Duncan Kay Draws the Heck of My Brain Droppings (Part 2)

 The week before last, I began posting some of the concept images that artist Duncan Kay has produced for our comics work together. In that post I covered his designs for The Unleashing of the Ineffectual, the strip we collaborated on for Something Wicked, and here we have a handful of designs for another story, the alread-much-posted-about Endangered Weapon B, which ended up being drawn (and painted, and lettered) by Bob Molesworth.

 First up we have some designs for the man known only as the Professor.  Imagine a really sordid version of Allan Quatermain, or an elderly Indiana Jones with his own airship and mechanically-assisted grizzly bear - if that makes any sense.  Which it doesn't.  Did I mention the Professor worships the Norse gods and wants to summon zombies?  Anyway, I strongly recommend clicking on that second picture to read Duncan's frankly insane notes.

The last image, right, features Tilly Tobega, the Professor's Polynesian pilot, computer engineer and kidnapped prospective future wife.  Tilly is kind of the voice of reason aboard the airship Valhalla, in so much as there's any reason at all in the world of Endangered Weapon B.

Which, as you've probably realised by now, there really isn't.

Lastly, here's a link to Duncan's blog, which I have a vested interest in recommending because these days he's mostly posting concept art for our forthcoming projects.  This week: everyone's favourite irrate fish-god, Cthulhu.

Duncan Kay Draws the Heck of My Brain Droppings (Part 1)

I wrote a little last week about my recent adventures in the heady world of small press comics, and particularly about my work - both past and hopefully future - with the brilliantly talented Duncan Kay.  Afterwards, I realised it would have been nice to spruce up the post with some of Duncan's work (and Bob Molesworth's too, for that matter, but hopefully you'll get to see that once we get Endangered Weapon B out there).

So I checked with Duncan, and he's cool with the idea, which is good news because it would be a hell of a shame if we were the only two to get to see these.  Duncan's an excellent sequential artist, but I think he'd agree that it's concept and design stuff like this that he truly blows out of the water.

First up, then, here are some colour concepts for the strip that recently appeared in Futurequake Press's Something Wicked imprint.

Above, left and right, we have some sketches for three nerdy henchman cultists.  I gave Duncan next to no direction in the script here, but he absolutely nailed the idea: I love the thrown-together uniforms, particularly the robe / sneaker combinations.  I can totally believe that these are guys who'd practise occultism in their basement really badly.

For that matter, I can believe that this guy, the Head Cultist (aka Derek), would be the one to encourage them to do it.  I'm not convinced he'd actually be able to summon spooky green fire, though.  He may look a bit sinister, but those sandals are an even more misguided robe accoutrement than sneakers, so it's clearly all a put on.  My guess is that it's actually something he's knocked up out of lime jelly.  Or maybe he's so desperate to look cool that he's set his hand on fire - something I think we've all been guilty of once in a while.

"The Dark One will cleanse!"  Yes indeed.

Lastly, and my personal favourite - to the point where I framed it and put it on my bookcase - we have the Monster Baby. 


Again, I don't think anyone could have done a better job of capturing the script's vague concept of something at once eye-wateringly cute and completely repulsive.  I never know whether I want to hug this little guy or kick him into a ditch.  Maybe both.

Anyway, that's The Unleashing of the Ineffectual covered.  Hopefully next week I'll get round to compiling Duncan's sketches for Endangered Weapon B.

Some Comic News

While there hasn't been a heck of a lot happening on the prose front lately that I haven't already posted about -well, except for the ginormous bit of news that I can't mention yet - there have been a few fun and interesting developments on the comics front.

I've talked a few times about my script Endangered Weapon B, which has had a troubled existence so far, to say the least.  The gist of that backstory is that I wrote it for Futurequake Press's imprint Mangaquake, the editor there picked it up but suggested some major alterations - expanding the story and changing the titular protagonist from a panda because some other studio did a lot of books with pandas in - and then, months later, told me it wouldn't be getting published after all because Mangaquake had folded.

So that sucked.  But not to be defeated ... well, actually, I did kind of give up for a while there, since there aren't a heck of a lot of places that take short comic scripts, to say the least.  After a few months, though, I got around to doing a bit of market research, and discovered the neat-looking Underfire Comics.  I sent Endangered Weapon to the editor there, Bob Molesworth, and he also really liked it.

A month or two after that, I was contact by Duncan Kay, who did a completely brilliant job of illustrating my story The Unleashing of the Ineffectual for the recently-released Something Wicked #6.  Duncan asked if I had anything going and I mentioned Endangered Weapon.  Duncan liked the script too, and said that he'd like to draw it, which was fine with me.

Then some more time passed, I likely got distracted by something shiny, and before anyone knew any better it was last month.  Duncan got back in touch again to say that he'd started on some concept sketches, and at that point I figured I'd better get in touch with Bob again to see what was what.

At which point, I found out that Bob had finished drawing, colouring and lettering my script.  And that he'd done a ridiculously great job of it.

Since, due to me shabby lack of research, I had no idea that Bob was even an artist, this came as a bit of a surprise.  A good surprise, though, all told, since like I said it looks fantastic, and especially since Duncan was cool about the whole thing and suggested that rather than pass up on the opportunity to work together again we start thinking about putting together some kind of comics collective and involving all his hugely talented professional artist mates in it.

So the upshot is that Endangered Weapon B is pretty much finished and just waiting while we figure out how to get it out there, and that I've been insanely busy attempting to churn out scripts that Duncan and his mates can draw. Which, considering that a month ago this whole comics thing was little more than a fun sideline, is both interesting and quite exciting.  Will it come to anything?  Well, I hope so, and there's plenty of enthusiasm going around, so I'd say that right now the signs are good.

The Ineffectual Unleashed

Many and odd are the roads a story can take from weird little idea throbbing at the back of your brain to full-on published goodness.

The Unleashing of the Ineffectual began life as a short story about four years ago.  The idea - of a bunch of teenage Lovecraft groupies trying to summon something the master might have been proud of and getting less than they bargained for - was definitely fun, but it just didn't work the way I first wrote it.  I sent it out a couple of times and realised it didn't have much of a future.  But I still liked the concept, I just felt like I'd slipped up on the execution.

Some time after that I was looking around for an idea for a follow-up comic script to my first attempt, Fleshworld, as published in Futurequake #10.  It occurred to me that the problem with Unleashing was that it needed too much exposition to get it moving. That isn't so much of an issue in a comic, you just write instructions like "It’s a surreal landscape, with an extra sun or two, huge distorted trees, strange crystalline towers, and vast mountains in the background" and shift the problem onto your poor artist.  So I hacked Unleashing up, turned exposition into panel notes, and sent it to the Futurequake guys, who also happen to publish a horror comic imprint by the name of Something Wicked.

 This time it got accepted straight away, and the artist who got landed with the unenviable task of interpreting those instructions was none other than the phenomenally talented Duncan Kay. I try not to throw around phrases like 'phenomenally talented' too much, so to put that in context, I now have two pieces of Duncan's work framed and sitting on the bookshelves in my study.  Not only is Duncan a fine artist, he was a spot-on choice for this particular story, and I really couldn't have got much luckier.

Anyway, things went from there.  Duncan and I got the comic strip version of Unleashing finished a little over a year ago, for the 2009 issue of Something Wicked, and then for behind-the-scenes reasons it didn't appear in that issue - at which point, what with having the memory of a confused marsupial, I mostly forgot about it.  But now, finally, it's out, and I should soon have my contributor copy.  In the meantime, there's the entirely neat cover in the top-left - and the full TOC can be found here.

October Wrap Up

Just a quick post to report a few belated odds and sods of October news:

Well, the month was a bit of a triumph, all told, with a couple of very strong sales and three acceptances for non-paying but fun venues. Of the latter, and not to denigrate the other two, I'm currently most excited about the picking up of my comic strip for Mangaquake, since I've just finished the new edit. It's now called Endangered Weapon B, after its grizzly-bear-in-robot-armour hero Banjo, and it comes in at ten pages, twice as long as Fleshworld (as printed in Futurequake #10) or my forthcoming strip in Something Wicked. It's been fun to decompress the story, and I think that this is the definite high point of (my admittedly limited!) comics work so far. In short, I'm chuffed with it, and can't wait to see what an artist makes of those ten pages of utter dementedness.

I'd hoped to have a couple of things out this month, but neither has materialised; on the plus side, the anthology from Comet Press that's to feature my Rindelstein's Monsters now has a fantastic cover, a neat webpage all of its own, a release date at the back end of November, and perhaps most importantly, a name - The Death Panel. I've seen a copy of the galley, and I can say with only a hint of bias that this one is going to be awesome.

Last up, I found yet another review of The Living Dead, which is both staggeringly thorough and singles out Stockholm Syndrome for credit - in the shape of a 4 out of 5 rating. At least, I hope it's out of five, and not say, seventy-three. Either way, cheers to reviewer Gregory Tidwell.