SCREAM! & MISTY SPECIAL: Black Max!
27th October 2018
The most spooktacular time of the year is nearly upon us again, which means it’s time for the Halloween Horrors of two of Britain’s best-loved comics of the ’80s to return to haunt us – it’s the SCREAM! & MISTY SPECIAL 2018!
Featuring a petrifyingly perfect cover by Kyle Hotz and a 2000 AD webshop exclusive creeptacular cover by Lenka Šimecková, the comic is out now in print and digital!
Inside you’ll find tales to terrify and stories to scare you stiff, including the return of The Thirteenth Floor by Guy Adams, John Stokes, and Frazer Irving, Black Beth by Alec Worley and DaNi, Best Friends Forever by Lizzie Boyle and Yishan Li, and Decomposition Jones, a brand-new horrific mash-up of zombie/vampire DNA by Richard McAuliffe and Steve Mannion.
Today, we chat quickly to artist Simon Coleby about Black Max as well as his love of all things batty and biplaney!
This is your second outing for Black Max, the German World War One fighter pilot descended from a race of bat-people. It’s one of those strips that so many readers remember fondly, all biplanes and giant bats. With the Scream & Misty Special last year you showed us Black Max in limbo, with a young girl dreaming of the sound of giant, beating wings who has the chance to free Max. What is it about the character and the set-up that brought you back to it this year, and would you fancy bringing Black Max back for more than just this annual appearance? Is there a series you have in mind?
Simon Coleby: Black Max is such a gloriously gothic character, he’s a joy to draw! Kek’s script, last time, was wonderful, so I was delighted to have the opportunity to take the story a little further. I feel there’s a nice balance and contrast between the contemporary, dismissive, fiery attitude of Maxine and the fierceness and anger of Max himself. Kek is superb at telling a story while subtly opening up the potential for future tales, so I’d be hugely keen to do more with the story if the opportunity arises. I feel I’m just getting to know the characters, and I’d love to know them a lot better. We’ll see…
The original stories had superb art, and evoked a wonderful, gritty atmosphere. It’s a creative challenge and a lot of fun to try and retain the essence of that work while taking it a little further and pushing the fundamentals of that story in a more current direction. The stories in Thunder and Lion were a superb foundation and I’d like to hope that Kek and I have begun to build something enjoyable and worthwhile upon that.
Have any of you got any strips from Scream! or Misty that you’d absolutely love to have a go at in future if we get another special? Or more generally, given that Rebellion have access to the entire Egmont and IPC archive, If you could bring back something (strip, character, comic) what would it be and why?
SC: Clearly the archive of work, newly available to Rebellion, is vast! In all honesty, I haven’t fully got to grips with all the characters and stories which are now part of their catalogue, but the potential for new stories appears to be enormous. There are obvious stories which would be fun to explore, such as The Steel Claw. I’ve always wanted to draw a real horror story, as I feel that’s something which would suit my art style very well. I wonder if there’s something in the new catalogue which might suit that ambition. I don’t know if it’s viable, but it’s something I’d like to explore.
What do you have coming up next?
SC: I’m currently drawing the next instalment of a story for 2000 AD but it hasn’t been announced yet, so I probably shouldn’t say what it is. (Stak!)