Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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FILM & TV

COMICS & BOOKS

25.2.06 Blues in the night

Seven AM on a Saturday morning and I am flying down Pentonville Hill on wings of aluminium. Night shift is over; my day is done. The bicycle wheels go zu zu zu as they spin down asphalt: the sky is unfinished white, artist has stepped out, back soon, please wait. Dirty plastic bags, delicate aquamarine hue, skitter and tumble alongside me; clubbers like mangy birds of paradise blink in piss-stained doorways; and King's Cross sits in state below, crowned by cranes and embraced by the industrial, the desolate, the abandoned, the strange and complex beauty of the city. Zu zu zu.

Friend and co-conspirator Igor Kordey has been nominated for a Shuster (Canada's most prestigious comics award) for his work on our book Smoke. Below, some of Igor's new work, from Coeur de Batailles (written by Morvan, author of the bestselling series Sillage) and the steampunk colonial epic Empire.

Other friend and co-conspirator David Marquez has just put up a new website, clicky on his name and go see. David, like many of my Austin illustrator friends, has just been unchained from working on A Scanner Darkly and emerged, squinting and rubbing Wacom-damaged wrists, back into the sunlight of general society. (You can see the new Scanner trailer here. Hmm.) He has a new comic coming out soon and once he sends me pages I will post some. I adore David's art and think he has a great talent; we've been talking about collaborating for a long time (on a more serious project than our 8-page, drawn-in-a-weekend parody "Necrocomicon" in Commercial Suicide 3) and as soon as I can find a publisher who can pay him a living page rate, he's getting a graphic novel script from me.

A little over 48 hours remain until my film shoot. Heading out to walk the location with the gaffer. I'm holding up well, all things considering: I can still form coherent sentences. (Did I mention I was directing a short film? Well, I am. Sometimes, gentle stranger, I forget what I have told you.)

( 3:51 PM ) (0) comments

20.2.06 Smoke en vente

La version française integrale de Smoke a été juste publiée en France par Delcourt. Cliquez sur l’image pour sauter à sa page sur amazon.fr:

Si vous avez déjà lu Smoke, rendez-moi un petit service et écrivez un commentaire sur la page d'Amazon.fr. Je crois que l'avis et les commentaires des autres lecteurs sont très importants en choisir un nouveau livre.

Je suis très fier de cette édition, à mon avis elle est meilleur que l’Américaine. J’ai eu l’occasion de corriger quelques erreurs et omissions fait dans le version integrale Américaine par IDW et, comme tous les BDs fait par Delcourt, le papier, l’impression, et la conception sont de qualité supérieure. Mais n’ayez pas peur – je n’ai pas fait la traduction moi-meme; vous pouvez voir que ma grammaire française est abominable. Pfft, je suis Américaine; je trouve parler anglais assez dur…

( 2:50 PM ) (1) comments

10.2.06 On my travel plans, or lack thereof

Various of you have been emailing to ask whether I will be coming to Wondercon or at Wizard World New York. Sadly, I won't be at either. I'm in the middle of pre-production on my first short film, and also trying to line up producers for my second (a larger-budget affair). Thus there is no way I can depart this sceptr'd isle for the time being. I will be at Cannes. I might be at SDCC; I tend to decide at the last minute. It also depends significantly on whether Tokyopop want me there.

I'm sorry not to be coming out to America for the two February conventions; there are a lot of you I'd like to catch up with or indeed meet in person for the first time. But the only way to make my dreams come true is work very, very hard. And that is what I must do this Spring - if not this entire year, and the one after, and the one after that.

( 8:04 PM ) (0) comments

5.2.06 The Secret Origin of Agent Boo

If you go to the Tokyopop website and click through to the February issue of their Manga Online magazine (registration required, but it's quick), you can read the first chapter of Kat & Mouse. (You can also read previews of Becky Cloonan's East Coast Rising and George Alexopoulos' beautiful Go With Grace.)

Also, here's Edo's cover draft for Book 1 of Agent Boo:

I love it, it's got just the right Petit Prince-meets-Flash Gordon vibe to it.

I think now can be told the Amazing and Absolutely True Story of How Agent Boo Came About. Back when the Isotope Forums existed (and I had a little corner of it), somebody had posted a thread about the online comic retailer, Khepri. I had always found Khepri's old navigation quite hard to use, and I posted something essentially going "blah blah useability blah clunky, boo Khepri". Larry Young responded in fairly short order, pointing out how incredibly dumb it was for me to criticise a well-known US online comic retailer just as my first comic book was debuting.

Now, there is nothing in life that pains me quite so much as admitting that Larry Young is right, but in this case there was no avoiding it. I wrote a mea culpa to Larry saying I had gone back and, in a burst of Stalinist historical revisionism, deleted my critical post about Khepri: "Commissar Boo has vanished". (The reference is to this wonderful and chilling book, an in-joke I was probably the only one to get. Still, if you can't amuse yourself...)

That night, I can't sleep. I keep turning over in my head that "Commissar Boo" sounds like a really cute character name. As the low blue hours crawl through to dawn, I create this dippy, absurdist sci-fi story in my head about this little girl called Agent Boo, who lives in Space City and fights the evil Queen Misery of Iron City, and her Commissar Noir. I emailed a couple of sentences the next day to my editors, describing the concept. They email back: "Love it! Send more."

Then I added the talking cat. The talking cat has been an in-joke between myself and Tokyopop editor Tim Beedle since about July of 2004. When we were pitching Kat & Mouse, Tokyopop weren't looking for school-drama shoujo as much as they were looking for more wild, fantastic stories. It was a struggle to get Kat & Mouse greenlit. Then-Tokyopop (now, Marvel) editor Mark Paniccia turned to me at lunch, confessed he didn't really like or understand manga, and said about Kat & Mouse, "Oh, just add a vampire or a talking cat to it, and they'll approve it easy." I resisted. There are no talking cats in Kat & Mouse. But oh, the delightful irony of deliberately adding a talking cat to my next Tokyopop pitch... and of course the cat (named Pumpkin, after a stray cat my family rescued when I was a little girl) has run away with the book with his straight-out-of-Brooklyn wisecracks.

Via friends (really, the only way I find artists) we hooked up with Edo Fuijschkot, who just gets the whole concept so well. The pitch zoomed through the approvals process and suddenly, bang! It had a contract and a deadline and I actually had to write the blasted thing.

If Agent Boo were a mathematical equation, it would be: (stupid self-referential in-jokes about Stalin + insomnia) * editors with a sense of humour = series!. Sometimes graphic novel projects are agonisingly hard to get off the ground. And sometimes they're not.