Bobby Joseph’s credits include creating Skank Magazine – the first Black, satirical comic book as well as the sequel Black Eye Magazine. He was the ‘TV Assassin’ columnist for the Voice newspaper. Under the pen name of Malcolm Vex, he wrote the satirical column ‘The Vex Factor’ for the New Nation Newspaper. For Loaded Magazine, he wrote the monthly column ‘The Ghetto Food Critic’. He has also written satirical columns for The TV Collective and contribute on a regular basis the comic strip Afro Kid for Vice.com. He wrote for the award-winning BBC1 sketch show ‘Lenny Henry in Pieces’ and created the popular character ‘Gloria the Vex Petrol Station lady.’ He has also worked for Radio 4, and been a comedy presenter on Colourful Radio’s ‘The Black Eye Boyz.’ He won a Portobello Film Award for my short film ‘Skanked’. He had one of his comic book character Co-Co-Nutts featured in the British Library’s ‘Anarchy in the UK’ exhibition in 2014. The inclusion of the piece was viewed by over 60,000 visitors. He has also been credited on the BBC website as being instrumental in creating the ‘first comics by Black creators featuring Black characters.’ He is currently writing my first graphic novel ‘Scotland Yardie‘ – which will be released by Knockabout comics in 2016. His novel/comic collection ‘Skank – The World’s Most Dangerous Comic Book‘ was released February 2016. Proceeds of the book go to charity. Skank Magazine was published in 1994 by the X-Press, a black publishing house that gave the British public novels such as ‘Yardie’ and ‘Baby Father’. Under the guidance of book publisher Dotun Adebayo, Skank magazine was written and edited by Bobby Joseph and illustrated by local comic artists Daniel Francis, Michael Robinson and Joseph Samuels.
He was interviewed by 3:AM back in the day. Now we interview him again…
3:AM: It’s been a long time.
Bobby Joseph: I was selling Black Eye at the Portobello Film Festival when we first met. I made you buy two.
3:AM: You got any new ones?
BJ: Nah. I haven’t done Black Eye in over a decade. That said, I’m doing a graphic novel called Scotland Yardie with Knockabout Comics. They are the UK publishers of Alan Moore. They also publish Hunt Emerson and the utterly brilliant Gilbert Shelton. – I met him last year – he did me a cool Freak Brothers sketch for me. Great guy.
3:AM: So what has happened since last we talked?
BJ: A year or so after we last met I gave up doing comics – it became too hard – distribution became impossible. We used Tower Records and Borders back then and they both crashed and burned and it all became too difficult to get the stuff out.
3:AM: You ever consider it was cause and effect both Tower and Borders going down like that?
BJ: Ha! I can’t take credit for crashing both stores! Come to think of it… maybe, nah… anyway… after Black Eye died without distribution… I decided I didn’t want to do comics again. That shit was too difficult and I stopped enjoying it. It was no longer fun! I decided to diversify. I was then offered my own bad taste film night at the Portobello Film Festival – which was a different step for me. The germ of the idea started when people would send in to the festival these really strange films and the PFF didn’t really know what to do with them – I guess that’s where I came in with all my madness and weirdness and they got me to present these quirky, nutty films to the general public.
After a while, people seemed to really dig the stuff we were putting on. A popular one was where a guy gave himself a concrete enema – it was a very peculiar, disgusting Jackass type of short film. And because the film night went down really well with the public, the organisers of the festival then gave me a slot every year at the festival to show off as much bad taste material as I could find. Then it morphed into a Black Eye Film Nite where we filmed our very own bad taste sketches from the pages of Skank and Black Eye – real guerrilla type of sketches with zero budget and that was interesting for a while. It was fun and liberating! There was talk about a few TV stations interested in commissioning it on terrestrial TV – but as usual it was all lip service. We didn’t care though! We sold the sketches on DVDs. And it was nice for a while, to see all these weird Skank DVDs floating around Ladbroke Grove.
But really I didn’t know what to do. Off the back of the Skank DVDs I got offered stuff for TV but it never came through. There were offers for me to do comedy writing and presenting spoof documentary stuff but it was terrible stuff they wanted me to do. There was one production company that wanted me to do one on the Ten Best Things That Slavery Had Given Us! I couldn’t get my head round where they were coming from with that one. Slavery? Really? It was an abhorrent idea as a pitch and I was trying to work out how it would work. I mean, I asked them: “what kind of thing are you thinking about?” and they were giving me shit like; “Well, the chains could have turned to wearing gold chains…” Jeez. Well. Fuck that! Another idea was for me to join the BNP and that was another dumb-arse pitch that I couldn’t get my head round. They were saying things like: “if they don’t accept you, then you could pull them up for discrimination,” – and I’m thinking that I’m in the company of stupid. It was all stupid! They’re stupid. I’m stupid for turning up for the meeting. I wasn’t impressed. It wasn’t what I wanted to do.
Another time I was brought in for a meeting, and a ‘top’ producer was interested in turning my Malcolm Vex character into a TV thingie. Now, at this point, I was writing under the nom de plume Malcolm Vex for Loaded magazine as well as the New Nation Newspaper and I was creating a little buzz with it. People really dug it! The meeting happened, and the producer wanted the character, but for someone else – to be Malcolm Vex. They wanted my character, my persona, my words, and to get other ‘established’ TV writers to rework my ideas to make Malcolm into an Ali G rip-off. So I played it in my head and told her, “Wait! Before we even get into this Ali G crap, let me get this straight… You want my creation? You want to exploit it and do it without my input? Well, nah. Not interested. And as for your dumb-arsed idea of turning Malcolm into an Ali G clone? Fuck that. Don’t contact me again.” I didn’t exactly burn my bridges when it came to TV. I sort of torched that motherfucker!
Dealing with that type of shit? It was all kind of depressing. I went on and started doing my day-to-day thing – floated, focused on being a father – and after a while I let things go, I let the writing go. I retired. The TV shit pissed me off beyond belief and I became a sort of strange urban myth and kept myself under the radar.
3:AM: But you did get back to writing?
BJ: What got me back to writing was the legacy of Skank Magazine. I wanted to write about what me the guys had done with Skank – because what went on behind the scenes of the magazine was a lot more crazier than anything we actually put in the comic! It was a bunch of guys, teenagers, who wrote their own comic book but lost it through their own stupidity. So that was one story. I also wanted to combine that story with how my daughter had died. So I was looking to get a balance. I wanted to write about the pain of losing both my daughter as well as my magazine. So I started writing that as a novel – a combined story of loss. The story just clicked in my head… two stories from two time periods – 1994 and 2001 – and how the time periods resolve, and converge by the end. Skank: The World’s Most Dangerous Comic Book was my initial idea for a title as it made the most sense to me.
People were shocked when I mentioned I was writing a comedy about the death of my daughter. Their faces were priceless! They slightly relaxed when they realised it was not me taking the mick out of the death of my daughter, but rather looking at the absurdity of death, and the absurdity of what happens when dealing with that kind of tragedy.
3am: That’s really your humour isn’t it – serious things discussed at an angle.
BJ: Definitely. I look at things and try to skewer it to find the humour. That, I guess is my thing. To turn things inside out, and drop a satirical slapstick edge to it. I spent two or three years writing the Skank novel. I didn’t think about doing comics again during that time. I was done. After the book was finished, I didn’t know if I was ever going to put it out as that was not the point. It was such a personal journey. Hell, I was just happy having it done!
But what changed my path was that back in 2013, I was in the mega-comic store in London, Forbidden Planet and I accidentally bumped into Paul Gravett and he asked me if I wanted to contribute to the British library’s Anarchy in the UK comic exhibition by having Black Eye as part of it. It was a huge exhibition and then my comic work went in there and suddenly I was legitimised all over the place! I was happy. My comic book work was rolling with the Magna Carta! I never thought that would ever happen. It was so cool to be a part of such an amazing experience. Thousands upon thousands of people saw my work. At the same time, it also felt weird that almost overnight, my comic work was seen as a prominent part of UK comic book history! That was nice, but my best moment was seeing the look on my son’s face on the opening night. He was very proud. Then the publicity went a bit bonkers. I sent out a press release to a journalist I knew, he sent it on to others and suddenly I was news again. I was doing radio and BBC interviews and the magazine Vice did an interview with me – it all skyrocketed again.
The novel was finished by then and the chapters were interspersed with the original Skank comic stuff. I loved doing that as it made it a weird hybrid of novel and comic. Throughout the book, you’re getting different feelings resonating from the comics and the prose blended together, which I thought was an interesting idea to have done. I was thinking maybe with this buzz on my work, I could put it out and donate the online sales to the Meningitis Now charity. After completing the novel, I began to seriously think about doing comics again. I got that feeling again. Then Vice online was interested in me doing a comic strip.
My son was 11 or 12 at the time and he was constantly asking to read my comics and I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to at that point! The humour wasn’t aimed at his age group, if you get what I mean! So in my head, I needed to write a comic that he could read. So I ended up writing Afro Kid for Vice online for a bit – a comic strip that used my humour without relying on my other somewhat, darker adult humour! I based the lead character on my kid.
My son had a huge afro at the time which is why I made the main character rock the same look. The Afro Kid character was based in south London and I wanted the comic strip to be a kind of urban Peanuts with shades of Calvin and Hobbes. So I did that for a bit but I had to stop it because my son’s humour changed and he moved into darker comedic stuff like Cyanide and Happiness, South Park and Family Guy – he’s of that Family Guy generation. So his humour changed and Afro Kid wasn’t working for him anymore and then it stopped working for me. It didn’t feel right anymore! So I put Afro Kid on hold until I figured what I was going to do with the comic strip. Was I going to make it a darker? Was I going to write a comic strip that reflected my son’s growth into a teenager? I didn’t know. And it was at that point that I got offered the chance to write a graphic novel with Knockabout Comics.
3:AM: How did they get in touch?
BJ: They’d distributed Skank Magazine years ago and were part of the Anarchy in the UK exhibition themselves and had said back then that if I ever wanted to do a Scotland Yardie graphic novel they’d be interested. So I decided that this would be a good time to write that project. By this point, I was a different type of writer and was wanting to try out new things. As a comic writer, I’m a lot more multi-layered than I was back in the nineties. So with my first graphic novel, Scotland Yardie – the general idea was doing a Black Lethal Weapon in South London. The general premise was Jamaica’s most feared policeman, a ganja smoking, no-nonsense bad bwoy cop that breaks all the rules coming over to good ole Blighty to dish out his own harsh sense of justice to the criminals of downtown Brixton, south London. I did the character initially in Skank, but I was never really happy with it. Now I am, as the character works better in a longer graphic novel form.
Scotland Yardie is one of the tightest pieces of work I’ve ever done. It’s a graphic novel of cultural clashes, institutionalised racism, police brutality and a riff on Breaking Bad, which, as a programme is not as great as some people make out! So I wanted to take the piss out of it.
Within each panel I try and fit in loads of little background gags like Luther arresting Stringer Bell and things like that. It’s kind of like Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ – he’s an inspiration of course. But instead of using brilliant literary references, we instead looked to popular cultural references of the last thirty or forty years and find a way to use them in the context of the story. The background gags propel the main story. So this is a multilayered graphic novel launching in August.
3:AM: Is it a one off or could there by a sequel?
BJ: Ha, good question. It’s a one-off at the moment. I write very detailed scripts. The artist, Joseph Samuels might not want to work with me afterwards because of what I have asked him to do visually! So it might be a one off – it depends. It’s beautiful though. When you look at the way it’s illustrated, the artwork has got this slight Raymond Briggs quality to it. Joe’s really pushing himself as an artist!
3:AM: It’s more subtle than the earlier stuff isn’t it?
BJ: Before my comic work was up front and brutal, whilst now, it’s more nuanced and can be seen from different angles. This book is also a challenge for myself, as I’m looking to make sure every single panel is funny and people will have to read it more than once, because they’ll not get every gag first time around. It’s not like the early stuff, which was more punk and in your face. I’m more skilled as a writer now. I’m at a really good point as a writer. I’m feeling I’m doing what I want and with these two projects – the novel and the graphic novel – I’m feeling happy. I’m looking to focus on writing my own stuff rather than do anything else for like TV. That stuff takes too long and TV commissioners take eighteen or so many months to even give you a straight answer. Screw that. I can’t stand to have stuff in stasis. I need to get things out quickly. Writing for other people is frustrating. I don’t want to do that anymore. I’m comfortable right now as a writer.
3:AM: How do you see your work?
BJ: I’m an urban writer that satirises the absurdities of life. My writings are rooted in south London. I always focus on my environment. It’s about what I’ve seen and known – and see and know – growing up and living here. I’m not pushing politics but my work can be political. I am not pushing race, but my work can be racial. My experiences, my people’s experiences drive me as a writer. An example of that is when I was stopped and searched by the police as a kid – I’d pull out my pockets to stop them putting anything in them! That was my environment back then and stuff like that has, and will always proliferate in my writings. As any writer will tell you, write what you know! What I write is based on observations from where I was grown. It is personal and that’s what I was doing with things like Scotland Yardie… there’s an urban edge and it’s based on what I’ve seen out on road over the years.
3:AM: Is there pressure on storytellers and artists in London at the moment? Is it harder to get a venue and a scene than it was back at the beginning of 2000, or even earlier?
BJ: I think so. A lot of great writers have just simply disappeared off the scene because they couldn’t adapt through choice or circumstance. Writers and artists dislike doing self-promotion. They are afraid of it. I’m not. I enjoy my work. And I think others would do too, if they were given a chance. So I push my work. That’s the nature how the game has changed. That’s the new venue, that’s the new scene – social media! Being able to manage social media is the best tool for any writer, new or old. And if you don’t use it to your advantage, then it is your loss as a writer.
Then there is also the other side… a lot of writers can’t afford to do it anymore. Writers get paid crap money! That’s a fact. Hell, I was close to quitting on numerous occasions, until I decided that I didn’t really care anymore and went off the grid to write my book – the way I wanted to write it. You reach a point where you question yourself as an artist. Is it about making money or making art? I’m not going to be working for Marvel or DC comics. I’m settled to that. If I can do what I’m doing then I’m going to be happy – I have a fan base, I have comics in the British Library and a graphic novel coming out. I’m feeling that this is a good situation – not bad for twenty odd years of doing this stuff!
3:AM: What influences your writing?
BJ: Alan Moore obviously; he’s been a huge influence. As a child, I read Marvelman and V for Vendetta. I think I was about ten, and those comics scared the living crap out of me, as I was just reading very simplistic comic books up until that point. I’m am also huge fan of Alan’s comedic works – The Bojeffries Saga is funny as hell. The man is completely underrated as a comedy writer! He can drop amazing, jaw-dropping gags with the best of them!
I love Gilbert Shelton’s Freak Brothers – without a doubt, one of the funniest comic books ever written. I can pick up his work, and it will still make me laugh out aloud even today. I adore the ingenuity of Daniel Clowes – a very layered and brilliant graphic novelist. I love the odd bit of Bill Watterson, and Hunt Emerson – who as a cartoonist, is one of the finest that Britain has to offer! Garth Ennis is amazing –very talented, prolific guy. I like Paul Pope, Mark Millar, early Howard Chaykin, Matt Wagner, Moebius, the Hernandez brothers, and the Pleece brothers. Ha! My comic list would go on and on there are so many! With regards to authors, I like William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch – it blew my mind as a kid as well as Blake too. With him it’s the London thing. I see myself essentially as a London writer. Other writers I like include, Vladimir Nabokov, Bret Easton Ellis, Terry Pratchett, and Roald Dahl. I like dark humour and slapstick.
Films I love: Trainspotting, Quick Change, Fight Club, The Conversation, The Big Lebowski, GoodFellas, 21 Grams, Grease, Betty Blue, The Fountain, Uproar in Heaven, The Maltese Falcon, Magnolia, The Shining, Tarantino is a weird one for me – I loved Pulp Fiction. The slapstick. I liked him up to Jackie Brown and then after that he’s become an almost self-parody of his work. Kill Bill was a Manga cartoon. I mean, it was okay, I liked it, but it felt more self-parody, as the dialogue felt clunky rather than anything new and fresh. I love the Godfathers 1 and 2. Actually I like Godfather 3 and think that if it hadn’t been called Godfather everyone would have raved about it. I love ‘I Married a Witch’ with Veronica Lake.
3:AM: I love her.
BJ: Me too! That was the first time I fell in love with someone. I adored the first Superman. I believed a man could fly after that. Still do!!
3:AM: The novel sounds intense.
BJ: Through writing the novel, I’ve found my own self. I managed to rebuild myself from my own personal tragedy. When I wrote the Skank novel I had to write myself as a character. The book is a story about my twenties. I had to look at myself and be honest about the person I was. It opened my eyes, whilst at the same time I had to be detached from that person as well and treat him as a character. It was a bit like therapy for me, it made me more functional by going through the writing process. At the beginning of the book is the death of daughter. I get a phone call – so in the first chapter I write exactly what happened, as it happened. Step by step of how her death unfolded on one night in February back in 2001. Then it flips back to 1994. Then flips back to 2001 again.
Writing it made me come to terms with my past. 13 years ago, well, I was very different from what I am now. I was grieving when we met first time. I was really messed up – I lost my father eight weeks before losing my Baby Girl. People I loved were gone. Bam! I was utterly devastated. I wasn’t sure I was coming back from the loss of my daughter. I was in a dark place. For me it was a question of why did these things had to happen to me? It wasn’t supposed to go down the way it did. Why was I supposed to bury my daughter? I had got so far as a parent and then bang. It was over. I just needed to know why. So after I had seen you, I moved to Croydon and locked myself away from everyone. I stayed away from everyone, for five or six years, I just stopped everything. Cut myself off.
3:AM: How did people react to you writing the novel about this stuff? Were they sympathetic?
BJ: Well, I’d gone to my daughter’s mother and said that I was going to write about the death and asked her if she was cool with that and she said she was. It was a painful process going through everything again in the retelling – especially the first and last chapters. I finished it last year. My editor made me read it out loud which was great in terms of getting the sentences right. It’s an excellent technique to get the writing working. But there were times I broke down doing that – it was too much. The book was a journey for me and about coming to terms with losing my daughter – and also losing my magazine at an early age too. In the book I put everything I had into it using a street vernacular from two different time periods and tried to produce a trip where you don’t know whether to laugh or not. When I was recently On BBC Radio London, the interviewer had read it and said that although it’s a tragedy it’s a story that makes you laugh. Which I was happy with, as the book is about how we deal with loss and how we say goodbye to pain – it’s a turning point in my life. I let go a lot this year. The novel drained me so much. It was so emotional. I’m not sure I could write another novel again. I think one and I’m done is good. My focus is going to be about the comics, the graphic novels.
That’s why Scotland Yardie is refreshing for me – that’s why I threw everything into it – it’s a different sort of energy. A rebirth. A new beginning for me!
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