That was not the only time Grant would clash with his creative partners. However, it was by no means an acrimonious parting of the ways, and they continued to work together less regularly on specific projects. Wagner was vehemently opposed, and realising the partnership was not working any more, they agreed to dissolve it. Their writing partnership came to an end in typically argumentative fashion when, during the Judge Dredd series Oz, Grant wanted to kill off a popular character, the sky-surfer Chopper, by having Dredd shoot him in the back. They also worked on the Strontium Dog strip, about a group of feared and hated mutants suffering prejudice, as well as more madcap series such as the futuristic detective story Robo-Hunter and the space comedy Ace Trucking Co.Īlan Grant, left, with his longtime collaborator John Wagner in 1984.

Grant often wrote in collaboration with John Wagner, who was one of the founders of 2000AD along with its editor Pat Mills, and together they wrote some of the stories considered to represent the golden age of Judge Dredd, including the long-running Apocalypse War saga, feeding directly into 80s nuclear anxiety. The story appeared in 1989, in the wake of the UK government enacting its controversial Section 28 regulation banning schools from promoting homosexuality. One Judge Dredd story he wrote, John Cassavetes Is Dead, even had the titular law-enforcer questioning the totalitarianism of the regime he has sworn to uphold as he is forced to sentence an elderly man to 10 years’ imprisonment for possessing banned literature from the 20th century, including newspapers, novels and comic books. He said in a 2021 interview that he was thrown out of the Young Conservatives for being too leftwing, and shown the door by the Socialist party for being too Conservative-minded, adding that “basically, what both parties were saying was that I was just too argumentative for either of them”. In fact, Grant imbued all his comic book writing with his experiences and political beliefs, though the latter were often as quirky as the strips he wrote. Alan Grant began writing comic book stories at DC Thomson in Dundee.

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