Robbie Morrison

Like many British comic book writers, Robbie Morrison found his earliest audiences through 2000AD: he wrote Judge Dredd for a while, did turns on Judge Hershey  and the X-Files influence Vector 13. Yet he is best known for the characters that he created for the magazine, including Nikolai Dante, a rare sensuous character in the 2000AD corpus who is as comfortable seducing as fighting, and Shakara, a science fiction thriller that has shades of dark horror beneath its futuristic sheen.

Morrison has gone onto work on the more interesting US titles, including The Authority  and WildCats, and script films and a BBC drama. While his subjects are often within recognisable traditions - Dante is influenced by Steam Punk, and he has had a shot at Batman and Spider-Man, his attention to detail and supporting characters is distinctive. Dante has a huge cast, and a complete social order forming a backdrop to the action - with some cheeky touches that invert the patriarchal fantasies of science fiction.

This made him ideal for the contemporary comic book version of Doctor Who, which is one of his recent gigs. As a writer, Morrison has taken strong storytelling skills and applied them to a medium in which brand often trumps quality, and unostentatiously forged his own style and added new characters to the graphic novel mythos.