I’ve included this entry in the Interviews category to make up for the fact that I forgot to mention Pat Mills…
Let me explain. Interviews usually include a question along the lines of “Who are your biggest influences”, but it wasn’t until I was reading this weeks 2000AD I realised I hadn’t been mentioning one of my biggest: Pat Mills. Now, its not within the scope of this blog to write biographies (its scope is Robots and Accordions, as I’ve mentioned before), so follow the link if you want to know more about him, but I’m including this entry to make up for Mills’s omission from recent interviews.
So why Pat Mills? Well, his stories Robusters, ABC Warriors and Metalzoic all featured robots and were an undeniable influence on me, but there is more to it than that.
I grew up on three great comics writers, Alan Moore, John Wagner and Pat Mills. Mills was always my favourite: for the breadth of his imagination (Nemesis book 4 is surely the birth of Steampunk), his attention to detail (the research that went into Slaine spawned many imitators), but mostly for his depth of character. Fitting real characters into SF or Fantasy settings can be a challenge, Mills manages it better than the others, to my mind.
I could go on, in fact I think I will in another entry some time, but for the moment, here are some recommendations:
Tony Ballantyne's Blog 