PJ Holden's Blog

(the featured image is a comic my youngest son did a few years ago when he was much younger, I love it)

I’ve always been fascinated by jokes. When I was a kid, maybe early teens, I read an Isaac Asimov story that totally ruined all jokes for me – the story was called “Jokestar” first published in 1956 and in it, a “Grand Master” (an expert at asking the all powerful computer useful questions) asks the Multivac computer where jokes come from.

And it came up with an answer.

Skip this paragraph if you don’t want read spoilers for a 60 year old story:

To the best of my recollection, it categorised jokes as either puns (nice easy to create or variations of a theme (knock knock) and finally, wholly original completely impossible to create from whole cloth. Those jokes, multivac posited were clearly of alien origin and used by aliens as a sort of sociological experiment on humans. And now, having discovered this, the whole experiment would be rendered moot, and the aliens would no longer give us jokes.

It’s a silly story, notable maybe for the idea of a grand master – what we’d probably now call a “Prompt Engineer” (if we were wankers) and that it was written, it turns out, by a terrible sex pest. (Asimov, why???)

This story messed me up in one peculiar way, I couldn’t figure out where it was wrong about jokes – I didn’t believe the aliens explanation (that would be daft) but the general criteria and that some jokes do seem to fall from the sky fully formed.

In my later teen years (now I’m 56 the difference between being 13 and 17 seems like a twitch of an eye, but at that age it was the difference between being one human being and entirely another) I started collecting jokes. I couldn’t really make them up (how could you? every joke already existed and nothing new was coming) but I could remember a LOT of jokes. Often I’d have one setup and about three punchlines. Many were very … ribald (I was 17!)

To this day it feels weird the idea of making up jokes, but I think I do it all the time. But my brain just hasn’t wrapped itself around what it means.

I mean I was in the same boat with the word “composition” – it took me years and years and years before I really understood it. But even then, I may be wrong.

Writing

Yesterday’s blog post was warmly received, and that is very gratifying. Especially when some of the people who comment themselves are professional writers. My new business cards included the word “Comics” but they also included a drawing of a scifi character who doesn’t exist, so it turns out you can put anything you want on a business card, real OR fictional.

I will say, my mum, like everyone was just a luminous being of pure love. Sometimes she could be outright ferocious. I remember someone once trying to steal a bike, outside the house we were living in, they’d literally got on it while I was also on it, and my mum, despite being English had somehow become quite a hard Belfast mom, shouted to me “hit him Paul”. I think I was 11. All I really wanted was for my mum to tell the other wee shit to piss off and to take me home.

Anyway, that is to say, I’m going to keep faking being a writer until I believe it myself. So I’m going into a slightly different discipline from now on : ten minutes blogging as a warm up and twenty minutes of writing something. Thirty minutes in total. The morning blogs then may be silly slight willow the whisp thoughts and the actual serious business of writing might just be me typing redrum a hundred times in to a pages file. We’ll see.

Drawing

Yesterday got three pages of Terran Omega #2 pencilled and lettered. Hoo boy, the second issue it taking shape fast (did another page this morning) currently at page 8 and they’re al lettered. So part of what I’m going to be doing is sending the lettered version to a pal for some script edits, and suggestions. He’s also going to help me shape up other ideas I have.

Of course inking and colouring are the real time consuming parts, but they’ll come, they’ll come.

Yesterday I saw a post about the Marvel Try Out Book from 1983.

I’m pretty sure I had this and deduction brought me to having it some time around my 13th or 14th birthday. I know I got an Amstrad CPC464 when I was 14, and it feels likely this was before the computer but it certainly rang a bell of recognition deep inside a dark vault.

Likely it was a gift from my mum. Herself something of a frustrated artist. The house would be dotted with eyes, drawn in that faux-70s art style that probably would have been big when my mum was impressionable enough to have seen it.

Mum was 17 when she had me, a child herself. There followed four more boys, and she never really had much of a chance to grow into being her own human being. She was very much the epitome of a mum. I think in my kinder moments, in those times when I do something for someone and expect nothing in return, I feel like that’s partly my mum’s doing. 

“they fuck you up your mum and dad, they don’t mean to but they do”

One of my favourite poems (Phillip Larkin’s This Be the Verse) is just heard as it’s first line. Because it really resonates, but they fuck you up in lots of ways, sometimes negative, sometimes positive. Sometimes it’s by leaving you so reliant on the shape of them that when that shape is gone, it leaves a vast aching unfillable void. You can certainly paper over it and layer paint on that, and wallpaper on that and more paint, and more paper, until you have something that looks like a solid structure. But all it will take is to see a photo of the Marvel Try Out Book from 1983 and suddenly you’ve pushed your hands through the paper wall and you’re staring into hurt that floods right in.

And the thing is, I don’t think my mum was unique in the world. How many women just make their lives for their own children, and then their grandchildren and then other people’s children. And how many people write books about them? They are the foundation that holds up the world. Certainly my mum was the foundation for me.

My mum’s sister, my aunt Francis, told me mum was the only person she ever met that was excited for the school holidays. She lived for a house full of chaos.

When I posted about the Marvel book on bluesky and talked about my mum, a son of one of my dad’s oldest friends replied:

I remember your Ma a bit (I first remember a holiday visiting Strangford?). She was luminous, had a great laugh and would take the time to speak with a weird kid.

And she was right about your art.

Mum was luminous. How could she not be? she was filled with love.

And episode 2 begins!

There’s more details over on the patreon, but basically, after splitting the single 48 page story in to 2 issues, because of comic book page counts I needed a new page one. So great chance to get a nice big establishing shot.

I’m finding with writing US length stories, as opposed to my usual rapid fire one/four/six page shorts that I suddenly have all this real estate for establishing mood that I didn’t have before. If I want to show how big a place is, I can just take a few pages to travel it, let you feel the sense of the scale. So that’s what this page is about, a single ringworld floating lonely in space and then I lifted the dialogue from the actual page 1, and just put that in and it does that nice thing you can do in comics when word and imagery are sort of saying opposite things about the same thing. Dialogue suggesting they’re not as lost as you think, and the image saying oh-boy-where-are-they?

You can go back to episode one and read Terran Omega from the start at my Patreon.

PJ’s Progress

Yesterday actually felt pretty good, I got two covers inked, and pencilled a page of Terran Omega (and made dinner and gave people lifts and tidied up a scan of a page).

I need to find my speed again, and the covers were a step towards that. They were digitally inked. I don’t think I’ve really taken in to account how slow erasing things from a page are – a process you can skip digitally. Plus drawing panel borders. Holy smokes panel borders are the bane of my life. So I think I’m going to go back to hybrid working. Maybe pencils on paper and inks digitally.

A slight pity, as I do like having the inks as a thing, but I’ll probably have pencils. And really, look there’s stuff that it’s far too early to talk about, but hoboy will I want to get a lot of work done in a short period of time.

Anyway, off we go!

It’s Pancake Tuesday. Normally I’d put a little effort in using the Jamie Oliver recipe (one cup of flour, one cup of milk, one egg and pinch of salt). It’s messy but the kids loved it. This year the kids are adult and youngest has headed off to his mates. My pancake day is ironically flat. 

Just another little marker, a little life milestone, not one you’re prepared for, not one people talk about, but little by little the world changes and you’re never ever ready. The photo is from 2009, and looking back on the photos from that year when my kids were less than a year old and about four, and … oh man, my wife finds it baffling how much a photo of the kids upset me. I miss the little tykes, even as I’m grateful they’re able to plan their trip to Japan for the summer, or the concert the other is going to in London with his mates. I’d give nearly anything for one more day where they’re begging me to do one more pancake for them.

War is Hell

Trying to really get in to a Rhythm today. Inked a cover (and started another) for a war book that might be announced soon. I’ve still two issues to go on it.

Outside of that, If things pan out how they could I’m going to be both mad busy and broke for the next 7 months. And that is probably best case scenario. But you know… sometimes you have to bet on yourself. 

Oops. I forgot to blog today. In my defence I was working largely what I think I’ve taken to calling “undrawing” when you look at a piece of art you’ve finished and say “i can do this better” and then you’ve undrawn half a page. 

Anyway. It does, as expected, look better. 

Sent off an email today. Let’s see. 

Oh new Dredd from me and Rob Williams and Ned Hartley coming soon. Big explody adventure. 

When we moved in to this house a few years ago now – this was the house my parents had from about 1989 until I bought it off them (I mean it’s stupidly complex, I bought it in ’89 and they moved in and paid the mortgage and I ended up selling it back to them in ’03 so I could buy a house) anyway… we did a few things to it.

We have a small back garden. Not massive but certainly more exterior space than we ever had in our flat – but we also had a freakily useless large drive way at the side of the building that leads to a garage.

We ended up having to knock down the wall at the side of the driveway and we replaced it with a tall fence, which actually gave us a bit more privacy in the back garden (because the wall allowed anyone to just peer in). I mean we could spend another 15k-I-don’t-have on this house and barely make a dent, but this was one of the first and most sensible things we did.

As a result our drive way effectively became a yard. And it has become the place that houses things that have to go to the dump, especially large things. It’s purgatory for junk.

My wife hates it. Understandably. It takes a small area and makes it unnecessarily messy.

But, weirdly, I actually like it. It takes a small area and makes it feel like the back yards of my childhood. Where a broken chair leg could be repurposed in to a machine gun to kill hordes of Nazi stormtroopers, or a detached broom handle could pull double duty as either a lightsaber or as Monkey’s staff, fighting various demons while it was twirled around you like a maniac.

My wife sees a pile of crap and I see a pile of childhood wonder.

I’d love to convince my wife we should also dry clothes in this area, but she’s resolutely set on never doing that. (Which is a shame, because a backyard full of junk and hanging clothes you can get lost in gives me a sort of warm hug just thinking about it)

So I’ve been constantly kicking the can down the road for when I should tidy it all up. The endless rain has really been on my side on this front.

Arts Funding

I’ve been trying to understand arts funding, and let me tell you – it is not easy to understand. I’d much rather walk in a place and talk to someone, explain what I’m trying to do and have them say “this sounds great, lets fund that” – which was how I did things when I worked in IT. In the arts, filled with people, famously allergic to paperwork, you have to go through mountains of paperwork. I’m staggered any one bothers.

I am trying to think of some lateral moves I can make, in NI – to fund doing more Terran Omega. Ulster Scots? Why not? Irish Language? For sure. Just you know… give me some money.

Sunday For Sammy

Wife and youngest off to Newcastle today for Sunday for Sammy a charity concert. Son is a massive fan of the 1975, and it was all very last minute. Was out and got a text on Friday “We’re going to Newcastle on Sunday” so I’m trying to take today to finish some stuff, start scripting the next two episodes of Terran Omega (‘The Seed’) and get some invoices out. It’s been a rough week or three for invoicing, and I really need to get on top of that.

And that’s it. Will try and get back to our regularly scheduled programming of Yesterday On Social Media (which I kind of miss) tomorrow…

“You haven’t bought me a Valentine’s Day card have you?”

“Er… no”

“Good. I haven’t got you one either”

And that’s how you know you’re in the “happily ever after” part of life. 

Rendr

Well that turned out to be way more useful than I expected. I was introduced to people by people I knew. At least two solid work related contacts (neither of which directly comics related but certainly drawing adjacent). Hopefully one will turn into some sort of regular thing we’ll see. 

My wife is very strongly of the opinion that people locally need to know I exist for them to be able to hire me for things (i maintain living and working in one room away from humanity is the perfect basis for a career). But I can’t deny she’s got a point. 

But man my social battery runs down quick. Thankfully I can largely rely on other people to introduce me and that’s been useful

Something like normal service resumes tomorrow. See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya!