Who could’ve foreseen that a weird graphic novel about Aleister Crowley would sell well and get good reviews and have to be relaunched at London Super Comic Con in a handsome new hardcover edition with an all-new cover by Roy H Stewart. Not me, that’s for sure.

Me and Roy will be signing at the Markosia booth from 2-3pm on Saturday the 20th of February.  And I’ll be there, flying solo (but hopefully not flying low), on Sunday from 11-12. Do stop by and say hello if you can.

It was great to get a chance to go back and fix a few small but niggling errors. And I was very glad of the design skills and all-round good taste of Bram Meehan, who pulled everything together for us on this new edition. This is very much the author’s preferred edition. So if you’re going to buy a copy, make sure it’s this one.

Here’s the skinny…

Aleister Crowley: Wandering the Waste, the critically-acclaimed graphic novel by Martin Hayes, Roy Huteson Stewart, and Paul McLaren is re-launching at LSCC 2016.

A meticulously researched exploration of the life of Aleister Crowley, with a foreword by renowned Crowley scholar Richard Kaczynski. This new edition has been revised and completely redesigned with a new cover and additional bonus content – fully annotated and complete with bibliography and rarities.

Know then the life and times of England’s most infamous son. Occultist, artist, poet, prophet, record-setting mountaineer, drug and free-love pioneer, spy, scholar, and legendary bad egg. Summoner of demons and loser of friends. An explorer of many realms who conversed with gods and angels but ended his days labelled “The Wickedest Man in the World.” A foolish genius. A much-maligned history. A wanderer of the waste.

Published by Markosia.
ISBN: 978-1-909276-75-8

Praise for Aleister Crowley: Wandering the Waste

“One of the most ambitious and well-balanced experiments in comics I’ve seen this year.” Hannah Means-Shannon, Bleeding Cool.

“The ending really is something quite interesting and special.” Richard Bruton, Forbidden Planet International Blog.

“Skilfully written and illustrated, leaving one almost dizzy and in mind of Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House 5.” Matthew Stocker, The Green Book.

“Deftly weaves together the spiritual and the mundane, truth and rumour, into what is ultimately a human story about one of the most ambitious people ever to live . . . a work to savour and return to.” From the foreword by Richard Kaczynski. Author of Perdurabo, the Life of Aleister Crowley

Written by Martin Hayes. Art by Roy H Stewart. Lettered by Paul McLaren. Designed by Bram Meehan. Script edited by Martin Conaghan. Published by Markosia.

A few pages from the prologue…

This is pretty bloody brilliant. The renowned Atlantis Bookshop on London’s Museum Street will be holding an exhibition of Roy H Stewart’s original artwork from the graphic novel Aleister Crowley: Wandering the Waste.

The exhibition opens as part of Atlantis’s annual Crowleymass celebrations on Sunday the 1st of December, 2013. 2-5PM. Roy will be there talking about his art and process, and I’ll be there too – chatting, looking shifty, and generally milling about.

There will be over 80 pieces of framed original art on display, along with several grimoire-like sketchbooks which Roy put together while we were working on the book. And everything is for sale. Prices start at £25.

The exhibition will run until the 24th of December.

If you’re planning to attend, the Atlantis Bookshop would appreciate it if you could RSVP at the email address on the flyer. You can also contact them there if you’d like to reserve a particular piece of artwork.

Hope to see you there!

Two new reviews of Aleister Crowley: Wandering the Waste this week.

The ending really is something quite interesting and special, Hayes and Stewart finding a really involving, and yes, a magical way to end their tale, to end Crowley’s life. But the thing the graphic novel leaves us with, as it should, is that Crowley’s desire to transcend death, and to live in the imagination and the memory of the world, was accomplished. Death took the man, but his legacy lives on.

Richard Bruton on the Forbidden Planet blog.

The impressionistic style often bleeds over into the real world scenes, kind of like how the world of magic often comes into the everyday life of Crowley. I enjoyed both styles but I particularly enjoyed the “Interlude” chapter which was entirely in the first style and was a nice change of pace and break from the often haunting imagery of the impressionist style. Overall, I really enjoyed this book.

David Ferguson on Irish Comic News

I was lucky enough to get my mitts on this yesterday. Lovely piece of work by Richard T. Cole.

Here’s a little preview of the opening nine pages, to belatedly mark the official launch.

I’m happy to report that the signed bookplate edition from Weiser Antiquarian Books sold out in a little over 24 hours. See the end of this post for details of where you can grab a copy of the standard edition.

Aleister Crowley: Wandering The Waste. 144 pages. You can grab a copy…

Direct from the author, signed and dedicated upon request
Direct from the publisher
amazon.com
amazon.co.uk
The Atlantis Bookshop in London (included with each copy is a postcard signed by Martin Hayes)
Sub City on Dublin’s Exchequer Street have signed copies

Available digitally at…

Comixology
Kindle store US – UK
iTunes

The Syracuse Herald
March 5th 1915

Link.

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.

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.

“The first ice worms species were discovered in 1887 in Alaska, on the Muir Glacier .[2] These glacier ice worms can be found on glaciers in Alaska, Washington, Oregon and British Columbia. They have not been found in other glaciated regions of the world.”

After the last of the murders, an article appeared in the newspaper of W. T. Stead, the Pall Mall Gazette, by Tau Tria Delta, [D’Onston] who offered a solution for the motive of the murders. It stated that in one of the grimoires of the Middle Ages, an account was given of a process by which a sorcerer could attain “the supreme black magical power” by following out a course of action identical with that of Jack the Ripper; certain lesser powers were granted to him spontaneously during the course of the proceedings. After the third murder, if memory serves, the assassin obtained on the spot the gift of invisibility, because in the third or fourth murder, a constable on duty saw a man and a woman go into a cul-de-sac. At the end there were the great gates of a factory, but at the sides no doorways or even windows. The constable, becoming suspicious, watched the entry to the gateway, and hearing screams, rushed in. He found the woman, mutilated, but still living; as he ran up, he flashed his bullseye in every direction; and he was absolutely certain that no other person was present. And there was no cover under the archway for so much as a rat.

AC

I changed the blog header a little while ago. My friend and cohort Roy Huteson Stewart very kindly let me use a cropped image from his superb artwork for our forthcoming Aleister Crowley graphic novel, Crowley: Wandering the Waste.

Page 43 to be exact. Roy’s pages are things of rare beauty and insight.

Research on Crowley: Wandering The Waste had me scrolling through a copy of Fred Gettings’ Dictionary of Occult, Hermetic and Alchemical Sigils for interesting squiggles which Roy Huteson Stewart might be able to incorporate into the backgrounds and page layouts of the comic. And would you look at what I found on page 201, given as Jerome Cardan’s 1557 sigil for the planet Saturn.

Looks familiar.

Further net-based mooching about led me to this excellent article about the symbol, and Jimmy’s use of it.

Roy Huteson Stewart‘s pages are starting to come in thick and fast as he works on Crowley: Wandering The Waste, our collaboration for Insomnia. Here’s a couple of unlettered panels from the prologue…

I’m really enjoying working with Roy, he’s bringing plenty of strange and brilliant ideas to the project that I would never have thought of.  Can’t really ask for much more than that.  He’s also doing a great job capturing the frailty of Crowley in old age.

I don’t know who took the above photographs, possibly Kenneth Grant (one of them does appear in Remembering Aleister Crowley, Grant’s very interesting memoir of his friendship with AC).  Taken in the garden at Netherwood, Hastings. Probably in or around 1945, which would make Crowley approximately 70 years old.

The book is looking like it will end up containing about 90 pages of actual comic, plus 30 or so pages of notes at the back. There may be a gallery at the back too, showing other artists interpretations of AC.

Out towards the end of the year, with any luck.

I signed contracts with Insomnia Publications last week to write an original graphic novel based on the life of Aleister Crowley. This has meant I’ve had to crawl around the attic like some kind of giant, malformed silverfish to gather up all my old Crowley books.

It will be done in a similar style to Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s  magnificent From Hell – as much as possible based on historical fact but with some fictionalised elements to provide a framework for the story and to really make it sing. Crowley wasn’t averse to fictionalising his own life anyway, so I’m sure he wouldn’t mind too much.

Crowley – Wandering The Waste will be published under Insomnia’s Vigil line of historical graphic novels, probably in 2010.

Not sure yet as to who the artist will be.