PJ Holden's Blog

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…)

You might remember a strip I did a little while back called “One small step” about an astronaut left alone on the moon, nice short little horror. Anyway, I’ve never been happy with the name, which ordinarily would be ok – the title was both a homage too Neil Armstrongs “One Small Step” – and the idea in my head that the astronaut of the story took one small step backwards and fell down a massive hole.

Anyway, this strip was spotted by a guy called Krishna – who makes short films and he asked if he could take this strip and turn it into a short. Krishna is a professional filmmaker, albiet for corporate videos (with I think the odd music video) so he has assembled a team and they’re making it. Step one is gonna be a kickstarter (with a fairly modest and achievable target, I think). But in our first chat I told Krishna I wasn’t terribly happy with the title, but hadn’t needed to worry about it up til this point. Then, about a week ago it just occurred to me (and it’s so bloody obvious I’m annoyed it took that long).

It’s called ALONE. I’ve suggested to Krishna the name come up exactly like ALIEN does in Ridley Scott’s film (of er.. the same name) might happen, might not.

I also sent him this, a rough of what a movie poster would look like – though I’ve just realised this is the Gravity poster. Flip sake. Oh well, here’s the rough…

Webtooning out.

DC have recently launched a new Webtoons only comic strip (for those that don’t know webtoons is a ‘platform’ – which hosts comics, the comics are formatted as massively long vertical strips designed to be read on a phone (essentially Scott McCloud’s “infinite canvas” idea finally made real, and really popular). And as such it’s really the perfect format for comics on the phone. It’s odd that long horizontal strips never took off, but here we are. Webtoons boasts readerships in the hundreds of millions – an utterly headscratching figure.

Webtoons originated (so wikipedia tells me) in South Korea. So, of course, they tend to favour anime/manga style art and stories.

Marvel Unlimited -Marvel’s app and platform that lets you subscribe and read a massive amount of marvel comics – has realunched and has included marvels new “Marvel Infinitity” line – basically the webtoons format (Marvel’s infinity line is not to be confused with Marvel’s Infinite comics which where another internet only format that used the form really really well but we’re rather burdensome to produce   ) 

As it happens I quite like the Marvel Infinity comics, probably because stylistically they’re much more in line with the western art styles (plus I have pals who’ve drawn some). 

Some of it makes more use of the format than other and it’s interesting seeing the different approaches as people learn this new format. 

So, I thought I’d try my hand – purely as a way to test what the story telling can/can’t do and what I can/can’t do. The results (typo’s, crappy art, et all) is here it doesn’t look good on a big screen at all, optimised for phone really.

And I thought, well, if there’s an audience and money maybe I should think about doing something more than an experiment, so I went to my balcony and kicked around an idea and then wrote a script. It’s a fun little thing, I think. 

But I’m torn.

On the one hand, new platform, new audience. On the other hand – well, I’m gonna be a tiny dribble in that big ocean and before you can make any money on the webtoons platform you need to hit massive, massive numbers of readers (a doable figure if you invest a consequential amount of time and energy in to it)

And I just wanted to dip in, and dip out. So now I don’t know. I don’t know if this fun little strip should be a webtoon or should be just a traditional comic (though if it’s a traditional comic I’m not even sure what I’ll do with it, it’s too light and frothy for a 2000ad pitch and I’m not even sure where I’d pitch it to outside of that, short form scifi? who knows.)

 Anyway. decision making is hard.

The Sarge for an upcoming 2000ad/Battle special, all written by Garth. I drew an 8 page Sarge strip (ages ago now… in fact so long ago I forget how many pages it is… any was a lot of fun to do a short wwii story…)

When John McCrea (one of me best mates, and who’ve known since I was 18) asked if I wanted to help him finish up Yondu – he needed someone to read a few pages of the script and do some breakdowns. I leapt at it – well, you would!

Neither of us were sure how we’d jell, but it turns out when John draws over me you can see almost nothing of my art! It’s amazing. I mean, I know I did it – and if you do a side by side compare you can see I contributed … something… but honestly it’s just John’s work that shines through. (Granted I was do rough breakdowns so John had a LOT of leeway!)

Anyway, here’s a page of that!

Just between us…

Sold my first script to 2000ad. I’m not gonna say any more than that (who knows when it’ll see print!) when it does see print, you’ll be able to find the draft scripts here for you to peruse and read along with.

Now, I’m in danger of going SOLD A SCRIPT! WOO! and then never doing any more, but I’ve already done page breakdowns on two other solid stories (I think they’re solid – I think they’re SOLID – not sold, that’s a bit presumptuous…) and have a third I think has a shot at 2000ad (as well as about 9 other ideas that are sort of waiting to be developed up, all have something)

But, you know. I gots to draw some comics too…

More men in hats in planes in the jungle with mules. This book will kill me. This is from an upcoming unannounced book, so please keep it under your jungle hat.