Recently in The Sunday Scribbler Category

”A lot of emphasis has been placed on the cinematic quality of comic book storytelling. But if you’re using words, there’s got to be a literary element there, as well. I don’t consider myself a very good writer. Maybe I write pretty good comics, but in the broad arena I wouldn’t be anything special. But there’s no reason why comics should not achieve the same effect as the very best books. There’s nothing inherently inferior about the medium, but it will be held back until the scripters are asked to be good writers.”

Interviewed in ‘Comics Interview’ #12

In the history of comics, there have been those that simply serve the form, producing formulaic tales that merely continue a genre. But, rarely, there are those that evolve the form, taking existing conventions, genres and even characters and developing them into a new benchmark for the industry.

As a writer you will know, one of the favourite fantasy plots of a writer is a character’s told you’ve got three months to live – which is what I was told – and who would you kill? (I) call my cancer, the main one, the pancreas one, I call it Rupert, so I can get close to it. Because the man, Murdoch, is the one who, if I had the time – in fact I’ve got too much writing to do and I haven’t got the energy – but I would shoot the bugger if I could.

Dennis Potter in interview with Melvyn Bragg

Television has always fought for legitimacy as a medium. As it grew into a mass cultural phenomenon, it was unpopular to talk about television in artistic terms. It was considered more of a bastard child to theatre rather than a serious rival. But some writers were to define television as a modern theatre of the masses, bringing a new form of drama to a wider audience, elevating the television script to the level of artform.

”Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, ‘You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass.’ Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows.”

Notes From a Small Island

Ten years ago, a close friend of mine was working in a bookshop. Understandably, a lot of our conversation turned to recent books and who was worth reading. One recommendation he was very keen to get across to me was for a small paperback called “Tales From a Small Island”. Being, like myself, an English ex-pat living in Australia, the book was a revelation of nostalgia.

The first in this new series of weekly writer profiles goes to someone I have followed for well over twenty years but remains unknown to many of you. This should be rectified.

Paul Cornell first came to my attention with a piece of short Doctor Who fan fiction in the fanzine Frontier Worlds. Unlike virtually all fan fiction, Cornell’s story (the title of which is lost in my fog of a memory), mixed reality with fantasy in a unique way. Unlike anything else I had read – and I read almost anything in print that contained the two words ‘doctor’ and ‘who’ in those days – this short tale packed a melancholy punch that betrayed a writer who knew how to write from the gut.