Brendan: I was clearing out some old cupboards and a few old copies of 2000AD fell out. I'd kept them because there were episodes of SOONER OR LATER on the back covers. This was a one-page strip that I did with writer Pete Milligan over 23 years ago. When I saw the dateline on the cover, I had a hard time believing it was so long ago.

Unemployment was the big social theme back then... and Swifty is feeling like a contemporary character again. I guess things really do go around in a circle.

Pete Milligan wrote S&L. We just knocked it up one afternoon on a phone call. We had the title first, but no idea of what it would be about. Pete named the hero after one of his favourite writers, Jonathan Swift. Tony Riot drew about a third of the strips with me and was the unofficial "other artist".

That reminds me, I must go and revisit Tony's one and only solo strip for 2000AD, "Tribal Memories", which also written by Pete. Wonder if anybody remembers it!

It's astonishing to think of the variety of strips that Pete was writing around that (white-hot) time in British Comics: Bad Company, Paradax!, Johnny Nemo, Mirkin The Mystic, Sooner or later, Skreemer, Shade The Changing man, Rudcliffe and Williams, The Extremist, Rogan Gosh, Skin... That's an amazing slab o' stuff! A very wide difference in tone and mood, from very dark violence to a surreal and foppish wit.

And, whatever happened to that 'Bizarre Boys' comic thing written with Grant Morrison and to be drawn by Jamie Hewlett? I saw one weird bit of art and that was about it...

Interestingly, it was Jamie Hewlett who took over Sooner or Later for a sequel, which was also written by Pete.