PJ Holden's Blog – Comics, Drawing, Writing and more (or less)

Thursday 26 March 2026 Update

So, this week went a bit weird.

Wednesday I spent it all day doing storyboards, can’t really say for what, but it was fun to do. I find storyboarding weird. Firstly the drawing part is absolutely no challenge whatsoever, storyboarding (certainly what I’ve done of it) is a matter of sitting with the people who are gonna film it and just going through the script and sketching out what they’re after. I sort of consider the drawings to be an aide memoire to the work they’ve done working all of that out.

That kind of wiped out Wednesday – and it wasn’t helped by my having a mild IBS attack on tuesday night. I haven’t really caught up with pencilling yet.

I find if I don’t get back to the drawing board before 7-8 at night then I’m lost to it. I’ll end up putting roots down on the sofa and just staring blankly in to the void.

Still that allowed me the chance to start working on another story for Terran Omega.

After I’m done with the Ghosts of War, there’ll be a two part story called The Seed. And then, a much more ambitious (for me) three parter called “The Seven” which takes the root of seven samurai and spins a different story from it. Sometimes I just need to know where I can start with a story and then I can figure out what it would look like from there. Sometimes you do that and you end up so far from the original that really it’s hard to tell what the original seed for it was.

This year, I decided I’d put away the acting and improv for a bit, putting the old toys back in to their boxes, to focus on writing and drawing comics, but I accidentally signed up for an audition (a self tape) and so I did that today too. Forty recordings later I finally did one that I didn’t cock up and sent it. I suspect it’ll not go beyond that, but it was good fun to do. And I do still enjoy acting, so who knows. It does scractch a different part of your brain and actually it’s really nice to hang out with people doing something. Comics can be so isolating, and I’m occasionally a bit jealous of my wife who’s working with people (and even doing storyboards yesterday reminded me that I do like chatting to people when I work).

I wish I’d had a shared studio space in belfast at some point, but it never happened and it’s unlikely that it ever will.

Week Starting 23 March 2025

Last week’s plans:

Monday Dog tag layouts. DT pencils 1-3. Colours TO pg5
Tuesday DT pencils 4-7
Wednesday DT pencils 8-10
Thursday DT pencils 11-14
Friday DT pencils 15-18
Saturday TO Pencils 10-11 (double page spread) Inks 10-11
Sunday Catch up on anything I missed.

So: 20 pages of pencils (hahah probably not)

So what actually happened, well, I wrote off about two days due to er… new computer. Bought myself the Macbook Neo, so I could spend some time focusing on writing. No regrets (well, one, I wrestle with the fact I bought the £599 model and didn’t spend the extra £100 to get the £699 – which has a fingerprint sensor and double the storage – every day I think “well, it’s only a hundred quid” – but no, sod it, I bought the cheapest laptop because I wasn’t even sure I could properly justify it.

In the end, I pencilled 12 pages – DT pages 1-12. Some days I got three done, some days I got none done. I think I could have got close to 20 if I’d been more disciplined.

This week:

Monday – DT Pencils 13-14. TO Colours Page 6
Tuesday – DT pencils 15-16 (2 pages, got lunch meeting)
Wednesday DT pencils 17-19
Thursday DT pencils 20-22
Friday Catch up and scan on the DT Pencils
Saturday TO Pencils 10-11 (double page spread) Inks 10-11 (brought over from last week)
Sunday Catch up on anything I missed.

That plan calls for 14 pages of pencils, one page of colour and 2 pages of inks. Doable. More doable than last week.

Here’s how I justify three pages of pencils a day:

10-12 Pencil most of a page.
12:30-2 Finish it.
2-5 Pencil second page.
7-11 pencil third.

These are lose pencils, sometimes with notional backgrounds. But I’ll work those out later.

I will also be spending this week refining the second Terran Omega story. I’ve written it, I just need to print out and spend a day or so just going over it with a red pen.

Saw some sunshine last week, and I’m excited for summer to start and I get outside and sit in the garden and do some work. I’ve detached myself from digital drawing enough that actually I can bring a drawing table down to the garden and do pencilling (and maybe inking)

20 solid ideas for writing Future Shocks.

I’m going through my notes on my computer, just culling and tidying and stumbling across ideas.

I wrote this out for a workshop some time ago, 2017 to be precise. At that point I’d written ZERO futureshocks (later on I’d write on terror tale)

Anyway. You can take or leave these.

Comic creation workshop. 20 solid ideas for creating future shocks

Create lots of ideas.
Edit/merge/invert those ideas.
Tease out the story from the idea, does this lead logically to that?
Write, then find your theme.
Rewrite knowing what your theme is.
Twist once is good. Twist twice is clever. Wrong foot the audience when you know that’s what you want to happen
Avoid VR prison stories. avoid killing hitler. Avoid they were Adam and Eve.
If you can’t avoid them, subvert them. Invert them. Add to them. Mix them up.
No story idea is ever dead, just sent to the great recycling notebook in the pocket
The finished story should either confirm your theme or repudiate your theme. Is the story that greed is good? Does the end confirm that or flip it on its head?

Neo news is Good Neows.

So, look, I relented, and bought myself a Macbook Neo. This is, I think, my fourth macbook in my life I’ve bought. The first way back in 2006? – I think I bought for £900 at currys (iirc there was a sale on).

I’d been staunchly windows based for a long long time, and my pal had a macbook and I very much coveted it’s silver metal casing, and it’s instant on, and thought “yes please – save me from a pc with a case that was constantly open because maybe the next tv adaptor card will be the final one ” ( I never did find a final tv adaptor card and in the end streaming made it irrelevant)

As I walked out of Currys with my first apple bit of hardware, a thought occurred that I was the first point of advice for a LOT of people (it was my day job at the time, people paid for my opinion!) and I figured if I was ready to move to mac, then a LOT of other people were too – and that’s when I decided to buy apple shares.

Unfortunately I had no idea how to buy apple shares, so that idea fizzled. Which is a shame because a year later apple introduced the iphone and and the rest yadda yadda.

Over the years I’ve bought macbooks and imacs and mac mini. The last computer purchased was a mac mini. I like the macs, I’m fully in the eco system and every time I try out a PC (in fact, about three computers ago I went to PCs because I couldn’t find a mac at the price point/spec I wanted) I deeply deeply regret it.

My priorites over that time have converged on a couple of points, primarily:

1 ) Silence. I want a dead silent computer. Not a fan of a fan. Just give me the gentle pitter patter of tiny fingers hitting a keyboard and whatever ambient sound is in the quiet room am in and I’m happy.

2) A good screen. Oh lordy, I can’t believe we lived in a world with a maximum screen resolution of 72dpi – no more of that, thank you…

3) UHM… that might be it.

I think I’m flexible on every other requirement. Maybe I’ll add good insurance is now my standard on this stuff. Apple’s on going apple care is a pain but it means any equipment I have will keep working until I decide I’m done with it,

So here’s some early thoughts on it:

Initially I was concerned about lack of back light keyboard. Honestly my eyesight is not what it was, and I like the reassurance of being able to see letters in high contrast. The macbooks neos in every colour except silver have quite a low contrast on the keyboards – the letters printed in dark grey and the keys are a tinted white (to match the colour of the laptop). So I went with the silver. But, a thing my wife reminded me of – I can touch type. I just don’t because… well, for stupid reasons (I’m an artist!) my keyboard is sat away to the left of my huion graphics tablet so if I’m ever typing it’s me turned at an awkward angle and trying to find the keys.

So having sat and typed up some stuff on this keyboard, it turns out I don’t even glance at the keyboard, and maybe a lit one would be a little distracting.

I went for the 256Gb hard drive. Sure an extra £100 woulda doubled the memory, but the price escalator must be avoided (sure another hundred for that and another hundred for this and pretty soon you’re staring down the barrel of a £1400 laptop and you’re thinking “what am I doing?”)

I wanted the cheapest one I could go for. The plan this is to attack writing, and this is the weapon with which I will attack it and so, for that purpose 256Gb is oodles.

The 8Gb of ram (standard on the macbook neo) doesn’t bother me at all. I had an 8Gb M1 mac mini and it was fine – and this thing (the neo) is supposed to be faster than the M1 (which wasn’t slow for my purposes at all).

Look, computer speed is a funny thing, most people think faster is better – and it is, but the lived reality is – for the most part – the computer is waiting on YOU doing something. Sure if you’re rendering video, or compiling code, then you’re waiting on it, but if you’re typing a document or drawing something in clip studio – it’s mostly just waiting on you.

The limiting factor of a dual USB might be a bit annoying – god knows, on my M4 mac mini the four usb-c ports drive me nuts, it’s just not enough for a desktop. So I’m dongled up the wazoo on it. But actually having two usb-c ports just helps me restrict what this thing is for (I mean I genuinely contemplated deleting the mail.app off the laptop, thinking NO – this is for writing, not for email correspondence. But then I came to my sense)

(by the way everything here is being typed on the neo – turns out my touch typing speed is actually pretty damn good on this thing)

Still, what if I did want to do a bit more with it… what could I do?

Well, I stuck my huion 16″ drawing tablet in to the usb-c 3 port, and it worked great! downloaded affinity and clip studio, and both run well enough for my purposes that it means this machine will comfortably pull double duties as a back up computer in case the m4 mini karks it.

You can use either port to charge the macbook, so you use the usb-c 3 (the rearmost one) to plug in the huion and the foremost one to charge.

Does mean you’re not plugging anything else in to it though, but that’s ok.

(I might eventually buy a bluetooth mouse as I quite like a mouse but don’t want a dongle, the apple magic mouse is just … it’s weird. C’mon, it’s weird)

Anyway needless to say didn’t get much work done today. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Working out the week

So last week looked like this:

Monday – ~~2 pages of inks~~ / ~~one page of colours~~ (F part 2 pages ~~5&6~~, colours T ~~02.04~~)
Tuesday – Inks 3 pages (F ~~7,8,9~~)
Wednesday – Inks 2 pages (~~F10, T 02.05~~)
Thursday – Layout day. D ep 5, and C ep 1
Friday – Pencils D 1-3
Saturday – Inks T ~~02.06,~~ ~~02.07~~
Sunday – catch up on anything I’ve missed.

How’d I do? Well, first I’ve already forgotten what all the bloody code letters were so that’s a rough start. Secondly I think I did everything, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what “D” was and I did none of that… so uhm… NO WAIT! I do remember what D was, and I’m doing that today (dogtag, it’s dog tag). Layouts for episode 5 (episodes 1-4 are all finished as are all the covers).

So, last week I didn’t get three pages of pencils done. Actually that’s not terrible. And I did get 9 pages of inks done and 1 page of colours. So, this week… and the work didn’t quite happen the way I thought it might (all plans go to pot when they meet the real world)

So: 20 pages of pencils (hahah probably not)

I think I’m too optimistic in how much pencilling I can do, Friday meeting a pal for lunch, and Saturday is always chaos. But we’ll see.

Blogging will resume as an every other day just as purely catch up.

BTW Here’s how I find images to go with my blog posts, I search in my vast photo album for a word and what turns up is what I use. I sued the word “Chaos” which turned up this handsome Dave Gibbon’s Mekon picture that I think I must have taken of an old 2000ad annual (you can practically smell the paper of the photo)

This also turned up this – me answering a question about using frames in clip studio, this is still useful information…

Terran OMEGAZINE

HIs, this month the Judge Dredd Megazine has an exciting interview with yours truly, as well as the start of the new Fargo and McBain strip I’m drawing and A PREVIEW OF THE FIRST FIVE PAGES OF TERRAN OMEGA!

Sadly, I’ve had to tell a few people – no it’s not running in the megazine, it’s simply a preview of the strip. But I suppose since it’s all in colour over there I could show the first five pages in full colour here as well.

Elsewhere in 2000ad, Judge Dredd continues to rip peoples faces off on a Weather Satellite in CLIMATE CRISIS!

And that’s a quick update!

The Play’s the Thing

I’m afraid blogging is going to be a little less consistent for the next while, big news to come, but if I was busy before, now I’m insanely busy. And it’s all my own doing. Less cryptic updates to come.

Two days ago, Gail Simone (whose origin story is writing funny columns for ComicBookResources, back in the glory days of the web, when advertising wasn’t as all consuming and creative people were often paid to write) posted this on blusky:

Say a thought about comics. Here’s mine. In superhero dialog, verisimilitude is better than realism.

(Now, I am on shaky ground when it comes to big words, but verisimilitude is one of my favs and it means something that feels true or gives the appearance of being true – though more often applied to art than say the news – where Stephen Colbery coined the similair in meaning if not application “truthiness”)

I replied to this, wuith something that’s been on my mind for a long long time, with regards to comics and it was this:

Comics took too much from tv and film and not enough from theatre and opera.

So, that’s maybe not as obvious a thought as I thought and when asked to explain, I came up with this, which i will expand on a bit (I’ve also corrected for typos and meaning)

Quite a lot of the language of comics is lifted wholesale from film and tv (pan, frame, Dutch angle [when a panel is tilted], Birds Eye view, worms eye, POV etc) that language has then informed the kind of ways stories are told. But there’s a whole bunch of theatrical tricks (and things from opera)

That are not just “as helpful” but possibly more so. Theatre relies on the imagination of the viewer more than film or tv does and so actually can be more like comics. Theatre actors on stage will often cheat the angle so they face the audience and each other to deliver dialogues

A thing tv does by cutting between people’s heads, but the [Theatrical staging is] a technique we can use in comics too-to have characters talk to each other both facing the reader. Also theatre uses lighting in often more dramatic ways than film or tv (which esp now has become sort of hamstrung by digital colouring

Which has forced lighting to be flat while filming so they can add drama after the fact, but that stops really dramatic lighting from coming to the fore ) also opera gives us melodrama -over the top, big! Kirby has more in common with opera than most films. (Id argue)

So oddly, one way I think I can explain this is by citing examples of films that USE theatrical staging as much as film staging. Orsen Well’s Citizen Kane, was heavily influenced by Well’s theatre experience.

Here’s a great example, two characters talking. BOTH facing the audience. film/tv now would do an establishing shot then you’d have “noddies” (a shot of the back of someone’s head while the other person talks, so called because – certainly in tv news – the back of the head is often nodding along, to indicate they’re listening – though guess what! IN tv interviews, they usually have only one camera so they often film the questions and responses seperatly! it’s all fake!)

Here’s another. Three characters all largely turned towards us (ok, one is a side profile) all talking. AND look at the framing of the boy playing. This is a very deliberatly crafted bit of theatrical staging.

Here’s Nosferatu, right at the beginning of film, when they were still playing it as theatre…

Now, look at this, shadow of the Count Orlak, and the shadow of the Bannister and a door. This has more in common with theatre and comics than it does with film (well, at least until you get to the amazing Francis Ford Coppola/Bram Stoker’s Dracula)

Here again, a very much more symbolic background than real – the lighting from the window and a full frame figure. Haunched over the table. Visual story telling. In theatre and opera figures have to be BIG over the top aklmost in order to be seen at the back of the theatre. In comics, you want someone to know this is a lowly menial figure from a single drawing. We’re pulling the same trick. Film and TV, can DO that but tends to not do that. It’s reaching for realisim so often over verisimilitude.

(Actually, How to Get to Heaven for Belfast might be worth a watch as something that does this too)

Another favourite of mine, which feels like it was thought of as much in theatre as film/tv is the Ipcress Files. (I’ve stolen these from https://thecinemaarchives.com/2020/11/19/the-ipcress-file-1965-furie/)

I’d also say a few years ago Garth Ennis and I were talking about the Judge Dredd’s of our youth, and it’s my contention that those Dredd and what made them magnificent was the pracitcally operatic nature of the stories and the characters. Dredd standing firm in front of insane looking bad guys and making mad proclamations…

And I leave you with this, if this isn’t opera then I don’t know what is….

Ian Gibson double page spread eyeless In hell.

Mid week check in…

Well Tuesday didn’t go according to plan at all. I started behind and sort of stayed there. I half inked two pages (so maybe one complete page) and now this morning, I’m staring at two half inked pages that I have to finish before I can even start today’s work.

On the plus side I did put addresses on the envelopes for people who’ve bought print copies of Terran Omega, so should get those signed and stuffed in to envelopes tonight for posting first thing tomorrow.

Kept thinking yesterday that UI had nothing to blog about and then I’d think of something but be far away from the keyboard and so nothing got recorded.

Run for the Hills

Went for a run yesterday. Currently at week 3 day 3 of coach to 5k. I’ve clocked Cto5k a couple of times now, getting to the end and finding myself pushed right back to the start. (Or at least the near start).

Doesn’t matter. The important fact is I’m out every couple of days for a run.

The unbearable trauma of memory

Is it weird to be haunted by embarrassing memories of your youth? and if that youth happened in your thirties? (and sometimes forties?) you feel like by your 30s you should no longer be saying stuff that is immature and stupid but then you think back and realise oh god, what was I thinking.

Maybe this is the perpetual shame of humanity. The original sin, isn’t Adam and Eve eating the apple, but some deep part of us that feels shame at every moment and holds on to it for all time. It’ll be gone in 10,000 years. No one will care, but at the same time your brain goes “what a dick head”

Slop out

Been thinking a lot about AI/art. Separating art from artist, etc. I’m sure it’ll surprise no one to know that I’m pretty much anti generative Ai for art. But I admit to some grey line thinking. Like the recent Corridor Crew video where they trained an ai to pick out people from green screens, making that part of the process easier. Was that trained on data stolen from books/art? no. They generated their own very specific data to train it on. Will it remove a job from someone? I mean maybe, I guess, the low level tech guy cutting green screen away from people? But actually as far as I can tell that simply stops that same tech guy from doing something interesting.

So, there’s definitely areas where machine learning (let’s use that less loaded term) is useful. I know I’ve said in the past, train a machine on flatting colours and make that a feature in clip studio – though as others have pointed out that actually is often the first paid work of many colourists, flatting is a low pay job, and it’s a grind, but it’s often the way in to a career as a colour artist in comics.

I know, when it comes to generative AI, I feel somehow cheated if I read or see something that’s “good” and it’s been ai generated. Let’s pretend that the gAi stuff is actually indistinguishable from an artist (I don’t think we’ll ever reach that point, but certainly for the sake of argument). Well, I don’t think that feeling of being cheated will ever go away. I think it’s like your an archeologist and you find something – some piece of art or literature – and it’s 40,000 years old. Well, the excitment isn’t in the quality of the finished work (though that is often the case) the excitement is in the fact that a human being produced this thing, these marks, this texture, these series of scratches that have intent.

If you were an archeologist 4000 years from now and you stumble across a piece of Ai art, no matter how good, what’s your reaction going to be? Pretty sure it’ll be dismissed as just another example of the slop of the period.

Anyway, that’s my brain emptied. You may continue your day.

Planning the Week

(Image is a photo of the magazine PREDICTION, taken in 2010. I knew I’d need it eventually)

I find myself somewhat irritated by the use of the phrase “Project xxx” for things people can’t talk about. I don’t know why. And it’s absolutely a me problem rather than a them problem. Maybe it’s has an air of grandeur that I don’t think I can muster, maybe I’m just annoyed I can’t do it without feeling stupid. At any rate, I have projects I can’t talk about really, so instead I’m going to try and use first letter initials.

Things to do this week:

Monday – 2 pages of inks / one page of colours (F part 2 pages 5&6, colours T 02.04)
Tuesday – Inks 3 pages (F 7,8,9)
Wednesday – Inks 2 pages (F10, T 02.05)
Thursday – Layout day. D ep 5, and C ep 1
Friday – Pencils D 1-3
Saturday – Inks T 02.06, 02.07
Sunday – catch up on anything I’ve missed.

I suspect I’ll have to revisit this all tomorrow and see where we are.

(God using letters for project names is also really annoying. Ugh)

Yesterday In Social Media

Discovered this blog post that, well, largely reaffirms lots of things I’m already thinking

https://dsell.me/how-to-stop-jumping-ship/

Almost all of us have been on the internet long enough to have had one of our essential community hubs go flying off into oncoming traffic. MySpace, G+, Discord (world weary sigh)? Facebook and Shitter’s decent into I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream? Dead and dying, the lot of them, and they take what little community they generated down with them every bloody time. I’m tired of wasting energy on rebuilding community ties over and over again, it’s not an especially good use of our time and it means that those of us who are most comfortable with, or benefit the most from, a fractured, chaotic wider community benefit and rise to the top. Behold, the world.

One surprise, IRC is still a thing?

Walking it off

(photo Helen’s Bay a few summers ago, went to pick my son up from a beach party – was amused at just how many beach parties there seemed to be)

Went for a walk this morning to Helen’s Bay. It’s a little beach a few miles outside of Belfast, and a short drive from my house.

Helen’s bay is the beach where students would traditionally go off on a summer’s night and do those jaws-like beach parties. But because it’s Northern Ireland it’s always sodding freezing.

But you can see on the ground the burnt tarmac of make shift fires.

This morning it was hundreds of little dogs out with their owners, and then the odd big dog.

I went to one beach party in Helen’s Bay. I hesitate to say I was more mature than most, but when everyone was going wild at uni I was working a day job so the wild side never really had a time to develop. I went with my mate Karl, and at one point a bunch of his mates thought it would be hilarious to throw me in the water. What they hadn’t accounted for is short people have low centres of gravity and so I hunkered down and was pretty much unshiftable. Or at least hard enough to shift they eventually gave up.

On the drive back, I was pretty annoyed and one of them complained about something and I cut him so deeply with a comment (too rude to repeat here) that, I later found out, that particular naval cadet was scared of encountering me again. I thought I was, like earth, mostly harmless.

Weird the stuff that sticks.

Yesterday In Social Media

Ah no time to add much, except to say go and listen to me’ learned collegue Paul Cornell’s adaptation of Iain M Banks excellent short “The State of the Art”. I love Banks while you can (30 days on the bbc iplayer)