In other news: looks like I’ve secured an artist and publisher for a short graphic novel. It’ll probably end up coming in at around 55 pages. Grey-scale I think, maybe some letratone effects. Hopefully out towards the back end of summer 2013.

More info as things solidify.

Took a shortcut through a lane I haven’t used in many years today and spotted a very nicely made iron gate that I don’t ever remember being there before.

I used to walk through that lane at least once a week but I have no recollection of the gate, and yet the gate is very old. What’s going on?

Looks like I’ll have a six page comic called “Thunder On A Summer’s Day” in an upcoming issue of Overload. Probably issue three. No word on who the artist will be yet. I’m quite happy with this one.

Lets see – I’ve got pitches for two new 66 page graphic novels out with publishers at the moment. One seems keen. The other inscrutable. Fingers crossed.

Work continues on Project Luna: 1947 and the Crowley book. Both look to be on schedule to launch early next year.

This painting is haunting me.

My favourite of Gustave Courbet’s trout paintings – the fish seems to be staring right at you. There is a something in that eye that pleads for help, or at least mercy. The late Robert Hughes said “A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.”

It reminds me of bright summer mornings. A fit trout, fresh from the water and still squirming in your hands, has a unique and not at all unpleasant odour.

It makes me immensely happy to report that my old pal and cohort Roy Huteson Stewart has recommenced work on our graphic novel Aleister Crowley: Wandering the Waste. Contracts have been signed with Markosia and it’s all systems go. All we need to do now is finish the bloody thing.

The road has not been easy but at last it looks as though we’ll see this book on shelves before we’re all dead and rotting in the ground. It’s nearly two years since Crowley was supposed to be completed and published. It seems longer that that, since the original publisher collapsed in a wholly avoidable and bile-filled fashion, since my first trip to a lawyer’s office, since the long and tedious exchange of emails with a worm masquerading as a man. But that’s all in the past. And we’re back on track. And we will finish this awful cloying bastard of a book.

If all goes to plan Crowley will launch at 2013’s Kapow! comic convention in London.

A little about the format of the book: we’re talking 100 pages of actual comic, with each chapter being preceded by a page of relevant quotes from Crowley and his contemporaries. A 17,000 word appendix to the chapters will also be included. Expect it to be about 144 pages all in.

So, it’s all back on track. All systems go. Thanks must go to Roy for sticking with the project during it’s scrap-heap years. And to Paul McLaren for continuing his lettering work even when the book was without a publisher. And to Martin Conaghan and Nic Wilkinson and Alasdair Duncan, for their support at the beginning and throughout.

I received these unlettered pages from Roy just this week. They’re from a short five page interlude which comes between chapters three and four. Just a little walk in the snow-covered grounds of Netherwood. An easy, ambling lull to decompress after an information-heavy chapter three.

I especially like what Roy has done on the page above. The sun coming out on Crowley. How very appropriate.

Jack B Yeats

Look below for further proof that Margaret Thatcher is an evil, rotting carcass of a woman. Bereft of soul, bereft of empathy and heart and emotion; naught but a gluttonous, feeding machine eager to devour the hopes and dreams and flesh of the electorate.

Seriously though, that is an incredible cover by Graeme Neil Reid.

Overload is edited by Martin Conaghan. He’ll be reviewing portfolios at the Kapow! convention on Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th of May. 1pm both days at table 34. Potential contributors, both writers and artists, should drop by.

You can view a small preview here.

Lots of good names in issue one, and me. I was lucky enough to team up with Graeme Howard for a six pager called Staring Into The Eye Of A Blackbird, You Can See The Things He Likes And The Things He Doesn’t. Surely the longest and most convoluted title to ever be mentioned on Bleeding Cool.

Here’s a little peek at one panel . . .

Paul McLaren did the lettering.

Lovely stark artwork from Graeme Howard.

Graeme and myself are currently working on something that will hopefully turn into a three issue mini-series. We’ll be sending it out to the usual suspects soon.

In the mean time, beware Zombie Thatcher.

Laid off from the shipyard. No work. No more boats for the time being. It will, at least, be nice not to have bloodshot eyes for a while.

HOLE IN THE GROUND

My story Get It Down (which appeared in Innsmouth Magazine #6) was included in the Honourable Mention List for Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year Volume 4. Link.

Nice to know that she read it, never mind liked it.

HOLE IN THE SKY

Been trawling youtube looking at Harlan Ellison videos. Lots of people really hate Harlan, but I think he’s funny as hell. In this vid he shows off his sprawling comic collection. The actual storage archive is almost as impressive as the comics themselves.

Further to Cliff Twemlow’s The Pike, here’s some archive footage detailing 1982’s sadly aborted movie version featuring Twemlow, Joan Collins, and the brilliantly awful mechanical pike.

In this documentary Twemlow informs us that “the largest pike ever caught was nineteen foot.” A statement so wrong I am going to pretend that it is true from now on.

By noted English “actor, nightclub bouncer, horror paperback writer and library music composer” Cliff Twemlow.

Sadly out of print, but available in dog-eared form from the usual places. I admit that I’ll buy most books with a pike on the cover, but this really is good. I’ll be tracking down a copy of his other novel The Beast Of Kane.

Here’s a picture of Cliff.

Random line from his wikipedia entry – “The Mechanical Pike apparently now resides as an exhibit of robotics in Japan.”

More info at http://itsahotun.com/Cliff_Twemlow.htm

Housebound deity. As real in life as in the mind.

Rudy Rucker just released the latest issue of his webzine Flurb. Thirteen new weird stories, including one by me called A Bigger Piece of Nothing. You can read it here.

It didn’t used to be called that. It used to be called something much worse. And the original ending was, thinking back on it, awful. But Rudy set me on the right path and I rewrote the thing and now it’s much better. Thanks Rudy!