As a young boy in the early 1980s, Duncan Jones, the son of David and Angie Bowie, would take refuge in comic books. His parents divorced in 1980 and his father was awarded custody, but was often away. (The Observer report)
“I travelled around a lot at that point and was kind of all over the place,” said Jones, 55.
“The woman who looked after me a lot when Dad was away was Marion Skene, who was basically my mum at that time. She lived in Aberdeen, so I spent a lot of time there.”
Skene, who died in 2017, was Jones’s nanny while Bowie was hopping between his New Romantic phase, including the 1980 album Scary Monsters, and his poppy era epitomised by Under Pressure, his No 1 duet with Queen in 1981.
With Skene’s help, Bowie, who died in 2016, was trying to give his son as normal a life as possible — despite calling him Zowie, a name Jones rejected in his teens.
“There was a traditional old corner shop near where Marion lived and I would go there and buy a bag of chocolate buttons and some comics,” Jones said. “It was around then I discovered 2000AD. I would sit down with it and my chocolate, and for me that was just pure escapism.”
45 years later, that escapism has turned into the latest big screen project for Jones, the film-maker behind the sci-fi movie Moon, the virtual-reality thriller Source Code and the video game adaptation Warcraft.
Jones has adapted Rogue Trooper, one of the most popular strips from the British comic 2000AD (which next year celebrates its 50th anniversary), into an animated feature using the latest motion capture and CGI technology.
“But without AI,” Jones added. “This is an all-human crafted movie made by people. There’s no artificial intelligence at all.”
2000AD is also the home of Judge Dredd, the hardline future lawman who has had two big-screen outings with Sylvester Stallone and Karl Urban respectively. Rogue Trooper is less well known, but fascinated Jones from the first time he saw him.
Rogue Trooper is about an endless war being fought on the distant planet of Nu Earth between the opposing forces of the Norts (Germanic bad guys) and the Southers.
Rogue Trooper and his comrades are genetic infantrymen – blue-skinned genetically modified clones able to breathe the poisonous atmosphere of Nu Earth. They can also have their consciousness downloaded into computer chips at the time of death, allowing for re-installation in a freshly cloned body. _ Read the full article here
