A tribute to Alan Grant, the comic book genius who mixed Scottish and American culture

He lived a life of wild adventure in his writing and imagination, and in his commitment and support of such good causes as bringing Scotland into American comics, or American comic book heroes to Scotland, and being a champion of his favoured place, his own locality, with “MONIAIVE FIGHTS BACK!” – the campaign to bring together local people and local initiatives to win through the Covid lockdowns and keep a community alive and kicking.

As a professor of Scottish literature, I feel I have a responsibility to pay tribute to him. You might think of best-selling Scottish authors, such as Walter Scott in his day, or Robert Louis Stevenson, or Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan or Ian Fleming, having a long-standing popular appeal and influence. But I suspect none of them really come close: with Batman, Alan Grant was probably the most widely read popular writer of Scottish literature in the last century.

The mythic figurations of most comic books are winning formulae – the lonely adventurer and the loosely assembled group. The child who sets out and the family to which we always return. Tarzan and the Wild Bunch.

Variations within strict limits have helped such strips as DC Thomson’s Oor Wullie and The Broons to survive for generations and the publishing industry of which they are a part remains an extensive empire, selling throughout the world.

At the Modern Language Association convention in December 2008 in San Francisco, the poet Gerry Cambridge and I took a few hours off from reading our work to our 12,000 or so scholarly colleagues and went on a coach trip to the John Muir Woods. As we were buying our tickets for the bus, an Indian woman in front of us in the queue turned and asked, “You are Scottish?” Affirmative.

She beamed. “Ah! Wonderful!

Oor Wullie! The Broons!”

The Broons prompted a homegrown and happily scabrous response in Alan’s The Greens, a vividly colourful strip with identifiably Broons-like characters taken to science-fiction extremes of caricature.

In one episode (in issue No 6, 2002, of the magazine Northern Lightz), while Granpaw’s aged debilities make particularly pungent expression from his nether regions, the twins, playing with the gas pipes, bring about an explosion that triggers a nuclear catastrophe at Faslane, leaving a disconsolate God to shake his head in disbelief and mutter, “Sixty-five billion years that took me … ”

Northern Lightz (advertised on its front cover as being aimed at people aged 18 and over, an “Adult Comic Book”) was generally pro-law reform regarding cannabis, but whatever one’s judgment about drugs and the law there is undoubtedly a very simple aesthetic and cultural pleasure to be had from the cover of issue No 4 (2001), modelled on the famous cover image of the Belgian Hergé’s Tin Tin adventure of The Black Island (1938).

The cover of the Tin Tin story has the intrepid boy journalist in kilt and Tam o’ Shanter toorie, standing in a small boat with his back to us, steering, hand on the stick of the outboard motor. Tin Tin’s face is averted – he’s staring at the castle on the black island on the horizon, where he’s heading, while his wee dog Snowy stands in the bow of the boat, ears blown back by the wind, face turned to the viewer with a look of trepidation and an expression that says, “What sort of mess is he getting me into this time?”

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By contrast, the Northern Lightz cover has four red-faced kilted ruffians in lurid kilts and toories, smoking appropriate substances, drinking from bottles of whisky and cans of beer (discarded empties heedlessly tossed in the waves), all facing out towards the viewer, rowing towards the dark castle on its island on the horizon in a small boat marked “Property of Clan MacBam”. The childish humour seems an aptly irreverent counterpoint to the pieties and stereotypes implicitly endorsed by Hergé.

A more extended development that deserves closer study is Alan’s series centred on the character of Archibald “Middenface” McNulty (“The Scottish Boy Who Ate His Grannie”). Middenface featured in the 2000 AD comic series Strontium Dog and had a long-running series in the Judge Dredd Megazine in the first decade of the 21st century.

Set in 22nd-century Scotland, after radioactive fallout has created an underclass of mutant anarchists, Middenface is at the centre of various battles against the establishment, all sorts of fanatics and authority obsessives, so the action format takes us to different recognisable locations in Scotland (including Harthill Service Station), making reference to numerous texts from popular culture and contemporary politics.

The villains are led by the genocidal Sir William “Stinking Billy” Cumberland who eventually blows up the Scottish Parliament Building (which was still being paid for at the time of publication).

As satire on then current Scottish politics, the series was rambling but keen-edged and no targets were off limits. As satire on representations of Scotland in popular media, the humour was a welcome avalanche of uninhibited riot.

For example, the story entitled “Brigadoom” took the Hollywood musical Brigadoon and transformed its misty romantic village into a dystopia inhabited by the legendary Sawney Bean and his band of cannibals, who habitually and unexpectedly break into song.

The prospect of an engaged political satire in a self-consciously absurd science fiction format – uninhibited about violence and outrageous narrative leaps but cleverly engaged by contemporary political and public personalities and healthily disdainful of the clichéd representations of Scotland in popular culture and mass media – is more than attractive.

So much could be done with it now! As a means of drawing attention to and exercising the skills of storytelling, visual depiction, engaging with political figures and major issues of the day, it’s probably true to say that more use could be made of the graphic art medium in political satire than has ever been attempted. In this respect, Alan Grant was a pioneer.

It was Alan who most memorably brought Batman to Scotland in Batman: Scottish Connection (1998). He wrote the text and the graphics were drawn by Frank Quitely (which, of course, is not his real name, quite frankly).

Bruce Wayne attends an ancestral family re-union at Edinburgh Castle and announces that some of his ancestors were indeed Scottish – perhaps also echoing the notion that his creator Bob Kane gave him the name Bruce because of the stories of courage and dedication he had imbibed as a boy, told to him about Robert the Bruce.

Bruce Wayne it turns out is a descendant of the Clan MacDubh (dubh – black, as in the Dark Knight), landowners responsible for the Highland Clearances centuries ago, so guilt is part of his inheritance. And yet, dedication to justice becomes the current priority and ancient vengeance upon ancestral predators is seen as a murderous liability.

The story includes a detailed exposition of the Highland Clearances and opens up questions about fanatic nationalism, national superiorism and inferiorism, as well as the values of self-determination and the moral commitment to protect the innocent.

Serious sub-texts inform the fast action, moving from Skye to Rosslyn Chapel and Edinburgh Castle at high velocity. “You may have seen Scotland from angles no-one else ever has, sir,” says Alfred, “but I enjoyed it immensely!”

Such vulnerabilities as Batman shows here do not confine Nick Fury – Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Alan’s story with art work by Cam Kennedy set in the Orkney islands: “Greetings from Scotland” (1990). Cam had a home in Orkney at the time, so Alan took Fury to the islands and the story begins with him climbing up the Old Man of Hoy with the curious suspicion that it might be hollow, with a bunch of villains hiding inside it.

Alan Grant and Cam Kennedy adapted Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde as a graphic novel in 2008, closely following the original structure, after the success of their version of Kidnapped in 2007, which was published in English, Scots and Gaelic versions. So much more could be done!

examples of Examples of Alan Grant’s work from Alan Riach’s collection

Imagine Walter Scott’s Waverley novels as comic books, made by fine artists and literary writers with real insight into good storytelling and the languages of Scotland! What pleasures could come!

In a more poignant or even tragic vein, The Last American (2004), written by Alan Grant and John Wagner, ends with what might be literally the last American standing, singing of “the land of the free and the home of the brave” surrounded by “a vast starlit darkness” emptied of people and it seems life of any kind. The balance between apocalypse, nihilism and despair on the one hand and chaotic hilarity, riot and carnival on the other, is the heart of Alan Grant’s work.

But Alan’s supreme text of Scottish-American hybridity in comic book form is The Bogie Man co-authored with John Wagner and Robin Smith and published by John McShane (1989-90, with sequelae 1992 and 1993).

The title character is Francis Forbes Clunie, inmate of an asylum near Glasgow, from which he escapes in the mistaken belief that he is, in fact, the incarnations of all the main characters played by Humphrey Bogart in the classic noir films of the 1940s and 1950s. This allows plots to unfold in which Clunie is only partly self-consciously involved but which he manages somehow to resolve (more or less).

Individual titles in the series (based on Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and other classic noir writers) included “To Huv and Huvnae” and “Chinatoon”.

This appropriation of the American idiom and genre takes us to a crazily unpredictable but recognisable Glasgow and west of Scotland setting. Locations and language were instantly familiar, from the Victorian cemetery of the Glasgow Necropolis to one villain’s roaring battle cry, “It’s laldy time!”

The Bogie man is Alan Grant's supreme text of Scottish-American hybridity in comic book form

On the evening of Clunie’s escape from the asylum, the nurses and staff are having a Hogmanay party. One asks another, “Another year in, eh, Huey? Aye … Wonder what the new yin’ll bring for us aw, eh?”

The question and its answer have come into my mind every Hogmanay since I first read them: “I’ll tell ye – mair bampots!”

There are a few things that I can rely on to make me smile and feel good about life. I don’t mention them very often but here they are. There used to be only three: Haggis, Tarzan and The Magic Flute.

Haggis is so intrinsically comic that it must please anyone not congenitally insufficient or impossibly predisposed to not liking such food; Tarzan is an eternal delight, fluent in more languages than any other living creature and respectful of all their articulators, as swift and secure in fast movement through high trees as he is among the weird old aristocrats of England and the great apes of Africa; and Mozart’s opera, which holds and then freely expresses the essence of joy.

Add to these the Bogie Man, and you get a sense of Alan Grant’s eternal contribution to civilisation, life as it should be.

Nobody, anywhere, should ever have any excuse for feeling anything but goodness in company like his, and the work he has left us.