Enter The Dragon - Redux
A Studio in the Heart of Chinatown
There was a time in the early 90's when a small collective of artists and designers got together to share a studio in the heart of London’s Chinatown.
It was Rian Hughes who’d seen the advertisement in the papers and responded immediately to what seemed like an absolute bargain. A few telephone calls later and we'd rustled up quite a posse to inhabit the space and share the very reasonable rent. Life was good. We all got on very well and as freelancers it was a relief to work in the company of like-minded people instead of working at home alone. This was up until it all went horribly wrong. Rian has written about this in part for his most excellent Logo a Gogo book, and John Tomlinson offered to write about it too, as he was someone who came off a little bit worse than the rest of us; so here's John's account...
Baldrick’s Cunning PlanÂ
by John Tomlinson
In the 90s when I was a freelance writer/editor, I moved (with Steve Cook and others) into a roomy two-tier studio in London’s Wardour Street, former HQ of a small design agency. The agency had been badly hit by recession and one of the partners, I'll call him Baldrick, was looking to rent out the studio at what seemed, to a bunch of struggling freelancers, a very reasonable rate. So we moved in – me, Steve, artist/designer Rian Hughes, comics artists Kev Hopgood, Andy Lanning and Brian Williamson and illustrators Kim Dalziel, Pauline Doyle and Lucy Maddison. I call our landlord (whose real name I remember very well) Baldrick because that’s who he resembled. Not Tony Robinson, the actor who played the character of Baldrick in Blackadder, but Baldrick himself – sickly, shifty and dim. He wasn’t dim, though. Not a bit. The Saturday morning we moved in he greeted us warmly enough. As we lugged boxes and furniture into the studio he observed our labours with the languid disinterest of a grazing ruminant, choffing slowly through a sandwich in the company of his silent but strangely furious wife. Later we had cause to remember that silent fury.
For the first few months everything was fine. We all got along so well that Rian suggested an umbrella name for our small collective. Something classy, something prestigious... something like Hughes Associates. For some reason this didn’t meet with universal enthusiasm, but you can't blame a man for trying. There were other minor hiccups: Andy put up a jokey cartoon notice on the interior door to the studio (or possibly the toilet, records are spotty at best). Rian took it down on the grounds that it was ‘not aesthetically pleasing’. Two associates, not Rian or Steve, tried to stiff me for ‘my’ share of a colossal phone bill, although I hadn't been in much or used the phone. When I objected it was suggested that if I were me I should consider my future in the studio very carefully. After an itemised bill revealed that much of the eye watering expense was the result of numerous transatlantic phone calls (not mine), a compromise was reached and, for a quiet life, I agreed to pay half what I'd been asked. We continued to get along, by and large.
Then the real owners showed up.
It could have been worse. Legend had it that much of the area, adjacent to Chinatown, was owned by the Triads. After a disappointing dearth of black clad gangs kung fu-ing each other in the streets below we discounted the rumours. The owners were only businessmen – but they had no idea we were there, or that Baldrick had illegally sublet the studio. All things considered, their response was quite reasonable – we could stay, but we’d have to pay the real rate.
Of course, it was prohibitively expensive. We took Baldrick’s deception badly, gave notice and withheld the last month’s rent in protest. Not best pleased, Baldrick snuck in at the weekend, changed the locks and padlocked the main door. He also looted a great deal of our stuff, including a new phone/fax machine and two pieces of framed original artwork belonging to me: a Steve Dillon painting of Captain Britain and a portrait of Mr. Stay Puft (from Ghostbusters) by Andy Lanning and John Burns. He even took a jacket of mine that I'd left hanging on the back of a door. Doubtless he took other people’s stuff too, but one thing’s for sure, he harvested an extensive John Tomlinson collection. Baldrick held us to ransom – we could cough up or kiss our stuff goodbye.
At no stage did we consider involving The Law, which may have been a mistake. Instead we rang a locksmith and turned up mob-handed one Saturday night with a van to do a moonlight flit. At that time Tundra UK (a short-lived but fondly remembered independent publisher) had offices over the river at Butler's Wharf. From 10PM until sometime after 3AM me, Steve, Andy, Kev, Brian, plus Tundra guys Steve White and Dave Elliot drove back and forth across the Thames, burgling our remaining possessions from Baldrick's felonious clutches and piling them up in a spare office at Tundra. It was tough going – Andy was actually crying with exhaustion by the end – but there was a general air of triumph, of having stuffed up Baldrick good and propah. I never saw the phone/fax, Mr. Stay Puft or my jacket again.
Some good came of the whole dismal episode – Brian and Lucy later fell in love and now have two daughters. Looking back from the perspective of subsequent brutal recessions it's hard to feel too angry, even with Baldrick – he was probably just doing what he could to stay afloat in straitened circumstances. And really, what punishment could be worse than his actual fate – waking up each day to look into that face, the face of Baldrick – a liar and a thief.
As a happy postscript to the above, I got Captain Britain back. Some 24 years later the artwork, still in its frame, appeared on eBay as 'Captain England painting'. My brother-in-law bought it for me and it now hangs above my desk, more precious than ever since the passing of Steve Dillon. As my old Gran used to say, what's for you won't go by you.
UPDATE:  Rian Hughes adds... "I remember it well. The part that sticks in my mind is the dodgy "ask no questions" locksmith we found. He looks at the industrial-strength drillproof lock that Baldrick had just installed. "Drillproof lock", he helpfully states. A pause. He hefts a drill that looks like something Sigourney Weaver would wield in Aliens out of a toolbox. "Should take me five minutes". Baldrick had also locked and taken the keys to all the filing cabinets, so they had to be drilled out too. Kev Hopgood lost an entire issue of Iron Man pencils for Marvel US, and I lost my airbrush and the cover to the first issue of the Fantagraphics version of Dare. I managed to recreate it, but the original is still out there somewhere..."
This may well have been a bullet I dodged. Andy and I had shared a studio in Islington with Brian West called The Cartoon Factory. He wanted to relocate somewhere a bit easier to get to from his home in Bromley with other up and coming young creators, and asked me to join him. But I didn’t feel I could leave Brian on his own, so I stayed. It was also much closer to Finsbury Park, where I lived, than the intended new place.
The rest, as they say…
Great stuff, genuinely thrilling.
For the longest time I had thought (what latterly became known as) Detonator Studio was about the only game in town and always had been (this is presumably before Kev, Brian and Lucy relocated to Coldharbour Lane, and a vacancy I'd alerted them to). 26 years I shared premises with Woodrow. It was like being married.
Good job on the moonlit flit - they deserved no less.