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.

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.

End of August News: Part 2

Being, as the name suggests, a contination of yesterday's rambling:

I had a novel experience at the back end of last week, in that I submitted a story for one magazine and had it accepted for a totally different one. I sent in my Feeler - a cheery tale of an empathic counsellor struggling under the weight of other people's pain, and her quest to hang on to a little sanity - to Tyree Campbell at Aoife's Kiss, which featured my The Burden of Kings not so long ago. Mr Campbell decided to accept it, but for Sam's Dot Publishing's new imprint Shelter of Daylight. Expect to see it in April of next year.

Finally, I just received the artwork for my comic strip The Unleashing of the Ineffectual, forthcoming from Futurequake Press, from artist Duncan Kay. Duncan's been teasing me with character sketches and suchlike for months, one of which was so damn neat that it's currently sitting framed on top of my bookcase, and the final product doesn't disappointment. No idea yet when it will actually see the light of day, but I'll post when I know more.