As another month careers to a sticky end, I thought it might be helpful to list where we are with the various current Massacre projects:

Holt Bros: Megazine 6-pager - Submitted and accepted in March 2006, still awaiting publication. We've had no indication of when this might be and the signs are that there's a big slush pile of these strips. Shame as we're keen to unleash these characters on the world.

Walking Wounded - Issue 0 is finally clawing in some sales (including one on eBay thanks to adventurous relisting - hurrah!) but it's issue 1 we're really keen to get out there. Unfortunately, sorting out the printing has been a chore

Still, we're getting there.

Thing Anthology - Finally some good news. The 5-page Commando-style colour Walking Wounded strip has been accepted for the UK Web and Mini Comix Thing Anthology and will be available at the event itself on March 17th. I wish I could be so definitive about Walking Wounded #1.

Bosher's Goals: Webcomic - I did the scripts for this football-orientated strip a while ago and now the artwork for Island of Terror is done hopefully Steve will turn to this at some point soon. A companion 1-page story, styled Bosher On Sunday is being prepared as a submission for the Forbidden Planet catalogue insert.

Not a bad list, and there's more to come. We've been at this for a long time now and I feel it's time that our various efforts start to pay-off...

I was asked to do a t-shirt logo for a trampoline club and after a little research produced a number of illustrations. It was, as always with the internet, tricky to find any specific photo reference. Type in trampoline and you get 7million pictures of peoples kids in there back garden! Absolutely useless! I did however in the end find enough scant reference to produce some fairly accurate athletic moves.

That was pretty much intended to be a starting point for an animal themed illustration. As the head coach is called Cat has pet cats volunteers for a cat charity and in general loves cats a cat theme seemed obvious. My first anthropomorphic effort was rejected for having boobs and the second is a bit to young.

Although many of the drawings will be used in one way or another the referenced human pictures will make the image that adorns the clubs clothing and I have to say they are my favourite pieces also.

How’s this for speed, 09;50 on the day they receive my art work submission commando editor George Low writes an e-mail reply! Not just any reply but an encouraging and personal reply that didn’t just sound like a standard response. It’s almost beside the point that they are not looking for artists at the moment when some one acts with such old school manners. Even within the small press is a rare but pleasant surprise. It’s really the time thing that has impressed me, I’m blown away by the speed of response. 2000ad over the years have always been very polite and helpful with both written and art submissions and only Doctor Who have ever ignored me completely (something I consider to be rude). Almost all submitting creators are long term fans and as such deserve at the very least a reply. It will be interesting to see how this compares with my next shot in the dark.

This evening I uninstalled McAfee Security Center, precisely one day before my licence expired.

I had McAfee for a couple of years, mostly because I like the corporate product. At first it was reasonably priced, unobtrusive and effective, but in a relatively short time the home version at least has become expensive, intrusive and, if my personal experience is anything to go by, crap at stopping viruses.

Rather than pay the £40 for the honour of having to reboot every few weeks for no reason (sorry, due to a McAfee software update) I decided to put my figurative money where my actual mouth is and go for the open source virus-scanner WinClam.

I'm a big fan of open source but Massacre for Boys tends to be created on proprietary programs, simply for convenience. I write the scripts on MS Word, Steve uses Photoshop to master the artwork and letter, the website is administered using a mixture of Dreamweaver and Fireworks. I'm typing this blog entry now in IE7.

However, there's really very little reason why you couldn't do everything with open source products. OpenOffice.org for word processing, Gimp for image manipulation, Firefox for web.

All of that will run on Windows, but if you don't fancy paying for an OS (usually bundled with the hardware but pay you still do!) the transition to Linux could end up being pretty straight forward as all those apps are native to the Penguin.

In fact the main reason I don't change right now is familiarity with what I've got. However, no software version lasts forever and as our stuff becomes obsolete I don't see why we should be giving Microsoft or whoever our cash when perfectly good and truly free products are out there.

With ClamWin, I've made my first step...

Alas, Walking Wounded #0 did indeed go unsold on eBay. Still, it was at least a bit of promotion if not a successful sales venture. I could play "double or quits" and relist but I'm doubtful this would do the trick to be honest.

Most of my eBay auctions do end up in a sale, but of course you get the odd one or two where you can't find a buyer. Here was a recent item that eventually ended up in the recycler:

Can't think why no-one wanted that

Still, there was some good news because I got a decent price for American Gods. All hail the online car boot sale!

Steve delivered the finished pages of Hot Air yesterday so I emailed them to the Thing this morning (5 hi-res pages = 5 separate emails). heard nothing back yet but I'm going to be optimistic and assume everything okay. It's certainly one of our better strips.

Not sure of our next step, but I think I'm going to work up a Bosher's Goals 1-pager for this.

Page is in the bag/can/computer. Look at the explosion, is it big enough, have I used enough colours? Yes I believe I have. After the last 3 predominantly grey pages I think a riot of colour is just the thing for a climax.

I should be able to letter all 5 pages this weekend and then send it off to web and mini comix thing. If it gets accepted it will be interesting to see how well it sits alongside the other entries. The small press is always an interesting mix of genres, styles and abilities. Any collection, especially one as ambitious as this, is bound to be worth a look. It’s to our own shame more of our work is not on the internet, I have spent hours cheeking out and reading other people works and web sites. The UK Web & Mini Comix Thing site is a great place to start surfing as it has links to all the exhibitors pages and there is some good stuff there I would never of heard of otherwise.

Well I finished page 4, now I have to get over my last page mental block. I don’t know why but last pages seem to loom before me raised to gigantic proportions, they sit heavy in my mind with a power all of there own. Some people talk of the fear of the blank page of the daunting task of starting a project for me it’s the task of finishing a project that has this resonance, typically arse about face of me. If I drink enough coffee I should be ready to start by midnight.

In my latest foolish attempt for paid work I sent some samples to D.C Thomson’s commando comics today. We’ll see how that goes, but I’m not going to be holding my breath.

I've been tempted to put one of our comics on eBay for a while, and this week finally dipped my toe in the water. A copy of Walking Wounded #0 is available here.

With a shade under 3 days to go at the time of writing, it looks like the comic may well go unsold. It's not a total loss though as the number of hits is in double figures so at least a few more people are aware of our stuff, even if none of them are actually willing to pay for it at the moment!

Distribution remains a headache, although small press sales are reputedly strongest at shows, it would be nice if we could get at least one mainstream e-commerce site to carry our work. The number one target at the moment is, perhaps unsurprisingly Forbidden Planet.

eBay is probably a tad too general for stuff like Walking Wounded, which is if I'm honest has a limited market (at the moment!). It's a great site generally though and I've used it quite a bit to raise funds for our publishing enterprise. At the moment, for instance, I'm also currently offering a lovely hardback copy of Neil Gaiman's American Gods:

Not my favourite novel, admittedly, but hopefully it can add an extra couple of quid to the Massacre coffers.

Continuing with the short story posts, this was the page I worried about most. Frame 1 has a tricky amount of action to include but I’m happy overall with the lighting and the story telling. I’m pretty sure that the problem is that I have drawn the parachute far too short and that’s distorting the overall perspective. Ah well no use crying over spilt milk.

The commando style of this story serves a double purpose, not only is it for the mini comix show thing but also for submission to commando comics as an artwork sample. The black and white version will be going to them. I will be keeping this blog posted as to how that goes.

I was looking at Chris Weston’s blog yesterday and he had posted some artwork he did for a first world war batman elsworlds pitch. The page of painted artwork he put up is typically impressive and I for one would have loved to have seen this book.

Working in a smaller DC Thompson Commando style has been a lot more rewarding then I thought it would be. All the pages were drawn a4 to be reduced to a5 and every page has 2 frames and at least one caption. This very regimented format is a lot less restricting then I expected and the story can be followed even without the abundance of words I am yet to put on it. (Probably covering half of my artwork)

I have always respected the work of good colourists, it’s far from an easy job and often overlooked. My painting of this strip is cheating really, making no attempt at using a limited pallet or traditional flat colour areas. As I have mentioned before Colin McNeil was a massive influence in the early stages of my artwork and even now, somewhat unintentionally, I can see how his brightly coloured early work still permeates my colour schemes.

Well, 5 pages it is instead of 4 but they did want to fill a substantial book so lets hope they are ok with our page count over run. All 5 have been drawn and 2 have been coloured already so it’s on track for last minute submission. I can understand why some people were angry about the somewhat threatening e-mail that was sent to the exhibitors. I’m not sure it was meant to sound like bullying, maybe it was a sort of incentive gone wrong (traditionally incentives give you something extra instead of promising to take something away if you don’t comply). Small press creators have trouble enough finding time for their own projects, a page may not seem like much but a page in your spare time may be a fairly large undertaking. And lets not forget the important stuff theme, we nearly fell at the first hurdle, thrown by the task of creating an a5 short comic about important stuff. Not forgetting that it was only the very end of December we finished the comic we are going to the show with in the first place. Having a story printed in colour and distributed is however too good an opportunity to pass up and being temporarily unemployed leaves me the free time to get it done. Lucky old me. So here is the first page. No lettering yet and I’m not sure whether you would call it fully painted or not is up for debate but I like it.

I just hope the print process is worth the extra hassle I have gone to with producing a colour strip. (I say gone too I mean going to, if suddenly I screw up the last 3 pages and have to send them a black and white version, then I will have egg on my face.)

The grubby squabble over Lords of the Rings movie money got dirtier this week, with New Line's boss banning director Peter Jackson from ever working for his studio again.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about this. Whilst it seems clear that New Line are basically in the wrong and are just trying to weasel out of their contractual commitments to Jackson, I don't think he's exactly covered himself in glory either.

IMHO, Jacko's attitude smacks of putting greed before art and besides I'm not sure his stated ideas for the Hobbit adaptation (which boil down to a "more of the same" trilogy of prequels to LOTR) are at all in keeping with the spirit of the novel. The Hobbit is very different from Rings, much simpler, more childish and not nearly as epic. It's a great story, don't get me wrong, but it bears little stylistic resemblance to the nominal follow-up.

What I'd like is a truthful adaption of The Hobbit, not some half-baked retread of something we've already seen. If Jackson won't deliver then it's probably for the best that he's been kicked out.

Besides, let's not play down the role of karma in all this. After all, cutting Christopher Lee/Saruman out of Return of the King at the last minute was a phenomenonally crappy thing to do to a screen God. I like to think of New Line pushing Jackson out of The Hobbit as a little bit of cosmic justice...

All these LOTR shenanigans have reminded me too that fantasy is not a genre that has a great history in comics. There's been the odd readable publication, such as novel-to-graphic novels Guards! Guards! and, ironically enough, David Wenzel's The Hobbit. I do remember enjoying some of DC's Dungeons and Dragons back in the late 80s and Groo The Wanderer too. Gotta love Groo.

However there doesn't seem to be a lot else out there. Conan was a big success, of course, but it's not really my thing. There's plenty of others but nothing really grabs me.

Of course if you have a wide definition of fantasy you can count Neil Gaiman and it's problem solved. However, the more classical, Tolkien derived stuff is hard to find. Maybe one day we'll get around to doing some of our own....

Hello again, welcome to 2007 and apologies for the titular alliteration!

Now Island of Terror has been completed there's other fish to fry and I've just finished a short script for our contribution to the UK Web & Mini Comix Thing. The story's called Hot Air, features Winston Churchill and is a surprisingly lean 5-pages of full-colour A5.

A modest post on the Thing forum enquiring about some technical details seems to have spurred the event organiser into tough action.

Then, a day or so later this email arrived in the inboxes of all the exhibitors:

Hi,

I would like every exhibitor to submit art for the anthology please. Exhibitors that do not submit art for the anthology will not be allowed to book before January 2008 for next years show. This means that the people that support the show that bit more get in first etc.

For those of you that dont want to, and see this as a dictorial affront to freedom, please just submit something. Anything. But really, you should all try.

The reason I want you to all submit work is that people like to take home a momento of the show, like a tour guide. A comment from last year was that it didn't have the majority of actual exhibitors represented in it. Remember, its not really possible to see every exhibitor on the day and a few tables are bound to get left out. This is an ideal way for people ensure that they are remembered. Just a reminder, if you dont then next year you'll have to wait until January before you book, if there are any places left by then.

Anyway, its A5 in b/w or colour. So get moving. 1-2 pages or 4 if you have to.

If you dont create comics, ie, publishers, resellers, then do a creative ad, anything.

I want to get about 200 pages this year so its a solid read.

The anthology will be going for 50p or a pound again this year, a huge loss leader, but it was really popular, and allows people to get into print and everything, so its worth it etc.

Also, the show has a MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/ukwebcomixthing If you have a MySpace then join, and let all your friends know too.

Hope your getting excited.

Regards,

The Thing.

This didn't go down very well with all recipients as a subsequent Pencil Monkey thread makes clear. Personally I'm less worried about the penalty for not submitting a strip (as that's academic to us) and more concerned about the 4-page maximum this email implies (never mentioned before) and the possibility of not being allowed to get a copy of the anthology for myself.

I'm happy to contribute but not to a publication I am actively banned from obtaining. Will see how this one develops...