ELEPHANT WORDS - Tangahl Unbowed, and the Water Boat Beneath His Notice.

The flash fiction website Elephant Words - where six writers offer daily stories inspired by the same weekly image - has been overhauled and relaunched, and I'm pleased to have been able to again write the first offering. My story, Tangahl Unbowed, and the Water Boat Beneath His Notice, was posted earlier today and can be read here.

New stories will follow every day this week, until Sunday when a new image will be posted. The new setup means that more than six writers can be published, all you need to do is register with the website to apply.

THE WHALE HOUSE progress report.

Just a quick update post to record the midway point in the drawing of The Whale House issue three. Here is page 12, the point at which Diggory meets Granddad Whale and events take an odd turn. Well, odder than usual.

Twenty four pages will also be the longest single comic I've ever drawn by myself, much less also written. This is a milestone in itself, and while I can see that I'm learning as I go, I can also see tiny elements coming together and, I think and hope, getting better in the learning.

I hope the next twelve pages are as good, if not better, and certainly a bit quicker off the drawing board.

WEST: DISTANCE reviewed at Forbidden Planet.

Richard Bruton has offered a very favourable review of West: Distance (and a reread of West: Justice) over on the Forbidden Planet Blog.

From the review:

"Everything in these two books works, and the more I read, the more impressed I am, the work transcends genre trappings, becoming that simplest of things, a mythology..."

The entire review is here.

West: Distance and West: Justice are available to buy from either our Big Cartel or Comicsy storefronts.

WEST: THE TRAIN LEAVES AT NOON at the MCM London Comic-Con.

This weekend (May 22nd-24th) sees the latest MCM London Comic-Con at the Excel. Our friends John Maybury and Siobhan Hillman (with whom we did The Newspaper Strip Collection of Charles Oscar Drayton) will be exhibiting, selling Space Babe 113, and they have kindly offered to take along copies of West: The Train Leaves at Noon to sell at the event.

THE WHALE HOUSE continues

Just a quick update, to report that my illustration of The Whale House, part 3 continues, and has even accelerated in pace a little - I'm getting much more comfortable with the drawing of it, and am beginning to enjoy myself a little. This is the longest single comic I've ever drawn (not to mention all the issues to come after), and building up a momentum seems to be key.

Also, although the next few issues are already written (and have been since Chris Doherty was illustrating the series) drawing it myself would seem to relieve the need to fill the scripts with the sort of minute details that Chris needed to know, so I'm probably saving myself hours of writing down the line too!

WEST and THE WHALE HOUSE, in progress

Both Tim and I are now well into drawing the next issues of both West and The Whale House (that is Mississippi Shuffle and Part Three: Ordinal, respectively). Below is a page of West, showing the setting of the next storyline - the Deep South, riverboats (which Tim has been aching to draw for years), and some faces old and new - and a Whale House panel of Diggory discovering he may very well be in the wrong place at the wrong time. At time of writing, both these issues are scheduled for the ICE International Comics Show in September.

WEST: THE TRAIN LEAVES AT NOON now available

Our latest West title  - the newspaper-strip style The Train Leaves at Noon - is now available through our usual online stores.

Kansas, 1891. While travelling across state, Jerusalem West and Wilton Frohickie encounter a mysterious and bedraggled figure, a man who hands over a tattered journal before dying and wasting away in front of them. The journal may lead to treasure... or it may lead to damnation. 

So begins a journey between life and death, this world and the next, as West and Frohickie are drawn into a surreal, nightmarish adventure in the dark side of the American West.

The Train Leaves At Noon is a unique entry in the ongoing saga of Jerusalem West - told entirely in the form of a daily newspaper strip. Previously featured in John Maybury’s “The Newspaper Strip Collection of Oscar Charles Drayton”, and collected here for the first time, this edition now features the never-before-seen conclusion to the story.

Written by Andrew Cheverton and illustrated by Tim Keable, The Train Leaves At Noon is 20 pages of black and white story in a special landscape format, with full colour cardstock covers, and is available through our Big Cartel and Comicsy stores.

THE END (again)

A few years ago now, Spanish artist Felipe Navarro and I were working on a low-key science fiction comic called The End - I had a first issue scripted, the series plotted, and Felipe had drawn character studies and a couple of test pages. The idea was to confront the Earth with an unknowable and unavoidable catastrophe, but to then follow a small handful of characters as they went about their final hours in what would seem (especially against all the panic and bombast of traditional Hollywood renditions) humdrum and insignificant. The point being, of course, that these hours would be incredibly significant and, above all, human.

Image from FH Navarro's Instagram.

This all ended when I saw an announcement that Drew Barrymore was lining up to direct a film of the (roughly) same plot and exact same title, on top of such recent fare as Seeking a Friend For the End of the World and Abel Ferrara's 4:44 Last Day on Earth. If my debilitating experience with trying to dig my aborted series Month of Sundays with David Frankum out from under the colossal shadow of Stephen King's book and TV show Under The Dome taught me anything about the creative process, it was in these situations to drop baggage and keep moving.

Time, of course, also moves on, and The End is no longer listed on Drew Barrymore's IMDB page, so I dusted the script off and realised that (as much a fan of grandeur and bombast as anyone) I could have my cake and eat it too. Felipe was still on board, so we started again where we left off.
Almost...

Because then Felipe and I had a short exchange on Facebook that changed the project entirely. It was, I think, the catalyst that moved us from wishing to work towards completing a project we once thought dead to grasping something new with both hands. And by new I mean classic; something recognisable that we hope to shape into something new again - we're telling this sort of comic in that sort of language. We can sum it up in one word, but we're keeping that word to ourselves for a moment.

The first line of dialogue on the first page of The End reads, "The universe always begins with a word." I didn't know when I wrote that how true it would be.

Angry Candy in 2015

It's been quiet for a fair while here, so this is an update on our plans for 2015.

The next West comic will be The Train Leaves at Noon, a completed version of the strip that appeared last year in The Newspaper Strip Collection of Oscar Charles Drayton, and now featuring a never-before-seen conclusion to the story. This comic will debut at Cheltenham's True Believers Comic Festival on Saturday, February the 7th, and a week later (-ish, Sunday, the 15th of February) at DemonCon9 in Maidstone. Also available, of course, through our Big Cartel and Comicsy online stores.

Our only other booked convention so far for 2015 is ICE International Comics Expo in Birmingham in September, and for that we plan to kickstart our regular series with new issues. We will have the first issue of West: Volume III, Mississippi Shuffle, and, also for this event, we will be offering issue three of The Whale House, though one or more of these comics may be available online, or at an as-yet-unbooked convention a little sooner. You never know.