This monster interview was conducted by Jay Eales for the online comics journal Borderline, ostensibly to promote the forthcoming release of Down to Earth. But it also touches on several other areas of my career, including Halcyon Sun, and my long-forgotten days on Action Man comic.
Borderline Interview
The sort of things I'd be interested in knowing is a potted biography of yourself
Jonathan Clements' first job was Blue Hawaii by Elvis Presley. He translated it into Japanese for his landlady in Osaka, and was paid with an orange spongecake. The Sunday Times called him "the medium's most sought-after translator" for his anime work - writing the English versions of dozens of Japanese cartoons and comics, including Street Fighter II, The Cockpit, Grey: Digital Target, and Sol Bianca. He has also translated ancient Chinese ballads, lyrics for pop songs, and the haiku collection Moon in the Pines. He has written for several film and game projects in Japan and Europe, most of which are stuck in production hell. He is the author of over a dozen books, and the first Strontium Dog audio drama, Down to Earth.
Google suggests a long and varied list of achievements, to say the least!
Oh, right…. There was a porno writer in the 1960s who used Jonathan Clements as a pseudonym. People often think I wrote Keep it Kinky and Mummy I've Been Ravished, but they were published before I was born.
My first comics job was translating Ironfist Chinmi for Bloomsbury back in 1995, then I was hired by Action Man comic. This was during the six-month period when Northern & Shell (now the owners of the Daily Express) thought they wanted a children's publishing division. It was my job to write fake articles about Action Man's international exploits, so I'd create spoof newspapers like The Sung (a Manchurian tabloid) and the New York Rap Sheet.
We answered to two licensors at Hasbro, who I'll just call Good Cop and The Whingeing Serpent. Good Cop enjoyed the humour and realised that it would add value for adult readers - we used to get letters from parents saying that their kids loved the adventure stuff, but they were cracking up over the in-jokes. I did a spoof of Hugh Grant's arrest (with Doctor X done for kerb-crawling in Paris), and a pastiche of Bob Hoskins' BT ads "It's good to talk" (a beginner's guide to torture). Stuff like that. The Whingeing Serpent hated it.
Action Man's enemy, Doctor X, become my hero. I started running the Ask Doctor X letters page, where kids could write in to be Minion of the Month. For the annuals we did later, that was transformed into Skullman!, which was a pastiche of Hello! magazine, "for high-class minions". I also got to write the Doctor X back-up strip.
We had a great time, but were soon very fired. Action Man was doing a respectable 50,000 an issue, but N&S were comparing the sales with Penthouse, and decided that we were all idiots (after that, the licence ended up at Marvel). I woke up the next day, and realised I'd just become a full-time freelance. After that, I wrote a few books, translated Gunsmith Cats for a while, and got roped in as a writer on a short-lived attempt to adapt the Destroyer books into comics (you know, the Remo: Unarmed & Dangerous guy). I was hired back for the Action Man and Sindy annuals (I don't think Hasbro ever worked out my Sindy Song was set to the tune of Deutschland Uber Alles). Then I edited Manga Max magazine for two years, which was an experience not unlike herding cats.
How did you become involved with Big Finish?
I was hired with Simon Jowett (who I'd met on Action Man) to write 12 episodes of Halcyon Sun, an interactive webcast sci-fi series. Each episode was about 20 minutes story and 20 minutes gameplay, all downloadable for free. One reviewer called it "Ally McBeal in space." He was trying to be insulting, but I was very pleased. We had some good stuff going on in that series; it got to be very popular on the Babylon Five newsgroups. Apparently it's just been re-released on a CD-ROM. You could call it a flight sim with long cut-scenes, or you could call it a two-hour animated movie with battles you can take part in.
Since then I've had a lot more script work, smeared with all sorts of embargoes and gag-orders. Last year I wrote three new episodes of a famous sci-fi puppet show, which paid the rent, but probably won't see the light of day. Also a feature-length script for a computer game. The money's great, but entire years of your life get buried in confidentiality clauses - you're only as good as your last job, and it's frustrating not to be able to talk about some of the best projects you've worked on.
I got to know Big Finish through work I was doing for the Sci-Fi channel. There was a point when Sci-Fi were interested in putting Halcyon Sun on their website, if the price was right. I think that's when we first started talking about other scripts I was working on. That must have been when cogs started turning in their heads about putting me on an audio script.
Can you explain your particular interest in Strontium Dog, and the sort of things you'll be exploring in your audio play?
I like Johnny Alpha's past. He's an exiled prince waiting to reclaim the throne. His origin-story is a movie just waiting to happen - son of fascist dictator turns out to be a member of the persecuted minority, runs away from home, leads resistance. Wins but is exiled. The high concept is sitting right there. Like all the best myths, it blows very familiar family tensions (father-mother-brother-sister) into all-out war. It's got some great contemporary angles, too - disability, prejudice, asylum-seekers… and this is all there during the space-cowboy bounty-hunter stories, hanging over his head like the Sword of Damocles.
When I write, I list the things I can and can't do. Then I try and turn these limitations to my advantage. It's a great way of working when producers say things like: "We need to ensure that there is a five-minute chase sequence we can re-format as an amusement-park ride", and you end up trying to think of a way to work it into the story. I thrive on that kind of stuff. I let the limitations do the storylining for me.
The requirements for SD were pretty obvious. Everyone remembers SD, or at least pretends to. But if you ask most of them exactly what happens in the classic chapters, it all goes vague. "There's this guy, Johnny Alpha, and he's a bounty hunter. And he's got a big Viking guy with him called Wulf." That's what you get if you're lucky. So I have to fill in the blanks about the characters and the milieu. Johnny and Wulf both have pretty detailed back-stories, and they need to be summarised, particularly for the benefit of any listeners who are too young to remember the originals. I figured the best way to do that would be to engineer a trip home for them, even though Johnny is supposed to be an exile.
SD is the Wild West in space, so I thought I'd take the characters away from the lawless frontier, back down to grotty, humdrum, urban Earth. Then I'd take them to the most backward part of Earth there was; almost like a trip back to the 21st century. Leave them there for just long enough to remind people why the hell they left, and then set everything up so that the rest of the series can leap back out into space with all the rayguns and space-perps we know and love.
I presume that your story won't be an adaptation of previous Johnny Alpha adventures? (This assumes that you'll be using Alpha, of course!)
All I was asked for initially was a pitch for "Strontium Dogs", but I guessed that they meant the Alpha era, not the later stories after the death of Johnny. It's all new, but I deliberately based it on characters and situations that would be familiar. I hate it when a new writer comes in and chucks everything out - it's a sure sign that they don't know what they're doing. Any idiot can say "Yeah, I kind of remember the originals, but I couldn't be arsed to read the comics again, so I just made them all dolphin trainers and added a talking giraffe." You owe it to the creators to do something in the spirit of the original.
SD works well with audio because the original comics are dripping with dialects. Audio character differentiation is that much easier when you have a Viking, a Scot, and a four-armed alien with two mouths (at least I assume the Gronk has two mouths - the speech balloons always point at his snout, even though he eats through his belly).
The most difficult note to hit is the humour. SD is very funny, but I doubt many of its fans remember it that way, because a lot of the jokes flew over their heads… well, they flew over my head when I was seven, anyway. I was initially worried that two of the characters, Wulf and the Gronk, would initially come across as too campy for anyone to take it seriously. That's the thing with SD, it's deadly serious. The stuff happening might be downright funny, but it's like Star Wars - the characters treat it with the utmost sobriety. The comics can be very surreal, but while you might laugh at their world, they never do. So I thought I'd find a way to keep Wulf out for a while, while people got used to the other voices and the general tone. So, I thought, "I know, Wulf gets kidnapped, and Johnny has to get him back." Once I'd answered the question "Who would want to kidnap Wulf?" I had my story.
I also wanted to get a female character in the foreground, to give a greater variety of voices. I suggested a team-up between Johnny and Durham Red, but Alan Barnes reminded me that it wouldn't fit the continuity. Durham Red isn't introduced until Bitch (# 505), whereas any story with Wulf in it has to be set before his death in the Max Bubba arc (# 445). He said that, not me. I couldn't pull issue-numbers off the top of my head like that. He suggested I use Middenface McNulty instead. Not quite as attractive, but great fun to write for.
In fact, the only problem was Johnny himself, who's notoriously taciturn. I needed to put him in situations that required talking… or at least, shouting while brandishing firearms, because normally he doesn't say much, and that's no fun on radio. So I set him up with a new supporting character, a motormouth bounty hunter who just never stops talking, a character with real verbal diarrhoea. Johnny keeps his laconic one-line put-downs as a result, but he gets more chances to say them.
I have vague recollections of reading SD in Star Lord, but that was a long, long time ago. The first 2000AD I definitely remember reading was an annual, must have been 1979. I cherished every page of it. I wish I still had a copy. I'd love to know which writers were responsible, because two lines in particular have stayed with me all these years. One was M.A.C.H. 1, being told that an ice hockey goalie was expendable, and leaping in front of a speeding puck shouting "Not to me, computer!" The other was a line from Dan Dare about refugees forced to live for generations in dark tunnels: "The young among us saw, but dimly." I've always liked that; sounds like something out of Beowulf. I also have fond memories of all those dying Volgans screaming "Aiiiieeeee!" in Invasion.
If the range is successful, and expands to produce plays based on any other 2000AD characters apart from Dredd, Rogue and Alpha, is there one in particular that you would like to take a crack at?
It's a privilege to work on any of them, so I'll take what I'm given. I've always thought that Nemesis or Slaine would present all sorts of thorny problems for audio, so I bet I could have fun trying to solve them. I've already come up with a Bad Company idea. How could you resist an audio drama called Band of Mothers?