Because Walking Wounded is a pastiche of classic war comics it throws up a particularly thorny issue, which is just how jingoistic can/should the tone be?

Our first effort, The Resistance That Went Mad, sailed pretty close to the wind in this regard because I decided to make the French characters just as evil as the German ones. The showdown at Agincourt featuring the ghost of Henry the Fifth was also what some might describe as a blow to the entente cordial.

It was not meant seriously, but it would be possible to view the story as pretty xenophobic if taken the wrong way.

With Island of Terror I've had to be a lot more careful, partly because the comedy is not so broad, meaning a more realistic portrayal of the enemy is called for, but partly as well because this is a more sensitive time.

The new Walking Wounded comic will feature the British as unquestionably the good guys and the Nazis as extraordinarily bad, but there will be a bit more of a grounded approach to it.

There will be a clear difference between the term Nazi and the term German (or "Jerry" to use the traditional war comic form). All Nazis will be as bad as ever, but not all Germans will be Nazis. All the zombie Germans will be Nazis, though, because good guy zombies are rather thin on the ground.

There wont be much flag-waving in Island of Terror, but that doesn't mean it's going to be full of peacenik crap about Winston Churchill committing war crimes.

World War 2 gives an excellent opportunity to portray British soldiers as unambiguously heroic. Obviously if the stories were set in present day Iraq we'd have to do it a different way (Steve's solo project Another World is about as anti-jingoistic as you can get) but it's hard to look at the fight against Hitler as anything but a morally justifiable and necessary conflict.

The fight against Hitler's Nazi Zombies, even moreso.

Steve's roll call of comic artists that have influenced him is a long one, but when I try and compile my own list of comic writers that I have taken something from it's a rather different situation.

To be honest, there aren't many good comic writers around. It seems to be much more an artists medium, with the scripting duties often performed by hacks who do a job but whose talent for story-telling is modest to say the least.

So when I look at the writers who I really admire in this medium I find it pretty difficult to look beyond the big three: Miller, Moore and Gaiman.

Frank Miller is probably the ultimate writer-artist. The Dark Knight Returns is of course incredible but Batman: Year One is perhaps equally as impressive. The first few Sin City books are truly remarkable, presenting some brilliant slices of OTT pulp fiction (although it has to be said the quality-level does degenerate markedly in later installments).

I have to admire Miller because that kind of all round talent is indescribably rare. Only Mike Mignola comes close - I love Hellboy! - and there are some quite notable examples of great artists who can't write for toffee. Even if they did draw Watchmen.

Neil Gaiman is a totally different kettle of fish. A Brit who rode the wave of 2000AD talent-scouting (despite barely writing for 2000AD) and who struck it big over the Atlantic almost immediately with the phenomenally good Sandman series. One of the greatest comics ever, although like Sin City it's better at the start than the end.

Gaiman is arguably the biggest example of mainstream breakout from comics, with novels and screenplays now taking most of his time. When he's good he's transcendentally good (Stardust blew me away) but there are also some quite spectacular misses in his repertoire. For example, Neverwhere absolutely sucked, both on TV and then in novel form.

The true nadir of Gaiman's output has to be American Gods, a diabolical novel that illustrates just how little ability to portray America he has. Much as I love a lot of his work, IMHO Gaiman made a massive mistake in relocating to the States because it has removed him from his natural habitat and instead, as Gods shows, placed him in a culture that is pretty alien to his faerie-loving sensibility.

One man who certainly didn't make that error is my ultimate comics hero, Mr Alan Moore of Northampton. For me, Moore is the only fully-fledged genius that's ever worked in comics and he's so far above the competition (even Miller and Gaiman) that it's not really a contest.

Moore's output is consistently brilliant, even when he's working on useless characters for shite publishers. Of course, he's famously spikey and has managed to fall out with just about every big comics company going, not to mention the whole of the film industry and at least one former collaborator.

The problems Moore has had with the likes of DC, Marvel and Fleetway are usually born of his refusal to compromise and it seems to me that he's been pretty much in the right every time, albeit rather more hardline than most other creators would be.

I do feel the constant disputes harm his career, not just because he can't touch the golden jewels of comics such as Batman, Superman or Spiderman any more but also as they force him to work for tiny little publishers like Top Shelf who really cant handle such a big name in their modest stable. Witness the debacle over Lost Girls' much delayed release in the UK.

Naturally I am not even going to start comparing my own writing to Moore's. I do however think that for all his faults he has set the benchmark for what comic writing can achieve. It's up to everybody else to catch up...

In the early days of this blog I referenced Leonie O'Moore whilst having a bit of moan about BugPowder.

She noticed!

As we are posting the Doctor Who project, I thought for sake of completeness I would stick in the other pictures. As well as the fourth doctor strip (chosen as a personal favourite instead of as a sensible pitch) I also did a splash page of Rose and the 2 doctors and a small one page strip set in the new Tardis with the 2 new doctors. This was before the Christmas invasion so I only had a few production shots of David Tennant to go on. Still it’s not bad stuff so I thought I would give it a good stern posting.

This Time lord tomfoolery actually has another purpose. I spent literally months working on the perspective and sketching the actors to try and get some kind of likeness, I researched the Tardis and the costumes and re-drew everything time and time again. It was the first comic produced with the kind of attention to reality that I am using on the Walking Wounded.

Talking of the Walking Wounded and redrawing frames, as I have been, page 15 has the finished frame from my ‘I don’t know why I found this so hard’ post. Presented here is the inked but lettering free version of the complete page and that nicely sets up a future entry too:

Perhaps strangely for a story about WW2 Nazi Zombies running amok, Island of Terror is the most heavily researched comic we've ever done. Steve has done incredible amounts of preparation, including scouring reference books, interminable googling and making Airfix-style models of all the military hardware featured.

I have not been idle either. The concept for the comic dates back around ten years but it was always set on a tiny island I'd heard about in the Bristol Channel. When I finally came to write the story I did change the name to Bundy to give us a bit more freedom, but it should still be pretty obvious where exactly we mean the adventure to take place.

The island in question is called Lundy, a small outcrop of cliffs around ten miles off the north coast of Devon. Happenstance (well Holiday) brought me to North Devon in September 2005 and not wishing to miss this opportunity I managed to persuade Marianne (my wife) into getting up at the crack of dawn to catch a ferry to what is arguably the remotest place in England.

It was definitely worth the effort. Lundy is a beautiful location, owned and maintained by the National Trust as a nature reserve with a tiny human population and lots of wild moorland to explore.

I had written a detailed plan and the first six pages of the script by the time I set foot on Lundy and was pretty happy at how much I'd gotten right. For instance, the crashed German airplane was already in the script before I discovered it had really happenned.

One glaring problem was the idea that the people of Lundy/Bundy would retreat to their town hall when facing attack. Trouble was, the town hall didn't exist. In truth, I'd lifted this element from the 60s horror film Island of Terror - from which I'd obviously also borrowed the title - but it made no sense in the setting I'd chosen because the village is just too small.

Seeking authenticity, the town hall was replaced in the scripts by The Mad Isco tavern. The real-life Marisco tavern proving to be the social centre of island life, not to mention stockists of some really excellent Old Lundy ale!

During the day I took loads of digital photographs as reference material for Steve, and others simply to remind myself of how great the place is. Bundy Island may be a rather bleak and unwelcoming setting but it's real life equivalent is certainly not.

In fact, I enjoyed combining travel and research so much that there's a very good chance the next Walking Wounded adventure will be based in Gibraltar...

Steve's title for the previous post drew in a few visitors looking for Doctor Who-related shenanigans and has reminded me that we need not disappoint such surfers.

True we're mostly concerned at the the moment with Nazi Zombies rampaging around a quiet English island, but before we got on to that Steve and I collaborated on a short Doctor Who strip for nobody's amusement but our own:

Well, that's not quite true. It was also intended for Clayton Hickman, editor of Doctor Who magazine, but with the advent of the New Series he's pretty much lost interest in the classic version and never even acknowledged the strip. Ah well.

The lettering does need re-doing but due to needing to have Walking Wounded issue 1 ready and printed for March, tidying up our back catalogue will have to wait.

At last! Half way there! I have just finished lettering part 2 of Island of Terror and it finally feels like we're making progress. I don’t like to think about how long it has taken to get this far or how much there is still to do before we have a published comic in our ink stained hands. I don’t know if it’s like this for everyone in the small press but it seems to take forever to finish a project. What with work and social life (that I have put on hold a few time just to get something done!) the time for creativity often has to be snatched whilst eating or instead of sleep.

A while back I posted a few frames of pencilled work from page 10, now here are the same frames again inked and lettered in all their glory:

Next March sees the launch of Walking Wounded issue 1, but it's not the first issue of Walking Wounded to see print...

A year or two ago I came across Smallzone, a UK-based website dedicated to Small Press comics. This was interesting to me because my brother and I had a 26 page comic story that was pretty much ready to go. It had been completed during our university days but we'd never found a satisfactory method of printing and I knew nothing about distribution.

Smallzone offered both affordable printing and the promise of distribution so we were happy to give it a go. After some preparation involving adding a couple of new pages and a cover (you can read more about the comic's history on the Massacre website) we were ready to go to press. Shane Chebsey did a great job of arranging the printing and within weeks I had 75 shiny copies of The Resistance That Went Mad in my possession.

However, distribtion proved to be a bigger problem. We decided on a soft launch just to see what the reaction would be. The comic went on sale on Smallzone and we sent it off to TRS2 to be reviewed.

Unfortunately, no review ever appeared on TRS2 and the Smallzone presentation hardly put our efforts in the best light. This is what the cover should look like at the Smallzone thumbnail size of 200x300:

But this is how it appears on Smallzone:

I did ask Shane to change it and provided him with the corrected version of the file, which lest you think filesize is the issue, is actually a few kilobytes smaller than the dodgy version. Still, for whatever reason, the change was never made and to this day Resistance appears on Smallzone with the latter of the two covers, but without the Buy Now button that is supposed to be next to it.

Resistance is now Walking Wounded issue 0 and we will try to shift some copies when we can. It's not a priority though as both Steve and I recognise it's not really representative of our current talents.

Unsurprisingly, sales of Resistance were slack. In fact, to my knowledge not a single issue has yet been sold, neither on Smallzone nor from our own site.

Still, the moral of this story is not to bash Smallzone. It's a valuable resource and I'd use them again, just not in quite the same way. No the real lesson here is don't expect anyone else to do your promotion for you!