Month: February 2024

Wow, people liked this dracula image. So it’s gonna be the cover for my October Monster Sketchbook I’m putting together.

Been a mad month October, by my count I’ve done 18 pages pencils and inks, a further 15 pages of pencils and 19 pages of layouts/pencils (though really, they’re pretty much layouts) which means (if you add the pencils to the inks, that’s 18+15 = 33 completed pages, plus 4 layouts, plus a sketch every single day. Mental.

I’ve had to take on a fair amount of the work on Soul Plumber, while John recovers from covid, wasn’t the plan but we are were we are. I think in a few days by big War thing with Garth will be announced, I’ve STILL 60 pages of that to go – terrifying. Plus 12 pages of time before time to do this month. Mental.

Anyway. Enjoy dracula.

Like an idiot, after doing some one per day sketches this month – and one page per week in 2019, I thought, could I do a daily comic like this?

I mean, the answer is a very clear and obvious no.

But … if I COULD do a comic like this, what form would it take.

I mean, I’ve flirted with the idea – dozens of times – of doing a digest sized commando comic (because I THINK I could draw on page per day of that quite easily – and when  I say one page per day, I REALLY mean one page in an hour  – a morning sketch).

In theory I *could* draw that, but reading scripts is a bit of a pain and I wouldn’t want to work with someone for fear of cocking it up or choking and picking a thing up and doing it weekly is harder than it looks, but a daily strip…? would it be easier or harder. Probably harder… but maybe easier ? I’m not sure.

Anyway. I need to write something myself, and I’d need to draw it myself. That’s a given. So it isn’t going to happen.

Even if I did accidentally come up with an idea and plot out a story. Which, you know, I could write out as a bunch of one line bullet points, which I could use as the basis for jazz drawing a comic page per day. I mean I could do that, but won’t. (I mean, I have written out the first nine bullet points, which are the first nine pages).

I’d like to have a finished book at the end of one month, but it’s more likely, if it were to happen, that it’d be a book after two months, because around 50-60 pages feels better as a read at that size.

But I’m not doing it.

No matter how tempted.

(Oh god, I might do it)

I told Thomas(13) the plot and he very succinctly put me in my place again by saying “yes, but are you going to do it?” the last time he did that to me I ended up pitching, writing and selling a story to 2000ad.

So I dunno. I think I want to do this. Taking a week holiday this week (which means I’ll be working, but in a different location) and maybe will think about it a little more.

Shh! Tell no-one!

Work has been hectic, I’ve been keeping a proper log of my workload since August, and to be honest, I’m a little baffled I’ve done this much. Here’s October (so far)

15 pages of inks on WAR Thing.
11 Pages of Pencils and inks on an issue of Time Before Time (there’s another 13 to go, but will not do that til next month)
22 Pages of layouts (though, really pencils) for Soul Plumber 3 (which is running late)
2 Pages of inks on Soul Plumber (helping John out of a deadline hole, I may end up doing more of this this month)

Running ahead on TBT, running ahead on SP and running behind on WAR thing. So gotta spend this week catching up on war (which is a pain since I’ll be away for a week with just the ipad to work on and I’ve never successfully worked on the ipad aside from colouring stuff in Procreate).

No time to really dig in a make the art better either, you’ve just got to draw it, hope it meets a minimum standard and move on, taking all lessons you shoud’ve learned into the next thing. To be honest, I much prefer this to drawing a half a dozen pages in a month. I love being busy, and I love that they’re all radically different from each other. 

A bit of a green cover…

Here’s a recent character design for a thing.

Don’t be sharing this as it’s still secret!

So, things that have been announced and are coming:

Soul Plumber with John McCrea – I’m doing layouts for issue 3, after doing a couple of pages of pencils on issue 1, a bunch of layouts on issue 2 I’m doing ALL the layouts on issue 3. After that, who knows. Been a real pleasure to watch John take my sort of attempt at McCrea and polish them up to stunning diamonds of the most McCrea it can be. Honestly, even knowing the pages I’ve done it’s hard to spot them. OUT SOON!

(here’s an early mini review  “McCrea and Holden’s art is an Acquired Taste” is a fair point).

Roots – this is the four page terror tale I’ve written and drawn for 2000ad. Simon Bowland over on that there twitter tells me he’s just lettered it up, I’m taking that as a positive sign that it’ll see print sooner rather than later. It’s only four pages, but it’s MY four pages. Really excited to see the reaction to it, too. (Because I’m a fool whose learnt nothing from decades of working for 2000ad – the fanbase can react … harshly). I’ve nothing firm on this, but I’m actually hopeful it’ll come out this side of xmas.

Lion and the Eagle – Ok, cards on table, not been announced yet, it’s been taking up most of this year, it’s a four part 40 page per issue Garth Ennis war story about the Chindits. I think it’s some of the best work of my career. Coming from Aftershock. Not sure when – February? maybe an announcement. (That’ll be almost a year since I started the damn thing!)

And weirdly been asked to do storyboarding for THREE different tv shows this week, my hit rate for shows pitched vs shows that have been made is rubbish though, but it’s decent money for – usually – a day or two’s work. Apparently this is the norm, pitching season is beginning with the hope production can start in the summer.

Anyway, that’s what’s coming. I’m excited about Roots coming out, Soul Plumber is fun to do (even though all you’ll see of me in it is probably my name, but I’ll give you some nice before and after images here at some point) and Lion and the eagle will be a while. Making comics takes time, and weirdly for reasons unknown, they all seem to pop out at the one time.

Oh Shoot! Forgot: Monster FUN – out now, too, I think!

Decided to do an “Inktober” – though, since yer man who claimed inktober as his own that turned out to be a bit of a dick like many, I’m doing my own. Immediately regretted not doing an octopus themed sketch month where in I could call it “Octo-ber” and be all smug about the joke, and instead decided to do something like a classic monsters thing (trying to avoid anything copyright infringy) with a plan of putting a sketchbook together and making it available from amazon as a print on demand book.

(Why Amazon, well, I tried Lulu a few years ago and amazon is cheaper and easier and I think I’m using the monsterous machinary of amazon to my advantage since they can self publishing in every part of the world so a book I do in the UK if bought in the states is then self pubilshed in the states, thereby minimising postage – though I accept this is still an ethical roadmine and I’m a terrible person with horrible values)

I’ll update this once a week here, with some thoughts, on the process so far, rather than updating every day.

Day 1: Frankenstien (yes, it’s the monster) Traditional ink and brush – was advised that you can dilute black indian ink with alchohol (I used an alchohol hand wash) and actually, I think it might be better than water (or even distilled water). Worth a try anyway (my ink was horrible gungy, having spent most of a year unused in a not-quite-air-tight seal. I offered this online for sale, not even a sniff of interest. So that’s poop. I thought it’d be funny to wrap the octopus theme in to create an OCTO-ber MONSTER MASH-UP. But I admit, that joke wore thin on me by day 2.

Day 2: Dracula. Started a traditional picture with pen and ink, wasn’t sure where to put some tentacles, so rubbed out the inks with a view to appraising it, and goddamn it but I forget ink has to dry and smeared the black stuff everywhere. Sodding stupid thing. So back to the digital drawing board. The octopus in this is the Vampire Squid. But I may lay off that nonsense the joke is already a dead horse/octopus.

My prompts are as follows:

1

Frankenstien

2

Dracula

3

The Wolfman

4

The Mummy

5

Creature from the Black Lagoon

6

Invisible Man

7

Jeckyl and Hyde

8

Masked Slahser (freddie)

9

Godzilla

10

BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS

11

Them (giant ants)

12

The Blob

13

The Metaluna Mutant

14

The beast with five fingers

15

Gwangi

16

The Thing from ANother world

17

War of the worlds tripods

18

Aliens

19

Predators

20

Terminators

21

50 Foot Woman

22

Killer tomatos

23

Death Race 2000

24

It terror from beyond space

25

Fiends without a face

26

The abominable snowman

27

the fly

28

the creature that walks among us

29

the aligator people

30

the H man

31

The Return (of your favourite monster)

I got to reinvent Major Jump – and so Jump, Jnr… Oddly came about because I was invited to come up with a design by the Editor (who suggested the starting point of Blade)who then asked who could write it, at the time I was doing the Monster Macs with John Reppion, so I thought this would be a fun thing for us to do (and get paid for!). The complete strip is two pages, so hopefully this doesn’t spoil it for you. I really enjoyed doing it, hopefully I’ll get to do more at some point…

For reasons unknown, schedules being weird and wot not this October sees not one BUT two things I’ve done come out, the first is Soul Plumber from DC Horror (this is one where I pencilled a few pages for John McCrea, you’ll never see the join though!)

And the other is the Monster Fun Halloween Special. To be honest, I did the art for that about a year ago, so had no idea when I’d see it, nice that it’s finally coming out (I also didn’t know it was going to be an ongoing title – hoping that was something that developed over the past year and if you want, you can probably read something about the health of rebellion’s comics in to that – a new comic launch in this climate? Amazing)

Here’s  John’s cover for Soul Plumber (it’s a grueseome, sweary comedy about a catholic kid obsessed with religion who accidentally builds a machine that can extract demons from the possessed. At least that’s what I think is going on)

Me and John Reppion (and Len O’Grady) revamped an old character into a new character for this, hopefully if it goes down well, we’ll get to do more.

I wish I knew it was going to be an ongoing, because I pitched an idea to John for Leopard from Lime Street story (we kicked it around when he was visiting around xmas) that we would have loved to have done for it. Who knows, maybe if it keeps going for long enough we’ll get to do it…

But I don’t think I can do anything with patreon that feels worthwhile doing, so I’ve paused the next payment cycle with the intent of unpublishing my creator page in the next month or two. Thanks for anyone who stick with it. 

I’ll go back to blogging on my blog (www.pauljholden.com) or tweets. So no advanced peeks (but I was always a little wary of doing that any way, it didn’t feel right…)