Several weeks have passed since my review copies have gone out but still no appraisal of Walking Wounded #1 has appeared.

There does seem to be a problem with getting small press comics reviewed, as they are seemingly of scant interest to mainstream magazines and sites yet those dedicated to independents seem little more than black holes. Certainly TRS2 is already in my bad books for failing to pass judgement on Walking Wounded #0, and they won't be alone unless some long-awaited reviews start appearing for the current issue.

More on my List of Shame in the coming weeks...

Meanwhile, if you are interested in graphic novels at knock down prices I suggest you check out your local MusicZone on a regular basis. This chain of DVD/CD retailers, formerly MVC, has gone bust twice in a year, but still seems to carry on regardless in some of the stores.

Over the last few months I've picked up Hellboy, Shade The Changing Man, Road to Perdition and Transformers books at silly prices, and just yesterday Slaine the King appeared for £2 and I had to greedily snap that one up too.

And finally, I loved this photo, from Neil Gaiman's journal of Gaiman with Alan Moore, taken at Moore's wedding:

Isn't that hat amazing?

Whilst not sorting out Massacre's mobile comic debut, I've been slowly but surely working my way through some Bristol purchases.

Scarlet Traces was neat, really loved the art and the story was fine. Perhaps it's a little too close to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen for comfort, but I think overall Edginton and D'Isreali carry it off.

The Eternals was fine, although I'm not really sure why Neil Gaiman works with Marvel these days. Certainly I don't like Marvel nearly as much as I like DC and I'd prefer my second favourite comics writer to stay with DC (particulary as my first favourite has such bad relations with them). I also would have preferred a proper ending, but heigh-ho.

Small press wise I have to say I was very impressed with Zarjaz a 2000AD fanzine that for me is so well put together that it's almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

Check it out.

In a complete change of computer colour direction I have decided to use flat colour to try and pull the focus of the images into the storytelling elements and working with the small scale. It is a very very short story with a small picture size so only takes about 30 seconds to read. Still it will be 30 seconds well spent.

So I started to draw the crusader Strip for mobile phones and things kicked off pretty well. After some tinkering with the size and a false start it just started to flow, helped no doubt by the experience from Bosher. I’m drawing the whole thing in little 10cm by 10cm squares and it seems to be the right size for the format. The 480x480 size on the web page displays at a bit larger then it’s drawn but the 240x240 shows up at about the right reduction. I’ve got as far as inks on frame 5 and hope to have all 11 done and be working it into colour on Friday with the strip finished by the end of Monday, no hanging about on this one!

Chris’s script uses the format brilliantly, there are very few words and no speech at all, just captions. I hope it all turns out as well as it looks like it will, I could be converted to the format.

After I am done with this it’s time to get back to the boys from the walking wounded for there time twisting adventure that was bumped from the first issue for…. Ummmm time reasons.

Definitely enjoyed my second Bristol Comic Expo even more than my first.

The day started with a pleasant enough drive along the M4, and then the unexpected bonus of free parking close to the event (Matthew's local knowledge coming up trumps there).

A quick cappuccino in the cafe next door (renovated since last year) followed and then we popped into the event to collect our free copy of the Beano and have an initial look round.

There was a really good selection of stalls, actually, and the combination of comic shops like Forbidden Planet and publishers such as Rebellion, not to mention representatives of UK, US and European creativity, gave the show an excellent balance across the different stratospheres of comicdom.

We made a beeline for Messrs Edginton and D'Israeli where I picked up my long anticipated signed-copy of Scarlet Traces and where Matthew seemed to buy pretty much their complete works. It was nice to speak to them both too as they are amongst my favourite creators these days.

Steve had a good chat with Bolt-01 of FutureQuake Press and collected his complimentary copy of Something Wicked #2, which was reportedly selling well. He also picked up some other stuff from their stand, including an issue of Strontium Dog fanzine Dogbreath, which could be significant, watch this space!

I was a little taken aback by some of the Manga action figures - there was a naked schoolgirl in peril theme! - and the Dalek also freaked me out. I may be 32 but those pepperpots are still scary. It was nice to see Boba Fett and Batman also wandering round, clearly the free entry to anyone in a costume promotion had the desired effect.

Lunch next door followed, a semi-excellent panini and then we braved the frankly relentless rain and resulting flooding and headed down to the Ramada for some panel-based action.

We arrived to find that the schedule had been put back. Matthew was undeterred and headed in to listen to Brian K Vaughan, but Steve and I were not so interested and thus went to the bar. Apparently we missed a really excellent lipstick lesbian joke so that was probably a mistake!

We three joined forces again to make the Blake's 7 audio presentation. As I feared it was not very impressive. Re-casting all the parts has really limited my interest and the fact that they've even changed the theme tune I find verging on the sacreligious. The model they have is obviously Battlestar Galactica but I'm not sure that audio adventures really appeal to the general audience so I think a Big Finish style fan-centric approach would have worked better.

There was something marvellous about the panel though and that was the clips from Blake's Junction 7, a spoof short film starring Martin Freeman and a host of other TV comedy stalwarts. It looked incredible and I want to see the complete movie right now:

After the Blakes 7 thing was done, we dodged Dave Gibbon's Hypotheticals (whatever that is) and returned to the main hall where I picked up the Eternals softcover and an issue of Zarjaz! and Matthew continued his hunt for all the 2000ADs that have ever featured Zenith. He actually succeeded, at least until Steve mentioned the Maximan strip in a long forgotten Winter Special, and then the search was back on!

As the exhibitors started packing up we decided it was time to go and headed back onto the M4 away from the Bristol rain and, eventually, into the Surrey sunshine. We'll be back next year, though, and hopefully with a Massacre For Boys stand to show for it.

Steve and I, along with my good friend and fellow comics buff Matthew, will be travelling to Bristol tomorrow for the Comic Expo.

Lots to see and do,but all three of us are particularly interested in seeking out Ian Edginton and D'Isreali, in the hope of signed Scarlet Traces goodness.

D'Israeli's exclusive poster for the event is pretty neat in itself:

I'm also aiming to catch the Blake's 7 audio launch (I suspect it will be poor, but I'm really interested to see) and let's not forget that Something Wicked #2 is being launched at the event, and that contains 6 pages of artwork by one of Massacre's own (i.e. not me, the other one).

Will let you know how it goes....

Work is soon to re-commence on Walking Wounded #2, but before that I've been warming up by penning a short script for a strip intended to see the light of day at comics-on-mobiles site www.rokcomics.com.

A mobile phone is perhaps not the ideal medium for reading comics (the screen is a bit small!) but it's certainly an intriguing idea if it can be made to work. Each panel starts of life normal-sized and is then shrunk to accommodate the pocket-sized nature of the device. This does mean that the lettering has to be on the large-size, as demonstrated on this example frame:

Only 6-words, but quarter of the screen, which definitely limits a writer's opportunities for verbosity! Each strip is also a maximum of 12-panels long, although you can string sets of strips together, obviously to make a longer if more expensive whole.

I've decided to use The Crusader, our superhero character who has thus far been kept on the back burners, and try to do something meaningful in just one strip. An interesting challenge, but also a rewarding one. Coming up with stories to fit pre-existing slots can be very enjoyable as well as stimulating the creative juices. Walking Wounded: Hot Air, for instance, came out of the need to fulfil a pretty specific brief.

Here's a panel from the script as a taster of what to expect:

3) SKAGMAN getting out of the back seat of his limousine. He’s wearing a mask and skin tight purple costume that is not in fact dissimilar from that worn by The Phantom, but in a copyright respecting way. In one hand Skagman’s holding a slim leather briefcase. He’s smiling in a smug manner.

CAPTION: SKAGMAN. THINKS HE’S A SUPERVILLAIN

Steve's going to be doing the artwork in colour, and if it's a success there will definitely be more of them.

As promised, here's a completed strip exclusive to the blog:

Bosher's Goal's: The Workhorse (originally called just Bosher on Sunday) was created at the same time as the main Bosher's Goals strip but as a submission to the Forbidden Planet catalogue. Sadly for us they decided not to use it (although FPI have been very good to MfB in other respects).

Subsequently we thought about putting it up on the Massacre site but it's too short really to count as a proper webstrip. Now we've decided to use The Work Horse as the back cover of Walking Wounded #2. Until that comes out, this is the the only place you'll be able to read it...

What more could you want? This story keeps on going much the same for the next few pages so I probably won’t Blog about it again. I think I have successfully re-introduced heavy blacks back into my comic work. After the next Pages of zombie onslaught I’ll be getting back to the walking wounded for a little while. If all goes to plan I should end up with 3 new comics to publish this year. Including the 48 page first part of this zombie action epic!

I did a whole page today and things are getting a bit better, no more redrawing frames until I start to crack up and lets hope I can keep that going.(although I did forget to draw spears backpack in the first frame so I’m going to have to add that) It’s not great, there is still a lot of work for me to do and a lot of observational drawing. Really I have just been adding a lot of shadow to how I was drawing any way.

By this time I had noticed that my frames were getting rather dull and started to make a effort to shake the angels up a bit. There are a lot of small frame to keep the action moving and no backgrounds to get in the way, always the fastest pages to draw. It’s not easy to get yourself bogged down on the kind of comic book bred and butter pages that a 16 year old should be able to do, hopefully not as well though.

It’s not that I’m unhappy with my artistic voice, the way I draw is the way I draw and I’m very happy to have my own artistic look. I do feel there is still a lot further I can go with improving the basics of my artwork, the figures and the clothes in particular and so long as I keep my work rooted in reality and find some time to do a good body observational drawing I can see it coming on.

Page 28 actually finished up ok, there’s still plenty I’m not happy with but on the whole I’m glad it’s over. The last 2 frames are a fairly simple pull back to reveal shot wit some wonky perspective and some dodgy poses. Lots of zombies walking around so a fair bit of detail, shockingly boring frame brake downs and really dull angels. The majority of my brake downs and angels are a bit dull at the moment, something else to think about. The next few pages are an orgy of violence, can’t really go wrong there.

Right, I've had enough of a break, time to get back to work.

You may recall that we launched this comic recently:

Well, now it's available to buy at the following highly reputable online retailers:

Forbidden Planet (UK based)

ComiXpress (US based)

Of course, you can also get it at the Massacre for Boys website and there's also webcomics up there too, if you've not seen them yet and you're not feeling like dipping your hand in your pocket just at the moment.

In other news I've created a new blog header and planned out a short Crusader story, more details on that one soon.

We're going to be at the Bristol Comic Expo on May 13th, but only in a personal capacity. Possibly it's a bit too soon in Massacre's history to go for The Big One, convention-wise.

Still, excitingly, Steve at least is going to have some new work debuting at the show. Something Wicked #2 features 6-pages of random-chance magic. Here's a snippet of Steve's completed artwork the editor's been using to promote the launch:

Okay, that's my lot for now. But I'll be back in the next few days with an exclusive completed strip, so stick around.

It didn’t take too long to re-draw this frame witch is good as it isn’t anything to shout about any way. The artwork looks back on track but still not really going any were if the next few frames go ok I’ll stop complaining all the time and get back to work in earnest, if it goes badly I’ll probably start going crazy.

Yesterday it took me all day to draw one small simple frame, one small picture of Spears loading his shotgun. Sometimes I get caught in a loop, the loop of redrawing the endless loop of redrawing but never really improving. Today I’m going to give the second frame of page 28 a going over and see if I can complete it without the endless problems of the last few frames. If it goes well who knows I may even finish the page. A lot of it comes down to confidence, when my confidence takes a knock my lines all tighten up and everything becomes stiff, my work regresses and I make mistakes I wouldn’t of been happy with 15 years ago. A few good pages and hopefully I’ll snap out of it.

Feeling a little trapped again and not really knowing were to go with my artwork I bought a how to draw book today. I know what I need to do, I need to spend a bit of time drawing from life and no book is going to help with that. About the best I can hope for is a few useful tips and tricks. Bighting the bullet and taking more reference photos and working more from life is the only way to learn and I know it but it’s not an easy way to work.

I think I’ll have one more go at drawing the way I worked with Island of terror but if it all falls apart again I’m going to need to reinvent my work from the ground up and that could take some time.