by ·Comments Off on Incomplete Works: Gloomesbury

Left to right, slacker genius Doug, reluctant human slayer Kel and ambitious family head Soria.

 

Gloomesbury was a short lived but long-bubbling project about vampires.  Just for historical context, this was before the Twilight-o-pocalypse of Vampires and Barechestwolves and was probably cribbed from a mush of Buffy and Underworld, but more English. 

The comic is about a reluctant vampire, Kel, who has been designated as the “Human Slayer”, a hunter of the clan who does his best to cull humankind and make the chances of vampires surviving from the brink of extinction a little more favourable.  Kel is however very much a human sympathizer, getting his blood from blood donations to the clinic that his sister works at and generally being a little too mild mannered for the darker elements of vampire society. 

This was the second comic that I started working on after the Student Squad and tried using a grayscale palette and experimenting with a slightly different art style, initially attempting to use plenty of cross hatching and as little computer enhancement as possible aside from the text (which is, I am terribly sorry to say, in Comic Sans.  I was young, I didn’t know, I’m sorry). 

There was a lot I wanted to do with this.  I have a couple of pages still in production folders where I started to expand the cast a little more and I have a few sketches and scribbled ideas. 

The main problem I would have with restarting this comic is the aforementioned Twilight craze.  I’m a little tired of vampires showing up all over the place and being the current big thing.  Although the Gloomesbury cast do actually drink blood (except for the vegan vampire drummer in Kel’s little brother’s band), vampires are very much over used. 

There really isn’t much of this one.  All 7 pages of it are included in the archive below. 

Gloomesbury.rar 

Additional Notes: 

  

Maybe it would be fresh and interesting if the cast were zombies instead… 

On a side note, I really like the name “Gloomesbury”.

by ·Comments Off on Incomplete Works: Matt Cubed

I am very sorry for that green. It is a bit light-saber-y.

Matt Cubed was a comic that I created with the intention of making it incredibly easy to draw and something I could scribble out with minimal effort that would remain in black and white to make it easier to print.  The downside to this is that it reads like it was scribbled out with minimal effort.  It was however a lot of fun to make and I’ve heard a few people say they actually really like it.

The story is about a guy who gets pulled into his computer and must save it from the clutches of evil viruses and rogue programs.  Although it sounds like I’m ripping off Tron, I was actually thinking more about Reboot at the time.  It was never intended as anything serious or particularly deep, but there are a few nice panels in there and I do like a few of the characters.

The idea forced its way into my brain when I was trying to fix my housemate’s computer whilst particularly hung over and was surprised to be shown a nested installation of Windows and what appeared to be some form of evolving eco-system of programs that were the result of every old computer that my housemate had ever had having its hard drive copied onto its replacement, like some kind of digital parasite.

I was tempted to have a go at re-igniting Matt Cubed when Tron Legacy was announced and go for an updated aesthetic too, but of all my projects, this one is probably in the most “completed” state clocking in at three issues and I’m fairly keen to leave it there.  It does mean that Matt will remain stuck in his computer, but it could be worse.

Archived collections of the comics can be downloaded below in .rar format, unpackaged using WinRar.

Matt Cubed Issue 1.rar

Matt Cubed Issue 2.rar

Matt Cubed Issue 3.rar

Additional Notes:

I’m actually tempted to write and draw this just on the strength of that cover.

Whilst I was digging out my Matt Cubed archives, I rather excitingly found this cover image for my planned fourth issue that I never really started but had a good idea about.

It was basically going to be a comic that you could read forwards to the centre or backwards to the centre and would start from either end and was going to set up a secondary nemesis for Matt.  The “To Be Continued…” would be in the centre spread.

It was something I’ve seen done in a couple of children’s books that we had at school where there were two sides to the same story.  My favourite one involved a fisherman catching a fish that then gets away when read the first way, and a fish being caught by a fisherman and then escaping when read the other.

by ·Comments Off on Incomplete Works: The Student Squad

The cover of the one complete issue of the Student Squad

The Student Squad is pretty much the first thing I ever worked on with any regularity.  At one point I did fifty days of daily updates to the web comic, building a relatively substantial arc of events and filling a nice healthy archive.

There are two reasons why I don’t really carry on with this any more:

1)  The characters were all loosely based on some very close friends of mine, so I never felt I could do anything too interesting with them and due to mild superstition was always scared of damaging or killing any of them just on the off chance that I might have created some form of Voodoo comic.

2)  I don’t think it’s very good.  At a later date I think I will compile a list of mistakes that webcomic authors can make drawing completely on my experience with the Student Squad, staring with the author self-insertion character and going from there.

Here is a pdf file of the first issue of the Student Squad.  Despite this being the first issue, it does still draw slightly on an archive of the older webcomics but was intended as an entry point for new readers.

DOWNLOAD PDF FILE (Recommend Right Click and “Save Target As” – File is about 30mb)

If that file is way too big, it is also available online in an old version of my website that I keep alive and can be found by following this link.

If I ever did resurrect this project and attempt to work on it further, I think I would go down the reboot-route and have some ideas on how I could make it more interesting and less…in my opinion…rubbish.  In short, I find it highly unlikely that I will carry on the Student Squad’s story as it exists above.

More than anything else, The Student Squad was a vehicle that taught me a hell of a lot about drawing both inside and outside of a computer and about web editing and maintaining a website.  If anyone ever wants to learn anything about any of these things, I can’t recommend trying to maintain a webcomic strongly enough.

Additional Notes:

It’s bizarre that almost every webcomic out there has some form of author self insertion and it rarely helps the comic.  There are a few notable exceptions but really it just seems like a bad idea.  This desire to put a caricature of yourself into your work I think goes beyond basic wish fulfilment and taps into something different.  It’s something I plan to write about and explore more in the future, and one of my more recent projects deals with self insertion characters in more detail.

by ·Comments Off on Inspiration and Projects

If you’ve noticed that I’ve been away from the blog for a few days, I have a couple of things to say to you:

  1. You must be my readership.  Tell me who you are so I can cater to you.
  2. There are two reasons why this has happened:
  1. A repeated failure of my Writer’s Quest
  2. Working on a few sporadic projects.

I think in life I draw inspiration from what other people around me are doing.  If you are ever down in the dumps about a project of some description, find some people that are doing the same sort of thing and find out what they’re working on.  I know that whenever I’ve been to the UK Web and Mini Comix thing that’s held each year, I come back geared up to work on comics after seeing all the weird and wonderful (and sometimes poor, but still inspiring) things that people have created in their spare time.

I recently represented myself as somebody who likes making things.  I don’t think this is strictly accurate.  I’m somebody who likes the feeling of having made something.  The actual process I find frustrating, but I’m willing to go through it if I see someone else doing something that I think I’d enjoy doing too.  Some might say this displays a lack of imagination, but I prefer to think of it as a short attention span.

Snakral

Snakral the Goblin

The project that I have finally got around to starting is something that’s been stuck in my head for several months.  Allow me to introduce you to Snakral.

Snakral is the protagonist of a comic that I’m working on called “Paladin”, about a young adult goblin who wants to rebel against the tradition of his species and train to be a knight protector of the realm, despite being rather weedy even by goblin standards.

Once I’ve finished a substantial amount, I’ll make it available in some way.

A friend of mine offered me some advice with this, namely to “not make it like Warcraft”, which was never the intention, despite my desire to start a comic about goblins and paladins whilst in the throes of online-game-addiction, but I am taking a page from the book of Warcraft developers Blizzard by saying this will be done when it’s done.  In other words, don’t hold your breath for new comics (which I hope nobody has done for my comics in the past anyway: I just wouldn’t want that on my conscience) as I have no idea how long this will take me to fully flesh out.  I’ve decided to take a much more ordered approach to this comic than my previous efforts with the Student Squad, which is very much a “ready, fire, aim” approach, without so much of the aim part, or if I’m being honest, the ready part.

Additional Notes:

Is it a bad sign that I really struggled to spell conscience?