Digital Bullet

HERO KILLERS - the Eagle Award-winning one-shot I did with Marvel artist Declan Shalvey - is now on ComiXology. You can buy it here for the very reasonable sum of 99c/69p. I now intend to submit a few of the other Moonface Press titles, starting with Blood Psi.

* DEFIANT! THE LEGEND OF BRITHNOTH is now about one-third coloured and - thanks to the excellent Aljosa Tomic - is looking very good indeed. I've also managed to get permission to use a fine translation of the original Battle of Maldon poem in the book which is great news. 

The plan as it stands is to bring Defiant! out early next year so Time Bomb Comics publisher Steve Tanner has a chance to submit it to Diamond and to get a bit of publicity going ahead of its release.

Here is one of the coloured pages; art by Dan Bell...

* I have two other major things I'm working on - one a graphic novel with publisher contracts already signed, the other a very intriguing webcomic with a name artist whose brilliance intimidates the hell out of me. Unfortunately I can't say anything about them until I'm given the green light to do so. Soon, though, hopefully...

* What else? Need to get on with writing more Tim Skinner very soon. It's slipped down the schedule a bit as other stuff has elbowed it out of the way... artist Jim Lavery and I have collaborated on a fun short story which has found a home in a very exciting anthology. I'm really proud of it, actually, probably the best short story I've written since... ever. Aljosa (again) and Nikki Foxrobot have turned in sterling work on the colours and letters for it too.

* I've reached that part of the year where I need to rush to get through as much stuff as possible before the kids break up for the summer. I love them both dearly but struggle to get any writing done when they're around, and there are deadlines I simply can't leave hanging until September. I really don't know how proper professional writers and artists cope with this stuff. I mean, I can't just decamp to a hotel for six weeks, can I? Hmmm...

* Finally, I now have a tumblr page here. At the moment I'm really just using it as a second home for this blog but plan to do a bit more with it soon. Feel free to follow me there, if you must...

Winterview

THERE'S a new interview with me up at the Comic Related website, here.

Conducted by David O'Leary (not that one), it covers everything from Hero Killers and Tim Skinner to David Hasselhoff and Liam Gallagher!

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.

Radio Free, er, Essex

I appeared on local radio station BBC Essex this morning to talk about Hero Killers' Eagle Award nomination and comics in general.

I can't imagine many of the station's listeners will be rushing out to buy copies of my stuff ("I loved the one about the Antichrist" - Brenda from Basildon), but I think it's important for comicbook creators and fans to engage with the mainstream media whenever they're invited to. As long as the coverage comics get in newspapers and on TV and radio isn't of the patronising "Biff! Bang! Pow!" variety then it can only be a good thing for them to be discussed in exactly the same way as new novels, films and plays. Surely engaging with people who know nothing about comics was one of the ideas behind that whole "comics evangelism" thing that popped up briefly a few years ago, so it was good to do my little bit.

Anyway, I had a blast with the show's presenters - John Hayes and Sadie Nine - and even ended up writing a short story featuring them both as superheroes (Purple Hayes and Cat'O Nine Tails) that I later read out on-air. I had to get up at 5.30 to catch a train over to Chelmsford to appear, though, which means instead of getting any work done on Brothers this afternoon I'm likely to spend it asleep or zonked in front of last night's episodes of Prison Break and Heroes.