Interview: Talking Action Pact with Mike Carroll & Luke Horsman
28th February 2021
It’s REGENED time again with 2000 AD Prog 2220 – out on 24 February – where the all-ages adventures are back to thrill and amaze regular readers and brand-new readers alike!
This Regened Prog is the first of four this year (the others will be 2000 AD Prog 2233 – 26 May, 2000 AD Prog 2246 – 25 August, and 2000 AD Prog 2256 – 3 November) with the now-familiar mix of returning series and brand-new thrills destined to become firm favourites. Over the course of the year’s all-ages action you’ll see the return of the hit series Pandora Perfect by Roger Langridge and Brett Parson, and the Judge Dredd-world series Department K by Rory McConville and PJ Holden, but there’s also plenty of new Regened surprises coming through the year, including Lowborn High by David Barnett and Philip Bond and Viva Forever by David Baillie and Anna Morozova.
But first of all, hitting hard and fast in Prog 2220, we have Action Pact by Michael Carroll and Luke Horsman, a frenetic, all-out action strip that Mike and Luke have taken time away from their packed schedules to talk to us about.
2000 AD Regened Prog 2220, is on sale from newsagents, comic book stores, and from the 2000 AD web shop on 24 February 2021.
Okay, Mike, Luke, Action Pact: The Radyar Recovery…
First up, what’s Action Pact all about – in the couple of preview pages I’ve seen it’s obviously <ahem> action packed, lots of explosions, trucks, making an escape, that sort of thing?
Michael Carroll: The series title does kind of hint at what it’s all about! It’s an action-packed science fiction yarn.
If you picture it as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid crossed with Steel Magnolias, with maybe just a hint of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure sprinkled around the edges… you’d be way off: it’s nothing like that at all. Not unless those things have all got an awful lot of spaceships, aliens, robots, blasters, rocket-boots and giant monsters that I never noticed before!
My original idea was to have a series that was absolutely nothing but action scenes from start to finish: everyone is constantly being attacked, chased or rescued, and in fact that’s what the first draft of the script was like – there wasn’t a single panel in which someone wasn’t getting shot-at or being punched or crashing backwards through a window or wrestling a giant killer cyborg or dangling one-handed from a crashing spaceship’s landing gear – but a non-stop barrage of action gets exhausting very quickly: we need the quiet moments to highlight the exciting parts. This gives the characters a bit of breathing space, too, so they can patch up their wounds!
And did the pun title come first or the strip?
MC: I thought of the title years ago, but I never did anything with it. At one stage I had plans to use it for a Young Adult adventure series. It was one of those things that came very close to happening, but in the end the publishers and I wanted different things from the series, so we abandoned it.
The title hung around for a few years in my “Cool Titles” list, along with dozens of others that’ll probably never see the light of day (but I won’t mention any here in case someone else nicks ‘em) until I started developing this new story and I realised it would be perfect.
It’s an all-new strip, presumably unconnected with anything previously in 2000 AD?
MC: Yep, completely new! For a brief while I toyed with the idea of setting it in the Proteus Vex universe, but I decided against that because I wanted Drake – the lead character of Action Pact – to be human, and there are no humans in Proteus Vex. Besides, this is a very different kind of story: Proteus Vex is told from the point of view of an unseen narrator far in the future, long after the events of the story have faded into legend, whereas by its very nature Action Pact needs to much more immediate.
As this is for Regened, what sort of changes have you made to your work to fit in with the all-ages brief of these Regened Progs?
MC: I’m quite used to writing for readers of all ages, so I don’t think I’ve had to make too many concessions. But one thing that’s important for us to bear in mind – and for anyone else who’s writing stories suitable for younger people – is that the folks buying the product are frequently going to be the adults, not the kids, so if the adults think that the comic or book or whatever is unsuitable for their kid, they’ll leave it on the shelves. So we keep the violence and gore to a minimum, even though the kids themselves don’t mind reading about exploding heads or eyeball-eating aliens or psychopathic blood-crazed zombie-vampires.
That’s one of the things I enjoy most about writing the Regened stories… the challenge of giving a story a ton of action and a sense of danger without resorting to the sort of violence that would make a concerned parent snatch the comic away from their kid’s hand.
Although you’re planning something that’s initially a one-off strip for Regened, I’m presuming that there’s an element of world-building going on here, thinking of back-story, working up histories for the characters and the worlds, as well as formulating plans for any potential future for the strip?
MC: Oh yeah! The basic idea behind Action Pact does lend itself rather well to more stories. I won’t go into any detail here because that would spoil this first tale, but, yeah, I’ve got a few more planned: if this one is well-received and The Mighty One gives it the go-ahead, I’d like to do a full series, especially now that I’ve seen Luke’s fantastic character designs and the way he brings the action to the page – it’s frenetic and in-your-face and exciting as anything! Brilliant stuff!
As for the future, I’d prefer to keep Action Pact as an all-ages tale, though: it would be easy to to “age-up” the series and introduce more adult themes, in line with most other 2000AD stories, but it doesn’t need that and I really want to keep this one accessible to everyone.
Similarly, Luke, I’d assume there’s an awful lot more work involved for you in terms of designing the world, designing the characters?
Luke Horsman: There is, but Mike fleshes his characters out very well, so there was a strong starting point to run with. I had a good idea of the visuals in mind before I started drafting so it came together relatively quickly.
Are you colouring your own work in Action Pact?
LH: Matt Soffe has done the colour work for this, he also did the Cadet Dredd strip I worked on – he has great colour pallets and textures.
Next, what changes to your style have you adopted for this strip?
LH: Not much change, I went slightly more cartoony in some parts to emphasise the action, but for the most part it was my standard style.
And finally, in terms of art Luke, one thing that’s really good to do is chat process involved – how are you working now – traditional, digital, a mix of both? And can you describe to us the process involved in making your art?
LH: I work solely digital these days, it’s a lot quicker and far less mess than traditional inking. Though I try to use as many organic brushes as possible as to not loose the traditional heavy tapered brush style I tend to go with. I use textured dry brushes akin to using a sponge with real ink, toothbrush ink spatter and even a brush made of my inky fingerprint for certain mucky smoke effects.
My rough stage is very loose, I’m very gestural and like to roughly play with the shapes and flow of the page. Spending most time inking.
And Luke was kind enough to send through a couple of examples of that loose roughs stage and the same panels complete with inks…
As far as Action Pact is concerned, and thinking about the whole all-ages thing, is there any big shift in your thinking when it comes to creating something all-ages and more than that, is there necessarily any real difference between strips in Regened and strips in 2000 AD in terms of content, bar the obvious things such as swearing and more graphic violence?
LH: No big shift for me really. The script of a strip dictates where I go with it generally, Mike did a great job on this one. Super fun and silly. My thinking and process is pretty much the same with any title – have fun with the story organically and try not to think too hard about it! It would be great to see more from these characters – the script leaves a lot of scope for a fun universe to play around in.
MC: I don’t think this is especially difficult to do. Sure, over the years a lot of “adult” aspects have emerged in 2000AD, but two of its best and longest-lasting strips – Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog – have for the most part managed to get along perfectly well without changing all that much from the early days.
It’s a mistake, I think, to associate kids’ fiction – or all-ages fiction – with simplicity or childishness, and a worse mistake to build on that and assume that the kids only want clear-cut, unambiguous stories. Kids are more than capable of understanding and appreciating complex story-structures and ambiguous themes… if you give them the chance. Just about any eight-year-old Star Wars fan will be able to argue both sides of whether Obi Wan Kenobi had the right to lie to Luke Skywalker about his father. Kids do understand this stuff – they just don’t encounter it very often because adults assume that it’ll be too complicated for them.
Nearly finally, in terms of creating comics for children – and yes, this is rather a huge topic, sort of a ‘solve the problem with comics’ question – how do you see comics for children succeeding in the future?
LH: That’s a tough one, for sure. I guess just give the kids as much original content, fun and variety as possible.
MC: The Regened issues of 2000AD are, for me, a very welcome trek back through territory that has of late been very sparsely populated. The quality of today’s kids’ comics is extremely high, but the quantity is woefully inadequate. How are kids supposed to discover comics if there isn’t enough variety for them to find something that snags their interest?
Unfortunately, therein lies a pretty big problem: launching a new title into an empty market is like whistling in a vacuum, but the market won’t grow if there’s no product to whet the appetites of the potential customers.
Sure, a publisher with a large back-catalogue could plunder its archives and produce a bunch of low-cost reprint titles, but modern young readers aren’t going to be able to identify with strips like Shiner or Whacky or Bully Beef and Chips – a lot of that old material just won’t work. I mean, I’ve never seen a real-life park-keeper or a teacher wearing a gown and a mortarboard and I grew up in the seventies – I can’t imagine what a modern-day kid would make of them!
This is where Regened and Rebellion’s Cor!! Buster specials – and even the new Roy of the Rovers, I expect (I’ve not read them because football) – stand out: quality new material, accessible to all… the only drawback being the low frequency: only one Cor!! Buster special a year means that it’s likely that the kids who enjoyed the first one would have mostly forgotten about it by the time the second one was published. A year to an eight-year-old is equivalent to almost seven years for someone of my vintage!
And finally, as we always like to ask, what can we expect from both of you this year, whether 2000 AD related or elsewhere?
MC: This year… I’ve got another new Regened strip lined up: Mayflies. Some more Judge Dredd strips, Dreadnoughts: The March of Progress and my third Judges novella, Necessary Evil, are waiting in the wings. Later this year, all going well, I’ll be writing my fourth Judges novella, the third Proteus Vex series, and a couple of projects not yet ready to be announced. So, yeah, a pretty busy year ahead!
LH: Outside of the day to day indy comic work I’m working on a pet comic project called Oathbound. It’s going to be a series based on Vikings and Norse mythology. Illustrating the birth of the Norse cosmos, the misadventures of the gods and heavily inspired by the Poetic/Prose Edda and Icelandic sagas. Got to love a Viking! A preview issue is currently available! Wink wink, nudge nudge.
Thank you to both Mike and Luke for taking the time to chat to us here at 2000 AD. You’ll be able to find Action Pact in the brand-new Regened Prog 2220, out on 24 February and available right here at the 2000 AD web shop.
You can read more of Mike Carroll’s thoughts on so many things at his website, his writing blog, and his always worth a read Rusty Staples comics blog, and catch up with him talking about the recent Judge Dredd: Desperadlands saga with artist Will Simpson here, as well as the just-completed first series of Dreadnoughts over in the Judge Dredd: Megazine here.
As for Luke Horsman, you can find an interview about a previous Regened Future Shock here, you can find him here, and read the preview of Oathbound right here – it looks like this…
