John Smith

Script droid John Smith is a comic strip writer who was born in Darwen, Lancashire in 1967 and is not yet dead. He has created the character of Devlin Waugh, a gay vampire exorcist (that is, a gay exorcist who is a vampire, not a homosexual who goes around exorcising vampires) who works for the Vatican in the future, when recruitment policies are presumably a lot laxer. Devlin was created for the Judge Dredd Megazine. Smith is also responsible for the charming reptilian jack-of-all-trades Tyranny Rex and the reality-shaping post-mortem operatives of Indigo Prime, both found rampaging through the pages of 2000 AD.

Like Pat Mills, Smith attempts to unite all his characters into one coherent universe. Unlike Pat Mills, his storytelling style is allusive and splintered, juxtaposing panels from different time periods or areas with scant explanation, with the narrator's focus twitching from one character to another like a compass needle in an electromagnetic storm. His stories definitely put the reader's neurons through their paces, but aren't everyone's cup of tea-substitute.

Smith has written for Starblazer twice, for the late lamented Crisis (he wrote New Statesmen) and for Tharg's Future Shocks many times. He teamed up with Massimo Belardinelli to produce one of the best future shocks, 'One Man's Meat', in which a repellent glutton meets (or should that be 'meats'?) a suitably grisly fate. His taste for the grotesque has not diminished since then. Among other things, he has also written episodes of Robo-Hunter, Rogue Trooper, and Hellblazer (and Vector 13, but we shan't hold it against him). One of his latest episodes of Indigo Prime involves Christ being removed from the cross by a dying Nazi, jettisoned into space and replaced by a horrific Cthulhu-type abomination that amazes the onlookers by bursting into a pullulation of purple tentacles. It's not clear whether it's possible for a writer to be more offensive and bizarre than this, but he'll probably give it a go.