Post-BICS

I HAD a blast at the BICS festival in Birmingham over the weekend, catching up with lots of friends, meeting some great new people and selling loads of comics. Septic Isle and BritForce were my top sellers, suggesting punters are more interested in a meaty graphic novel-length read these days than in flimsier pamphlet-style comics.

If anything, though, the event very much underlined to me that I've really taken the self-publishing lark about as far as I can. I simply don't have the money to kick on from here, especially since Diamond's increase in their minimum order benchmark makes it harder than ever for tiny indies like me to get into Previews. Nope, my decision to concentrate on my writing and slowly run down the publishing side of what I do is, I think, the only one that makes sense right now.

To that end, on the Saturday morning I met with one of the artists with whom I'm going to be pitching to companies and we agreed a way forward for our project. I'm really excited about working with this particular illustrator (whose identity will remain a secret for now) and about the project itself. The plan is to get the 'pitch package' ready to show to people at the Bristol Expo next May.

I also met a young artist called Matt Birks whose work is terrific (strong storytelling, great design sense) and I'm keen to collaborate with him on a pitch, too.

I probably won't stop publishing altogether at this stage - BritForce's creator Andy Radbourne is keen to do a second issue and I might do the odd thing to keep my hand in just to sell at cons. But I'm not sure right now whether I'll be exhibiting at Bristol and Birmingham next year or whether I shall just attend as a regular punter/aspiring writer. I have to say it would be very nice to go to a comics convention and not spend all weekend stood behind a table endlessly spouting the same sales pitches for my comics. It's given me a sore throat and aching legs this year...

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...

Future imperfect

CAN'T believe it's been over a month since my last post here. Not that there's been much to report anyway - nothing good at least.

Diamond won't be soliciting mine and Dec's Tim Skinner: Total Scumbag one-shot, which is a bit of a blow really; especially as it's easily the best thing I've yet written and published. And Dec's full-colour artwork is terrific.

I shall probably be contacting Haven Distribution in the very near future to see if they might be interested in picking the book up but, to be honest, I can't see us getting nearly as many orders going that route as we would have through Diamond.

The worrying thing is that if Diamond don't want something as blatantly commercial as Skinner, I really can't see them going for anything else currently sitting on my release schedule (although Brit Force's Glenn Fabry cover might give that book more than a fighting chance).

That means I'm back to square one in many ways - publishing comics to sell online and at conventions. This is something of a backwards step so I'm going to have a serious think about making some changes. I'm currently in the middle of lettering the Brothers one-shot for release at the Bristol Expo in May but, after that, I'm going to take a long hard look at what I do and decide what my next step will be.

It could be that I stop publishing altogether and concentrate 100 per cent on writing and pitching to professional companies, but that would take a lot of the fun out of it for me. I enjoy the entire process of putting a comic together - not just the writing side. And, of course, the problem with pitching is that there's no guarantee any of my ideas would ever be picked up - I could spend years toiling away for absolutely no return.

As you can probably tell, I'm a bit confused about where things are headed at the moment - hopefully I'll feel a bit more positive after Bristol...

Stuff I've been doing

So, what have I been doing for the last couple of weeks...

* Lettering issues 2 and 3 of Brit Force.
* Reading The Umbrella Academy trade (it's so good it almost made me feel guilty about all the hateful things I've said about My Chemical Romance).
* Sending Declan Shalvey admiring emails about his beautiful full-colour Tim Skinner pages.
* Rolling home at 1.30 in the morning from work (ouch!).
* Reading comedian Mark Steel's latest book, What's Going On?
* Following the American Presidential election even though I can't vote in it and wouldn't vote for McCain or Obama even if I could.
* Loving every minute of Dexter season two on the FX channel.
* Telling my kids to be quiet about a hundred times a day.
* Inching ever closer to getting this movie option stuff sorted once and for all. The contract is now with a solicitor...
* Putting a few ideas together for a couple of new projects.
* Realising that I shouldn't be thinking about new projects when I have lots of perfectly good old projects to be getting on with.
* Enjoying the heck out of the Luna Brothers' new Image ongoing, The Sword.
* Taking the kids to see Space Chimps. It sucked.
* Visiting LegoLand with the family. It also sucked.
* Itching to get back to the comics writing on September 9.

A Brit of all right

I'VE been meaning to make this announcement for weeks, so here goes. Moonface Press is proud to announce a new ongoing series called Brit Force. It's written and drawn by Andy Radbourne, lettered and script edited by me and the cover to issue #1 is by Glenn Fabry (above). Look for it later in the year and in the meantime find out more at www.britforce.com

* SEPTIC Isle is now available to buy from the shop at www.moonfacepress.com. It's £3.95 (plus £1.50 p&p) for 52 perfect-bound pages.

* THERE'S a lovely review of Hero Killers here by Paul Brown. Yeah, I know it's a bit tardy but Paul has only recently got his hands on a copy!