SI SPURRIER Flashes through the World of the Written Word
- Andrew Irvin
- Mar 13
- 28 min read
Interviews Editor, Andrew Irvin, welcomes Si Spurrier to the Yeti Cave for a career-spanning conversation on the range of titles he has released, running through his ongoing work today.
COMIC BOOK YETI: Si, thank you for your willingness to join Comic Book Yeti for a conversation on the breadth of your work. It’s been a warm summer here in Melbourne - how are you gearing up in England as the year rolls on?
SI SPURRIER: Spring is springing all around me. The good news is that I’m just back from a trip to the ComicsPro event in Glendale, California, and notwithstanding the usual jetlag and airplane plague it’s made me more upbeat and positive about comics than I’ve felt in a very long time. The futureproofing is finally happening.
I should also warn you that I haven’t done a holistic interview like this for a while. You catch me just as I emerge from a sort of public-sphere dormancy. Which means - and you could see this as a good thing or a terrible thing - this document is likely to be long. And painfully honest. And quite possibly an act of career self-sabotage. I am Writer, hear me purge.
Ok. I have a glass of decent Minervois and a bowl of toasted corn next to me. Let’s do this.
CBY: This is well worth the wait! I am excited to provide a platform for this sort of open-ended discourse, particularly given how many interviews are schedule-pressed to hit a campaign deadline or promotional window, which preclude further exploration. You’ve had an incredibly prolific and laudable career working across numerous British and American publishers, with multiple Eisner nominations for some of my favorite work in the era. Can you share a bit about your early independent work? How did it lead to a five-year run for 2000 AD (which you began, appropriately, right at the start of the 21st century)? What avenues of engagement or figures in your life drew you into the world of comics?
SS: I came to comics pretty late in the game, I think. I’d always been keen on storytelling but didn’t discover the sequential form until I was about 16. Judge Dredd: Judgement On Gotham, of all things; Simon Bisley, ultraviolence, humour blacker than dragonshit. It backflipped all my expectations of the medium, all that clean-lined, morally simplistic spandex stuff I’d instinctively avoided. I’m not sure it was quite love at first sight, but it was definitely I Need To Know More at first sight.
2000AD is the gateway drug. Five different episodic tales being told in every weekly comic. Each 4-6 page chapter being - to quote Andy Diggle, the editor at the time - a shot glass full of rocket fuel. None of this lazy decompression nonsense. No needlessly-indulgent splash pages every time a character says something halfway significant. The term “punk” is overused and not entirely accurate, but what 2000AD was, most of all, was angry. The sort of dense, distilled anger that howls one thing but whispers something else. It covered the gamut. Crime, science, romance, politics. Politics above all. Politics buried in every grisly, gory, hilarious moment. Easy to see how, from the beginning, my idea of comics was something nuanced, something sly, something rich and paradoxical, which could say anything and achieve everything, even if it was doing so invisibly. I was entranced, and instantly wanted in.
Grim little aside; in a way, from a global, careerist sort of perspective, all of the above is not a terribly useful way of admiring the medium. I worked joyously for 2000AD for a few years, aged 19 through mid twentysomethings, and when it came time to make an attempt on the US market, which is code for Writing Fiction About People In Sexy Costumes Who Hit Each Other, I discovered that all the things I’d learned, all the things I was starting to get good at, counted against me. This was the ‘00s, the apogee of the widescreen tale, the decompressed story, the doctrine of Simple Is Better Than True, where “confident storytelling” was the highest accolade and all that dense, baroque, morally ambiguous stuff could be dismissed as “1990’s Vertigo” fare.
It was repeatedly made clear to me that I’d entered the game a decade too late.
But that’s leaping ahead of the question. Getting a start with 2000AD in the first place was a mix of the easy and the impossible. Easy because it was, and remains, one of the only publications in existence which tacitly seeks out and rewards first-time writers, by encouraging submissions of a particular type of story. Impossible because said type of story is the devilish Future Shock, a five-page science fiction tale which is expected to be not only characterful, idea-packed and thrilling, but also to culminate in a twist ending which - and this is important - readers should have seen coming but did not.
I spent a solid year or two - age 16 through 18 - battering the editor to death with some utterly dire submissions. The arrogance of youth. Moore? Ennis? Morrison? Pft. Anything they can do, I can do better. (Reader: I could not do better.) But after two years learning the importance of tenacity and resolve it finally occurred to me that maaaaybe I should also make an attempt at learning to be good as well, and since the editor was being generous enough to send feedback on my submissions the least I could do was actually read them. And put his advice into action.
The minute I did that, I got my first gig. A daft little tale about cosmic whalers chasing their prey. Its finale featured a twist about mating songs and a gargantuan space-whale fucking a spaceship to destruction. See? Dense, baroque, morally ambiguous. But by no means subtle. The die of my career was cast.
Here’s a weird metaphor. Being an astronaut is often an exercise in redundancy. 99% of the equipment is automated and the remaining 1% is controlled by a legion of experts from back home. And yet the very best astronauts — which is to say, the ones who know when to grab the stick and switch to manual, the ones who don’t go to pieces when things go wrong, the ones who push the mission parameters past safe limits and achieve remarkable things — are the ones who didn’t start out as astronauts. They started out as rocket testers, fighter pilots, lunatic-fringe maniacs who’ve been blown up, shot at, fallen miles through choppy weather and crash-landed without wheels, wings, or windscreen.
So it is when one begins writing mainstream US comics, when one has had one’s start writing for 2000AD.
CBY: You’ve just inspired me to work on a Future Shock submission of my own I’ve been considering for a month or so, now. Given your diverse portfolio of work in the UK early in your career, of which you’ve just shared a snapshot, I’m curious for your take regarding how the UK comics community and industry operate differently from the US community, where you’ve published not only with Marvel and DC, but Image, Boom! and others. How has your international perspective on the comics industry evolved along with your expansive body of professional work over the past 25 years? As you’ve also also written multiple novels, how does your experience with the literary publishing landscape differ from that of comics?
SS: The differences between UK and US tastes in fiction is a colossal topic which could fill libraries in its own right. I’ve touched on some of the formalist stuff in the above answer, but if forced at knifepoint to narrow it down - at risk of unfair generalising - I might say… let’s see…
US audiences can be content with stories which present unadulterated ideas.
UK readers cannot.
To put that in a very crude example: Americans love a story about a good dog. Brits love a story about a good dog which bites its owner.
I could talk for hours about why that should be the case. It’d involve waxing prolix about the paranoid hangover left by Empire, the hard-won reliance upon a miraculous but flawed welfare state, the natural cynicism of the No-Longer-Important national identity, dah dah dah, and - on the other side - the half-joking-but-actually-quite-serious mythology of One Man Against The Wilderness. None of this is always true all the time, of course, but one senses patterns when one’s been at this for a while.
The good news is that there’s just enough of an appetite for my peculiar, toxic, cynical brand that - from time to time - the US mainstream takes a risk.
As for how my perspective on the industry has changed over time… here’s another hideously overextended metaphor I’ve been brewing.
I like to picture the biggest players in the US market - the Big 2, basically, especially their core brands - as a pair of fishermen. They’ve been fishing opposite each other for as long as they can remember, hunched over their rods on either side of this one particular pond. It’s always kept them and their kids fed.
For kids, read: shareholders.
But, uh oh. They suspect - as we do, don’t we? - that the pond is drying up. There don’t seem to be as many fish biting these days. Now, the smart play would be to down tools and go find other ponds. Research new methods of fishing. Discover other delicious, nutritious breeds of juicy ichthyoid. And hey, credit where it’s due, from time to time one of them might cast a crazy line over the trees into the unseen wilderness, just in case there’s an undiscovered waterhole back there. Sometimes they might even reel in a whopper that way.
[In this increasingly baroque and stretched analogy, that’s me. That’s my editors. Taking a risk on the peculiar unknown. I’ve made a career out of fishing in mysterious ponds.]
But, ah, there’s a problem. Our two diligent anglers can’t get up. Can’t go looking for richer waters. Why? Because their kids - their shareholders - are hopping up down behind them demanding more fish today than you caught yesterday. More fish! More fish NOW NOW NOW.
So what do they do? What can they do? They have to cast their lines into exactly the same spots where they remember catching a big fish in the past. They use exactly the same bait. They repeat the same moves, the same timings, the same strategies. Over and over and over. No risks. No major changes. Maybe they use a bigger hook. Maybe they blow a bit more of the budget on bait. Maybe they paint the rod a slightly different color. But it’s still the same thing, over and over and over.
And that’s not their fault.
But it isn’t sustainable.
The good news is that we finally, finally, live in a world where this terrible stagnation is reaching a climax. Those two old boys, to their credit, are casting wider and wider with their experimental rods, even while they keep all their focus on the shrinking little pond. Sooner or later, when that pond is just a puddle, their kids are going to have to accept that no matter how loud they shout, they won’t be getting more fish today than they did yesterday. And maybe that’s when they grudgingly agree to go hungry for a day or two, while poor old dad goes looking for a new spot.
But when they get there? They’re gonna have to jostle for a pitch on the bank. Because there are suddenly plenty of serious, smart players who have been aware of this problem for years, and have been scouting the terrain the whole time.
Like I said up top: the futureproofing is finally happening.
As for your question about the literary landscape… I’ll get back to writing novels eventually. It takes me a long time between prose projects to recover. What’s the old saying? “Writing’s a lot like reading, except the book’s trying to kill you.”
CBY: There’s a deeper analogy in there about the depths of the ocean, resilience, and the narrative pool from which we draw to relate our intent through new stories, I would posit. On that topic of crafting new stories, you’ve created a number of your own worlds and characters over the years. For instance, your 2000 AD Judge Dredd spin-off title, featuring Jack Point - “The Simping Detective,” hasn’t returned since the slang around the term simp shifted in the mainstream. Do you have any stories for any old creations that you’d like to bring off the backburner soon? More recently, you’ve also delivered the brilliant post-apocalyptic fantasy, Coda that established an expansive world in 2019, so what narratives wholly your own can readers expect in the near future? What creative space and productive time do you find for your own creations amidst working with established characters?
SS: Generally speaking I don’t look back. There are exceptions. Coda was such a broad canvas, and we so adored scribbling in our one little corner of it, that we quickly realised we could keep returning to it as often as we wanted. 2000AD has a special place in my crusty black heart, and although it only happens once every few years I hope to circle back to it for as long as I’m able, like a fond traveller revisiting a honeymoon spot.
There aren’t many established characters I’ve got that burning urge to write. The ones I hanker for - because fuck my life - tend to be the ones very few people want to read. The strange, imperfect, adulterated ones.
Of the non-spandex properties, I think it’s really just Alien, Predator and a couple of long-forgotten 80’s cartoons that would be instant No Brainer “yes” responses from me. (Who’s got the rights to Bravestarr? Surely that’s an IP just gagging for a mature reboot. See also Ulysses 31, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, etc. Bonkers but beautiful.) Although in all these cases my ideas might change editors’ minds quite quickly. Get me gently roaring in a pub someday and I’ll bore you to tears with where, when, and why the Alien franchise went so blithely off the rails, and what it needs to do to restore its honour.
Hint: class warfare and a frank examination of sexual fetishes. (Ed. - we look forward to the follow-up interview when this comes to pass.)
This is a separate note, but I often suspect the more adoration a writer feels for a character or property, before they start writing it, the less impressive their approach will be. I say “adoration” rather than, say, love, because there’s absolutely a sort of perverse fondness for this or that IP which nonetheless permits a writer to inflict all the correct sorts of abuse, torture, critical judgement and status-quo-busting change needed upon a character. We’re back to adulterated vs unadulterated again, aren’t we? Anyway, one can often sense the faint whiff of fan fiction in some of the biggest and most lauded runs of the biggest books. They often sell extremely well and are always instantly forgettable.
Anyway. I have an imperial scad of creator-owned comics arriving in the next couple of years. I think the only one announced so far is A Mischief of Magpies, reuniting the creative team from Coda and Step By Bloody Step, published by DSTLRY. Who, to return to our tortured metaphor from earlier, are very much at the spearhead of Finding New Ponds.
AMOM is the story of a troubled young man who falls out of the world. It’s told via a unique fusion of sequentials, diaristic prose, and illustrations. It’s the sort of medium-bending formalist experiment we couldn’t do at any of the older, more set-in-their-ways publishers. What we’ve learned is that when you take the time to really push the medium - not just what it can do but the subtle ways it can do it - then the emotional beats of the story hit like a fucking freight train. It might be the best thing Matias and I have ever done. I think it’s going to create quite a stir.
More profoundly, for my future journey, I’ve just signed-up to produce multiple creator owned properties with Ignition Press. About whom I’ll have a lot more to say over the coming months. For now, I’ll just mention that if and when the bigger players do finally start making the changes they should’ve been investing in for decades - exploring new genres, new markets, new forms of shared storytelling, new ways of working, new approaches to marketing, new guarantees to retailers - Ignition’s who they’re gonna find waiting for them.
CBY: You’ve conveyed a firm sense of both position and trajectory regarding your forthcoming work entirely of your own making, from what you’ve shared. As mentioned, you are incredibly adept at adding dimensions and depth to the characters of others. What sort of approach do you have for reviewing and internalizing the history of characters (often who have had stories in print longer than either of us have been alive)? How do you systematically build your relationship to these characters you then work to embody on the page, and does your writing process differ substantially from working on your own wholly independent creations?
SS: I mentioned the faint whiff of fan fiction above. To linger on that for a moment: I’ve found that the real talent, in the game of Writing Other People’s Creations, is this:
Don’t write a story about a character you adore.
Find a story you adore about that character.
I think I succeed maybe… three-fifths of the time…?
For some properties it’s obviously easier than others. I could write Hellblazer until the proverbial cows come home, because Constantine is precisely the sort of multi-layered noble abomination I love to spend time with. Stories cleave to him like flies to shit. Other pairings are more unexpected. I’d be an eccentric choice for The Flash if the object was simply to - ugh - play the hits. But if I’m allowed to go delving for fascinating tales in cosmic horror, psychedelic revelation, 70’s adventure or (as per the next arc) ghastly trench warfare? Count me in.
X-Men books are a really interesting proposition here, because the metaphors they play with — mutantism as an analogy for pretty much any sort of Othering, on pretty much any sale, from the intimate to the national to the politically epic — is so much juicier than most “good guy does good stuff out of the goodness of his good heart, mostly by punching things” archetype.
It’s about pluripotency of ideas, in the end. How fertile the soil.
We talked earlier about the distinctions between US and UK tastes? Someone recently made the observation to me - I think it was Matt Rosenberg? - that in his experience most American Writers will begin a pitch with “it’s a story about a character who…” Whereas most British Writers will begin a pitch with “it’s a story about a world where…”
Idea vs individual. I think about that a lot.
CBY: I think the rampant individualism of the American psyche has centred the Monomyth on the character as a wish fulfilment avatar to a pathological degree, and it leads to broader societal inaction (and that is a pronounced instance of me editorialising, there, but as a citizen of the Commonwealth who has lived outside the US most of my adult life, I’m calling it as I see it). Speaking of history, you are currently writing for one of the longest continually running titles (since 1959); so let’s talk about The Flash. How’d you end up working with Mike Deodato, and what sort of game plan was involved in picking up with issue #801 under the new Dawn of DC relaunched #1 for the title? You also have the added complexity of dealing with Barry Allen and Jay Garrick legacies in addition to Wally West’s - how tightly are the narrative guidelines laid out when shaping a narrative so interwoven with both past precedent and concurrent releases?
SS: I refer you to back to the fishing-in-strange ponds metaphor. (Sorry.)
Basically I was invited to pitch for the book. My editor Chris Rosa had enjoyed my work in creator-owned spheres, and when the vacancy arose – due to I know not what DC internal decision-making math – he reached out. The opportunity came to me at a time when I had way too much on my slate already, so I approached it with a certain amount of reckless abandon.
(Nine times out of ten, the work you don’t need turns out better than stuff that pays the bills.)
So I swung big. “Find a story you adore about that character,” right? I started thinking about the ramifications of having abilities like Flash’s, the impossible things he would have seen and done, and what that might do to his mind. And to his family. I started thinking about the cultural doctrines that lie behind a lot of the superhero archetypes: aspirational role-models that urge readers to always be better, stronger, faster, more dutiful… Somewhere in that dizzying crush of inspiration and percolation it began to feel like the only honest way to approach the character would be through the lens of horror. The weight of expectation. The anxiety of never being enough. I think it worked beautifully, and each subsequent arc has been an exercise in changing gears, finding the next story I can adore.
To your other question: it’s been a really nice mix of free rein and shared-universe-participation. Part of the quid pro quo of playing in these collaborative sandboxes is that one agrees to generate the illusion of overlap, whether structural or superficial. Several DCU events have come and gone during the course of my run so far. It’s an interesting challenge, telling the story one set out to tell while weaving these exotic threads through it.
One thing I’ve often found useful, working in shared universes, is what I think of as Featuring A Bug. What I mean by that is: think long and hard about the big Event Stuff going in, and there’s almost always gonna be plot holes, unanswered questions, uncertain pivots. So you simply make those things your story. Answer the question, plug the hole, explain the pivot. Hey presto: you’re being a good soldier, helping the wider universe retain its coherence. But you’re also doing so in a unique way. If you can also make that story support the threads you wanted to weave as part of your own book’s narrative, abracadabra: you’ve turned a bug into a feature.
All of which is to say: I’ve been trusted to apply my own sideways-thinking weirdness to the book so far, and am therefore more than happy to field the curveballs from above, and sling them back with added glitter.
CBY: …and hopefully that description of what’s going on in The Flash will catch the attention of some readers who might not otherwise latch onto those threads and inform their further exploration in subsequent texts. I’m also a bit curious about your introduction to working on Doctor Aphra, which involves this ethically-fraught techno-archaeologist dealing with – essentially – Vader, a rogues’ gallery of aliens, and the “evil twins” of C-3P0 and R2-D2; a protocol droid named 000, and an astromech named BT-1. I enjoyed the whole run - it was stellar work. How did you get involved in the Star Wars universe, and what sort of editorial/creative guidelines are you given to build in that world? It seems especially complicated with the fractured Canon/Legends distinction, so what are your aesthetic or narrative anchor points in the Star Wars universe that help you capture the excitement you’re after?
SS: Good example of what I touched on earlier. I had no great burning desire, before this book, to get involved with the Star Wars universe. I was a fan, I suppose, but by no means obsessive. I think I probably ended up taking the story to stranger, darker, sillier places than would have been the case if I were a little more awestruck by the, y’know, numinous sanctity of the holy lore.
My understanding of the way it all happened was: Aphra’s creator Kieron Gillen was over-committed, workwise, and asked his editor to find a co-writer. They came to me. As luck had it Kieron and I lived near each other anyway, so we could easily find a handy pub to discuss plans.
During my hurried background reading, prior to that meeting, I remember being excited by the arrival in the previous arc of the character Magna Tolvan: an Imperial antagonist on whose good looks Aphra comments. (That might even have been the first real hint of Aphra’s sexuality?) The idea I pitched Kieron was to go back to Tolvan, and to borrow a lead from the absurdly good Elmore Leonard book Out of Sight, in which a US Marshal simultaneously pursues and falls for, a charismatic criminal.
Cat And Mouse Fall In Love, to reduce it to its crudest state. It’s often quite handy to use this sort of borrowed narrative framework with shared IP. There’s so much developmental shorthand involved in work for hire, it can save everyone a lot of time and explanation to lean on X-meets-Y vernacular. The stories themselves inevitably diverge during the act of writing, but to get people aboard it’s a powerful tool.
In this event, the “co-writing” setup consisted of Kieron writing the first issue and me doing the rest. A very gracious and generous transition, given that he’d only recently created the character, and had every right to be far more precious about her development than he was. Somewhat to my surprise I found the SW universe a very fertile place to tell stories, it being pleasantly vague, non-scientific and ill-defined. And Aphra herself is easily enough of a flawed little monster to sustain analysis, interest and enthusiasm for (I think it was?) 24 issues. By the end I was getting a little fidgety about finding new things worth saying, but I enjoyed it very well along the way.
The distinction between Canon/Legends you mention, I find fascinating. I think that was one of the bravest and cleverest choices in modern shared fiction. The accumulated weight of detail was simply too much for the franchise to bear. Something dramatic had to change.
Sidebar: it’s been my observation that the more a fandom exerts its influence over a fiction, the less concerned its stories become with what and why, and the more obsessed they grow with how. IPs that are stricken in this way have an ugly tendency to break out in maps. Cross-section diagrams. Timelines of important in-world events. All of which feeds the fandom’s ravenous appetite for minutiae very nicely, but with the unhappy side effect of utterly neutering writers’ ability to surprise. It’s the fictive equivalent of painting yourself into a corner. However much fans clamour for explanation, background details - Lore! Lore! Lore! - it is cancer for stories.
So that decision they made? Not a retcon, not a hard reboot, but a clever realignment of the expanded material — “this stuff all still matters, it’s still rich and satisfying and packed with good stories, but for the purposes of our shared universe this stuff is now regarded as myth, and the new stories we tell are truth” — that’s really very sophisticated. Folkloric euhemerism employed as a creative strategy.
It hasn’t always been managed perfectly, and of course it’s way too easy to start mining the mythology for lazy beats to plop into the so-called Real Stories, specifically to get the old fandoms fizzing - I think of Admiral Thrawn, among others - but yeah. Smart thinking.
CBY: Agreed - and I think you were able to push the whole new Star Wars universe into relationship territory it had managed to leave unexplored prior to your arc with Aphra and Tolvan, despite its galactic-scale diversity. On the topic of working with corporate-owned intellectual properties (by either DC or Marvel) and editorial control, how much determination are you given in the selection of your creative collaborators when books within long-running continuities are concerned? This may be more of an editorial/managerial question, but I’m curious – as a writer who has been deep in the continuity development process within an interrelated universe – how do creatives in the process with affinity for, or experience with, certain characters, find ways to stretch creatively without bumping into each others’ plot arcs, and how much cross-dialogue takes place to coordinate the team-ups in titles? (The characters popping in and out of your run on The Uncanny Spider-Man is a great example of this practiced on the page.)
SS: I can only speak to my own experience, obviously, but in the Big-2 situations you describe I’ve tended to have rather less control over my collaborative partners than you might think. Casting decisions are contingent on a dizzying number of variables: availability, budget, speed, attitude, marketability, visibility, etc. Quality too, sometimes.
On a few occasions I’ve had a shortlist of Ideal Picks which I’m invited to assemble into an order of priority. But, yes. Add it all together and generally speaking an artist is assigned to a book without much input from the writer. There are exceptions. The bigger the book, the more chance there is of writer and artist appearing as a package (perhaps they’ve collaborated together before, perhaps they’ve been petitioning for a chance for years, etc? “From the team who brought you…” is a low-stakes strategy marketeers love). Working with Lee Garbett on Uncanny Spider-Man came about because we’d been asking Marvel for a collaboration for ages. But, yes. By-and-large, in work for hire environments, creative teams are assembled by editorial.
Of course, I understand why that’s the case, but it can occasionally feel like an avoidable weakness in the system. This tends to be why, when a really fantastic collaboration comes together through good fortune, all members of the team will do everything in their power to keep it going. Often by diverting their attention towards creator-owned projects where teams are assembled by unanimity rather than dictat. So it was with Matias Bergara (Coda) and Aaron Campbell (Hellblazer). Those are the partnerships I’ll now defend to the death, which arose thanks to the chaotic Brownian Motion of schedule, portfolio, and smart editors with a good eye for creative pairings.
As for navigating the waters of a shared universe - story points, adhering to the broader picture and all that - I’ve spoken a little about making features out of bugs. Ultimately it’s all a reflection on how good the internal communications are, and how hierarchically arranged the decision-making is. More on this below.
CBY: You’ve already covered some dimensions of this topic, but as you’re working on another Nightcrawler story or Flash arc, in your pitch process, do you find yourself saying, “I want to send Nightcrawler on a self-contained adventure, and I’ve got an idea that will run for a certain number of issues,” or “I think with Dawn of DC, these are the elements I want to bring forward for The Flash to face,” etc. Are you being given editorial and publication parameters and told to flex creatively to craft a narrative that fits a trajectory within the broader narrative mapping of characters for various titles? How do you best pitch that story in a way that gains traction, and how is the direction shaped beyond your role as a writer?
SS: Communication, hierarchy.
When writing Big-2 books, unless you’re one of the handful of creators invited to plot the course of the entire shared universe, at some point you have to reconcile yourself to the notion that you are a cog in a machine. Some publishers, and some editors, are better than others at telling the cogs about the machine. Where it’s going, what it’s for. Who’s tinkering with it, and to what end. Why that new component suddenly appeared overnight, and what it means for your specific function.
Ugh. More tortured metaphors.
Point is, it’s easy to understand why the creative urge tends to carry a writer, when confronted with this reality, in one of two directions. They either a) aspire to become a driver of the machine, or b) focus so tightly on their own unique component within it - seeing it as a discrete device in its own right, with its own modes and motivations - that they can essentially ignore the rest. For myself, I’ve consciously tried to be in the former camp while instinctively falling into the latter. The right strategy is probably somewhere down the middle.
That there is a strategy is, in itself, disheartening. It won’t surprise many readers to learn I’m constantly having a dialogue with my unconscious self, in which I recognise that my best work - my natural fit - is with characters and stories which deliberately eschew the well-travelled road. The weirdos and oddballs. The stories that subvert expectations rather than, sigh, sigh, sigh, playing the hits. (That phrase has been on my mind a lot, lately.) And yet, oof, I can’t deny there’s an ambitious little voice in my lizard brain whispering you should climb… you’d be really great at the top… you could do that stuff standing on your head…
It’s lying, but I still haven’t decided whether it’s a lie worth investing in or not. I’m pretty sure I’m never going to be the sort of writer who gets asked to tackle The Avengers, or Justice League. But still the little voice. If you just try. If you just show them you’re a good soldier. If you do the hard yards and never drop the ball.
The brain is the enemy, in short. And comics are really fucking hard. “Best medium, worst industry”, as a clever ex-editor who shall remain nameless is wont to remark.
All of this probably explains why a lot of your favorite indie writers seem to go through looping oscillations in the mainstream-ness of their work. A few years making beautiful freestyle books for limited audiences, before being lured back to do a big spandex title. Until the stress or disillusionment, or the thin-skinned but justified sense of simply not being valued penetrates the creative shell and sends them spinning back to those other, stranger ponds.
I’m never gonna quit that goddam metaphor, am I? It’s too good.
CBY: Variations on a theme function just as well in an interview format, and the insight is indispensable, particularly on the topic that initially convinced me I should reach out to have this conversation. You’ve been writing in the X-Men continuity for around fifteen years, with a lot of attention on Nightcrawler’s arc in recent years. Your latest title, X-Men Blue: Origins #1 – a self-contained continuity correction to the backstory of both Nightcrawler and Mystique – exhibits many of these elements of a broader editorial directive we’ve previously discussed. From my understanding, it restored the origin story intended by Chris Claremont. I’m sure the particulars are confidential, but what can you share with our readers about your continued involvement in Nightcrawler’s story?
SS: No onward plans, at present.
My X-work was mostly a dream and only occasionally a nightmare, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned above. Standard Shared Universe stuff, with an extra dose of an especially vocal minority of the fandom who performatively express their love for the IP by virulently hating its chroniclers and every word written.
That said, the Krakoa era X-office was unique in that it actively invited all its writers into a shared space - the famed X-slack - where the usual hierarchies were suspended, ideas were free-flowing and egos were, broadly speaking, left on a peg at the door. It was heady, and exceptionally creative, and - I think - materially rewarding. It took the whole problem of expecting editors to be informational middlemen out of the picture. Writers could organically keep each other updated, in real time, about plans, allowing other writers to be reactive to changes in the wider fictional ecosphere. No curveballs, no sudden crashing memos that derail an arc halfway through. We each had our carefully-carved fiefs, but it was the nature of that project - the interrelated community/nation nature of it all - that it always felt honest, additive and satisfying to be referring to events in other books in parallel. And on more than one occasion a plot problem in Book A would be effortlessly solved by a forthcoming plan in Book B. This sort of thing is, in my view, precisely how shared narrative universes should operate. Positive interactions where possible, dignified autonomy when not. And not a deleterious collision in sight.
I have, shall we say, views, about the way that era was wrapped-up, and the logic behind it. That’s for another day, and probably needs a well-stocked pub. What I will say is that the editorial team spearheading the whole enterprise were never less than diligent, enthusiastic and generous with their time, support and courage. Whether you loved or loathed the Krakoa era, it was undeniably the most daring and original project among these peculiar, risk-averse spandex universes in recent decades. I can’t help feeling that those who oversaw it have been rather ill-rewarded for their service.
For myself, no plans at Marvel right now. Always a bubbling grab-bag of ideas waiting to go, and several characters I’ve always fancied playing with, but for the moment I’m too busy to beg.
In fact, thinking with my fingers now, you remember that slightly pitiful little train-of-thought about the quiet unconscious voice that urges you towards the mainstream, ambitious stuff? I might awkwardly add that a decent chunk of that desire could be filed under, “it’s nice to be wanted.”
Writers are just needy little vipers, under it all.
CBY: Given my experience both as a writer, and interacting with them, as much as everyone writes because of an intrinsic drive to wrangle with reality through words, having someone to read what is written provides the whole process with an otherwise unattainable validation - the communication of the idea beyond the idea, itself. With the wide array of narrative worlds you’ve lended your talents towards developing, perhaps this question may be more difficult for you to answer than many - what creative work totally unrelated to your own projects has been inspiring you lately? Are there any creators out there you haven’t worked with yet who have caught your eye for collaborative efforts in the future?
SS: You’re right, I struggle with this question. I have a really peculiar relationship with consuming fiction which I hesitate to unpack too much. The distilled version is that when I’m loving my job, I’m ravenous for comics and novels; when I’m overwhelmed or stressed or depressed I consciously avoid it, and absorb myself in non-fiction instead.
Well. Parenthood (I have two kids under 6). The conveyor-belt of work-for-hire comics. The pandemic. The ongoing Trussonomic financial crash. Bereavements and illness and blah blah blah. And, the cherry on top, an unreliable brain chemistry which occasionally decides to torpedo an otherwise sunny situation. All of these things have conspired to ensure that, not to put too fine a point on it, I haven’t read much fiction in the past five years.
That’s changed recently - I’ll come back to that in a moment.
What inspires me? The use of language as a technology to enrich my understanding of the world. I read science books a lot. And strange histories. I get caught on the spokes of eccentric topics. Opium economics, the history of paleontology, cargo cults, the Haitian revolution. I spent three years almost exclusively reading books about first century Roman Judea and the apocalyptic/messianic cultural ecosystem. I am, in short, a massive fucking geek.
My most enduring reader-relationship is with Fortean Times. For those who don’t know, it’s a monthly magazine which somewhat reductively self-describes as “the World’s Weirdest News!”, but is in fact a hard-to-pin-down exercise in paranormal agnosticism. Modelled after the ideas of protean phenomenologist Charles Fort (“you measure a circle starting anywhere”), I like to describe it as the preserve of the hopeful sceptic. That is, it’s for folks who would dearly love to exist in a world that features ghosts, extradimensional visitors, telepathic transmissions, werewolves and Loch Ness monsters, but are quite sure it probably doesn’t. Folks who choose to keep the door of their optimism ajar just a teensy crack, just in case. That’s probably the single most productive source of my “inspiration”, if we take that to mean, “the origin of fascinations.”
But! I was pushed back to fiction lately, as I said. Life had started to become a little easier, so that helped. I think the thing that most did it was, somewhat absurdly, Hemingway’s imprecation in A Moveable Feast to the stuck writer: “all you have to do is write one true sentence.”
To me that not only felt like a fantastic yardstick by which to measure the jobs I’d taken on (is it possible to write something true, given these elements?), but also gave me a metric by which to judge the overwhelming mass of other fictions around me. I realised I’d been hiding from the eight million other comics on the shelves because I no longer had any faith in my own ability to tell good from bad. The books that I find tedious, or stagnant, or so busy relishing their own style and confidence that they lack any substance, are quite often the ones that sell like gangbusters and get the rave reviews. The books that I think are emotionally powerful, or plotted with grace and poetry, or are simply good value for money, are often dismissed as boring, or confusing, or “a mess”. We’ve normalised simplicity, I worry. At any rate, that one-liner from a long-dead overly macho serial womaniser and bloodsport enthusiast made me realise that it’s not just about writing truth, it’s about believing in it. If I think a book sucks, it does. If I think a book’s fantastic, it is. That’s the spirit in which to write, and that’s the spirit in which to read.
Anyway, I digress. There are plenty of artists I’d kill to work with. Ian Bertram, DWJ, Abigail Harding. Henry Flint. Others where I’ve had a taste and want more. Bilquis Evely, Hayden Sherman. And as long as I can keep collaboration with Matias Bergara and Aaron Campbell, I’m a pig in shit.
Ha. What a list of eccentrics and visionaries. Not a single gradient-filled anaemic house-stylist among them. Nice to know I have a Type, at least.
One other thing I’ll say about inspiration: find peers you trust. I have a couple of little groups of writers with whom I speak almost daily. (And I don’t mean assemblies of semi-strangers who feed the anxiety-cycle and self-aggrandize by constantly reporting their own hustles.) I mean friends. Trusted humans in the same basic sphere of work. Part support network, part gentle critics, part purveyors of tough love, part absorbent shoulder, part punching bag, part cheerleader. I’ve watched more half-arsed ideas evolve into beautiful coherent narratives as a consequence of sharing them than I can remember. It might be because of a prod, or a nod, or a “what if you got rid of that part?”. But often the simple act of presenting a thought to people whose opinion you care about makes you give it the love and respect it needs. Often that’s all it takes to transform a wisp of formless oddness into a beautiful tale.
CBY: I think that nod to socialization and community building is incredibly important in divisive times, where healthy relationships are not being modeled properly by those meant to be the most diplomatic among us. Si, it has been an exceptional honor to have you provide some insight from your experience. For our readers at home, please feel free to share any of your publication, portfolio, and social media links that you’d like everyone to check out once they’re done with this article.
SS: I tend to lurk mostly on Bluesky, these days. @Sispurrier.bsky.social, I think. I try to funnel all the latest goings-on via my website - www.simonspurrier.co.uk - although I’ve been lax. That’s all set to change in the near future - I finally find myself with the one thing all writers truly wish for in their hearts: Other People To Sort Out Their Shit. That’s a consequence of the relationship with Ignition Press I mentioned above - more on that in due course.
A Mischief Of Magpies drops, from DSTLRY, in April ‘25.
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