DAVE GIBBONS
The illustrated man
COMICS LEGEND DAV E GIBBONS BROWSES THE BACK ISSUES OF HIS LIFE IN A REVEALING NEW AUTOBIOGR APHY
WORDS: NICK SETCHFIELD
PORTRAIT BY DANIEL LEWIS
If you repeat stories you actually make them into better stories,” says writer and artist Dave Gibbons, justifying the title of Confabulation, his autobiography. “You edit them, because real life is quite messy and random. Confabulation is what people do who think they’re telling the truth, who have absolutely no intention to deceive, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that what they say is what happened, and I was very aware of that writing this.
“Having said that, I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible with the facts and the players in these various stories. But I am aware that maybe things didn’t happen in quite the order that makes the best dramatic sense…”
Bursting with gems and rarities from his own archive, many previously unseen, Confabulation reminds you that Gibbons is one of the prime movers in the British comics industry. A rugged reboot of Dan Dare for 2000 AD rode the Star Wars zeitgeist, while a spectacular Doctor Who strip for Marvel UK felt like a dream of the show unshackled from a BBC budget. Watchmen, his mid-’80s collaboration with Alan Moore, took a loving but merciless scalpel to superhero mythology while also exploding the possibilities of the comics medium itself. More recently, The Secret Service spawned the Kingsman movie franchise.
Gibbons revisits this stellar career in a moreish, anecdote-packed A-Z format, from Aliens to Zarga – Man Of Mystery, his professional breakthrough in 1973. There’s even an entry on his own brief stint as a caped avenger on the newsstands of Britain.