Michael Carroll: Writing with Dredd, Blood and Tears

Michael Carroll is an Irish writer known for his books, comics, and short stories. His superhero centric New Heroes/Quantum Prophecy series for young readers debuted in 2006 and has several upcoming additions. In comics, he currently writes Jennifer Blood for Dynamite, Judge Dredd for 2000AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine.

I recently had a chance to discuss comics, writing, and superheroes with Michael. It's clear he is a life long science fiction fan and has a passion for the genre.

As a huge science fiction fan I'm always interested to hear how others developed their love for the genre. How did yours start?

Hard to say exactly when it began... It was so long ago now! One of my earliest memories is watching one of the moon landings on TV, possibly the very first one. This was on a tiny monochrome TV set that my parents borrowed for the occasion. If it was the first moon landing, then I would have been three years old.

My parents have always been voracious readers, something they've passed on to me and my three sisters, so we were always at the library. I'd pick books on science and astronomy, and that led to SF novels by people like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. Before long I concluded that science fiction was more interesting than real science. With science fiction, you got aliens. With real science, you got mathematics. No contest!

In the early 1970s I discovered Doctor Who through a two-page strip that appeared in a British comic, possibly TV21 or something of that nature. Jon Pertwee was the Doctor du jour, and I loved the comic enough to seek out the TV show. Later, I discovered that the local library stocked Doctor Who novelisations -- they were great! But some of them were kind of scary: I had to read them from behind the sofa.

The kid who lived next door introduced me to Batman and Superman (not personally: he didn't actually KNOW Batman and Superman) and that sparked my interest in superheroes. Somewhere along the way I encountered Star Trek, which I think was the first TV show I ever saw in colour (we were not a wealthy family - for years we didn't even HAVE a TV set!).

But the three biggest influences on me were... The UK Marvel comics. These were black-and-white reprints of Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, The Avengers and so on, and they were GREAT! Here in Ireland, we didn't have a comic-book industry of our own, so we had to make do with comics imported from the UK. Most of them weren't great: they were still mired in the barely-post-Victorian sensibilities. They seemed to be about war, sports or cheeky guttersnipes getting the better of the local park-keeper. Compared to them, the Marvel stuff was chocolate-chip ambrosia!

The next great influence was the British science fiction comic 2000AD, which arrived in early 1977, a few weeks before my eleventh birthday. Like most British comics, 2000AD was an anthology title, and one of the strips was Judge Dredd, who quickly became - and remains - my all-time favourite comic character. (Important nerdy trivia: Judge Dredd has been around longer than Star Wars!)

The third influence: In late 1979 2000AD also brought us The Stainless Steel Rat, an adaptation of the novel by Harry Harrison. This was my first introduction to Harry's work, and it completely blew me away -- so much that I went out and bought the book, then I bought the others in the series, and - gradually - all of Harry's other novels and collections. From his books I learned that it was possible to seamlessly combine action and humour - something far too few writers seemed to even attempt, let alone master.

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Michael Carroll: Writing with Dredd, Blood and Tears