TURF IS OUT NOW ON TITAN BOOKS

SPOILER ALERT: This interview reveals parts of Turf's twisted plot!

Dog sucking blood at the witch’s teat!” barks Jonathan Ross, scrolling through the “terrible ideas and bits of dialogue” he’s tapped into his iPhone.

It’s a balmy July morning, and Bizarre’s been invited to the TV legend’s London offices to talk about the new hardback edition of his vampire/gangster/alien mash-up, Turf. But despite the comic’s success – the first issue sold out in the UK on pre-order, and Turf won the Stan Lee Best Newcomer Award at the KAPOW! comic convention in April – the typically self-effacing star can’t resist sharing some of the trashier ideas that have popped into his head in recent weeks.

“‘Dinosaurs?!’” he continues, comically exaggerating every punctuation mark. “That’s a phrase from a fantasy book I’m going to write in a couple of years. Then there’s, ‘Man raised by millionaire. Finds out his father killed his parents and took him as revenge. Raised him badly while real parents still alive? Trapped below? Or jailed!’ That’s a terrible fucking idea. ‘Reality show student kids hoping to fake haunted frat house.’ Oh, here’s a great one: ‘Soldiers vs Yetis in Siberia!’”

TALKING TURF

Ross’ outrageous debut – which he calls “the comic equivalent of a big-screen popcorn movie” – is set during the 1920s Prohibition era, and opens with dapper mobsters battling for territory in downtown New York. But just when you get comfortable with that idea, in glides a gang of Romanian vampires, intent on enslaving mankind.

Then some aliens crash-land in Coney Island after a botched robbery on a distant planet. And Haitian zombies also pitch up in the final panel, under the command of Russell Brand.

But while it’s no surprise to see Ross penning his own comic – he’s been an obsessive fan of Marvel and DC since childhood, and has sung the praises of comicbooks to anyone who’ll listen ever since – Turf was his first attempt at fiction.

“I’ve always played around with ideas,” he says. “When I was younger I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if Swamp Thing did this,’ or, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the Turtles did that’ – I’ve always had ideas going around in my head, but never did anything with them.”

“A few summers ago I decided to amuse myself by sketching, because I love to draw,” he continues. “I designed covers for 10 new comics, and sent them to Mark Millar (friend of Bizarre and writer of Kick-Ass).

He said, ‘Why don’t you just write them?’, and I told him I was too embarrassed and couldn’t face the awkward situation if they turned out to be bad. But he insisted I should go for it.”

Comicbook artist Tommy Lee Edwards – best-known for his work on titles such as X-Men, Marvel 1985 and Batman – was Ross’ top choice from a selection of illustrators recommended by Millar, and for Turf, it was a perfect match.

“Without wishing to sound forcedly disingenuous, Turf’s biggest selling point is Tommy’s artwork,” Ross smiles. “He’s one of the best, and has a distinct and personal style. What I love is that his work’s influenced by comic greats such as Alex Toth and Bernard Krigstein, but he also goes back to classic illustrators of poster art like Bob Peak, and even artists who worked for Collier’s Weekly and old mags in the 1920s and 30s.”

As for the story, it was another of Ross’ passions that got his creative juices flowing: classic cinema. “My starting point was the thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if there was an old black-and-white Warner Bros or RKO picture starring James Cagney and George Raft, and a group of gangsters led by Humphrey Bogart was pitched against Bela Lugosi and his horde of vampires’ – that would’ve been awesome!”

he says. “That’s why I was drawn to Tommy, because I wanted the comic to look like that period. I like modern comicbook artists, but their work is often shiny and slick, with no depth or clever use of light or dark. But Tommy plays with shade and tones, and was ideally suited to Turf.”

ESCAPE FROM ZOMBIE ISLAND

Although Turf was the idea the pair ran with, Ross originally pitched three comics to Edwards. “One idea was fully formed,” he explains. “It was about an island where the army is experimenting with reviving injured soldiers, and they employ a female trauma specialist. But she soon realises that the soldiers aren’t shell-shocked at all – they’re dead! And they can’t deal with the trauma of being revived. The working title was Zombie Island.

“The second was a superhero book called Special Boy, in which a guy gets super powers, but it all goes horribly wrong. It’s like if Spider-Man’s powers were a bit, well, icky – Special Boy’s powers are useful, but no-one gets turned on by them. Everyone’s a bit embarrassed for him. The first villain he fights says, ‘Bring me the special boy!’, and that’s how he gets the name. I loved the subtext of the word ‘special’, and how that’s what we call someone with a disability. Tommy didn’t get it, though! But he liked Turf – it’s the least commercial of the ideas, but the most fun.”

It isn’t only Turf’s odd premise that makes it feel different; it’s also one of the wordiest comics on the shelves, punctuated by dense speech bubbles and long narrative captions.

In fact, it often feels like you’re reading something by Alan Moore.

“Alan Moore without the ideas and the brilliance!” Ross interrupts. “But while I do like wordy comics, some of the early parts of Turf went too far. I mean, look at that (pointing to a speech bubble that dominates a panel). There’s no excuse for that! I don’t think it’s bad dialogue but, looking back, I could edit that down to 2/3 the size and you wouldn’t lose anything.”

“To be honest with you, it’s wordy because I was learning to understand the comicbook form,” Ross continues. “In Turf there’s probably the volume of words that you’d find in four comics today. There was a lot of squeezing, but we cover a lot of ground. In the first six pages we set up the gangs, the vampires, the aliens… you could say it’s overly ambitious!”

WOSSY WRITING

While the comic is text-heavy, Turf is still a rollicking adventure, with grisly action sequences that are all the more powerful for being juxtaposed against intense dialogue, and which also demonstrates Ross’ natural flair for storytelling.

“I love writing,” he says. “I sometimes write pieces for The Guardian, but I find it really hard to get a stream of thoughts on paper – I find it physically fucking draining! But comics are fun, and you can lay down the big blocks of the plot and then move stuff around. Seeing it come together is an incredible feeling.”

Wordiness aside, Turf may also surprise readers as it’s relentlessly dark and moody, and a world away from the Day-Glo TV persona that’s made Ross a national treasure.

“Mark Millar was surprised when I sent him the first treatment,” he says. “He expected it’d be kind of knockabout, quite rude, a bit loud. But writing humour in comics is hard – there aren’t many funny comics, apart from confessional stuff by R.Crumb, Chris Ware, Joe Matt and so on. There aren’t many people working in genre stuff that can make you laugh. I think it’s because of the way you read the page – you can’t use the rhythm of language or punchlines in the same way. It’s also tough as comics are a collaboration; it’s easier to be funny when writing scripts as your words are delivered by actors who don’t change them that much, whereas in comics the way the frames are composed by the artist can affect the way it’s read.”

MOVING FOWARDS

Turf isn’t a lazy one-off or self-indulgent experiment by a rich TV star with time to kill. As far as Ross is concerned, the future’s all about comics.

“The next book Tommy and I are doing is Golden Age,” he says. “It’s about a retirement home for superheroes who didn’t want to retire. I’ve also written a Rocketeer story for IDW called Junior Rocketeers, which is out this summer, and is about a gang of Will Eisner-style kids who want to join the hero on his adventures. And then there’s Home Run, which is about this child trying to find his way back to Earth – it’s a bit like Superman in reverse, and as he gets closer to home he loses his powers and becomes a scared, lost little kid. I’m also doing some superhero stuff that I can’t tell you about (he does tell us after the interview is over, but Bizarre is sworn to secrecy).

"I can only tell you the initials – AGP – and that I’m working on it with one of the best artists around. It’s a superhero tale, but with a weird premise – it’ll hopefully say something about the world of TV entertainment.”

Looking to the immediate future, Ross has also written a series of five short comics that were available at the recent San Diego Comic-Con, and will be released in the UK later this year.

“One is Speed Trap, which is set in the world of Formula 1 racing in 1963,” he says. “In the story there’s a man in a coma whose brain can be connected to a robot body, but only for an hour at a time. But the technology has been stolen from the Japanese, and they send three more advanced robots to try and claim it back. And the hero is fighting corruption in the Formula 1 world, and he’s also got a girlfriend – so he’s got strife.

“Another is Escape From Prison Planet, which is a 2000AD type story, and there’s The Brotherhood Of Steam, which is a multiverse story involving these weird explorers led by dwarves who discover a new substance called Haluciem. It’s a gas from the North Pole, and they’re not sure if it opens up a portal to another realm, or if they’re just tripping. There’s also Tonda: Barbarian Queen Of The North, and Rock Paper Scissors, which features alien cops exiled to Earth who wind up in 1970s Brooklyn.”

Comics aside, though, what about the rumoured movie version of Turf? “There’s no news, really,” Ross says. “Sam Raimi (director of The Evil Dead and Spider-Man) was interested at one stage – he wanted to make a Turf TV series – but he couldn’t do it. The problem with Turf, I think, is that there are too many vampires around at the moment: True Blood, Vampire Diaries and so on. But it might still happen.

“We’ve more or less sold Golden Age to a studio, and there’s also interest in Speed Trap, Home Run and AGP. I’m sure a couple of them will get made, but who knows? I know people who’ve had films in development for their whole lives.”

With our time running out and more hacks queuing downstairs to quiz Ross about Turf, he takes Bizarre on a whistle-stop tour of his office, showing off his obscenely valuable toy collection while discussing his love for HP Lovecraft (he wanted to call his son “Wolf Galactus Cthulhu Ross”), and revealing how he used a rare VHS copy of Re-Animator to lure his wife and co-writer of the Kick-Ass movie, Jane Goldman, back to his lair for the first time.

“This is only a fraction of my stuff,” he sighs, looking around. “Jane does get annoyed with me sometimes. Girls just don’t understand. But they have vaginas, so that’s alright.”