Massacre For Boys

It's time to get that bugle out and play The Last Post because we're moving to a new home:

http://massacreforboys.blogspot.com/

It's been fun here on blog.co.uk but the time has come to join the crowd over on Blogger, and to stop looking at all these damn adverts that kind of ruin things round here.

See you on the other side!

You cannot argue with the proverb that necessity is the mother of invention. The offer of a full page of advertising space in Something Wicked came last weekend, with the proviso that it was needed within minutes. We had nothing appropriate to use but quick as a flasher, Steve knocked up:

Nothing like a deadline to hone those creative juices!

Whilst we're on the subject of war, my old uni comrade Danny Graydon tipped me off about the latest development in the bitter feud between DC and Alan Moore. It seems that Absolute Black Dossier is about the worst rip-off DC have ever managed to perpetuate. The Amazon.com reviews are hilarious.

Now I am sure that the fault is not all on one-side as Moore's artistic temperament does seem to lead him into conflict with pretty much every comics company going, but for DC to take their frustration out on his (and their) fans is disgraceful. Okay so if the Bearded Genius has denied them access to the normal absolute special features they can't publish them. However to put the book out anyway, and hike the price from the level set by the real Absolute editions of previous LXG volumes, only harms DC and their reputation.

Today's big news is that our Crusader strip is finished

This is the lead story in Massacre For Boys In Colour #1, written by me with art + letters by Bolt-01 and colours by Richmond Clements (making his Massacre debut).

I think it's utterly fantastic and, by the way of proof, let's take a look at the development of the first panel of page one, starting with Bolt's confident pencils:

He then added some equally accomplished inks:

Over to Richmond to make a first pass with the flat colours:

And finally, Richmond polishes off the colouring beautifully and then hands it back to Bolt-01 for some slick letters, and we're ready to go to press:

Cool, eh?

I quite literally cannot wait to get this into print. Stay tuned for release details...

Let’s for a moment think about the 1980’s. I read a lot of comics in the 80’s, more then I did in any other decade, but that’s understandable as I was the target age group for most publishers way back then. Amongst the usual suspects of 2000ad, the re-launched Eagle and a plethora of American superhero comics I also collected a wide range of Marvel UK titles, like Transformers, Actionforce, Thundercats and the re-packaged Punisher comics. So that’s the set up, I read a lot of comics and of the Marvel UK line one of them stands Head and shoulders above the rest ‘Dragons Claws’

Dragons Claws blew me away from the very first issue I was hooked and my collection of action figures were recast as Dragon and The Evil Dead. When the series hit the news agents in 1988 I was 12 and the perfect age before Playstation and endless TV channels sidelined comics it was also the perfect time. The comic came from the pens of transformers top creative team, writer Simon Furman and artist Geoff Senior, already a Marvel UK favourite of mine. Unlike many of the other comics of the late 80’s this tale of fare future heroics really has stood the test of time, probably because it’s themes are timeless.

Dragons Claws only ran for 10 glorious issues but what a 10 issues, bad guys became heroes and heroes were flawed. There is enough complexity to keep things interesting but it’s not so high brow as to alienate a young boy. Across the 10 issues the relationship between the 3 key characters changes dramatically and you realise that they are all aspects of the same person. Dragon, Slaughter-house and Deller are all men driven by duty or a need that can never be quenched. Dragon and Slaughter-house are flip sides of the same coin, the light and dark of the greatest players ‘the game’ ever knew and the parallel is played out though the directions that there lives have taken. Deller and Dragon are both worriers but born years apart, dragon is a middle aged man with a family were as Deller is a young super solder who sees himself as dragons natural successor. Simple enough right? Maybe, but it’s Dragons and Dellers interaction with his family that draw the parallels closer as well as Dellers maturing from a point and destroy no questions asked order following good little solder into a flawed hero with a shady past that could catch up to him at any moment.

Reading about it you may be saying to yourself ‘hang on that all sounds fairly familiar’ and, yeah, it dose but it’s done well and what’s more it’s done for kids without duming it down or being heavy handed. It’s heroics but it’s just that bit more grown up then you would expect and do you know what? I still love it and it still works for me every time I dig out my dog eared, battered old comics and read them again. They don’t make them like they used too… they don’t make them at all any more.

I don't read any awful lot of comics, but I have stuck with the Judge Dredd Megazine even though it's Small Press section was pushed aside for reprints of Bob The Galactic Bum, and is now still dormant whilst some godawful Tank Girl revival plummets to inevitable doom.

Apart from those turkeys it's generally a good read, and John Wagner Dredd is always worth the cover price. I'm becoming quite a fan of Al Ewing too, and his recent Tempest series was pretty cool.

Graphic novel-wise, as I write I am currently ploughing through:

I understand there's now a widespread belief that Future Shocks have had their day, but not if they're written this well they haven't. Not all of the stories are classics, yet many certainly could be described as such. The great man's trademark humour, innovation with the form and general sophistication are all present and correct.

I find it amazing (and a little chastening) that Moore was that good that early. I've also just finished Miracleman Book 2 and that's basically fantastic as well. Almost worth the small fortune it cost on eBay to buy the thing!

Incidentally, imho it's quite funny really that Miracleman is pretty much the same as Doc Manhattan, until Gaiman takes over for Book 4 and then he becomes The Sandman....

More disappointing was Hellboy - Darkness Calls. I'm usually a big fan but this collection makes sod all sense and Fegredo's Mignola impersonation is competent but no real compensation for not having the great man really doing the artwork. Ah well, I'm sure the next one will be better....

Publicising your own small press comic is both incredibly important and incredibly difficult. Much of the mainstream media is not particularly interested, and you end up relying on your work striking a chord with a particular editor or journalist.

Of course there are websites and magazines dedicated to the "indie" scene, but here you are again at the mercy of others, depending largely, it seems, on whether what you produce is their thing or not.

Still, fortunately there are some really good avenues for the likes of me opening up. I mentioned indiereview in a recent post and I'd like to add to that Comics Village. The Village is a site dedicated to all of comicdom, with stacks of news, reviews and interesting columns from various luminaries in the UK comics world.

One such column is Village Gossip, an interview strand that seems to find its subjects from all corners of the industry. Including Matt Smith (Tharg), Tony Lee, Rob Williams, Oli Smith and now...

Me.

Here's a sample Q & A:

Can you remember your first fan letter, either sent or received?

Yes, it was a mad rant I sent to Justice League Europe. Basically I had this idea the Americans were all Benny Hill obsessives and I riffed on that. They printed it too, so they must have found it charming, in a schoolboy xenophobe kind of way.

The pervasive tendrils of real life have once again closed around me, so Massacre work has had to take a temporary back seat.

There have been some exciting developments to report, though:

- The script for Walking Wounded #3 is finally finished. I struggled with the final third, but got there in the end (more or less). Steve and I then had a minor artistic disagreement over the important issue of whether talking monkeys are allowed, but it was amicably resolved so it's now over to him to produce the artwork....

- Bolt-01 sent over his pencils for the Crusader story he's illustrating for Massacre For Boys in Colour #1. Jolly fine they are too I won't post any clips here just yet, but please keep an eye on Bolt's own blog where lots of juicy Massacre titbits are wont to appear.

- We've now got our own page on IndieReview.

Normal service will be resumed shortly. Meanwhile Steve is beavering away on various other indie projects, some of which have been announced here and some of which have not. Hopefully I can persuade him to list everything he can talk about that he's doing in a future post...

I sometimes think it's interesting to see how a comic script translates into a comic strip. I put this together as a quick example of how the words get turned into pictures:

Now you see how little Steve has to work with I'm sure it gives you a new apprecation of his artistic talent

Looking back I see one significant change we made after the script was done (check out panel 4). I pretty much plan to re-use this idea in a more conventionally-formated and much longer Crusader strip, and I will be having our hero go after the drugs rather than the money this time. He'll have a really good reason, I promise you...

There's nothing like trawling the web for your own past sins. Here's a humour page that must be a decade old, but features art by Steve and words by Steve & Pete (the mysterious Denton Brother number 3):

As for me, I used to have it in for the BBC:

(That was Steve on ani-GIF duties.)

I went through a phase of being a Linux journalist. I even got paid and everything! Although I haven't really done any of this for a couple of years now, it's nice to see some of my old writing is still around, for example:

http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/pdfs/download.php?PDF=LXF66.rev_linspire.pdf

And someone somewhere is even using a quote from me to promote their book:

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596004101/

It can truly be said that cyberspace has made us all immortal....

As I am sure I don't need to tell you, a great way of killing time at your employer's expense is to browse Wikipedia.

However, this massive database of trivia is not all-encompassing, because Massacre for Boys is but a "page not found".

There is a link to Walking Wounded from the Eagles Awards page but so far no one has done anything with it so there's nothing to see at:

Walking Wounded on Wikipedia

Clearly modesty (also, house rules) forbids me from creating the page myself, but if anyone else would like do it I'd be more than delighted. If you do decide to do the sum total of human knowledge a favour and add some info here, why not make it more interesting by working in a song title or two into the text?

Oh and if you do ever get bored of surfing Wikipedia, I can heartily recommend Garbled Communications as a a great source of online entertainment. Massacre's friend Alex Finch has just revived this cult site after a two-year absence, and it's better than ever so you should probably click the link right now!