From Captain Britain to Doris Lessing

David has either edited or written comics and graphic novels with Marvel Comics, Titan Books, Vortex, Eclipse, Escape, Spiderbaby and Mad Love, also with Macdonald Futura, HarperCollins, Oxfam and Greenpeace.

Comics – Captain Britain and more

• David began by editing Marvel UK weeklies and monthlies then writing Captain Britain, drawn by Alan Davis in Marvel Superheroes. Many of the characters and concepts David came up with were used by later writers such as Alan Moore. Read more about this in an introduction to the Captain Britain anthology published in 2011 and in the introduction to Captain Britain Legacy Of A Legend, which contains some of his strips, published in November 2016. The story of the circumstances of the writing and the reason why David left the series has been told in an interview with him about in SFX magazine: download a PDF [6.2MB].
• Doc Chaos, which was based on a commissioned tv series written with Lawrence Gray and published by several publishers.
• Doc Chaos: Science, Fun and Politics, and Mutant Love with artist Phil Elliott in ES*EF.
• After Life, created with Aidan Potts, published by Steve Bissette's Spiderbaby Graffix n Taboo Magazine
• Salvation's Gate, with Duncan Fegredo, for Blaam!
• How the World Works (link is to Amazon where you can buy it), for Oxfam/Toucan Books, with Aidan Potts: a six chapter highly illustrated book teaching 10 – 15 year olds about development issues
• Repo Blues, with Duncan Fegredo, for AARRGH! magazine
• Mutant Love, an early experiment with what was later to be the hybrids idea. Published in an obscure British comic anthology. Art by Phil Elliot.
• Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union Trading cards, for Eclipse Enterprises – 36 cards with a painting on one side and 300 words on the other. Art by Greg Copeland.

Graphic Novels – Watchmen to Playing the Game

David edited graphic novels for Titan Books at the time of the '80s boom. He was desk editor for Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Sandman, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Swamp Thing, Judge Dredd and many 2000AD collections, plus English editions of several European graphic novels.  

He wrote a graphic novel, Hothouse, about climate change commissioned by Greenpeace in 1990, then went on to conceive, commission and edit a series of titles matching best-selling literary authors with the best artists from Europe and N. America, exemplified by Nobel Prize-winning Doris Lessing's Playing the Game.

This was possibly the greatest otherwise unpublished series of literary graphic novels ever (apart from the Lessing book, the only one which saw publication). This post on David's blog reveals the story of both Playing the Game and the series and his role as commissioning editor. Artwork © HarperCollins 1999.

Cartoon strips

David has so far produced three comic strips:

• Managing Hell, published in FM magazine
• Public Servants, published in, believe it or not, Public Servant
• ArtMan, with artist Martin Kennedy, published in Pssst! magazine.