Support Reincar(Nate)

KEITH BURNS (the co-creator of Blood Psi) is the artist on a project currently looking for funding on Kickstarter. It's called Reincar(Nate) and Michael Moreci (of Image's Hoax Hunters fame) is the writer.

There's a page of Keith's lovely art above and here's the lowdown on the project from the book's Kickstarter page...

Reincar(Nate) is a 102-page, full-color graphic novel that tells the story of Nate McCoy, a well-meaning, down on his luck P.I. who has a special ability--he can see and interact with past versions of himself. The people he reincarnated from. With the help of Jameson (a Wild West lawman) and Alan (a 1960s-era hitman), Nate works to solve his latest case, one that digs straight to the heart of the city's criminal underworld.

If you're a fan of stylized, character-driven noir in the vein of Chew or Terriers, you'll find a lot to like in Reincar(Nate).

Sounds great, right? The project needs another $2,880 (£1,178) to reach its total of $8,250 (£5,094) by next Friday (May 4). A mere 20 bucks will get you a signed and numbered first edition of the book, 30 will get you a signed and numbered book, plus your name on a special 'thank you' roll of honour inside.

You can make a pledge right here.

Blood Psi STILL getting great reviews!

THERE'S a lovely review of mine and Keith Burns' Blood Psi one-shot in episode seven of the Small Press Big Mouth podcast. Reviewer Stacey Whittle , who also blogs for www.sfx.co.uk, describes the cover and interior art as "gorgeous" and says the story is "very satisfying" and kept her guessing right until the end.

The review starts at 17 minutes 20 seconds into the podcast and you can check it out here: http://castroller.com/podcasts/GeeksyndicatesPodcast/1209360

You should also take a look at the SPBM blog here: http://smallpressbigmouth.blogspot.com/

Blood Psi has been out for at least a couple of years now but a great review's a great review as far as I'm concerned.

Very long post about Blood Psi and Diamond

I'VE just had a week away from the day job to get cracking on the Blood Psi stuff and have made pretty good progress. I finished the first draft of the story's second part yesterday and will now spend the next week tweaking and chopping it around.

I don't know how other writers do it but, for me, a first draft is never more than about 60 per cent of the way to the finished script. It's all about giving what you're writing a structure and hitting the plot points you need to in the allotted number of pages (in this case 24-25). It's in the second and third drafts that stuff like dialogue and panel descriptions take proper shape. You also become aware of plot elements that aren't really explained properly in the first draft and have to work out ways of weaving them into the story without having to rely on obvious exposition. After fight scenes, this is the thing I find trickiest.

*WHEN artist Keith Burns and I first discussed doing more Blood Psi, we thought it would take the form of a three- or four-issue mini-series. It's more likely to appear now as a graphic novel though. The main reason for that is the recent changes Diamond (the comic distributors) have made to their minimum order benchmarks. In the good old days, titles submitted to Diamond had to generate a minimum of $1500 in revenue for the company. That figure has now been raised to $2500 - a massive increase.

The implications for small publishers like myself are obvious - if low sales mean we can't get our books listed in Previews, we're pretty much screwed. I think I'm right in saying that all my books to date have exceeded the $1500 minimum but, in the new climate, expecting a four dollar mini-series by a couple of obscure UK creators to do $2500 four times on the bounce is unrealistic to say the least. Therefore doing Blood Psi as a 100-page graphic novel makes a lot more sense. If we solicited it for $10, on a 60-40 split in Diamond's favour, we'd only need 600 orders to hit the minimum benchmark; $12 and it's just 500.

Where all this leaves the raft of one-shots I'm submitting to Diamond this year I don't know. Tim Skinner is the most commercial thing I've published and boasts full-colour art from Dec so I'm hopeful that'll be picked up. Brothers is black and white but it's about superheroes and the art's gorgeous so that could go either way. Scoregasm is about football so that has about as much chance of being picked up by Diamond as I have of being picked up by Halle Berry.

So while I'm still determined to submit my stuff to Diamond and get it into Previews, I'm probably going to have to look at other ways of getting my books out there. One thing I'm going to do is check out Haven Distribution (www.havendistro.com) who, from what I can gather, carry quite a lot of indie comics stuff. I'm also going to look seriously at making my stuff available for download - either from the main Moonface site or through Eagle One Media (www.eagleonemedia.com), a company that already have many smaller comics publishers supplying them with digital content for download.

It's all a bit scary - worst case scenario is that I could end up with no US distribution for my comics. And on that glum note...

Tripwire etc.

THE Tripwire annual featuring my interview with Alan Moore hit comic stores in the US and UK this week. It's nowhere near the strongest piece I've ever written (I put off transcribing it for ages and then had to get it all done in a big hurry) but trust me when I say Alan waxing lyrical about The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, his new novel Jerusalem, his appearance on The Simpsons and his pull-no-punches views on The Watchmen movie make the 132-page book well worth splashing 10 quid (15 bucks) on. The annual also features great stuff on Hellboy, The Simpsons, Heroes, Hellblazer and 2000AD. That's Duncan Fegredo's cover above.

* I'M having enormous fun with the Tim Skinner script. The titular character has already done some thoroughly unspeakable things and I'm not even halfway through yet. It's quite theraputic to write such an utter, utter scumbag with no redeeming features. In fact, other than making it funny, the biggest challenge so far has been to stop myself reigning in Skinner's more excessive behaviour. He works best when he's bad to the bone.

I guess it would be easy to turn such a project into one big snark-fest, using it to stick the boot into those comics and creators for which I don't especially care but that isn't the way it's turned out at all. Oddly enough, everything being mercilessly lampooned in Skinner is something I have genuine affection for. Let's hope the book's numerous targets see it that way too.

There won't be much time to work on Skinner in the next couple of weeks as I'm off on holiday next weekend. It'll be wrapped up in September, though, and then it'll be time to revisit my currently stalled short story for the Robots anthology before making a start on either Kurss or Razor Snakes...

* IT looks like Blood Psi artist Keith Burns and I will be working together again in the new year. I've got an idea for a one-shot graphic novella that would suit Keith's "abstract noir" art style perfectly. I'll reveal more about the project later in the year.

* ARTIST Mick Trimble is zipping through the pages now on Septic Isle. He has around a quarter of it done and I think we'll be good to go for January when I plan to submit a fully lettered dummy of the book to Diamond.

Lovely review

There's a very generous and positive review of Blood Psi by Tonya Crawford right here: http://www.brokenfrontier.com/reviews/details.php?id=1481

Highlights include: "Winter does a wonderful job with this story. He crafts an entire world for these supernatural creatures within just a few pages and he does it without ever being heavy handed or overly expository" and "Keith Burns, the artist for this title, also brings in a unique style. He utilizes angles and planes to give many panels the appearance and feel of abstract art."

Megazine mention

There's a nice mention of Blood Psi in this month's Judge Dredd Megazine (Meg 261, August 2007), above.

* Artist Declan Shalvey and I have just started work on a new one-shot project together. I'm prepared to say no more at this stage other than that it definitely isn't a follow-up to the Eagle Award-winning Hero Killers. That said, I do now have a story in place which would act as a kind of sequel to HK and will probably tackle it at some point in the new year.

* Took my eldest son to see the Transformers movie yesterday. It's stupidly long, the amount of product placement is obscene and hardly any of the humour works at all. But the CGI on show is little short of astonishing - there's a sequence towards the end when Optimus and Megatron are kicking the crap out of each other and they plough right through the middle of a skyscraper that actually made me want to jump out of my seat and cheer so impressive is it.