Interview: Artist Lee Sullivan

GACCH: Can you tell us a bit more about Lee Sullivan the person, from the beginning?
Lee Sullivan: Well, you read (from Lee's own website) about my training as a wildlife illustrator and all that kind of stuff. Basically I got into comics accidentally... I'd always loved the idea of doing comics strips, and had been devoted to TV21 as a kid. I loved the Embletons doing stuff on Captain Scarlet, just marvellous marvellous work. Mike Noble, who is one of my favourite artists, did Zero X and Fireball... and he did a really amazing take on Star Trek, but he had clearly never watched the programmes! I loved all that really high quality comic strip work. I know everyone talks about the Eagle, but I actually think TV21 beats it hands down. I know they were properties, and it was all merchandising spin-offs in a sense, but they had the best people working on stuff, obviously with Bellamy doing Thunderbirds. I just absorbed all that, and really I believed that world more than I believed what I saw on the TV in a sense. I believe in the original creation of the Daleks rather than the Davros thing. Davros was always (dismissively) 'yeh, yeh...' but it was Yarvelling and Zolfian actually... we all know that because we read the strip in TV21! (laughs)

All the locking in of the WASPs, the World Space Patrol and all that stuff, was fabulous. It made a bit of a strange thing about tying it together - it didn't quite make sense - but Fireball was still out there doing stuff, Stingray was out there doing stuff, and Spectrum... I assume they kind of locked it into that when it came along too. So that world was wonderful, and I think that has never been bettered, as a marvellous comic. And it was a newspaper as well, which was a brilliant stroke, although I used to find it slightly boring to read the text - I was always rushing off to read the strips. That made it even more realistic, as if you were living in the world of the 21st century.

I know I was impressed with the fact they had photographs. I believe they did photograph inserts in the Stingray stories, didn't they? And I know that really captured my imagination... it's difficult, casting my mind back, we're so used to seeing publications about now. If you're unlucky you can watch a programme about 'the making of something' before you actually watch the programme, and all that stuff is so available now. But it wasn't at the time - there were no photographs from Doctor Who, even in TV21 there were not that many photographs from the series but when there were, and they were colour, it was just like a jewel sitting in the middle of a shop window. You were really drawn to it. That kind of contrast, and the locking it into a TV reality was really important, and I imagine the front pages were too - photos always sell much more than artwork does. I think a photograph from a series is probably worth x-amount more copies sold, than a piece of artwork. Unfortunately, for people like me, but I think it's the truth.

Illustration: The poster from issue 2 of the Thunderbirds magazine. Lee comments, 'The early poster of Thunderbird 1 launching was the first thing I did for them; there were a few versions (different Scotts) but it was essentially my sample page.'

GACCH: For the Redan magazine. the covers were artwork but which seemed to be pulled from material you had already used for the strip?
Lee Sullivan: (laughs) Increasingly they were, yes. The story behind that is, when I was approached to do Thunderbirds, there was another guy involved who was one of the big fans (Steve Kyte), who had done one strip, and they were hunting for someone to replace him as they couldn't agree terms, and I was up for it. It was one of those weird things that can only happen nowadays - it certainly wouldn't have happened in TV21 times. Donna Wickers, who was the editor-to-be on Thunderbirds, she was looking for an artist, and contacted a friend of hers who now lives in California called Richard Starkings (now famous for the Comicraft fonts), but a long time back he was my first editor on the Doctor Who magazine comic strips. He knew I was looking for work, and he recommended me, so it kind of bounced across from England to America and back. I did samples, actually not for Donna at that stage but for Diana Turner, who was stepping in for her. She was on board when I did my samples, and she got them approved by... I assume the people who own Thunderbirds, and I know it wasn't Gerry Anderson. It was really funny, because we did several drawings, and I was sent the stuff that had been done by other artists as potential work, and I don't believe they ever turned up in the magazine. So they were clearly looking for, and I was routing really hard for, 'if you're going to use me, I want to be the main artist on this' - I didn't want to be doing this once, then two episodes someone else does it, and I think they were quite keen to do that too. We did two or three versions of the characters - I don't think there was ever any problem with the hardware. But the look of the thing was a difficult thing to pitch, because clearly it wasn't going to be TV21, as the whole production thing is different these days. It wasn't going to be full colour, it wasn't going to be highly detailed because it was aimed at a much younger market. I don't know if that's really true as what age range they were I don't know but certainly a lot of the letters that went in were from very, very young kids watching it. So it was a much less sophisticated approach to the strip anyway, and also there's a kind of style in that age range publication like Action Man, that is very simplified, lots of colour. We couldn't quite judge whether they should have big heads (laughs) because the proportions of the puppets are extremely weird when you measure them out - they don't pretend to be right. In the end I settled on simplified... trying to look as much like the puppets as possible facially, but actually have the proportions be really correct. I think after the first couple of episodes, I'd given up any idea of doing them as puppet proportions because it just didn't work. It's very difficult to match in any new 'real-life' characters being introduced - it then gets really quite horrible, I think, to look at. I much preferred the idea they look like real people, but be as puppet-like as possible. (laughs) You're pulled both ways...

I could remember from my time reading TV21, I was always really annoyed when people didn't pay attention to what the puppets actually looked like. Although I absolutely understand why Frank Bellamy is a great artist, he really took incredible liberties with the craft... and he used to drive me nuts actually! He'd draw the bloody things... in the same double page layout, he'd draw a craft two different ways! And I'd think, 'What...!? What are you drawing here!?' The thing is, I believe Bellamy's work - great as it is - is about his graphic design, how he felt the way it should look, and he probably is an artist in a way I'm not. I'm an illustrator. And I think he just did it his way, and stuff it. If it didn't look right on the page, he wouldn't do it - he would just do it the way he felt it should look, and if Thunderbird 3 should look one way in one drawing, and another way in another drawing - fine. Both are artistically true. But as a nitpicky little git when I was that age, I used to think 'why can't he just draw the thing properly?' (laughs) I know it's only got so many fins and whatever, and he's just messing around with it. And I also used to think the characters were unrecognisable, in my child view of the world, I didn't know which character in a blue hat I was supposed to be looking at... and that's probably shocking. I don't want anyone reading this to get the impression that I think I'm in any way in the same league as most of these guys, because I really don't think I am. When you look at it from the professional's point of view, I think probably some of my best work in other areas is the same as their average work. And I certainly wouldn't pit my Thunderbirds against anyone... except that I know that every time I draw the craft, it was as accurate as I could make it, and I tried to make the characters look like the characters.

Doctor Who: Confessions (part one of one)

Talk veers to Lee Sullivan's work for Doctor Who (which we confess being big fans of), and notably the Eighth Doctor strips in the Radio Times in the 1990s...

My own personal thing was the Radio Times stuff I did, which is really bizarre because no-one at all remembers that. (Well this writer does, and has all of them - 'Good for you!' Lee laughs, 'I'm glad someone else does!')

Techically, that was the most complicated thing I have ever done. To try and cram that much story-telling into that little space, with the same size word balloons you'd normally get on a much bigger page. Boy, oh boy! It ended up being about a third of an A4 page. I had to design them around the word balloons, I had to take the script, and actually typeset them on a DTP so I could know exactly how big the word balloons were going to be, and I used to trim Gary Russell's scripts mercilessly. He was lovely about it, as I would say 'Look Gary, I'm afraid I'm going to have to lose four paragraphs in this balloon...', because he's a writer and he writes words - that's what they do - but I had to pare out as much of that out as possible.

Illustration: Part One (of Ten) of Doctor Who: Perceptions, for the Radio Times dated 4-10 January 1997. Written by Gary Russell, coloured by Alan Craddock and lettered by Elitta Fell.

Once I was left with that, I knew I'd got five boxes. The first would probably be the biggest box, or the last one, or there was an obvious big box, then the rest were little ones. What I got was little tiny areas left where I could fit in these little drawings, and that was exactly how it worked. It was entirely back to front. Normally you'd want to do a nice piece of artwork but because of that technically it was really very exercising. A really good solid, interesting job that was, and although it's not spectacular to look at, I'm very proud of that work because I think it achieved a huge amount in a small space.

Lee Sullivan: The thing is I knew I absolutely felt the weight of TV21 hanging over me when I started it, because as much as I wanted to do it, I knew that it wouldn't be the job I'd really want to do on Thunderbirds. It couldn't be because the budget wasn't there - it was quite limited - and they were not going pay reprint rights. I think that was where it floundered for the other artist - he wasn't having any of that. And I was standing around waiting for a job so if it kind of snatched the rug from under him, then I apologise to him. So I just went for it but it was a bit annoying. The page rate was quite low, and I thought fair enough - you have to cut your cloth according to what you're given. We'll do it as basic as possible, and I'll do as good a job I can, and someone made the mistake of saying to me, 'if it gets successful, then we can talk about upping the page rate'. Well, the talking amounted to, 'can I have some more money please?', and them saying, 'no you're not', and that's it! At that point, which is an entirely fair business transaction - they want to get away with paying as little as possible for as long as possible - I had to start taking the view if that's how it is, and I'm not really getting a great page rate per hour, then what I'll supply them with will be commensurately more recycled (laughs). And that became the very fun period where I reused as many drawings from the first fifteen to twenty episodes. I just started to reuse them because I thought, why draw Thunderbird 2 again, when the page rate hasn't gone up to what it might have been, given our original dialogue. And there's this wonderful thing called Photoshop, which I'm using to create the pages in the first place, and having a great deal of fun! Diana Turner had come back in, as Donna Wickers had gone off to have kids and all kinds of things like that, and she wanted a different look to it so we had these double page spreads where the top panel would be one dramatic thing, across both pages. I think the most outrageous one was I blew up one of the original Thunderbird 2s to stretch across A3! Which was a bit cheeky, but it was interesting learning the techniques for doing that.

Illustration: Lee Sullivan's original art for issue 67 of Thunderbirds, with 'a really great sky', 'some interesting clouds', and 'things like lens flare'!

GACCH: Did you draw a selection of craft for this, or were you pulling them from pages you had already drawn?
Lee Sullivan: I would like to say that I had enough foresight to do that, but I didn't. Again, being lazy, I decided I wouldn't do that and just drew them as they came up. When I started reusing them, I did then keep them as isolated files so that maybe there was a Thunderbird 2 going left to right file, and that would double up as one going right to left, and then with a layer on that with the writing reversed. But that was later on when I got very slick with my terrible trade of... I feel a bit like Sweeney Todd... butchering things. Also, at the time, my parents had both died within a year of each other, right in the middle of doing that strip. Quite honestly, when my mum died, I had to start looking after my dad quite a bit, and my interest level in doing this stuff just went down to zero. I knew I had to do it, because it was regular work and it was great, but I frankly couldn't tell you what I was doing from one minute to the next in the middle of that. I did the minimum amount of work in order to get a strip done. There are probably dozens of guys out there wanting to draw Gerry Anderson strips for money, and what you get is the actual person doing it has no interest. That must be very frustrating but life is like that. So there is this period where I simply cheated horrendously... there is one page which simply doesn't exist - I wish I could tell you which one it was but unfortunately there are so many episodes I can't really remember. I started planning things in a very kind of cold-bloodied way. I would sit down and read the script, and think, 'Can I re-use any stuff? Okay, I know which shot will look good there with Thunderbird 2 taking off. I also know which one I used last week so I won't use that one... I'll have to use another...', and there was one page I was looking at, just analysing it, thinking, 'Okay that's interesting, that's a scene in the house. And then that's another scene where it's just Alan and Jeff talking. And there's one of Thunderbird 1 taking off...' and I suddenly realised, 'I know where all of these drawings are...' because every week I was looking through the whole of my work every time I started a strip. I would look at every page, and I got really familiar with what stuff I'd already done, so I could just see it and I thought, 'Could I get away with this?'. It became some challenge then, and one page just has nothing on it - it just has 'TB 25.1' or whatever page it was, and there's nothing on it. And what was fabulous was, I felt really great! (laughs). I'm going to sell that on eBay one day. But it makes a great anecdote. Shocking, absolutely shocking! As I'm telling you this, I hate myself for doing it... (laughs even more)

And it was good really. That whole thing with the death of my parents, it got me through that as well. It gave me work. I'm extremely grateful to Thunderbirds - it sounds as if I wasn't but I really was. I couldn't have got through that period having to do something where I was really having to engage. I would never have been able to do the Radio Times strip through that period - I just couldn't have done it. So thank you Redan, and thank you Thunderbirds. Redan were fine. They are a bottom line company - they need to know exactly how much money they're making, and that's the reason why the strip stopped. They just decided in the end, it wasn't cost effective to continue generating new artwork. So for a while they had enough money to get me to recolour the strips I had done. What did you think of those?

Illustration: Frames from the original Burnout strip in issue 32 of the Thunderbirds magazine (left), probably coloured by Robin Smith, and Lee Sullivan's recoloured version for the reprint in issue 72. Lee also added effects, and - as seen here - replaced a drawing of Thunderbird 3 (bottom frame) with a more detailed version. Note the homage to Fireball XL5 as well!

GACCH: They were a significant improvement, and more detailed.
Lee Sullivan: That's good - I'm pleased about that, because that was really my first go with computer colouring. Although the colouring of Thunderbirds was fine, it was always very basic, and I thought it was one area where it could be lifted. So when I got the opportunity to it... I think towards the end of the run they were trying various ways of making it more interesting for the viewer. And I suppose they considered getting rid of the artist, and to give them their due they never did. Oh, I know... it was the covers. They wanted to have three-dimension looking covers.

GACCH: That was something I wanted to ask, as they got Andrew Skilleter in to do covers, but there are a couple which aren't his... and I'm not sure are yours either. The last recogniseable one of yours features Lady Penelope's racehorse FAB 3...
Lee Sullivan: Yes that's right. It may well be the case, because what I did was try and do the colour for those but it didn't work out. I have a feeling I tried that racehorse one, and what I did I thought was fabulous, because I was really interested by that stage in doing the colouring. Not actually on the strip but having a go at the colouring full stop. I submitted that but the editor at the time - Frevisse (Dearsley-Hitchcock), she was lovely, she was great, no nonsense at all. She kept slapping me down (laughs - and I respond to a firm hand!) but she wasn't having any of that. She did bear it in mind as she liked the colouring but it wasn't quite what she wanted for the covers, and obviously Andrew's stuff was. The colouring became available, and I said I'd love to do it, and she said 'okay, let's do it, and see what we come up with', because I convinced her there would certainly be more of it. I think she was getting bored with the idea all skies were blue, and all seas were green, and it was just looking the same in each panel. If you had a lot of panels with the same background, they'd all have the same colours and that makes the page would look kind of dull, no matter how good the colouring is. I'm not at all taking away from the colouring, because whoever was doing a fine job. But I kept thinking, if I was doing that, I'd do a really great sky there, put some interesting clouds in, and that wasn't happening. So I took on the colouring in the last few strips that were generated, and I really really enjoyed that. Then it went into, 'we can't afford to pay you to do any new strips, and we're just going to reprint, but how do you fancy just colouring in the old ones?'. And I was really pleased to do that, because by then the colouring was what I was more interested in doing anyway, and it meant I could perk up some of the strips that I had done, in a way that was more interesting. I would put in things like lens flare, and various effects, to try and compete with what kids really get from all sides now. Television has such flashy graphics. Doctor Who is a case in point - just wonderful graphics. Kids are used to seeing that, and I felt they should be seeing that in the comics too. So that happened for a little time, and then they got rid of me completely!

Illustration: Lee Sullivan's Trapped In The Time Corridor for the Doctor Who 30th Anniversary calendar ©1993.

GACCH: So why did that happen? Was it just a cost factor?
Lee Sullivan: Yes, it's entirely to do with how many issues they're selling. Because it costs x-amount to print it, x-amount to edit it - those are things that can't be removed from the equation. Anything that costs more than that has to be taken out of the profits, and if they have fallen to a stage where it's only really covering reprint costs, then that's what they will do. And they'll do that for some time - I mean it's still going now, much to my surprise. It's just carrying on and on, and it will do so until the time when they feel they have something which can replace it easily, and they don't need another title in the range. They'll keep something going, I imagine, just to have something on the stands which says Redan on it. I speculate they would do that in any case, even if they were only earning a penny out of it, simply because that's a good business thing to do. But the sales fell to the point where they could no longer justify spending several hundred pounds on art.

GACCH: So have the sales have started to tail off now?
Lee Sullivan: Well they must have. I now have no contact with it so I've no idea but I imagine they fell to a certain point and that's when they chucked me. There is also another thing where, if you've got enough strips - and I have a horrible idea I did five years on Thunderbirds. I can't really quite believe that (but yes folks, he did!) - by the time you've got to a certain level, you've got enough to go into reprint and to catch a whole new wave of people who have joined the magazine. I think they reckon on three years as being the maximum anyone buys a title for, so by the end of that, they then start doing what Eagle did, and say 'the guys who are reading it now aren't the same ones who were reading it in the first place' by-and-large', and start stripping it - in TV terms they strip stuff (rescreen a whole run of shows on a cycle) - endlessly repeat the same stuff and keep appealling to a new audience.

Illustration: It's not what you know but... Frames from Lee Sullivan's first Doctor Who strip, Planet of the Dead, from the Doctor Who Magazine strip in 1988, and celebrating the show's 25th aniversary. Coloured by Paul Vyse.

GACCH: Everything is being regenerated now, except for the covers, aren't they?
Lee Sullivan: I'm not sure. I think some of the activity pages still might be - some I don't recognise. Some of the covers seem - to me - to be using some of the images I reused myself. I can see when Andrew has used one of my drawings, and fair enough, he changes them and is painting them from scratch, and he's probably not being paid a huge amount of money either. I suppose also, we're this far away from the TV series being on air, and the DVD releases, I imagine the turnaround in people coming into and out of reading the title, is probably higher so they feel they can get away with it even more. I say 'get away with it', that's not a derogatory term - to keep the title alive, they'll do what they can. Perhaps kids nowadays are only dipping into it for six months, and then out again. Of course, if you look at the history of any of the titles we know and love, they all have the same strictures applying to them - they have to make money. And particularly if you're originating artwork, it just physically takes a long time, and is the biggest part of their bill because they can probably get them printed in Indonesia for twenty pence. But the artwork still has to done, and that's much harder to do - to send out to foreign parts, and the communication problems.

GACCH: In an increasingly digital age, are you sending the artwork electronically - by email or ISDN?
Lee Sullivan: Oh yes, in the end we were using something called Smart FTP (a means of uploading a file to a webspace, so it can be downloaded at the other end) because the file sizes were quite large for the colour stuff, and it wouldn't get through on email. I would scan the pages at 450 or 600 dpi, and work on them at that level for black and white - you could go in and clean up drawings, add things, push in a composite drawing from somewhere else, and then when you convert it to 300dpi (the minimum required resolution for print at same size reproduction), it would be a much better effect. Because you'd done all the nitpicky work at a higher resolution, bouncing it down (reducing the resolution) it would look the same as everything else on the page. I think I probably did the colouring at 450 or 600dpi, because again the effects worked better at that stage, and bounced down, it gives the impression of being quite slick. I'm not quite sure how it works actually - there's still an element of magic to that stuff!

Illustration: Lee Sullivan's RoboCop, which he pencilled, with inks by Kim deMulder.
© Marvel 1991.

Lee Sullivan: The sequence of events is: you'd do a rough which would be approved, and in the end I was doing very, very rough roughs. I'd say 'Thunderbird 3 will be in this area, left to right', as they knew I was reusing artwork. As long as it was my artwork I was reusing, they didn't mind. I think they'd had problems before where someone was reusing somebody else's artwork in their own, and there was a bit of a stink about that - I don't think it was Thunderbirds, but they advised me to stay away from that. I wouldn't have done that anyway - there's cheating, and then there's theft! Then I would do very rough pencil drawings on, quite honestly a lot of the time, just on A4 paper - not even proper illustration paper. I think I did the whole run at same size, except possibly the first few which were larger than the size reproduced at, because it was just easier. Then pen and inks, and scanned in. I put page borders in, because I didn't even draw those - they were all done at Photoshop stage on a layer. Then I would import any extra drawings on another layer, and on another any adjustments to faces or things I didn't like. Maybe if I'd done an eye slightly squinty or something, I'd change it at that level. Put them all down onto one layer, and send them that, and then they'd send it away to be coloured and word-ballooned. If I was colouring it, I'd do another file based on the finished black and white art.

GACCH: Why would Redan (among other publishers) feel it necessary for someone else - initially - to do the colouring? Is that usual now, to reduce costs?
Lee Sullivan: Comic strips are usually based on a production line - particularly American stuff. No-one does the whole job. I think generally, it's because of time, particularly if you're doing something like an American comic book, it would take most of a month for an artist to do. It's much more cost effective... time effective, while he's finishing the last ten pages of pencils, someone else is inking the first ten pages of the work. By the time he's finished, someone else will by that stage have the first ten pages to colour up, do the word balloons and stuff, and that production line method is very much the industry norm really. I don't really like doing pencils at all, I like doing the full black and white artwork and I've done that on as many projects as I have been able to since the early days. I've never got on with people inking my work - I was too lazy at pencilling stage.

GACCH: That's because if someone is inking your work, your pencils have to be that much more detailed?
Lee Sullivan: To me, it was just mad. You have to work really hard to get pencils looking like the ink version - you have to put all the weight of the line in... I might as well be doing that with a pen. Mostly, I go from a very loose pencil, and draw directly the finished product over that, and it doesn't necessarily follow all the lines that I've put down because I will make changes and choices that are the final version. I do the pencils knowing that in advance - I know roughly what I'm going to aim at. Then when I sit down with a pen, and the ink starts flowing on the paper, it goes its own way. So I'm not a big fan of being inked, because I just hate the process of pencilling really.

Captain Scarlet

There were rumours that having successfully launched the Thunderbirds magazine in 2000, Redan planned one to coincide with re-runs of Captain Scarlet in 2001?
I always assumed they had done (Lee may be referring to the 'Collector's Editions from 2001), but I know there was talk about it. I know I was interested in the idea that, if anything came up, I'd get my greasy mitts all over that too - you're probably thankful I didn't!

The thing is that Captain Scarlet is just not as good a format as Thunderbirds - it hasn't got the same solid... it doesn't fit together quite as well as Thunderbirds. Thunderbirds interacts with the real world but Scarlet has a much more covert feeling. As a series, it's not really as strong. But that is just a personal opinion.

Because as Redan have a much younger readership, was it perhaps difficult to 'write down' such a dark series as Captain Scarlet?
I think you're absolutely right, but I don't think that would be a primary consideration. I think the only consideration they would have is whether they thought there a big enough market for it. They're businesses, and that's what they do, and if they felt there were x-thousand kids out there who were going to buy it, they would have done it. I didn't hear much about the Captain Scarlet thing. I was trying to say, 'if there is some stuff going, I wouldn't mind doing it' but it went so fast. By the time I knew, it had gone.

Lee Sullivan: Colouring is different. Up until relatively recent times, colouring would have to done as a mechanical process, before Photoshop and that stuff got going. The way Marvel UK, and most American comics, used to do it, is someone would get a photocopy of the original black and white art, they would do a magic marker or watercolour version of the page in colour, and then that would go to someone else who would decide how that would break down into various overlays. It's almost mind-boggling now to think of it being done this way, but if you had a particular colour orange, that would be closest represented by 20% magenta and 80% yellow, someone would note each colour, run a pen line off the page and all that information would be on the side. That would go to someone else, and I think they would fill in all the areas in black on overlays that were 10% magenta, 20% magenta, and so on, and it's just mind-mangling that people did this stuff. That's why comics were crudely coloured, with a basic range of colours, because you couldn't do sophisticated stuff like fades. There was a time when they were done with Letratones, and I've done a little bit of that - not for comics - and it nearly drove me mad, and the results were rubbish. So those people were unsung geniuses. But when the computer technology took over, it then started to play into the hands of people who were doing the origination in the first place. I did a few strips for Doctor Who which were full colour, and I would take my black and colour artwork and airbrush or watercolour over that, and they would scan that. But by the time we get into Thunderbirds, that's all being done in Photoshop by a colourist, who would get the black and white file in, colour it up, and that would be split automatically into CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black - the four colours used in full colour print) and the whole thing would be done then. The time involved was much faster, so it became much easier for someone like me to do both jobs - the inking and the colouring, and as it was a monthly, I had a month to kick it backwards and forwards, and everyone would be happy with that. It's very interesting, the technology has brought it closer to the artists than it's ever been.

GACCH: When you coloured your artwork, did you adapt it accordingly - using full outlines so you could colour using something like 'magic wand' for selections?
Lee Sullivan: I was always aware of that from doing the Radio Times stuff (see box-out above). Alan Craddock was the marvellous colourist on that, and he was the first guy I knew who was doing stuff which augmented what you were supplying - he would do interesting colour backgrounds, skies, import 3D models of Mars and all kinds of stuff. And I learnt quickly from him that he needed closed lines - you couldn't just do sketchy outlines and leave a little space, because it would be technically more difficult for him. He would have to close off the line himself, either by drawing it in or changing the mask in Photoshop. So I became very aware that, if a head was all going to be the same colour, then the line running round the hair would be solid so he wouldn't have that problem. I didn't always succeed but I did deliberately try and do that. When I came to do it myself, I was already thinking like that, but it made me much more strict with myself obviously - because I knew I'd be doing it! But also, I didn't really care so much, as I knew I would simply draw it in at Photoshop stage, and yes I do use a graphics tablet for that. I have, in quite a few of the things for Thunderbirds, background details particularly that I had forgotten about, or faces that I didn't like, I've simply wiped them out and redrawn them directly in Photoshop. And some you can tell, and some you can't...

Illustration: Lee Sullivan 'saxes' lyrical with a visual in-joke for part 1 of Children of the Revolution, from the Doctor Who Magazine strip in 2002.

GACCH: I don't suppose we can mention Thunderbirds without mentioning your other interest - Roxy Music - which started to sneak into the strip... ?
Lee Sullivan: Oh yes, absolutely! The thing is, when you do strips, a certain amount of madness starts to creep in if you're not careful, because after a while you feel 'my god, I've drawn all this before...', and in some instances I had! (laughs) But my musical passion is Roxy Music, and they were getting back together when Thunderbirds was starting, for their 2001 tour. They had reformed after donkey years, and I was very pleased about that, so I thought it would be kind of fun to drop these characters in every now and then to be rescued. Bryan Ferry became Lady Penelope's mysterious James Bond -like controller in M.I.5. or something, and the whole of Roxy were saved from variois rooftops, and one ship as well. Roxy have always figured in all my stuff - Andy Mackay's name is stuck in all kinds of things, he's in the Radio Times strip, Transformers... where there's shop windows, you almost always have 'Mackay's Music' with a saxophone in the window. I put a poster advertising one of their videos into Robocop in a street scene. On my website, there's a picture from 2000AD, of Judge Ferry arresting Andy Mackay in his 1972 outfit - the guy in green with the saxophone. It's just a way of breaking up the tedium of drawing another panel, if you can squeeze something interesting in. The one I had the biggest fun with was the Doctor Who strip, Children of the Revolution - the huge submarine in that is, in fact, a wind controller - an electronic saxophone - on its side!

GACCH: Did anyone at Redan ever pick up on these?
Lee Sullivan: I think I would reveal these things some weeks after, because there was no chance of anyone saying 'you can't have a picture of Bryan Ferry in there'. I don't think people care enough about it, and as long as they're not going to be sued. It's interesting, as it harks back to my first Doctor Who comic strip (Planet Of The Dead) - I got that as I had done a likeness of Richard Branson in a Transformers strip, and because I'd done that, the story that I was selected for became the Planet of the Dead one, where there were likenesses, because they knew I could do them. And that was purely as a result of - jokingly in the script - it said 'a Branson-like figure is hauling rotting Transformers out of the Thames'. There was a thing at the time about 'Keep Britain Tidy', and Branson was involved with that. So we had a picture, in rough form, of 'Branson' on the dock, and someone said, 'ooh, that's rather funny but we probably can't do that', but then they thought 'perhaps we can'. So they actually contacted his office, ran it by him, and he said, 'yeah, no problem' - you know Branson, any publicity is good publicity! And so that happened with his approval, and that kicked off my career in Doctor Who, as Planet of the Dead was a more significant story than the one I was up for originally - a much higher profile, seven Doctors plus companions. And I may never have done another Doctor Who strip if it wasn't for that one. That led on to other stuff, as a result of that I got RoboCop, and from that TekWorld, so the whole thing snowballed.

Illustration: One of Lee Sullivan's Transformers annual covers, and a page from the comic, starring Richard Branson! © Marvel 1988.

GACCH: On the subject of Richard Branson, you had a 'Branson'-like balloonist in Thunderbirds?
Lee Sullivan: Yes, that's true. I'd forgotten about that. He wasn't quite as good then. I didn't have any reference of Branson from the side, so it was a 'sort of Branson' but it wasnt terribly successful.

GACCH: Do you ever get the same kind of interest from Transformers fans as you do for Doctor Who and Thunderbirds?
Lee Sullivan: Oh yes, Transformers has a real hardcore fan base. Transformers was the first comic strip I did, around 1988. I kept all my Transformers art because I thought, 'well, why throw it away?', and I knew that eventually someone would be interested in that stuff. Obviously from a mercenary point that was very nice, because all my original Transformers stuff is gone - a long time ago. I went to a convention with full colour artwork from the original UK runs, and I held them up at a semi-auction they were doing, and it was amazing. There were one or two pieces which I knew had been used a lot at the time, and they were quite punchy, and they'd recognise them. And I lifted up one piece of artwork, and the audience just went 'gasp!!!' (laughs). It was really funny. It was like for me seeing - and I have - a piece of the TV21 Dalek art in someone's house, and saying, 'Oh my god! I would die to own that!'.

GACCH: You mentioned having to rewrite the Doctor Who strip in Radio Times to fit in the space, but it's also been said you reworked some scripts for the Thunderbirds strips for Redan?
Lee Sullivan: Yes, that's certainly the truth. What was starting to happen with some of the strips, and you can see exactly see why this would happen, because people want it to look modern, and kids are all into new technology, there was one sequence where they're using laser guns to cut through something. I said, no that's not the way Thunderbirds works. What you've really got to do is stick with the technology shown in the series, or it's not Thunderbirds, because in the end you could just have anything really. I'm sure fans have produced strips where they have pushed things up to date, but I wanted it to be that every strip I did you can imagine it as a television episode. There's no such thing as mobile phones - not in the strip! I did introduce latterly, a kind of earpiece where they could talk to each other, as it was so cumbersome having the Mobile Control unit - I think it appears once or twice in the strips. Even I couldn't keep my standards up! But I hated them having laser pistols, because they don't have those, they have those wonderful little guns with interchangeable barrels, we all know that (well, we know that...)! I didn't want there to be things I didn't think Brains hadn't come up with. Because if you have things like anti-gravity generators, though there are some in those lift rescue things they used to get people off buildings, it had to be more subtle than what was coming up in the strip. It was my feeling you should try and keep everything in Thunderbirds as close as possible to the series, otherwise what's the point of it. You might as well call it... Thunderbirds The Movie!

GACCH: There was a period in the Thunderbirds magazine where they promoted the film. Was it ever a consideration they might have done a strip based on that?
Lee Sullivan: That's an interesting point, because that occurred to me - with an eye to business - and it looked to me like the film might be quite successful. I did ask them, and they didn't have the rights to it. They had renegotiated the rights to use the classic stuff again but they hadn't included the film, and I think that was probably a financial decision - and it was the correct one as it turned out. Obviously I was up for doing two strips instead of one, and it would have been very interesting to do a version of Thunderbirds based on the film, but as it turned out there was no market for it, and it just faded away.