Even though John McCrea has been drawing comics for over 30 years (including The Demon and Hitman with frequent collaborator Garth Ennis for DC, Deadpool, The X-Men, Spiderman for Marvel, Judge Dredd, and a number of independent titles), he’s never published a collection of his creator-owned work before.
As many established creators have done in recent years, McCrea turned to Kickstarter to finance the project and bring many exclusive and long-lost stories to fans (including essays, interviews, and even puzzles!).
Learn more about The Mighty World of John McCrea in this exclusive Conskipper interview.
You mentioned in the video on the kickstarter page that you wanted The Mighty World of John McCrea to be similar to the Christmas Annuals you used to read as a kid. Why were these such special comics?
John McCrea: In the UK our annuals came out at Christmas unlike the USA. They were my favourite presents at Christmas- usually they were a collection of comic strips in an oversized hardback book .Not only that, they also featured puzzle pages, prose stories and other things of that ilk. So lots of great memories of reading them on Christmas day.
Was it difficult to track down the “lost gems” that you are including in this edition such as “The Tosspot Four” and “Carla Allison”?
McCrea: Some of the stories where tricky to track down- files lost,missing artwork but in most cases I have managed to track everything, having spent a lot of hours reorganizing my attic!
Besides the vintage material, you also have a number of new stories. What can you tell us about Rocket Station Charlie and the Atheist?
McCrea: The new stories in the book are Rocket Station Charlie and a prose story of Dead Eyes. The Dead Eyes story is a tale from his past when he was a young thief operating in 90’s Boston. Rocket Station Charlie is a preview of a new book that Gerry and I are doing together. I don’t want to give too much away about the story, but it’s down and dirty sci-fi.
Many fans have fond memories of your work on Hitman with Garth Ennis. Memories of working on that book and pushing the boundaries of superhero stories?
McCrea: Working on Hitman with always great fun but we were constantly getting in trouble with the bat office for our use of their characters- the cat signal, the vomit on Batman’s chest and Green Lantern having the piss taken out of them were all iconic and troublesome (for us) moments.
So far the campaign has been a big success, so do you plan on going forward with the four volume set idea in the future?
McCrea: Definitely. I have most of the other three volumes planned out, and apart from some pesky missing pages everything seems to be fine…. obviously I still have to draw the new content as well but that’s for next year!
Check out McCrea’s Kickstarter campaign right here and the first collected volume of Image Comics Dead Eyes is currently available at finer comic shops everywhere.