Skinner refuses to die

THE good folk over at the Irish Comic News website (www.irishcomicnews.com) are currently serialising the Tim Skinner: Total Scumbag one-shot I wrote back in 2008. The first part is already up, with a second part going live later this week.

I re-read Skinner for the first time in a year or so the other day and was surprised at just how many of the gags still hold up. Zombies rule the publishing world more now they did five years ago, character deaths have become ever more fleeting and meaningless. The more things change in comics, it seems, the more they stay the same.

On the surface, Skinner is all about rude jokes, bodily functions, slapstick violence and childish digs at people far more talented and successful than me. But, believe it or not, the book did have a more serious purpose too. Skinner himself was meant to be the embodiment of the comic industries' worst excesses, particularly the way in which it uses and abuses beloved characters. In 30-odd pages, TS:TS only does what comics companies do to their characters all the time. They're killed, brought back, killed again, made to wear absurd costumes, given insanely convoluted backstories, burdened with ridiculous anatomies, retconned, rebooted, reduced to one or two defining characteristics... I could go on.

I had a couple of people tell me they thought the book was "misogynistic" but that was kind of the point. Is the yobbish Skinner lusting after Spectaculass's large breasts really that different to the way in which Power Girl has been treated over the years? Her only distinguishing characteristics are that she has big boobs and displays them through a little 'tit window' in her costume. Not exactly empowering, is it?

Besides, you aren't actually meant to like Skinner. The title of the story isn't Tim Skinner: Good Samaritan. He's a scumbag and while it's perfectly OK to laugh at the shit he gets up to, he's surely impossible to empathise with. He killed the Superior Seven's pet cat, Kenny the Kickass Kitten, for Pete's sake!

I should, of course, mention that the Skinner one-shot was drawn by Declan Shalvey, the guy who now makes a living on the likes of Venom, Northlanders, Conan and The Massive. I'm not sure if it was the last project Dec drew before he landed the 28 Days Later gig with Boom! but it was certainly one of the last. He did a fantastic job and even coloured the book himself. I love this particular page set in 'Murda-City One' and was always a bit disappointed that no one spotted it was a homage to William Hogarth's famous Gin Lane engraving (which I've reproduced below it so you can compare the two)...

Anyway, all this reminiscing brings me to the real purpose of this post. Skinner's coming back (you knew he wasn't really dead, right?). He'll make his return in Tim Skinner: Retconned either later this year or early next, probably as one of those new fangled webcomics. I have a sack load of new ideas, a heart black with sarcasm and scorn, and an artist ready to make it all happen. Watch this space...

Mugshot

TO promote the newly-available PDF download of Tim Skinner: Total Scumbag, artist Declan Shalvey has put this new sketch of Tim up at the Eclectic Micks blog he shares with Irish artists PJ Holden, Nick Roche, Stephen Thompson, Bob Byrne and Stephen Mooney.

Dec posts new sketches there every Tuesday so check it out here: http://eclecticmicks.blogspot.com

Dec is also the artist on 28 Days Later, which you can read every month from Boom! Studios.

Download Skinner for FREE

THE Tim Skinner: Total Scumbag one-shot is now available as a free download from www.moonfacepress.com - just click the banner at the top of the homepage and you'll be directed to the site's download page.

The download consists of two stories over 43 PDF pages (30MB, under a minute to download). The first tale is written by me and drawn - in glorious full colour - by 28 Days Later artist Declan Shalvey. The original comic came out in November 2008 and was launched at that same month's Dublin City Comic Con in Ireland. Scarily, few of its jokes are out of date!

The second - black and white - story is from 2005's SHRIEK! one-shot. It was Tim Skinner's first appearance (in a tale entitled Zardo Zapp Attacks!) and was written by me with art by Natalie Sandells (pencils) and Adrian Bamforth (inks).

I'd love to do more Skinner at some point - I had a story based around Phonogram all mapped out in my head - but Dec's super-busy with paid work these days so I can't see it happening any time soon.

And, finally, here are some nice things reviewers and comics pros said about the Skinner one-shot...

"Fucking hilarious!" - Jonathan Hickman, writer, Fantastic Four

"Delightfully, incredibly, enjoyably sick. Oh, I liked it." - Joe Gordon, Forbidden Planet blog

“Tim Skinner [is] a very self-referential, up-its-own-arse comic that I was destined to love. Even The Boys gets a good shoeing over with hilarious consequences.” - Rich Johnston, bleedingcool.com

"I don’t laugh out loud often, but I laughed out loud at this." - Regie Rigby, comicsbulletin.com

Pre-Bristol ramblings...

OFF to Bristol in a few hours and feeling a bit more optimistic than I was the last time I talked about the Expo here. It's probably got something to do with the fact Brothers arrived back from the printers this morning and looks absolutely brilliant. It's three quid for 56 pages with only one ad - the story and art are also pretty neat.

It'll be for sale on the Moonface website soon, too.

* APPARENTLY, there is going to be an Eagle Awards this year after all. From later on today, people can go and nominate their favourites in a host of categories here: www.eagleawards.co.uk

I wouldn't be too upset if TIM SKINNER: TOTAL SKINNER was nominated in the Favourite Colour Comicbook - British category and SEPTIC ISLE likewise received a nod in the Favourite Black & White Comicbook - British section. Just saying...

* ON the subject of Skinner, I only have 15 copies for sale left so anyone reading this planning to buy one in Bristol should probably turn up early on Saturday morning. Colour printing is horribly expensive so a second printing is very unlikely in the near future...

Skinner gets the Bullet

THERE are a couple of nice mentions of mine and Dec's Skinner one-shot over at Comics Bulletin.

In Regie Rigby's Fool Britannia column, he says: "Nobody is safe from Winter's acid pen. The caricatures are cruel, sharp and totally totally spot on. I don’t laugh out loud often, but I laughed out loud at this. If you have even a rudimentary knowledge of contemporary comics... you’re going to have the most fun you’ve had with a comic for some considerable time."

The full article is here.

And Kelvin Green gave Skinner 4 out 5 bullets in his review on the same site, saying: "It's a triumph of scripting and one of which writer Andy Winter can be proud. Not everyone can turn such an irredeemable git [Skinner] into a compelling character. Declan Shalvey's art is as impressive as I'd come to expect... the storytelling is strong throughout, and there's a looser yet more confident feel to the linework than before."

Read Kelvin's full piece here.

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...

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...