right, I know its traditional to wait until the end of a review to say what you actually thought of a film but as it’s pretty much beside the point I’m going to start with it. 300 is allright, it’s good in places and bad in places, it’s stupid and machoistic and clever and insightful (normally into macho behaviour.) it’s got a reasonable look to it but the slow fast editing is repetitive and nothing we haven’t seen a million times before and the battles go on a bit too long because of the lack of variety. More character development and less repetitive action would have been nice as would a less cartoon evil for every bad guy. Even with that said it is still half clever and half interesting and that makes it a hell of a lot better then a lot of action films and every damn MTV style horror of recent years.

300 has it’s detractors and some even have good points, like I said it’s not all good, but one thing that can’t be levelled at it (but has) is that it’s a pro bush anti Arab piece of right wing madness. It is very, very, heavy handed and manipulative with it depictions of the Persians and there army, turning them in to grotesque inhuman monsters, normally under makeup that leaves them resembling orcs more then men. This is basically bad story telling, they are the villains and as such are painted stupidly dark and evil. It’s not having a crack at the Persians, a country that ceased to exist a few hundred years ago, they could be from any were, the filmmakers are just desperate to let you know they are the bad guys. I’ll come back to the right wing and the George W Bush points in a moment.

But fist, another criticism is the only disabled person is a hideously over the top hunchback (I’m not counting the inbred priest as they are just kind of warty and covered in cysts and boils so you know they are bad, that’s right the short hand for villain is ugly and or deformed or in one case a stupid beard.) the hunch back it turns out is also evil and betrays the Spartans to the monsters from over the seas after he’s told he can’t fight as one of them. This is fairly negative especially when coupled with the Spartans killing any deformed or week children born to then, it pretty much seems like it’s meant to justify it. So 2 points upheld.

Back to the Bush argument, this one falls down right from the get go, the invaders are more like Bushes America then the Spartan defenders. The massive army striding the globe with a man that believes himself a god at its head subjecting and conforming all that lies before it, the Persians are the global super power not the Spartans. Xerxes is convinced he is god and George w is convinced he is sent by god. Leonidas is contemptuous of the old gods and the religion that still desperately clings to its corrupt power in grease, not a religious man. Leonidas is not invading any one he is not trying to set up any puppet governments unlike Xerxes and George w Bush.

Right wing, this is not really something the film can be accused of as it isn’t really suggesting we all should live like the Spartans but the Romans certainly did admire them and the Germans of the third rich certainly were inspired by the Romans so take from that what you will.

Also totally groundless and only asserted out of spite, homophobic has been levelled at it. The only references is to the Athenians being boy loving philosophers that have already stood up to the Persians and that isn’t said in any seriousness. I would have to say the film looks with all it’s polished mussels and semi naked men to be well aware of it’s gay audience and appeal.

So confused and sometimes stupid yes, but also sometimes intelligent and strong, with good and bad writing seemingly mixed together in about equal proportion.

Here it is, the end, the grand finally, the last 2 episodes in this epic tale. Ok maybe not epic and I do still have an intro segment to do with the title and credits and stuff.

It’s always good to have a project in the bag no matter how small and I’m hoping that Chris will have time to get the finalized version onto our website soon. Even with the small amount of work left for me to do on the strip it feels like I can move on to some other projects, like the next walking wounded story and some unfinished work from a few years ago. The exciting times with any project are starting them and finishing them, the rest is hard work.

I finished 2 episodes today! 2! As with all techniques they seem to get faster as you go along. For every episode there has been a subtle variation or refinement, a little bit of experimenting here and there.

I think it’s starting to work pretty well now I have come to the end of the strip, that’s always the way with me, doesn’t matter how long something is it always takes me until the last third to get warmed up.

Hitting a bit of a roll I finished off episode 7 and 8 in no time at all. Only 4 segments to go now and no real time limit for completion. As well as Bosher I have dug out an old project to work on and notionally started work on the next walking wounded instalment.
Future heroes was written as an 8 page additional story, a sort of introduction to the main characters, in island of terror but we didn’t manage to complete it in time. Instead it makes up one third of issue 2. The main reason we were selling issue 0 at the thing was if you bought 0 and 1 you would probably get a better idea who the mass of characters are and otherwise we would only have had one comic to sell. With issue 2 I’m hoping that it won’t be necessary to offer issue 0 up again. Admittedly you will be better off reading issue 2 then 1 but you can’t have everything can you?

It’s been a little wile but I am now at the half way point for Bosher’s story. The time it takes for each episode depends a lot on the content of the frames, episode 6 took a fairly long time t colour with all it’s detail and attempts at complex lighting. Episode 6 however was fairly straight forward.

I should imagine the art will slow right down again as soon as the action turns back to the football match. It will be nice when the strip is completed and up on our website and ready for a bit of feedback (hopefully positive) Bosher seemed to go down ok taped to our table at the show so if all else fails it will make some lovely wall paper.

As Steve says, great event and we did pretty well after a slow start.

I thought our table looked pretty good, although, unlike some of the more intricate designs of our fellows, it only took 10 minutes to set up:

We were positioned pretty well, on a corner right next to those excellent fellows from The Goldfish Bowl. It was perhaps a little far from the entrance for some folk but I'm not complaining.

Loved the Anthology, 200 pages of top Comix (including Hot Air, which came out beautifully) and superb quality printing courtesy of Lulu.

Coolest moment was probably as we were setting off, walking through the lobby area past a show visitor reading, I like to think avidly, Walking Wounded #0. Actually, I think it was this chap. The point of things like the Thing is surely to bring your comics to an audience. There's no finer feeling than, in some small way, to do just that.

The U.K web and mini comix thing is where we were on Saturday last week. It was pretty good all in all for our first show ever and the anthology book looks really nice and was a bargain at just 50p. I think we did pretty much as well as can be expected but didn’t really network that much. The importance of flyers and cards seems like an obvious improvement and our pitch improved after the first hour or 2, going from it’s based on comics you are too young to have ever read too ‘nazi zombie war action.’

Next year hopefully we will have more titles and more issues of the walking wounded as well as web content and a better selection of links/higher profile for our work. Now with printing and shows experience it’s really just advertising and sales outlets we have to explore. Sending copies of island of terror for review and having smallzone and comixpress hold our product seems like a logical starting point but I’m sure there are other marketing tools out there and I suspect we will blog about them if we find them.

Whist at university my friend James and I decided to produce our own Spiderman comic based on Stan Lee’s original principles. Peter Parker is a late teenage boy with all the problems and desires of a real teenager who just so happens to also have super powers. His concept, as he has stated many times, was to bring a kind or reality to the superhero format. Setting his comics in real cities (New York for his Spiderman and Cambridge for ours) instead of made up dreamscape cities like Superman and Batman.

Our Spiderman was set in Cambridge because that’s were we were at the time and his teenage problems are related to, but in my opinion more realistic then his traditional problems. In the comic most his ‘real world’ problems are witch hot girl is he going to marry or as a geek who also has super powers, how will he impress a hot girl.

To get a true marvel feel we lifted a whole bunch of prose from a Spiderman into page them made sure the speech picture and captions in most panels repeated the same information. It was going to be six pages and get really really obscene but we ran out of time and couldn’t really be bothered to go back to it.

I was fairly happy with the backgrounds in episode 4, another 2 crowd scenes and masses of detail. Ah crowds, the bain of many a comic artists creative life. Why is it that comics nearly always involve large crowds? Obviously this football strip is bound to have football crowds, and a London premier would have a crowd and I dare say future storeys would also be stuffed full of perfectly reasonable crowds

It seems with comics almost every story is a relentless parade of crowds, crowds of solders of robots or zombies of sci-fi citizens or police or super heroes or crowds of people crowding around any of the crowds above. I normally find that if you stick a big head or something at the front right in the way you can normally get away with a few shoulders and hats for a massive collection of people. Can’t do it to often though or people start to think that there is some really annoying guy in the row in front trying to read there comic.

Episode 2 had some re-touching done, I didn’t like Bosher’s jaw so I mad it a little less blobby. Episode 3 was a bit of a pain, the artwork was never that good to start with and I didn’t really find any joy in the colouring. Frame 1 clearly has too many words on it but they just about fit in an ungainly sort of way.

I have discover that there is no way I could do this as a daily strip as it takes longer then a day working flat out to complete each 3 frame segment it probably takes something like 20/30 hours from start to finish so 3 or 4 days an episode. It takes about that long to do a normal page of comic book artwork and that doesn’t seem right. I want to keep on doing web strips but I defiantly need a better method.

For once I didn’t put in loads of effort creating a fantastic 60’s magazine cover, I didn’t even use crazy 60’s writing and do you know what? It dose the job fine. This cover appears as a composite element in a few frames but always pretty small, and wit Bosher you know that’s going to be small. It’s clear it’s not fussy and there is nothing that I care too much if I cover up. It is as composite elements should be; a part of a frame, not a frame within a frame. The colouring is a bit crap, but it works in the context of the page

Computer colouring hey? It’s pretty tricky really. Sure there is an undo button, sure you have layers and filters and all kinds of cool brushes but it takes just as long and ends up looking sort of plasticky, witch is fine if that’s what you’re after. I have been trying to introduce some paint elements into my computer colouring to speed it up a bit, it sort of works but it still takes ages and it looks like neither traditional or computer art.

Computer aided art can look fantastic and it can look disgusting, it’s versatile and creative and rewarding and takes a crazy long time, as dose traditional art. I mix the 2 I bitch about them both and I love them both. Probably why I never get much done.

Episode 2 is now finished and I have rescaled part 1 after deciding on the web size, to make it more legible. This whole project has really taught me about formatting, choosing your format at working out whether it is practical or not before rushing in and completing a strip. it’s a good job the images stand up to being shown actual size and the computer colouring is detailed enough to hold together.

I have always thought it important that our website have several strips for people browsing to read. It’s taken a wile to get to the stage were we could get one started and I think it’s important that I learn from this and keep on producing more, even as a sideline as our print comics are being made. After all what is a website without content?

Lettering! Isn’t it a pain? For Bosher I have the undesirable situation of either presenting the art the size It was drawn or letting so large you can’t see any of the damn art any more any way. The problem is it’s a web comic but everything about the format has been taken from print size and you can’t read print size lettering on the internet.

Nearly everything I have lettered to date has had a generous font size, normally fare larger then you would see in print, in part with an eye on the internet in part making sure of legibility irrespective of print quality and in part just plain ignorance. Bosher’s tiny little frame size makes it impossible to fit the words on in anything other then a compact size. It’s just a pain with it being in colour and all that it’s unlikely to see print in the intended format.

If I get time I may well go and colour and re-letter our project for Judge Dredd the Megerzine, the only things stopping me are, that I’m working on Bosher, it will take a long time, there is no guarantee they would use a new version, and I would be tempted to tinker with the art and were do you draw the line with tinkering.

It took me as long to colour as a full size strip. I’ll probably get used to it as I go along like I did with the artwork but here it is at last. Part one of Bosher’s goals.

Hopefully I can have up to part 4 done by Saturday and we can start to get some stuff on the website before the show.

My artwork has always shown promise, mixed in with all off the poor figure work and bad perspective there was always a kind of potential showing though. Perhaps in the quality of line or the conference of stroke, at collage and uni I was regularly being told I was the best sketch/life drawing artist in the class and really could draw. Growing up with comics as my first artistic influence and, for want of a better term, art as my second and fare later coming influence it has always been hard to marry the two. The potential shown in comics is often fed though from my more traditional drawing skills. And the composition and confident way I work a page space flows from a lifetime of comic layouts and storytelling.

Form a far to early age I was submitting work to the unsolicited slush piles of various publishers, each time convinced I had conquered my problems and done enough to warrant a brake and each time I was seriously mistake. My submissions were the bane of the sub-editors responsible for sorting though this mountain of deluded hopefuls. If I had thought about it I would have realised that by repeatedly submitting before I was ready I was doing my self enormous harm, building up a reputation as one of the pests who belong in the small press but think they deserve better. Optimistic dreamer or egotistical fool it all amounts to the same. For about 6 or 7 years I have been nearly ready, nearly there. But as my stylistic approach was reaching the stage of competence, with flaws in technical skills hidden by narrative compositional and stylistic tricks, my traditional skills started to feed in more and every new flourish would expose a hundred mistakes. My artwork was unravelling and deconstructing itself, only when it was fully destroyed could it be rebuilt in its new form.

I still submitted, year after year even with my artwork fighting against itself, until maybe 3 years ago. After my last Judge Dredd submission, I finally noticed what was going on. How my work was at war on the page and I stopped. I hope to be able to resolve my split artistic personality and as much as possible bring the good drawing skills I have learnt and am capable of to comics without stylistic tricks or shortcuts.

I have been working on the last of the panels for Bosher’s first strip and boy has it been hard going. It has got a bit less troublesome as I have got used to the scale but lots of small detailed frames still seem to be the hardest way to work it’s a lot of effort for little return. I was hoping to have the whole thing coloured and up on the web by next Saturday in time for the show now we are just going to have to see.

This time next week we'll be here:

You should come too!

However if you have a really good excuse (a broken leg, say) then don't forget the exclusive blog price for Walking Wounded #1.

I'll be back after the event with a full report, and sending out copies of WW1 to customers / friends / the world's press will be keeping me busy!

I do a fair bit of research and reference collection for my art these days and I must say the internet has helped that up to a point. The internet is a vast resource full of odd and specific information. If you know what you are looking for exactly you may well be able to find exactly what you are looking for, like certain weapons vehicles buildings or costumes. If you are looking fare more generally you can also find a lot of suitable stuff, for instance, you need a bar, an old looking bar, you can probably find enough information to cobble one together, you need Cairo in 1921, well just find any were in Egypt form about 1960 back to 1860, who is going to know the difference? Sounds good right? Right, until it falls apart and if your unlucky enough not to have broadband at the moment then you had better get the vallium out.

I have been working on a football strip set in the early 60,s and time and time again I have had all my classic football efforts crushed by American football! you want a stadium, here have 300 hundred pages of American football stadiums and players and helmets and god only knows how much other crap. To get a football stadium or dressing room I had to actually type in the team name or the name of the ground. I’m sure there must be a picture of an old scoreboard out there some were, an old football scoreboard that is, I know there are about 100,000 for American football. but why not type in soccer? Well I would if I wanted 10,000 pages of American children’s and women’s soccer. The problem with the internet is there is just so much stuff out there on it, a general search will turn up a million pages of crap to sift though and a more specific search, nothing unless you just so happen to type the exact title of the picture you are randomly looking for. When it really matters your still better off with books so it’s a shame that libraries are closing down again.

Bosher’s goals is a web comic, free to read, not selling anything, not an advert for our in print comic or a subscription site, what would be the point, it’s not pornography after all so who would pay to see it? Some people do put up web comics just for the hell of it and some of them are quite good, and one of them (that I have found so far) is actually pretty amazing. This isn’t really a review of them, more just drawing attention to the depth of work available online.

The Rainbow Orchid by Garen Ewing is hands down the best web comic I have seen so far, the art work is stunning and the story is a old school boys own adventure told in 3 panel chunks. a format that is sometimes broken up with larger frames. The writing has it’s slow charm but the art is the real stand out. Seductively simplistic and amazingly consistent the clean line artwork is of top notch professional quality, the evocative backgrounds and well thought out characters all add to the deceptive simplicity of an incredibly complex work. You could say that I’m impressed. I was also impressed by Neill Cameron’s online comic, Thumpculture. Neill illustrated Bulldog Empire with some success but Thumpculture really shows off his skills. The full colour artwork is never less then interesting and the writing is not bad at all. Both comics are easily of professional quality and represent the high end of the market, professional artists doing there thing on line because they want to.

at the other end of the market you get the people who could never turn a wage putting out there storeys to the masses, this kind of thing is the life blood of the small press. the Noob by Gianna Masetti is a pretty good example of internet comics about internet subjects, basically a crudely drawn but well observed bunch of jokes about on line roll playing games. From what I read before getting board it seems that just like with the office, (funny if you work in an office) it’s funny if you play world of war craft and the like. And a call to destiny is by some one who really needs help, it’s crazy, it’s what the internet is all about, go on take a look I dare you, you have never seen such crudely drawn Orc porn before, that’s right I did just say Orc porn and that’s all the warning your going to get.

Naturally there are a lot of web comics that fall in-between the two ends of the spectrum, like the fantastically silly Doctor McNinja and the really rather good, hope for the future by Simon Perrins. I wonder, when we get more of our comics up on line were we will come in the hierarchy and how hard it will be to get noticed. I guess when Bosher is up I will find out.

I have spent the last few days sorting out the backgrounds for the next 4 instalments of Bosher, as with the first segment, 4 instalments of 3 frames take up one sheet of A3 paper. I was wondering why it was taking so long to prepare every page, an A3 page of art normally takes me about 2 days from start to finish, each Bosher page is taking a week. It’s a staggering difference in working time and it’s all down to the backgrounds. A normal comic strip will have on average 6 frames on a page and you’ll be drawing backgrounds for about 2/3 or ½ sometimes less if you skimp on detail. With this newspaper strip format I’m finding that every frame has an elaborate background and normally a crowd of figures. Irrespective of the actual dimensions of the frames the strip is a fairly detailed and complicated 36 frame story and about 30 of those frames have complicated backgrounds that have to set the scene tell the story and evoke a period atmosphere, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s as time consuming as it is.

Bosher’s goals was in many ways inspired by the rainbow orchid, Garen Ewing’s impressive and deservedly successful newspaper format web comic. I wonder if his painstaking backgrounds and impressively consistent artwork takes as long to produce as my slightly shabbier effort. Maybe when we have Bosher up online I’ll ask him.

I have decided to draw all the Bosher strips before I colour and letter them. Originally I was going to complete them 4 at a time because that’s how many fit on one sheet of paper. Despite my initial reservations it seems to be going fairly well, even if the lettering is going to be a tight squeeze. It seems like a while since I posted any new drawings on here so here is the inks for the first page.

There is an entire magazine cover to create as a composite element and you can see how the stadium model was used to create finished artwork. The method of creating backgrounds I have used for this strip I will continue to develop I think in as many ways as I can for my future strips. I’m feeling a lot more positive about the whole project now.

Just a mere fortnight now until Massacre for Boys make our comic how debut at the UK Web and Mini Comix Thing. Ideally we'd have the comic we're launching in our possession already, but I have every confidence that we'll have the copies we need printed in time.

Well, almost every confidence...

The Thing is bound to be a great day out. Here's the details:

Saturday 17 March 2007

The Great Hall
Queen Mary University
Queens Building
Mile End Road
Mile End
London
United Kingdom

10am - 5pm

£4.00

The Thing Anthology, featuring 199 pages of the best of Small Press comics (including 5 pages of exclusive Massacre action) will be on sale for a stupidly low price too, so the value for money of the event for visitors is excellent.

If you like that kind of Thing, obviously.