Wayne: While you were at Southend Art School, you unveiled your first self-published work, Amon*Spek, a mix of sci-fi, barbarians and scantily clad babes.

Millidge: I was doing Amon*Spek in my spare time. It was originally conceived by a friend and me at college. But he rapidly lost interest after the first couple of issues, and I gradually took over publishing it. Later on, many more people got involved. I was subsidizing it as much as I could on a college grant.

Wayne: Although there were three other guys working on it, it sounds like you were doing the lion's share of the work.

Millidge: What discouraged me was that I spent most of my time on the publishing and editing side, writing letters to people. I was spending all my time and money promoting other people’s work. That put a bit of a damper on it.

Wayne: In the States, retailing has been a popular path for comic collectors to take. With all of the art training and other interests you had, retailing was the last thing I thought you’d want to do.

Millidge: My father was an entrepreneur. Every so often, he’d start a new company, make a small fortune. Then, he’d get bored, let someone else manage it for him, and it would go bust. And he’d start from scratch again. I knew how businesses ticked. I had an instinct for that. From an early age, I was drawing my own comics, and thinking of ways to market them. Not in a sense of making money, but for the satisfaction of empire building.

The first thing I did was to start a mail-order company in 1982 after college. I had to get a job of some sort. There was nothing else I was qualified for, and I wanted to do comics. But, I sidestepped that issue for the moment, because I wasn’t good enough to step into a comics job. Certainly not the comics that I wanted to do. So I started a mail order comics business and created a comics news magazine. At that time, there really wasn’t a major news magazine about comics over here. There were a couple of fledgling ones also fighting for the same small audience. I started Comics News Monthly as a supplement to the mail order company. That rapidly grew into a fanzine in it’s own right which I was selling through the mail and at conventions through Paul Gravett’s Fast Fiction organization.

The mail order side did reasonably well, based on advance orders, so opening a comic shop just seemed the logical thing to do next. I’d seen my dad open umpteen shops, and I believe there was only about 20 comic shops in the UK in 1984. I thought - rather naively-- that it was the logical stepping stone and perhaps a way to build a retail/publishing empire that would eventually allow me to have the time and resources to actually write and draw my own comics.

I had the shop in two different locations. It went from a quite big location, to a smaller one before I finally went bust. It actually took seven years for me to pay off the debts I’d accrued in two years of retailing. I sold the mail-order end, but I couldn’t sell the shop.

Wayne: What went wrong?

Millidge: I was situated an hour outside of London, so my location was a problem. I was also undercapitalized, and under a false impression that I was doing better than I actually was. It was around the time of the black-and-white glut, and I was trying very hard to be a complete store. When I started, it was too difficult. When the industry started to expand quickly, I had too much dead stock. I made a lot of mistakes back then that I see retailers making now. I walk into shops and can see that they’ve got all their capital tied up in bad stock.

Wayne: Your Comic News Monthly reminded me a lot of the Comic Reader from my teen years in the 70s, with a similar format and style. How many copies did you print?

Millidge: I had a circulation of 250-300, but those were the very early days of British fandom. And it was sold almost exclusively through mail order. It wasn’t anything a distributor would’ve considered at the time. It could’ve been something very successful, but unfortunately it died with the shop.

Wayne: Your Food For Thought benefit book for Ethiopia is an interesting compilation of early work by some of today's top British creators (Grant Morrison, Bryan Talbot, Warren Ellis, Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell, Jim Bakie), who were, like you, building their own craft. What made you want to self-publish the work of others again?

Millidge: I had the retail store at the time, and was doing Comics News Monthly. So, I had contacts with a lot of people in the industry, as well as from the Amon*Spek days. I used to swap fanzines with Dave McKean. He did a fanzine called Meanwhile. Glenn Fabry did a fanzine called Working Class Superhero. At the time, there was also Paul Gravett and his inspirational Escape magazine, and he was promoting Eddie Campbell to a wider audience. There was a real scene going on, and a reasonably positive outlook at the time for comics.

Four of us were standing in my retail shop, talking about Band Aid, which later became Live Aid. We were joking, "Wouldn’t it be great to do a benefit comic?" The contacts were there, so we just did it. We sent out circulars, and it just grew out of nothing. Unfortunately, I didn’t actually have the knowledge or expertise to solicit it through the international direct sales market so it only got limited distribution in the UK

Wayne: I’ve seen this book somewhere in the U.S. too.

Millidge: Somebody wrote a piece about it for the Comic Buyers Guide, and it was on the front cover. It was nice that someone did a write-up like that, but it was completely unexpected.

I remember delivering the book to the distributors. One of the workers broke a box open, looked at it, and said, "Ugh, it’s black and white," and chucked it back into the box! Somebody spoke to me last year at San Diego about reissuing it, but getting the creators’ consent would be a nightmare. Maybe sometime down the line when there is an equally worthy cause, we’ll re-release it.

I also revived Amon*Spek for one issue too, which was a "Best of " compilation. I also published one or two other works by people, and had plans to publish a whole lot of other stuff by Warren Ellis and others. With the mail order and retail businesses and the magazine, it just became too much.

Wayne: What did you do after the retail-mail-order gig folded? There seemed to be a big gap of time between Comics News Monthly, retailing and Strangehaven.

Millidge: Being in debt with the sole distributor in the UK hamstrung me as far as doing any comics-related projects, for quite a while. I had my money tied up in all of these huge stacks of worthless bits of paper, and that left a bad taste in my mouth. The things I published probably sold 100 copies. They weren’t really selling. It set me back, but I never gave up hope of getting back into comics. In 1986, I was 25. I thought that if I ever wanted to make it in the music business, I’d better do it in my 20s when I was still young. You don’t get thirtysomethings making it in the business. So for the next three years, I put everything I had into the music business.

Wayne: I'm looking at your "Watchmen" single, but I haven’t listened to it yet.

Millidge: It’s pretty bland stuff. That was the output of a day-and-a-half in a 24-track recording studio. After spending a fortune in the studio, we decided to go the home recording route. Again, it was that do-it-yourself ethic. I’d already set up my own record company (Flying Pig) and music publishing company, which is still running to this day. I still get very small royalty checks. I believed that setting up my own recording studio was another way of making a living. I soon realized that the recording studio required a continual investment in new equipment. It was pretty much a mug’s game, and a pretty antisocial thing to do. Still, having a free recording facility for the band was pretty great. We could spend as much time as we needed to get things right. And it’s something I’d like to get back to some day. One group was called "Rebel" of all things. I got outvoted there, and with my subsequent band, Watchmen as well. I knew there were 17 other bands with the name Watchmen or Watchman. I actually wanted to call the band "Skin Trade."

Wayne: At least Skin Trade would’ve been a lot more memorable than Rebel.

Millidge: We were pretty successful on a local level. We played live on a radio broadcast for half of the country. That was pretty exciting. We did some big gigs in support of some big names. We pressed singles and recorded tapes, but record distributors just weren’t interested. They want to see your tour list, what promotions you’re doing, and what TV or radio play you’ve had before they’ll even make it available to music stores, unlike the direct sales system we have in place for comics. In comics, it’s a smaller pond to be a bigger fish in. It’s been a lot easier to make an impact in the comics world.

During that time, I was keeping my hand in drawing. Most of it was a series of illustrations and paintings for each of the songs we performed live that were projected on a huge screen. I also did all of the cover designs for the singles and promotional literature.

We spent years trying to get into the music trades, like Melody Maker. I didn’t make it until I sent them a copy of Strangehaven. I had a write-up in Melody Maker about my book that was bigger than anything about my bands. That’s the real irony.

Wayne: So the band eventually broke up.

Millidge: Yeah, we just drifted apart. We just went off and did other things. Being in a band is like a three-way marriage. It’s very difficult to keep everyone together for a long time. As soon as you make a personnel change in a band, you’ve changed the chemistry. Things can fall apart very quickly. A new member joined the band, and I couldn’t be in the same band with him.

(c)1998/1999 Wayne Beamer