Early Life
Brian Bolland was born on 26 March 1951 in Butterwick, Lincolnshire to parents Albert "A.J." John, a fenland farmer, and Lillie Bolland. He spent his "first 18 years" living "in a small village near Boston in the fens of Lincolnshire, England," but has "no memory of comics" much before the age of ten. When American comics began to be imported into England, c.1959, Bolland says that it "took a little while for me to discover them," but by 1960 he was intrigued by Dell Comics' Dinosaurus!, which fed into a childhood interest in dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes. Comics including Turok, Son of Stone and DC's Tomahawk soon followed, and it was this burgeoning comics collection that would help inspire the young Bolland to draw his own comics around the age of ten with ideas such as "Insect League." He recalls that "uperheroes crept into my life by stealth," as he actively sought out covers featuring "any big creature that looked vaguely dinosaur-like, trampling puny humans." This adolescent criteria led from Dinosaurus! and Turok via House of Mystery to "Batman and Robin were being harassed by big weird things, as were Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman ." Soon, family outings to Skegness became an excuse for the future artist to "trawl... round some of the more remote backstreet newsagents" for comics to store on an overflowing "bookcase I'd made in school woodwork especially."
As early as 1962, aged 11, Bolland remembers thinking that "Carmine Infantino's work on the Flash and Gil Kane's on Green Lantern and the Atom had a sophistication about it that I hadn't seen." He would later cite Kane and Alex Toth as "pinnacle of excellence," alongside "Curt Swan, Murphy Anderson, Syd Greene, Joe Kubert, Ross Andru, Mike Esposito, Nick Cardy and the under-rated Bruno Premiani," whose influences showed in his "early crude stabs at drawing comics." The young Bolland did not rate Marvel Comics as highly as DC, feeling the covers cluttered and the paper quality crude. His appreciation of the artwork of Jack Kirby, he says, only materialised much later "through the eyes of a seasoned professional." He did however enjoy UK comics, including newspaper strips such as "Syd Jordan's Jeff Hawke David Wright's Carol Day, " and Valiant which featured "Eric Bradbury's Mytek the Mighty and Jesus Blasco's Steel Claw " Despite such a variety of inspirations, Bolland credits his eventual pursuance of art as a hobby and then vocation to a primary school art teacher, who "evidently said all the right things to me."
Growing up as "and only child in a house without culture," (Bolland says that his "mother and father had no use for art, literature or music"), he embraced the late 1960s pop culture explosion of "pirate radio stations, music (particularly Frank Zappa...), drug taking, psychedelia, "peace and love," "dropping out," the underground scene, Oz Magazine," and other aspects of hippy culture epitomised by underground comix such as Robert Crumb's Zap Comix. Having taken both O-Level and A-Level examinations in art, Bolland spent five years at art school (starting in 1969) learning graphic design and Art history. Learning to draw comics, however, was "more a self-taught thing," with Bolland eventually writing a 15,000 word dissertation in 1973 on Neal Adams - an "artist had never heard of." He would later recall
| “ | "It was during this time that I discovered the sheer range of comics and their history. All the British stuff I'd missed was there to be discovered. I found the American greats, Foster, Herriman, Alex Raymond and Winsor McCay... Noel Sickles, Milt Caniff, Roy Crane, had all, I discovered, put down the basic building blocks of our "Art form". And there were the Europeans... Moebius, Manara, Breccia. Later the Filipinos—Alex Niño, Nestor Redondo, Alfredo Alcala, all were inspirational. None of this stuff was to be found in the art schools. During my five years in three art schools I never learnt a single thing about comics from any of my tutors." | ” |
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