Topic: Alasdair Stuart has very generously given me an unlimited budget, and access to every comic creator on the planet, and the remit to build a company that publishes comics and OGNs, and asked what I would do.

Obvious answer #1: embezzle the budget, live out the rest of my days in luxury.

Clearly, what he meant is that money’s no object, but I do have to turn a profit on it.

Obvious answer #2: Hire top grade talent, then get out of the way.

Except I’m not 100% convinced of the viability of that. I think everyone, absolutely everyone will do their best work if there is someone set over them with the authority to tell them that their work isn’t up to scratch, and that they’ve got to go back and do it again, or at least, tighten the damn thing up, and make sure it fucking sings. However much I like a creator, I tend to remember Bill Drummond’s views on Julian Cope – that Cope is undeniably a monstrous and vitally important talent, but that the single greatest blight he’s suffered is that post-The Teardrop Explodes there was no-one to tell him to get back in the studio and try again, because what he’d just produced wasn’t up to the level of his own ability.

(On the other hand, if there had been, he might not have evolved into the hugely interesting auto-didact of ancient sites and religions that he is, and I might never have gotten Cope’s “Discover Odin”, of of the best albums I own. So you know, swings and roundabouts.)

Obvious answer #3: Hire the usual predictable list of names. Moore, Morrison, Ellis, Rucka, Ennis. Equivalent grade artists. (Obviously, I am still all about the clever writing.)

And you know, I probably would. The deal is straightforward: create me two properties – the creators can decide if they’re ongoing, OGNs, whatever, so long as they are (to within 10% or so) the same number of pages in length, and I can reasonably expect similar production and distribution costs for both. One of them, the one that is published first, the company gets a 50% stake in, across all media, and tie ins (and yes, gets approval on the tie ins – this is the company’s cash cow), and will attempt to shop around, and will shoulder 50% of the marketing costs. The other 50% of the profit will be split among the creators as they dictate.

The other, is 100% creator owned. I’m not going to shop it about or anything (well, I might, if the opportunity arose, but I’m not going to look too hard for ways to exploit it), as all the profit from it, and from any other media sales at all, that all goes to the creators – all my company takes are any production/marketing costs. If it fails to cover costs, any losses it makes are recouped by my company from the cash share of the profits from the first that that creator makes.

There’d need to be a bit more fine print (to allow for then running the one I see cash from into the ground with production/format costs, while coining it in off the 100% creator owned one), but you get the idea. A genuine, honest to god, codified “one for the studio, one for the love of the art” (or you know, whatever reason the creators have to make their book, anyway) system. (Should creators wish to do more that two books, I’m delighted. Extra books are still done in pairs, on the same basis.) Creators are completely free to ask for a page rate up front for either book, and I’ll pay more or less what they demand, but their page rate is a production cost for the book, and gets deducted before profits.

All of this, contains the caveat: I am not going to bankroll anyone’s project that is obviously not going to make us both a profit. Anyone demanding a page rate/production values that are likely to have a net effect of rendering both books together unprofitable will be told to piss off.

So there you have it. Is it earth shattering? No. But Al gave me as much money as I could possibly want, didn’t he? Well, yeah, in that case, there’s other things I’d add to it. This would be aimed at making a profit over a five-to-ten year period, because apparently, I’m well capitalised enough to work like that. And the initial ad campaign would cost a fucking fortune, because it’d need to do a Playstation-grade job of branding these things as aimed at hip 20-somethings, not mouth-breathing nerds, and it would need to raise the level of awareness of them to something quite huge. So I’d be looking to launch with a line of 12 Watchmen-length (and hopefully Watchmen-quality) OGNS, none of them featuring superheroes. And I’d attempt to support it with interviews in mainstream press – Esquire, GQ, hell, even FHM and Loaded, including buying enough fucking ad space with the relevant magazines that I could be sure of having these things and these people treated as cool, rather than getting “Biff! Bang! Pow! Comics Are Back!” treatment. The point being: I have time, and I am explicitly intending these things as long term investments, like Watchmen, or Sandman. Because I am very rich, it turns out, and can afford to.

Of course, that last paragraph isn’t much besides a lovely pipe dream. You really do need absurdly deep pockets and a willingness to take a huge risk in order to run something like that. And very occaisionally, you do find a publisher with one of those two things, but you’ll never find one with both.

Topic: Hugh Hancock amongst other suggestions, gave me this one: “I’d never pay 200 quid for a meal. Discuss.”

I’ll state my position from the off: I have already paid over 200 quid for a meal. Twice. I hope to do it many times more. Having had three-Michelin-star food once, I want to do it again. And again. And again.

When I tell people this, and yes, I do mention it a lot, because the first time I did was a life-altering experience, I get a number of reactions, the most amusingly extreme of which to dat has been “That’s a sin!”.

No, seriously.

A couple of my family members genuinely believe that spending that amount of money on a meal is a sin. In their defence, they are from Northern Ireland, where atheism is either Catholic atheism or Protestant atheism. Anyway, that’s the most extreme form of the “why would you want to spend that amount of money one meal?” camp. It generally varies between those who think one meal cannot possibly have been worth that amount of money, and those who just think it wouldn’t be worth it to them.

Obviously, I can’t entirely rebutt the latter group there, but I can have a go at the former, which I shall do by providing a link to something I’ve written before.

So, as I’ve said before, the sort of meal you get for over 200 quid is not like any other restaurant meal you’ll ever have. In terms of comparable experiences, you don’t want to be comparing it to three course at even a one Michelin star restaurant. I’ve eaten at quite a few of those. I like eating at them. They’re not the same. I wrote in the neighbourhood of 5000 words, the first time I ate at a three-star restaurant. I have ex-girlfriends I couldn’t write 5000 words about.^[1]

Anyway, I provide that link about to stop from feeling like I need to wax lyrical about whole experience, and why it specifically was worth the money, because that’s not really what I was asked to do. I was asked to discuss the proposition that 200 quid is too much to pay for food.

I am, I must admit, suspicious of people who say they wouldn’t pay that much for food. I wonder what’s wrong with them. I wonder how they cannot instinctively understand that yes, good food is worth it, and more than worth it.

Because let’s face it, we are a collection of attractive^[2] bags of meat on a lump of rock that’s hurtling around at quite astonishing speeds in an essentially meaningless universe. We are biologically required to do a number of things, in order to remain here, and one of them is eat. And since the alternative is not being meaninglessly sexy high-speed meat, well, not eating is pretty much unthinkable.

So, if we’re going to do it anyway, my thinking goes, then it ought to be bloody amazing. And you know, most of the time it is. Think of the fresh crunch of a really good apple. Or that marvellous oozing smoky-salty bacon delight that is a good hot, thick, bacon sandwich, made with good bread, and good butter, and maybe just enough brown sauce to add that fruity vinegary sharpness to cut the other tastes and textures. Or some rich, dark chocolate melting on the tounge, or a cup full, bitter coffee. Tell me at least one of those doesn’t get you going.

But even I would grow bored of eating nothing but bacon sandwiches.^[3] And so I want other things, different things.

But that on its own isn’t really enough to justify my suspicion, is it? I mean, I could probably make quite a lot of different kinds of sandwich before I ran out of tasty options. And that’s before I get on to the kinds of food that don’t come installed between 2 slices of bread.

So let’s move away from mere taste. If fact, I’ll even forget about looks, smell, texture and sound as well. Let’s talk about what food means beyond the purely nutritional and sensory.

Food is one of the things we all have in common. Everyone. In fact, it extends beyond the reach of mere humanity – all things that live must also eat. (Or so I was told in Biology in school.) Food is ingrained into us, right down into the animal hind-brain. It’s one of the ways we used to ensnare a mate, demonstrative the ability to feed them. And obviously, it still is. But it’s more than just a means to get laid, or it can be. At its very best, it’s a means to communicate. A means to pass ideas from one mind to another, to evoke emotion. It becomes Art.

And I know that some of you are rolling your eyes and thinking that this is a thin justification. Tough. You’re wrong, I’m right, and I can prove it. What do you call serving all the flavours of a cooked breakfast as a dessert at the end of posh meal? Wit. What do you call serving passion fruit with Fruits de Mer? A pun. What do you call using a variant on a sherbet fountain as palette cleanser, if not an attempt to evoke the playfulness of childhood?

Really good food can be Art, not just because it takes skill to produce, but because you feel the chef is saying something in his choice of offerings. It may not always be that clever or sophisticated, but it is often very, very intense. Smell is the sense most closely allied with memory, remember. Food is something that reaches past all our clever centres of reasoning, to touch our most basic thoughts and feelings. Tell me there isn’t a dish from your childhood that you don’t recall with a misty smile, be it a family recipe that no-one else can do right, or a favourite dish from a beloved restaurant.

Now maybe a master chef isn’t going to produce that dish, but my point is that the really, really good ones, the ones who command 200 quid a meal, have spent years studying the power food has. Eating their food is ever bit as worth trying as reading classic literature or a virtuoso musician. Adoring Nabokov doesn’t mean that Terry Pratchett isn’t still rewarding. Being a fan of Green Day doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy Beethoven. If fact, appreciation of one informs and improves my appreciation of the other. And so with food. And unlike literature, or music, there is no means to mass produce the very best versions yet. There are very few economies of scale to be had – a dish takes the same amount of prepare, and requires fresh ingredients and skilled labour. So the best costs more.

I would also add this final coda: the 200 quid food was also inspiring in the most literal sense. Eating at The Fat Duck (and a few other places) has changed my outlook on cooking. Cooking has never been something I enjoy, and probably never will be. But prior to eating there, I cooked almost nothing. These days, I cook a variety of different things, because I’ve come around to the idea that with enough practice I might produce food that other people enjoy, and even, if I practice very hard, might say a little about the way I see the world. Right now, I’m still at the stage where I’m happy if I don’t burn it to a crisp, mind. But maybe one day…

^[1] OK, that’s a lie. I might have trouble writing 5000 words of effusive praise, without revealing things that were very personal about a couple, though.

^[2] What, you thought I was going to call us ugly? Look, it doesn’t do anyone any good, thinking like that. Call yourself ugly if that’s what you really want, but I think you’re lovely.

^[3] Well, probably.