Bubbling

APOLOGIES for the lack of recent updates, I haven't been idle. Indeed, I have a lot of stuff bubbling away at the moment...

Sample pages from Petal, the crime/horror story I did with Argentine artist Nicolas Armano, are with a publisher and I'm awaiting a decision on whether they are interested in seeing more.

Pages from Historical Project #1 are being coloured by the brilliant
Vicky Stonebridge.

Historical Project #2 is being drawn by the excellent
Daniel Bell.

Sci-Fi Project #1 is with a very talented Italian artist and he's designing characters, alien races and spaceships.

I'm also at various stages with a couple of other ideas. Monster Fun Project #1 uses minor characters from a very famous horror novel but in a completely new way, and Time Travel Project #1 is a black comedy featuring a female lead so outrageous she makes Tim Skinner look like Mother Theresa.

I'm looking for artists for both these latter projects, so if anyone out there is interested, please get in touch. More soon, including some artwork...

More Petal

Above is a full page from Petal, the horror/crime project I'm working on with Argentine artist Nicolas Armano. This is a sequence from a nightmare that Petal's daughter is having and it features a character called 'The Frozen Man', who pops up throughout the story. He isn't real but what he represents most certainly is...

Petal

I'M currently working on a pitch for a crime/horror project called Petal with Argentine artist Nicolas Armano. Here are a couple of panels. We've based the look of the central character - Detective Inspector 'Petal' White - on a young British actress. Bet you can't guess who...

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.