About

Who
John Reynolds is a British artist and writer, living in Scotland, working in England and dreaming across space & time…

Why
So why comics – why did that become my principal form of artistic expression?
It probably started with television – Thunderbirds fired my imagination to create, and the first creations were in Lego, reproductions of Gerry Anderson’s machines in brightly-coloured plastic bricks. Star Trek too; I had a toy version of the Enterprise, made by Dinky, and it became my first model for drawing work. I wish I still had those drawings because, age five or six, I actually drew it as it appeared to me – the nacelles foreshortening to a vanishing point, the saucer oval in perspective, the little disc-shaped torpedoes it fired from its nose bigger near the edge of the paper. Television cartoons of Spider-Man and Battle of the Planets inspired more drawings, and more Lego – my Battle of the Planets’ Phoenix ship even had the drooping wing pods and working compartments for the jet in the back and the race car in the nose. Its base, Centre Neptune, was just the biggest enclosure I could build on the largest Lego base board I had, but it garaged my Phoenix and had to live under the spare bed, being a bit on the large side.

But then I was given a Spider-Man comic annual; not an annual as American readers would recognise, but rather the UK type of annual – bound in a hard cover, reproducing art and a complete story from one of the American monthlies in black and white with perhaps one colour tone (Full colour comics were a rarity in the UK), bolstered with strange editorial content (Spider-Man’s workout) and advertisement-free. The first comics I bought regularly were the Beano (still have them in a box somewhere), followed by the “Boys’ Paper” Spike – a weekly anthology of cowboys, WW2, football, mystery and sci-fi strips – I had become a comics reader.

And then the Transformers appeared, in part-animated TV adverts for the toys. The idea hooked me, but so did the comics produced by Marvel. I’ll freely admit I was too old by then for such childish distractions, but perhaps the fact the Cybertronian shape-changers have lasted over forty years in popular culture is a good hint I was not the only one captured by the idea.

For years, I drew my own TF adventures, inspired most strongly by the British artists and writers of Marvel UK who took an American toy tie-in and turned it into a story with legs, arms, feet and wheels, strong enough to drive the narrative way beyond its natural exhaustion point, if it had remained only a glorified, four-colour advert. It kept me drawing and inventing far longer than I might have, reaching a point where I even could dream of perhaps being a comic artist myself.

So, to writers Steve Parkhouse and Simon Furman (still Mr Transformers), artists John Ridgeway, Mike Collins, Geoff Senior, Bryan Hitch, Lee Sullivan, Robin Smith, Jeff Anderson, Steven Baskerville, Will Simpson, Andy Wildman, Steve White and probably others whose names I’ve forgotten, I owe thanks for a lifelong love of creating comics. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting quite a few of them – spending significant parts of my life living and working around Carlisle helping here, as quite a few of them hail from the city originally. If you know your letterers, you’ll know Annie Halfacree (Parkhouse) and as well as her unexpectedly being the librarian in an architectural practice I worked in in Carlisle, I still occasionally run into her in the supermarket.

Of course, I didn’t just leave it at Transformers, I wove a narrative that managed to involve Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds and the Buck Rogers of Glen A Larsen’s 1980s TV series, with all the characters relocated to the 25th Century.

The stories were original, if occasionally derivative, but hardly something I could claim as my own. What I decided I needed was a set of original characters and a setting, something that let me indulge a love of sci-fi, spaceships and outlandish, over-engineered vehicles.

Genesis of 'The Astrologers'

I can't remember the exact year, but it was probably around 1986 or 1987. I was in my GCSE years at school – Littleover School, in Derby. A comprehensive school, not new, but not old – perhaps 1950s. The architect won an award, I remember being told. On plan, it was meant to look like a Viking's helmet. It's still there, but, of course, the fields I remember being opposite it, across Pastures Hill, have now been filled with housing estates and its generous grounds filled with more classroom buildings.
It was ruled by a superb, patriarchal bastard headmaster, called Mr Connor. There were a thousand pupils and little trouble. The county council had a policy of mixing the schools racially – Derby had a diverse mix of ethnicities and whilst the school was in a more-white suburb, at least a third of the intake was bussed in from the other communities from around the city. Noticeably, there was no trouble with racial tension until the school uniform debacle (occurring after Connor had retired and a nice, new, friendly head, who no-one was frightened of, took over). Connor kept it under control – I remember he took a lesson with my class once, and absolutely carpeted one pupil (lad called John Keene) for spoofing an Indian style of singing. (“Who was that – the singing; what was it?” Keene wouldn’t admit it, or repeat what he had done, once forced into admission, but Connor made it quite clear no-one left until he’d got to the bottom of it and he, obviously, knew what he had heard. He made it absolutely clear what would not be tolerated.) So, generally, the pupils all got along.

The Astrologers were born on the ground floor of 'B' Block – in a history class taken by Trevor (Mister) Stevens. Good teacher, nice guy – and lucky it was before social media for one alliterative slip in a lesson. We were studying 20th century history and it may have been the name of a treaty – the name is lost to memory now, but not the future echo of potential public shaming.
Anyway, Nick Glynn-Davies sat next to me; like me, he'd started late at the school and was an incomer to the area too, so we had a bit of non-local solidarity (I’d started one month later than everyone else in the first year, having just moved). Sharing my enjoyment of sci-fi and spaceships, he showed me a sketch:
“I'm calling it the Gemini spacecraft,” he said, showing me a drawing of, basically, the Twin-Pod Cloud Car from The Empire Strikes Back. I told him so.
“Yeah, but they can split up,” he protested.
I was, at the time, getting into imported American comics – the smaller format being a novelty after the magazine format of UK productions. Simon Oglesby (a rotund lad who inevitably was renamed “Ovalsby”) had found a junk shop in Littleover selling the US imports for pennies (35p, I think). In exchange for me drawing the Phoenix, from ‘Battle of the Planets’ (which I could still do from memory, the programme no longer being broadcast), he let me have a copy of “The Spectacular Spider-Man”. This was written by Gerry Conway and illustrated by Sal Buscema and had an albino character called 'Tombstone' as a villain.

In the crucible of my mind, an astrological sign, an albino and battling robot machines came together. First came the vehicles – not just the Gemini fighters, but the whole zodiac. Flying, swimming and driving machines, transformers that didn’t transform, piloted by the teams – an anti-terrorist force. Except they kind of did – they were a combiner, bolting together into one giant robot (the puppet series Star Fleet and the robot Dai-X had aired in the early eighties, another inspiration). The teams came next; twelve men, twelve women, and amongst those what smattering of diverse ethnicity I felt brave enough to try portraying. Their leader was Isabeau LaFey, an albino woman. They needed an enemy, and so I brought robots into it, but not quite blatantly, there was a McGuffin between them and the Astrologers in the form of the Death Squad terrorists, corrupted humans doing the bidding of the machines. The robots lurked in the background. I had the basic components of my stories, and so, in 1988 I started drawing...

The Setting
The idea was simple – a post, post-apocalyptic world. We’d lost against the Robots: a war that left them the rulers and humanity beaten and in hiding. But rather than tell of the fight back amidst a shattered world, I set the story long enough after the fight back that we’d restored the world, its grass was greener and we’d started to go out properly into the Solar System. The human race was to be shown slowly expanding into a galaxy containing history it had forgotten, that was waiting to trip it up.
And the Robots were gone – oh, yes, definitely. Not going to be a problem again…

So, for around ten years, whilst I finished my schooling, roamed the rather pleasant suburbs and countryside surrounding Derby with my two best friends, Mark & Phil, talking rubbish about life, people and old sci-fi/ fantasy tv films & programmes (available for our viewing delight from Blockbuster Video!), left there for the grimmer surroundings of Huddersfield, studied how to be an architect and, in time, became one, I produced around three hundred pages of stories starring the Astrologers.

The archive section is the result. The first two stories are actually from what I optimistically titled as Issues 3 and 4 of The Astrologers, drawn in 1990-1991. The art, whilst not by any means professional, was at least settled in style for the approximately fifty pages they span and fully painted with coloured drawing inks (pause a moment to lament the passing of Rotring, for all those who know what that name symbolises; recently bought out by Waterman pens and its greatest products discontinued).

The Restorations
More opportunely, the original lettering was all placed over the top on sheets of acetate, so could be removed and my wonky hand-lettering replaced with computer lettering. This has let me re-script the stories to better suit the direction and setting of the subsequent novels and current comics; just don’t pay too close attention to the logic of some of it – also forgive the naivety of the art in parts (exaggerated proportions, lousy anatomy here and there, poor representation of the ethnicities of the characters, anything not mechanical being obviously not really loved as much as that which was mechanical), I was learning and trying to teach myself as I went along (I still am).
Issues 1 and 2 exist – they date to 1988, but the (terrible) lettering is drawn onto the painted art of issue 1, and issue 2 is only coloured for around five pages, with the remainder in black and white, although the lettering is separate (and non-existent in parts). They may need much more work if they are to see the light of day. Issues 3 and 4 were more salvageable and were done whilst I worked at a supermarket during the day, to save money for university, and drew every evening whilst being looked after in the family home by my parents – spared many of the pressures of real life. I never had the time after that to draw and colour my work (in fact, several of the Marvel UK guys gave a talk at Carlisle library and I took their advice to stick to black and white as it was rare to be your own colourist).

The Earth Space Police Force
You will, eventually, meet the ESPF of the current comic strips – they were a set of secondary characters in the world of the Astrologers, my tip of the hat to a much-neglected, almost forgotten and very enjoyable piece of BBC TV drama called Star Cops (The International Space Police Force) - created by Chris Boucher. I wrote them in as a throwaway storyline in the Astrologers; I had a need for a busybody police force getting in the way of the Astrologers on their very important Robot-hunting mission… but somehow, I had to do more ESPF stories…. Prior to their re-emergence in 2014, the last time I drew them was in a 1999 story that ended with a standoff between Astrologers and ESPF. I’ve already cleaned that of its lettering, ready for a tweaked script, and re-inked seven pages of one of the earlier stories, added artwork and can pick another seven or ten existing pages to re-work to make a story that works as either an ESPF story, an Astrologers Story or a more general TOT44C story – it has pretty much the full house of characters from all strands and will be next up after ‘issues 3 and 4’.

Novels and Short Stories
The dream of being a comic artist didn’t die after 1999, but it took a rest for fifteen years when working life and social life left me without any time to create comics. Beginning in the year 2000, however, I started to write a novel series and short stories, using a bit part character from the comics, who I didn’t initially even name in them, as the protagonist. Her name, of course, is Angela Landau, and if you’ve read some of the short stories here, you’ll have met her, but may be puzzled by her origin and talk of the Martian Massacre – it’s in the first novel and maybe one day I’ll make serious effort to have it published along with its two sequels.
The first novel takes place on Mars – and that setting arose from my somewhat unconventional design thesis and dissertation at university: Architecture on Mars(!). Wanting to make the most of the opportunity to design and research a building type I was unlikely (in the extreme) to ever work on for real, I looked practically at how you might live on Mars and what you could design to live in there. The dissertation underpinning it was a battle between my instincts to write dramatically, bombastically and dreamily, and my professor’s insistence on strict academic writing; to this day I thank Professor Brian Edwards for helping me to actually think logically and dispassionately. His parting advice when I graduated was to waste neither ability: ‘get a job in architecture, but also go and write a novel!’

Forgive the art, but below, are some of the first appearances of the Astrologers and the ESPF.


1988 - Covers for the first few issues of The Astrologers & the splash page for the 2nd issue, introducing the home of the bulk of humanity, the vast underground cities.

1989 - inside pages, including a strong influence from the Tim Burton Batman film & Anton Furst's take on Gotham City. On the far right, Couper Hall & Austin Amundsen

1990 - Some of the Astrologers vehicles (Capricorn, Leo & Aries), "Issue 3's" title page with the first appearance of Hogarth Colony (to finally appear in novel 2!) and a recap page showing the events relating to the Wyndham Forest Anomaly...

1990 - Captain Louise Davies, Kirkebo Amundsen & Matt Bowden of the Deep Space Freight Corporation freighter Welles and its ultimate fate...


1991 - "Issue 4" - I think you can blame the influence of the TV programme 'The Highwayman' for some of this wander into Monument Valley!





1994 & 1995 - The ESPF encountering the Robo-virus and the Astrologers tasked with hunting it down and later, shooting down an infected freighter…which still managed to deliver a Robot to the Earth…