The origins.

The Sleeze Brothers comic was first published in August 1989 by Marvel UK. After working together on various licensed titles such as the Real Ghostbusters, Thundercats and Dr Who, John Carnell and Andy Lanning were given the chance by their editor Richard Starkings, to create an original six issue mini series.

The deeper, darker origins.

In the beginning...

The Sleeze Brothers was an idea created in the pub in Knightsbridge, some 12 months earlier when John Carnell met with Andy Lanning to ask him to do some artwork for a poster for the cleaning company he was working for at the time. Andy, who was already well on his way to fame and fortune, drawing strips for Look In magazine, duly agreed. For £50 and a pint of lager he drew a picture of ‘the Grimebusters’ a bunch of cleaning folk, not unlike the Ghostbusters, but holding mops, vacuums and brushes instead of Ion Cannons and ghost traps.

Job done and lunch time drinks taking hold, John enquired after Andy’s cousins Phil and Pete Carmichael, old friends from their home town of Ramsgate. Andy, who would often caricature family and friends, had drawn them dressed up as a couple of Private Dicks called ‘The Sleeze Brothers’ and was toying with the idea of making them into a comic strip.


John, who was a writer in disguise, yes, a bit like a Transformer, liked the idea and ran with it. Within the hour, and a few pints down, the first mad ideas for futuristic detective agency set in the dystopian future world of The Big Apple, was born.

Episode 2.

Back to reality...

John needed a job, writing. The cleaning work was giving him housemaids knee, elbow and brain. Andy suggested he should try writing comic strips. Encouraged, John followed Andy into a tryout for Marvel Comics and there met the man soon to become the architect of the Sleeze Brothers attempt to take over the world - editor Richard Starkings.


Andy, port folio filled with drawings, was hired and John, empty-pocketed, but with a head full of ideas and enthusiasm, was given a chance to write a sample script with Andy.


The process was tortuous, they laboured long and hard into the night, come dawn, they had sitting before them, a comic strip! But not just any comic strip - one that would put them on the launch pad to greater things. They knew it, they could smell success - or was creative fluids leaking from every pore. No, it was possibly just body odour.


Scrubbed up and shaking slightly like two naughty boys sent to see the headmaster, they presented the work to Richard Starkings. They held their breath. He stuck out his unusually large tongue... surveyed their work, humming. Slurping and generally making pleasant noises. Then he laughed. We were hired!

Backs were slapped. Hugs shared. Champagne corks popped and flew over the river Thames - hampering the rescue efforts of environmentalists trying to save a stranded whale.


John, Andy, Richard and a few of the beautiful, FHM-like models that worked at Marvel at that time, as editors and secretaries, all retired to the pub, setting a frightening trend for Friday nights to come in London WC1.

Next... Sleezy goings on in the Marvel UK offices. In fighting, cat fighting, dog fighting, and the sexual relations that led to Sleeze Brothers, the bastard son of Marvel UK, the screaming baby that no one, except us, really wanted to be born.