The other day I had a quick idea for the Thing Anthology, a very short story featuring a supporting character from Island of Terror. This supporting character, in fact:

Subsequently we've decide do something different, but here, for your delectation, is the complete 4-panel script:

COCKPIT KARL: LUFTWAFFE FLYING ACE & NATURIST
By Chris Denton

This a 1-page A5 strip intended for the Web & Mini Comix Thing Anthology.

1) We’re in the skies where a dogfight between two fighters is taking place. A Spitfire is swooping down on a Messerschmitt bf-109, firing its machine guns which impact into the German plane.

CAPTION: FAR ABOVE GERMANY, 1942.

CAPTION: OUR HERO IS SURPRISED BY A SPITFIRE…

FX: BRACKA BRACKA BRACKA

2) W see in the cockpit of the German plane, which is being enveloped in smoke. KARL, in full pilots uniform, is undoing his seatbelt. The glass of the windscreen is riddled with bulletholes.

KARL: MEIN GOTT! TIME TO ABANDON SHIP!

3) Karl is floating down to Earth by parachute, still in full airman uniform.

KARL: THAT VAS A CLOSE SHAVE!

4) The edge of a German airfield. Karl is literally just landing, his clothes now vanished except his underpants but his parachute harness is still attached exactly as before.

FREIDRICH, Karl’s immediate superior is standing a few feet away, waving his fist angrily.

FRIEDRICH: NAKED AGAIN, KARL? YOU’RE A DISGRACE TO THE REICH!

CAPTION: AFTER ANOTHER COURT MARTIAL, KARL RETURNS IN ISLAND OF TERROR…

So, first the update on my Island of Terror progress, I have finished the pencilling on all 24 pages of the strip and have begun the inking. It seems sensible to show a frame here and an appropriate frame it is too, all 8 of the Walking Wounded landing on Bundy Island on the first page of the story.

Going back to my roots, the first comics I picked that had any real affect on me were 2000ad and Eagle way back in the 80s. this was pretty much when I realised that I wanted to be a comic artist, I had pretty much wanted to be an artist since I was born but this is when comics became my thing in a big way. Strontium Dog and Rogue Trouper from 2000ad and Dan dare from Eagle had me drawing my own versions of the Future heroes. Cam Kennedy, Carlos Esquerra and Carlos Cruz were my first real influences and Esquerra the first artist I tried to ‘draw like’.

Both Esquerra and Cruz are Spanish artist like many of the illustrators working in 2000ad and commando at the time. it’s probably one of the things that has helped me keep my European sensibilities instead of becoming the poor mans Rob Liefield (I’m not just insulting him for no reason he represents everything I hate about comic art).

With Carlos Esquerra I remember trying to perfect Johnny Alpha’s nose and his distinctive gun shot style as well as the broken black line he used in his black and white days to separate his figurers from the background. Carlos Cruz was probably the first time I actually tried to learn how to draw people and shade all from one artist. Pretty much after that I changed artist every few months and became a hopeless copycat.

It wasn’t really until Simon Bisley that I (foolishly) thought that copying a style might actually get me somewhere, before that it was just a way of learning how to draw. For years I was convinced that there was some trick to it, if I could learn the tricks I could draw a comic. If you find the trick to drawing computer screens then you can draw computer screens and the same applied to cloth cars faces legs trees, everything and then find my own style later. How was I to know you can find all this stuff in the real world to learn from?

Learning from other peoples work gave me some tools to draw with like cross hatching and methods of shading, but also put up massive barriers that still plague my work today. The biggest single flaw I had was flat drawings. When you learn from 2d your work is 2d and relentlessly flat, cripplingly flat. It’s only really now after years based in the real world I’m starting to understand how to look and see the shapes in 3d.

Now here is the list I promised. A list of 50 artist that have influenced my work, many of whom I tried to copy. This isn’t every artist just 50 of them. The really important ones I will go over in more detail in the coming blogs.

Carlos Esquerra
Carlos Cruz
Cam Kennedy
Brian Boland
Kevin Maguire
Bret Blevins
Dave Gibbons
Geoff Senior
Bryan Hitch
Steve Dillon
Glenn Fabry
Simon Bisley
Colin MacNeil
Simon Harrison
Frank Miller
Chris Foss
Kev Walker
Andy Kubert
Jim lee
Todd McFarlane
Chris western
Luis Royo
Alfonso Azpiri
Richard Corben
Kevin Eastman
Klaus Janson
John Higgins
John Bolton
A C Farley
Brendan Mccarthy
Brett Ewins
Mike Mcmahon
Simon Coleby
Arthur Rackham
Ted Mckeever
Simon Davis
Dave Mckean
Frank Quitely
Steve Yeowell
James O'barr
Riot
Simon Fraser
Katsuhiro Otomo
Dean Ormston
Mike Mignola
Sean Phillips
Paul Marshall
Joe Colquhoun
Kevin O’Neill
Arthur Ranson

One of the best things to happen to the British comics scene in quite a while was the advent of the new Small Press section in Judge Dredd Megazine. Although there was some controversy at the start, mostly due to the fact that the creators featured are not paid for their work to appear, the slot has proved to be pretty successful.

My favourite strips so far are the sublime mime Mr Amperduke by Irish comics pioneer Bob Byrne and the sleek, polished fun of Monsters from animator/writer/artist Ian Culbard. Each a gem.

Naturally we tried our hand at submitting for the gig, but perhaps not quite as naturally, our offer was accepted! A 6-page tale featuring our Edwardian Paranormal Investigators, Holt Bros, with, as you may expect, script by myself and art from Steve. No idea when it's going to be published, but it's pretty exciting waiting for our turn to come around.

Messrs Byrne and Culbard have kindly put their Meg strips online and we'll follow suit after the story has seen print. I'm really keen for people to read it in the comic if at all possible though and that's why I've shown the completed story to practically no one yet, not even my wife!

I figure that this may be my only work that ever appears in "2000AD" and I'm going to milk it for all its' worth...

In a fit of glorious self-confidence, we've just booked ourselves a stand at the UK Web and Mini Comix Thing. This will be our first convention as exhibitors and it's an exciting if more than slightly scary prospect.

The main cause of fear is that we've now got a deadline set in stone for the completion of Walking Wounded issue one. If it's not printed and back in my hands for March 17th 2007 then the Comix Thing is going to me very embarassing: Steve and I sitting behind an empy table, shrugging at anyone who notices us.

Still at least having a deadline focuses the mind!

Incidentally, I had to provide a MFB logo to the organisers for them to use in their publicity. Having nothing to hand I knocked this up in Fireworks:

Not bad, considering it's just the website logo merged with one of Steve's preparatory sketches!

Anyhow, the next concern is that there's an Anthology to go with the Thing and we'd really like to contribute to it. The schedule's a bit tight but hopefully we can do something in January, once the work on Walking Wounded is over...

This strip has made me look at my art and its progression, its saleability and my level of skill relative to my age. In short if I went to bed a bit earlier I would think less and probably get more work done.

Lets start off with a confession, I’m 30 years old and I have never sold a piece of comic art. Most artists have 10 years under there belt by my age, Sean Phillips had 15 years, Steve Dillon started very, very young too I believe. Ever since I picked up my first copies of 2000AD and Eagle in the early 80s I have wanted to be a comic artist and it’s not like I can’t draw. I have a degree in art and the odd times I have branched out I have met with bits of success. It’s not like I can’t draw comics, my craft and story telling is better then some very successful creators (Rob Liefield, you stand accused of being an embarrassment to comic art) I just have this foolish desire to be a decent competent and complete artist. For the last 5 years I have worked on my core drawing skills referencing only real life and classical art to improve my skills and gain my own identity. Finally I seem to be getting there, finally my technique seems to be falling into place.

Walking Wounded: The Resistance That Went Mad was really the last piece of work I did as an artist that had learnt how to draw from comics. (Although I did produce a 5 page Judge Dredd story that was influenced by Kev Walker and Mike Mignola it was just an influence on shading and not a massive style change.) So I started to make lists, list of artists that I have tried to emulate, lists of stories I have worked on and all kinds of other lists about the pit falls and follies I have fallen into.

That’s what the next few Blogs are going to be about, I know what you're thinking, some one writing a Blog about themselves? Honestly what ever next!

God knows why I found this so hard, after all it’s just a man with a gun. This is a war comic and so it’s bound to be full of men with guns, hell it’s a comic, men with guns are a staple of the medium so why on earth was it so bloody hard!

After days of frustration and rubbing out i thought i had lost it, no longer could I draw men with guns. what next, would i one day wake up and find I could no longer draw stupidly proportioned muscular men in tights? Would my skills at drawing ridiculously top heavy women also desert me?

I did eventually settle on a picture to use, although it’s still not quite right I think it’s passable and at least it gives me an excuse to move on… to more pictures of men with guns in much the same pose.

I guess I should be grateful, the worse case of this kind of artist block I had came when I was doing a four page Doctor Who fan strip. The perspective on his console had me stumped for about 2 months. Week after week of drawing the same thing, hitting the same problems day after day, forced me to completely reconstruct my understanding of drawing as a craft. It helped to move on my technique and in turn my art to a higher level. This man with a gun problem was less influential, more sort of annoying and thankfully now over. (I hope)

For the last few weeks or maybe months, it seems hard to tell, I have been working on the perspective drawings for the second half of island of terror. Once I finished I moved back to page 13 and started to fill in the pencilled art work only to find myself more then a bit rusty. The last few days have been a frustrating slog to try and get my form back. Much like an athlete or a horse artists have form and mine at the moment is anything but good. Bad form tends to manifest itself by drawing me into endless adjustments on a frame taking hours and hours, sometimes even days, until the paper has been worn though by the constant rubbing out and my head throbs like a pulsing star.

My way of dealing with this is once the frustration brakes and normal service is resumed I destroy all substandard art work by either gluing over the offending frames or burning the whole page so it can no longer taunt me with it’s amateurish glair. This time however I have decided to leave the substandard frames and present them here for comparison with the finished version I will no doubt be so proud of. Hopefully it will be an interesting insight into how I work and a bit more honest then only presenting the odd good piece I do.

I’m just finishing pencilling page 14 tonight so it’s moving on. The method I have been using for this strip means that the bulk of the work for all the frames has been done, pencilling is just finishing off the details.

Now the inking that’s going to be a trick, I’m doing it with brushes and I have never done that before. I’m looking forward to it but there is still plenty of pages to finish off first. Still here is a picture from part 2 I’ll put some more up for the second half when it’s done.

Steve has now pencilled the first twelve pages of Island of Terror, and pretty damn good they are too. Hopefully he'll be posting an example panel here very soon.

I've pretty much finished the Future Heroes script, save for some last minute tweaking we're gonna do. It's been much harder to write than Island, actually, mostly because the page count is so low but also because I set myself a rather tricky narrative challenge. Still, I reckon it'll come out okay...

At the moment I'm working on some updates to the Massacre website and trying to decide which script to tackle next...