Early Monday morning (Sunday evening for us in the Americas), John Allison published the first page of a new webcomic, Dust and Bones. Webcomic readers were excited to see that it was new Giant Days material. But exciting as it is to have new Giant Days, what was even more exciting for his Patreon subscribers, who got early access to the entire story, is that it’s, of all things, an All-Star Batman crossover. An outlaw comic.
The introduction mentions a 2016 pitch Allison had made to DC editorial about the possibility of a crossover that ended up going nowhere. It ends, “In 2021, I decided that I wanted to draw a new Giant Days comic. This was the only unused plot I had left.”
I spoke with Allison over Zoom about the comic, his process and what might be coming up next for him.
Mark Turetsky: Just to restate it: This comic is being done without any kind of clearance or permission from Detective Comics Comics.
John Allison: Yeah, that’s right. I just made it. I made it for my own amusement. I started it knowing that it was not a money-making activity. It was more a spiritually revitalizing activity. But no, I don’t think DC ever got the message from BOOM (Studios, publisher of Giant Days in print). I checked with my old editor who doesn’t work at BOOM anymore, and she said that it probably never made it through to DC editorial. This is very much a kind of zombie project. It’s simply been thrashing around in the woods for a long time, and now it’s broken out into the light of town. And we have to look at it now. We can’t just get annoyed with it in the background.
Mark: It’s funny, I was listening to your interview on WMQ&A from 2019, and you laid out the entire thing, so yeah, this has been percolating for a while, right?
John: Yeah, I think when Giant Days was nominated for an Eisner originally — it was nominated for two — I was filled with a kind of hubris, some might say an aggressive bigheadedness, I could pitch anything at this point to my editors, and they would have to take it in. And there was a BOOM/DC crossover, there was Lumberjanes/Gotham Academy. So I thought, well, you know, this isn’t so different. I mean, it’s a bit different. But I know Lisa Wood (Tula Lotay), who worked on All-Star Batman and Ollie Moss who’s done covers for it, and I’ve met Jock a few times, and Declan Shalvey, who’s worked on the book as well, so like, if the editors went to any of these people and said, “this foolish boy from England wants to do a crossover,” they’d say, “Oh yes, John, well, he’s the greatest man we’ve ever met.” And then I would be ushered into a sort of Bruce Wayne-style mansion, sat at a very opulent table and told to get on with it. But I didn’t expect results. It was just the sort of nutty trial balloon that you fire off when you’ve been given carte blanche to sort of do a bit more than you normally would.
Mark: And so, are you at all worried about a knock on the door from the DC comics police?
John: No, because I’m not charging for it. Are they going to sue every comics artist who draws pictures of Batman for money at conventions? Everyone who draws headshots of Batman for cash? And where am I in the pecking order before all those guys when I’m not charging anything? I’m literally drawing this for my own amusement. I put it on Patreon, but those people are my subscribers anyway. It’s not a special thing to Patreon where you pay extra. It’s just me firing more of the garbage from my garbage sluice into the paywalled area of my website as far as I’m concerned.
If they got really cross with me, if for some reason it upset them, I’d simply go through and redraw the whole thing. I’d just redraw Bruce Wayne. I’ve already come up with a name for him if I ever have to do that, and Batman will become Whiskers, his entire costume will be themed around cats and Garfield. Alfred Pennyworth would be renamed Parsley, and they would be Parsley and Whiskers. This was given to me by friend the cartoonist Rachel Smith. She didn’t come up with the whole cat identity, because I was very keen to theme it Garfield-style. I think Jim Davis is very open to these things in a way that Detective Comics Comics is perhaps not. And that would be even funnier as far as I’m concerned. And I will write a long disclaimer saying “this is what I’ve had to do. It was Batman, it’s not anymore.” But I don’t see it.
Mark: Like Mike Allred having to redraw Princess Diana for X-Statix.
John: Or when Rob Liefeld left Marvel with a load of Captain America stuff, so he just invented a character, an old sort of American fighting man, or just came up with a new one, called, like “Shield-Guy” and just marched on. But the other thing is, and I don’t want to go on about this at length, but although I’m not actually a big fan of Batman, it is a loving tribute to Darwyn Cooke.
Mark: I noticed the dedication to him at the beginning.
John: I met Darwyn Cooke at the Lakes International Comic Art Festival when I was doing the 24-hour comic, and I wasn’t that aware of his role in things. I knew about Bruce Timm’s work on Batman The Animated Series, but I never got across Darwyn’s work. It was a name I knew, the same way you know loads of comics names when you don’t read the comics. And I met him, and it was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. I was doing a 24-hour comic, so I was sort of slightly altered anyway. And I remember Darwyn Cooke kind of staggering, because he’d basically been in the bar all day, having been on a trans-Atlantic flight, and just staggering in. I remember him coming up to me, I had brought my Cintiq with me, he looks over my shoulder and goes, “Argh, no originals! You’re not going to be able to buy your wife a kitchen.” And he had such presence, and I liked him so much. I remember saying something quite — I was so tired — and I remember being a little bit rude to him, not in a mean way, but just like, [politely exasperated] “Yeah, OK.” But, I loved him, and I got into him straight after that, and I looked at him and he had the perfect attitude to comics, he has the perfect way of drawing comics that works every time. So I thought when I make a Batman, it’ll be a Darwyn Cooke-style Batman. It can’t be anything else, really.
Mark: I’ll just confess, I’ve read very little Batman, and none of All-Star Batman, which this is–
John: A very powerful tribute to!
Mark: But my colleague Robert Secundus asks, “Two things define All-Star Batman: Batman says a lot of swears, and Batman does a Smokey and the Bandit. Will either be a factor in this historic crossover?”
John: I use the word “bastard” in the story, which I consider a little strong, but I wanted my 9-year-old nephew to be able to read it, and therefore I have not leaned heavily on the swear button. And “Batman does a Smokey and the Bandit,” now, obviously I know the film Smokey and the Bandit with Burt Reynolds, but I do not know how Batman gets on CB radio and evades the police.
Mark: He does get in his special British Bat-Auto.
John: Yeah, he does, and you do get to see his Knight Rider-style dials and things, which was again, very important to me that I should address. The practicalities of what the Batmobile would be in the U.K., a country with a lot of roundabouts, which might confound the “Bat-Computer,” if you will. And the auto-driving functions of the Batmobile. I thought very carefully about what a British Batmobile would need to be. It would need to be more compact for our slightly narrower roads, and to get into our parking spaces, which are always in short supply. And also it would need to deal with roundabouts and caravans being towed on the roads. And so I based it on a Vauxhall Astra, which is a mid-priced hatchback. But no, there’s no CB radio, but I can always, should DC Comics get on the phone and say we need Giant Days/Batman #2: Return To Gotham, I can absolutely consider the Smokey-related issue and perhaps get some more swears into it as well.
Mark: Why did you choose to set it in this very particular era of Giant Days?
John: It was expediency. I didn’t want to have any plotlines from the Giant Days series intervene in it. I wanted the weather to be a certain way. There were always things going on, and I wanted it to be from a quiet time in the series. So I found that the quietest time was when they all moved in together into one house in the second year. A lot of the stressy plotlines that occur in that second year haven’t started yet. So it’s just a nice little window where you can drop in a story: They’re all together, they’re in the house, they can hang out together. It’s very easy to move them around between locations. Because a lot of my comic is just walking people from point A to point B. I’m finding ways to get them to different locations from wherever they live, and that was the easiest way.
Mark: When you were writing Giant Days, there was a possibility maybe that things could exist within a sort of protracted timeline. Where they’re just sort of at university forever. But you very consciously chose to say, well, now it’s their holiday, it’s exam time, and that sets a very definitive timeline on where things are. Why did you choose to do it like that? Is it because you had a definitive ending in mind?
John: It’s to lend structure to it. Because you never see them at university really. They only attend a few classes in the course of 54 issues. In 1,200 pages or whatever, you never really see them doing any serious book learning. The series is about domesticity. In order to move them through the different phases of their domesticity, the dorms in the first year, co-living in the second year, them being split apart in the third year. It was a way to explore three different ways of a college friendship existing. And the stresses it’s under.
Bad Machinery kind of worked in real time as well. The idea was that I would tell the whole of their upper school life. I never quite got there with that, because it just ended up being such a vast quantity of material, it was too much for me, but with Giant Days, it was a manageable amount, it was three years, 18 issues per year. It felt like enough. Less, 12 issues per year, wouldn’t have been enough, and anymore would have been too much was my feeling. By the end of Giant Days, I was absolutely down to the last idea. Everything I wanted to do with it, apart from the Batman story, I had done. That was why. It was just the way my brain works. That’s the way I divide things up to make things easy for myself.
Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion to our interview, where we discuss Allison’s mysterious new Bat-Villain, 147, making this crossover special a “key” issue!
