Meeting the Talented Kek W

I recently have had fun talking to Kek W. This is a name (not a pseudonym) that should be familiar to readers of 2000AD new and old. He has worked on a number of thrills. Chatting to him about his time working for Tharg and beyond was fascinating. I asked him for some trivia about himself outside of writing comics and he kindly offered me three facts:

1) I collect analogue synthesisers.

2) At the moment I am mainly watching: early 60s British Science Fiction like A for Andromeda and old Turkish Yeşilçam Era SF / action movies.

3) I own more Denis Wheatley novels than is healthy for a grown man!

Paul: When did you start reading reading comics? How old were you, and when that relationship began? Can you describe the very first comics that really impressed you?

Kek-W: I read British educational comics like Treasure and Look & Learn, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_(magazine)) We’re going back a looong way, but I can remember reading a version of The Water Babies. Wind in the Willows, The Borrowers, stuff like that. The fully-painted artwork in those early / mid-sixties comics – the beautifully-illustrated ‘fairy-tale’ aspect of all that – stayed with me down through the years and played into my work later on in things like THE ORDER with John M Burns. The endless, unspoiled forests of medieval Germany and so forth. When I saw John’s initial artwork for that series – that fairy-tale feel – I was transported back to being a young child again; it summoned up that sense of wonder and became a feedback loop. Of course, John had almost certainly illustrated some of the things I read as a young child – so it all went full circle.

Kek W: I also enjoyed Dan Dare in The Eagle, The Trigan Empire and reading Garth in my dad’s copies of the Daily Mirror. But my favourites were the b&w reprints of early issues of The Hulk and The Fantastic Four in Wham! and Smash! I have vivid memories of time-travelling pirate Ben Grimm and that freaky first Puppet Master tale. That time Dr. Doom sent the Baxter Building into space. My first full-colour Marvel comic was Marvel Collectors Item Classic #3, which reprints both The Hulk and the FF – which is probably why I bought it! – and it’s a beaut. It re-presents the story where The Human Torch found the Sub-Mariner. Wow. If you read something like that at 6 or 7, it’s gonna change you for life. Basically, Jack Kirby rewired my brain.

Paul: How did you approach first getting published? Also did you receive a lot of knock backs or rejection letters? For many writers and artists collecting a handful of them is almost a rite of passage.

Kek W: Before I wrote comics professionally I wrote short prose stories that I sent off to various Indie magazines and anthologies in the late 80s / early 90s, some of which got published. Before that, in the late 70s, I drew short comic strips and spot illos for various publications and put out Human Debris, a Punk zine, with my friends. In the early 70s, I contributed short stories, articles and art to comic-book fanzines. To be honest, I’ve never really thought about any this before, but I now realise I’ve spent most of my life submitting work! (laughs). In the days before email and the internet, I would type or hand-write submission letters and post off manuscripts, stories, essays, art, whatever. I've been doing it since my early teens. I've Never had an agent or anything resembling a strategy, I just got on and did it. I was always making art, music or writing at home – it was just something I did. Part of my personality. At some point around 12 or 13, I guess I decided to see if I could get stuff published, just for the thrill of seeing it in print. Initially, it was fantasy or comic-book related zines like Fantasy Unlimited, things I read myself. I would bash stuff out on an old Edwardian manual typewriter my Dad got for me for a couple quid from a junk shop across the road called Mabel’s Dress Agency (laughs). Honestly, there was nothing else I would have rather been doing, apart from reading comics and SF books.

Above: One of Kek W's characters Rose O'Rion, illustrated here by Dylan Teague.

Kek W: Yes, of course, rejection comes with the territory: even now, I get more things rejected than accepted. Although these days a lot of editors tend to just not  reply, rather than send a rejection-slip or a short ‘Sorry Letter’. So you just send the work somewhere else or sock-drawer it ‘til it finds its place in the sun. Sometimes, it can take 10, 20, or 30 years for a piece to find a home. Obviously, rejection can sometimes be disappointing, but my advice would be: don’t ever see it as a failure – it’s not. Everything you do is practice for something else.

Paul: You are certainly well known now to the readers of 2000AD. Can I ask how you went about getting Tharg's initial approval? What was your very first story in the pages of the Galaxy's Greatest Comic?

Kek W: I was a fan of Shaky Kane's work in Deadline. We started corresponding and became friends, then drifted into batting around ideas and collaborating. In 1994, I mentioned an idea for a Vietnam War Zombie story to him which he then pitched to Alan McKenzie, who was Tharg at the time. Alan bought the idea which became a 2000AD Future Shock called "Nightmare Patrol".

Paul: I enjoyed volume two of Canon Fodder titled Dark Matter. Working with Chris Weston must have been a thrill. It is a shame there was not a volume three, I believe there was some disagreement over ownership of the strip, Is that right? 

Kek W: I really enjoyed working on Canon Fodder with Chris – it was a LOT of fun – and I think it could have been the start of a very fruitful working partnership if I had not been thwarted by a change of editorial regime and then getting chronic ME for the next 3 to 4 years. Yes, there was definitely an ownership dispute, but all I know is what I was told at the time by David Bishop. My own memory of events differs from Bishop’s subsequent accounts, so what actually happened is anybody’s guess.

Kek W: David Bishop told me he had just sacked Mark Millar, Grant Morrison and Peter Hogan, and inferred I was next. Whether he sacked Mark first and that provoked a legal claim against the character as a response, or whether it was the other way round, or none of the above, I’ve no idea. I bumped into Mark at a convention around that time and he said some very kind words about series #2 which I greatly appreciated. I only took on the strip after Alan Mac assured me that Mark was done with it.

Paul: Did you have any storylines planned out for the future of the series?

Kek W: There was going to be a third series with Chris as the artist, but I think Mark asked him to walk away. Gary Erskine was briefly mentioned as a possible replacement before things spiraled into legal stuff and stasis. Yes, I had started planning Canon Fodder series #3: it was called “The Reformation”. As an aside, around the same time I was also offered series #4 of Revere (with John Smith’s blessing), but that was nixxed by Bishop when he took over.

Paul: That rather neatly bring us onto Indigo Prime. It is another 2000Ad property that you took over from an existing writer. In this case it was John Smith, but this one was certainly a great success. How did this come about? You were again fortunate to have fabulous artistic talent to work with. How did you approach the project? 

Kek W: Well, the previous writer went off-grid and stopped responding to Editorial, so I was asked if I wanted to pick up the series. It was a no-brainer. When I was working with Chris Weston on Canon Fodder back in the 90s he sent me stats of his art for some of the early Indigo Prime stories. It had all the stuff in it that appealed to me as a reader at the time: big ideas, bizarre concepts and surreal, oblique storytelling. I had been reading the ReSearch and Amok books back in the 80s, I was into the occult, strange tech, outsider art, etc, etc so early Indigo Prime resonated with me. 20+ years later, it still did, but in different ways. Picking it up was initially a challenge: there were no series notes, no outline, nothing – just two scripts and the art Lee Carter had done for them. There was no hint of where it might go next. I was left with what the Surrealists called ‘an exquisite corpse’.

 

Kek W: My approach was to soak myself in those two scripts and then read, read and re-read the different series that came before it until I lost myself in the characters and the cadences of the storytelling. I completely immersed myself in the 2010’s Indigo Prime vibe until it almost became automatic and something I could channel. I then extrapolated a new story outwards from the existing two scripts, pulling in any hints, story seeds or unresolved threads left hanging from earlier series. My main concern was to minimise any ‘joins’ that might show between the two sections, to try and make it as seamless a read as possible. The current IP team had the writer William Burroughs as an agent and I had corresponded with Burroughs back in the early 90s before he died, so that was one advantage I had. Bill carried a lot of guilt and grief over the death of his wife, Joan (he had shot her), so that was folded into the story. On a personal level, I had moved on a great deal from 1990's-Me and although I was still in love with big, widescreen ideas, I also wanted to focus more on the characters in this iteration of the strip. I tried to drill down into the cast – sometimes literally – and find out what made them tick. Mostly, I just wanted to have fun with the strip.

Kek W: A quick aside: When I was finding my feet with the first series, for a laugh, I generated a rough Indigo Prime Time-Line where a line or two described a story-event that would potentially generate a single series. I ended up brainstorming about 25 to 30 years worth of stories! (laughs) But then I never used any of them! (laughs). Instead, I ended up gravitating toward a looser, more improvised style for Indigo Prime – to retain the freewheeling feel of the earlier series. I now tend to go with a lightly plotted series outline, but with key scenes mapped out with detailed notes and page breakdowns for each episode prior to scripting. So far it seems to be working. Actually, writing this has just reminded me of something: A pitch of mine that was rejected by Andy Diggle for 2000AD many years ago had an Indigo Prime-ish feel (they weren’t running the series at the time, so I thought: why not?) and had a Neanderthal as part of its core team – and this was well over a decade before Unthur Dak appeared. Looking back, that now feels like an oddly Indigo Prime-esque precog flash-forward thing (laughs). Maybe I’m a Freelance Psilencer.

 

Kek W: Yeah, Lee Carter is a phenomenally talented illustrator! I’ve been blessed to work with some extremely gifted collaborators over the years. Sometimes I have to pinch myself. When new art, colours or lettering arrives in my in-box I still get the same buzz as I did thirty years ago from opening a parcel in the post and discovering that something I wrote is no longer an abstract idea but a beautiful physical object – that other people have manifested it and brought it to life. It’s an incredible feeling.

Paul: You mentioned that you are a huge fan of Jack Kirby and superhero comics. You also mentioned you are "used" to rejection letters and submit material a great deal to a variety of publishers to this day. Can I guess you may have sent story ideas to Marvel and DC Comics. Is there any reason you have not broken into that market as a writer?

Kek W: Well, I did do something for Marvel. Kinda. A pitch I submitted to a Marvel editor in the 90s ended up getting used and published. Except: the editor gave my plot, title, etc to one of his mates to write, not me, and it was published as an inventory issue later that year, title and all. Of course, the editor never responded to my request for a credit or a plot payment, or to any subsequent mail asking him to take a look at my other pitches, as my ideas were clearly good enough to use (laughs). A little while later, Marvel brought in a form that you had to sign before they would even look at your pitches and which basically assigned them the right to do whatever they wanted with them and indemnified the company against potential litigation, etc. I’m guessing the practice I experienced may have been a bit more, erm, widespread and one victim may have even lawyered up (laughs). Who knows. It might have been the first time that a pitch of mine was ‘borrowed’ by a company and given to another writer to write, but it certainly hasn’t been the last.

Note: The above photo I hope is slightly funny and a little amusing. In the intro Kek W mentioned he was a fan of Dennis Wheatley.

Kek W: I got asked to pitch at DC-Vertigo in the late 90s by Shelly Roeberg (now Bond), but I never got a response to the pitches I sent in. I suspect this was because they were crap (laughs). Also, my being obsessed by Doom Patrol probably wasn’t a good look (laughs.) The reality is: I probably still wasn’t quite ready at that point. Or maybe I hadn’t mastered the Art of the Pitch yet. Not long after, I spiralled into ME, and brainfog. Chronic fatigue meant writing took a back-seat for the next few years. I was focused on just surviving. In the 90s, all communication with comic-book companies was glacial and conducted by snailmail or the occasional transatlantic phone-call. When I recovered in the 00s I tried to pick up lost threads by emailing Shelly and asking if I could pitch again. I never got a response. In recent years, though, I’ve ended up doing a bunch of comic and prose work at AHOY Comics whose staff include ex-Vertigo editors Tom Peyer and Stuart Moore, and I have to say that working with them has been one of the most fun and rewarding experiences of the comic-book side of my writing career.

Kek W: Having grown up reading Silver Age Marvel, etc, it always felt like working for the Big Two was the Be-All and End-all of comic-book writing when I was younger – it’s not – and, up until only a few years ago, writing for Marvel was still quite high on my bucket-list. It’s increasingly unlikely that’ll ever happen and I’m increasingly less bothered by that fact. Every few years I might have an email go-round with an editor at one or the other company, but that’s about it. Yeah, it’s sometimes frustrating to see people who have only ever written 2 or 3 comics suddenly getting a Big Two series, but good luck to ‘em. I think I’d rather have a fun, fulfilling and looong career in which I get to create loads of goofy, crazy stuff in among some slow-burn, long-form quality creations rather than be "This Years Thing" and get chewed up, burnt out, and then spat out by a corporate sausage machine (laughs). Having said that, I’m available next week to write Man-Thing. (laughs) Or The Hulk.

Paul: Could you please tell me about the origins and inspiration behind your book The Reconstructed Man? 

Kek W: THE RECONSTRUCTED MAN is a short Historical-Horror-Conspiracy-Thriller novella set at various points in time between 1713 and 2010 which I describe as "James Patterson for weirdos" or "Dan Brown on brown acid" (laughs) – ‘cos it also has a slight New Weird type tinge to it. The historical side of things is messy, deranged, disease-ridden, crap-splattered and psychedelic – more Ben Wheatley than Bernard Cornwell. It’s a beguiling, rollicking, cross-genre read that has something for everyone. It follows a 300 year manhunt for a man who becomes immortal following a nightmarish 18^th century medical experiment. Everyone’s after the poor blighter – they want to dissect him to learn the secret of Eternal Youth – so he’s been on the run for three centuries. He’s lonely and paranoid, can’t trust anyone, has to completely change his identity every few years. We meet him in 2010 when he’s cornered and running out of places to hide, trying to hang onto his sanity. We learn his backstory, how he ended up here. The book pieces together his past adventures and the different strands of his personality; the people he’s known, the women he loved. In 2010 he finally reaches the end of the line. The net is closing in on him. He has nothing left except one last, desperate throw of the dice...

Kek W: In terms of inspiration, I’ve always loved manhunt books: stories where a desperate, wrongly-accused man is on the run and everyone’s after him. Things like Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear or John Buchan’s The Thirty Nine Steps; the paranoid protagonists of dramas like The Invaders, Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Philip K Dick novels. I wanted to do my own take on something like that. A fast-paced thriller with some fantastical elements. Also, I had been thinking that living forever was not a particularly desirable proposition; that it was riddled with pitfalls and was potentially a bit crap (laughs). If you were immortal you would be cursed to lose everyone and everything you’d grown to love, over and over again. The authorities would want to take you apart, study your blood, tissue and DNA to discover your secret. You’d never know a moment’s peace. It seemed a desperately sad and lonely position to be in, so I wanted to explore some of those ideas and figure out how a human being might deal with all that. THE RECONSTRUCTED MAN is my answer. It combines horror with humanity, humour and hope.

Paul: Over the last twenty to thirty years computers and technology have impacted the way comics are produced. This would be especially true for artists, but have those changes altered your approach to writing a great deal? Also, has it changed your reading habits? Do you occasionally use a tablet or laptop to read digital comics?

Kek W: No, I don't generally read comics on a tablet or a laptop. I might browse them a bit or check out someone’s work, but that’s all. I grew up with physical media – the tactile aspect of reading books and comics is part of the experience for me, along with the smell of old books, etc; it’s ingrained in my synapses – plus I spend too much time staring at my phone, tablet and computer screens all day. It’s an activity I’d like to decrease.

Paul: Do you have any fun or funny conventions stories you can share? All creators have at least one annecdote in their locker do they not?

Kek W: Not really. They're either stories that couldn't be publicly shared, or things that were personally interesting to me, but potentially boring to other people, like meeting fellow creators that I only knew online or by reputation and them being really nice people.... I do remember going to a convention that shall remain nameless with my friend Mick and a sex-worker trying to pick us up in the hotel. Then we bumped into my old pal Shaky Kane in the bar who introduced us to Philip Bond who then showed us a portfolio of design work for a pornographic circus strip he'd been commissioned to draw for a magazine. It was like a bizarre fever dream, but I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine it.

Paul: What are you working on right now? What projects would you like to shamelessly promote?

Kek W: Well, THE RECONSTRUCTED MAN is just one of three books I’ve recently put out. Its anti-matter bookend twin is a collection of prose stories called THE NEW ABNORMAL – “An Anthology of the Uncanny and the Odd”. It’s Post-War British Science-Fiction meets The New Weird meets Soviet SF meets Alt.Historical Strangeness meets Cold War Paranoia meets Orwellian Absurdism meets a creeping sense of monochrome unease. I describe these as, er, “Philip K Dick if he'd grown up in a suburban 1950s Semi.” Or “A Carry On film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky." (laughs). They are strange, creepy little stories. THE RECONSTRUCTED MAN and THE NEW ABNORMAL have complementary, colour-coded covers so that they look cool when they’re sat together on a book shelf. I’m hoping these will be the beginning of a series of short novels and collections. Rounding off the first phase of releases is WONDER FUNNIES – a deranged, eye-poppin', poop-sniffin' 24 page A5 full-colour psychedelic surfpunk comic that collects strips by myself and the amazing Polish illustrator Lukasz Kowalczuk. It’s probably the complete opposite of the two prose books: demented, lurid and totally stoopid. It features characters like Conspiracy Dog, Surf Wolf and the Trashbots – a group of Transformers-esque robots who like to wallow in garbage and filth. (laughs) it’s Punk AF! These will all be on my merch table at comic conventions and book fairs, but you can also get ‘em off me for £4 + £2 postage each. I’m trying to keep things as cheap as possible in these tough, strapped-for-cash times. DM me on social media or hit me up via https://about.me/kekw

 

Kek W:  I’m right now in the middle of writing two series for 2000AD. The first I’m not allowed to talk about yet, but the other one was teased online yesterday: it’s a new series of INDIGO PRIME by Lee Carter and myself called BLACK MONDAY. I started setting this storyline up a couple years ago: Indigo Prime has been liquidated following the death of CEO Clive Vista, its operatives scattered and on the run, hunted by the company’s new owners who want to get their hands on Vista’s data – his final and most valuable secret. It’s a wild, wild ride and features a mixture of old and new faces from the IP multiverse.

Paul: That soulds like a lot of fun.

Kek W: I have other work-for-hire comic-book projects in rotation in Europe and America, but they’re mired in NDAs and mud, so I can’t tell you about them (laughs). I’m also talking to some media companies about assorted things, and there are some film projects that are currently moving at glacial speeds and may or may not happen, like these things do. Or don’t. I’m actually pretty busy – but not with much I can openly talk about (laughs). I can, however, mention EDWARD MONARCH POLICE MYSTERIES – a really cool, creator-owned strip featuring a strange Edwardian occult investigator by myself, artist Mauro Longhini and lettering legend, Annie Parkhouse. I think that’s coming out later this year in the 1900 anthology.

Note: All images are entirely copywrighted to the writer and artists involved. THE FRANKENSTEIN KID (c) copyright Kek-w and Charlie Gillespie

Kek W: Work on a new prose book is starting to pick up speed. I seem to be inching toward mainstream respectability (laughs), grafting weirdness onto a more straightforward commercial thriller chassis. I may have accidentally created a new genre with this one, though! Someone once described me as “a more accessible Grant Morrison” – I’m not sure that’s true, but it’s a tag I can definitely live with (laughs). The reality is: not many people are writing the sorts of things I like to read, so basically I just decided to do it myself. I have assorted creator-owned strips on the go with amazing illustrators like Charlie Gillespie, Warwick Fraser-Coombe and others that are currently looking for sympathetic homes -- the strips, not the artists -- so if you are an editor / publisher whose wallet is bulging with tenners, please get in contact (laughs). Similarly, I’m always looking for artistic collaborators to work on a wide range of genres and styles – Horror, SF, Humour, Action-Adventure, Pulp, you name it.

Paul: May I please ask why you use the name Kek W to be published? Is it a desire to remain mysterious? Are you aware it is a move in World of Warcraft?

Kek W: I've been called Kek for almost 50 years - long boring / personal story - it's now my name, has been since then. There was never any intent to be 'mysterious' - it's not a pen-name or pseudonym - the name was 'given' to me - and I just migrated into that identity all those years ago. Long, long before World of Warcraft ever existed. :-)   

Paul: So as a writer where do you see yourself in five years time?

Kek W: Still not writing The Hulk. Or Man-Thing. (laughs)....

Paul: Imagine writing both at the same time.

Kek W: This question is just basically an attempt to trick me into revealing my mutant pre-cog talents, isn’t it, Paul? (laughs)

Paul: Not at all.

Kek W: I’ve no idea where I’ll be in five years time. I’m not sure I’d want to know. Precognition, like immortality, is potentially a major bummer IMHO. Hopefully, I’ll still be writing. I can’t see myself ever stopping – it’s hardwired in me, it is like a biological imperative. When I’m unable to write I get twitchy, restless,and  thoughts and ideas start piling up and leaking out of my eye-sockets. Metaphorically speaking, not literally. Though sometimes… (laughs)

Paul: Thank God. That sounds rather uncomfortable.

Kek W: I’m restless, curious and easily bored. I have a short attention span. I like novelty. I tend to have lists in my head of things that I’d like to try out or have a crack at, rather than a life game-plan. I’m not ambitious. I write what I write because I have to if that makes sense? Because I enjoy it, because something sounds like a daft, fun idea, or it’s a genre or medium I’ve never written for before. And if I can make some sort of living out of it as well, then that’s great. I write because I’m restless, because there are things I want to say, stories I have to tell. I write because it’s fun and it completes me in some way that makes my synapses fizzle or makes me giggle, not because an agent or manager is telling me this would be a good market to piggyback upon this year.

Note: CONSPIRACY DOG (c) Copyright Kek-w and Lukasz Kowalczuk

Paul: I have not asked you about AI art. Do you have any thoughts?

Kek W: As for what we (mistakenly) call AI becomes ‘smarter’,ie they use bigger and bigger LLMs, and automates more low-end writing tasks, I think it’s increasingly important for writers to develop unique and individual human voices. It is vital to create new genres, to tell stories and make art that reflects our lives and times and experiences, even if – no, especially – if those stories and genres are niche. Look on the shelves of any national bookshop chain, the listings of your local multiplex cinema or even bloody Netflix, and see how generic and interchangeable the bulk of their product has become. Derivative, formulaic, familiar brands; remixes, reboots and xeroxes: content that can often be summed up with a handful of convenient keywords or descriptive tags. Sure, some gems or maverick voices or quality show-runners still shine through, but we are in an era where stories often feel like they are designed, written and packaged by a faceless sub-committee. AI starts to feel less like automation replacing human input and more like the almost-inevitable next step of the last forty years or so.

Paul: I appreciate the thought, which is scary. I didn't ask about forty years into the future. How about the next five years?

Kek W: So, yeah, in five years time, I’ll still be writing. But I’ll be writing something different to what I’m writing now (laughs). If by some terrible twist of Fate I turn into a content-spewing, sausage-machine of a corporate hack you have my permission to shoot me in the head with a dum-dum bullet, Paul. (laughs)

Paul: I would never do that but I thank you for so much of your time. It has been a blast.