Up its incongruous fairytale tower he went, to rooms adjacent to its ‘cinema of sin’. You had to run the gauntlet just to get in the place.’ Well, more in the armpit, with fucking crowds of smack dealers outside by the snooker hall. It seemed that someone did need a ‘ 2000AD-style artist’.Īrmed with a thick portfolio of extra-curricular college work, the graduate Malone was ‘thrilled just to be in London, in King’s Cross, right in the heart of it. It was his loyal typography tutor who spotted an ad in media digest Campaign. A brief stint at underground publisher Knockabout Comics offered work but little pay, and even worse if it was ‘a bad month’.

Neither Marvel nor Britain’s own 2000AD were hiring when Malone left college a decade later. ‘Kirby, the king, had evolved his style to have this graphic rock-like look for the Thing, and it was a pure, natural evolution of him just drawing the character over and over again. Not for another 50 issues did he realise his mistake: MWOM was a reprint, its stories dating back to the 1960s. He was bemused, though: its characters, once iconic, now lacked charm and definition. After Marvel UK launched The Mighty World Of Marvel in 1972, its first British weekly, Malone never missed an issue.

But so little of it existed then that you often had to draw something if you wanted to see it – and I wanted it, so I drew and drew and drew.’Įxposed to American editions of The Fantastic Four by his dad, prolific commercial artist Jerry Malone, Dan’s childhood favourite was astronaut-turned-granite-skinned-clobberer the Thing. ‘Batman was the first guy I drew,’ Malone explains, ‘but Marvel is my biggest influence. Not that he didn’t like the subject, she understood, but he already had two masters in superhero artists Jack Kirby and John Buscema. Let’s start at the beginning.ĭaniel Malone spent his time at Ipswich Art College arguing with all but one of his teachers: the typography tutor who let him draw comicbook characters in class. Another tells of hooligan futuresports, luxurious dungeons, and happenstance worthy of a godlike piston-powered computer. So advises Thundercrack!, a pornographic black comedy horror B-movie, one of many weird fables to pass through London’s notorious Scala Cinema during the late 1980s. When you wake up being masturbated by a great big horny gorilla, you’d best look like you’re enjoying it.

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