First Prog: 793 (although
he had a strip in the 1992 Sci-Fi Special, published a couple of weeks earlier)
Last Prog: 1023
Total appearances: 86
-including his stint as editor
of the sadly short-lived Revolver, and his strip from the 2000AD Action Special,
but not including an unknown amount of issues of Crisis that I think he edited
at some point before he started Revolver.
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| Art by Nigel Dobbyn |
Creator credits:
Tharg’s Dragon Tales
Timehouse
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| Art by Tim Bollard |
Other writing credits:
Strontium Dogs / Durham Red
RoboHunter
A Christmas episode of
Judge Dredd
The Steel Claw*
various one-offs
Notable character creations:
The Walking Lady
Old Father Time (not
to mention death and God)
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| Come on, how can you not find this charming? Art by Tim Bollard |
Notable characteristics:
Gentleness;
thoughtfulness; playfulness; some might say ponderousness?
In perhaps deliberate contrasts to some of his 2000AD contemporaries (Mark Millar, I’m talking about you), Hogan’s stories tended to use violence and surliness sparingly.
In perhaps deliberate contrasts to some of his 2000AD contemporaries (Mark Millar, I’m talking about you), Hogan’s stories tended to use violence and surliness sparingly.
Handy with wordplay,
puns, and literary references.
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| It's the Alan Grant / Peter Milligan school of literary references. I love it! Art by Rian Hughes |
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| Art by David Hill |
On Peter:
I believe Hogan’s
first involvement with the world of Tharg came from behind the scenes, as a
fill-in editor on Crisis, but really
making his mark as the editor of Revolver.
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| Design by Rian Hughes; Art by Brendan McCarthy |
You may not have read any of that ill-fated comic’s eight issues, but if you
were reading the Prog in the late 1980s / early 1990s, you can’t have failed to
see it advertised. At the time, Crisis
had been a moderate success (the early issues sold well, at least); rival
music/comics mag Deadline was doing
even better. Tharg-in-Chief Steve MacManus was hard at work prepping The Judge Dredd Megazine, basically
designing tit to be 2000AD for grownups. Somehow, there was
room for one other adult-aimed comic, and that was to be Revolver. The sort of comic that had two spin-off specials, one horror-themes, and one romance-themed.
I’d love to know what the brief behind its creation was.
It appears to have been ‘adults like comics, now, right? Especially the sort of
adults who really like music and pop-culture and stuff. Let’s do a comic for
them.’
This ends up with the
highs of Dare and Rogan Gosh, the worthwhile indulgence of
Purple Days, and the lows of Happenstance & Kismet. Also Dire Streets, which was pretty decent
but ultimately unremarkable. Slice-of-life comics, you’ll just never get out of
the 90s for me. I’m curious to know how much control Hogan himself had over
what went into the comic, and how much he was just putting together stuff in
haste. It’s also worth noting here that he was teamed with wunderkind designer
Rian Hughes, who helped set the tone of Revolver, and would also go onto
collaborate with Hogan on his most successful 2000AD series – which we’ll get
to later.
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| Design and art by Rian Hughes |
I wish Revolver had been able to last for 22
issues, just to see what other strips Hogan would’ve slotted into the line-up,
eclectic as it was. Instead, Hogan lost his job as editor, and shuffled over to
2000AD as something of a regular writer for a number of years until David
Bishop took over and told him he didn’t want any more stories about people
talking instead of shooting each other.***
Time to tackle Peter
Hogan, writer at large!
Tharg himself says
that when Peter Hogan got wind of the idea that there should be a series of
Future Shock-type stories focussing on dragons, he demanded that he write them.
And so we got three Dragon Tales.
They’re uniformly dull, I’m sorry to say. Not necessarily bad, but they sure
didn’t linger in the mind of this reader.
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| Even when his leads characters are being nasty too each other, it's all a bit refined. Art by Nigel Dobbyn |
As if to make up for
that, Hogan brought smiles of joy and relief to readers everywhere (or at
least, to me!) with his take on Robo
Hunter. Where Mark Millar had murdered and sleazed his way through a
painfully silly take on Sam Slade, Hogan classed it up with charm and wit.
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| Hogan sets his stall out early, reclaiming Slade for a new series of adventures. Art by Rian Hughes |
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| That's like 4 puns in one panel! Stellar. Art by Rian Hughes |
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| Robot class wars - the essence of RoboHunter Art by Rian Hughes |
Metrobolis, in which angry unionised worker droids kidnap New York City, was a
longer adventure that captures some of the lunacy of Wagner’s original, but at
a more sedate pace. I’ll forgive it many sins for introducing Mayor Helena
Handcart (you have to say it to appreciate it…).
These stories have all been reprinted in the RoboHunter Droid Files vol 2 - but they really deserve another airing in full colour. Hughes' art rendered in greyscale really doesn't do it any favours, especially in the murky print-edition. (It's not so bad digitally).
Time House soon followed, a new series unlike any other in 2000AD, before or
since. I know it’s not much liked, but I really, really liked it at the time,
and still enjoy it now although I’ll confess the jokes haven’t entirely held up
for me. Some of the scenes are a little too silly, a little too light British
sitcom.
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| This is what Downton Abbey would look like in 2000AD Art by Tim Bollard |
But, you know, the adventures of the Time family keeping messes in
check plays as the Beano version of Indigo
Prime. They’re essentially the same basic story idea but one is played for
laughs, the other for brain-warping horror and nausea. Series artist Tim
Bollard takes much of the credit for absolutely matching Hogan’s sensibilities. What actually happens in Timehouse? Well, the various children of Old Father Time run (or amble gently) around moving people from the wrong time periods back to the right ones,
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| Art by Tim Bollard |
usually by walking through various doors in a big old country mansion type house. Class and family comedy is sometimes thrown in. Super charming.
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| Hogan pokes a bit of fun at his editorial overlord Art by Tim Bollard |
And then there’s
Hogan’s biggest contribution to Tharg, as he took over writing duties on
Strontium Dogs, aka the further adventures of Feral and the Gronk, and brought
Durham Red firmly back into that world. Once again, the art had a part to play.
Nigel Dobbyn was a great fit for Hogan’s storytelling, but not really a great
fit for the actual story Hogan wanted to tell.
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| A penal that promises so much, but never quite delivers Art by Nigel Dobbyn |
Mark Harrison was a
great fit for the series, but a terrible fit for Hogan both in style and execution.
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| Yes, that's why you hire Mark 'EPIC SPACE WAR' Harrison, to draw people having a fireside chat... |
The one bright spot
was, for me, Simon Harrison, who showed up near the end to deliver Feral’s
penultimate mutation:
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| This is Hogan knowing when the let the artist do the heavy lifting. Art by Simon Harrison |
(Then there was Trevor
Hairsine, who famously disliked the script so much he gave up and drew in flying
thrill suckers instead. Although ironically, if he’d come aboard earlier it may
have all worked out better!)
But what was the story
actually about? I’m not sure anyone, Hogan himself, really knows, as it all
ended up being drip fed across short stints with long gaps in between, and the
inevitable episodes in Specials that were too important to ignore. Including
Hogan’s first actual work for Tharg (I think?), a Johnny and Wulf flashback
that is nicely vicious:
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| Learning a lesson from John Wagner. Art by John Ridgway |
I hate the Walking
Lady. I get that wise old crones are a standard trope in hero fiction, and it
worked out well in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but here she just exists to be
cryptic and irritating, a fact that the characters themselves point out without
overcoming the problem of her being cryptic and irritating.
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| You said, it, Gronk. Art by Simon Harrison |
It sort of turns out
that she’s there to guide Feral through a series of mutations so he can be
reborn as some sort of mutant messiah or something, but we never get to see the
fruits of that. The Alphabet Men were fun villains who get mixed up in the hunt
for Feral, but again their master plan isn’t given enough depth.
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| But I'll never get tired of putting up pics of them here! And there's those Hogan-esque refined speech patterns again. Art by Nigel Dobbyn |
Basically, there’s a
little too much of the scenes of people sitting around (or walking around)
talking about what’s going on, and not enough action!
All that said, it’s
not actively bad, either, and it’s not as if outgoing writer Garth Ennis had
left much of a direction for the strip to go in, except the whole ‘Feral keeps
on mutating’ thing. Hogan’s Durham Red
stories work a fair bit better, with a lovely bit of early 90s pretension
called ‘mirrors’ exploring what mirrors mean to a vampire who isn’t really a
vampire. And there’s a natural sass to Red herself that Hogan is adept at
drawing out in his dialogue.
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| You get the sense Hogan was always more in tune with Crisis/Revolver than he was with 2000AD; he later moved to write Vertigo comics, which makes a ton of sense. Art by Mark Harrison |
It’s possible
(although unlikely) that if the entire run was collected in order in a single
book it might be quite good. But there’s not enough goodwill in the world from
the readers to make that likely! And to be fair to us readers, for a strip that
was originally about bounty hunters wielding crazy future weapons, Peter
Hogan’s ‘Strontium Dogs’ has way too much chat and not enough punching!
Although a stray RoboHunter episode would be his final
printed series, Hogan maintained a steady supply of Future Shocks and Vector 13s
that speak to his sensibilities rather well. They’re gentle, relatively
well-constructed, if sometimes obvious takes on genre staples.
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| One of many Vector 13 tales to explore the JFK assassination. Art by Lee Sullivan |
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| Yes, that's Hitler getting his due from a demon Art by David Hine |
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| Can you predict the ending..? Art by David Hill |
And I’ll end with a
sequence from an almost entirely silent story, called ‘hush’
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| Art by Jon Haward |
that I’ll now spoil for you by saying how much it puts me in mind of the film Scanners, opening as that film does with a shabby-looking tramp who harbours a secret. It’s also a great example of telling a story without words, obviously a big debt to Jon Haward but I suspect Hogan did a lot of work to suggest the sequences, too.
Peter Hogan was unlike
almost any writer before or since, and that’s always a good thing. And, despite
a rather unceremonious booting from the Prog, he did pretty well for himself in
comics, moving over to pick up from one Neil Gaiman on Sandman spin-off the Dreaming, and then from one Alan Moore
on his Tom Strong series. More
recently he’s had big success with Resident
Alien and Kings Road (drawn by
20000AD stalwarts Phil Winslade and Staz Johnson).
More on Peter Hogan:
A career-spanning
interview on Tripwire:
(which barely touches on his writing for 2000AD, sadly)
-perhaps not
surprisingly, I can’t find much that references his 2000AD work, other than him
pointing out that this was where he first tried writing comics, and was very
much learning on the job. It’s safe to say that virtually everyone thinks he
got better after he moved to Vertigo!
More ‘love’ has been
shown to Revolver:
I’ve written it on myother 2000AD blog
So have various other
people:
WarpedFactor.comhttp://www.warpedfactor.com/2015/02/shoot-me-now-revolver-retrospective.html
WarpedFactor.comhttp://www.warpedfactor.com/2015/02/shoot-me-now-revolver-retrospective.html
And the good people at Everything Comes Back to 2000AD
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| Those cretins! Art by Lee Sullivan |
Robo Hunter: Winnegan’s Fake; Metrobolis
Timehouse
Durham Red: Mirrors
Future Shocks: A Kind of Hush; Time of Peace; Clone Wolf
*Not a 2000AD
character, but in 1992 Tharg thought maybe he could be used as one. And now, of
course, he’s owned by Tharg again – I think?
**The consensus seems
to be that lots of people wanted to read Dare,
but not enough of them wanted to pay for a comic full of other strips they
didn’t want to read. Even Rogan Gosh, which many acknowledge as a masterpiece but all agree is rather hard work.
***As far as I know,
there is no actual bad blood between Bishop and Hogan. And I’m entirely making
up a reason why Hogan’s work was no longer wanted.
