Jungle Jim Variant Cover

My variant cover for KING: Jungle Jim #4 hits stores tomorrow from Dynamite Comics. Can you spot a theme?

Cons, Creations and Kronos City

Had a brilliant time at #BICS this weekend, which saw the launch of the Sleepless Phoenix: Suvival anthology that holds Andrew Croskery, Andy Brown and myself's 'Welcome to Absolution'. The book marks Andrew's first printed work, but it won't be long before you see more as he signed up his, Alex Wilmore and Lauren Ann Sharp's 'Kronos City' graphic novel with TimeBomb over the weekend.

The anthology sold so well (on top of a ton of preorders) that Lauren and co. are going to continue publishing and hopefully bring out another anthology next year.

It was brilliant meeting up with everyone, and a couple of comicbook opportunities may have presented themselves. Bring on MCM next week. Here's a Hellboy sketch I'll be bringing with me:

Absolute zombies!

I'd had an inkling to do a zombie western for a while and after a wild night of geek chatting at one of the Belfast comics creators meetings, Andrew Croskery went home and wrote the script for 'Welcome to Absolution'

I pencilled the four page comic and we somehow managed to convince Andy Brown (Publisher of Beserker comics and Slaughterman's Creed inker) to greyscale-paint over my pencils and David Withers lettered it up.

We're showcasing the whole story as part of the 'Tales of the Undead' collection on talesofthe.com (the Northern Irish creative showcase) and its just gone live, so click here to read the whole strip. It should also see print in a soon-to-be-name print anthology that will be available at BICS this year.

Here's a little breakdown of how the process for this one went:

Andrew's Script:

The original idea was to draw this as a 19 panel tabloid sized spread for the Gaurdian comic strip competition last year, but we hadn't realised the deadline was a few days later, so Andrew's script was originally written as such.

Welcome to Absolution

"Panel 1: Wide panel, establishing shot. Preacher Joe is riding on a mangy horse on a small dirt road. It is night time, with a big hammer horror moon. He is riding towards a small, western town. There are still a few lights on in the town, particularly the inn.

We don’t see the preacher at all clearly but something is in his demeanour that suggests despair, guilt, dismay.

The horse he is riding is a bag of bones, making its way towards the town through sheer force of will – step after determined step.

In front of a town is one of those old ‘Welcome’ town signs. It says: ‘Welcome to Absolution. Population 300.’ Except the 300 has been ‘x’ed out with what looks o be blood and replaced with a smaller number. Maybe need to do some research on the size of towns in those days.

Panel 2: Preacher Joe has ties his horse to the outside of the inn. He is leaning against the open door frame, staring in. Again, we can’t see him clearly in the darkness, but he seems hesitant to enter the establishment. We can see the dog sitting chewing on something in the background.

Panel 3: Preacher is now in the inn. He has stopped at a desk. There is a ledger on it, with a few names written on it. The writing of the last name tails off and the pen marks slides down the page like the person who was writing it had slumped to the ground while he was writing his name.

There are a bunch of bunches of keys scattered on the desk with key fobs and numbers attached to them. The preacher has picked one up.

Panel 4: In the dimly lit room, the preacher makes his way across, pushing his way past tables, brandishing an oil lantern.

Voice from behind him: “Been a while since we had new blood around here, sugar.”

Panel 5: Preacher spins around towards the voice, brandishing his lantern in its general direction. We can see a dim figure of Jezebel, sitting with her legs crossed, drinking from a bottle of scotch.

Preacher: “Who’s there?”

Voice: “And a preacher no less. Why don’t you scooch on over, honey? I sure do got some sins that need forgivin’.”

Panel 6: The preacher steps towards the woman.

Preacher: “I think not, woman, but maybe we can pray for your torment-”

Preacher: “Gasp!”"

Loose pencils by myself:


For traditional comic format, I broke the spread down to four pages. I chose the first 6 panels to show on page 1 so we ended on a bit of page-turner. Andy and I were figuring out how to collaborate on the art so I sent him the layouts/scribbly pencils below as a work in progress.

A tighter version of the pencils:

Andy said he'd like all the structure to be there, but I should tighten as much as I wanted and he'd do the  painted finishes.

Annotated layer:


I sent the above image to Andy via email and since I wasn't doing the finishes myself, I added a Tiff layer of annotations for some of the points that weren't quite clear in the pencils. You can click below to see what I wrote, but beware that it spoils a lot of the plot and twists in the story. So go read the full strip first if you haven't already.

Paints by Andy:


Andy sent me back the brilliant pages, which were even more detailed and atmospheric than I'd imagined.

Lettered by David:


Some very cool lettering added by David that really adds to the atmosphere.

Great, fun collaboration that created art a lot different from any other project.

One month later...

Haven't blogged in almost a month, been really busy with the Torchwood strip, which I've now finished, and had some sort of event almost every weekend. Here's a very quick summary of all the exciting happenings:


2D festival: 

It started so nicely...

Ended wildly...

Was fun meeting up with the just-beyond-local comics scene; Tommie Kelley, the Berserker folk, Sunnyside comics fellows, Longstone comics, Aidan Courtney of Ri Ra,  Bridgeen Gillespie, Ciaran Lucas, Will Simpson, Gary Leach, Paddy Brown and of course 2D organiser David Campbell.

Bon Jovi:

The weekend after was a trip to London for a long weekend to see the infamous Bon Jovi. Aimee is a big fan,  We'll say no more.

Q-con:


This past weekend was the Q-con in Belfast. Mostly a gaming convention, the comics section and artists alley grew a little this year and looks to continue to do so. PJ Holden, Paddy Brown and Ciaran Lucas were again in attendance. Cancertown continued to sell comparatively well considering the gaming/anime audience, and a nice amount of commissioned sketches were drawn as well.

Here's one such sketch of Mickey Rouke's Whiplash giving it to Iron Man:

(It's a photo taken from my phone, so excuse the quality)

Torchwood:

As I mentioned, the 11 page Torchwood strip is finished. I handled the pencils and inks on this one and its set to be published in the Titan Torchwood magazine on 19th August. I think there are plans to reprint it in the US comicbook version at some point as well.

Talesofthe.com:


Tales of the... is currently hosting a zombie collection of stories. A short Rhyme of mine is up there today inspired by a bloody fantastic Zombie portrait by Ryan Brown. Clickity here to read.


Future travels:


Myself and Aimee are heading off traveling this Summer around Belize, the West coast of America, then Thailand and a little stop-off in Dubai on the way home so I don't know how regular this blog will be. We're not heading off for a few weeks though and I've a few things to show, so I'll try to keep the weekly schedule until then...

I'm drawing a Torchwood comic..

As the title quite plainly states I've been asked to draw a Torchwood comic. Its an 11 page story that will be published within the Torchwood Magazine that's available not only in comic stores, but Easons, WHSmiths and all good newsagents nationwide! Quite excited about this one as I'm a fan of the show, not to mention it'll be my first real foray into licenced characters.

Unfortunately I can't mention anything about the story, other than the fact it involves Torchwood and aliens, or even show any art as everything needs to be approved by the BBC. The strip should be great fun to draw though, with great action sequences, set pieces and some nice character work.

It all came about after I went for a Titan portfolio review with Martin Eden, the Torchwood comics editor at BICS last October. If you're a creator and needed a reason to go to a comic con, apart from the great geek drink-a-thon, there's one right there. Martin will be at Bristol this year again launching issue two of Spandex, so you should stop by his table and check it out.

I'll be at the Bristol International Comics and Small Press Expo myself this weekend coming (ash cloud permitting), doing sketches, having a nosy, a drink and there's a Cancertown signing scheduled at the Mercure for 2:30pm of the Saturday and midday on Sunday.

Hopefully see a few of you there and more details on the Torchwood project as it develops...

Rí Rá

I drew a two page strip for an Irish language kids comics named Rí Rá sometime around last Christmas and just got my copies in the post this past weekend. The comic is a great looking little package with a host of Irish and European talent creating short strips for the anthology.

I can hold a simple conversation in Irish but I wouldn't consider myself fluent, so when I met Aidan Courtney at the Dublin Comic con last year and mentioned submitting something to him I brought on board an Irish language teaching friend of mine, Finnbar Christie. Since my style of art, even in this more cartoonish form, doesn't really suit slapstick humour, I came up with a simple plot and asked Finnbar to write a poem over my layouts. Aidan liked this idea, something different from the other strips and ties in nicely with the expansion of Irish literature which was one of the main goals of the comic.

I created the whole artwork, from linework to colours to letters, about 95% digitally in Photoshop. I think I drew one of the panels on page 2 by hand, but ended up changing it a lot in PS anyway.

Here is page one of my strip. If you want to find out what happens to our title character you'll have to buy the comic. Does he hate school? Will he like it? Will he get expelled for setting it on fire? OK that last option is the least likely considering the target audience is 8-14 year olds but hopefully you'll be able to follow most of the stories by just looking a the art even if you don't read Irish (and theres a glossary at the back if you want to pick some up).

And here's the cover art by the wonderful Bob Byrne.


I

'm not sure exactly where you'll find copies of Rí Rá. I know it's on its way to a lot of Irish bookstores and Libraries, including www.ennisbookshop.ie but if you want a copy you can contact coimicigael or Aidan direct.

Tomorrow is the end of my blog-a-rama nd come back then and I'll prob be back to the regular Wednesday and Sunday schedule after that.