Tag: writing

The New Normal

My wife is starting a new job today, moving from part time to full time employment. And, for at least the first six months, will be in an office for five days of the week. This is the first significant change in how things are around here since the birth of our now 21 year old son. (these younger than the blog! Holy crap!)

What this means is I’ve a chance to block out a brand new daily routine, with scope to do some of the slightly barmier things I might want to do, like micro podcasts. I’ve been obsessed with making things for a long long time. And I’ve always wanted to do more media things, but there’s always someone in the house (couple of years ago I bought my dads house and went from a roomy flat – albeit one that shrank over the years – to a small house which came pre shrunk. Moving my studio to a much smaller space)

I’ve a new microphone and a patreon, and I’m not afraid to use it.

right now, I need to get back to the “Two things per day” system. Two pages of pencils or two pages of inks. I’ve slowed way down on that front, unsure why. But sure of the results: slight financial disaster. I only get paid when I work.

Yesterday on bluesky

(a new feature where in I highlight whatever the previous nonsense in Bluesky was)

one of those “show me a thing that describes a personal thing about you so I can reverse engineer it to figure out your date of birth and PIN number” started… somewhere… this one was

“Show me a comic you loved when you were 13, that’s all I need to know about you” – Brad Meltzer

And, look I knew it would be 2000ad, so I just googled 2000ad for the year and … ok. This wasn’t the first one to turn up… but I mean…

an absolute stunner of a cover, and a back issue of 2000ad that is just overflowing with classic stuff.

The Starborn Thing, Dredd meets alien/The Thing. Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. Classic.

Fort Neuro. Rogue Trooper Stumbles in to Fort Neuro where madness has taken hold. Stone cold classic by Brett Ewins and Gerry Finlay-Day

Skizz – SKIZZ! Alan Moore, Jim Baikie – Boys from the Black Stuff meets ET. I mean!

Invasion of the Thrill Snatchers. Tharg has his detractors, but actually I always loved when there was a Tharg centric story – this one written by “Tharg” and drawn by Massimo Bellardinelli, so looks alien as all get out.

AND finally…

Chrono Cops – Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s delivering the greatest comedy time travel story to have ever or will ever exist.

I mean, what a thing for a 13 year old boy to read in one week, it’s really not much wonder my life turned out the way it did.

Somewhere I have this issue in the house. Buried, I’m sure under a million things, but it’s in there, it’s thrill circuits, gently thrumming and powering my brain even now.

As it happened, decades later, drawing a fun Dredd story about an alien wig monster trying to take over Mega City 1 I got to do a homage to this cover.

Literally the only piece of my work I’d consider hanging in my studio (if I can find it, because it too is buried somewhere…)

Brandon Peterson posted this over on bluesky

The story you’re carrying around in your head. The one with the twists you can’t wait to drop on the audience doesn’t exist. You gotta get it “down on paper” in some form. As soon as you do it begins to change, and you begin to react to it as you solidify choices. (This is a self criticism)

Man, I feel that.

It hit particularly yesterday because – on the drive up to my mother-in-laws (a good solid hour long drive) I was thinking about a new Terran Omega story, and how to start it and i found my hook in to the story, and having done this before where I’d conjure up a story but not write or draw it, I’m aware those ideas are just… gone.

Anyway that terran omega story has started as a note in my notes app. And let’s see how it grows.

And finally, Will McMillen posted this on bluesky… and frankly in this Pilots and Comic Artists are united…

An old advert. A jolly happy looking pilot Capt Peter Fletcher of British European Airways is quoted as saying “Piloting an aircraft all day I must have comfortable underwear”. It’s an advert for Pegus (London and Montreal) Activity (tm) Underwear (is his choice) from Good Men’s shops Everywhere.

Funky Pencil Monkey

Spent a couple of days in a bit of a funk. The world is just … ugh. My mood has been dark (which, all jokes aside, I partially put down to binging Walking Dead which finally got to Neagan, a character I despised so much on first contact, and the grim never ending awfulness of what the characters are going through that it genuinely has effected my mood, so I’ve put it away – no thanks, not watching that) have turned instead to the delights of Gone Fishing.

I’m in a fairly privileged position (in that I’m in a part of the world that is relatively stable, and safe) and so have decided I can’t watch the news at the moment either – things are too grim and it’s impacting how I think about stuff. I don’t remember when things felt this oppressive (plus the comic industry seems to be going through one of its cyclical crunches where there’s more published work than there are readers, and more talented comic book creators than there are jobs for them)

There’s a guy in fixing my gas (big bill I could do well without) and he’s working in my studio room. So I’ve decided to blow the cobwebs off a script idea I had a few years ago (oh god, just after me and Declan did “M” for Dynamite, in 2017) and start polishing it up with a view to drawing it myself as a commando digest sized comic.

Well, strictly speaking I’ll be drawing it A5, and printing either A5 or some reduction of same.

I wrote a fairly detailed treatment of it, and then I rewrote and rewrote it. It was a James Bond pitch originally, and I’ve turned it into “John Regent” a Bond like MI6 Secret Assassin.

Honestly it came about because in our book M, Bond’s boss – a former british soldier – returns to Belfast, and I thought “Oh, man… if James Bond came to Belfast … he could get stuck in an Orange Parade!” because Bond surrounded by a load of guys in Bowler hats marching to a band while he’s being hunted by OddJob is very very funny.

Of course, what often happens between inception and treatment/scripting is the original idea gets lost as you build your plot. So ultimately, that didn’t make it.

Anyway, I have a detailed treatment (no page numbers, just plot happenings) and 64 pages to do it in. So I’ve been trying to work out how long each section should be and man, 64 pages seems like a lot, but every page is only 1 – 2 panels. So you’re really cutting it up a lot. But that’s ok. Because the treatment basically breaks down into Prologue (it’s James Bond! gotta have the bond bit at the start!) Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 and Epilogue I’ve sort of picked arbitary points for these things to break down, that’s when you really start to feel it.

BUT – I’ve adapted tweets into comics, so taking this treatment and going, well, these words have fill 8 pages – beginning on a splash and ending on a splash, giving me roughly 12 panels to tell that part of the story isn’t impossible.

Plus, to be honest, I’m trying not to get bogged down on “what if this is rubbish?” so what. Then it’s rubbish. I don’t think it will be, I think it’ll be not-as-good-as-I-want-it-to-be, which has the same effect as “what if it’s rubbish?” and that effect is to stop you even trying.

So I’m ignoring that instinct and I’m going to write it in to pages, and then draw the damn thing as fast as is humanly possible. And then, if I get that far try and kickstart the beast (I won’t be after big numbers, just enough to get it printed)

But the kickstarter is a long way off, and honestly, I’m doing this because right now, my workload is very very light, and that’s not a terribly comfortable place to be for me. I’d rather have way too much work on.

Sent to kill the super hacker codenamed “White Rabbit” MI6 Assassin JOHN REGENT discovers that she is, in fact, an 11 year old non verbal autistic child. Mission aborted, REGENT and the girl are attacked. Betrayed, REGENT has to go on the run with the girl and her mother to find answers, and to discover just exactly how far down the rabbit hole this goes.

“White Rabbit”