The Project Luna: 1947 trade paperback won’t be released until July 1st but I hear that the publisher still has a few copies of the very limited LSCC hardcover edition in stock at their fortified storage bunker.

Jim Boswell and I are really happy with how this edition came out – it’s a thing of beauty. Jim’s artwork looks truly superb. The crappy jpeg below doesn’t do it justice.

Usual price is £15 + p&p. But Markosia have just begun a week-long special offer of £13 with free UK p&p.

Full colour. 96 pages including bonus material: sketches, script pages and things of that ilk.

Project Luna: 1947  will almost certainly never be available as a hardcover again.

Lovecraft by the brilliant Ben Templesmith.

Almost as unsettling as an actual photo of the man. Superb. Thanks Ben!

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.

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.

Project Luna: 1947. My collaboration with the infinitely talented Jim Boswell.

Look at that cover!

88 pages of retro pulpy science fiction goodness. Out from Markosia in 2012. Here’s to hoping those Mayan bastards were wrong!

Someday, Somewhere – short story in an upcoming issue of Nature.

Staring Into The Eye Of A Blackbird, You Can See The Things He Likes And The Things He Doesn’t – six pager in a currently beyond top secret and therefore unnameable anthology comic.

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.

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.

Unlettered. Top notch work as always from Jim Boswell, who has made me promise not to write any more crowd scenes.

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.

Pleased to say that I placed a short ghost story with Supernatural Tales and a five page horror strip with an upcoming Insomnia anthology.

Both out next year sometime, I should think.

Got my contributor copies of Wasted issue 2 today.

68 full colour pages including Holmes Has It Large by me and Adrian Bamforth.

The Bad Press/Wasted lads also have  a spanking new website up here.

Here’s another teasing peek at what Jim Boswell has been up to while working on our graphic novel . . .

Our story “Intergalactic Bank Robbing Teenage Space Aliens On The Run” appears in issue 12.

Story by me, art by Jim Boswell.

Lots of other good stuff in there too!