What was the inspiration behind the character of Luther Arkwright?
All through the seventies, I was a very avid reader of science fiction. [British science-fiction writer] Michael Moorcock actually put up [a character], Jerry Cornelius, as a template for other writers to use as a starting point. I enjoyed the Jerry Cornelius stories, and I had to do a short strip for one of the Brainstorm underground comics, an anthology title. I was a big fan of Richard Corben’s underground comics, where he used a really lovely technique of a little line with a watercolour wash. I just needed an excuse to try this technique out, so I decided to do a Jerry Cornelius strip. So I created Luther Arkwright. He wasn’t exactly Jerry Cornelius, but it was along those lines. It was only afterwards I started to think about that character and the situation in more detail. At that point I took it away from Mike Moorcock’s character. I made Luther very much his own character, and told a story that wasn’t similar to the Cornelius stories. They’re fragmentary and they’re surreal, a
