John Smith (comics writer)


John Smith is a British comics writer best known for his work on 2000 AD and Crisis.
Smith's work is characterised by intricate, sometimes obscure plots and an interest in taboos and the occult, told in an elliptic, fractured narrative style reminiscent of Iain Sinclair or the cut-up technique of William S. Burroughs. Other notable influences include Michael Moorcock, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alan Moore and Noël Coward.
His best-known character is Devlin Waugh, a flamboyantly gay exorcist, assassin and vampire working for the Vatican of the future, co-created with artist Sean Phillips for the Judge Dredd Megazine.

Biography

His earliest work was for D. C. Thomson's science fiction comic Starblazer in the mid-1980s. He wrote his first script for 2000 AD in 1986 and wrote the political superhero series New Statesmen for Crisis in 1988.
Many of his series for 2000 AD were tied into the same continuity, under the umbrella of Indigo Prime. Indigo Prime was a multi-dimensional organisation that policed reality, recruiting recently dead people as its agents. One such story was Killing Time, in which agents Winwood and Cord pursued a demon that had hitched a ride on a Victorian time machine, one of the legitimate passengers of which turned out to be Jack the Ripper.
Other series for 2000 AD include Revere, a post-apocalyptic occult story with artist Simon Harrison, which was reprinted in its entirety in the 2000 AD Extreme Edition title in February 2007, and Firekind, an anthropological science fiction story involving alien cultures and dragons, illustrated by Paul Marshall. He has also written Rogue Trooper and Judge Dredd.
For DC Comics' Vertigo imprint, he has written a fill-in on Hellblazer, and an eight-part series called Scarab, which started out as a revamp of Doctor Fate.
Smith has also written a run of Vampirella for Harris Comics.

The Smithiverse

Examples of John Smith's cross-referencing of characters throughout his oeuvre include:
Comics work includes: