Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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COMICS & BOOKS

15.3.05 I'm Not Ignoring You, Honest

So yes, this has been the week that was. I have updated my comics section with Diamond order codes and previews of SMOKE 1, and have also re-jigged the right margin "coming soon" cover shots, as you can see. Simon Fraser has produced a delightfully wrong Vargas-esque pin-up for Commercial Suicide 3. I think our cover colour scheme will go all tropical this issue, like the Hawaiian beaches as seen through a badly-judged combination of hallucinogenics and dark rum. Rising star Jamie McKelvie is once again doing the back cover, and he muttered something about "that woman in the box from the first OMAC cover".

Variants 1 is at last out. Len O'Grady (the incredibly talented colourist on SMOKE) and I did HIGH & LONESOME, a 16-page Lovecraftian space horror story inspired by some of the exhaustion-induced hallucinations I used to have while offshore racing. At the time, it was a digest-sized anthology, and the story was written and drawn with that in mind. (I'm a real believer that you pace a story and compose a page completely differently for digest books than you do larger books). But somewhere in the 6 months since we completed the story, the format changed to a full size bimonthly. Le sigh. Hopefully the story will still hold up. Here's a one-page preview. It's actually set in the same universe as my French project, which is now all signed and under way.

I'm running HIGH & LONESOME in its original digest format as part of DEFECTIVE COMICS, my solo digest anthology. 120 pages of experimentation and weirdness from myself on words, and Arthur Goodman, Rob Croonenborghs, Paul Peart-Smith, Len O'Grady and Felipe Sobreiro on pictures. Lee O'Connor designing the cover. To be ready for Bristol, barring any self-publishing-related disasters. We're only printing 100 numbered copies of DEFECTIVE, plus about 4 artist proofs per artist, so bear that in mind. Our Bristol offerings tend to sell out very quickly. Yes, we could print more, but if we sell out quick then we can knock off to the pub at 3. Can you argue with this logic? No, I didn't think so.

The mad muse-induced horror story mentioned a few days ago is now a completed manga pitch sitting with a publisher, and with an artist doing utterly gorgeous work on sample pages and character sketches. Imagine Takehiro Inoue seasoned with a bit of Junji Ito and you've got it. I ran into the artist on LiveJournal - they friended me via Dean Haspiel, who friended me via Neil Kleid, who is an acquaintance on the Andy Diggle Forum. I am finding LJ to be a really important community resource for indie creators.

( 3:02 PM )

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