Well it’s done, now I’m going to call this frame finished. After redrawing it about 20 times I am finally ready to move on to the next page. I couldn’t really write a Blog about trying to improve, learn and get things right and then leave a clearly wrong frame in place of a clearly wrong frame. It’s not perfect but except a few very talented artists so very little ever is.

Redrawing frames is always a bit of a mistake, in the end I normally just change the angel and do a completely new one. The original normally has more charm or is freer, more energetic and less fussy then the redrawn version. The other annoying thing is the compulsion that sets in as soon as you start to redraw, to go over and over the same image and start again and again until you get the pose and the lighting just right. It becomes fussy and you just can’t leave it alone so the whole project stalls.

Working on shading and lighting and even anatomy again I seem to be learning things I have before. Everything I wok out triggers memories of the last time I worked the same problem out only hopefully with a little deeper new understanding. The big things for me this time are clothing, shading and less blocky backgrounds, so basically everything.

I used to be really really into shading, big black shadows and dramatic lighting intricate crosshatching and distracting detail. One of the things I was frequently being criticised for was using to much detail for no real reason and making it all very confusing. I will admit that page 27 wasn’t really a break though, it’s got far more shading and no backgrounds to distract the eye.

I didn’t use enough reference really to get the shadows right so they look a bit dodgy, next time I’ll try a bit harder and see if I can really learn something.

It’s a difficult balance to strike between the desire to work quickly and the need to learn and progress. At the moment I working on the principle of some pages fast and some slow. Trying to mingle the 2 is tricky but with the ‘indie’ comic aesthetic of zombie onslaught the variations seem to stay with in the bounds of expected consistency. Next there is a big fight so I will choose the frames to research on the bases of them not being a long shot or a crowd scene.

Probably the most influential artist in comics over the last 10 years is Mike Mignola, his high contrast style and breath tacking sense of design make geniuses look effortless. His visual story telling and understanding of form and shape are also impeccable. I can’t help but admire him and admit that I have done since about 1988. Kevin Walker who has obviously been influenced by Mignola in the past few years has many of the same qualities but on a slightly less impressive scale.

Sean Phillips and Jock are 2 more high contrast high style artist that I admire greatly and even more then Mignola and Walker have been influencing my direction or desired direction recently. That’s not to say I want to draw like them but the more observed and realistic approach is closer to the way I have been working. My best results have been from extensive photo reference and research but I would like to think its informed or informing my less referenced work.

This reliance on reference (a good thing) and methodical research is excellent, rewarding and produces the best work, just look at Bosher, but it’s also incredibly time consuming.

For page 26 of Zombie Onslaught I did little more then one point backgrounds and a little generic person drawing but I did try a little harder with the shadows. Next page is a generic showing a girl how to hold a gun sequence. Lots of generic stuff in this strip but it’s got a fresh spin honest!

By making less guidelines before adding the pencils for the figures, a stage I am no were near simplifying, I have actually finished a page. I did however draw all the frames so low that I hade to make everyone crouch and stoop so I could keep the heads in shot. The page I thought more about where the heads are going to be and drew even less information in the background. Given the intended format is standard U.S I have drawn the original pages well oversized, not actually a problem so much as a waste of time.

My original intention with this comic when I started was to draw it fast and with a lot of high contrast black and not a lot of detail. That lasted about 3 seconds and I spent nearly a year drawing 20 pages some of them over and over again. Almost every frame was drawn as a background and foreground then layered together, each panel completed one at a time. Not with any attempt at Brian Bolland like perfection more an attempt at not sucking so badly. I did learn a lot, each time I struggle with a strip I learn a lot, the most painful comics to draw are normally the most rewarding.

Nearly drawing a frame properly has left me in a much better mood, I drew a very basic background made up of a few guidelines and worked around that. The angel has changed to the most sensible one for the job if not the most dramatic. I’m not happy with the figurer work but it’s a start. I have filled in the backgrounds for the rest of the page in a similar sparse fashion and hoping things go a little better from now on.

Well that puts an end to that little experiment, there is no quicker way for me to draw but there are plenty of quicker ways to make a total mess. I can’t even seem to make a good job of working the way I use to with simple perspective lines on the page. I have been working on a looser less ridged technique with less precise perspective and simple more stylised figures. Needless to say it’s not worked very well for me so far, in fact it’s been a staggeringly frustrating waste of time!

The promise of saving a whole bunch of time and general frustration with the increasingly elaborate nature of my working method and the general blockyness of some of my backgrounds prompted my sudden drive to evolve. Sean Phillips’s excellent work on Criminal with mostly a blue marker pen for pencilling was the inspiration that flicked the switch on and my staggering lack of skill ground the whole thing to a halt.

So it’s back to the old method, the tried and tested method and the hopefully not now totally broken method. There’s no easy way and there is no such thing as a short cut.

My art broke down like a car that has been driven too hard. The hardest bit about rising you level of skill is raising all the aspects at once. A new set of tools or skills can help in one area but others can be left behind and this is what my problem is at the moment. Recently, by recently I mean over the last few years, I have put a lot of work in to my figure drawing almost reinventing my method altogether. With the last few projects I have tried to use a lot of real world reference for everything and complex perspective for all the backgrounds leaving me with a lengthy and time consuming working method. The results are good but it takes so long to work on each page that I’m not sure it’s a viable way to create comics. Every time I try to pair down or simplify the technique problems seem to rear there heads and pages start to look more then a little ropey.

So I have changed method to an older less precise way of working and gone back to my Zombie comic. Zombie Onslaught has a underground scratchy 70’s look to it that is a lot more forging of my mistakes and lets me experiment more with my art.

The first problem it highlighted was shading, I have become over reliant on tricks and stylized shapes and forgotten what it is I’m trying to do. The spiky sharp shadows have taken over and are no longer helpful in creating solid shapes. The backgrounds are blocky and uninteresting and the texture to every surface looks the same, I seem to have lost my way, the shapes I used to create image have taken over and become the focuses of the pictures themselves.

I’m looking forward (almost) to experimenting with the next few pages and I’m positive about what I could achieve if I can improve upon my current standard of work. A lot of the problems I have are ingrained flaws compounded over the years, the echoes of my teenage artwork and the problems I reinforced by trying to learn to draw from comics alone.

I've had a rather hectic time this last few weeks which has restricted me pretty severely from embarking on the kind of press offensive I had in mind following the launch of both Walking Wounded #1 and Bosher.

A promotional email to Bugpowder was reproduced more or less verbatim thanks to Dan Fish (who incidentally has rescued the site following a period of inactivity that threatened to kill it).

Still the impact of that post is hard to quantify. It doesn't appear in my Top 30 referrers stats for the month so I can't actually see if anyone has clicked through from it. Certainly Bugpowder has featured us a couple of time already - "in the vein of Solar Wind" was one of theirs. So it's a fair bet that a decent proportion of site visitors were already aware of us, if not our new ventures.

Other attempts to drum interest have so far not born fruit. I did fire off an email to John Freeman of Down the Tubes and I got a nice response indicating that he would promote us. He also pointed me in the direction of his comics on mobile phones venture, which I perhaps unwisely questioned the viability of. Certainly there's been no mention of Massacre on his site yet and I'm rapidly losing hope...

I should definitely be getting off my backside and firing out review copies of WW #1. I have sent some off to Silver Bullet Comic Books (beware unblockable popup) both to their Small Press section and also to Steven G Saunders the columnist who has previously supported us. Nothing online yet but I'm optimistic that these guys will come through for us in the end.

Next on the the list of promotional contacts are the Rebellion due of Matthew Badham and Matt Smith. The former because he's the guy who writes the many small press articles for Judge Dredd The Megazine (including one that promoted us), the latter because he's the editor of 2000AD and the Meg, and over a year ago accepted a strip of ours for as yet unconsummated publication. I'd like to show him what we've been up to in the interim.

After that it's submitting to the magazines for review: Comics International, RedEye, Playboy - okay, maybe not that last one. There's still a lot of promotion to do. The time when I can actually go back to creating comics is looking to be some way off...

I remember giving my email address out a few times at the Comix Thing, and one of those people I clearly gave it to was the eminent Edd Ache of Bollox Comics who has been organizing:

Alas, we're not contributing this year because we're in a short post-Thing break from Massacreland. Still, it's exactly the kind of thing the Walking Wounded or Bosher's Goals would suit, so maybe next year....

As promised, the conclusion to the film begun yesterday.

It was Steve's idea, I recall and was about the only time I ever wrote a script from his story. He was at art college and I was at university. This was a college project of his so he acquired the camera and came over to Winchester where I was currently living with most of the rest of the cast.

Ah, the heady days of 1995. We pretty much immediately embarked on another movie, an adaptation of HP Lovecraft's The Evil Clergyman. In many ways that was totally the wrong direction for us to go in. Dusk was intelligent and full of ideas. We made glossier looking, more professsional style movies subsequently but nothing so heartfelt or interesting. Ah well.

More of that later, but for now...

I used up some more bank holiday hours converting a 720MB MPG file into a 38MB WMV file using Windows Media Encoder and then splitting it into 2 files using Windows Movie Maker.

I did this so that I could place the very first Clergyman Film, Dusk, before the public. YouTube's 100MB and 10 minute limits had been an obstacle before, but thanks to the might of free Micro$oft software I can now present:

(Any copyrighted music that may have been added onto the soundtrack without my knowledge is absolutely nothing to do with me and definitely all Google's fault. So sue them.)

Find out how it ends tomorrow...

Thanks to a handy long weekend, I've gotten my act together sufficiently to sort out the Massacre For Boys website, adding Bosher's Goals: Hands on the Trophy and Walking Wounded: Hot Air to the web comics section and generally having a bit of a spring clean. Check it out.

I also took the wife off for a couple of days at a very nice country hotel enjoying the sunshine and the Sussex scenery.

Back to the day job tomorrow, but there's still plenty of promotion to be done to try and bring Massacre's wares to the world's attention. I scratched the surface a little today by firing off emails to Bugpowder and Down the Tubes but there's still loads more to do!

Thankfully, there's a couple of long weekends in May, so I might just get some stuff done before the summer really kicks in...

With the Thing safely behind us, the launch of Walking Wounded #1 proper is well under way.

In addition to our own website you can also buy the comic at ComiXpress, pretty handy, especially if you're based in the US of A.

I've also been in contact with Forbidden Planet and Smallzone and have struck up agreements in principal for those august institutions to carry Walking Wounded #1 too. Incidentally, Joe at Forbidden Planet is currently about my favourite person in comics after giving us the oxygen of publicity with this blog post.

Review copies are going to start going out soon, and hopefully that will lead to some exposure, even if it does take a whole to filter through.

To augment this media blitz a major update of the Massacre website is due, including adding the new webstrips Bosher's Goals: Hands on the Trophy and Walking Wounded: Hot Air. I'm currently beavering away in Dreamweaver and Fireworks to achieve this, and when it's ready I'll post here first, and then send out emails to comics news sites and random people who might like that kind of thing.

I've been busy as anything these last few weeks, but I have found time to vote for the Eagle Awards. The absolute ideal would be to make the nominations list next year, but I am not going to hold my breath because competition is fierce.