No. 106 Peter Hogan

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.

Art by Nigel Dobbyn

Creator credits:

Tharg’s Dragon Tales

Timehouse

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)

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.

Handy with wordplay, puns, and literary references. 

It's the Alan Grant / Peter Milligan school of literary references. I love it!
Art by Rian Hughes

Based on the kind of stories he wrote, he may have been the nicest person ever to work for 2000AD. Like, a classic Hogan Future Shock is where an ancient wise tree imparts great wisdom. It's even called 'A time of Peace'. It's nice.

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. 

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.

Design and art by Rian Hughes

A crude comparison can be made between Revolver and StarLord. Like that ill-fated 1978 comic, Revolver was glossier, prettier, cleverer and had (some) amazing stories in it. It also failed, for who-knows-what reasons. There’s a case to be made that Hogan wasn’t cut out to be an editor of a monthly comic because he wasn’t mercenary enough. As in, he made sure the strips were good, but failed to make keep an eye on whether people actually wanted to read them.**

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.

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.

Hogan sets his stall out early, reclaiming Slade for a new series of adventures.
Art by Rian Hughes

It’s mostly here that Hogan’s fondness for wordplay comes to the fore. It’s also important to stress just how much it warmed this reader (Me! I’m talking about me!) to see Sam Slade and Hoagy having fun and enjoying simple, clean adventures without ultraviolence and misogyny getting in the way. Rian Hughes on art made the whole thing very retro-future, giving a spin on the noir influence of Sam Spade by way of future fashions.

That's like 4 puns in one panel! Stellar.
Art by Rian Hughes

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. 

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, 

 

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.

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.

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.

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:

This is Hogan knowing when the let the artist do the heavy lifting.
Art by Simon Harrison

Maybe I’m just a sucker for Harrison’s art, but he seemed able to work with Hogan’s languorous pace to let the reader drink in atmosphere and awesome visuals.

(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:

Learning a lesson from John Wagner.
Art by John Ridgway

 But commits the sin of kicking off Hogan's ongoing lark with the Walking Lady.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of many Vector 13 tales to explore the JFK assassination.
Art by Lee Sullivan

Yes, that's Hitler getting his due from a demon
Art by David Hine

My favourites are a classic take on clones, one of those stories where the ending is so apt you can’t help but think you should have guessed it from panel 1 – except you don’t (or at least, I didn’t)…

Can you predict the ending..?
Art by David Hill

And I’ll end with a sequence from an almost entirely silent story, called ‘hush’

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

And the good people at Everything Comes Back to 2000AD

Those cretins!
Art by Lee Sullivan

Personal favourites:

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.