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Photo: SAMPATH KUMAR g.p.

Star trooper Tony Lee throws in imagination and experience

For a graphic novelist, Tony Lee is quite the realist when it comes to himself. He begins with a list of everything he is not: he is neither the creator of Spider Man and X-Men nor does any of the illustrations. He is just one of the many writers who write for the comics that Marvel brings out every month, he says, dispelling any myths about himself.

The British writer, has, however, also written for the Doctor Who license held by Panini and IDW comics, authored books for the Starship Troopers adapted from the Robin Hood legend into a 140-page graphic novel called Outlaw: The Legend of Robin Hood, and written his own mini series Hope Falls and Midnight Kiss.

Touring India as a part of the British Council’s Litsutra programme, Lee judged a drawing competition for kids aged 11 to 17. As they queued up to get their entries autographed by the author, he reserved a special comment for everyone, sometimes scribbling ‘Nice Hat!’ on a dracula drawing or ‘I like the tuft of hair,’ on a Doctor Who.

“As a writer, you have to lead the reader by the hand. But sometimes you have to let them run,” he says explaining the challenges of telling a story in just 30 pages of five panels each, yet not disturbing the status quo. “It’s like taking out all the toys from a toy box, but having to put it back exactly as you found it. The character has to progress, the story has to be built, but everything should remain the same.”

Building the story comes from his own experiences and imagination. He had to create a whole set of Marines for Starship Troopers, each of whom he named after a friend and then systematically killed in a host of fun and interesting ways. “The only one I didn’t kill was the one named after a friend who hated to have a character named after her and swore she would never forgive me for it. I kept her alive,” he says with a chuckle. Sometimes, he doesn’t realise how much of his own experience comes into his writing. In Hope Falls, a character’s other died. “It was written around the same time as my own mother’s death; although I did not realise it then, there was a lot of me out there,” he says. Lee also gives his take on the growing chunk of Hollywood movies based on cartoons, “Hollywood just needs the basic story, very little of the other stuff is borrowed from comics,” he says, recalling the time when producers showed an interest in his story on a fallen angel. “‘Can it be a human instead of an angel?’ they asked. ‘No, she is dead,’ I said. ‘Can she be a ghost at least?’ ‘Hmm… maybe’.”

“They want everything to be changed,” Tony lee is antagonised. However, with comic book companies themselves entering Hollywood, there is greater faithfulness to the original, he says. “But there are adaptations. Even the comic Wolverine has been made to be like Hugh Jackman, even though originally he was just a stumpy five-foot something Canadian,” he grins.

So, what next? “There’s always got to be a cliffhanger,” he says with a laugh.

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