Where does your affinity for drawing come from?

I always seemed to have had it, I can not remember a day when I was not scrawling something down onto paper. It always seemed to be part of my playtime, no matter how young I was or now how old I get.

What's your educational background?

Not much, travelled around a lot after I left school at fifteen, started a night course on art when I was about eighteen then went to Art college in my early twenties when I knew art was a passion and not just a hobby and it was were I wanted to be.

What are your passions in life?

Funnily enough after all these years still art. But a pint of Guinness does hit the spot every now and then.

Briefly, what were the most important projects in your artist career?

For something to become more than just a "job" and become a project there has to be an involvement in it above and beyond just being a paid illustrator. The projects have mainly been in comics, a comic mini-series for a major company can become that project and become personalized even if it is done on a licensed character, and book series like GrailQuest become a project because it has a continuity and after a couple of books I have a commitment to it, but my personal projects have been World Without End for DC comics co-created with Jamie Delano the writer and a self-published project called Razorjack, I created and wrote, the first issue I completed about seven years ago. The character was then taken up by Com X, a British publisher who published two more issues.

What projects are you working on at the moment?

I have just completed a mini series for DC/Wildstorm called Thunderbolt Jaxon where I really did have the opportunity to use methods and techniques I had learnt on GrailQuest all those years ago, specifically when I had to draw a giant serpent. Though not too similar to the Dragons in GrailQuest it needed the same techniques to depict the scales and such.

What are the artistic techniques you like to use? The things you like to represent?

I love all forms of expressing ideas from black and white line art which I think is a wonderful discipline, but it can be so unforgiving as a medium, if it's not right in black and white you see it immediately, full painted art is great fun as it is a relaxing medium as it is so forgiving but it can bring the viewer closer to believing in the subject depicted as you try to express it as a fully realized image in colour and tone.

Who are your favourite artists?

I have so many really but I suppose I can lump groups together such as the Pre-Raphaelites, the early French impressionists the early American landscape movement called America Sublime, Berni Wrightson who influenced the way I approached the line for the GrailQuest books, Luis Berjemo, Jose Ortiz, Mobius, Richard Corben, Brian Lewis and who ever I am reading in my comics this week probably.

How did you come to illustrate the GrailQuest and Transformers series?

GrailQuest was fortuitous timing. I had just gone to Armada paperback publishing one week with my very limited portfolio as I had just started as a freelance artist and they were in the process of expanding their game book publishing and I got the job as I had at least some relevant line art in my portfolio. The Transformers, if I remember rightly, was for a different publishers and I got the job because I had illustrated some of the Transformer comics by Marvel comics and had by then also done the GrailQuest series so I had shown I could do that form of art to a high standard.

How did you collaborate with JH Brennan while planning illustrations for GrailQuest?

It was fun to work on the series across the board as the editors at Armada were fun people who I enjoyed socializing with and either they or Herbie initiated us connecting up after the first couple of books as the series became more of a success, in fact I just found a letter from Herbie December 24th 1985 thanking me for some ideas we had talked over for the books, not sure how many ideas Herbie used but he was always open to suggestions.

What were your inspirations, your models, when you illustrated this series? (historical documents, films, other illustrators, Brennan's indications...)

My inspirations were all the above and more of the same, but the major source for me was more a feeling I had when I remember reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time, more than anything I wanted to try and give the feeling of complete involvement to the reader such as I had with my favourite books, so I tried to, not only draw as well as I could but to also create a depth of believability in the world Herbie had written of, from how I depicted the characters or the rooms or corridors no matter how simple the particular task was, even if it was a simple illustration of just looking at a door that lead into a dark room.

Between fantasy (GrailQuest) and science-fiction (Transformers), what would you rather illustrate?

I love them both but probably I have a real feeling for fantasy as it usually has a more organic feel than science fiction which fits into my artistic bias.

Is there a type of illustration you particularly liked doing? (knights, buildings, monsters, weapons...)

Monsters and knights, in that order, are my favourites type of illustration, monsters, to depict something that no one else has imagined and make them believable is fun, and Knights because to do an action picture of armoured men pounding away with battle axes and long swords to try and show how dirty and dangerous it must have been and to draw a viewer in to give them a sense of the world of individual combat, the smell of blood, the grunts of men fighting for their lives the noise of clashing steel, to remind people of the role chivalry played in such a world, to somehow tell a story in an image.

Do you have special memories or anecdotes to tell about your experience as a gamebook illustrator?

I remember talking to the editors to try and find the right starting point to work from concerning the horror content of the illustrations on how far could I go in the depiction of the gore and horror, and with Herbie's letter I have just found was one from Jackie Dobbyne the assistant editor explaining the thinking behind the horror content when I had spoken to the head editor about it previously, she wrote, "Marion has asked me to explain that when she said "not disgustingly gory" in her letter she meant blood and gore rather than not too scary; maggots in the eye sockets would be fine."

I just love the "maggots in the eye sockets would be fine" comment, just makes me smile the idea that a sweet gentile English lady mother of two book editor would think hard on this subject.

Did you ever meet other gamebook illustrators and/or collaborate with them?

I didn't tend to meet many game book creators at that time as I went mainly to comic conventions, but 2000 AD - the British SF comic - did a gamer magazine for a few issues and I met all those artists and writers at conventions over the years, such as artist Glenn Fabry, and Pat Mills, writer.

Apart from GrailQuest and Transformers, did you illustrate other gamebooks?

No, my career went more into the comic art direction around then and I concentrated on building my career in that.

Did you illustrate other games, or even role-playing games?

No, but I did illustrate cards for DC, Marvel and Wildstorm that did appear to have a game quality beyond collecting cards, and was a regular contributor to one of the first computer games magazines at that time.

Did you ever play GrailQuest? If so, did you like them?

The only way I followed the story through in a game quest way was while illustrating the story so I could follow what happened in the game and to see how that would affect the way I drew the illustrations.

Did you play other gamebooks? Did you like that type of literature (and why)?

I didn't play but I enjoyed that type of literature because it was a sequential form of story telling which did involve the reader in a way most books did not, my real enthusiasm as a fan and reader and also as an art form for me is comics, so there was an obvious cross over between games books and comics and my appreciation of well-told stories that had a large artwork element.