With any luck you’ve managed to get through 2019 in one piece. So, Merry Christmas and fingers crossed for 2020!
Avengers Strikefile 1
When I was growing up I wanted to draw Marvel Comics more than anything else in the world…
In my teens, in the late 70s, I drew and self-published my own comic fanzine, The Mighty Apocalypse, spending far more time on it than my studies.
In the 80s, when I was in my 20s I finally got to work in comics professionally, with Shatter, an original strip in a magazine called Thunder Action that reprinted out of copyright T.H.U.N.D.E.R Agents strips. I say ‘professional’ but that’s in the loosest sense of the word - but I did get paid for it. But it wasn’t for Marvel Comics…
By this point the lure of becoming a full-time comic book artist had faded significantly but in the back of my mind there was still a little voice saying ‘Marvel Comics, Marvel Comics…’
So when, in 1993, the chance finally came to have some work published by Marvel, I jumped at it. By this time it wasn’t a matter of ‘what you know’ but ‘who you know’, as several of my contemporaries were now working in the industry in one way or another. In this case my old friend Richard Ashford, from Acme Press & Speakeasy fame was in New York working as an editor for Marvel. He commissioned mutual friend Cefn Ridout and myself to put together a one-off issue called Avengers Strikefile.
The bulk of the issue was a ‘proper’ comic, illustrated by Jeff Moore, but there was a central section, Galactic Mourning, written by Cefn and featuring ‘Computer graphics, enhancements and visualisations’ by myself, which served as recap of of the massively complex Skrull/Kree cosmic war - lots of aliens punching the crap out of each other, basically.
I didn’t so much draw it, as do a complex cut and paste job using images from many older comics, and wrapping them up with a healthy dose of 3D rendered spaceships, robots and planets and psychedelic computer effects that were popular back in the day (who else remembers Kai’s Power Tools?). These days the 3D graphics look especially crude but remember, this was before Toy Story came out so the benchmark was pretty low…
Back in those days, comics weren’t coloured on computers plus there was no way of getting the digital files to Marvel (they wouldn’t have know what to do with them anyway) so the artwork was output as CMYK colour separated films and shipped to them like that - so in other words, they never had any original artwork, which must have been pretty strange for them.
So off the films went to New York, and I waited with bated breath to see what the final printed thing would look like - it was such an unusual process, that there was definitely a chance that things might go spectacularly wrong! My promised complimentary copies never arrived but I eventually managed to get my hands on a copy and was quite pleasantly surprised.
Job done! Crossed off the bucket list!
Anyway, today, 25 years later, it was released digitally. They’ve got an enormous back catalogue of stuff that they’re slowly working through and there’s lots of more deserving stuff still waiting, so I wasn’t expecting to see it pop up on Comixology.
Considering Marvel have never had the original art as such, I’m not sure exactly how they’ve done the digital transfer - it looks better than a scan but not as good as the original digital files. I guess they’ve scanned in the black and white films again and assigned a colour to each one then assembled them digitally - especially since one of the pages looks like they’ve mixed up the films :) And they missed a page out! Luckily it wasn’t a story page…
So, all in all, a very nice little surprise to see my one and only Marvel Comic officially on my iPad at last.
Fanscene issue 3
Fanscene 3 & 4
Since I last mentioned Fanscene, David Hathaway-Price has produced not one, but two(!) more issues celebrating over 50 years of Comics Fandom. What was originally going to be issue 3 expanded in size so much that it split into two, more manageable editions.
Issue 3 celebrates Vampirella’s 50th birthday which is a great excuse for everybody (myself included) to draw their favourite scantily clad vampire, as well as the British APA scene, which I’m embarrassed to say, I was mostly unaware of. This issue clocks in at a mere 160 pages but contains plenty of quality material by Nick Neocleous (including a great cover) and much more from Floyd Hughes and Steve Hooker.
David pushed issue 4 out quickly after the last one - it was more like FanScene 3 part 2, with an almost measly 88 pages, 3 of which were devoted to my Stan Lee piece.
All issues are available for free download here: Classic UK Comix Zines
My Vampirella illustration from #3
My Stan Lee illustration from #4
Fanscene #4
The Art of Control
I’ve just finished playing through the rather excellent game, Control, by Remedy Entertainment. When I first saw the initial publicity for the game, I wasn’t that bothered, but as the release date grew closer and I saw this trailer, I became much more interested:
Without giving away too much of the story, the game contains elements of all sorts of strange events, conspiracy theories and Government cover-ups. In fact the whole game is set within the headquarters of the fictional(?) Federal Bureau of Control, a top-secret Government organisation responsible for the the containment, study, and control of paranatural phenomena. The so-called ‘Oldest House’ is in Manhattan but can only be found if you’re looking for it and, amongst other things, houses a collection of everyday objects with strange powers - a wonderful nod to one of my favourite tv shows that nobody’s ever heard of, The Lost Room.
It was the fact that the whole game was set inside a single building that bothered me the most - I tend to like games with a strong visual identity and that let me explore strange, new, worlds, meet alien races (and kill them in most cases :) But I shouldn’t have worried, the FBC HQ is not like other buildings…
Although we start off in what looks like a pretty conventional, if slightly retro, looking office, things soon start to get weird and we realise that the normal laws of physics don’t apply here.
There’s a risk that everything could look a bit samey, but the designers have done a fantastic job of differentiating the areas using colours and lighting.
As well as housing the usual assortment of offices, cafeteria, post room etc. that you’d expect to find in any office building, there’s a power plant, a furnace (although nobody knows who installed it or what it heats) and even a quarry!
The more you explore, the more of the back story is revealed as you find research reports, inter-departmental emails (some of which are pretty amusing) and videoclips.
And by the time you reach the end of the game, you’ll have visited some very strange and uniquely memorable locations.
I really enjoyed playing Control a lot more than I thought I was going to. It was a feast for the eyes, great fun to play - especially as your character gets more powerful as the game progresses - but, more importantly it had it’s own sense of self. It’s nothing like any other game I’d played and it revels in its own weirdness - and that’s a good thing in my book!
I’ll leave you with a quote from the game:
“We live in a room, and there’s a poster on the wall. We stare at it and we think that’s the whole world. The room... and the poster. The picture’s something nice - a landscape, a famous person. Like in that movie... what is it called? The prison movie. The room’s a cell, and the picture, it’s different for each of us. It can be beautiful or terrible, but we’re all transfixed. But it’s all a lie. Something to distract us from the truth. They’re lying to us. We’re lying to ourselves. The room’s not the world, the world... is much bigger, and much stranger. There’s a hole hidden behind that poster that leads to the real world. We all feel safe in that room. But sometimes... sometimes something crawls out from behind the poster, and the ones that see it happen freak out, and try to forget what they saw.”
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year 2018
I hope you all manage to have a wonderful break wherever you are and whoever you’re with… and good luck with 2019 :)
Stan Lee R.I.P.
I surprised myself last night by shedding a tear when I heard that Stan Lee had died aged 95. Although, thinking about it, I really shouldn’t have been surprised. To a great many people of my generation, he wasn’t just a guy that wrote comics, he was a father-figure who helped shape the people we would grow up to become.
This isn’t really aimed at my friends who used to read comics (or still do) - they know all of this already, and a whole lot more. This is aimed at the people who only knew Stan as the face of Marvel Comics or the man behind Spider-Man. And it’s especially aimed at the people that think that comics are ‘just for kids’.
I started reading Marvel comics when I was 11, just when I got to the age where I started thinking about the bigger things in life, and have no doubt that they helped shape my moral compass. Stan’s stories weren’t just about people in funny costumes fighting each other - they were about standing up for the underdog, fighting intolerance and doing the right thing even when it’s difficult.
One of his famous lines, ’With great power comes great responsibility’, makes me pretty sure that Donald Trump never read comics. But Stan wasn’t content with making sure his stories had a strong moral backbone, he actually wrote frequent editorials, Stan’s Soapbox, where he would hammer the point home e.g:
‘Let's lay it right on the line. Bigotry and racism are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today. But, unlike a team of costumed super-villains, they can’t be halted with a punch in the snoot, or a zap from a ray gun. The only way to destroy them is to expose them - to reveal them for the insidious evils they really are. The bigot is an unreasoning hater - one who hates blindly, fanatically, indiscriminately. If his hang-up is black men, he hates ALL black men. If a redhead once offended him, he hates ALL redheads. If some foreigner beat him to a job, he’s down on ALL foreigners. He hates people he’s never seen - people he’s never known with equal intensity with equal venom.
Now, we’re not trying to say it’s unreasonable for one human being to bug another. But, although anyone has the right to dislike another individual, it’s totally irrational, patently insane to condemn an entire race - to despise an entire nation - to vilify an entire religion. Sooner or later, we must learn to judge each other on our own merits. Sooner or later, if man is ever to be worthy of his destiny, we must fill out hearts with tolerance. For then, and only then, will we be truly worthy of the concept that man was created in the image of God – a God who calls us ALL - His children.’
I certainly didn’t get that sort of moral guidance from my own father :)
Plus, I passively absorbed an incredible amount of knowledge from those stories: physics, biology, geography, mythology… Who knew learning could be so much fun? Comics fuelled my imagination and acted as a gateway drug to reading ‘real’ books, both fantasy and factual.
If all you know of Stan’s comics are the Marvel movies you’ve seen at the cinema, then I’m not sure how well this stuff comes across. Reading Spider-Man as a teenager was like being involved in a decade-long soap opera, watching the characters interact and develop - there’s no way that can be condensed into a 2 hour movie. You simply don’t care enough what happens to someone you only met an hour ago…
Sure, Stan was sometimes happy to take too much responsibility for his part in creating these characters - both Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko did far more than they’re credited for in the mainstream press - but there’s no denying it was his vision that powered the characters and gave them the human touch.
I met him twice, both at book signings, and he seemed like such a nice, genuinely enthusiastic guy. Although I was just another in a long line of kids waiting to get his autograph, he took his time to make everyone feel special, like he was really pleased to meet us. And I didn’t just meet Stan - it was through comics that I met some of my best friends who I’ve grown up with ever since.
So perhaps I shouldn’t feel so sad - after all, he lived to 95 years old, was happily married for 69 years (his wife died last year, also 95) and was one of the most read authors in the world. His characters have created a mythology for the modern age that will outlast us all… not a bad legacy.
So Rest In Peace, Stan - you’ve earned it.
Fanscene
About 50 years ago the first British comics Fanzine was published and David Hathaway-Price decided that this was an event that needed celebrating. So he asked some his friends who had been involved in the fan scene over the years (myself included) if we'd be interested in contributing to a commemorative fanzine.
I'm sure he was surprised (and terrified) by the scale of the response! Fanscene has just been released and checks in at massive 328 pages. It's a wonderful mix of articles, personal reminiscences, new or unpublished artwork and strips - basically a great big wallow in nostalgia for anybody that grew up loving comics in the 70s & 80s.
I contributed an article about my memories of publishing my own fanzine (Apocalypse) and also supplied three unpublished strips from back in the day, including my unfinished, illustrated version of 2112 by Rush.
I can't recommend this highly enough for anyone who has an interest in British comics (or even just a collection of great artwork) and since it's completely free, there really is no excuse not to download a copy right now.
Fanscene
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v4htUqh7voJY4pNB7z7LrPLNZ6b_gw1v/view
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year 2017
This year seems to have gone by quicker than ever... Globally things still seem pretty grim, but I hope you've managed to have a good year and that 2018 is better for all of us
New Year's Resolution: update the blog more frequently :)
David Bowie
I was cleaning out a cupboard this weekend when I came across this painting I did of Bowie that I'd completely forgotten about - it bought a little tear to my eye...
I made an album...
Years ago, I made an album, then, apart from giving a few handmade CDs to close friends, forgot all about it...
But then I found the files and uploaded them to Soundcloud so everyone can listen.
It's all instrumental electronica, so you don't have to worry about my singing voice. If that sounds like your sort of thing, here's a link.
ps. the song titles are all related to the Final Fantasy series of video games...