PJ Holden's Blog

I guess, I can remember the first time I found the Dark Knight Returns. It was in a double page spread in the magazine Computer and Video Games. A tiny 2″ reproduction of a single page, microscopic text – I suspect the entire thing was under the banner of “kapow! Comics have grown up!”

The page was of Batman holding the draped corpse of an American general wrapped in a US flag. And I remember reading it and thinking “oh wow, this is something else.”. It felt much closer to the sensibilities of 2000ad than a batman comic, and much much closer to my sensibilities as an 17 year old.

I’m not sure actually when I saw that in C&VG, but I do remember it was 1988 when John McCrea and Fred Collier opened their comic shop “Dark Horizons” and I went in there after a drought of five years away from comics, and bought it and just devoured it.

What a book.

I reread it every year for a long long time. And tbh it’s been a while, but I cracked it open last night and started and man, still fresh.

I’ve since bought and rebought this book a number of times (an insane number of times). I have my original copy – scratched all over in front and back, a Titan Books first edition from 1986 (is it worth money? it shouldnt be, but the world is a strange place) and I have copy I bought a few years ago (I just checked, it’s the “Tenth anniversary edition” and dated 1997!) because this one is so beaten up and then I have a pure b&w (a Noir edition) though if I’m honest, Lynn Varley’s colouring on this is so incredible it seems a crime to remove it. A rare instance of colouring doing so much.

And I have an artists Edition. A big old chunky version reproducing much of the original art (including with overlays for redrawn panels).

I also have at least one digital version.

What I’d love would be some version of the original four issues rather than a collection. That might tempt me to buy it again. The digital version is reproduced from scans of the printed book, I think, certainly there’s things in there that make it seem like that (or maybe scans of the film used to print it). So I don’t know if we’ll ever get a definitive reprint that looks as good as the first print editions (certainly my old 1986 copy looks better -at least internally- than the digital versions)

(On the left the 1997 edition, presumably reprinted from film. On the right the 1986 first edition. What’s immediately striking is the blue of the caption boxes, suddenly it’s grey. Why? I have no idea. There’s no other difference, and I would say the blue is more readable.)

Will I ever give any copies of these books away? nope. Not on your nelly. Which is a mad really, but I think that speaks to how important graphic novels and comics are to the people that read them. I know that if I ever see a bunch of comics in a charity shop (as opposed to books) my first thought is “I wonder if I knew that person” – we lived a shared experience, that you only get from physical print.

This year, is the 40th anniversary of the Dark Knight Returns. That’s insane. But what a book. A generally piece of literature, that still even now can resonate.

(Featured image: My wife had planted Daffodils, and they popped up the other day and yesterday I saw this rather impressive fellow mooching around – SPRING IS HERE!)

IBS attack last night. Didn’t get to bed until I’d say about 5:30am or so. Just exhausted. Was supposed to go for a run and didn’t. Was supposed to get two pages of pencils done and didn’t. Was supposed to not spend all morning in bed and didn’t manage that either.

Honestly it’s a little dispiriting. On the plus side, the pain is bearable. (And in the past it hasn’t been) but what caused it, dunno? Maybe some cadbury’s chocolate? maybe too much greasy food? Maybe I ate too much? Maybe nothing? Maybe the weather?

It’s not even worth a doctors visit. For what? for him to tell me what I already know? There’s no good way to find pain relief, except, for me, sitting with a hot water bottle (and I tried a tens machine for a while and that seemed to work a little). So I sat with a hot water bottle glued to my belly and watched some tv.

I watched an episode of Star Trek Starfleet Academy. A show I’m enjoying despite lots of factors. I feel too old for a lot of tv shows now. I’m not just not the target audience, I’m about four demographics too old for many of them.

I’m older (by three years) than Richard Wilson was when he started playing Victor Meldrew.

I’m older (by one year) than Batman is in the Dark Knight Returns.

I’ve always felt somehow the demographic tv shows were aimed at was just slightly out of my grasp. I think the last time I felt like – oh yes, this is aimed at my age – was seeing Why Don’t You in the 70s.

As a kid I’d see stylish ads for perfumes with sexy people on yachts and think, oh yeah, that’ll be my kind of life. Then I was that age and didn’t see a yacht (and I wasn’t sexy) and now I’m so old the thoughts of a party on a yacht with sexy people horrifies me.

Man on the Inside at least has an older than me cast, but it won’t be long, it won’t be long before I’ll age out of that show too.

Anyway, hoping tonight is a little better. I have work today, and I’d like to get it done tomorrow.

It’s silly, but I’ve been mulling over the question of “could I write Terran Omega as an on going comic series”. I keep thinking, well, I’d run out of material, really. But I suspect in coming up with a character who was a weapon designed for a war long past, in a galaxy where people still live with the trauma of that millennial old conflict, I’ve accidentally stumbled across something that will always be relevant. Sadly, every news item throws up two or three ideas or things worth exploring.

The harder thing, I think would be figuring out ways to approach those stories that would keep it interesting both to write and to read. I mean not every story should be a ghost story, not every story should be a sad window into a sad world. You need hope too.

Anyway. I’m sure you’re as familiar as I am about the news (and for the record, for about 15 years from now when the blog might still be going, this is about Trump going to war with Iran).

I try and avoid talking about the news here, because, well, it’s already everywhere. But this is hard to avoid.

Pencilled two pages I’m happy with (unusual!)

Watched Abigail (try and avoid spoilers, but you won’t be able too – but actually it’s pretty great and funny) and The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Largely by the numbers, nice to look at, lacking the humour of Abigail. but still fun.

Yesterday in Social Media

Oh the new Gorillaz video, absoloutly stunning, and all hand drawn! https://www.catsuka.com/news/2026-02-27/gorillaz-the-mountain-the-moon-cave-and-the-sad-god-en-ligne-realise-par-jamie-hewlett-max-taylor-et-tim-mccourt-au-studio-the-line

And … it’s late so I’m off to bed.

Yesterday in the car taking 21 year old son N home from work. 

“Dad, I’d love to make egg friend rice again. But I need old boiled rice.”

(His last egg fried rice making adventure he used 8-EIGHT! Egg – where did he put the rice? I have no idea)

“Why don’t you make old rice?”

“I need old rice”

“Well son unless I build a Time Machine I can’t make you old rice. If you make rice when you go home you can make egg fried rice later tonight”

“Ok how do you make boiled rice?”

“Well my technique is one cup of rice and 2 and a half cups of boiling water. Once it boils turn it down and then when you see airholes in the rice it’s cooked”

“Do we have cups?”

“…what?”

“Do we have cups?”

“Do we have cups??? What are you talking about?”

“Cooking cups”

“Cooking cups????”

“Yeah for cooking with”

“… No son. I use Normal cups”

“Oh. Like glasses”

“Wha…? ok. Just use cups.”

Later we’re heading out with comic artist Mike Collins and his lovely wife Bernie for dinner but before that…

“Son, do you want me to help you make the rice?”

“No i’m ok”

“Ok. It’s one cup of rice and two and a half cups of water. Ok?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I can figure it out.” (hes doing a degree in Computers, he’s got three A*s at A level. He’s on track for a first. He is very smart)

We leave. 

We’re having dinner. There is a phone call. 

“Dad. I’ve had a rice disaster”

“What…?”

“I didn’t put enough water in.”

“Well no problem. Put more water in.”

“I can’t. It’s overflowing with rice.”

“What?”

“I think I used too small a pot.”

“Ok. Ok. Get another pot. Scoop some rice out and add more water. Will be home soon”

We get home. The kitchen is a crime scene. A rice related crime scene 

I start tidying. I lift the now empty massive bag of rice that should have some in it. 

“Son how much rice did you cook?”

“Oh two and a half cups worth”

“What??”

“Yeah I weighed it and it didn’t seem that much so I did all of it. I didn’t take in to account how much it would weigh after I cooked it”

“But I said one cup of rice to two and a half cups of water”

“Yeah I thought that was just the ratio”

“Oh so how much water do you use?”

“Four cups”

“But that’s … you did two and a half cups of rice so four cups of water isn’t even the right ratio”

“I know”

“My egg fried rice was delicious though”

The scene of the crime:

Ok, not really perils. But it’s been interesting. I restarted my patreon and thought if I just consistently delivered new material every week on a regular metronome like consistency I’d slowly build an audience, and I did, but actually that building has now turned to a trickle. For a few months there I was gaining 50+ people a month, and then January and February that just slowed down significantly.

(The drawing by the way is from when my youngest was doing his amazing comic Monkey Arms, I hope he’ll get back to it one day, right now he’s all about music and mates, but he’s 17 so that’s expected)

I’ve enough followers there now – 373 that it does feel like there’s a solid reason to post there, but like every platform the number of people following you doesn’t directly translate in to likes or actually any active choices. Most posts get about 7-8 likes, some outliers 15.

I’ve a few paid followers, certainly a decent number (about 37) but most oare paying $1 (and once you subtract the costs that’s literally pennies) in all I think I’m theoretically making $110 per month. But it’s just stacking up in patreon, waiting for me to do something with it.

I could have tried to make more, and maybe once this book is finished, I’ll restructure it so that the paid amounts start at $5. I had hoped that at $1 I’d convert most people to paying, but that’s not how that has panned out (if everyone paid $1 I’d be making $370 per month, still not a lot, but actually enough to pay for two pages of work per month…)

If I end up doing a second book on the platform, I’ll maybe up the monies and see if I can up the frequency of pages.

Could be I scare away everyone donating $1, but maybe if everyone was paying $5 I’d do alright.

(BUT WHY WHY? So I can basically fund myself doing comics I’m writing and drawing!)

On the writing front, I’m approaching TerranOmega like “what if I’m writing twelve issues of this”, so I’ve all the stories but some are requiring a bit more thought than others. And in the middle of watching an imax concert (21 pilots, with my son who is a huge fan) I decide the story for #5-#6 needed to start at the end. Grab you right at the worse moment and let the story unfold.

Yesterday I didn’t post! Shock! Did you miss me? No time and by the time I realised I was gonna break my streak I was lying in bed (ipad in hand, wordpress dashboard opened up, ready to start typing awkwardly) and thought – no … what if I take one day off deliberately. Not that I missed it, but that I decided “this day intentionally left blank”. Giving it an intentionality made it easier to stop worrying about it and think “well, I’ll post tomorrow, so it’ll not be because I had no time, rather becuase I just decided a blank was ok”. So there.

Yesterday in Social Media

John Cullen a marvellous artist posted a fun comic strip

Any way that’s all I’ve got time for, now run free horse! RUN FREE!

Some days just escape from you. This is one of them. I mean it didn’t start like that. The morning and afternoon felt like there was plenty of time then suddenly none. 

I was driving around earlier today, I like within the same 10 minute walkable route that I was born in. I sometimes think that’s a real failure on my part. Like where did I go? nowhere. What did I achieve? I mean a reasonable amount. I guess. 

One street in particular was the street of my childhood and it’s largely the same except it’s got cars everywhere. As a kid I remember it as being mostly empty. We could run around the streets and see the odd car but now it’s cars right up to every corner. We used to play in an old abandoned car park beside an old abandoned factory. Left alone for hours. At least until dinner time. 

I might have been the last generation to have that freedom. 

On the writing front, I wrote the entire issue #3 of Terran omega and sketched out issue #4. I dunno, writing doesn’t seem that hard (haha I kid!)

When on earth will I ever get a chance to draw these things? I don’t know. I’m thinking retirement. 

Speaking of which (and the which here is Terran Omega) there’s a new page over at my Patreon, but here it is too. 

I’ve writing scripts in a couple of ways, firstly as very plain text in a note using apple’s notes app (and because the notes app is on my iphone, my ipad and my mac mini it basically makes any stuff I write available across all the devices) and using apple’s pages.

The Notes app is usually for writing ideas, rough skeleton drafts or any old text that might turn up or at least help my thinking on the story.

The Pages app I set a template up with to make doing the layout of a script easier. I tend to rewrite the script in pages as a rough outline then go in and break it up as pages. I do though, end up spending a stupid amount of time wrestling with page numbers (a few days ago, for example, I had to add a page which meant going through every page I’d already written and increasing the page number by 1 – so “Page 2” became “Page 3” and “Page 3” became “Page 4” and you can guess how tedious that got after 20 pages)

And then it turned out I’d mistyped somewhere and missed a page and had to readjust AGAIN!

Because I have a background in IT I kept thinking about how I would solve this problem. After all I really only need a basic text editor, it just needs to know what a comic page is, and panels, and dialogue. These days writing a text editor should be fairly trivial (he says knowing full well the last time he programmed in anger was over 20 years ago)

Anyway, I decided to do a bit of research and stumbled across two things, firstly a website with a comic script editor here https://comicwriter.io/ and this is a fine solution! Because it’s web based it’ll work on pretty much every device, BUT scripts aren’t saved (you can save them locally). So great. Solution found.

But I kept googling and stumbled across superscript.app – which I’d forgotten all about. This was a kickstarter project from around 2018, which it turns out, I’d contributed to. At the time it was a paid project. I supported it but actually at that point didn’t really use it and then forgot all about it. But since I’m scripting things now, I found it again and it turns out in the interim the person behind it has made the app free.

It has lots of really nice little features for scripting, automatically page number, automatic panel number, pop up character names for dialogue etc, it can give you panel word counts, as well as number all of the lettering on the page for helping lettering placement. Just nice little quality of life features that you’d wrestle with endlessly with a generic word processor.

Of course it lacks a LOT of traditional word processing features, but who needs those? (I mean I wouldn’t use it for writing a book or a thesis) but like Clip Studio Paint – photoshop for comic artists, this is word for comic writers. Stripped of everything you don’t need and built with tools you do.

I like it a lot.

Also, it’s smart enough that if you’ve written a script in pages and cut and paste it you should get a lot of the smart features without any effort (it’ll recognise PAGE 1, PAGE 2 etc and will turn them in to the smart autonumbering pages)

Yesterday in Social Media

There really is too much news happening isn’t there?

Let’s go to our pronunciation expert (me):

So it turns out while I have always pronounced segue right I have been saying vague wrong.

Look, I pronounce both words correctly, but I admit I had no idea the written word “segue” was the same as the word as the word “seqway” [sic], I see the written word and I hear “seig” (as in seqway seqway sputnik, hat tip to Ned Hartley)

Now, I have form for pronunciations. It’s a LONG standing bit that in the 2000ad comics community I, and I alone, am pronouncing PROG wrong. Which is irritating, because actually, I and I alone, am pronouncing it right.

Prog in 2000ad was short for Programme. The first couple of issues were labelled Programmes, presumably in 1977 in a mock “computer program” way – but “computer programs” were so new the US Spelling had yet to totally dominate. And for young people, programs where what we used to call “apps”

Shortly, Programme got truncated to Prog – NOW I maintain that means it should be pronounced like your saying “program” – “prog” to rhyme with “rogue” (brings us back to “segue” somehow)

And the entire UK contingent of fans and creators and droids all say it should rhyme with Prog as in Prog Rock. (Prog for Progressive).

It’s a mass delusion that I alone have somehow shaken off.

Anyway, I’m successfully annoyed myself now. Go in peace!

I could be talking about any number of things with that title, but today I’m talking about COMICS WHAT I HAVE COMING OUT.

If you missed it yesterday, I have a new War book coming out, this one written by Mark Russell, who’s a fantastic writer. As you probably know I’ve drawn a lot of war books, this one covers the war from a more American angle, but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s view of the conflict is any less penetrating.

It’s called Dog Tag,. art by me, colours by my old pal JP Jordon (who’s been doing some fantastic work, bright colourful future for that lad) and letters by Buddy Beaudoin, what’s interesting is we all get credits on the cover. I remember years ago having conversations about whether letterers should get cover credit (I was a yes) and even colourists (again I was a yes) this time, no conversation there they were. Mad Cave is pretty good place, I tell ya.

Six issue mini, we follow one guy as he ends up in various parts of the US’s involvment in WWII.

The day before yesterday it was also announced my new Dredd is coming, written by Rob Williams, colours Jack Davies and lettering by Annie Parkhouse. Out NEXT WEEK.

A fun Dredd action adventure. Look at that cracking Cliff Robinson cover:

And then also yesterday some improv chums are about to release the nbext season of their bonkers podcast “The Bad Articles” (A sort of x files meets father ted) for which I did some character drawings, this was just for fun for me, but it’s a very fun podcast and you should give it a listen. You can find it on any good podcast app, under Bad Articles (or here’s a link)

Yesterday On Social Media

Zac Thompson said this:

Had an artist reach out saying they were interested in collaborating. Told them to send me their comic portfolio. A few hours later they reach out and say they have no idea what a comic artist portfolio looks like and if I could just look at their pin ups. 

Nope! You're not ready.

OH FER THE LOVE OF GOD HAVE A PORTFOLIO FILLED WITH COMICS IF THAT’S WHAT YOU WANT TO DRAW.

You know the expression “Dress for the job you want” – well, build your portfolio for the job you want. Honestly doesn’t have to be much. Keep it up to date. Keep it handy. Keep it within easy reach of any online presence. That’s it. Nothing like blowing your chances at the simplest thing.

Also over on the old bluesky, I stumbled across a short of this video, but here’s the full thing for your delight:

And that’s yer lot.