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...

Disintegration

I haven't updated this blog since October 25, so Happy Halloween, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to one and all! It isn't as if I've spent the last four months sitting around with my feet up watching TV... actually, there has been a fair amount of sitting around with my feet up watching TV, but I have been doing other stuff, too. Comics stuff.

I currently have several projects at different stages of development and the plan is to submit pitches, including finished artwork, to publishers in the next few months. Just to prove I'm not making it up, above is a page (no letters or colours yet) from a project I've been working on with brilliant Brazilian artist Edu Menna. It's for a story called Disintegration, a mad mash-up of small-time London gangsters and bizarro sci-fi.

We're currently on the look out for a colourist to work their magic on a few sample pages, so if anyone out there might be willing to help us out for very little in return (a family bag of Maltesers, my eternal gratitude and, er, that's about it) please get in touch...

There are other projects, too, but you're going to have to wait to find out about those. Hopefully not for four months, though.

We could be Heroes

THERE'S a lovely review of mine and Duane Leslie's Scoregasm webcomic in Comic Heroes magazine, issue #9 of which is out today (October 25).

Choice quotes from Rob Power's piece include: "Leaves you gagging for more", "Breathlessly entertaining" and "Gloriously evocative black and white artwork". He also gives it four stars out of five and the review itself features three big panels of Duane's art.

In fact, so happy am I with Rob's kind words I'm willing to forgive the fact that Scoregasm is misspelled (as Scorgasm) throughout the review!

* WE'VE had a couple of other nice recent reviews, too. A four-star one from
Comics Bulletin, and the other from Ain't It Cool News. The latter is full of praise for Duane's artwork - "Leslie captures the speed, style, and excitement of football to near perfection" - and deservedly so.

* THE fact I haven't been blogging much recently isn't because I've been idle. Far from it, I'm working on three pitch samples with a trio of artists at the moment and am really looking forward to getting them 'out there'. The stories are all very different to each other and from anything I've done before (no superheroes, vampires or spies). With the artists' permission I'll post artwork up here as and when...

An extremely smart book

THE first review of Scoregasm is in and it's hugely positive. A few highlights from David O'Leary's piece over at comicrelated.com...

"This is an extremely smart book."

"Duane Leslie is a great artist with a keen eye for detail."

"I was buzzing a bit after reading this issue."

"In a perfect world, this would be a weekly comic."

Here's a link to the full review

* WHILE I'm in the mood for irksome self-congratulation, Mick Trimble recently pointed me in the direction of a link to Demonoid in which Septic Isle, the graphic novel we worked on together, is listed as one of the 'best comics of the decade/ever'.

I don't know what made me laugh more; the fact we're being mentioned in the same breath as Joss Whedon and Frank Miller, or that the heading above the list reads: MANY THANKS TO ALL THE SCANNERS WHO MADE THIS COLLECTION POSSIBLE. Yep, turns out Septic Isle's biggest fan is also an illegal downloader!

Here's the link

Scoregasm is go!

MY new football comic - Scoregasm - is now available for your delight and delectation over at www.scoregasm.co

You can read it at the site or download a PDF of the entire thing to keep. Whatever your preference, the 38-page book is totally FREE.

Scoregasm is part-homage to the football strips I grew up reading in the seventies (things like Billy's Boots, Hot Shot Hamish and, of course, Roy Of The Rovers) and part-poison pen letter to the cynicism of the modern game.

Duane Leslie has done an excellent job on the art (see above) and many thanks to Eva de la Cruz for colouring the cover and Kay Downes for her fantastic website design.

* I'M keen to do more web-based stuff and one of the projects I'm looking at would be to bring back Tim Skinner: Total Scumbag (star of 2009's critically-acclaimed one-shot). Obviously I can't ask Declan to get involved as he's somewhat busy at Marvel, but, if anyone else might be up for it, just give me a shout.

Smells like Team spirit

SEE that fresh-faced young scamp at the front there, between the girl with short hair and the big galoot in the striped shirt? That's me, from around 1986, when I worked as a presenter/reporter on a BBC Radio Northampton 'yoof' show called The Team. I hadn't laid eyes on that pic - a publicity shot for the show - in at least two decades but then a former colleague put it up on Facebook this week.

It made me feel very, very old but it also reminded me of just how good The Team was, especially in terms of the music it played - reggae, hip-hop and indie-rock were all staples of the show. We were playing the likes of Schooly D, Misty In Roots and Butthole Surfers on a Sunday night on a conservative local radio station whose usual output rarely got any more radical than the Traveling Wilburys and Kim Wilde.

The best thing about working on The Team for me, though, was that I got to interview loads of great bands and singers. I chatted to Sonic Youth, Swans, James, Danielle Dax, Zodiac Mindwarp, Steve Earle, Spacemen 3, Ruby Turner and a hundred others the sword of time has cut from my memory.

I also spoke to the silly Tory MP who tried to get the Beastie Boys banned from Britain, and Boy George's brother immediately after the Culture Club singer's heroin-related fall from grace. Best of the bunch was interviewing Rowan Atkinson at the height of his Blackadder fame. Just me and him in a radio studio for around half an hour talking comedy was heaven for a teenager who'd been a massive fan of Not The Nine O'Clock News.

Of course, it wasn't all plain sailing. There were constant arguments about the show's direction - I was firmly in the camp that believed an NME/John Peel vibe was best, others saw it as a more mainstream No Limits-style proposition. Because I was such a control freak/force of nature/total bastard back then, my side almost always got its own way which didn't exactly endear me to my colleagues. Yes, I was a dick but I always had the show's best interests at heart - at least that's what I tell myself all these years later whilst trying not to cringe at some of the terrible things I said and did.

And then there was the rather unpleasant altercation with a local band, called Stiff Lizard, whose awful single we refused to play. They got very upset and tried to attack me at a gig we put on at Northampton's Roadmender Centre. In retaliation we snapped their single in half live on air the following Sunday. God, even typing those words feels childish now. (Funnily enough, a few years later I was editing Splinter, a Northampton music magazine, in which I gave a demo by a duo called Hex a glowing review. I then went along to see them at a local pub only to discover they had both been members of Stiff Lizard!).

For its part, Radio Northampton was always pretty supportive. I think the station's suits liked having something a little edgy on their schedules, even if we landed them in trouble a couple of times (I'll never forget the on-air apology we were forced to make after cracking a joke about snooker players all taking cocaine or the horrified look on a senior producer's face when we played the Beasties' 'It's The New Style' featuring the immortal lyric, 'We told her some rhymes so she pulled up her skirt'). There were, of course, snipers and whiners who resented a bunch of ill-educated teenagers playing on their turf once a week, but they were mostly ineffectual posh twits with no bark, let alone a bite.

It seems odd now, but we never knew or even seeked to discover how many people actually listened to The Team. Frankly, we didn't give a toss. It could have been 10,000, it could have been 10. No one was interested in chasing ratings or poring over demographics; we did it because we loved it and felt we had something to say. And I think that's the reason why I'm still so proud of it.

Neil, the former colleague who posted that photo on Facebook, is threatening to upload a couple of old episodes of the show to the net and I have a horrible feeling it will sound terribly earnest, horribly dated and a bit pretentious. But, hey, being earnest and pretentious in the 80s was practically a badge of honour.

I eventually quit when I started to feel exploited (I poured my heart and soul into the show for a couple of years for little more than expenses) and realised my reputation for being 'difficult' probably meant proper employment lay elsewhere. I did more radio at university and for the BBC in York but my experience on The Team had been so enjoyable that nothing else came close to matching it, and I soon shifted my focus to magazine journalism. But that's another, not terribly interesting, story...

Slow and low, that is the tempo...

THINGS are slowly coming together on one of the projects I've been trying to get off the ground for the last few months. The artist I'm working with has done some very striking character sketches and we've decided to do a full-colour, 22-page sample to pitch to companies.

I'd originally written a 10-page script for him to draw but have spent the last week or two completely rejigging and expanding it. I haven't got much written this past week because the children have been off school and my time simply hasn't been my own, but I'm hoping to have the whole thing done and dusted very soon.

*SCOREGASM is slowly taking shape, too. Artist Duane Leslie is about halfway through lettering it and I've been talking to web designer Kay about what the host site is going to look like. Still confident of that early-August launch date.

*I'M doing the Twitter thing now so please feel free to follow me @andywinter1 - unsurprisingly, I tend to talk most about sci-fi, comics, TV and film. I occasionally say unpleasant things about Adele and David Cameron, too.