10 Scottish comic book creators who changed my world

Here are 10 comic book creators who can stake a claim in the pantheon.

Dudley D Watkins

Let’s overlook the fact that he was born in Manchester. Watkins studied at Glasgow School of Art and became a creative powerhouse for DC Thomson in Dundee. In 1936, in collaboration with writer and editor R D Low, he created both The Broons and Oor Wullie for The Sunday Post and then went on to draw Desperate Dan for The Dandy and Lord Snooty for The Beano. It helped that he was fast, but the quality never suffered. “His command of perspective and shifting points of view was almost peerless,” the cartoonist Rod McKie once said of Watkins. 

After the war he adapted both Treasure Island and Kidnapped into picture book form and long had plans to adapt the Bible (he was a devout Christian). He died in 1969 at his drawing table, a half-finished Desperate Dan comic strip in front of him.

Alex Graham

Born in Dumfries, cartoonist Alex Graham found a home in the hearts of Middle England thanks to his long-running comic strip Fred Basset. Last year Fred celebrated his 60th birthday. Graham turned out thousands of strips featuring the basset hound over nearly 30 years until his death in 1991. (And after too. Graham had stockpiled 18 months’ worth of stories.)

Fred Basset (Image: Alex Graham)

Quite a feat for a strip that had a bumpy beginning with readers of the Daily Mail complaining that Graham’s cartoon dog looked nothing like the breed in question. To solve the problem the paper bought the cartoonist a basset hound he named Freda.

It clearly worked. The strip – a very gentle, very Middle English thing – became hugely popular. Its admirers included PG Wodehouse and Charles Schulz, who knew a thing or two about dogs in comic strips.  

John Wagner and Alan Grant

From Middle England to punk attitude. John Wagner was a war baby from Ohio, the son of a Scottish mother and a “worse than useless American father.” He emigrated with his mum back to Greenock aged 13. He came to prominence working on the wartime comic Battle and then the infamous and ultimately banned comic Action before turning up on 2000AD where he co-created Judge Dredd and wrote some of the most impressive story arcs for the character, often in collaboration with his fellow Scot Alan Grant (actually born in Bristol but he moved to Scotland as a child with his Scottish parents). 

As well as Dredd, the duo worked on other 2000AD strips Robo-Hunter and Strontium Dog and had a run on Batman in the late 1980s. They also created the Scottish comic book character The Bogie Man. Robbie Coltrane played the part in a TV adaptation. 

Wagner and Grant’s scripts were often darkly, Scottishly, satirical, a mixture of rage and black humour. All the better to hide despair, one might say. 

You could make a case that Wagner’s Judge Dredd story America (drawn by Scottish artist Colin MacNeil) is one of the high points of the character’s history and a reminder that he is not  – and has never been – any sensible person’s idea of a hero. “Justice has a price. The price is freedom.”

Cam Kennedy and Jim Baikie

The truth is you could do a top 10 of Scottish writers and Scottish artists who have worked on 2000AD alone. Among the former are Gerry Finley-Day (creator of Rogue Trooper), Gordon Rennie, Robbie Morrison, David Baillie, Emma Beeby and Jim Alexander. As for artists, CalHab, as the irradiated wasteland of 23rd-century Scotland is known in the comic, is hoaching with them. Jim Baikie, veteran Ian Kennedy, Alex Ronald, Gary Erskine, the aforementioned MacNeil, Graeme Neil Reid, Frank Quitely (see below) and Jock. But perhaps the two key figures are Cam Kennedy and Jim Baikie. It’s impossible to choose one above the other. Glasgow-born, Orkney-based Kennedy drew Rogue Trooper and Dredd for 2000AD and his gritty, strong-jawed approach made him one of the essential Dredd artists. Orcadian Baikie, who died in 2017, also drew Dredd, but he is possibly best remembered for teaming up with writer Alan Moore on Skizz, in which an alien is stranded in Birmingham in the 1980s. 

Grant Morrison

2000AD offered an early home for writer Grant Morrison, most notably on his superhero satire Zenith, but he really made a name for himself when he began to write for American publisher DC. Whereas his fellow Scot Mark Millar grafted Hollywood narratives onto his superhero stories, Morrison was interested in surrealism, meta-narratives, issues of identity and conspiracy theories. He made his name in the late 1980s by taking second-string DC characters (most notably Animal Man and The Doom Patrol) and using them as vehicles to explore his own concerns, before moving onto writing Batman, Superman, The X-Men and Fantastic Four. But his key comic – for both its ambition and its excess – may be The Invisibles, a mash-up of occult thinking, the battle between order and chaos, psychedelics and sexuality. Morrison may be the nearest Scottish comics got to a rock star.

Grant Morrison (Image: Getty Images)

Eddie Campbell

In the early 1980s Britain saw a golden age for small press indy comics. And arguably the greatest of them were Eddie Campbell’s biographical Alec strips. Originally from Glasgow, Campbell moved to Southend-on-Sea and began to create these scratchy, impressionistic comic strips that revelled in the hothouse mundanity of normal life. Everyday stories of work, love and alcohol, rendered as personal mythology. Campbell went on to work for Marvel and DC and provide the art for From Hell, Alan Moore’s take on Jack the Ripper. But the Alec strips are his gift to posterity.

Metaphrog

I’m painfully aware how male this list is. But there is nothing tokenistic about including Sandra Marrs, who, with her partner John Chalmers, creates potent children’s comics and illustrated books under the name Metaphrog. Originally from France and now based in Glasgow, Marrs is an artist who has always drawn on the European ligne clair drawing style. But her work has developed and reached a swimmy, deliquescent perfection in Metaphrog’s adaptations of Bluebeard and The Little Mermaid.

Frank Quitely

Real name Vincent Deighan, Quitely first made an impression with The Greens, a strip that parodied The Broons. He then drew for 2000AD before becoming a signature artist for Marvel and DC, working with fellow Scots Grant Morrison and Mark Millar on The Authority, X-Men and Superman. His art has a sheen and a beauty that feels both modern and classic at the same time. Some might argue there’s little grit in it, but his work is full of detail and invention and is attuned to the epic. This is how superheroes would like to see themselves. His work makes for an interesting contrast with that of fellow Scot Jock (aka Mark Simpson) whose art has the same impressive finish but comes from a darker place.

John Miller

If ECG machines drew comics … John Miller, who died earlier this year, is, safe to say, the most obscure name on this list. But his work may contain more pure joy than anyone else’s here. Incredibly distinctive, his short strips drew on his love for pop music and pop culture – who else could come up with Grace Slick Magnum Force? – embodied in bravura black and white strips full of aliens and Scottish humour. Even his lettering was unique. 

Stewart Kenneth Moore

Stewart Kenneth Moore artwork (Image: Stewart Kenneth Moore)

Actor, painter and 2000AD artist Stewart Kenneth Moore may be best known for his Judge Dredd cover art, but he’s included here for such recent(ish) projects as The Tragedie of Macbeth and Project MKUltra, a wild take on the CIA’s involvement with LSD and the counterculture in the 1960s, two very different graphic novels that show up his versatility and his obvious pleasure in cartooning.