Continuing what is now a mighty push for exposure, I have setup a Massacre For Boys page on a certain MySpace-inspired comics community site:

Thankfully ComicSpace is not the horrifically formatted hell-on-the-web that MySpace has become so it's actually possible to look at the site for more than 15 seconds without your eyes threatening to melt.

Of course, pushing for publicity is one thing, but you still have to find time to do a bit of comic creation on the side. Having been a bit slack on this front for a while I have now warmed up again with a 5-page script for the 2008 Thing Anthology.

Some creators have dark opinions of the Thing's requirement for an anthology submission, but personally I love it. There's nothing like a brief of some kind to get the creative juices flowing. This year the strip has to have a giraffe in it, an inspired topic if ever there was one

Following my now usual research habits I took a trip to London Zoo to visit some real giraffes, amongst countless other exotic creatures. I can't say this helped me much but the script is set in a totally fictional wartime version of the zoo and it does indeed feature a giraffe.

You might think from the above that this is a Walking Wounded story a la last year's Zeppelin effort but no, in fact the strip will mark the debut of what is faux-chronologically Massacre's first ever character:

Jimmy Baker Animal Hatmaker

Bet you can't wait

In other news, we've had a spate of random spammings just recently, with some unscrupulous gits taking advantage of our open comments policy to try and sell random crap. If you're reading this Mr and/or Mrs Spammer, kindly fuck the hell off....

I have now booked our appearance at the UK Web and Mini Comix Thing 2008. This will be our second ever convention appearance following Massacre's debut at last year's Thing.

This brand new image is currently gracing the title page of the event's website:

Or at least, it is every so often!

The hard decision was which table to go for. We finally elected for Table 42, partly as it seems strategically located facing a row and partly because of Douglas Adams.

Of course, now this is all booked we have to make sure Walking Wounded #2 is actually finished in time. Damn deadlines!

I reckon it's probably time for a taster of Walking Wounded #2:

Technically it's not the first page of the Future Heroes story, but the sixth, and it may even end up being page seven of the actual comic. Still it's the first page to see the light of day.

We feel it's pretty representative of Walking Wounded as a whole, if not necessarily Future Heroes itself, (which has a retro Sci-Fi slant).

Steve received an interesting email this week:

Can you tell me if the following comic is still in production and if so is it web based or hardcopy.

If it is hardcopy then it will need depositing at the British Library under the Legal Deposit Act.

Full details can be found on our website at http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/legaldeposit.html .

Walking Wounded - The Resistance That Went Mad (comic)

I wasn't sure previously if we were big enough to bother about the British Library, but clearly it seems that we are. Copies of WW0 and WW1 are now sitting in an envelope and ready to go.

Any other small pressers out there should be aware that legally you need to send the BL a copy of your work within a month of publication. Hopefully the punishment for not doing so is mild as WW0 has been out for rather more than 31 days!

Still, looking forward to finding out what academics in a hundred years will make of our work. From the spectral plain, obviously.

What was I doing in Birmingham? (the answer is in the title to this entry) Getting to Birmingham was the hard part, the only day I could go was Sunday and I was going to have to travel from the south east coast to get there. After a initial logistical problems Chris and I had a plan in place and set it into faltering action. Faltering mostly due to the trains on Sundays I made the train portion in about the same time it takes to drive from just under London to Birmingham (the second portion of the journey). Anyway we got there, we found it found our way in and made our way round.

What I like most about comic conventions is that for the price of a trade paperback the artist or writer is compelled to talk to you until hew can find a way of politely ending the conversation. It’s brilliant, I got to quiz Sean Phillips for about 10 minuets when I purchased the last copy of the very good Criminal: Coward collection. Sean Phillips is an artist I have a great deal of respect for and I believe his painted work to be some of the strongest in comics.

I also spoke to PJ Holden over on the 2000ad table as well as Dave Evans and his budding artist son (I assume it was his son, there wasn’t a big sticker on him or anything.
Dave Evans, better known as Bolt-01 is probably the most respected and prolific publisher/editor in the small press and with good reason. He knows hoe to put together a comic and I think fairly soon his guiding editorial hand will be sending the next generation of UK creators into 2000ad and across the Atlantic.

Apart from Criminal all my purchases were UK small press titles. Although my funds are limited I do like to pick up a few small press items at all the shows. This time I got myself a copy of Dogbreath, Stack and Violent and read them all on the long journey home. After a hesitant start I think I like the convention scene, it’s good to meet both people you (internet) know and work with as well as the artist and writers producing the best comics around at the moment.

I was on the 2000ad review site and feeling in need of practice when I saw a post about how impractical Dredd’s costume is as how a 2000ad artist should try and update it. well I’m not a 2000ad artist but I do know a challenge when I see one so I drew a quick picture. Then one of the guys on the forum said how about an eagle in a flying off his shoulder look so I had a go at that too but the first one was better.

It's always nice to be appreciated and so I was very happy to come across this via the Massacre site stats:

http://www.comicsuk.co.uk/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=1607

Which in turn led me back to Felneymike's livejournal:

http://deathbringer.livejournal.com/

In particular his short but I feel excellent entry from 5:52pm on September 25th. It makes sense if you've read Walking Wounded #0!

And now it seems the esteemable poster, who has before visited this very blog, is starting his own small press venture:

http://www.crystal-knights.co.uk/

Which appears to have Sexton Blake in it. So frankly it's bound to be great.

PJ Holden has been extremely helpful. Just as I had given up hope of ever getting my foot in the door of comics PJ comes along and shows me a glimmer of light. Let me explain, a little wile ago I started posting some colouring I was doing as a last ditched attempt to claw my way into the medium and gain some credibility. I posted the first few pages about hear and there and it went largely unnoticed except on the pencil monkey forum run by none other then PJ Holden himself. Pencil monkey is a message board I would recommend to any small press or independent comics creator or any one interested in becoming involved in comics, it’s the best board for the UK small press scene.

One of the main reasons it’s so hard to break into comics is it’s tricky to know what’s expected of you. sure you can buy ‘how to’ books and you can watch tutorials on line (some of witch are quite interesting) but the insight you get is normally into how a particular artist works, not how the creative industry operates. Working with a seasoned professional is giving me an insight into what is expected and hopefully that will translate into credibility if I can scare up some work (and that’s another thing PJ has been helping with placing a link to me on his blog and making sure I know what ground to put my ear too). Also as an unexpected bonus PJ has asked me to colour a Strip for him written by Leah Moore and John Reppion and published by an independent American publisher. It’s all exciting stuff.

I mentioned before that I had never really thought of myself as a colourist and in these days of studio produced anonymous colouring that’s still true but there are plenty of artist, really good artist that colour other peoples work, Peter Doherty, d’Israeli and John Higgins either are colouring or have coloured other peoples work and 2000ad’s regular colourist are for the most part distinctive and high quality. It’s amazing the difference colouring can make to the artwork, it can compliment it or it can crap all over it and it’s amazing how little respect it gets. Veteran artist Ian Gibbson Had a bit of a rant about the faceless bland colouring we normally see in American comics and he’s right, how could anything produced by a studio on a production line ever have an artist touch or a distinctive feel? All the top comics look like they have been inked not just on computer but by a computer and the same computer at that. The differences between the artist are lost as the colour pulls everything together pushing out the nuances and making it look the same as everything else. Far from thinking that the colourist is unimportant I think it’s time for there importance to be recognised, I think it’s time for a colourist come back.

Looking back at this blog it struck me that it's a bit light on praise for The Greatest Comic Writer in history. I'll be making up for that over the next few posts, and to get things started, here's my hastily compiled Alan Moore Top 10:

1) Watchmen
2) Batman: The Killing Joke
3) League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vol 1
4) League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vol 2
5) From Hell
6) Top 10 Books 1 & 2
7) Halo Jones
8) V For Vendetta
9) Terra Obscura Book 1
10) Lost Girls

I won't go into any great detail about my choices right now, except to say that the more glaring ommissions are mostly due to my unfamiliarity with Swamp Thing and Miracle Man. I've read some of both but all of neither and I don't feel able to include them here.

Perhaps inevitably, Top 10 has to feature in a Top 10, and I've lumped both books together because they're fairly clearly the same story. By the same token I've counted both volumes of LXG separately. Okay that's a bit arbitary, but hopefully not in a credibility destroying way.

Arguably my most left field choice is Terra Obscura, which is co-written rather than fully authored by The Special One. Still I really felt it had something going for it, a lightness of touch, a compelling narrative, and in truth Book 2 is probably not far away from the Top 10 itself.