Leading Comic Artist

Agents of TIME

2011-10-31T22:33:00.010Z

This is my strip from 24 Hour Comic Day 2011, written and drawn at Plan B Books in Glasgow between 3pm on Friday 30th September and 2pm on Saturday 1st October. Thanks to Tom and Pete for the coffee and to Garry McLaughlin of Cosmic Designs for organising things. If I'd tried to do this at home alone I'd have given up halfway through!

One Hundred and Eighty

2011-09-28T19:45:00.008Z

I mentioned in the last post that I'd lost some weight recently. This is actually kind of a big deal.

I haven't always been a flabster. There was a time when my brother Robbie was the chubby one and I was actually quite lean, kept in trim by a high-impact/low-repetition exercise regime of my own design which incorporated elements of dance, improvised drama, freestyle martial arts and parkour.

I called it playing outside.

By the time I was nine or ten, though, the Powers That Were at my primary school came to the conclusion that I should have grown out of such nonsense, and that if I wasn't going to channel my physicality into monomaniacally chasing a football around like everyone else, the best thing was that I should spend playtimes as a Front Door Monitor, and learn to conduct myself with Dignity and Decorum.

And so, incrementally, the lard began to accumulate... assisted, in time, by puberty and the greater appeal of sedentary pursuits like comics and roleplaying games versus football and violence (which seemed to be the only alternatives available, especially as the then District Council was closing swimming pools left right and centre at the time). I never got especially huge by comparison with some of the kids you see waddling around today, but this was an era when even playing video games generally meant walking a mile or so to the nearest arcade, so there were just fewer overweight teenagers around, and we stood out. I was only about 11 1/2 stone (160lbs) by the time I went to university, and 13 or so by my mid-20s - but at my eventual height and lacking any significant muscle tone or upper body strength, I felt pretty fat and unattractive for much of that time.

If you'd asked me, though, I'd have said that certainly I'd like to be slimmer, but I was used to it, and prepared to accept the spare tyre as a small price to pay for not having to wear hideous polyester sportswear or spend hours every day on the sort of repetitive and boring workouts I imagined losing weight would entail. There was a lot of received wisdom floating around that I picked up - dieting doesn't work, you need to go to a gym three times a week, and so on - and I just figured it was time I could be spending doing more interesting things.

But then, early in the new millennium, my friends began to retreat from the club scene and settle down, which meant I wasn't going dancing three nights in a row anymore; I started working in offices, and commuting by public transport rather than walking everywhere in town; and within a couple of years I ballooned. By 2004 I was 17 1/2 stone (245lbs), and just trying to find trousers in my size was a challenge (and depressing even when I succeeded, since the W40+ rails at M&S and Debenhams do not exactly cater to the more flamboyant gentleman). I started keeping an eye on my weight, and managed not to get any heavier over the next few years - but I couldn't shift any of it: short of caving in to the exercise-fascism I'd hated for twenty years, I simply didn't know how, and taking up jogging or something was out of the question anyway considering I could barely run for the bus without my heart and lungs bursting.

So that was the weight I stayed, all through my time in Shetland and for the half-decade following. This was me, at my mum's Significant Birthday in January this year:

(I'm the cackling Bond villain in the mustard weskit, obviously. Not my finest hour.)

That meal was the final event of a six-week festival of overindulgence even by my standards, which left me feeling so bloated, sluggish and uncomfortable in my own skin that I swore off puddings for a week, just to give my gut a rest. I wasn't intending to lose weight by doing so - it was more of a breather than a deliberate diet - but I felt better for it, so I kept it up for another week after that... and then another, and another... until by the time of the Glasgow Film Festival in February people who knew me were already starting to comment on how much trimmer I suddenly looked.

And it was true. I lost a full stone that first month, just by not eating cake. I hadn't even stopped drinking, let alone taken up any physical activity I wasn't already doing. I was astonished - surely it couldn't be this easy? I decided to carry on and find out - and sure enough, as the weeks went by, the fat continued to fall away. By mid-April I actually began to worry that it was coming off too quickly, and that I'd be left at whatever size I ended up swathed in hanging folds of once-taut skin like what's-his-name from Marvel's Generation X, looking even worse naked than when I'd started. So I started going swimming once a week, or twice if I could fit it in, figuring that hauling 100kg of meat through a resistant medium with my arms was as good a way of toning up as I could think of... but that was three months in, remember: it wasn't how I started, and I probably wouldn't have done it if I hadn't already felt lighter, brighter and more energetic than I'd been in years.

I've just dropped below 13 stone now, a weight I once thought I'd never see again. The last time I was this size somebody described me as looking like a sack of potatoes tied in the middle, but having now come back to it from the other direction, and in the middle of an obesity epidemic at that, I feel practically svelte. I mean, I've still got manboobs and lovehandles, and Men's Health and Attitude are not yet engaged in a bidding war for my swimsuit pics, but my shoulders are wider than my hips for the first time since John Major was in power, my arms are stronger than they've ever been, and I'm wearing a pair of vintage Calvin Klein jeans I bought in a charity shop in 1999 and haven't been able to squeeze into since before the Twin Towers came down. And I'm not done yet – if I keep going at this rate, by Christmas I'll be the weight I was as a teenager, and in considerably better shape.

I remain astonished at how easy it's all been. The secret?

Eat when you're hungry, and for no other reason. Not because it's "lunch time" or because you're bored, upset or watching a DVD. My worst habit used to be eating for inspiration - if I got stuck composing a drawing, or I was waiting for something to dry, I'd make a cheese sandwich or something while I thought about what to do next. Multiply that several times a day for ten years and you're asking for trouble. I'm on one proper meal a day now, plus maybe some toast or a bowl of cereal, and for a still mostly-sedentary lifestyle that's all I seem to need. Apart from lots of coffee, obviously.
No cake, pudding, or sweets. This is more of a guideline - I've had the occasional profiterole or squishy Haribo novelty these past few months, if somebody's offered me one of theirs - but once I dropped out of the habit of eating chocolate, say, it's amazing how little I've missed it. On principle, I refuse to miss out on my Christmas pud and brandy butter, but one day's indulgence is not going to reverse the general trend.

And that's it. No special recipes, no cardio, no weights, no calorie counting, just a shift of attitude. I decided I wanted to wear normal sized clothing more than I wanted another chocolate brownie, and bam: pretty soon I'm going to need a whole new wardrobe.

Where I Have Been. What I Have Been Doing.

2011-09-15T14:29:00.005Z

It's been an interesting summer.

The Glasgow Comic Festival went very well, and Burke & Hare won two of the inaugural Scottish Independent Comicbook Awards (Best Writer and Best Graphic Novel). I did my first convention panels, alongside the likes of David Lloyd, Jon Haward and Frank Plowright, and the whole thing ended up with a rather marvellous party and the artistic desecration of some game young ladies' alabaster epidermes. Only the following morning did anyone sober up enough to think that maybe water-based ink, rather than Sharpie marker, might have been a kinder medium for that...

The con's organisers are also behind Black Hearted Press, a new comics publisher with several titles on the slate. Black Maria and Laptop Guy have had debut issues out already, and School of the Damned #1 is back from the printers and ready to ship. Next up after that, though, is Black Hearted Love, a romance anthology with a twist for which I've drawn a couple of pages - more info on release dates when I have it.

I landed some work as an extra on World War Z, about which all I'm allowed to say is that it involved a lot of running. Really, a lot. It's a good job I've lost weight this year, because six months ago I wouldn't have made it through the first day. Great fun though. The film comes out in December 2012, just in time for no-one to see it because the world's ended.

The same day as my costume fitting for that, I attended the crew screening of another movie I'm in: Electric Man, a low-budget heist comedy about comic collectors in Edinburgh. A whole bunch of Scottish comics people appear as background, mostly in the convention scene, although Gaf Austin of Deadhead Comics has the best cameo of all.

Bad news: Wasted magazine has gone onto an online-only hiatus for what appear to mostly financial reasons, so it looks unlikely I'll be drawing any more any more of Alan Grant's It Came From Outer... Spaced! any time soon. SICBA Best Artist Alex Ronald's Vampire Vixens of the Wehrmacht is also temporarily homeless, but I gather he has plans afoot for it.

These things happen, as we know. The good news: Burke & Hare has a new publisher! The first edition will continue to be available in the UK direct from the website while stocks last, but Gary Reed, formerly of Caliber Press, is now handling international orders through his Transfuzion imprint - the new edition appears in this month's Diamond Previews under order code SEP11 1245 for distribution in November. Gary also published Martin's and my first collaboration, an issue of the spooky-detective series Raven Chronicles, more years ago than I care to consider, and it's a pleasure to be working with him again. The new front cover is once again by the redoubtable Rian Hughes, and looks (of course) great. If we're very lucky we might have a few collector's-item import copies for sale at Thought Bubble, but it depends on the timing.

Right now I'm juggling half a dozen projects at once, and looking forward to 24 Hour Comic Day at the end of the month. Life is pretty good.

It's Back!

2011-06-15T13:13:00.006Z

The SOMETHING FAST COLLECTED EDITION is back in stock - it just arrived from the printers. Huzzah! I'll have copies with me at the Glasgow Comic Con on Saturday, priced at a tenner so I don't have to faff about with change - or you can purchase it direct from the link in the sidebar here at cover price.

184 pages of snappy dialogue, over-the-top action, weirdass conspiracy theories and psychic hoodoo; plus of course my usual impeccable period detail based on extensive research - I was in the nineties for ten years, how's that for dedication? All digitally remastered, as they used to say in the Old Times.

"Something Fast was the first small press comic I ever read. I remember reading it back in the day and thinking "I wanna do this"… It was pure genius." – Jim (Ganjaman) Stewart

Psst...

2011-05-31T09:57:00.002Z

It might be a good time to mention that I'm selling off parts of my comic collection at
http://comic-cupboard.blogspot.com/

Dressing Up In Costumes, Playing Silly Games

2011-04-14T07:21:00.014Z

When cosplay goes right:

It was nice at Kapow! to see people wandering around dressed as characters I actually recognised - I think the anime/manga crowd must have been saving their efforts for MCM. There were many more than these two, but they're both favourites of mine.

The girls were good too, although there was a lot of duplication - I counted three Poison Ivys and at least four Black Cats (the two Ms Marvels don't count as one was in the original costume, the other the current one - both of them together would have been a good shot to get) - but as delicious as some of them were, they just looked fragile compared with the sheer awesomeness of what I was sitting across the aisle from all weekend.

You want cartoon action heroines? These girls are the real deal:

Members of the London Rockin' Rollers roller derby league, including my new friend/muse Fonda Kaos (centre). I had to have the whole thing explained to me, but as near as I can figure it's kind of like British Bulldog on wheels, except hot. Not pictured because she was only there on the Saturday: the pneumatic Derby Stopout, unanimously acclaimed winner of the Irving Forbush Award for Best Ass in the Room... Fortunately, I like to draw:

And once I'd started...

What Cebulski Didn't See

2011-04-11T07:07:00.007Z

It's a pity Marvel talent scout CB Cebulski had to cancel his portfolio review session at the London Cartoon Museum on Friday. Oh well, maybe next year. At least I was spending the rest of the weekend at Kapow! anyway, so my disappointment was less acute than some people's.

Most of the stuff I had to show was my general portfolio, but I did knock out a couple of pages specially...

Even I'm surprised how strongly the influence of John Romita Senior shows through, but those were the Spider-Man comics I read as a kid and his character likenesses are still definitive for me. I'm also pleased that the scenario I came up with gave me an excuse to get the classic half-mask effect in there!

Glasgow Comic Mart

2011-03-31T08:18:00.002Z

Talking About Comics at the Glasgow Film Festival

2011-03-21T07:57:00.006Z

ON WRITING:

Mark Millar is the best-selling author of Kick-Ass, Wanted, The Ultimates and more. After a few early flops, he reinvigorated his career in the 199os with a period as kid sidekick to the mighty Grant Morrison, before going on to eclipse his mentor with a less cerebral, more populist style of writing that left fewer readers scratching their heads in confusion and so lent itself readily to translation for the big screen. A master self-publicist as well as an unstoppable character factory, he probably has a stronger claim than anyone to being the Stan Lee of the 21st Century.

ON DRAWING:

Frank Quitely is the artist of The Greens, WE3, Flex Mentallo, and well-regarded runs on New X-Men and Batman and Robin, amongst other things. By his own admission not the most punctual scribbler in the business, with a tendency to overthink composition at the expense of actually drawing (hmm, sounds familiar), he keeps getting work anyway because he's just so damn good.

ON INTERACTIVITY:

Mika Stoyanova is an American academic working with the concept of heterotopia, or playspace, and the ways in which people - particularly gamers - interact with fictional worlds. One of her themes is that postmodern critical theorists have underestimated the interactivity of traditional artforms, and that narrative media such as comics and film offer a route to rediscovering the transformative rather than purely decorative role of art in human personal development.

All sketches drawn at A7 size with 0.2mm Unipin fineliner, February 2011.

To All The Girls I Should Have Loved Before

2011-02-14T13:00:00.003Z

On Valentine's Day, a single man's thoughts turn inevitably to his romantic failures and regrets.

In my case, I'm not bothered about the relationships that ran their course; nor about the idols of my early Petrarchan phase, the girls I loved epically and catastrophically but never stood a chance with – everybody's got one or two of those tucked away at the back of their heart, right? Either way, I gave all of them my best shot, some several times over. There's nothing there to regret.

No, what sticks in my craw now are the girls I could have had, but didn't. Not the ones I gave up on because they had boyfriends, or lived too far away, or it would just have been too weird for some reason – everybody's got those stories as well. I'm talking about the ones who mooned after me silently for years and then revealed later that they used to fancy me; the ones whose eventual panicked declarations of affection so completely blindsided me that I just stood there like a lemon saying "What? Really?" instead of sweeping them manfully into my arms; and most of all the ones who bodily threw themselves at me all through my twenties but whose repeated blatant displays of physical and emotional vulnerability I wilfully chose to interpret as evidence of trust, not lust.

Raised under the twin thumbs of Catholic dogma and feminist critical theory, I'd been conditioned to believe that the Male Gaze was a social menace more dreadful than poverty, famine and nuclear weapons put together. Even after I rejected my religion, the second thumb still weighed heavy on my back for another decade or so. Mark Steel and Alan Davies have both done routines about the ethical dilemmas of dating as a left-winger in the 1980s – I'm a bit younger, but not so much that I didn't recognise the problem. Was it, ideologically speaking, okay to fancy the local SWP branch's resident Helena Bonham Carter lookalike on a physical level, or should I want her for her mastery of dialectic instead? Would chatting up the tidy blonde from the Tory Club make me complicit in the decimation of the steel industry? And if men were all patriarchal oppressors from whom the night needed to be reclaimed, shouldn't the girls I knew all be shagging each other instead of me (or, more realistically, the rugby team) anyway? It was a minefield!

Thus it was that – driven as much by overweening respect for a confident and empowered woman's ability to make independent choices as by visceral disdain for the leering, brutish braggadoccio that constituted "masculinity" where I grew up – I convinced myself that the only safe course was to be as friendly and approachable as I could, but (except in cases of the direst infatuation) let the girls chase me instead.

Yeah, I know: good luck with that. No wonder I ended up convinced I was rubbish with women, which as self-reinforcing mental circuits go is a pretty bad one to get into. The crazy thing, looking back, is that actually it wasn't true at all. On the basis of any kind of empirical observation, an outsider would have to have concluded that a lot of girls really liked me – it's just that for the most part I convinced myself I was imagining anything that might have resembled sexual interest. For a huge chunk of the 90s, even my most intimate relations were crippled by the belief that without an explicit, specific and (importantly) unprompted verbal come-on, any amount of touching, giggling, hugging, snuggling, sighing, handholding, generalised sex talk, undressing in front of me, sleeping in the same bed, spooning, intertwining of limbs, heavy breathing etc that came from a woman to me might all be perfectly innocent, and even the minutest sign of any response on my part would be tantamount to rape.

Luckily for my sanity, there were, of course, less subtle girls who were prepared to come straight out with the necessary verbalisation; and even without it, there's a point at which the evidence becomes incontrovertible. When a girl's got her hand down your pants and a smile on her face, there's no real need to whip out a consent form. But such instances were few and far between – and, very occasionally, just a bit too squalid to go through with.

Brrr! Moving swiftly on…

I'm glad to say I came to terms with my heterosexuality eventually. I'm even still friends with some of the women who helped me with that. My subsequent conquests, not so much; but that's pretty normal as these things go. To the panoply of disasters and disappointeds who went before, though, I can only apologise for being such a fucking moron. You all deserved better. If it helps, remember that I wasn't doing myself any good either.

Perverse as it may seem, though, I miss the agony of those years. I've always maintained that the so-called "thrill of the chase" is overrated, but there was a certain excitement that came from the ambiguity of trying to navigate with no maps through an abundant jungle of unmeasurable possibility. Even when I was talking myself out of seeing what was in front of my face, the thought was there to dismiss. Whereas now I have half a map, but I don't know enough single women to make it useful. Time has caught up with me, the bastard.

It's an old, old lament: If only I'd known then what I know now. Ah well…

UPDATE (Re: Comment from Padre)

You're one of the few people I still know who was there during the worst period of it, so thanks for the second opinion. It would have been more use at the time, though :)

In fairness, if my sums are right we'd have first met while I was in the throes of my second Great Petrarchan Tragedy, which did blind me to other options for a good while. But once I could no longer kid myself that was ever going anywhere? Nah, from then on I just badly needed someone to slap me round the head and tell me the score.

That daze? That would have been me thinking something like "Is there a subtext here or not, and how would I tell?" I genuinely had no idea how goddam sexy I was.

Which, for the record:

Oh you handsome devil.

What If..?

2011-02-08T07:30:00.003Z

Five years ago today I stepped off the boat in Aberdeen for the last time.

Sometimes, in my lower moments, I've wondered how things would have turned out if I hadn't done what I did next – if, instead of scuttling back south to lick my wounds, I'd taken that morning as a new beginning and tried to rebuild my life where I stood. I don't think the idea even occurred to me at the time – I wasn't thinking exactly clearly, and hadn't had long to consider my options – but certainly that would have been the adventurous, the picaresque thing to do: the thing that would have made the better story later. Could it have worked, and what would the consequences have been?

It wouldn't have been easy to get started: as I recall, I had about forty quid in the bank, most of which in real life promptly went on my train fare. Had I stayed where I was, it wouldn't have lasted a great deal longer – so the first thing I'd have had to do was acquire an address and an income stream before it ran out. Who knows, maybe the scale of the uncertainty involved in that did colour my thinking at the time, I can't remember. I don't know what out-of-the-way shithole Aberdeen City Council would have found to house me in, how long that would have taken or what I'd have done with the hundredweight of clothes and books I was humphing around in the meantime – sold 'em for food, probably, if I could – but people have been known to survive such processes, and assuming I got through those difficult first few weeks at least I'd have been in a real city with a life of its own, not stuck out in the badlands of my miserable youth. For better or worse, I'd have been somewhere new.

The next two years could have been very different: there are friends and bits of work I'd have missed, but who knows what would have been in their place. Here's the strange thing though: as time went on, there are things that would have happened regardless.

I'd still have returned to comics in 2008, when the first signs of early-onset presbyopia briefly gave me the now-or-never heebie-jeebies (though fortunately it's gotten no worse since); and I'd probably still have spent a lot of 2009 drawing and marketing Burke & Hare, and the summer of 2010 trying to get the rights back when the publisher collapsed. The trouble with my mother's neighbour which my presence brought to a head in 2007 would have rumbled on without me until she had to be rehoused anyway, probably not much later than she did in fact; and in entirely separate developments, she'd still have been ill last year, which would have brought me back to the ol' briar patch anyway.

All of that would still have happened not just if I'd stayed in Aberdeen in 2006, but also if I'd never gone to Shetland at all, or if I'd got any of the jobs outside Glasgow I applied for in 2004-5 and had to move somewhere else. Go back further: the family stuff would still have happened if Black Ship Productions had taken off in '03 and restarted my comics career then, or if either run of Something Fast had led on to other things earlier, or whatever other ways my adult life might have diverged from its actual course. If there are parallel universes out there in which versions of me have been better-travelled, richer, or luckier in love or work, a lot of those timelines have been converging with our own lately.

All the might-have-beens lead here. A terrifying thought, but a strangely liberating one.

So much for backstory. Refresh, reboot, relaunch. There's nowhere to go but forwards…

An Adaptation Experiment

2011-01-27T21:21:00.007Z

The first episode of one of the great "lost" Doctor Who stories, broken down into comic panels from the original TV script. As a 22-pager, it averages about 8-9 panels a page, which sounds pretty cramped but is actually normal for European, rather than American, comics. And that's with virtually no editing of dialogue: this is a talky 1960s teleplay, the intro to a six-part story, and a lot of that panel count comes from conversation and inset detail rather than spectacular action. Episode 6, which would likely feature at least one full-page splash, might prove harder to squeeze into the format. It's interesting to compare the differing parameters of the two media though.

THE POWER OF THE DALEKS
EPISODE 1
Written by DAVID WHITAKER
Adapted for Comics by WILL PICKERING

Page 1

Panel 1
Half page splash to include title and credits. Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor is regenerating. He lies prone in the foreground, his face obscured by a transformative glow as Ben and Polly watch in amazement from further back
POLLY : Hey Ben, look!

Panel 2
Closeup on the Doctor’s new face, peacefully asleep.

Panel 3
Ben crouches over the Doctor, but appears distracted.
BEN : He's breathing, and the TARDIS seems to be normal.

Panel 4
Wider shot. Ben has stood up again.
POLLY : Ben, what are we going to do? We can't just leave the Doctor there.
BEN : What, him? The Doctor?

Panel 5
Polly and Ben, large midshot so we can see both their faces with plenty of room for dialogue.
POLLY : Well that's who came through the doors - there was no one else outside. Ben, do you remember what he said in the tracking room? Something about 'This old body of mine is wearing a bit thin.'
BEN : So he gets himself a new one?
POLLY : Well, yes.
BEN : Do me a favour!
POLLY : Then whatever happened, happened in here.
BEN : But it's impossible!

Panel 8
Closeup on Polly.
POLLY : Not so long ago we'd have been saying that about a lot of things.

Page 2

Panel 1
The stranger on the floor moans. Ben and Polly look down, and notice that the stranger is slowly opening his eyes.

Panel 2-3
The small man struggles to sit up, but immediately clasps his head as he is inflicted by a searing pain.

Panel 4
The stranger looks at Ben and Polly, but his vision is distorted from the effect of his transformation.

Panel 5
Continuing to hold his throbbing head, the stranger begins to mutter.
DOCTOR : Slower. Slower. Concentrate on one thing. One thing.

Panels 6-7
The Doctor peers in concentration at the TARDIS console. Gradually, the panel of knobs, dials and levers focus clearly in his eyes.

Panel 8
Relieved, the Doctor smiles broadly.
DOCTOR : It's over. Hmm, hmm, hmm. It's over.

Panel 9
The Doctor staggers to his feet, and grabs hold of the TARDIS console to steady himself. He operates a number of controls. Ben and Polly hear the familiar sound of dematerialisation.
BEN : Doctor?

Page 3

Panels 1-2
The Doctor staggers against the console a second time, causing his ring to fall from his finger. It clatters on to the floor.

Panel 3
Completely ignoring the ring, the Doctor removes his predecessor's cloak, revealing an assortment of oversized clothes (giving the Doctor a very tramp-like appearance). He hobbles over to a storage chest in the corner.
DOCTOR : (muttering to himself) The muscles are still a bit tight.

Panel 4
Ben and Polly watch in confusion as the Doctor pokes his head into the chest, and begins to rummage through the contents.
BEN : What are we going to do?
POLLY : It is the Doctor. I know it is -- I think.

Panel 5
Ben walks over to confront the 'stranger'.
BEN : It's not only his face that's changed - he doesn't even act like him. Come on, it's time we sorted this out.
BEN (LINK): Now look here!

Panel 6
The 'stranger' thrusts a mirror into Ben's hands.
DOCTOR : Hold that. Tilt it.

Panels 7-9
As Ben obeys the Doctor's order, the Doctor stares deep into the mirror. At first he sees an image of his current face. But suddenly this changes into an image of his predecessor. The Doctor stares at the image in confusion. The image eventually turns back to that of his current self.

Page 4

Panel 1
Grunting in satisfaction, the Doctor begins to search through his pockets.
BEN : (referring to the mirror) Have you done with this?
DOCTOR : Put it down. Put it down.
BEN : Now, what's the game?

Panel 2
Ignoring Ben, the Doctor pulls out an ornamental dagger from one of his pockets.

Panel 3
He examines the object thoughtfully.
DOCTOR : Ah! The Crusades, from Saladin. The Doctor was a great collector wasn't he!
POLLY : But you're the Doctor!

Panel 4
Closeup. the Doctor looks mischeivous.
DOCTOR : Oh? I don't look like him.

Panel 5
The Doctor places the dagger back in his pocket, and then brings out a dull-looking piece of metal.
BEN : Who are we?
DOCTOR : Don't you know?

Panel 6
Another closeup, this time fearful.
DOCTOR : Extermination.

Panel 7
Ben and Polly look at each in mutual puzzlement. The Doctor replaces the metal back in his pocket, and gives a cry of joy when he discovers a magnifying glass.

Panel 8
Peering through the magnifying glass, the Doctor studies his hands.
DOCTOR : Very good. Nails need growing.

Panel 9
Ben picks up the ring from the floor.

Panel 10
Ben grabs the Doctor's hand, and slips the ring on.
BEN : Now look, the Doctor always wore this. So if you're him, it should fit now, shouldn't it?

Panel 11
However, the ring is far too big for the Doctor's finger and slips off again.
BEN : There - that settles it.

Panel 12
Closeup. The Doctor, imperious.
DOCTOR : I'd like to see a butterfly fit into a chrysalis case after it's spread its wings.

Page 5

Panel 1
POLLY : Then you did change!
DOCTOR : Life depends on change -- and renewal.
BEN : (sarcastically) Oh so that's it, you've been renewed have ya?

Panel 2
The Doctor rushes back to the storage chest, and begins to search through the vast array of items.
DOCTOR : (taking Ben's remark seriously) I've been renewed have I? That's it, I've been renewed! It's part of the TARDIS - without it, I couldn't survive.

Panel 3
DOCTOR :Come here! (softly) Come here. The Doctor kept a diary, didn't he?
POLLY : Yes.
DOCTOR : I thought so. I wonder where. I wonder where.

Panel 4
Ben and Polly watch silently as the Doctor pockets a number of objects, sometimes chuckling to himself with childish glee.
POLLY : He's a very different Doctor, Ben.
BEN : Yeah, maybe. Just where do we stand, though?

Panels 5-8
Suddenly, an expression of joy appears on the Doctor's face, as he pulls a tattered recorder from the storage box. He immediately blows a short tune on the recorder, while shuffling a few steps of a dance at the same time. At the conclusion of the tune, the Doctor deposits the recorder into a pocket.

Panel 9
He pulls out another object from the chest - his 500 year diary.

Panel 10
He starts to flick through the pages.
POLLY : Doctor? Doctor, what's going to happen to us?
DOCTOR : I think... I think we must have landed for sometime. I think it's time we went for a stroll.

Panel 11
The Doctor grabs a tall-peaked hat from the chest, and places it on his head.

Panel 12
With his eyes firmly placed on the diary's contents, the Doctor walks over to the console and flicks a switch.

Page 6

Panel 1
The TARDIS doors glide open. Continuing to read the diary, the Doctor walks out of the TARDIS.
POLLY : But you don't know where we've landed!
BEN : No! You haven't checked the oxygen or the temperature or anything!

Panel 2
DOCTOR : (not looking up from the diary) Oxygen density 172, radiation nil, temperature 86, strong suggestion of mercury deposits. Satisfied, Ben? Now, are you two coming or are you not?

Panel 3
POLLY : He does know us! He said 'Ben', didn't you hear him?
BEN : Yeah, I heard. But he might just have been copying you though, mightn't he?

Panel 4
Large establishing shot.
The TARDIS has landed in a rough, mist-covered landscape. The ground is littered with rock formations and small bubbling pools of liquid. At regular intervals, a small spray of liquid is emitted from one of the pools, causing the rocks to be covered by a small silver filament. Oblivious to the surroundings, the Doctor strolls by one of the pools, his concentration completely on the diary. The Doctor strolls directly towards a small pool of hissing mercury, apparently unaware of the danger.

Panel 5
Just as he is about to step into the pool, he stops abruptly, and turns a page of his diary. He laughs as he reads the contents of the diary.
DOCTOR : (shouting back) Are you coming you two?

Panel 6
Without looking where he is walking, the Doctor continues around the pool. He is able to successfully traverse the edge of the pool without even glancing up.

Page 7

Panel 1
The Doctor's concentration is interrupted when he detects the sounds of movement ahead. The Doctor looks up, and notices a medium-sized rock blocking his path.

Panel 2
Pulling a tape measure from one of his pockets, the Doctor measures the rock.

Panel 3
He then taps his legs mischievously.
DOCTOR : Time I put you through some tests I think!

Panels 4-6
The Doctor moves back a short distance, carefully studying the rock in front of him. Suddenly, he breaks into a run, and successfully leap-frogs the rock.

Panel 7
A man in a space tunic strolls into view.
THE EXAMINER : Hello? Hello? Is there anyone there? Hello? Hello? Why don't they come? (noticing the Doctor) Ah, so you've come at last. I'm from Earth. I'm the Examin...

Panel 8
Suddenly, a shot rings out. The Examiner collapses at the Doctor's feet, mortally wounded.

Page 8

Panel 1
The Doctor glances around his surroundings in startled surprise.

Panel 2
He is about to rush behind the rock, when he looks back to the victim on the ground.

Panel 3
Realising that the man could still be alive, the Doctor cautiously moves towards the body and kneels next to it. His worst suspicions are confirmed - the man is dead. The Doctor notices a badge attached to the dead man's uniform.

Panel 4
He removes his predecessor's wire-rimmed spectacles from a pocket, and places them on.

Panel 5
However, when the Doctor attempts to examine the badge, all he sees is a misty blur.

Panel 6
Realising that his new incarnation has no need for spectacles, the Doctor removes the glasses, and places them back in his pocket.

Panel 7
The Doctor then turns his attention back to the Badge.
DOCTOR : Earth Examiner. Accord every access. Vulcan.

Panel 8
As the Doctor searches the Examiner's body for further information, a figure begins to move in. The figure is wearing a shiny silver suit and a large helmet, which completely obscures the stranger's appearance. The stranger raises a futuristic-looking pistol to the Doctor's back.

Page 9

Panel 1
Suddenly, Ben's voice shatters the silence.
BEN : Doctor?! Where are you?

Panel 2
The Doctor turns around as he hears Ben's voice. The assassin quickly steps behind a nearby rock, but the Doctor has detected the movement.

Panel 3
The Doctor turns towards the rock, but the stranger has disappeared. Behind the rock, the stranger reverses his hold on the pistol - he now intends to use it as a bludgeon.

Panel 4
Ben and Polly have emerged from the TARDIS, and are closely examining one of the mercury pools. Both are oblivious to the fumes slowly drifting up from the active mercury geyser.
BEN : Whoa, ain't it hot!
POLLY : Hmm, do you think the air's like this everywhere?
BEN : Nah - might be just around here. Don't want too many lungfuls of it, I know that. Here, when I was a kid, we used to live opposite a brewery. You could take a walk and get tipsy all in one go!

Panel 5
Polly kneels next to the pool for a closer look.
POLLY : It's beautiful.
BEN : No, don't touch it Polly!

Panel 6
POLLY : I wasn't going to.
BEN : No, it's quicksilver - it gets through the pores. Where is the Doctor, or whatever he is, got to?

Panel 7
As Ben looks around for the Doctor, a jet of steam is suddenly emitted from the mercury geyser. It sprays all over Polly's face. She coughs and splutters.
BEN : What's the matter? Hey, Polly!

Panel 8
As Ben kneels next to her, Polly suddenly falls unconscious and collapses against him. Ben cries out.
BEN : Hey, Doctor - wherever you are. Quick, there's something happening to Polly!

Page 10

Panel 1
The Doctor, still holding the Examiner's badge, strides towards Ben's voice, but unbeknownst to the Doctor, this brings him closer to the helmetted stranger.
BEN (OFF): Quick, over this way!

Panel 2
The figure suddenly emerges from behind the rock, and strikes the Doctor on the head with the pistol. The Doctor is knocked unconscious.

Panels 3-4
In the Doctor's motionless hand, the stranger carefully places a button.

Panel 5
The stranger then proceeds to drag the Examiner's body away.

Panel 6
Meanwhile, Ben is trying to lift Polly to her feet. Suddenly, another jet of toxic vapour is emitted from the mercury geyser.
BEN : Doctor!
Like Polly, Ben begins to cough and splutter.

Panel 7
Slowly, Ben fades into unconsciousness.

Panel 8
Ben's last vision is of a white-suited figure approaching, with a pistol held firmly in his hand.

Page 11

Panel 1
Later. Two more white-suited figures have discovered the Doctor. The younger of the two is Quinn, while the older man is Bragen. Pretending to be unconscious, the Doctor listens as Bragen walks over to Quinn.
BRAGEN : Ah, Quinn, there you are. What have you got there? My people have found two more of them by one of the pools.
QUINN : (indicating the Doctor) This one's got a nasty bruise on the back of his head. Fallen over his feet, and knocked himself out, I suppose.

Panel 2
BRAGEN : I suppose so.
QUINN : Why don't they use the kit we send them?
BRAGEN : Yes, the other two have had a rather bad dose of the fumes - the girl has anyway.

Panel 3
QUINN : Girl?
BRAGEN : Yes, but she'll recover.

Panel 4
QUINN : These comic opera guards of yours do have some uses after all.
BRAGEN : I pick them for their physical fitness.
QUINN : I thought it wasn't for their IQ. Give me a hand with the Examiner, will you.

Panel 5
BRAGEN : I wonder why Earth has chosen to send an Examiner to Vulcan? Just now, I mean.
QUINN : I don't know.
BRAGEN : It's a mystery, isn't it? He isn't due for another two years.

Panel 6
Meanwhile, Ben is slowly recovering from the effects of the fumes. Quinn walks over towards him.
QUINN : How do you feel?
BEN : Ahh.

Panel 7
QUINN : We saw your rocket overshoot the landing area.
BEN : Eh?
QUINN : Don't worry - most of the ships from Earth do over-shoot. I'm Quinn, Deputy Governor.
BRAGEN : Bragen, Head of Security.

Page 12

Panel 1
QUINN : Let's get all back shall we? I'll take the girl.
BRAGEN : (to two guards) Here, you two, help carry the Examiner (indicates the Doctor).

Panels 2-3
Quinn grins at Bragen. As soon as Quinn turns his back, Bragen directs a look of hatred towards Quinn.

Panel 4
BRAGEN : (turning back to Ben) I suppose you Earth people can't wait to examine Lesterson's space capsule?
BEN : Eh?

Panel 5
One of the guards picks up the Doctor's 'unconscious' body.

Panel 6
Ben is surprised when the Doctor's eyes suddenly open, wink at him, and then close again.

Panel 7
Large. Lesterson is sitting in his laboratory polishing a dull-coloured piece of metal. A large space capsule dominates one side of the laboratory. Lesterson's assistant, Janley, walks into the room.
JANLEY : Lesterson.
LESTERSON : Look at this.

Page 13

Panel 1
JANLEY : They've just brought in an Examiner from Earth, and a couple of assistants.
LESTERSON : An Examiner? What's he here for?
JANLEY : I thought you'd know.

Panel 2
LESTERSON : Ah, it's the capsule, it must be. Ah, they can't stop me working on it, I'll tell you that.

Panel 3
JANLEY : Could anyone?
LESTERSON : The Governor's always been difficult about it. But surely they wouldn't send someone all the way from Earth just to...
JANLEY : Look, what about the meeting?

Panel 4
LESTERSON : Meeting?
JANLEY : Yes - I've arranged everything. Can we still use the old rocket room?

Panel 5
LESTERSON : Yes, I suppose so. But I do wish you wouldn't get mixed up with these pressure groups, Janley.
JANLEY : Somebody has to do something. The colony's running down and you know it.
LESTERSON : I'm too busy.
JANLEY : But, if we ran things, you'd have better facilities, more money. I wish you'd take an interest.

Panel 7
LESTERSON : Now look, I don't mind letting you have the use of one of my rooms now and again, Janley, but don't try to involve me. This is what I find important. Two hundred years in a mercury swamp. (indicating the piece of metal) : And this piece of metal that dropped from it. Look - a couple of minutes polishing and it's as good as new.

Panel 8
JANLEY : (bored) Wonderful.
LESTERSON : Rain, damp, heat, mercury - nothing touches this metal. No corrosion, Janley, think of that.

Panel 9
Janley strides from the room. Lesterson watches her leave, a worried expression on his face.
JANLEY : Well, I hope the Examiner lets you go on with your experiment. Frankly, I doubt it. I think the Governor's brought the Examiner here to stop you opening the capsule. You should join our group, Lesterson. You might need us one day.

Page 14

Panel 1
The Doctor, Ben and Polly have been left to rest in a small room. The Doctor is blowing absent-mindedly on his recorder.
BEN : So the murdered man was the real Examiner?
Nodding, the Doctor blows a series of notes on the recorder.
BEN : Well, did you see who did it?
The Doctor shakes his head, blowing a high-pitched note.

Panel 2
Polly holds out the button for all to see.
POLLY : The Doctor got this button though.

Panel 3
BEN : I think it's pretty dull around here - I don't know why we don't just go back to the TARDIS.
The Doctor again shakes his head, blowing a high-pitched note.
POLLY : Doctor, are you going to let them think you're the real Examiner?

Panel 4
The Doctor nods mischievously, blowing a "Yes" note on the recorder.

Panel 5
POLLY : Won't that be dangerous?
The Doctor pauses, and then blows a "Yes" sequence of notes.

Panel 6
Ben suddenly reaches forward and snatches the recorder from the Doctor's hands.
BEN : Why don't you stop blowing that thing and talk to us properly?
POLLY : Ben!

Panel 7
BEN : Now don't you start - it's bad enough with him!
POLLY : Well, he hasn't done anything.
BEN : No, that's just the trouble! He knows what happened back at the TARDIS - yet will he tell us? Will he come out and say? Will he admit to being the Doctor?

Panel 8
Ben shakes his head, and in mimicking the Doctor, blows a variety of tuneless notes. At that moment, there is a knock on the door.

Panel 9
BEN : Come in!

Page 15

Panel 1
Bragen and Hensell, the Governor of Vulcan, walk into the room. The Doctor takes the button from Polly and pockets it.
HENSELL : I am Hensell, the Governor. I trust you're all feeling much better?
BEN : I've felt worse, Governor. (to himself) The Governor.

Panel 2
HENSELL : If Earth had seen fit to warn us you were coming, we might possibly have been able to guide you down to the landing area.

Panel 3
DOCTOR : If Earth didn't warn you we were coming, Governor, they must have had a very good reason. I wonder what it was?

Panel 4
HENSELL : Now look here - I run this Colony. I'm entitled to know why you have come to Vulcan? What is your brief?
DOCTOR : I am the Examiner.
HENSELL : Why are you here?

Panel 5
The Doctor suddenly moves forward and examines Bragen's uniform. He ignores the look of puzzlement on Bragen's face.
DOCTOR : To examine. And I intend to start my examination at once!
HENSELL : Someone's leaked reports about these Rebel Groups - that's it, isn't it?

Panel 6
The Doctor moves across to scrutinize the Governor's uniform.
DOCTOR : Your turn now Governor.
BRAGEN : There is Lesterson's capsule.
HENSELL : Internal affairs are my business, Bragen. Please don't interfere!

Panel 7
The Doctor seems satisfied with Hensell's uniform and moves back to study Bragen again. Hensell continues talking, but the Doctor looks at Bragen, as if he wishes Bragen to explain.
DOCTOR : Please go on.
HENSELL : The capsule. It was found in a mercury swamp. It must have been here for centuries before the Earth colony arrived. I felt it might be dangerous, it might contain bacteria.

Page 16

Panel 1
DOCTOR : I shall examine the capsule later, you may leave us.
HENSELL : I shall look forward to your report. Bragen, see that the Examiner and his party get some proper clothes, will you?

Panel 2
Hensell, Bragen, and the rest of colonists leave. The Doctor slumps on to a bed.
DOCTOR : (grouchily) We are wearing proper clothes!

Panel 3
As soon as the door closes, the Doctor places the recorder to his lips, and starts playing.
BEN : Oh, how did he get that thing back again? That was a bit of a cheek, wasn't it? Ah, seeing if the Governor was the guy you got the button off?

Panel 4
POLLY : Doctor? When he was talking to you, you were staring at the other man.
DOCTOR : Yes, very rude of me wasn't it - terrible manners. To tell you the truth I was studying his reaction, seeing if he agreed with the story.
BEN : Did he?

Panel 5
DOCTOR : Must have a look at that capsule.
BEN : Now, you want to watch out you don't take this Examiner stuff a bit too far.
DOCTOR : Our answers must come from that mercury swamp.
BEN : 'Cause at least one bloke ain't going to be fooled.
DOCTOR : When Bragen found us, he definitely said space capsule.
BEN : Look, you're not going to fool the guy that did the real Examiner in!

Panel 6
But the Doctor is lost in his own thoughts. Ben sighs in exasperation as the Doctor blows a slow tune on the recorder.

Page 17

Panel 1
In a corridor nearby, Bragen is pinning up a notice on a board. Quinn strides up, clearly agitated.
QUINN : Bragen! What's all this nonsense about having to have a pass to see the Examiner?
BRAGEN : It's the Governor's idea.

Panel 2
QUINN : Surely it doesn't apply to me?
BRAGEN : It's not my order, Quinn. I expect the Governor wants to keep people away from him.
QUINN : It sounded like one of your red-tape ideas.
BRAGEN : It had nothing to do with me.

Panel 3
Frustrated, Quinn walks away, but almost collides with Janley as she hurries around a corner.
QUINN : Right!
JANLEY : Oh!

Panel 4
QUINN : Sorry, Janley.
JANLEY : My fault.
QUINN : Are you all right?

Panel 5
JANLEY : Yes. Lesterson's just cleared me out of his lab. Quinn laughs.
JANLEY : Is the Examiner going to let him open the capsule?
QUINN : I don't know. I'm on my way there now, if I can push past Bragen's army of layabouts.

Panel 6
Janley touches Quinn's left sleeve, which is missing a button.

Page 18

Panel 1
Later, in Lesterson's laboratory, the Doctor studies the strange capsule. The others watch on in anticipation.

Panels 2-3
The Doctor notices the piece of metal that Lesterson was polishing. He picks it up, with a concerned expression on his face.
DOCTOR : Where did you get this?
LESTERSON : It dropped from the capsule.
DOCTOR : Dropped?
LESTERSON : Yes, when it was being hauled into the laboratory. But, you can see, this metal could revolutionize space travel. That's why I'm insisting that we open it. Well, who knows what other marvels there may be inside?

Panel 4
HENSELL : But Lesterson, I didn't think you could open it.
LESTERSON : Well, I have a theory. I'm convinced that the opening mechanism on the other side is either here, or here.

Panels 5-6
While Lesterson is occupied, the Doctor pulls out the piece of metal he was studying in the TARDIS. His concern increases as he compares it with Lesterson's piece. Polly and Ben exchange puzzled looks.
DOCTOR: (in background) Extermination.

Panel 7
LESTERSON : Now, my theory is that I can insert a laser ray in this ridge here. The ray spreads, fuses the opening device and gets us in.

Panel 8
HENSELL : Examiner, I shall have to make it your responsibility.
DOCTOR : A laser? Why not? It shouldn't be too difficult.

Page 19

Panel 1
The laser torch has already been set up in front of the capsule. Lesterson switches on the torch, causing a small beam of light to shine into the entrance area.

Panel 2
Nothing happens.
LESTERSON : Well, we'll try the other side.

Panel 3
Lesterson shines the flame on the right side of the door. Suddenly, there is a crackle from within.

Panel 4
The hatchway door falls open.

Panel 5
Everyone rushes forward simultaneously to stare into the capsule.

Panel 6
The Doctor and Lesterson cautiously step through the entrance door, and into a small empty compartment.
LESTERSON : It's a bit disappointing.
DOCTOR : Not really. This is just an entry bay, isn't it?
LESTERSON : Yes, I suppose so.

Panel 7
The Doctor moves to one of the metal walls and discovers a thin opening in it. However, he remains silent.
HENSELL : Well, this doesn't get us very far does it?
LESTERSON : Ah, getting into the rest of the capsule will take time, Governor.
BEN : Well, can't you use that torch thing again? That must be an opening door.

Panel 8
LESTERSON : Well, I should have to measure it up and find out where the lock mechanism is.
DOCTOR : (hurriedly) And I think we'll leave if for tonight.

Page 20

Panel 1
HENSELL : Leave it for tonight? But what did we come here for?
DOCTOR : (tersely) That is my decision, Governor.
HENSELL : But, good heavens above, man!

Panel 2
DOCTOR : A hundred years you say this has been buried?
LESTERSON : Oh, at least. Now, there must be something in the inner compartment. We shall be able to find out where it came from originally.

Panel 3
DOCTOR : It didn't come from this planet - Vulcan.
LESTERSON : Oh no, no, no. The metal is quite alien.

Panel 4
The Doctor abruptly walks from the room.
DOCTOR : Alien, yes. Very alien. Goodnight.

Panel 5
Ben and Polly follow the Doctor, leaving the colonists to contemplate the situation.
BEN : What's he up to now?
POLLY : Ben, we're not going to let him out of our sight.

Panel 6
HENSELL : Well, Lesterson, you got your way. Was it worth sending for this Examiner? This idiotic Examiner?
LESTERSON : I didn't send for him. I thought you did.

Panel 7
QUINN : Why don't you let me talk to the Examiner, Hensell. I can find out what's he's here for.
HENSELL : No, no, no, no, you keep away from him. We'll leave him to work with Lesterson here. We've all got enough to do without having to worry about some amateur critic from Earth interfering.
QUINN : But with five minutes...

Panel 8
HENSELL : You heard what I said, Quinn. You won't mind keeping the Examiner busy, Lesterson? I don't mind what you do with him so long as you keep his nose out of our business.
LESTERSON : Yes. All right.
HENSELL : All right, well we shall talk about it tomorrow.

Panel 9
Lesterson watches as the rest of the colonists file out of the room. Once alone, he turns back to his workbench.

Panels 10-11
He suddenly realises the piece of metal that he was polishing has disappeared - the 'Examiner' must have taken it. A worried expression appears on Lesterson's face.

Page 21

Panel 1
Later that night, in the sleeping quarters.
POLLY : Ben!

Panel 2
BEN : (waking) What?
POLLY : Shh! He's in the corridor.
BEN : Who is?
POLLY : The Doctor you clod! Come on - quick!

Panel 3
Ben rubs his eyes and follows her out. They are in time to see the Doctor disappear around the end of the corridor.

Panel 4
POLLY : He's going towards Lesterson's lab.
BEN : Of course - to the space capsule.

Panel 5
The Doctor steps into the deserted laboratory, eerily illuminated from the light within the capsule. As the Doctor reaches its entrance, he dips into his pockets and withdraws the two pieces of metal - the one shined by Lesterson, the other from the TARDIS. He disappears into the capsule.

Panel 6
The Doctor creeps up to his discovery in the wall, unaware that Ben and Polly are close behind him. He inserts the shiny piece of metal into the thin opening, and pushes the 'key' home.

Panel 7
There is a hum as the inner door of the capsule slides open.

Page 22

Panel 1
Framed in the doorway, just as the Doctor expected, are two 'dead' Daleks.

Panel 2
He spins around as he hears Ben and Polly's startled gasps.
DOCTOR : Polly, Ben, come in and meet the Daleks.
BEN : What?
DOCTOR : The Daleks.

Panel 3
The Doctor begins to search through the inner chamber.
POLLY : You could have opened this before!
DOCTOR : These two pieces of metal are identical. The Doctor got one of them from the Daleks himself.
BEN : Why do you keep saying the Doctor if you mean you?

Panel 4
DOCTOR : I knew I should find them here, I knew it.
BEN : Ah, they look harmless, not very lively.
POLLY : What do you think? Two hundred years in a swamp and you wouldn't look very lively either. Nothing could live through that could it?
BEN : Live?

Panel 5
DOCTOR : Nothing human. No.
POLLY : Doctor, look!
BEN : What's the matter?

Panel 6
The Doctor has noticed something strange about the floor. He bends down to examine it.
DOCTOR : There were three Daleks in here! What's happened to the other one?

Panel 7
Behind the Doctor, a gruesome claw-like appendage crawls from out of the shadows. Paralysed with fear, Ben chokes. Polly gasps, as the Doctor turns to confront the horror.
BEN : Doctor!

TO BE CONTINUED

State of the Union

2011-01-26T13:26:00.002Z

Pontefract Town Hall, West Yorkshire, November 2010

Introducing: The Deadliest Man in Asia™

2011-01-12T20:09:00.003Z

It's easy to think of historic cultures as discrete, isolated from each other as much by indexing boundaries as by physical geography; but in fact, at any given time, contacts between ancient civilisations could be pretty sophisticated. Trade goods would pass from hand to hand along the Silk Road or between ports in the Indian Ocean, and while most individuals would certainly stay within fairly narrow bounds from one generation to the next, those few who travelled at all often ranged quite widely over a lifetime. Think of the Crusaders, or the Seljuk Turks. One of the T'ang Dynasty Emperors of China had a general who'd originally come from Iran as a Nestorian Christian missionary – that was in the Eighth Century.

So: it's 12th Century Asia, and our protagonist is a wanderer, a mishmash of cultural influences – a product of two cultures, each with its own honour code and unique style of lethality; fully accepted by neither, he has carved out his own path and lives or dies by his fighting skills. He is… the NINJASSASSIN™!

I haven't yet decided whether he's a Japanese somehow co-opted by the Hashishin, an Ismaili raised by a Ninja clan for some reason, or a second-generation hybrid with a parent from either end of the continent: clearly, the backstory needs a bit of work to make any damn sense at all. But the name is awesome (in the modern, internet fanboy sense), the setting is rich and expansive, and the premise is ideal for a series of self-contained stories in the old pulp style as he travels from place to place. I'd probably need to team up with a writer who knows Asian history better than I do, but there's matter there to work with. Or am I just crazy?

Tuesday Doodles

2011-01-12T00:35:00.004Z

Maybe it's a bit sick of me, but upon hearing that Michael Moorcock is contemplating having a foot amputated, my initial reaction of sympathy was soon brutally shoved aside by recollection of his 1975 short story The Stone Thing, and its prosthetically-enhanced hero Catharz:

Never play with HeroMachine drunk.

Just kidding, it's actually an ink sketch with (very rough) digital colour. I did have a couple of tries at the best configuration for a nine-fingered hand before settling on the two-thumbed version in the finished piece:

UPDATE: Someone called David Mosley writes,

Hi, just to confirm, all Mike is having amputated tomorrow (Thursday Jan 13th) is the remaining couple of toes on the infected foot. There's currently no plans to amputate the foot (or leg as some blogs are reporting). It's hoped that removing the toes now will mean Mike won't lose the foot later - as long as his post-operative after-care is done properly this time. (Previous shoddy after-care in the US is the reason why he's facing the current round of surgery.)

Moorcock's website, www.multiverse.org, is currently redirecting to random travel sites, so I don't really know any of the background here, but best wishes to the great man anyway.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, his Doctor Who novel is pretty good.

Then and Now: TV News

2011-01-03T16:39:00.000Z

@Whitechapel: Remake/Remodel

2011-01-02T14:20:00.002Z

See warrenellis.com for more.

New Year, New Attitude

2011-01-01T14:15:00.002Z

Sing With Bing

2010-12-02T20:59:00.001Z

2010-11-11T11:00:00.001Z

Ian Duncan Smith Presents:

2010-11-09T13:45:00.008Z

I was tidying some old magazines and came across this strip by Ed Hillyer.

End of the Century Club, DEADLINE #71 (1995). Plus ça change.

The rest of the series might be worth another look.

Those American Election Results In Full

2010-11-07T22:21:00.000Z

Notional Book Covers

2010-10-29T12:49:00.000Z

Work In Progress

2010-09-04T14:38:00.005Z

My web design skills get me about this far before it all starts going wrong:

Really wish I could just do it this way instead of faffing around with colons and brackets and tags and trying to figure out why one image appears properly and the next one won't.

I'd rather just be drawing...

Redundant Pitches #7.1 (Reprise)

2010-08-05T21:04:00.000Z

Originally posted 6/8/8.

Any sequel to Watchmen would, of course, be redundant by definition. You could catch up with the surviving characters, and make a stab at extrapolating the world of the series 23 years on, as once again a twisted mirror of our own - the Cold War replaced not by global harmony but rather a lot of paranoia about secret agendas, terrorism, and scientific progress run amuck - but even if executed with the same stylistic flourishes and meticulous attention to detail and structure, it would be at best a gloss on the original, more likely a travesty thereof.

That said, part of me did always wonder what might have become of these guys:

They only actually appear in about six panels of #8, and we don't see them again after that - but just at the point in the series when all hell is about to break loose and masked adventurers are in the news again for the first time in years, they stumble on a murder scene, in fancy dress, in time to see the culprits running away...

Sounds like the origin of a junior vigilante team to me.

Nothing ever ends...

Redundant Pitches #10

2010-07-25T17:32:00.004Z

This one's about five years old. It was going to be a commentary on the creative bankruptcy of continually updating characters out of the context in which they made sense, which makes it at least one level more arch and knowing than Moffat's version. Which I shall of course be watching, nevertheless...

ULTIMATE SHERLOCK HOLMES
#1: FOUR COLOR PROFILE

Page 1
Splash page. Three stealth bombers fly towards the reader, high above a desolate mountainous wasteland.
Caption: TORA BORA, AFGHANISTAN
Lead Pilot (jagged): Target acquired. ETA 90 seconds.

Page 2-3
Establishing shot spread across both pages, with a few smaller panels beneath. A US military recon squad is pinned down at some abandoned farm buildings by firing from across the canyon. The officer acknowledges the message from air support, and they hunker down. Last panel: missiles fly from one of the bombers.

Page 4
Splash page. Huge explosion.

Page 5
Six panels. As the dust clears, it becomes evident that the bombers have hit the farm complex as well as the enemy position. Several of the soldiers are dead; one rages impotently at the sky; another yells to the CO that one of the fallen men is still breathing -- the CO shouts "Get that medic over here!", only to be told that it is the medic. Last panel, we see the wounded man's nametape: Lt. Watson, J.

Page 6
Splash page showing New York City from above.
Caption: NEW YORK CITY, EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER.

Page 7
Watson gets out of a cab at the offices of Hudson Security Inc, and introduces himself to the receptionist. He's come for a job interview.

Pages 8-14
Watson's job interview is an infodump for the reader. We learn that Hudson Security is a private contractor with government connections - some of Watson's old army buddies are working for it "back over there" on salaries way higher than if they'd stayed in the service, but Watson himself is too badly injured: he's got an artificial lung and pins in several limbs. However, the job he's applied for is based right here in New York, doing mostly forensic medicine: Hudson has acquired contracts to provide criminal investigation services to the NYPD and DHS. The scene ends inconclusively: they'll be in touch.

Pages 15-17
Reserved for introduction of ongoing subplot.

Pages 18-19
Six weeks later, Watson is back at the Hudson building: it's his first day on the job. 'Is 'andler, Jaq Lestrade, an ex-FBI agent wiz a ludicrous Chris Claremont Cajun accent, shows 'im round ze office and introduces him to his lab partner: a 22-year-old dreadlocked black guy called Sherlock Holmes, first encountered doing something unspeakable to a corpse (possibly using a virtual reality suit - nah, not gruesome enough) to see if the results match another one that's already on the slab. Their initial exchange goes something like -
Lestrade: Doctor Watson, meet Sherlock 'Olmes.
Watson: ...
Holmes: Watson, yo. You ex-army, right? Afghanistan?
Watson: That's right. How..?

Page 20
Holmes: Dog, your resume's on the company mainframe. You think I don't check out who I'm gonna be workin' with? Oh Jaq, I got an ID for your Spanish Harlem killer. DNA matched a DUI from two years ago - Anthony Seldon. Got an address on 110th, but I wanted to make sure he was there before I sent the bulls in guns blazing, so I tracked his cellphone on GPS.
Lestrade: Zat is not your responsibility, Sherlock...

Page 21
Using a combination of GPS, CCTV license plate recognition and the nearest beat cop, Holmes gets Selden arrested at traffic lights.

Page 22
Splash page, p.o.v. as if we're inside the computer screen. Holmes looking straight at us, hands behind his head, grinning. Watson and Lestrade standing behind him.
Holmes: What you think then, Doc? Am I good?

The Wake (Part Six) – Updated

2010-07-04T23:16:00.020Z

... and any assurances I'd given Crawford about continuing to promote it were moot. I was now a freelancer without a book to punt, and my position on the fence was no longer tenable.

I'd already written him a fairly long email setting out the situation as I saw it, addressing the glitch in the contracts and advising him to drop some of his wilder allegations (the consequences of which for his own position he clearly hadn't thought through and which, in fairness, he hasn't since repeated) and call the whole thing quits. I got back a load of blather about how he didn't know what the problem was, he was "catering to everyone's interests", and was "pushing ahead" on negotiations with retailers about orders for a reprint. The trouble with the last point was that he'd been talking about such negotiations for months, and they had yet to produce anything concrete – perhaps not his fault, after all there's plenty wrong with the state of the book trade at the moment and things are tough all over; but by now we were, frankly, beyond the point where 20% of back end profit on a possible consignment of a thousand books for the discount table at HMV was going to change anyone's mind about anything. I began to wonder if he genuinely didn't get that, or just wanted us to think he didn't.

His next communication convinced me he'd completely lost the plot.

On Tuesday 22nd June, I received by email a PDF of a letter on headed notepaper, marked PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL and addressed to me, Martin and Paul, in which Crawford offered to release us from our contracts and give us the remaining unsold books in exchange for a four-figure sum close to the total cover price, on condition that we agree to concoct with him some anodyne PR spiel to conceal what had really gone on over the past few months. He didn't appear to be joking.

I tore a strip off him about the gagging clause especially, and resolved to go public as soon as I could spare the time. My patience had run out.

Martin and I having separately reminded him in no uncertain terms that actually, he couldn't even sell the remaining books to us except perhaps as damaged stock with the infringing pages physically removed, he came back on Friday the 25th with a revised "final offer" – or rather two offers, one including the seconded books (which at least he was now pricing closer to their notional "damaged" value) and one for the IP rights alone. It was a classic bazaar tactic: ask for something totally outrageous, so that when you discount to merely greedy it looks like a bargain. But none of us were interested in playing that game: we didn't want the books. They were only an issue because Crawford refused to discuss anything else on its own merits: as far as I was concerned, he could keep 'em. (Although, as Martin had by now gone off on his annual family holiday to America, and nobody else knew where they were, there was no way he was getting them back within three days, as his alternate "offer" demanded.)

All we wanted was the rights to our own work. But suddenly Crawford was looking to charge us hundreds of pounds more than we'd ever seen from him to buy them back. Such deals are a standard part of the Hollywood shyster's arsenal, of course; but considering it was Crawford himself who described Insomnia as "a creator-focused and friendly environment" with a "family feel" where "creators retain the rights to their work rather than selling them for a relatively small amount of money as with traditional publishers", and that the whole situation could have been avoided if instead of carrying on digging for a month he'd just apologised to Martin for whatever it was he'd said on the 24th of May, it struck me as a bit of a bloody cheek for him to now be asking us for money.

Challenged about it, he insisted he was being more than reasonable - that he had "costs" to cover (what, don't we all?). In a babbling phone call to me from a withheld number on the afternoon of Monday the 28th, he claimed that the whole Sony digital deal could collapse if Burke & Hare wasn't part of it, and pleaded with me to agree to his terms immediately before he was overruled by his shareholders and things became a lot more difficult for everybody. Which sounded, to me, like an admission that he'd lost control of his company.

So I made him a counter-offer.

Forget trying to negotiate with all three of us as if we were a corporate body with some kind of joint responsibility for each other; forget the books, which was a dispute (if it was a dispute) between him and Martin and could be addressed separately; forget the supposed but strangely unspecified "costs" of dissolving our contracts – I, as an individual, would buy the remainder of his 10-year-license on my, Martin's and Paul's IP for double the value of his original advance to us. Surely his mystery shareholders couldn't claim that was unreasonable.

I've heard nothing from him now in over a week. But no doubt he has other things on his mind: I gather that several other projects are also in limbo over contracts or the lack of them, among them Martin Hayes' and Roy Huteson Stewart's Crowley, which looked interesting. Certainly as much as I'd been looking forward to illustrating Richmond Clements' Pinkerton script, there's no way I'm touching it now so long as Insomnia still have it. On the other hand, Crawford's continuing to announce new signings, so who really knows what's going on behind the scenes?

Only the shareholders, presumably.*

* The original share allocation was 83% to Crawford, 1% to each of his parents in recognition of their being listed as Directors at incorporation, and 15% to Alasdair Duncan. Companies House has no record of any shares being transferred out of the family.

UPDATE 20th July

This gets weirder and weirder. A few days after this post, I checked the Companies House website and saw that Insomnia had submitted accounts for the period up to 30/06/10. I thought they might prove interesting, but I didn't get round to ordering them straight away. On Saturday just gone, however, it came out that these accounts (which because of the size of the company aren't required to show much more than the annual trading balance, so there's no real way of knowing how accurate they are) are glossed with the following note:

Regrettably, Insomnia Publications Ltd ceased trading on 30 June 2010. These are the final set of accounts.

This was news to a lot of people, not least those who were still acting as editors for Insomnia as late as the 17th of July. And all the books are still available as downloads on the Sony Playstation Network, so exactly in what sense Insomnia has "ceased trading" is still unclear – as indeed are the current whereabouts of Crawford Coutts.

The situation is still developing.

The Wake (Part Five)

2010-07-04T10:46:00.001Z

Email tennis followed for the next week or so, Martin pressing Crawford for a straight answer to his request for dissolution, and Crawford refusing to even discuss it until he was in possession of all the unsold stock, unwilling to concede that they were separate issues – Martin hadn't even received Alasdair's shipment when they started arguing about it, and had already agreed in principle to hand it over; the rest was logistics, and in the meantime he wanted an answer.

Eventually, on Friday 4th June, Crawford came out and said a flat "No". The contract would stand.

Or would it? Independently of each other, Martin and I had been preparing for this eventuality by going back through our original contracts to check out exactly what the various reversion clauses did and didn't say. While there was nothing in principle that covered just the situation we were in, we did both notice an anomaly or two which meant that arguably the company had broken the terms months earlier and we'd been operating on goodwill ever since. Predictably, Crawford rubbished the point when it was brought to his attention – unpredictably, he accompanied his rebuttal with dark accusations of various kinds of misbehaviour on Martin's part, whereupon the whole thing went into the hands of his lawyers. My heart sank: however this panned out, there was no longer any prospect of it being resolved soon.

But something else was happening at the same time, the consequences of which were immediate.

Back when we were putting the book together in early 2009, we'd always intended to use a few pages at the back to acknowledge the contributions of the other artists who'd been attached to the project in its long journey to publication: chiefly Nulsh and Stuart Beel, who'd both been slated to draw it before me, but also Lynsey Hutchinson who'd been of great help to me in my research. Somewhere along the line, this idea mutated into a marketing opportunity, and since we were having a gallery section anyway it was proposed to try and fill it out with some big names who might add to the book's profile – none of your Jim Lees or Frank Millers, mind, but stalwarts of Scottish comics with whom we were on speaking terms anyway and who'd have enough empathy with us and with the material to knock out a sketch as a favour. Dave Alexander, Gary Erskine, people like that. In the end, eleven different artists contributed pages, and Alan Grant was persuaded to write an introduction on the same basis.

None of them were on contract.

If they had been, the terms under which Insomnia could use their work would have been clearly specified – whether for the first printing only, all editions for a period of five years, or whatever. In the absence of such agreements, a change of heart by any one of them could stop the book in its tracks at any time:

18 Infringement by issue of copies to the public

(1) The issue to the public of copies of the work is an act restricted by the copyright in every description of copyright work.

(2) References in this Part to the issue to the public of copies of a work are to the act of putting into circulation copies not previously put into circulation, in the United Kingdom or elsewhere, and not to—

(a) any subsequent distribution, sale, hiring or loan of those copies, or

(b) any subsequent importation of those copies into the United Kingdom;

except that in relation to sound recordings, films and computer programs the restricted act of issuing copies to the public includes any rental of copies to the public.
(Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, Part I Chapter II)

I'm not sure who was the first of the gallery artists to come out in sympathy with Martin and withdraw permission for their page to be circulated, nor who did or didn't follow suit, but it doesn't matter. Once somebody had pulled out, Insomnia could no longer sell the first edition of Burke & Hare intact. To all intents and purposes, the book was out of print...

The Wake (Part Four)

2010-07-03T07:07:00.015Z

I wasn't privy to Martin and Crawford's phone conversation Monday 24th May – I spent most of that day on the train – but it seems to have been pretty heated. Things Were Said And Aspersions Cast; the dread word "unprofessional" was bandied around, again. I leave it to the reader to judge whether that's the best way to describe Martin's efforts to keep the Burke & Hare show on the road and salvage what he could from the weekend, but it will surely come as no surprise that he didn't think so – especially coming from someone who'd just spent two months alienating his business partner, stringing contractors along with platitudes, losing control of his supply chain and failing to turn up to major promotional events.

Thus, by the time I got home that evening, Martin had resigned from his editorial post at Vigil and formally withdrawn himself from future promotional support for Burke & Hare so long as it remained under license to Insomnia. I could see that he'd been put in an awkward position, but I hoped his resignation would simplify things. If he wanted to step out of the spotlight to avoid dealing with Crawford, that was a personal matter: I was just a freelancer with a book to punt, and I said as much to Crawford later that week.

Unfortunately, it didn't end there.

While I was out on Tuesday night, Crawford remembered the existence of the Red Eye blog, and posted there a diatribe which he quickly revised into an asscovering pep talk, dismissing all the problems of the previous few months as "spring cleaning" and rationalising the exodus of his senior editorial staff by saying:

"I guess some people just don't like change"

Mmm-kay.

Whether he'd have gotten away with that if Martin hadn't seen the unedited version is something we'll never know. As it was, it was a pinprick too far. On Wednesday 26th May, Martin asked for his contract for Burke & Hare to be dissolved, on terms which would leave Insomnia free to sell the remaining stock of the first edition and (assuming my and Paul McLaren's rights also reverted, being of limited value in the absence of a script) us free to look for a publisher who'd be capable of exploiting the book's potential without pissing on our goodwill.

In ignorance of these developments, I'd also contacted Crawford that morning to say that in Martin's absence, I was willing to do the National Library talk by myself. But apparently that wasn't an option. Which was a pity, as the event's cancellation left Dave Gordon still holding the box of books he'd agreed to deliver to it, and anyone else having physical charge of the books had been one of the things that set Crawford off in the first place...

The Wake (Part Three)

2010-07-01T09:58:00.006Z

...with a box of Burke & Hare and a box of Cancertown to make the tables a bit less bare.

This did not compute. Here was the guy we'd been led to believe was responsible for the whole no-show debacle, making an eight-hour journey on one of the hottest days of the year to do us a favour*. Not just that, but furious to no longer be part of the company from which he had supposedly wanted out. You do the math.

(* It's a curious thing, which I'd heard some people on the train discussing the day before. Although it's only about an hour and forty minutes by rail from Paddington to Temple Meads, apparently if you want to drive you have to go by a circuitous route that takes a great deal longer.)

Still, willingly or no, he was out, and he wanted rid of the stock he was holding. So Cy Dethan took responsibility for the box of Cancertown; and Martin, as Line Editor of the Vigil historical imprint the most senior Insomnia staffer available on the day, agreed to take charge of all Al's remaining copies of Burke & Hare - both the box he'd brought with him and a few more he had at home and would ship north later in the week - in order to stop internal company politics affecting ongoing promotion of the book.

Laden as I was already, there was no physical way I could carry home more stuff than I'd brought in the first place, but we managed to arrange a favour from friend and fellow exhibitor Dave "My Excess" Gordon, who took the extra books home in his car - intending to return them to us at the National Library of Scotland talk we had scheduled on the 3rd of June.

I stayed in Bristol that night, but Martin emailed Crawford when he got home to bring him up to date on events, and that's when all hell broke loose...

The Wake (Part Two)

2010-06-30T18:43:00.003Z

...from Martin Conaghan saying that nobody from Insomnia was going to the Expo after all. There was a story behind it which later turned out to be bullshit, but the upshot was that Martin and I would be there on our tods, and - with Martin at his day job and his baggage allowance maxed out - the only way we'd have any books to sell would be if I could somehow get some from Crawford that afternoon.

It's a good job I don't like flying.

As it happened, I was on my way into Glasgow to pick up a couple of things for the trip anyway; so a couple of hours and some phone tennis later, I met Crawford and Insomnia Business Manager Richard Murphy in the the Buchanan Galleries and took delivery of twenty copies of Burke & Hare, any proceeds from the sale of which they told me to split with Martin as a thank you for riding to the rescue. I didn't argue. Between the soulless atmosphere of the mall, the nondescript brown box and their haunted, hunted expressions, the whole thing felt like a scene from a low-budget conspiracy thriller, and all I really wanted to do was get out of there and go home.

I caught the London Sleeper that night, and on Friday morning in a Paddington internet cafe read the apology Crawford had emailed to the sixty-odd writers and artists who'd been waiting over a month for the chance to ask him face to face what the hell was going on. It wasn't very enlightening, and by the time I got to the bar of the Bristol Ramada that evening the rumour mill was grinding into action.

But the show went on. We sold a few books, and Martin and I managed to turn the erstwhile Insomnia table into an informal base camp where associated creators could hang out from time to time and leave their portfolios on display if nothing else. The most distressing thing for me was having aspiring artists turn up for the widely-advertised pitch sessions and telling all of them, no matter how talented, that I simply wasn't in a position to be any help at all. I had no idea if the company would even still exist by the end of the month - certainly it would be a different beast if it did, the way editorial people were continuing to quit as the weekend wore on. It wasn't the best convention I've ever had, but they can't all be. I used to work in marketing, and I was a self-publisher before that: I've manned exhibits alone or with minimal support before, and I'm quite sure I will again.

What made things really interesting was when Alasdair Duncan turned up on the Sunday...

The Wake (Part One)

2010-06-28T22:24:00.004Z

Readers of m'colleague's column at Bleeding Cool, and anyone who attended the Bristol Comic and Small Press Expo at the end of May, will be aware that all is not entirely rosy at the House of No Sleep.

The company expanded quickly through 2009 - possibly too quickly, but with the lead time needed for an original graphic novel to reach fruition it's hard to tell. It's not easy for a small publisher to punch above its weight the way Insomnia was trying to do, and having a substantial release schedule was clearly a priority for them. When Martin began talking to them at the end of '08, it was still a tight little group of ambitious enthusiasts - I think Burke & Hare was the third or fourth book signed; by the time it came out ten months later, sharing a launch at the Birmingham International Comic Show with Jeymes Samuel's and Michiru Morikawa's Buskers, there were dozens more books in the pipeline and a deal had been done with Sony to distribute digital editions on the PSP. Which is not bad progress as these things go.

The first indications that anything was up came when the company blog stopped being updated quite as regularly as hitherto; but that's hardly a rare phenomenon. My book was out by then, and although positive press and successful talks and signings weren't translating into hard over-the-counter bookshop sales as quickly as we'd have liked, as late as March I had no inkling that anything was actually wrong.

That bubble burst on the 19th of April, when co-founder and Managing Director Crawford Coutts sent all Insomnia staff and contractors a long email which began by apologising for poor communications, continued with assurances that the company was "continuing to move forward" into unspecified new markets and modes of distribution, claimed that management had just been too too busy busy busy to take advantage of a "prominent position" offered free of charge at the London Book Fair*, and then moved on to berate "small numbers of creators who are causing trouble" with their "unprofessional behaviour" and thereby threatening the "creator-focused and friendly environment" and "family feel" of the company.

(*The organisers denied this when I spoke to them this morning. Yes, they had discussions with Insomnia about a presence at the comic & graphic novel pavilion, but no free space would have been or was offered.)

I didn't know what any of that meant, but gradually it emerged that a couple of key personnel had stepped down. Creative Director Nic Wilkinson had come to the realisation that while overseeing half a dozen books at different stages of production might be fun, riding herd on forty-odd was maybe more than she could handle pro bono on top of other commitments after all. (Here's something I've noticed time and again in all walks of life: Why is it that the people who're swiftest to start banging on about professionalism always want other people to work for free?) More seriously, co-founder and Sales Manager Alasdair Duncan - the guy responsible for physically shipping stock to retailers, and himself a shareholder in the firm - was also out, in circumstances that remain unclear. There are competing versions of the facts and I don't know enough to try and unpick them all, but suffice it to say that the company line about him resigning for personal reasons is not the way he tells it.

Clearly, that left the company with some logistical problems, to say the least - but after a bit of a wobble, creators were assured at the beginning of May that although there might need to be some adjustments to the release schedule, everything was still go and Insomnia would still be attending the Bristol con.

Radio silence descended again thereafter. Then on the morning of Thursday 20 May, a little over twelve hours before I was due to catch the train south, I got a text message...

TO BE CONTINUED

The Seminal Sweary Scottish Supervillain Comic of the 1990s

2010-04-16T15:00:00.009Z

Coming in May…

184 pages of snappy dialogue, over-the-top action, weirdass conspiracy theories and psychic hoodoo; plus of course my usual impeccable period detail based on extensive research - I was in the nineties for ten years, how's that for dedication? All digitally remastered, as they used to say in the Old Times.

"Something Fast was the first small press comic I ever read. I remember reading it back in the day and thinking "I wanna do this"… It was pure genius." – Jim (Ganjaman) Stewart

Expertly designed to slip neatly into your bookshelf beside Road to Perdition and the Black Diamond Detective Agency, the collected edition of Something Fast is priced at £12.99, and yes I'm taking advance orders. I've been meaning for months to get online payments set up*, but in the meantime just leave your email address in the comments and I'll tell you where to send money.

Or you can come and find me at the following fine events:

Comic & Small Press Expo, Bristol Ramada & Mercure 22-23 May
Edinburgh Book Festival, to be confirmed - August
Birmingham International Comic Show, Millennium Point 16-17 October
Thought Bubble, Leeds Royal Armouries 20 November

Monstrous

2010-03-26T08:16:00.004Z

I was struck down by faceache in the middle of the week, and the painkillers I was initially prescribed proved hopelessly inadequate. Following a nine-hour campaign to have the latter fact recognised by anyone in the medical profession, however, I eventually managed to get an alternative script, and the pain is now under some sort of control. It was touch and go for a while, but I've had 24 hours now to get used to the new regime and I think I've got my schedule optimised.

Which means I can go to Hi-Ex after all!

Offline now till Monday.

Your New Favourite Comic

2010-03-22T12:13:00.006Z

Come back to the five and dime, Shaky Kane, Shaky Kane:

Panel from The Bulletproof Coffin, written by Dave Hine and published by Image. First issue on sale on my birthday, June 2nd, although I'll get mine a day later, thanks to the small inconvenience of 3000 miles of salt water.

Unless I get a cheap flight to New York...

(Sometimes Warren Ellis brings good news. Who'da thought?)

Comics Economics 2

2010-03-19T17:00:00.012Z

"I'd do it for free if I didn't need the money."
– Vim, Bad News Tour

The reasons why, and the ways in which, publishing is in crisis have been well rehearsed. I'm interested in solutions.

Kieron Gillen talks about the missing two thousand fans whose timely support would have made Phonogram viable as an ongoing series. Let's break that down: Phonogram is/was essentially a two-man operation, based in London, published in America and circulated internationally through a distribution chain that eats two thirds of the cover price before the printer even gets paid. If Gillen and McKelvie were making as much as 20 cents apiece off a three-dollar comic they were doing well. Times 4000 actual sales that's 800 bucks, or about £500. Times 6000, it's $1200/£800 – I guess their return per unit must be better than I thought, because I don't see how even that would keep the wolf from the door at London rents.

Around my neck of the woods, though, that extra three hundred quid is the difference between the dole and an office job after tax. It's the elusive "Doing Okay Thanks": If I could make £500 a month from comics, I could quit filling in application forms for Mac Operator and Admin Assistant jobs and just draw full-time instead. And I don't need to sell 4000 comics to do that.

For a start, there's only one of me. That's 2000.

For another thing, the comic shop distribution system is broken. It's fit for purpose, but its purpose is to funnel ever more Marvel and DC merchandise to a motley assortment of impressionable kids and middle-aged completists, and other publishers get a look in only in as far as they can generate their own buzz and/or seize on trends that the big two aren't already exploiting (there's a whole other post that could come out of this exploring the situation in more detail and adding some useful qualifications, but I'm not saying anything new here and I don't want to get bogged down). To get those 4000 sales, Image Comics and Diamond Comics Distributors had to punt Phonogram to every specialist shop in NAFTA, the English-speaking Pacific, the British Isles and a few more places besides – which seems like disproportionate effort. Yes, comics are a niche market, and indy muso wizard comics are a niche within a niche, but despite the vast difference in geographical scale, the population of the USA is only about 5 times that of the UK, and I'll bet you the proportion of sales of Phonogram in Britain is closer to 50% than 17.5.

2000 copies...

Back in the late 1990s, I was on the point of taking Something Fast to Diamond – it took four issues before they'd touch it with a bargepole, but once they realised I could stick to a regular schedule they were prepared to give it a chance. But for logistical reasons as well as financial, North American distribution meant I needed North American printing – partly because otherwise I'd be spending a bomb shipping boxes across the Atlantic, and partly because no printer in this country could match Kim Preney's quote in any case. At about US$700 for a minimum print run of 2000 (35c/copy!) in a bigger format (6.7x10.2" rather than A5) with a colour cover, I reckoned I could maintain my existing cover price of £1.50 (then about $2.50), give Diamond their cut and pay various logistical costs, and still break even selling about 70% of the print run. For all that adding 1200 extra readers from a single catalogue listing was a tall order, if I'd had a spare grand lying around to cover the gap between entering the payment cycle and seeing a return, I'd probably have gone for it. Of course, if I hadn't had to print 2000 copies to get a viable unit price in the first place, I'd definitely have gone for it. But in those days, that was how commercial printing worked: setting up the plates was the expensive bit.

Not anymore. Digital prepress really has changed everything. I'm looking at estimates now from printers in Britain who're charging a couple of quid for the equivalent of what Preney – the best value comic printer in the world at the time – was charging three or four hundred dollars for twelve years ago. The unit prices thereafter are higher (but they always were, over here), even in relative terms adjusted for inflation – for runs in the sub-500 range you're looking at a little over a pound, which is too much to sell through Diamond at even £3 a copy...

But do I really need Diamond?

If my goal is international distribution per se, then... even then it's not crucial. If my goal is to be in comic shops, it's the only game in town, but as we've established, that system is broken anyway. And for everywhere else, we have the Internet now: people buy things online all the time, to a degree I'm old enough to still be amazed by. Without even getting into digital editions, consider this: I posted a sample copy of The Spectacular Santa Claus to a New York publisher for under £1.50. If that had been in response to a £3 Paypal order, it would still have made a marginal profit of about 20-30p. Alternatively, I can use something like Comixpress to produce US editions of my work on demand at the same or higher margin, and I don't even have to lick an envelope. Neither of which solution will ever result in a thousand paid-for and unsold comics sitting mouldering in a distributor's warehouse four thousand miles and a retina scan from my being able to do anything with them. The risk that put me off in the Nineties is gone.

On the other hand, the rewards aren't great: if my short-term goal is to make £500-£800 a month from comics, then relying on 20-30p micropayments from the USA is not going to cut it – we're still looking at 2000 sales a month. America is irrelevant.

But Britain... That same £3 comic ordered direct from within the UK can make a marginal return of let's say £1.25 after p&p. If I had 400 regular mail order customers, that would hit my lower limit; anything more is gravy.

400 is the magic number.

Comics Economics 1

2010-03-10T22:15:00.005Z

Boy, can I relate to this. Kieron Gillen at Comics Alliance:

Will we make some money off the trade? Maybe. And that's a big maybe. But that means Jamie not earning any money for the six months it would take to draw it, which is the main reason why we took over a year to do 7 issues. As in, every time Jamie ran out of money, he had to stop and do something else. A couple of hundred dollars doesn't cover rent or pay for his fashionable haircuts. And doing this bitty work f--ks up the production anyway, because you can't concentrate or plan. You just spend your entire life in low-level money panic.

...

Imagine if we could have just done the comic and not had to deal with any of the shit we've had to. We'd have been up to issue 44 now...

... just to give you an idea about narrow the margins are between what we are and what we could be, if we were selling 6K instead of 4K, we could have done those 44 issues. The difference between breaking even and actually being able to do it in comics is insane. It's like being kept under ice, clawing.

I got into Phonogram too late to really get into it, having initially dismissed it as gimmicky and self-indulgent*: I'm one of the missing two thousand, and I'm sure Gillen would spit on my sympathy. But he's absolutely right about this, and all of us who've been round the block even once trying to get started in this business know it, even if the numbers are different from project to project. Depending what you count as a serious attempt, it's something like third time out for me, and although technological changes have made things easier in a lot of ways, there's still a missing step between Almost Viable and Runaway Success, a sort of Daathic Abyss where Doing Okay, Thanks ought to be.

Lest this sound like special pleading, I'd point out that such a gap is not unique to comics: check out messageboards for film/TV production staff and you'll find similar complaints, and one of the things I discovered during my years in the so-called real economy is the extent to which it's increasingly adopting the showbiz model. Consider: twenty years ago, if you used the word "intern" outside of politics or the media, people would have no idea what you were talking about. Changed days.

But comics and publishing are what I know anything about, and have an interest in getting right. And I need to do it soon. As somebody commented on Warren Ellis' blog earlier, in response to the same article:

Waiting for someone else to fix publishing looks less and less sustainable by the minute.

Thinking cap is on. More to come.

*Which it is, of course. I just had to see the whole thing before I realised that was what made it good.

Making Movies II

2010-02-27T23:04:00.020Z

Despite the snow, I made it to Stirling for 7:30 on Wednesday morning, a feat the National Rail Enquiries website had assured me was impossible from where I started. Pickering 1, Bloatware 0.

It being my first time doing anything like this, I assumed personal photography would be verboten on set, and didn't bother taking a camera. In reality, the whole moviemaking operation was effectively a temporary addition to the Stirling Castle tourist trail, and we were surrounded for much of the day by school parties and other onlookers happily snapping away. Plenty of my fellow extras were following suit (and there's something very surreal about the sight of a top-hatted Georgian gentleman adjusting the focus on a digital SLR), and as long as they weren't actually in shot at the time, nobody seemed to mind.

I did have a sketchbook with me, but I only managed to fill a few pages: even lightning sketches like these take longer to pull off than you can guarantee you'll have when you might be mustering into position at a moment's notice:

And we were actually kept surprisingly busy – yes, there was a lot of standing around, in or out of camera range, between takes or waiting for cues; but for most of us there were only a few periods through the day where we weren't needed at all and could go and sit down for half an hour or so. And most of the time we were at least in sight of the filming, so lack of documentary evidence notwithstanding, I had a great time.

For Edinburgh the following day, I did bring my camera. Unfortunately that was more like the sort of day showbiz memoirs warn you about: hours on end of sitting in a church basement while the interesting stuff happens elsewhere, followed by another couple of hours standing under a golf umbrella so my costume didn't get rained on between takes. Merchant Street, an odd, gloomy little nook underneath George IV Bridge, is almost tailormade as a film set, but it's an order of magnitude more confined than the courtyard of James IV's gaff, with far less space behind any given camera position for extraneous people to mooch about in, especially with horse-carriages trying to manoeuvre around. After a few false alarms, I was only eventually called into service around ten o'clock, so for me it was a relief to be finally doing something; but I could tell that for the crew who'd been slogging away in the rain since early afternoon, this was not exactly the best fun they'd had in months. Hats off to Stevie, Liam, Ellie and the rest for their patience and courtesy towards dillettante numpties like moi.

Onlookers from the bridge or Candlemaker Row would thus have had far more opportunity than I did to document the actual filming, but I did take a few snaps while waiting around inside. Hi to Fiona, Derek, James, Stuart, Dave, Patrick, and all the other extras, makeup girls and costumiers whose names I didn't catch.

Yes, he knows he looks like Noddy bloody Holder!

James from Stirling reads the graphic novel.

Stuart porte les pantalons fantastique. Shame he had to wear that coat over them.

When makeup girls get bored.

Lunchtime (i.e. 8:30pm or thereabouts) at Dropkick Murphy's. Even with the electric lights and Sky Sports blazing overhead, it kinda works.

I'm done, and the production now rolls on without me. My involvement was an in-joke all along anyway, and I'm fine with that. It's not the film of the book, it's not a documentary, it's a John Landis movie and that's plenty to be going on with. It's going to be great in ways that don't tread on our toes at all.

But you better believe we're going to a reprint in time for it hitting the cinema. We're not idiots.

Making Movies

2010-02-23T11:14:00.003Z

John Landis' Burke and Hare film is shooting in Stirling and Edinburgh this week. The Moving Image website has set photos.

Your humble correspondent is joining the fun tomorrow. Or rather Thursday. No, it's tomorrow again now. Ah, the joys of agency work!

It beats reading barcodes with the naked eye, though. Anyone who knows me well will confirm that I could happily dress like this all the time.

Formative

2010-02-09T12:19:00.004Z

"I had a wish to be an artist. Was that not mad of me? I had this work of art I wanted to make, don't ask me what it was, I don't know; something epic, mibby, with the variety of facts and the clarity of fancies and all of it seen in pictures with a queer morbid intense colour of their own, mibby a gigantic mural or illustrated book or even a film. I don't know what it would have been, but I knew how to get ready to make it. I had to read poetry and hear music and study philosophy and write and draw and paint. I had to learn how things and people felt and were made and behaved and how the human body worked and its appearance and proportions in different situations. In fact, I had to eat the bloody moon!"

"Duncan, remember what your headmaster said! In four years you can be head librarian in some small country town and then you can make yourself an artist. Surely a real artist could wait four years?"

"I don't know if he could. I know that none ever did. People in Scotland have a queer idea of the arts. They think you can be an artist in your spare time, though nobody expects you to be a spare-time dustman, engineer, lawyer or brain surgeon. As for this library in a quiet country place, it sounds hellishly like Heaven, or a thousand pounds in the bank, or a cottage with roses round the door, or the other imaginary carrots that human donkeys are shown to entice them to all kinds of nasty muck."

- Alasdair Gray, Lanark

Attention Lothianites!

2010-01-27T12:40:00.004Z

Just a reminder that Martin Conaghan and I will be signing copies of Burke & Hare at Forbidden Planet in Edinburgh tomorrow, Thursday 28th January – the 181st anniversary of William Burke's execution.

We'll be giving a behind-the-scenes-making-of talk at the Central Library afterwards, although numbers are limited so best to check with the venue whether it's booked up or not.

There’s also a Burke & Hare Tour later in the evening. Gruesome geographical family fun!

Notes Without A Theme

2010-01-14T13:37:00.009Z

The Scotsman newspaper devotes nearly a whole page to Burke & Hare today. Online here.

My mother was well chuffed to see her boy's name in the paper – and on her birthday too! – and spent the morning texting all her pals about it, until she got a call back and realised she'd sent the message somewhere she hadn't intended to. Readers of my old Pickering's Corner blog will know why she had the local police Incident Reporting number on her mobile in the first place... Oops.

Meanwhile, the printer I was looking forward to using took advantage of the Christmas break to move premises, take on extra staff – and oh look, now they're putting their prices up. I should have known it was too good to last. What recession?

Creative work is on hold at the moment anyway, while I get my house ready for a council-mandated refurbishment. I sense I'm going to end up drawing in pubs for a while, but right now I'm dismantling bookcases, packing stuff into boxes... It all seems strangely familiar...

REDUNDANT PITCHES #9

2010-01-02T22:10:00.006Z

An irregular series in which I play with ideas I'll never get to implement.

Twenty years ago, when it would have been a smash hit, Rambo Versus Terminator would also have been a big, dumb, spectacular piece of trash: an unsatisfactory halfway house to T2, in which Sarah Connor (with baby John in tow) meets a hangdog-featured black ops commando who becomes her new survival tutor just in time to get involved in an epic donnybrook with Evil Futurebot Redux. A bit of interest could be introduced by making this Skynet's first attempt to wipe out the human resistance's future leader, its failure then prompting the events of the previous episode; but otherwise we're talking money for old rope rather than meaningful drama. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if big dumb spectacle is all you want...

...but Schwarzenegger and Stallone are no longer young men, and the window of opportunity for such an approach is closed.

Which is interesting.

Both series are, in their own ways, Frankenstein fables about the mechanisation of warfare. The army took John Rambo and turned him into a monster, a cold-blooded killer unsuited to civilian life; and the Terminator of course is a literal killing machine, albeit one designed to infiltrate and mimic the human enemy. The two characters are natural opponents. But pitting them against each other in the early years of the twenty-first century creates an opportunity to look at them both in new ways.

I haven't seen the most recent Rambo revival, but publicity at the time of its release seemed to present a more nuanced vision of the character than the wrapped-in-the-flag 80s sequels could tolerate – a grizzled, haunted loner without a country, still capable of extreme bloody ultraviolence when pushed (some things remain constant, this is Hollywood after all) but trying his best to fade away and be left alone. Watching the clips, seeing Stallone force his sexagenarian muscles through those stunts gives Rambo an aura of doomed defiance that chimes with his earliest appearance in First Blood but ramps it up to eddaic extremes: he's not just fighting authority or terrorism any more – his every movement now is a warrior's rage against Death and Time and Fate, against his own inevitable decay. More than ever, he's a man out of his era, a relic of an age of giants in a world that has no room for him.

He's just the sort of man we need in the War Against The Machines.

We now live in a world of automated global systems. Cybernetic warfare is a fact. True Artificial Intelligence is still a way off, but not for want of people working on it. The Terminator remains fiction, but the Rise of the Machines becomes less like science fiction with every year that passes. Imagine a film that starts off like a Tom Clancy technothriller, all GPS missile targeting, Predator drones and game-based AI warfighting algorithms – and then something goes wrong, and we cut to five years later...

It's still early in the War, before John Connor and his crew begin to turn the tide – so Arnold Schwarzenegger need not appear, unless he wants to cameo as whoever provides the genetic template for the T-101's cloneflesh. Any random bodybuilder could play the early rubber-skinned infiltration units, but even they don't need to be a big part of the story. In this phase of the conflict, the more inhuman and robotic the threat the better.

This could be the unwinnable final battle that a mythic figure like Rambo needs. Called out of retirement not by patriotism or injustice, but by sheer brute will to survive, facing an enemy that stands as a metonym for the very thing that made him what he is. The system, the meatgrinder, the war machine: it chewed John Rambo up and spat him back out; now, forty years later, it's happening again and this time he won't survive – but he will die fighting with and for his fellow humans. He will die a man, not a monster.

De Profundis

2009-12-08T12:36:00.006Z

I was going to do a second series of Santa Claus Comics Daily this year, but as things have turned out I've got more on my plate than is really compatible with spending the necessary time on it. A couple of hard copies of the original run are now circulating, though: these are home printed on a strictly limited basis, so if you see one it's because I've singled you out for the privilege.

HM Government permitting, I'm likely to be doing some larger-scale self-publishing again soon, having stumbled quite by chance on a UK-based printer whose prices actually make it viable. Santa Claus #1 was briefly slated for the full treatment, but it's a bit late in the year now to start the ball rolling with something I'd have to turn round and sell out of before Christmas. The numbers are looking promising for other projects though, so expect further developments in the New Year.

Onwards and upwards at last...

Brains!

2009-11-08T22:06:00.000Z

"The country will fall silent next Wednesday at 11am to mark Armistice Day.

And Craigneuk's war dead in Wishaw will gather at the memorial for a moving ceremony."

- Wishaw Press, 4 Nov

Process Notes 5: Fiat Lux

2009-10-07T12:25:00.001Z

I made it to the library talks after all, and they went quite well.

Once Martin had talked a bit about the history of comics, the story of Burke and Hare and how the book came about, I went into some more detail about the sheer imaginative and academic effort involved in recreating the environment of early nineteenth-century Edinburgh, and portraying it on the page in a way that I hope evokes the feel of the period as well as the hard historical facts. The digging I did to identify Dr Knox's house wasn't a one off: every location, every piece of furniture or clothing, every supporting character high or low, is based on the maximum possible research I could get done. But inevitably there are limits to what you can find out.

For example: Chapter Seven finds William Burke living with his brother, in Gibb's Close off the Canongate. From a scouting mission back in January, I know where that is and how it looks today, but I stared long and hard at those windows – more specifically at the arches of stonework above them. Are they just force spreaders to protect the lintels, or were original arched windows squared off at some point, as happened later with Surgeons' Hall?

The tenement was built around 1700 as a townhouse for the Earl of Traquair, a family best known for staying Catholic through the Reformation, so an Italianate influence isn't out of the question; but with nothing definite either way, I eventually just went with what was easiest to draw.

Looking back, I should probably have dropped the level of the street a bit as well, but that's hindsight for you.

As the chapter opens, Burke is having an early morning drink in a nearby pub, where he makes the acquaintance of two young women (no prizes for guessing that this will not end well for them!). The precise location of Swanston's tavern is not recorded, so I considered using the World's End, which was associated with a notorious double murder in the 1970s:

but ultimately decided that that sort of expansive allusion to wider Edinburgh lore was beyond the scope of the book. Instead, I selected an appropriate-looking shopfront a little further down the hill on the opposite side of the road, just a few yards up from the distinctive landmark of Canongate Tolbooth – whence, according to the research, Mary and Janet had just been released after a night in the cells for soliciting – and used period illustrations as reference to replace the buildings in between with what was there at the time.

With the establishing shots pinned down, I drew the rest of the page freehand, trying to keep the transitions between panels as fluid as possible. The only major change I made at the inking stage was in panel 3: as with my earlier doubts about the windows, I've no idea whether Gibb's Close has, or ever had, a spiral staircase; but some of the older tenements further up the Royal Mile still do, so it's possible – and crucially it adds a sense of movement and drunkenness that's less obvious in the pencilled version.

It's worth asking how much value I got out of the research I did for this page, considering more than two thirds of it came straight out of my own head, and even the top row is as much speculation as fact. But my feeling is that for a project like this it's the details that matter, and you may as well get them right if you can.

Otherwise, you end up with something like this:

I mean, I ask you: Sheffield?

Read the rest, if you fancy a laugh, at Pappy's Golden Age Comics.

Release the Books!

2009-09-30T11:31:00.001Z

Copies of BURKE & HARE have begun to appear in the wild (pic at right courtesy of Professor Marto) - I saw the finished product for the first time last night, and I'm pretty chuffed with it. Kudos to all involved with the presentation and packaging - for an old small-press bod like me, having someone else handle the business side of a project like this is very much an appreciated luxury.

The first Amazon orders have already shipped, and initial feedback is good. It should be in book and comic shops from next week sometime, and the whole production gang will be at the Birmingham International Comic Show this coming weekend - where the first twenty copies sold will come with a free promotional poster by – *gasp* – superstar artist Frank "The Greens" Quitely!

Following that, Martin Conaghan will be talking about the book at Motherwell Library on Tuesday morning, and Wishaw Library on Tuesday afternoon – I'm probably going to miss these due to other commitments, but I'm sure the star of Radio Scotland's sports desk can rabbit on well enough for both of us.

Further events to be announced.

On Sale in October

2009-08-16T12:49:00.000Z

£12.99 from all good bookshops,
ISBN 1905808127; but you can get it slightly cheaper, and throw a few extra pence my way at the same time, if you Order it now from Amazon

Process Notes 4: A Picture is Worth Four Words

2009-06-13T22:53:00.000Z

Edit: Incidentally, does anyone know what that thing is under the arch above the door to the judges' rooms? It's unclear in the reference pics I have – I initially thought it might be a carved coat of arms, but I'm not convinced.

Crowd scenes are a bit like tattoos: they can look great, but you need to be a particular kind of crazy to put yourself through the pain of getting them that way, and one careless line can ruin everything.

The one above isn't even finished: I've still got the people in the gallery to draw.

Original size 20cm by 8.

Crazy.

Process Notes 3: The Dreaded Deadline Doom

2009-05-25T19:45:00.000Z

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!

Will Pickering is incommunicado until further notice.

Process Notes 2: Confession Time

2009-05-24T11:51:00.000Z

According to crime historian and professional Irishman Owen Dudley Edwards, William Burke took the sacrament of holy absolution while in Calton Gaol. It was administered by a Father William Reid, who apparently served for many years as assistant to the Vicar-General for Scotland* before retiring to a parish in Dumfries, where he died in the 1840s.

I've done my best to find authentic likenesses of all the background characters in the Burke and Hare comic, but inevitably there's quite a few who remain maddeningly obscure, and in such cases I've had to improvise.

*The Catholic episcopacy in Scotland had been abolished during the Reformation, and would not be recreated until 1878. Ironically, this meant that the surviving Catholic mission in the country was more dependent on direct Papal authority, not less. Doh!

Process Notes 1: Bringing It All Back Again

2009-05-19T11:54:00.000Z

By the time Newington Place appears on the 1843 Ordnance Survey map, it's clearly recognisable as the terrace of townhouses that's still there today, half-hidden behind a row of shops and redesignated as 1-17 Newington Road (odd numbers only: the OS map shows it as 1-9 running in the opposite direction).

The anatomist Robert Knox lived at 4 Newington Place in 1829, as confirmed by contemporary reports of the angry mob that besieged his house in the aftermath of the Burke trial; but was it the same house that was there 15 years later, or an earlier building in the same general vicinity?

I need to go further back.

West Newington House, just across the road, was built in 1805, as part of a development scheme initiated by the then landowner, the surgeon Benjamin Bell (grandfather of Joseph Bell, whose observational and deductive skills famously inspired Conan Doyle – in Edinburgh, everything connects to everything else!), but progress round about seems to have been reasonably slow: Thomson's Atlas of Scotland for 1820 shows no structures on the Newington Place plot, and a feu map as late as 1826 just shows an empty field assigned to a Mr Reid. Arniston Place, the next block south, does appear on both maps, which suggests that it's not just an oversight by a lazy cartographer.

Thus, in conclusion: yes, the current No.11 Newington Road, behind the New China Town Cantonese restaurant, is indeed the former home of Robert Knox, who must have bought it as a suburban newbuild sometime in 1826-1828. Here's his front door:

It was a relief to work that out. One of the nice things about Georgian architecture is that because it's all so mathematically regular, the whole original design can easily be extrapolated from even a partial view:

Reconstructing the chaotic vernacular buildings of the Old Town is a whole other barrel o' rollmops...

Death of Print Latest: "I Got Better"

2009-04-24T20:14:00.000Z

I want one.

Decisions, Decisions

2009-03-11T21:41:00.000Z

Sir Walter Scott (Bart.) Reflects

2009-02-25T14:05:00.000Z

From my forthcoming graphic novel with Martin Conaghan, Burke and Hare (Insomnia Publications, August).

Those of you who know Edinburgh well are invited to guess where the author of Waverley is standing in this shot. No cheating, mind!

For Future Presentation

2009-01-22T16:05:00.000Z

Depuis Quatre-Vingt Ans

2009-01-10T15:24:00.000Z

New! Exciting! Starts Today!

2008-12-06T20:05:00.001Z

People keep saying I should do a webcomic.

Okay then.

More tomorrow, and every day until Christmas. Enjoy.

Clearance Sale

2008-11-22T09:05:00.000Z

There's a campaign out there to persuade the National Galleries to stump up £100,000,000 for the right to continue displaying a couple of out-of-copyright soft porn illustrations:

Diana and Callisto

Diana and Actaeon

The paintings are already in situ, but are technically owned by the Duke of Sutherland, who wants to raise a bit of capital to ride out the credit crunch. No-one seems to have suggested that he get a fucking job instead.

They are indeed smashing pictures, and I've got nothing against Titian, but he's not going to see a penny from this sale; and the "loss to the nation" argument - that the public will never again see these images if the originals end up in a mansion in Dubai - is rendered fatuous by modern printing technology, never mind the internet.

So here's a better idea - in fact, here's two.

1) If the National Galleries can somehow raise the ransom, rather than sinking it into the pockets of a hereditary peer, they should find ten thousand struggling artists and give them ten grand each to get out of their bar jobs and DWP "training" schemes and into the studio for a year. Stimulate creative industry instead of parasitism, and as a side effect free up a few thousand vacancies in the real economy which could be filled by some of those newly-impoverished bankers we hear bleating so much.

2) Failing that, I hereby volunteer to step up to the plate and, for the benefit of the Nation, produce full-scale original copies of both paintings at the special value mate's-rate price of one hundred thousand pounds. That's 0.1% of the Duke's reserve price - a bargain, surely?

REDUNDANT PITCHES #8

2008-08-31T15:11:00.001Z

They're just doing their jobs.

REDUNDANT PITCHES #7

2008-08-06T21:07:00.002Z

Here's the deal: every so often I get ideas for an established cultural property which I'll never get to implement, either because continuity has moved on from where they would be applicable, or because the owners would never let me anywhere near it. I haven't posted any for a while, so here's a double bill.

1.
Any sequel to Watchmen would, of course, be redundant by definition. You could catch up with the surviving characters, and make a stab at extrapolating the world of the series 23 years on, as once again a twisted mirror of our own - the Cold War replaced not by global harmony but rather a lot of paranoia about secret agendas, terrorism, and scientific progress run amuck - but even if executed with the same stylistic flourishes and meticulous attention to detail and structure, it would be at best a gloss on the original, more likely a travesty thereof.

That said, part of me did always wonder what might have become of these guys:

They only actually appear in about six panels of #8, and we don't see them again after that - but just at the point in the series when all hell is about to break loose and masked adventurers are in the news again for the first time in years, they stumble on a murder scene, in fancy dress, in time to see the culprits running away...

Sounds like the origin of a junior vigilante team to me.

Nothing ever ends...

2.
I liked this miniseries proposal so much I was hanging onto it, just in case. But DC now have other plans.

In Africa there is a legend.

It is told as fact in the refugee camps; journalists and diplomats share it as a joke in the foreigners-only bars; governments alternately dismiss it as nonsense and use it as cover for their own atrocities. From war zone to war zone, the legend prowls the continent, its power growing, death and madness trailing in its wake.

It is THE LEGEND OF THE HAUNTED TANK.

The Haunted Tank is a WWII Panzer that went astray in the desert and was somehow cursed to wander. The abominable secret of how that happened is another story (perhaps suitable material for an ongoing series if the reaction warrants it, but for now best left to the reader’s imagination): in this series we are concerned with the legends. Each issue is a self-contained story in which the Haunted Tank is largely an offstage presence until the final scene: in some it is a mindless engine of destruction, in others an instrument of nemesis. For example:

In a nation crippled by famine, a missionary hears the legend of the Haunted Tank when it is blamed for interrupting aid supplies. He seeks to prove that the corrupt government is responsible, rather than some phantom – but then comes face to face with it...
In a failed state where bandit tribal militias vie for control, a charismatic miracle-worker is employed to make one group’s soldiers bulletproof. Their rivals fall into terror and disarray, and for a while they seem genuinely unstoppable – until the Haunted Tank appears...
A ruthless dictator blames the Haunted Tank for the massacres carried out by his own security forces. The opposition and the outside world scoff at his claims, but what can they do? But then atrocities start happening that the tyrant doesn’t know about...

This is a horror comic, and Jeb Stuart has nothing to do with it.

Beating Up The Wrong Guy

2008-07-01T09:21:00.000Z

It seems the proposed US remake of Life on Mars has hit the buffers. I have to say it comes as no surprise.

The unique texture of Life on Mars comes from the way it consciously addresses its own fakery: we're never quite sure if this is really 1973 or a marabou stork nightmare thereof. It's as much about the media presentation of the two periods as it is about the actual differences. The key lyric is not so much "take a look at the lawman, beating up the wrong guy" as "oh man, wonder if they'll ever know this is the best selling show". Sam Tyler is a modern TV copper, a politically-correct, university-educated managerialist familiar with all the forensic science, psychology and other procedures and jargon that pad out a typical episode of The Bill; Gene Hunt is his seventies counterpart, the sort of swaggering macho maverick who dominated shows like The Sweeney or The Professionals, for whom all that stuff was poncey desk-jockey rubbish that shouldn't get in the way of kicking villains' heads in. The trouble with translating this culture clash to an American context is that the core assumptions simply don't work.

The Sweeney was itself a metafiction: a conscious attempt to import the gritty rough-and-tumble of American gangster movies into a genre that had hitherto been dominated by cosy morality plays on the model of Dixon of Dock Green and Z Cars. It was violent, it was controversial, it was thought to bring policing into disrepute, and therein lay its transgressive appeal. It may have been partly inspired on the early behaviour of the real Flying Squad, some of whose officers went on record years later as saying they were making most of the rules up as they went along - but stylistically and thematically it was a complete departure from the way the police were expected to be portrayed on the telly. That it's now considered a kitsch period piece has less to do with the sideburns and lapels than with the way later programmes have reverted to the classic detective formula - as iconically demonstrated by the late John Thaw's transformation from Jack Regan into Inspector Morse. If, somehow (and it's hard to imagine), the cultural and political climate of the period had allowed the Sweeney trend to continue - each new series ratcheting up the grit, squalor and moral ambiguity - then we might very well have ended up with a scouse or brummy equivalent of something like The Shield or The Wire by about 1989. Instead, we got Heartbeat.

And that's the key; because Life on Mars is about how we got to here from the seventies, and what the two eras would look like to each other if they somehow collided. And the cop shows of both eras look markedly different on either side of the Atlantic: ironically, at the same time as the Sweeney and CI5 were charging around playing at being the Untouchables, American series were veering away from the hardboiled, pulp-influenced tradition towards something a bit more nuanced, compassionate and complicated. Theo Kojak was a tough guy, but he had a big heart and he understood the social deprivation that led good people to do bad things; Starsky and Hutch were a deliberate subversion of the god cop / bad cop routine, both of them being young, hip, funny, friendly guys who tried not to let the job get to them. Even in The Streets of San Francisco, probably the closest match to the Hunt/Tyler dynamic, it was Michael Douglas as the young idealist who was most of the period: the culture clash element came from the fact that Karl Malden's character was a relic of the old mob dragnet days. The high water mark of the trend came with shows like Cagney and Lacey and Hill Street Blues, in which the characters' personal crises and the human cost of crime and policing often pushed the detective-story elements out of the script altogether, and no-nonsense hardliners like SWAT commander Howard Hunter were lampooned as triggerhappy fascists. The other side of the coin is that in modern US shows, the likes of Vic Mackey and Jack Bauer, for their own separate reasons, don't give a shit about careful proceduralism and social justice: they are thugs first and public servants second, if at all.

So to work, an American version of Life on Mars has to do more than just swap locations. It has to acknowledge its own cultural hinterland, because the audience simply won't recognise that of the original. That means turning the Hunt/Tyler relationship on its head: what the remake needs is a seventies cop who's progressive, empathetic, smart and incorruptible - a kipper-tied bleeding heart who'd lay his life on the line to save the most desperate junkie; and a 21st century walk-in who's more in the maverick, beat'em-till-they-confess vein, and mainly sees being trapped in the past as a chance to pick up cheap land in Manhattan.

Or would that say too much about America, then and now?

Doctor Who and the Pong of Evil

2008-06-29T01:19:00.000Z

Well, we were all expecting the Daleks, and great as they are, there's only so much you can actually do with them storywise. Even so, and even primed by the return of the Bad Wolf Effect in last week's cliffhanger, I wasn't prepared for this year's big ending two-parter to follow quite so closely the model of its counterpart in Season 1.

A brief reappearance by the Ann Droid sets the scene: we're in a parallel universe's Game Station, where an omniscient but powerless female monitors live broadcasts in which abductees from the planet below compete for their very lives. Trapped somewhere in the programme schedule are the Doctor and Donna...

Or, I went out for dinner and taped sodding Wimbledon by mistake. You decide.

"So Powerful in Concept – It's Almost Terrifying!"

2008-05-14T21:55:00.002Z

In 1970, stuck in a rut and itching to try new ideas and approaches, Jack Kirby left Marvel and went hustling for work at the Distinguished Competition. They were delighted to have him, and initially gave him pretty much free rein to do whatever he wanted; but none of the concepts he came up with over the next half-decade turned out to be commercial successes by the standards of the time, and all ended up being cancelled within a year or two of launch. Although revered now by connoisseurs of such things, the likes of OMAC: One Man Army Corps and Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth were just too intense, too personal, too unlike anything else for most contemporary readers to deal with.

The first and most egregious of these casualties of fans' conservatism was the unfinished epic which came to be known, for reasons that still remain obscure, as the Fourth World: three (four if you count Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen) interlinked series examining different facets of a cosmic conflict between beings collectively known as the New Gods.

Others are better qualified than I to detail the ins and outs of the saga's publishing wrangles: suffice it to say that, notwithstanding their curtailment of the original series, DC have made several trademark-protecting attempts to relaunch a "bold new chapter" in the New Gods mythos, some of which have been better than others. With a couple of exceptions (and it's no accident that the best non-Kirby treatments of the New Gods have been by writers who know a thing or two about non-Kirby mythology), the story of the Fourth World for the past thirty years has been the story of lesser writers just not getting it.

Two weaknesses bedevil these revivals. Stylistically, they often fail to convey the grandiose operatic bombast of Kirby's original, the declamatory prose and opposition of absolutes that made these characters resonate with the genuine mythic traditions to which they were supposed to be the heirs. Jim Starlin's recent The Death of the New Gods unfolded mostly with a whimper, debased by colloquial language and proceduralism to the level of a plodding sci-fi whodunnit - CSI New Genesis - so that when the final conflict eventually came, it ended up mired in page after page of expository dialogue and philosophical mischaracterisation, enlivened only by Superman's frustration at being too impotent to intervene effectively.

The second weakness is more substantial. To Kirby, the Fourth World saga was literally an exercise in mythmaking, an updated synthesis of the Norse and Classical pantheons he'd played with at Marvel. The New Gods may have dressed in spandex rather than togas, and used Astro-Force Harnesses and Boom Tube Generators rather than lightning bolts and winged sandals - but they were actual gods, walking embodiments of particular principles or ideas, just like the gods of old. Rather than just run with this idea, too many of Kirby's successors have tried to explore, explain or explode it; to rationalise their status in the context of the broader DC universe - a universe where the Old Gods, far from being dead, appear regularly as supporting cast to the likes of Wonder Woman and Doctor Fate. Sometimes this manifests as a a sort of Gaimanesque psionic multiculturalism, in which gods are seen as being created and powered by the belief of their followers - a handy notion for a composite universe, but not one that's supportable for a pantheon too new to have any followers!

Other times, fervently mono(or a-)theistic writers have preferred to dismiss the New Genesites and Apokoliptians as not really gods at all - just immensely powerful aliens with pretensions, like the Goa'uld or the Squire of Gothos. Starlin, whose reputation as the 1970s' other doyen of cosmic comics is largely based on his iconoclastic Warlock/Thanos saga, falls into the latter camp. His antipathy to the very notion of godhood even spills over into his choice of godkiller, such that Kirby's ineffable, all-nourishing "Source" - the numinous superdivine power of which even the gods are in awe - becomes just another pan-dimensional gameplayer bent on genocide, and Darkseid - Darkseid! - is thrust by default into the role of plucky individualist underdog. It's hard to imagine a more bizarre travesty.

Darkseid is Kirby's greatest villain: the ultimate enemy of joy, freedom, creativity and compassion, as conceived by a New York Jew who went to war against the Nazis and then came home to find himself living under the shadow of the H-Bomb. He is not merely a god of evil: he is the god of triumphant evil, of authority for its own sake, of the subjugation of individual hopes and dreams to the demands of groupthink, militarism and automation. His eternal goal is the "Anti-Life Equation" - the outside control of all living thought (the quotation marks are important: like many of Kirby's big ideas, Anti-Life is an elegant concept given a clunking, unwieldy name, like an inadequate translation from an unknown language).

What Kirby did with Darkseid, in true mythographic fashion, was diagnose what he saw as the greatest contemporary threats to the human spirit - meanness, paranoia, intolerance, the abuse of power - and posit a god of them, poised on the brink of hegemony; and then posit a whole raft of other gods, rising to oppose him at the eleventh hour. These New Gods, with their absurd definitive names and iconic costumes, who act out of love, enthusiasm and hope - who champion Life against Anti-Life - are the angels of our own better natures, our connection to the Source in an age of fear and despair.

So what would a religion of the New Gods look like?

A few pieces of nomenclature apart, the very existence of a pantheon would make it more like classical paganism than the Abrahamic faiths to which we're now accustomed. The gods themselves revere The Source of all life; but although able to communicate in oracular letters of fire, the Source is not a moral authority, still less a person -- it is more like an energy field, or a natural phenomenon like sunlight or the Nile floods.

Highfather Izaya is its guardian, a benevolent shaman/prophet, counselor and patron of the arts. Highfather has renounced war: his way is to promote reconciliation, as with "The Pact" that forestalled the conflict for a generation in NG#4, or the the alchemical marriage between Mister Miracle and Big Barda in Forever People #14.

Yet New Genesis is not undefended -- it has Orion, born the son of Darkseid but raised by Izaya as part of "The Pact". Orion is not really a war god -- he is violence personified, but neither leads nor cajoles others into combat: he is a god of wrestlers and duellists rather than of generals, an acme to be emulated by those who choose a fighter's life, rather than a patron whose favour can be invoked to turn the tide of battle.

Most of the New Gods are like this, in fact: ideal figures or one sort or another, each finding their joy and fulfilment in some sphere of activity at which they excel -- Orion the brawler, Metron the scholar, Lonar the explorer, Big Bear the technician -- even Scott Free, who as God of Escape is the closest thing the mythos has to a messiah, does not really promote a code of behaviour for others: he has a small group of "disciples" (Barda and her Furies, Oberon, Shilo Norman), but they are friends rather than followers.

The fundamental principle of this odd, worshipperless non-religion, then, seems to be something like "to thine own self be true" or "be all you can be" rather than "do as we tell you". Radically, there is only one New God who behaves like the God of Abraham -- who demands worship, obedience and praise; who offers rewards to those who do his will, and destruction to those who oppose him:

Art & Literature

2007-12-17T02:19:00.000Z

A few months ago, I mentioned my admiration for the work of illustrator Victor Ambrus.

While helping my mum move house (at last!), I've just rediscovered a book I had as a kid – Favourite Tales from Shakespeare by Bernard Miles (Hamlyn, 1976) – with glorious pen-and-wash Ambrus pictures on nearly every page!

For example, here's carpenter-playwright Peter Quince and his black and white cat:

The King of Denmark's ghost:

and oh baby, Lady Macbeth:

There's so much more – duels, shipwrecks, fairies, Theseus and the Minotaur – it's almost unfair to pick these out. But aren't they gorgeous?

Art School Controversial

2007-12-11T11:54:00.000Z

George's Hangover. Oils, 12"x16", 2006

George the Mod was a musician I was pals with for a while in my student days, a veteran of Glasgow punk bands like the Humpff Family and The Colostomy Bags. The original sketch for this picture was done the morning after a memorable party in about 1989 or so, at his girlfriend's flat on Garnethill, which had its own secret door into the Glasgow School of Art sculpture studios. Long thought lost, it resurfaced after I moved back home last year, whereupon I decided to make something a bit more permanent out of it.

I don't tend to get to parties like that anymore. The friends I have now are much too well behaved.

Original pencil sketch, circa 1989.

Digital graphic version, 2006

It isn't fit for humans now.

2007-11-05T21:40:00.001Z

I've been standing at my window, watching the bombs go off all over Lanarkshire.

The horizon is alive with luminous dandelion seeds. Rockets whistle past the tower blocks, and lasers search the sky above the park.

Thunder is abroad.

I feel like Nero or Wotan. It's beautiful, but it's all too easy to imagine the real thing. Shock and awe on Babylon Road; Low Waters burning; Blantyre blown sky-high; Forgewood and Viewpark reduced to rubble.

Armaneddon. Swarm over, death.

REDUNDANT PITCHES #3

2007-05-10T13:38:00.002Z

At the tail end of last year, I became briefly obsessed with Hellblazer.

I'd been following the adventures of John Constantine since he first showed up in Saga of the Swamp Thing over twenty years earlier, but was finding recent issues less than captivating. This was odd, as they were written by Denise Mina, whose Garnethill Trilogy I'd thoroughly enjoyed for its tense, sordid drama and picking-at-scabs gruesome detail – qualities I'd thought (like DC's editorial staff, no doubt) would translate well to a comic about a struggling middle-aged demonologist with nothing left to live for except beer, fags and the fact that he doesn't dare die because he has too many enemies in the afterlife. I practically jumped for joy when I heard she'd got the job; but a year later, as her overextended storyline about a Glasgow planning application plodded unenthusiastically towards its conclusion, I realised I didn't care how it ended, as long as it ended soon.

Thinking about what had gone wrong with my favourite comic, I reread all my old issues and came to the conclusion that what it needed was more variety of tone: shorter stories, stories where the fate of the whole world wasn't necessarily at stake, stories in which none of Constantine's close friends or relatives were brutally murdered, stories where Constantine took the initiative or turned out to have had a plan all along rather than being constantly manipulated and crawling from the wreckage by the skin of his teeth. All of these were quite common in the early years of the series, and the fan-favourite high-stakes-hard-luck stories stood out more strongly in consequence. Not any more.

Mike Carey, the writer prior to Mina, had given us a 41-issue rollercoaster ride through the established mythos of the title with a half-dozen new baddies thrown in for good measure, all collapsed into six months of tight continuity in which Constantine barely got to draw breath between crises; and prior to that, Brian Azzarello had had him wandering around America under the supervision of a maverick FBI agent; which meant that in publishing terms, by late 2006 it had been seven years since John last poked his nose into a one-issue mystery out of sheer curiosity. I felt that was too long.

I also felt that his fiftieth birthday should be marked with a special story, as his 35th and 40th had been – and what better opportunity to kick off a change in direction?

So I wrote a script – at least, I wrote most of a script before I got distracted by Christmas and a couple of juicy job applications. And even the words "I wrote" overstate my agency in the matter: with my head buzzing with twenty years of continuity and characterisation, it was more like I put four characters in a room together and just let them talk.

I'm not going to post the whole thing – there were a few good lines in it, but it was basically a conversation in a pub, and I knew at the time that it was a pointless exercise anyway: DC would already have commissioned their next writer, and it would be someone with a better track record than me. But my writing muscles were itching, so off I went.

The treatment came in three parts: the initial 5oth birthday issue, a series of short unconnected adventures with a subplot running underneath, and finally a multi-issue showdown with an old rival that would resolve the subplot and put the title's basic premise back on track.

The key to it all was the timeline I'd worked out through rereading all my old issues. The textual evidence was pretty clear that all Mike Carey's stories followed each other in one apocalyptic six month period, and that John's trip to Glasgow took place a couple of months later, while he was still shaken by his experiences. Matching that up with other bits of continuity gave me the following sequence of events:

Autumn 2002 – John returns from America and gets embroiled in a whole heap of trouble.
Spring 2003 – Only a couple of months after swearing off magic for good, John is lured to Glasgow.
10th May 2003 – John turns fifty.
Later in 2003 – the events of Swamp Thing: Bad Seed (ST Vol.III #1-6)
Autumn 2004 – the events of the graphic novel All His Engines
11 July 2005 – the events of Hellblazer #223.

It all fitted together nicely, and the structure of a twelve-issue run set in 2003-04 just sat there staring me in the face. As it turned out, the conclusion of Denise Mina's story would throw this chronology to the winds, by anchoring John's Glasgow trip in summer 2006 for the sake of a cheap deus ex machina involving the World Cup; but I didn't know that at the time, just as I didn't know it would leave John back on speaking terms with his few remaining friends, or that DC already had other plans for the final antagonist I had in mind.

HELLBLAZER: PENTECOST (1 issue)

10th May 2003. In a quiet country pub, John Constantine meets up with what remains of his inner circle: his lover and protege, Angie Spatchcock (who is also his daughter, though neither of them know it yet); his niece Gemma; and his oldest friend, Chas the taxi driver. They've all been through the wars lately, and none of them are sure they want to be there. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife.

Chas is the only one who has bought him a birthday present: vouchers for a course of driving lessons. "Fuck up your test and I'll get you some more for Christmas," he says, "and that's the only fucking reason I ever want to hear from you again."

John has brought them here to apologise for everything that his lifestyle has cost them. He got into magic when he was too young and reckless to realise what a bad idea it was, and the people around him have been paying the price ever since. He doesn't expect, or think he deserves, forgiveness: he just wants to get it on the table that he knows it's all his fault.

Things get emotional, and he retreats to the toilets to compose himself for the second half of what he has to say. While he's there, his excised demon-self appears to him in the mirror, taunting him and mocking the haggard, drunken, hysterical wretch he's become. John dismisses the demon by scrawling a sigil on the mirror with liquid handwash, and allows himself a smirk: he's still got it...

Back at the table, John gets to the point. As screwed up as his life is, magic is all he knows. He's fifty years old, and he can't go back and change anything. Even if he quit, he has a reputation and he has enemies: sooner or later, someone's going to come gunning for him again, just like Evans did in Glasgow. That being the case, it's time he pulled himself together and started playing for keeps again: he's tired of being pushed around. So his friends have a choice: they can walk away and never see him again, and live quietly for a few years until some cosmic buggly or two-bit occult gangster slaughters them to prove a point; or they can stick around, probably end up dying the same way, but just maybe stop a few even worse things happening along the way. It's not much of a choice, but it's the best he can do.

Angie and Gemma opt to stick with him; but Chas has had enough. John promises the girls that everything's going to be different from now on.

Cut to a few months later, London gleaming in the autumn sunshine. In a plush office in a Georgian terrace, a man explains the predicament he finds himself in: a doppelganger has taken over his life, and his wife, family, friends and workmates no longer either recognise him or understand a word he says.

Final splash page: John by the window, sporting a new look...

"Alright, I'll see what I can do. But it'll cost yer."

That thing round his neck is Sargon the Sorcerer's Ruby of Life, a 4000-year-old mystic artefact which came into his possession at the end of Andy Diggle's 2004 Swamp Thing relaunch. And that's where the fun begins...

JOHN CONSTANTINE AND THE RUBY OF LIFE (8 issues)

Constantine makes a spectacular comeback to the world of professional occultism.

These are compressed, done-in-one stories, each structured like a Bond movie: a punchy 2- or 3-page opening sequence, which may or may not relate to the story that follows; a powerful title splash page; then cut to an exotic location – Venice, Calcutta, Tierra del Fuego, Moss Side – where John Constantine and his glamorous assistants Angie and Gemma arrive to do their stuff. Each situation is different – a haunting, a curse, a hunt for a magical artefact, a ritual murder being investigated by the local police; but there's an introduction, a cagey meeting with the antagonist, a deniable attempt to scare the Hellblazers off, a chase of some kind, and finally a spectacular conclusion across at least one double-page spread, followed by an epilogue in which our heroes enjoy the spoils of triumph.

This is Constantine on top for once. Magic is still a dangerous way of life, but with Sargon's Ruby in his possession he has never been better equipped to deal with it. He's no longer John-from-the-pub-wot-does-the-magic; he's the Hellblazer, the Mod Magus, Occultist Number One. He's living large and loving it.

It can't last.

HELLBLAZER VERSUS SARGON (3 issues)

Summer 2004. Constantine's ghostwritten and self-aggrandising autobiography has just been published, and a TV series is airing in which he performs astounding feats of hypnosis and conjuration amid hermetic and satanic trappings. The final, spectacular, death-defying episode is about to go out live, and John is on all the chatshows making Jonathan Ross do a striptease and Lorraine Kelly crawl on all fours like a dog.

Gemma is worried. This isn't the Uncle John she knows. He's gone beyond sarcasm and flamboyance, and she's not convinced it's an act anymore. He seems to really enjoy humiliating people – even Angie, who always seemed so sassy and confident, has become little more than a sycophantic minion. Could it be the power of the Ruby that's turned his head? Her investigation into its history and properties leads ultimately to Bavaria, where she enlists the aid of Sargon himself, returned once more from the grave to carry out his final task...

The finale is a no-holds-barred magical battle at Constantine's live TV broadcast. The show collapses in disarray; the secret of Angie's paternity is revealed; Sargon reclaims the Ruby; and it turns out that it's not the real John who's been prospering for the past year, but his excised sins and weaknesses – the so-called Demon Constantine. When John banished him in the pub toilet, he drew the sigil in the mirror the wrong way round, and they swapped places! Sargon swaps them back, wipes John's memories of his year in hell, and flies off into the night.

The crisis is over, but so is John's relationship with Angie, and the ignominious end of his TV career is likely to leave him bankrupt.

Back to bloody normal, then. Where's the nearest pub?