FUSION #7, October 1985

CAPTAIN CLYDE - HIS LIFE DEATH AND LIFE AND DEATH

by TONY O'DONNELL
When Captain Clyde was included in a round-up of British superheroes for the cover of Fantasy Advertiser 75 his appearance prompted a good many queries from bemused fans, to whom 'the flying hero in the middle' was a complete mystery. Hopefully this article and interview will serve as a spotlight upon a strip which was spectacularly ignored during its brief run in Glasgow.
Captain Clyde was, in fact, the main character in a newspaper strip written and drawn by Grant Morrison. (whose work should be well known to Fusion readers.) It ran in three local newspapers - the Govan Press, Renfrew Press and Clydebank Press - for three years, from November 1st 1979 to November 5th 1982 when it was cancelled and replaced by 'Tom and Jerry'.
During his short but hectic reign as Glasgow's premier hard-man, Captain Clyde saved the city and its people from all kinds of evildoers. Mind you, all those superhuman battles did have a damaging effect on Glasgow's architecture - Captain Clyde was, initially at least, very unpopular with the Glasgow Police, not to mention the city planners!
This might explain why some of his later adventures took place on or above such diverse locations as a North Sea oil rig and a Highland glen. Captain Clyde was never quite at ease with his role as a 'local hero' and often tried to disguise his inner tensions with sardonic wit. The story began with the appearance of a monster in the newly re-opened Glasgow Underground and ended, 150 episodes later, with Captain Clyde's death after a struggle against Satan himself. On the way the Captain had tackled the star-powered Quasar, the subterranean horror of the Deros, the villainous Sinister Circle, (Possibly the strip's finest hour.), and even the massed forces of darkness, in the shape of demons and creatures from legend. Sadly however, all good things must come to an end and Captain Clyde was cancelled — dead but not forgotten, at least by the few comic fans who have read and enjoyed the tale of his life as Glasgow's first and only resident superhero. Grant Morrison, Captain Clyde's creator, takes up the story:

T.O. What gave you the idea of creating a Glasgow based superhero strip?

G.M. The idea was given to me by Colin Tough, then editor of the Govan Press.(And, curiously, the brother of the male half of the Krankies - one of the most bizarre double acts in the history of entertainment) The paper, desperate for local news, had interviewed me when I was 16 and under the title, 'He's Quick on the Drawl', I was featured as 'a lad with a great future...' (Rather too optimistically as it turned out.)
This article, sandwiched between stories of the man up the road being kidnapped by flying saucers and Mrs. Dow's goldfish writing his fourth novel, went largely unnoticed but obviously made a strong enough impression on Colin Tough, who thought of me three years later in 1979 when he had the idea of introducing a comic strip to the new look entertainments section.

T.O. Was there any reader reaction during Captain Clyde's run?

G.M. Basically,no.
Fairly early on, the paper held a competition and asked readers to send in their opinions on the new comic strip along with their entries. As far as I can recall, the prize was a writing set - the sort of thing which, if you receive it as a gift, either goes straight into the bin with the wrapping paper or is eventually offloaded onto a hated relative.
As a result, only three people wrote in, two of whom were members of my immediate family. The actual winner of the writing set was an old woman who'd forgotten to include any comments on Captain Clyde at all and who probably just wanted the set so that she could write her will with it. I can only hope that the pen didn't work.

T.O. How much were you paid?

G.M. This is very embarrassing. Of course I love the comics medium so much, that any consideration of payment comes secondary to the true artistic joy of creation and ...
Actually I was paid £4 plus expenses, which was, in a burst of altruistic generosity, later raised to £6.

T.O. As a fan of the strip myself, I'm impressed that you were able to maintain your enthusiasm for Captain Clyde in the face of this lack of response and poor financial incentive. Were you never tempted to kill him off and finish it?

G.M. Not really. I did kill him off halfway through the run but that was a typical 'resurrection' plot device whose effects I had hoped to explore at more length than was ultimately possible. When I was eventually told to finish the strip, I decided bitterly to kill Captain Clyde permanently and that's what happened. That apart, I mostly enjoyed what I was doing so there was no thought of ending things from my side.

T.O. One of the things I enjoyed most about Captain Clyde was his unglamourous secret identity as an unemployed man. In fact, being Captain Clyde was about the only thing he had going for him, apart from his lovely girlfriend Alison. Were you trying for a more realistic approach to the usual superhero concept because Captain Clyde was based in Glasgow, rather than say, L.A. or New York?

G.M. Yeah, well when I was originally asked to do Captain Clyde, Colin Tough came up with the name and some vague ideas of what he wanted. Since the Glasgow Underground was reopening with new trains and modernised stations, I was asked to tie it in with that and perhaps give Captain Clyde a secret subterranean HQ. It was obvious to me that, as a non comic reader, Colin's view of superheroes was based on things like the Batman TV show and the kiddie cartoons so I suggested to him that we make it a bit more realistic. Since I was on the dole, I decided that Captain Clyde should just be a young man without a job who happens to pick up super powers. I also proposed that we have fairly natural dialogue and relationships, genuine injury during fight scenes and other bits and pieces of general realism. Looking back, I wish I'd made it even more realistic but this was before Marvelman, and while I'm proud of my few innovations, I was still thinking in a sort of Marvel Comics slam-bang way a great deal of the time. As far as Colin and the other editors were concerned, however, my approach was pretty radical and they accepted the first stories with a lot of enthusiasm. As the strip progressed, certain elements began to grow more and more fantastic but there was still always the sense of trying to keep it grounded in other ways.

T.O. How long did it take to write and draw an episode of Captain Clyde, and were there any deadline problems?

G.M. No real deadline problems - I had a week to do each 8 or 9 panel page - although towards the end, when I was getting bored, I used to do the whole thing in the eight hours before handing it in. Prior to that I worked on bits here and there over a full week. It wasn't difficult.

T.O. In the origin story, Chris Melville was offered the powers of Earth and Fire by the earth goddess Elen - if he could defeat her champion, Magna. Could you explain why you chose this source for his powers?

G.M. Well, before Captain Clyde I'd been doing, (for my own enjoyment.), a strip called Monad, which featured a superhero who was the end result of a government experiment performed on his parents. Monad was set squarely in the real world and had no super villains or anything else very much going on in it, apart from the lead character getting upset about his inability to do anything about the situation in Northern Ireland and that sort of thing. (Monad, incidentally, appeared in the Govan Press before Captain Clyde - in that selfsame 'Quick on the Draw' thing.) I'd always had a soft spot for Monad, so when it came to doing Captain Clyde I used a lot of the elements from the earlier strip but didn't want to have a similar origin or range of abilities. I opted for a 'magical' source for the Captain's powers as a result of this. I was very interested in ley lines and earth magic and all that pseudo mystical, hippy shit at the time so that came out in the origin story, wherein Chris Melville goes through a sort of Arthurian ritual battle while youth-hostelling in Derbyshire. I thought it might be quite a nice idea to have a superhero who periodically has to recharge his powers by drawing earth energy from standing stones and other sacred sites.
The exploration of the Captain's powers of Earth and Fire was to be part of my plans for the development of the strip, but it all went by the board when I was given my notice in 1982.

T.O. Do you have any favourites among Captain Clyde's adversaries?

G.M. Oh definitely. My favourite villain was Trinity, a member of the ridiculously named Sinister Circle. I was really enjoying the strip at the time I introduced them and I think it shows in the work. Trinity was a schizophrenic with a triple personality who was able to divide his body into three - each with a different power and facet of the personality. I think Chris Claremont has done something similar recently but it was my idea first, so up yours Claremont! Anyway, he was my favourite.

T.O. What was the reason for the costume change? Were you simply bored with Captain Clyde's first and more conventional outfit?

G.M. I just got fed up putting all the letratone on the original costume, so I came up with something that was purely black and white. Also, Captain Clyde had just returned from the dead and I wanted something to mark the occasion. It's as simple as that, really.

T.O. There still aren't that many writer/artists in comics today. Which of the two do you prefer doing most and have you ever worked from another writer's script?

G.M. I prefer writing. I really only took up drawing in order to tell the stories I'd thought up - so drawing was always the secorndary thing, although people pay more attention to it because its impact is immediate. I've never worked from another writer's script, (Except on inking jobs.), mainly because I'd probably be called upon to draw something beyond my abilities, like German tanks or hundreds of horses or even hundreds of horses driving German tanks. My artistic talent is fairly limited - most of my attempts to draw wildlife produce results which resemble grossly unsuccessful genetic experiments - so I think it's best to concentrate on writing.

T.O. Would you accept that your artwork on Captain Clyde, while retaining a strong stamp of originality and vitality of its own, does still betray a strong Neal Adams influence?

G.M. I suppose I ought to come clean and say yes, I do accept that. I think that, as it did for many others who began to draw comics in the '70's, the shadow of Neal Adams loomed large and metaphorical over my drawing board. It's a great pity that his work has lost all its fire nowadays but when he was young and at his peak, his work was blistering. Some of those comics seem to be straining to break free of their two dimensions. Exceptional stuff.

T.O. Are there any other artists who have influenced you? Your recent work for Fusion has been compared to Alan Davis, for instance.

G.M. When I started to work for Near Myths, people said my stuff was like Neal Adams or Jim Starlin: by the time Captain Clyde came around I was accused of ripping off John Byrne and now I'm looked on as some sort of Alan Davis imitator. All that crap just bores me silly now, though I suppose I ought to be flattered to be included in such company.
I admire Alan Davis' work intensely, (in fact while I'm here I might as well say that I regard Alan as currently the best superhero artist in the whole world.), but I wouldn't presume to imitate him. It just seems that our influences are pretty much the same, only he's made much better use of them than me.
I mean, I can't even draw horses!
Next question.

T.O. Who are your favourite writers and did any comic strip writers influence your approach to Captain Clyde?

G.M. I like a lot of writers but the ones who have directly and obviously influenced my own style are Alan Garner, Harlan Ellison, Philip Larkin and William McIllvaney. The Garner influence is present through a great deal of Captain Clyde although it's most apparent near the end of the series where I pirate a lot of the atmosphere of Garner's early books for the mystical stuff in the Highlands with the Andorin Warhelm character.
The only comics writer who ever really influenced me was Len Wein whose run of Justice League stories fired my whole interest in doing comics. Then, of course, like everyone else in the civilised world, I love what Alan Moore has been doing. You could say he's been an influence in a different way because I'd given up on comics ever making any progress until I picked up Warrior in 1982. Captain Clyde was coming to an end and I had serious doubts about the worth of continuing in comics - then I saw that Alan was attempting all the things I thought would never be attempted and my interest was fired all over again.
Just like a film really.

T.O. Recently there has been a revival of interest in the concept of British super-heroes due to the success of Marvelman and Captain Britain. Do you think that Captain Clyde could have been more commercially successful if it had been published as a direct sales comic rather than a local newspaper strip?

G.M. Possibly. I don't know though. Perhaps if it was published now it would work out but when I started there wasn't much interest in British material at all so I honestly don't think things would have been a great deal different.

T.O. Why was Captain Clyde finally cancelled?

G.M. I'm not really sure of the exact reasoning behind the decision to stop the strip but I can guess at a few of the factors involved. I think the lack of public response was a major part of it - I know that the two other papers which carried Captain Clyde dropped it sometime at the beginning of the third year, because they could more profitably use the space for advertising. In addition to this, a new editor took over from Colin Tough and his enthusiasm for Captain Clyde was roughly equivalent to that of bathroom germs confronted by new improved Domestos, (Even my £6 wage was grudged.)
So it shouldn't have come as much surprise when, during a long and involved story, (for which I had been laying the groundwork all through the previous year.), I was told to finish things off within the month. In the interests of symmetry I managed to wring out a few extra weeks, which brought me into November '82 and made it a neat three years I'd been working on the strip.
The whole 'Black Messiah' storyline, which culminated in the death of Captain Clyde, was compressed into eleven episodes from the thirty or so I'd originally planned and as a result, a good few subplots were never explained.
I must admit though, that perhaps some of the blame lies with me, in that I had pretty well given up trying to please the public. The strip had become very grim and unpleasant towards the end and was full of nasty deaths and evil forces - which no doubt made it easier for the editor to replace with a sanitized, syndicated version of Tom and Jerry.
I was pretty pissed off with the whole deal but shortly after my dismissal, the entire 'Press' chain of news papers collapsed into bankruptcy, so I suppose the ghost of Captain Clyde had his final revenge after all.

T.O. Haven't you ever been tempted to reincarnate the character as you did after his first death?

G.M. Hmm.
Well, oddly enough, I did toy with the notion. I drew a few pages which were set on an alternate Earth, whose Edinburgh based superhero, Captain Forth, had just been killed. Captain Clyde, (Cheating death yet again, in the time-honoured fashion of superheroes the world over.), promptly appeared and donned the costume of his counterpart to face a villain whose appetite for evil made even the Devil look like a dieter with anorexia. I got bored with the story fairly rapidly though, since there was no outlet for it and it's been lying in the cupboard ever since.

T.O. Did you do any other work during your three year tenure on Captain Clyde?

G.M. Yeah, I was contributing to D.C. Thomson's 'Starblazer' series - something I'm doing even unto the present day. Apart from that I was going through a phase in which I hadn't read a comic since 1979 and was much more involved in the disgusting excesses of life as a rock superstar with my band, the Mixers. As I mentioned, only the advent of Warrior convinced me that writing comics was a worthwhile occupation for a young man.

T.O. So, what about nowadays? When I'm not keeping you busy inking my 'Starblazer' pencils, what are you up to?

G.M. I'm keeping fairly busy; I've been writing for Thomson and working on the Liberators for Dez Skinn. I also wrote a couple of text stories for this year's UK Batman and Superman annuals, (The Batman one features Catwoman as illustrated by Garry Leach, so I'm looking forward to seeing that.) and am about to start on some stuff for Marvel UK. Then there's 'Abraxas' – a science fiction epic which is being drawn by someone called Tony O'Donnell - for Harrier Comics. (Hopefully.) Apart from that I've almost completed a long horror novel. The rest of the time I feed stray cats and arse around doing nothing. Strangely enough, money still seems to elude me.
Are we finished now ?

T.O. Yes. Thank you, Grant Morrison.

G.M. Thank you Tony O'Donnell and Amen.

As a postscript to the above, it might be mentioned that plans are afoot to reprint the complete adventures of Captain Clyde. Both Gary Millidge of Flying Pig Enterprises and John McShane of AKA have expressed an interest in putting together some sort of compilation, so there seems to be a good chance of Glasgow's own superhero taking to the air once more - hopefully to greater acclaim.