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Kerrang! interview and LBDSM Three

Kerrang! interview and LBDSM Three

Kerrang!, the world’s biggest-selling weekly rock magazine, have featured my 44FLOOD folk-horror comic HERETICS for the second time. Kerrang! have published a full-length interview with me and Martin Simmonds about the origins of the series, how the Manson Family played into its conception and the series ties to all kinds of rock, metal and punk.

This week on Saturday 4 February 2017 I’ll be…

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I’ll be sharing a table at Thought Bubble with Martin Simmonds (Death Sentence: London) on 5 and 6 November 2016. On Friday 4 November from 7pm until late we’ll also be at the HERETICS exhibition launch party of folk-horror art inspired by our upcoming 2017 @44flood series, created by me, Martin Simmonds and series editor @kasraghanbari. Contributing artists include Martin Simmonds, @templesmith, @johnjpearson, @casparnovacomics, Conor Boyle, Stevie-Leigh Smith, Luke Axworthy, Anna Fitzpatrick, Sarah Gordon, @jamesusill, Alisdair Wood and @chamonkee. HERETICS - NOBODY IS ABOVE TEMPTATION

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‘The Frog King’, created by @PMBuchan & @inkfunnel for Starburst Magazine issue 390 in June 2013. Based on the Brothers Grimm version of The Frog Prince. I loved this strip when we were working on it and I still love it now!

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Becky Cloonan and Andy Belanger interview plus All Roads Lead To Hell

Becky Cloonan and Andy Belanger interview plus All Roads Lead To Hell

SCREAM horror magazine issue 38 is now on sale, featuring my interview with Becky Cloonan and Andy Belanger about the second story arc of their Image series Southern Cross, the first issue of which goes on sale in comic stores today. Becky and Andy were a lot of fun to interview and had some great about the 80s-culture zeitgeist, Event Horizonand ambitions to create creepy erotica! The interview…

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‘All Roads Lead To Hell’, created by @pmbuchan Martin Simmonds & Jim Campbell for Disconnected Press in 2012. “I was 16 years old the first time that I died.” Probably my favourite opening line I’ve ever written. I can’t believe that four years have passed since we made this strip. It’s a little raw in places and we’ve both grown as storytellers in the years since, but Martin and I will have a big announcement to make later this year and it all grew from our collaboration on ‘All Roads Lead To Hell’. I can’t thank Lizzie and Conor enough for introducing us!

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‘The Fall’ was created by @alwyntalbot & @PMBuchan for Starburst Magazine issue 376, April 2012. Suicide Squad week seemed like a good time to re-publish this strip, which is probably the only superhero story I’ve ever worked on and pays homage to classic Batman strips like The Killing Joke and Red Hood. It wasn’t an entirely successful experiment, we tried to fit too much into too small a space (my fault!) and I couldn’t afford a letterer so Alwyn had to letter his own work, but I always liked the sentiment of the strip and loved the characters Alwyn designed for Missfit and, um, the hero whose name I can’t remember.

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′Sleeping with the fishes’ was created with @leonieomoore and lettered by Mike Stock. We created this strip in July 2012 for Starburst Magazine issue 380. This was my love letter to Maakies and Tony Millionaire, with characters that are an extension of the Frank strips I first started self-publishing when I was still in university. The Prawn of the Dead is probably my favourite joke that nobody ever laughed at. In 2012 I also created the pitch for a series called ‘Life of the Dead’ with Leonie and Mike, which I might also post online if Leonie agrees. Also, any friends of @jackfallows might recognise our loving tribute here to the stinky sasquatch.

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‘Harajuku Poison Heart’, created with @laughingindio for Starburst Magazine issue 380 in August 2012, before Indio came to national attention for his British Comic Award-shortlisted Raygun Roads with @owenmichaeljohnson. This strip was originally written to be a collaboration with Andy Bloor (co-creator of @midnightmancomic) but he had to pull out at the last minute. Indio saved the day by drawing ‘Harajuku Poison Heart’ in record time, even though it’s a far cry from his normal style.

The idea for this strip came from research I’d been doing into Japanese cannibals that had either escaped imprisonment or been released from jail and were enjoying celebrity status, which just seemed too bizarre not to write about. I began thinking about what it would feel like to see this hero worship towards someone that had eaten someone you cared about, then that idea became jumbled with Japanese endurance gameshows and the notion of a televised poison-eating competition...

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‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’ was illustrated by @alwyntalbot in 2012 for ‘Doomed Romantics’, a graphic novel anthology of Dark Romanticism that unfortunately never found a publisher. Envisioned as a collection of comic-book adaptations of Romantic poems by John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, there were some fantastic artists and writers attached at pitch stage, so it was heartbreaking that we couldn’t find a home for it.

Anybody familiar with ‘Isabella’ will notice from the sample pages above that we’ve taken a few liberties with the source material and that we skipped ahead to some of the action for the final sample page. This was everything that I created for the pitch with Alwyn, who’s also an incredible concept and production artist for games and film. Along with ‘Christabel’, created with @annafitz, this post concludes the material that was created for the ‘Doomed Romantics’ pitch.

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‘Christabel’ was illustrated by @annafitz in 2012 for ‘Doomed Romantics’, a graphic novel anthology of Dark Romanticism that unfortunately never found a publisher. Envisioned as a collection of comic-book adaptations of Romantic poems by John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, there were some fantastic artists and writers attached at pitch stage, so it was heartbreaking that we couldn’t find a home for it. I’m still working with Anna today so it wasn’t entirely a lost cause, but it felt criminal that more eyes didn’t see ‘Christabel’.

This collects all the material Anna and I created for ‘Christabel’. Anybody familiar with the poem will know that it was one of Coleridge’s unfinished fragments, and I’d planned what I thought would be a natural ending, but it seems unlikely the comic will ever be finished now. The front and back covers were created by longtime collaborator ‘Death Sentence: London’ artist Martin Simmonds. Hopefully next I’ll be able to share the other pitch pages from ‘Doomed Romantics’, which were from an adaptation of ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’ by me and @alwyntalbot. I’ll share these as soon as I’ve checked that he’s happy for me to post them.

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SCREAM 37 and more free horror comics

SCREAM 37 and more free horror comics

SCREAM issue 37 is now on sale, featuring ‘The Beast of Liverpool’, my four-page interview with John Reppion, co-writer of SelfMadeHero’s upcoming M R James graphic novel anthology, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary: Volume 1. I spoke to John about how Liverpool has influenced his work, whether or not it’s still cool to hate Lovercraft and how his peers are all flying around in helicopters drinking…

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‘Embrace the Dark’, illustrated by Martin Simmonds and lettered by Michael Stock, was created for Starburst Magazine issue 382, published in October 2012. This was the first time I worked with Martin, who is currently illustrating @montynero‘s Death Sentence: London, published by @titancomics. I met Martin through Lizzie and Conor Boyle’s Disconnected Press, who teamed us up on a story for their anthology ‘Disconnected Volume 2′. I really hit the jackpot, discovering an artist that loved drawing goats, skulls and pentagrams as much as I loved writing about them. \m/

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‘Colt 45′, a true story by @pmbuchan & @pipgreed. This is one of my oldest comic strips and first collaborations with Phil Marsden (now a frequent @kerrangmagazine illustrator), collected in our DIY Blackout #4 sometime around 2010 but never seen since. This strip is based on a true story from growing up in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, and happened to me when I was walking home from Cuba Cuba nightclub one Friday night, aged 17 or so. There was more to the story, and I *did* see one of the girls that kidnapped me again, but I’m not sure any of them will ever have seen this comic. This was the first time I had the confidence to write honestly about my real life without disguising everything, and it felt pretty good. Never be ashamed of your past, unless, like me, it involved drinking until you blacked out and lots of stuff you don’t remember.

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‘Not Now, Bernie’, by @pipgreed (Phillip Marsden) and @pmbuchan, created for Starburst Magazine issue 375, March 2012. Inspired, of course, by the children’s book ‘Not Now, Bernard’, which reinforces the amazing childhood fear that a monster will eat you and grown-ups won’t even notice. This is one of my only full-colour comic strips with Phil (who has done a lot of illustrations for @kerrangmagazine since) and one of my favourites that we’ve done together. This strip hasn’t been reprinted since 2012, so unless you were one of the early subscribers when Starburst returned to print then you probably won’t have seen it before.

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Tourou Nagashi, illustrated by Karen Yumi Lusted, was my last comic strip for SCREAM: The Horror Magazine, for their first colour special, back when the magazine was still printed in black-and-white. I was reading and watching a lot of Higurashi: When They Cry when I wrote this one, and wanted to channel those ideas into something original.

Karen and I are still working together on the four-part series La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the third issue of which will be out this year. This is much later than we’d originally planned, but we’re both committed to completing and collecting the series as we’d originally envisioned.

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Another AMAZING piece of art by @annafitz!

X Marks the Spot.

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Esben and the Witch, illustrated by bearded deviant @pipgreed, was my last black-and-white comic strip for SCREAM: The Horror Magazine​. Phil Marsden and I used to work together at a fine comic-book store called Travelling Man in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England, before he started doing illustrations for @kerrangmagazine. Luckily he had no qualms about drawing my moralistic filth.