Interview: Dan Abnett on 2000 AD’s BULLETOPIA, AZIMUTH, and how much he loves puns

The Beat caught up with busy writer Dan Abnettto talk about his long-running series Sinister Dexter and how to get into it.

Right now, the best way is through recent collection Bulletopia, which feeds into separate-but-related book Azimuth, a collected story that’s also continuing now in weekly issues of 2000 AD. Alongside his 2000 AD work, including Judge Dredd and Brink, his creation with artist I.N.J. Culbard, Abnett’s credits include Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes. We asked: how does Abnett produce so much? And why are there so many puns?

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mike Donachie:So, Dan Abnett, you’re always described as a prolific writer. How do you find any time to sleep? You have written how many million pages of comic books over the years? Could you outline what your career’s like?

Dan Abnett:Thank you very much. People call me prolific, which I guess has got to be a compliment because you’d only get to do that much work if people wanted your work.

I love what I do. Next year I’ll have been doing it for 40 years. I love the comic form. I also love writing stories, generally speaking. I’m not just a comic book writer, but I’m a novelist as well, and sometimes the question that I think to myself is why aren’t other people as productive as I am? And that’s not that’s no shade at all. It’s just I can’t imagine writing less, I just get on with it and enjoy it. People say “I’m having a terrible time” and I’m going, “But it’s fun”.

I do it for the love of it.

I don’t know how many millions of pages I’ve written, but I think I’m in the top 20 of most prolific writers in the American comic book industry of all time. I write loads of things at the same time. Whenever I get stuck on something, I’ll just go and do another job. I’ve got multiple jobs on the go at one time. So, I never stay in one place so long that I get bored of it or stuck. I go, “Oh, that’ll fix itself if I go and do something else.” I think it’s 73 novels now, most of which are Warhammer novels.

Donachie:You shared that you came up through Marvel UK and have pitched successfully to all the big American companies. How much of your success is down to 2000 AD and the freedom an anthology gives you to experiment? So that’s your opportunity to do something like write Sinister Dexter for more than 25 years, with twists and false stops and other tricks, right?

Abnett:With Sinister Dexter, pretty much not planned in any way, shape, or form. The plan is like writing something going, “Oh, what can I do next with that? Is there something to do?”

Brink is very much planned. I know where it begins. I know where it ends. I know how that works.

You’re often creating something where that weekly delivery is an important thing. So it’s not any kind of long game you’re looking at. You’re going, “Can I create a character that I can just keep telling stories, five-page stories, about every week?”

I came up with about seven or eight ideas, all of which I thought were brilliant, and then I thought, “Oh, just to make weight I’ll stick this other one on the end,” which was Sinister Dexter. And that was the one they went for, and I went, “Oh, I’ve got to make sense of that now.”

I was trying, and I hope succeeding, in creating a strip that had that multi-purpose use, which is like, here are two pretty simple characters in a pretty simple situation. How many variations of that story can you tell and where can you go with it? Sinister Dex has always lent itself really, really well to quick short stories, five-page stories, one-off gags.

Donachie: Bulletopia builds to a climax that leads to a reset. Then, partway through Azimuth, we discover it’s also a Sinister Dexter story, and then an Anderson story. How did that develop?

Abnett: I kept writing Sinister Dexter because I love writing Sinister Dexter, for years and years and years and years. Every now and then I go, “What the hell am I going to do next?” And then I’d think of something, and sometimes it was a radical invention. It was Malone [one of those twists in the story – this time a character with amnesia] or it was Downlode Tales or it was a reset of the status quo or whatever it was.

I realized that we were coming up on the 25th anniversary. It’s certainly the longest running strip that’s written by the same person all the way through. And I went, “Should I end it now? How much more is there to say?”

So, I designed Bulletopia as a sort of year-long celebration of its 25th anniversary in which big things had to happen. And in it, I deliberately picked up strands from loads of other stories that get explained. You can read it standalone. You don’t have to have read everything else. But I just thought, here’s a chance as a kind of like it’s the big season finale, and then I don’t know what I’m going to do after that.

But in doing that, I had this idea about another strip. I went, “Oh my god, there is a connected tissue here. I can sort of stop doing Sinister Dexter and do a new strip, but there would be some carryovers. There would be some carryovers in terms of characters.”

And once I got that idea, I realized that it was an opportunity to, as it were, carry over ideas from other places. I just thought it was a fun thing to do, this idea that it’s almost like this bleed between the different stories that have happened over the years.

Donachie: Why choose the Judge Anderson story Satan, by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson, and bring in an alternative version of Anderson from there?

Abnett: (2000 AD editor) Matt Smith is fantastic. He’s an amazingly great editor. We have a great working relationship. He has been very encouraging to me.

One of the ideas is that Azimuth is this artificially created place which is sort of ingesting other universes, and therefore bits of those universes are popping up. I said to Matt, “Wouldn’t it be cool to feature some characters from other strips, suggesting that there is this sort of connectivity?”

I suggested Anderson, first of all. I thought it’d be great to get a Dredd Universe character in there. And he was the one who said, “Why don’t we pick a version of Anderson that we can use freely without properly damaging the main continuity?”

And he said, “What about the Satan storyline?” And I went, “That’s a fantastic idea.” So that’s where we went.

And spoiler alerts, if you like that, you’re going to love the story that’s being published right now, because it’s the next part of Azimuth and we’re going to do something even more drastic and radical.

Donachie: And that’s part of how you maintain an audience’s interest in a series over so many years?

Abnett: Bulletopia was an attempt to tell a long form, a properly long form Sinister Dexter story. I’ve done long ones before, particularly with Simon Davis, but this is like let’s really plan out a story. It’s made of separate stories, but it’s got a long form narrative.

And then Azimuth has really got, like Brink, it’s got a long form narrative about what’s going on in it. They fit together and there is a meta narrative running through it.

And I think again all of these things are driven by my desire to find new things to do with it.

In the second half of Bulletopia, I started working with Tazio Bettin, the Italian artist. It enlivened me creatively because Sinister Dexter can be a very conversational strip about people having dumb conversations. I went, we can ramp this up in a really interesting way.

He’s got a particular eclectic visual imagination, which means that when I started to talk about what I thought Azimuth was like, he got it instantly. You go and look at those panels, the background detail of silly stuff that he’s put in there is fantastic.

Donachie: Puns and wordplay are a feature of your work, especially in these new books. Where does that joy in language come from? Are you sitting chuckling to yourself all day?

Abnett: That would make me sound very self-indulgent. My yardstick for writing anything is: I can’t guess what someone’s going to like, so I write something I think I would probably like to read. If it’s entertaining me as a writer, then hopefully there will be other people who read it and they go, that’s fun.

In Sinister Dexter, it was a comedic universe in as much as I allowed for ridiculous puns to exist in it in terms of character names and place names and all sorts of stuff like that. And that was a running gag all the way through it and it was notorious for it.

When we shifted to Azimuth, the puns are constructed on a different basis because it’s all about AI and computer stuff like that. There are puns that I would have written for Sinister Dexter that I would not use in Azimuth because they wouldn’t feel right and vice versa. The technology appears much more like magic rather than everyday technology and that’s part of the point of the difference. The humor has gone through that kind of translation as well.

But yeah, the short answer to your question is yes, I sometimes make myself laugh. There have been a couple of gags in Azimuth recently where I went, I am so pleased with that gag.

My all-time favorite was when Papa Legday, which is a joke in itself, is making dinner. He said he’s doing some tempura fried ouroboros. He invites them to stay and they say no we got to go and he goes, “Oh, are you sure? You can have lunch here. This ouroboros won’t eat itself.”

As far as I’m concerned, the gags and the puns are the decoration on the storyline and if you’re enjoying the jokes then that’s great. That’s an extra thing. Otherwise you enjoy the story.

When thinking in that kind of classic 2000 AD, I went, yeah, everyone should have those ridiculous names. Suzi Nine Millimetre. Why not? Every other person in Azimuth has got ridiculous names which are derived from other things. Everything is a gag. Yet the story is serious.

Donachie: What would you like readers to know about these books before picking them up?

Abnett: One of the lovely things those two trades do is they package stuff in a way that is just, well, this is just a graphic novel.

Here is a trade paperback collection called Bulletopia that will introduce you to some really cool characters and tell you a great story. And it happens to be part of a much greater, longer running thing. This is your primer and you will enjoy it.

It prepares you ready for Azimuth, which is this madness that comes after it. And you can read them separately. You could read one and not the other and that wouldn’t matter.

I love Rebellion for saying, “No, we’ll put them out together,” because you get that point of connectivity and there is a through line.