 2279. Honor, you’ve gone even further and actually have your second Future Shock in the very next Prog, 2280, the latest of 2000 AD‘s Regened issues, with Smart Home.
So, what did it mean to you to get the nod and realise you’d made it to the top of the pile?
HONOR VINCENT: I saw the email from Matt first thing in the morning, and I jogged around my apartment yipping until the stream! I had watched the old streams before entering to get a sense of the field, I’ve read many Future Shocks old and new, and I would have been delighted to even make it to the final round, let alone win. Then I watched the Artist Talent Hunt video and was extremely excited that the story would be drawn by Lee.
LEE MILMORE: It’s hard to describe. I’ve always wanted to be in comics, but I’ve always specifically wanted to be in 2000 AD, so it was a shock and a delight to realise that dream.
What did winning the contest and seeing your work in the pages of 2000AD mean for you?
HV: If I can come up with a story that’s worthy of being a Future Shock, that’s a massive sign that being a writer isn’t as quixotic an exercise as I sometimes feel it is.
Now, as for Relict, it’s very much a Future Shock but it’s also something that little different for 2000 AD I suppose… but I’ll say no more about it… instead, let’s have you tell us all about it and sell us on it! Honor, Lee, what’s it all about?
HV: It’s about ripple effects, and the unintended consequences of fiddling with things like aging and death (as we are currently doing in labs across the world)!
LM: Different yes, but also which other anthology book would it fit? Only 2000 AD has the diversity and depth to include it.
I suppose it’s something of a tale of derring-do, an environmental fable, and a harsh warning for us all about both animal cruelty and caring for the planet.
LM: For me Honor crafted a perfect little story about the consequences of human ignorance of our world and the other inhabitants we share it with.
And so say we all!
Do you know what it was about the strip that made the judges so impressed – what was the feedback you got?
HV: It seemed like they responded to it being – like you said – something that’s a little different. I’m certainly not the first person to write from an animal’s perspective, but it’s not the common case in science fiction. So I was able to do a sting in the tail AND a sting at the top.
Aside from that, I know that Maura [McHugh, one of the Judges at the Thought Bubble/2000 AD writers search] liked the idea of Steven and his little mouse bag!
LM: I think Honor put a little of everything that makes a good story into this 4 pager, emotional connection being a big one. I quickly cared about Steven’s story. She’s a real talent.
It’s also not the only thing you’ve written with an animal theme – with your Kickstarter for New Rat City still running – so where does the love of rodents come from? Or is it merely just the fact that rats are quite an obsession to you and you just couldn’t stop creating stories around them?
HV: I haven’t met an animal I didn’t like, which I think is why they’re a theme!
Oh yes, absolutely – surely one of the signs of a good person!
HV: Plus, if you live in New York City long enough you have to either learn to see the pigeons and the rats as neighbors or you develop a persecution complex. My dad was an exterminator when I was growing up, and that’s really where New Rat City came from: imagining a flooding, depopulated, crumbling NYC circa 2083 from the perspective of a pest controller trying to be a band-aid over the cracks.
Relict‘s influences were conversations with friends about senescence research and experiments done on mice, and reading all the Redwall books as a kid.
But of course, Relict’s not the only Future Shock on the cards for you, is it – in a typical buses analogy, you pitch and pitch and pitch Future Shocks and then two come along at once for you, Honor! You’ve got the Future Shock Smart Home, with V V Glass, in the very next Prog, the Regened Prog 2280. Was that a complete coincidence?
HV: Tharg & Joko (well, Matt) actually reached out to me a few weeks after I sent the final script for Relict in to ask if I could write another Future Shock for the next Regened issue, which was a very nice surprise!
It’s another great bit of Future Shock stuff, with the story of a sentient Roomba and an idea of just what real AI could lead to. And it’s one of those Future Shocks where it’s just not that far away from actually happening.
HV: Thank you! And I HOPE it is far away… if my Google Home gains sentience soon I’m in trouble, because I do take a tone with it sometimes.
It’s also evidence of what we’re increasingly seeing with the Regened Progs, that there’s very little difference between what you can do story-wise for Regened and in the grown-up Prog, just less swearing and blood, but the storytelling and the artistic style is just the same.
HV: The ‘minimal swearing and blood’ thing made me more nervous than the ‘4 pages’ thing, to be very honest. But I remember being a kid and reading anything I could get my hands on — I don’t think kids should be talked or written down to. If they don’t fully understand something on the first read, they’ll (hopefully, if it’s a good enough story) come back to it later on.
So, we know you’re both wonderfully talented, but what about your own stories? Who are you and how the devil are you and all that?
Where are you both from and how did you find yourself pursuing comics professionally? Is it something you planned on from a young age or did you manage to fall into it sideways, as it were?
LM: I’m from Durham up near Newcastle upon Tyne which is a wonderful and unique place full of wonderful and unique people.
I grew up wanting to draw comics, which meant to me drawing for 2000 AD. When I was 18 I traveled to London with my portfolio and just went over to the Nerve Centre and knocked on Thargs door. NOT the thing to do. However, I was lucky that Tharg needed to supply the Langley Droid with neck oil and we all met in the local oil dispensary. Tharg saw some potential and I got sample pages to draw, over the next couple of years I painfully slowly put pages together but really I failed to understand how to grasp that moment, for instance, I’d go to my Fine art painting school for 8 hours a day instead of preparing samples. So I messed that up or probably more accurately I wasn’t ready for it, being as green as the Mighty one’s bonce.
So I went off and got embroiled in designing websites, ran some web businesses, ran a record label for 5 years and eventually became a head designer at an agency in Newcastle. Note that I didn’t send samples to any other comic publisher, it was as if they didn’t exist.
Oh, I’m quite old for a newbie I should mention.
Proof that you’re never too old to pitch to Tharg!
LM: Years later me and a friend met in a pub after challenging each other to draw Spider-Man, and with his encouragement and nagging I’ve slowly geared back up to giving it a go.
Almost as an exercise I started entering the 2000 AD Art Stars competition but really wasn’t drawing strips. It really helped though to have that objective challenge there to focus the mind and get me into the habit of finishing art works. I eventually got to a place where I could start drawing pages and I love it. Winning the competition has started opening doors for me but I’m really barely in the industry yet.
HV: I was born in and still live in New York City, and I grew up on Long Island. I always planned to write well enough to get paid to do it one day. I got into comics because I kept writing short stories that actually only worked as comics, so I decided to give them a try that way. I wasn’t about to ask someone to work on my script without paying them, which made it a big undertaking. I saved up for a while before I felt ready to start my first series.
Lee, your art for Relict is so wonderfully polished, very much fully formed, tight black and white with a whole load of detail and a delicate line. I won’t go the way of doing all the comparisons, but I’m sure others will be definitely comparing what’s here to some very familiar names.
What’s your process – could you give us a breakdown of what it takes to create one of your pages?
LM: I have both a very specific and at once very unresolved process for creating a page. Firstly it’s all digital, I do very, very super rough doodles on paper, maybe I’ll work out what a character might basically look like in a sketch book probably whilst sitting in front of the idiot box.
From that I probably know what I want my basic compositions to be and how the page should flow, where I want my cameras placed all that good stuff.
LM: In the past I used to look to have a style, I mean I wanted to be Carlos or Mick MacMahon like everyone else, but I used to make terrible pages that obsessed with style over content, I couldn’t get a thing done. So I shifted to trying to properly represent the story and put my ego (“I am a superstar artist, I am”) in the back seat.
So reference has become very important to me, over much I expect. I’ll essentially hunt for the right poses, the right objects to help me tell the story authentically. I end up making photoshopped collages, which become my pencils more or less. Sometimes this feels like cheating but it’s such a creative part of the page design where things occur to me, more exciting poses and camera angles appear that I actually love that bit. It’s slow though, I’m currently trying to lighten the process to speed up my output. I feel like I’ll get the balance right eventually. In the meantime I want to tell the story as best I can.
Then I ink the heck out of it. So I drop my collage down faint, faint, faint and in a layer over the top I try and give it energy back by inking as freely as I can.
Warning – I don’t advocate for this approach exactly. It’s time-consuming and you can start to obsess over the right reference. I recently built a staircase in 3D just to get the perspective right, it ended up being a tiny sliver of a small panel….I shoulda just drew it, right?
I realised along the way that it doesn’t really matter how you do it, getting it done is everything. Once it’s done you have a possibility, something to share, something to be critiqued and learn from. I’ve drawn some awesome stylised Judge Dredd heads over the years but no one ever saw them and it ended up being a frustrating exercise. Now I just get it done, by hook or by crook.
Have you entered the Thought Bubble talent search before?
HV: Nope! This was my first.
LM: I’ve attended the competition panels in both Leeds and Harrogate as an audience member and have been full of admiration for those brave enough to get up there and be critiqued. I wanted to enter but was still struggling getting back into the saddle. Closest I got was a page that I showed to Matt Smith, I felt a bit silly having not completed the brief but wanted to see what he said. He was encouraging but one page is not a portfolio and it certainly isn’t an entry to the Thought Bubble 2000 AD talent search.
As for the competition itself, can you tell us a little about the actual process of entering, the preparation involved, and the terror of pitching in front of the judging panel of experts?
LM: I didn’t have the terror bit as the pandemic had pushed the competition online. In fact, as I hadn’t heard anything about my entry up to the day of the convention I assumed I hadn’t been selected. I was in the pub with friends when I received a tweet from the excellent Ade Hughes (look him up comic fans) simply saying “You’ve done it Lee, you won.” I still didn’t really understand until I checked my email. It was great actually as I was surrounded by good friends and my lovely wife, it was a shocking, sobering, delightful moment that I honestly didn’t think would ever come. Big thanks to the panel Doug Braithwaite, Liana Kangas and Olivia Hicks, I mean I love them for it. x
HV: The one good thing about the past two years of remote-everything is that I could pitch to my computer screen, so no one had to hear my voice shake! I considered entering in 2020, but I didn’t feel that I had something that lived up to the brief.
I’d been working on Relict as a short story, so I had the arc roughed out before I realized it could be a good Future Shock. Then I scripted it, thumbnailed it, and worked on those until I was happy with them. I wrote the pitch and then wrote a separate script for myself, then did a few timed practice runs and many takes on the video.
What advice would you give to up-and-coming writers and artists about getting into comics in general, and the 2000AD/Thought Bubble competition in particular?
LM: I feel Honor is better placed to answer this, my way has just been stubborn, dogged determination but in a very narrow furrow and I only have a toe in the comic waters. I’d say be determined but don’t do anything else I did. For artists doing the competition; I’d say again that doing the work is all-important, by that I mean get the pages done to whatever standard you’re able and be prepared to not win or even be selected. It’s ok to be disappointed but you should also accept you’re a developing artist and you might not be quite ready yet. Hey good news, there’s another one next year and you can work hard to get better for. Listen carefully to the feedback if you’re lucky enough to get it, they’ll be right about your flaws so learn from them, that’s the good stuff.
Also it’s such a privilege to have these competitions to focus on, 2000 AD have really embraced the creative community they know how much it means to us, respect the opportunity. Work hard and tell the story above all else.
HV: On comics in general: make them and study them. Figure out why the books you love work – reverse engineer the script from the page, map out the pacing, see what they do that can only be done in a comic. If you write and can’t draw, find an artist you can collaborate with on some shorter pieces.
Brass tacks-wise the best advice I have received so far is to not write scenes of people walking and talking. You can skip it! Grud made captions for a reason!
On the 2000 AD/Thought Bubble competition: do thumbnail sketches of your script to make sure your pacing works. No one has to see them but you. Writing a complete story in 4 pages is HARD, and It’s easy to get carried away and pack 3 pages of action into 1 ‘page’ of script if you aren’t careful. Doodling them will make that clear, and it also helps me polish the story up a bit, too. And of course, read as many Future Shocks as you can get your hands on.
When did you both get into comics? Was it something from childhood or from later? And what sort of comics were your entry points into the medium as a reader?
LM: My Dad read great stories to me when I was very little, Wind in the Willows, Watership Down, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Aesop’s fables and many others but most significantly perhaps he read me Lord of the Rings. I think these stories made me into a person who looked for the creative, strange, fantastic, and the thought-provoking. I think that was the genesis of what I like creatively. More specifically, very early on I read Tintin and Asterix getting books out of our local library where my Mam took me and my sister. That was a wonderful experience which I think I handed down to our younger brother Ben who also loves Tintin to this day. I also used to read Oor Wullie and The Broons, as my Grandparents bought the Sunday Post. Also Garth from the Daily Mirror was significant as it set me up for what was to come.
HV: My dad got me into comics when I was young, in the mid-90s — he’s got many hundreds of them in a shelving unit. The first ones I remember reading were 80s and 90s X-Men books, but the first comic that made a big impression on me as an example of what you could do with the medium was Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth; the second was Alan Moore and Stephen Bissette’s Swamp Thing. I started buying comics for myself regularly in college, and the first series I bought from start to finish was Fables.
When did you first start reading 2000AD?
HV: As an American (hiss!) I came to it late.
It’s okay, we forgive you, some of our best friends are American, etc. etc.
HV: I first encountered Dredd and 2000 AD in college when I spent some time in England, but money was scarce at that point, so I wasn’t able to keep up with the Progs until recently. Instead I have some well-loved copies of the Future Shock anthologies, and a bunch of the fantastic Judges Dredd and Anderson Case Files books.
LM: My Grandma gave me a copy of Prog 262, (the one with the Dredd badge with a bullet hole and a trickle of blood) that had been posted inside the Sunday Post by accident. In my family they say it was her fault! My first regular Prog was 274 probably after weeks of whining on at my parents about getting it.
Oh, well done to Grandma! Definitely a Squaxx dek Thargo!
And if you had the chance to work on a dream 2000AD strip or character, what would it be?
LM: So many…but perhaps predictably, Judge Dredd, I WOULD LOVE THAT.
HV: I know the Angel crew is kaput, but where is Ratty? What’s he doing? Is he okay? But seriously: Judge Anderson, bar none.
What about influences?
LM: Many but I’m not sure anything I do shows it. Most significantly for me those artists that set comics alight in the 80s. Carlos Ezquerra, Mick McMahon, Brian Bolland, Cam Kennedy, Kev O’Neill oh and loads of others. Away from 2000 AD, I love Moebius, Guy Davis, Mike Mignola, crazy for Marcelo Frusin.
HV: In terms of comic writers and artists: Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, Paul Bolger, Brian Bolland, Pia Guerra. Beyond that: I try to read in as many formats and genres as possible. If you want to write science fiction you need to read about science, and I enjoy Oliver Sacks and Elizabeth Kolbert. In terms of novelists I love John Crowley, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Olga Tokarczuk. I also read a lot of poetry. I think comics and poetry have a lot in common in terms of concision and the importance of imagery. Adrienne Rich wrote a poem called “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev” that I can’t help but imagine as a comic.
And finally, what’s coming up from you both next? Will we be seeing you in the Prog any time soon or have you other projects coming out?
HV: I’ve got a few more Future Shocks I’m mulling and hope to pitch, and a Judge Anderson outline out in the aether! After the New Rat City campaign wraps up (it’ll also be published by Scout Comics later this year, with a cover by our very own Lee Milmore, who was kind enough to do a fantastic one!), I’ll be getting back to working on Andraste, my historical fantasy series about Boudicca’s rebellion against the Romans. I’m also starting work on a new series, about a far-future Earth and the people living above and within it.
LM: Since completing Relict for 2000 AD I’ve been working with Dave Heely and Steve Macmanus on a strip for Blazer and am working on an Alan Hebden strip for Haunted scheduled for later this year. Both in The 77 camp. I have also done a cover for Honor’s New Rat City and have another lined up for her other book, the excellent Andraste which I intend to paint. As for anything else for the Prog, I have just signed up for a 3 part strip with the Prog – It’s been a great week so far!
Thank you so much to Honor and Lee for talking to us. We’re sure that you’re going to be blown away by their Future Shock: Relict and you can find it in the pages of 2000 AD Prog 2279, out on 27 April – get it wherever Thrill Power is sold, including the 2000 AD web shop.
And just one week later, you can see Honor’s second Future Shock: Smart Home, with the brilliant VV Glass on art, in 2000 AD Regened Prog 2280.
And remember to look in on both Honor and Lee online; Lee’s website, Twitter, and Instagram, and Honor’s Twitter, Blog, Substack, and of course, the Kickstarter for New Rat City.
