John Robbins Interview

CARTER'S COLUMN has been privileged to have John Robbins as its regular letterer: developing his hand crafted skills to its current digital presence, his draughtsman like sense of speech balloon placement remains consistent and is imperative to making the strip work as a whole. In that creative area he has also contributed his skills across the Atlantic for American comic book publishers such as Dark Horse, Caliber Press and Bluewater Comics.

What follows is a brief interview with the man; read carefully there's some nicely sardonic lines that follow...

Paul H Birch: Growing up in Ireland were there any home grown comics, or comic strips in newspapers; or were you brought up on a diet of British weeklies, supplemented by American stuff and the whole independent scene via comic's shops as you grew up?

John Robbins: As a child I was always indifferent to my Christmas-haul of Beezer and Topper annuals. School provided a monthly Irish-language pamphlet called Siamsa, which contained the odd strip, but comics registered with me only when I discovered the Alan Class titles in the summer of '82; I was heartbroken from losing primary school friends to a variety of secondary schools, and the likes of Creepy Worlds and Sinister Tales spoke to my sense of abandonment and despair.

By '84 I was nearing the end of a newsagent-facilitated affair with Marvel UK weeklies, and mad into Alan Moore; I was reading The Daredevils, Swamp Thing and any Moore one-shot I could mail-order. Regular haunts at the time were two comic-selling shops in the Temple Bar area of Dublin - The Alchemist's Head and The Rue Morgue - and second-hand book shop, Banba, which was always reliable for well-thumbed but pocket-friendly superhero titles from the US.

In '85 I began subscribing to the fanzine Fantasy Advertiser (FA), which heightened my excitement during the Watchmen and Dark Knight years, then introduced me to alternative comics like Yummy Fur and Love & Rockets, and European creators such as Mattotti and Manara. If any Irish comics existed in the '80s, they went undetected by my radar. (Indigenous comics began to perceptibly accrue in Ireland in the mid-nineties. Paddy Brown has the whole sordid history documented at the Irish Comics Wiki: http://irishcomics.wikia.com/wiki/Irish_Comics_Wiki.)

PHB: You started contributing to a few stripzines and independent comics. Had you always drawn? What got you into doing comics?

JR: Benign autism. FA published a one-page strip of mine in '88, but by then I'd already contributed to a few UK small press titles: Valhalla, Terra Waze, and Delirious. I'm less pathologically quiet now, but I still don't occupy
enough space in the world; self-publishing attempts to address this imbalance, I think; and the small press milieu - even with its protocols and complicity - provides a remote social-aspect that can be a good fit for my misanthropic narcissism.

I haven't always drawn, and I don't always draw; it's a compulsion I've never possessed. The artwork element of my comics only interests me in the context of limiting damage to my writing.

In the absence of a real artist to realise recent stories, I've used photographs and screenshots extensively. This method is no more than a place-holder for genuine drawing ability, really, and narrows the scope of imagination I have to play with when penning a story. So, while it might appear that my drawing skills have developed of late, in truth it's my resourcefulness that has.

PHB: Somewhere in those early days Lawrence Hutching (Judge Dredd Megazine artist) recommended you as a letterer to me - A fate you've not been completely able to escape from. I'm mindful of so much poor lettering that's been done, and increasingly so since digital lettering's come along, but you give it a level of craft too few do: what is it you seek to achieve when lettering, either your own work or others?

JR: Thanks, Paul. I think decent lettering is the result of little more than conscientiousness and some semblance of design-sense.

Any tenets to which I adhere are simply neatness-related. With appropriate digital fonts eliminating any issues regarding legibility, I pretty much just try to find a happy medium between maintaining the balance of the artists' compositions and presenting the audience with a read that's not disrupted by any order-uncertainty of captions and balloons.

My only deviation from general rules of lettering would be that I prioritise the look of individual panels over the flow of balloons/captions through the page-as-a-whole. I would maintain the compositional balance of a panel rather than nudge the reader toward the next panel, unless of course there is doubt as to panel-sequence due to inventive and/or misguided page-composition.

PHB: Your fiction's been published in Albedo One magazine, you've written comics, at least one screenplay, and countless short stories. Now your work feels Irish in tone to this outsider but I'm also both warmed and aghast at the small fussy everyday aspects you pick up on so uniquely and are able to weigh importance to... What is it you seek to tell as a story? And what are you ultimate intentions as a writer?

JR: While I have ambitions in my writing, I have no ambitions as a writer. I definitely have a sticky seat in the Irish school of miserablist writing, wherein pupils are disciplined to favour sensitivity over sentimentality. Though I make few concessions to legitimate autobiography-writing, my stuff has much to do with how I manage the world and protect myself against it.

A recent post to the FA site, The Mine-Sweeper, provides a final panel which captures well what I'm about: a pre-pubescent boy plays at sweeping for mines with a phantom mine-sweeper; the reader hopefully gleaning a sense that the emotional detonations he sidesteps are destined to be as much a part of him as those he fails to avoid. When I veer from slice-of-life fare, it's usually toward supernatural territory. That element usually exists as suggestion only, and issues raised in a story aren't addressed by the kind of device or story-fulcrum a sci-fi/horror audience would prefer.

Hence, those fussy everyday aspects take on greater significance - in The Monkey-Head Complaint a contrary mother histrionically winces at her first sip of tea and berates her son for over-sugaring it; a few panels later she accidentally knocks-over the tea and is distraught: "Just when I was enjoying the cup," she says. Such minutiae are revealing in the context of characters and relationships, I think.

PHB: You still appear to be as keen as ever towards self-publishing. What are your future plans as a creator, in comics or otherwise?

JR: My latest comic is Mortal Tedium, which is available alongside the fine work of Phil Barrett at the Blackshapes shop (http://www.blackshapes.com/comics.htm).

Much like my life thus far, my self-publishing has gone pretty much according to no plan; it'll probably continue in a similar vein. Maybe fatalism is a plan, I don't know.

PHB: The ultimate last joke, could be: but I hope not! John, many thanks.

For more about John Robbins visit: www.mylifeinshorts.blogspot.com