The shock of the new

THERE'S a new four-page story to download over at moonfacepress.com. It's called The Saboteur and was written by me and drawn by Mick Trimble, who you may remember as my collaborator on 2008's Septic Isle one-shot.

Look for the link at the top of the Moonface home page – it's FREE to download as a PDF.

* ON the subject of new stuff, my one-shot football comic – cryptically entitled Scoregasm – should be winging its way onto the net or into print (or maybe both) in the next month or two. The brilliant Duane Leslie – whom I collaborated with on the third volume of Devilchild amongst other stuff – is the artist. Duane also did the cover, with colours provided by Eva de la Cruz (see below).

Bits of the story's DNA come directly from the kind of football stories I read as a kid in comics such as Tiger & Scorcher and Roy Of The Rovers. The strip Billy's Boots was certainly on my mind when I was writing Scoregasm, although my story operates in a very different, far more cynical world.



Blokes of a certain age should remember Billy's Boots. It was about a young boy – named Billy Dane – who had a magical pair of football boots that made him the best player on his school team. It was a fun, innocent tale full of last-minute winners, plucky underdogs overcoming the odds and scurrilous opponents who'd have been more at home in the KGB than on a school football pitch. Because of the 'magic' boots, the strip also had an almost-supernatural element (although you were never entirely sure if the boost the boots gave Billy was all in his head).



As I've inferred, Scoregasm is a whole lot darker than Billy's Boots (its sub-title is 'Sex, Secrets... and Football'). I guess it's all about the loss of innocence and perhaps reflects how my own opinion of the beautiful game has changed over the years. I LOVED football when I was a kid, was obsessed with it actually, whereas these days I find many elements of the cynical, brutish soap opera it has become thoroughly dismaying.

There are hardly any football comics these days (Striker in The Sun and very little else) so I'm hoping Scoregasm may get people talking. I'd like to reach actual football fans with it but god knows how I'm going to do that. Ideas on a postcard please...

* MY old friend Phil Hall is currently telling the story of his lifelong relationship with comics over at his blog: http://alifeincomics.blogspot.com

Three chapters in, Phil hasn't got to the really juicy stuff yet (I suspect the recollections regarding his time as News Editor at Comics International will make essential reading, as will the chapters dedicated to Borderline magazine), but it's still an enjoyable, nostalgia-tinged read that British fans of 70s Marvel and DC will find essential reading.

On a more positive note...

IT'S been an interesting start to the New Year. As I mentioned in my previous post (you know, the ranty, embittered one about how awful 2010 was), I've been talking to a film producer for a few months now about turning one of the comics I wrote and published a few years back into a movie.

Anyway, things seem to be moving in the right direction at the moment and just last week I was in London (at swanky Soho House) to meet said producer, a couple of up and coming young screenwriters and a well-known actor/director whose work I admire enormously.

The premise of the meeting was to start thrashing out a plot made up of the stuff from the original comic (which would probably only make up 15 minutes of film time), a load of new material I'd written to continue the story and a variety of ideas from everyone else. It went very well and although there's still a lot of work to be done and obstacles to overcome, I got the feeling everyone present was really committed to making this happen.

I won't be counting my chickens though. I was in a very similar position a couple of years back after being contacted by an American producer who had worked on a hugely successful '90s serial killer flick. Everything was really positive for a few months and then slowly but surely the whole project crumbled to dust. I'll get round to telling that whole sorry story one day (perhaps on here) but it still hurts just thinking about it.

* I'VE been writing some short stories recently (well, I might as well get on with something while I wait for a couple of decent, reliable comic artists to make themselves known). I haven't written prose in years and years but it's going quite well so far. It's much harder work than writing comics, where you have an artist to rely on for a lot of the tricky stuff. Anyway, I seem to have settled into a kind of horror/comedy groove and am going to have a look around to see if I can find some anthologies to submit my stuff to.

* THERE should be a new four-page comic story available for free download from moonfacepress.com in the next few weeks. It's called The Saboteur and is written by me and drawn by Mick Trimble, my collaborator on Septic Isle. It was originally intended for Accent UK's Robots anthology a few years ago but the story's original artist never got round to finishing it and Mick stepped in.

BICS bits

I'M off to Birmingham tomorrow for the British International Comics Show - or BICS as it's better known. I have a table there as usual and Brothers and BritForce will both be making their BICS debuts. These are going to be the last titles I publish for the timebeing as I'm going to be concentrating on pitching projects to other publishers instead of putting out my own stuff.

As far as that goes I have three outlines with artists right now and the plan is to get proper 'proposal packs' together to show editors and publishers next year. I'm keen that this stuff shouldn't be rushed as I want to make all of the proposals as slick and professional as possible. I've certainly found three terrific artists to work on them with me, one of whom I shall be meeting up with in Birmingham to discuss our collaboration in a bit more depth.

In the meantime, new stories will continue to appear from me on the Moonface website - Mongo, Music Critic is already up there and will be joined in due course by a couple of other tales, one of which will be drawn by my old Septic Isle collaborator Mick Trimble.

After a very lazy summer - the kids being around gave me an excuse to do bugger all on the writing front - I'm keen to really get back into things. I've done a fair bit of work on another story idea but need to retool it a bit, while another couple are at the 'very roughly sketched out in my head' stage. After BICS I have a couple of weeks off work and intend to use them to get some of this stuff up and running...

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.