British comic book writer Alan Grant has died at the age of 73. No cause of death named, but he had been ill for some time.
From The Evening Standard:
Alan Grant was born in
Bristol in 1949 and grew up in Scotland. As a comic book writer, he
worked on some of the biggest titles, like Batman and Judge Dredd.
But
he was also known for nurturing new talent and is credited with
discovering writer Alan Moore when he found his script in an unsolicited
submissions pile at 2000 AD.
His
writing was influenced by his early experiences. At school, his
teachers would beat him for being left-handed, and he was regularly
expelled, but as a statement from 2000 AD said, “the injustice of his treatment [gave] him a powerful distaste for authority which saturated his writing.”
He had a “mischievous and wicked sense of humour that was at times scatological and at others soulful,” says 2000 AD’s obituary.
He
began working as a trainee journalist at the age of 18, at a
Dundee-based publisher and home to the Beano. Grant then moved to London
in 1970 to work as a writer and sub-editor, but after writing a strip
for the short-lived comic book Starlord, he was offered an editorial
position at 2000 AD.
2000
AD’s obituary says that “their partnership redefined Judge Dredd, their
black humour and wild imaginations forging what many consider to be the
strip’s first great ‘golden age.’”
Grant’s writing always maintained a political edge and was always a “fierce and strongly independent thinker.”
He later worked on DC Comics’ Detective Comics and Batman and continued to work for 2000 AD through the 1990s.
Grant
continued to write into his last years, despite being ill, and worked
on a Judge Anderson story in 2018 and a war story in the Battle Special
in 2020.
He and his wife Sue organised a comics festival in their village of Moniaive in Dumfriesshire for years.
Alan Grant died on July 20, 2022.
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