The story appeared in 1989, in the wake of the UK government enacting its controversial Section 28 regulation banning schools from promoting homosexuality. One Judge Dredd story he wrote, John Cassavetes Is Dead, even had the titular law-enforcer questioning the totalitarianism of the regime he has sworn to uphold as he is forced to sentence an elderly man to 10 years’ imprisonment for possessing banned literature from the 20th century, including newspapers, novels and comic books.

He said in a 2021 interview that he was thrown out of the Young Conservatives for being too leftwing, and shown the door by the Socialist party for being too Conservative-minded, adding that “basically, what both parties were saying was that I was just too argumentative for either of them”.

In fact, Grant imbued all his comic book writing with his experiences and political beliefs, though the latter were often as quirky as the strips he wrote. Alan Grant began writing comic book stories at DC Thomson in Dundee.

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