The Unseen Grant Morrison - A Fantastic Adventure with Johnny O'Hara

Post date: Nov 21, 2012 10:57:16 PM

In 1985 David Lloyd, of V for Vendetta and Nightraven fame, proposed to longtime UK comics publisher IPC a new boys weekly comic by the name of Fantastic Adventure. Each strip within would reflect a current movie or TV trend, slightly altered to avoid any copyright infringement or costly rights issues. Grant Morrison, an up and coming comic book writer who'd just landed a job writing 'The Liberators' under Dez Skinn's watchful eye at Warrior, snagged scripting duties on three of the strips and hoped that his proposal for a fourth, a sprawling parallel-worlds superhero epic called Zenith, would be commissioned too. It wasn't Morrison's first corporate comics writing job - he already had a number of one-off scripts for D.C. Thompson's Starblazer under his belt at this point - but, alongside his Warrior work, it promised to be the first that would earn him a regular living wage.

The three strips given to Morrison were 'Nightwalkers', a spin on the Ghostbusters concept with art by Ron Tiner; 'The California Crew', an 'A-Team in space' strip drawn by a young Steve Yeowell, also just breaking-in as a professional; and 'Johnny O'Hara', an Indiana Jones-style adventure strip illustrated by Modesty Blaise and Look-In alumnus John M. Burns. Scripts were written, characters designed, and work started on the stories in earnest in anticipation of IPC green-lighting the project.

But alas, it wasn't to be. IPC didn't commission Fantastic Adventure and gave the slot in their publishing schedule to a licenced MASK comic instead. Fortunately for us, Paul Duncan published three of John Burns' work in progress pages from 'Johnny O'Hara' in issue #32 of his Ark magazine, way back in 1987. Never seen anywhere before or since - many thanks to loyal Deep Space Transmissions-ite Scott for the scans!

As usual, please let me know if there's any problem with this being here. Not a clue on the copyright for this one - IPC are now owned by Time Warner but sold off all their post-1970 comic book properties a couple of years after this was(n't) publsihed to Egmont, who subsequently sold some of them to Rebellion. Take your pick.