There are only three good things that have ever come from the UK and one of them is Lorna Miller. (The other two are Judge Dredd and Mr. Belvedere.) Lorna is the creator of the comic Witch and the online comic strip Hot Pea Special. It’s pretty weird for a girl to draw comics, let alone funny ones. Seeing a girl drawing a funny comic is like seeing a baby smoking a pipe or Robocop making a quilt that is so snuggly it brings you to tears. So let’s find out about this spectacular freak of nature named Lorna Miller…

Vice: How do you feel women are treated in the alternative comic world? Like a unicorn on doomsday or like a retarded kitten at the Olympics?

Lorna: There’s an alternative comic world with unicorns and kittens in it? Sounds fucking horrible. I hope I never go there!

Are there any other good comics over there in the UK besides yours? Because if there are, I haven’t seen them.

Oh, you flatterer you! In the UK we like to beat the good cartoonists over the head with big sticks and wipe every trace of their work off the face of the earth. Anyway, I love John Bagnall’s work. He has a book called Don’t Tread On My Rosaries. It was published by Kingly Books, but it’s out of print.

The other comics I like are by a dead guy: Bud Neill. He drew funny things in the 1940s and 50s and there’s a wee statue in his hame toon of Glasgow of his character Lobey Dosser.

I also like this Irish guy called Bob Byrne. He’s self-published and does funny stuff.

I’m going to assume that comics are not your primary source of income. What else do you do to stay afloat?

I’m an award-winning illustrator, and I color in poo and snot characters for Toxic magazine (100% for boys).

How did you start getting your comic published in the US?

I took an antidepressant called Seroxat because I was agoraphobic. Then I got on a plane and went to a thing called a comics convention in America. Then I told all the publishers I was brilliant and would make them a lot of money and I asked them if they would like to publish my work. A couple of them looked at me like I was a mentalist, one ignored me, two were pleasant and one stared at my tits with his tongue hanging out. In my fantasies there was a bidding war and I was offered a shit load of money. In reality I sat in my hotel room trying to cry, but I couldn’t because I was on antidepressants.

Then when I got home there was an email from one of the half normal guys and that was Bob from Slave Labor Graphics. Fantagraphics had also been interested but said they weren’t in a position to take on new artists. So I went with Slave Labor. Not long later I got an email from Gary at Fantagraphics saying he’d had a few regrets in this business and not publishing my comic was one of them. And I thought, “Well, it’s a bit late telling me that now you twat.” And then I found out that the drug I was on had caused a man in the US to murder his whole family. During the trial they discovered the drug company’s test results showed it was really evil and dangerous but they licensed it anyway, and they’ve made billions from it. If you try and reduce the dose it causes suicidal and murderous tendencies. I spent a whole year trying to get off this drug and trying not to kill myself and my husband. He had to hide all our knives.



Do you get a better or worse response to your comics in the US?

Mostly no one knows I make comics in the UK or the US. I’m probably more unknown in the UK than I am in the US. But if you take into account the size of the US I would say I am more unknown there.

Why is everyone in the UK so jealous of how fucking awesome us Americans are?

We’re only jealous of the Americans who live in the TV. The real ones who come here, we hate. Well, not me personally, I love everyone. I heard on the wireless the other day that a book has just been published for Americans who are planning to visit Europe. It teaches them not to be so loud and arrogant and hopefully will prevent them from being murdered. I’ll send you a copy!

I remember a few years back there was some comic festival in Spain with a 9-11 theme and you were there. What was that all about?

Oh my God. Well, this was one of my first attempts at traveling on my own after I went on the evil drug. I knew Pete Bagge and Eric Reynolds from Fantagraphics, who I’m friends with, would be there so that was OK. But I missed Pete at the airport and nearly got abducted by some greasy old guy who followed me around saying he wanted to drive me into town. So I ran away from him and managed to get on a bus. Fortunately there are so many Brits in Spain, and someone helped me because I couldn’t speak any Spanish.

Anyway, Pete was told he was going to win an award and the ceremony was in some amazing posh building overlooking a Moorish temple in the beautiful Granada landscape. All of the town’s important people were going, the mayor and all that. This was not long after 9-11. In fact, I heard an American guy in the crowd saying how badly he’d been affected by it before we went into the auditorium. So we all sat down and the ceremony started. And it was your usual boring awards ceremony with some guy waffling on for hours, only it was worse because it was in Spanish.

Suddenly all these terrorists started running down the aisles shooting guns off. They grabbed the host, held a gun to his head and were shouting stuff about Bin Laden. Everything else that happened is a bit of a blur because I went into shock and was hiding inside my cardigan fearing for my life. But they made the host announce the names of the winners. Pete Bagge’s name was called out and he had to go onstage with all the other winners. They had their hands tied and they lined them all up like they were going to shoot them, shouting abuse at them, calling them filthy American scum and stuff like that. They brought on a model of the World Trade Centre towers and blew them up. Bin Laden came on and started preaching stuff. Some girls who looked like crap Spanish versions of the Spice Girls did a song and dance routine. Then a woman in a burka stripped it off and was fucked by one of the terrorists on the stage while the others cheered and clapped. Eric was jumping up and down beside me laughing and taking photos and Pete was standing on stage tied up with his eyes popping out.

I was traumatized because I didn’t like live sex and violence back then. It caused a national scandal and was in all the papers. The mayor and all the important people in the town were horrified and they won’t allow any more comics conventions in Granada. I found out that the guy who had produced the whole thing was a Tarantino style filmmaker in Spain who had sympathies with the Basque terrorists. The organizers had decided they didn’t want to do the convention anymore anyway so they wanted to go out with a bang. I met the filmmaker the next day at the convention. The organizers brought him over to introduce him to Peter Bagge. It was like, “Hey Pete, shake hands with the guy who thinks you’re American scum and should be shot!’ He was a four-foot-tall weedy little guy and had two scuzzy looking junky porn actresses hanging onto him. The director, not Peter Bagge!



When do you feel most creative? Before, during, or after your period?

Um… usually after. What about you?

Please tell us about all your great upcoming projects!

My latest project doomed to failure is Hot Pea Special. It’s going to be a collection of four-panel strips of a humorous nature. I’ve got a page on my website for them and will be putting them on there as I finish them. And knowing that no one in their right mind wants to pay to read comic strips, they’re FREE!!!

INTERVIEW BY JOHNNY RYAN