Comics

Interview: Intestinauts are going, going, gone! Getting tiny on a huge scale with Pye Parr!

21st June 2024

2000 AD Prog 2387 has the finale of the six-part Intestinauts: Busted Flush series, taking our micro marvels of the alimentary canal to greater heights than ever before as Arthur Wyatt and Pye Parr bring their latest adventure to an end.

Will the Intestinauts manage to thwart the dastardly plans of the Omega Genocide Four-infected Dr Globulon? Will Intestolabs ever recover? Will the Intestinauts survive? And will your future tummy troubles ever be the same again? There’s only one way to find out and that’s by reading Intestinauts: Busted Flush, the finale!

We’ve already chatted to Arthur Wyatt in part 1 of this mega interview (you can find that here), so now it’s time to talk to artist, colourist, letterer, designer, and creative genius of Intestinauts – Pye Parr! [Okay, okay, he asked me to put in the ‘creative genius’ – there’s always that creative clash between writers and artists!]

So far in Busted Flush, We’ve seen the Intestinauts go into battle with the experimental Instestolabs-modified bowel-bot, Omega Genocide Four – it didn’t go well. We’ve watched as OG4 escaped the lab experiment and ventured out into the nutrient pipes of Instestolabs – that didn’t go well either. And we’ve seen OG4 infect the (literal) brains behind Intestolabs, Dr Globulon – and that REALLY didn’t go well, especially for the poor Intestinauts! Now, in Part 6 in the new 2000 AD Prog, it’s all coming to an epic conclusion!

So, let’s talk to Pye Parr about what it means to be the artistic genius behind the smallest heroes… although, I should warn you that Arthur, being the writer that he is, couldn’t stop himself from butting in with a few answers of his own here! [Writers eh? What can you do?]

Hi Pye, you know we’ve already chatted to Arthur, so now it’s your turn to put the record straight!

Busted Flush has taken us behind the scenes at Intestolabs and introduced us to the (quite literal) brains behind it all, Dr Globulon. Arthur was saying that Dr Globulon turned up first in one of your sketches and appeared in the FCBD one-pager?

PYE PARR: Yeah we snuck him in pretty early, but he’s not really been a plot point until now. Looking back through my hard drive and I’ve just found a load of stuff I dont even remember drawing, including a film poster from 10+ years ago, so he’s been kicking around for a while.

I asked Arthur, I’ll ask you – seems like you’re having an absolute blast with every Intestinauts adventure?

PP: Oh man, absolutely. The scripts always make me smile. “It comes in peace!” …. “DESTROY IT!”

You’ve kept up a tradition of visual invention here in Busted Flush and Arthur’s already been singing your praises about what you bring to every page. What was that visual trigger that brought the Intestinauts to life and how did it all come together?

PP: I think the first designs were based on a pretty simple idea – they’re a form of medicine you swallow, so let’s make ’em pill shaped (and also gave me a simple design shape to use for graphics (see next question)… but then that’d make them too big, so they became pill-shaped robots within a dropship that’s an actual pill. And then we put in little transponders that are even smaller pill shaped things. It’s like a very boring fractal. Other stuff we added afterwards.

To start with I drew some with monowheels and that kind of silliness, but pretty quickly realised that’d be useless in the gut, so they got fans and scuba gear etc. Apart from the two main characters I made them up as I went along to start with, but over time they have coalesced into a regular cast of about 10 guys, each with their own job/personality. None of this ever really comes out in the story but it’s nice to have that extra stuff going on below the surface 

And here’s just some of the design work from Pye…

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In Busted Flush, you’ve really rather thrown everything at the page here. We’ve had schematics, plans, cutaway drawings, a choose-your-own-adventure strip, one-off in story flashbacks in faux-historical style, even a puzzle maze in the final episode.

Is this Arthur forcing you into doing all this or is it your own twisted sense of nostalgia and humour that made you want to get these elements in?

AW: (leaving this to Pye but I will drop this in) LOL!

PP: Think of it as me being a fully willing participant in some BDSM.

And if that isn’t the most perfect illustration of the writer-artist dynamic, I don’t know what is! Writer chuckles, artist compares it to BDSM.

PP: It kind of grew out of a slightly over-the-top level of design I did for advertising the first future shock, and a mutual love of clever infographics that Arthur and I share. Each story we seem to add more and more of it in.

And speaking of those early designs and ads that Pye has done over the years for Intestinauts…

PP: One of the benefits of doing a strip that isn’t entirely serious is you can throw in this random stuff without spoiling the story (the opposite hopefully).

I absolutely loathe advertising being thrust in your face every second of the day, so some of the leaflets and wording and in-world artefacts we throw in the mix are a kind of reaction to that, indicative of some awful corporate nonsense ruining everyone’s lives… And we’ve wanted to do a choose-your-own-adventure thing for YEARS!

And here are just a few of those incredible visual delights that we’ve seen throughout Busted Flush… including just a little of that fantastic choose-your-own-adventure sequence in part 2…

In fact, when it comes to Intestinauts, how does the collaboration work?

Is this another case of writer throwing out that simple few lines of text describing something that he knows the artist is going to have to spend days, weeks even, meticulously planning and then executing? Or do you get together and plan it all?

PP: We just text each other shit we find or think about and go from there. Arthur will say “I’m thinking about adding in X at some point” and like any good improv partner the answer is always “yes, AND….”  

It’s a bit of both as far as description goes. Sometimes Arthur will have to plan something meticulously, and other times will describe a fairly simple leaflet or whatever and I’ll spend a whole afternoon making it look ridiculous. I think we each know what the other one likes!

AW: (leaving this to Pye but I will drop this in) The numbers with the Bowelbots dropping (above) is actually something I borrowed from a Shang-Chi page. Thank Douglas Wolk’s book All of the Marvels for pointing me at that – In fact if you like seeing the comics form being messed around with there’s a bunch of cool and innovative stuff that happened in that run of Shang-Chi. Who knew?

I probably mentioned it to Pye as a cool thing and then wrote up a bit in the script that was like the Shang Chi thing. 

Yep, there we go, the writer jumping in with ‘That was me! That was me!’ They’re not jealous of the artist’s talent at all, are they?

And this was the Shang Chi page that Arthur’s talking about – art by the legendary Gene Day…

PP: Leaning into the design of the world is very fun though. You can’t really see it in the final image (the angle to show it would have made the art boring) but the top of the Intestolabs building in the cutaway from the first page is supposed to look like an open mouth swallowing a (surprise surprise) pill.

Arthur’s description was detailed in that it gave me a lot of bits to fit into the building, but the actual look of it was left fairly open. 

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What about the plans for the future of everyone’s favourite stomach saviours? Arthur did mention something about taking it large – ‘Intestinauts versus the poop meteor that’s going to destroy the planet’

PP: Oh please god lets do the Excremeteor! That sounds GREAT!! Scatasteroid? Effluencomet? Crapteroid?

Finally, what can we look forward to from the pair of you next?

PP: I’ve got a bit of cover work coming up (hopefully) for the US, and a summer working with Alec Worley on a webcomic I can’t say much about yet… and after that the passion projects: more Petrol Head and Intestinauts!

And that’s where we left it, with Pye heading off into the sunset still chuckling to himself as he came up with more space-related ideas… ‘Poopteor’ [giggle], ‘Shiteroid’ [heh heh], ‘Planetary Turdinator’ [guffaw], ‘The Intestinaut’s biggest jobby yet’ [bwah hah hah]… Artists, they’re easily pleased.

Thank you so much to Pye for chatting to us. Remember to have a look at part 1 of this interview with Arthur Wyatt as well!

The final episode of the six-part Intestinauts: Bowel Bots is in 2000 AD Prog 2387, out on 19 June and available everywhere the Galaxy’s Greatest is sold, including the 2000 AD web shop.

If you’re looking for more from Arthur and Pye talking all things bowel bothering, we’ve interviewed them here at 2000AD.com for Intestinauts: Symbiotic Love Triangle here in 2021 and Molch-R talks with them over at the Thrill-Cast here. And there’s plenty more of Pye’s incredible artwork in our Covers Uncovered feature… Megazine 443, Prog 2230, Prog 2275, and his most recent, Prog 2385 with PJ Holden.

And of course, if you haven’t already experience the hi-octane, pedal to the metal, Iron Giant meets Mad Max spectacular that is Petrol Head from Rob Williams and Pye, you’ve missed one of the best things published all year! It’s available right now in a collection from Image Comics that looks very much like this…

And finally, a few design elements that Pye sent along that we just couldn’t fit in above (and are too good to leave out!) plus the full-sized versions of some we have to crunch down to fit!