The Eagle Awards were announced last night at the MCM Expo Awards. Results are below, and congrats to everyone who won this year. You all have the chance to say you won the last Eagle Award.

After a long history dating back to ’79, the Eagle Awards are being retired, and in their place next year we’ll have the MCM Awards, organised (no surprises here) by MCM Expo. The Eagle Awards site may have the winners up this month… but Heidi was far quicker, so I’ve grabbed these from The Comics Beat… and added a few thoughts along the way….

Best Newcomer (writer): Jeff Lemire (Essex County 2009, Nobody 2009, Sweet Tooth 2009, Doug Wright Award fro Emerging Talent 2008)
Best Newcomer (artist): Francesco Francavilla (Zorro 2008 and many more)
Best Writer: Scott Snyder
Best Artist (pencils): J.H. Williams III
Best Artist (inks): Scott Williams
Best Writer/Artist: Frank Miller (Since I reckon it’s ythe only thing he published in the period, this would be an award for Holy Terror? Really? Oh Christ)
Best Fully-Painted Artwork: Alex Ross
Best Colourist: Dave Stewart
Best Letterer: Richard Starkings
Best Editor: Karen Berger
Best Publisher: DC/Vertigo
Best Full-Colour US Comic: Batman
Best Black/White US Comic: The Walking Dead
Best Full-Colour British Comic: Dr Who Magazine (comic?)
Best Black/White British Comic: Viz
Best New Comic: Batman
Best Manga: 20th Century Boys
Best European Comic Book: Dylan Dog
Best Web-Based Comic: Freakangels
Best Single Story: Dr Who #12
Best Story Arc: ‘No Way Out’, The Walking Dead
Best Cover: Batwoman #1 by JH Williams III
Best Original Graphic Novel: Batman: Noel
Best Reprint Compilation: Thor by Walt Simonson
Best Comics-Related Book: Supergods by Grant Morrison
Best Comics Movie/TV Show: The Big Bang Theory
Best Comic Book Website: Bleeding Cool
Best Comics-Related Magazine: DC Comics Superhero Collection (Easy to forget there’s a magazine attached to the statue – maybe the Comics Journal should give it a try?)
Roll of Honour: Frank Quitely
Huntsman Challenge Award: The Time of Reflection

The Eagles have long been the only British Comic awards. Now they’re gone. Will the MCM Awards be any different? I hope so, I really do.

The Eagles may have been organised by many well meaning people, but generally, the last few years at least have not been kind, and instead of a UK Comic Awards we can be rightly proud of, celebrating the very best of UK Comics, we have something that’s more often than not mentioned with a laugh and a snarky tone. Good luck MCM Expo.

Strong Female Characters – The Return:

Now with the rise of digital, I get a lot of comics being offered for review on pdf format, for which of course, I’m very grateful. But there’s a worrying trend amongst these digital works – too many of them seem to be looking at the decompressed form and adapting it for other genres.

Too often I find myself emailing back to a new writer/artist and telling them that there’s just not enough here to review. I try not to do really hyper-critical reviews of self-published stuff, preferring to be critical yet encouraging, but with these comics coming through it’s hard not to take some of them to task for the sheer emptiness of what they’re offering.

And as a simple comparison, here’s an ad for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #16 by Mark Martin from 1988 (courtesy of Mr Phil):

A one page ad for a comic that takes as long to read as some of the 20 page comics I see at the moment. Something’s gone very, very wrong I think.

The world really is a strange, strange place isn’t it?

Not only does Shia LaBeouf make mini comics, but they don’t look at all bad, and Sean T. Collins at The Comics Journal rather likes them:

“All right, let’s take the elephant in the room and fly that fucker around like Dumbo: These are self-published, arty alternative comics written and drawn by an actor whose movies have grossed just shy of five billion dollars worldwide. In that respect Shia LaBeouf has already lapped most celebrities who’ve gotten their names on a comic, since in most cases “name on a comic” is as far as it goes. At best, these vanity projects might provide an interesting mainstream creator with a better work-for-hire opportunity than most. Far more frequently they exist just to give some nerd-made-good the thrill of seeing their name on the stands at the Android’s Dungeon of their youth, or to provide proof of concept for some shitty genre movie-or-TV-show-to-(never)-be. In a context where singer Gerard Way’s apparently short-lived but well-received stint as an honest-to-god scriptwriter for his smart superhero series The Umbrella Academy qualifies an extreme outlier, it’s difficult to believe in the existence of freaking minicomics from the co-star of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull even when you’re holding them in your hands.

Believe it, though. And believe this, too: They’re good.”

“LaBeouf could have, I dunno, plotted a Transformers miniseries and some would have feted him for it. Instead he hand-crafted a bunch of weirdo comics that leave him wide open for mockery when he hits notes too hard or takes ideas too far or makes drawings too sloppy (and he does on all counts, from time to time, inevitably), because he had something to say and had to say it with this particular art form. That’s something I respond to no matter whose name is on the cover, and the response is gratitude, for lack of a better word: “Hey, thanks for making this cool thing and showing it to me, because I had a great time with it.” The craft may not be there yet, but the heart and smarts are. Shia LaBeouf is a for-real cartoonist, and a talent to watch.”

The world is indeed a stranger place for knowing this. But also, in just a small way, a better one as well. Next up, Jason Statham’s poetry collections?

These two are pending approval…

But a third design has already had a little feedback from Threadless. I’ll pass you over to Rian’s comments grabbed from his Facebook feed:

First T-Shirt design (image shown below) “not up to par” and “could do with more work” according to Threadless. Looks like I’ll have to give up the day job. Does anyone have an opening for an over-the-hill design/illustration intern? Willing to make tea. I need to start at the bottom again, I think:

“The Threadless staff has provided the following reason to decline your submission: Your submission was declined because we feel your idea could use a little more work to be up to the standard that will give it the best shot. We have a feature called Critiques on Threadless.com that allows you to have your design critiqued before you submit it for approval. By using the Critiques feature as a pre-submission tool, you can let the community help get your submission up to par. This will not guarantee your design will be accepted, but we hope this will help you improve your design!”

This could get very silly…. there’s a critique section on the design, where Threadless members are encouraged to give their own feedback… and Rian’s playing along:

Rian: “Student designer seeks tips.”

MrGoobler: “What year are you in, young fella? I’m guessing you must be a freshman? your design doesn’t seem to have legs, although that might be deliberate. Have you thought of adding a funny caption like: ‘Don’t worry if you get me legless, I’m pretty armless.’ or something.”

Rian: “Well, I’m just starting out. Working on an old Mac 2Ci, hoping to get a Quadra when I can afford it, and hopefully learn Corel Draw and PhotoExpress.“

Happening over the weekend, or this afternon if you were at the special Friday preview.

MCM Expo is a full media show, with a lot of guests from the worlds of TV, film, and pop entertainment of all kinds. Big names this time round include Danny Devito, Anthony Daniels, and Kevin Eastman along with a host of actors who’ve played bit parts in various sci-fi series in the US over the last few decades.

What makes MCM Expo relevant for comics is the sepcialist comic village. Whilst small in comparison to the MCM Expo as a whole, the appeal for exhibitors at the Expo is the sheer footfall that passes by the tables. Sure, most of them are doing just that; passing, but artists in the past have talked of Expo being a great place to meet new readers.

Full list, and details at The MCM Expo site.

Ken Harrison: You were a film journalist before you wrote strips for 2000 AD (and my understanding is that you still write journalism). How much was that a help or a hindrance to you when penning comic scripts? I’m thinking that studying and thinking about films may have helped develop your visual literacy.

Alec Worley: I was a film journalist for about six years before I got into comics. I wrote for all sorts of magazines, from Sight & Sound to Zoo. When I went freelance back in 2000, I had this tragically naïve plan that niche journalism was going to pay the bills in between writing comics, novels, screenplays and wotnot. Suffice to say, many bitter lessons were learned trying to make that work! These days, I do the odd film piece for SFX, but the film writing’s fast losing ground to the comics work, to be honest.

I studied film under my own steam just before I left school. I pinched a massive book on film theory from the library – not cool! – and studied it cover to cover and back again. In a way, I got into reviewing as a way of finding out more about how films and storytelling work, which is something I’ve always been interested in. People often make the comparison between films and comics, but the similarities are mainly in editing, I think, between ‘the cut’ in film and ‘the gutter’ in comics. Moving from shot to shot and assembling meaning as you go along. But yeah, studying and writing about film definitely sharpened my instincts for visual storytelling, when to cut to a close-up, an establishing shot, how to shape the story and what have you. Having said that, I think I came to comics with a certain amount of arrogance, in that I knew I could write, I knew how stories worked and I knew the genres. But after receiving some of my very first amends from Tharg The Ever-Perceptive it soon became apparent that I had a lot to learn. And always will.

KH: How long had you been trying to sell scripts to 2000 AD before you sold your first Shock and did you have any other experience of writing comics?

AW: I decided to lay siege to 2000 AD in Christmas 2006. The plan was to spend the next few months writing nothing but Future Shocks and to write them as though they’d already been rejected. That way your head is clear to just write the thing without worrying about whether it’ll get accepted or getting bummed out when it gets turned down. Based on my previous ventures into submission hell, I assumed I’d never hear back or a rejection would turn up a year or so after I’d forgotten ever having written to them. As it turned out, Tharg got back to me within a week. I think I was lucky enough to have started submitting just as the Nerve Centre was commencing its periodic shovel through the slush pile.

Anyway, Tharg said he liked the idea but it needed revising. I’d written two more Shocks by then and was on a bit of a roll. So instead of reworking the first one, I just sent the next one the same day I got the reply from Tharg. That one got rejected a week later by a chap called David Leach, who said I should definitely send more scripts and whose feedback at the time was invaluable. By now, I’d written a stack of Shocks and when David received submission three he got back to me a few days later saying, ‘Christ, you’re keen!’ He said the script needed reworking but the idea and the twist were solid.

I dutifully tweaked it several times, but a month later, having completed the final pass, David moved on to Titan and my finely tuned Future Shock tumbled into a Thrill Vortex never to be seen again. I continued writing Future Shocks until I had a stock of about five or six, which I fed into the slush pile over the next few months. Eventually, Tharg began picking some of these up, by which time I was writing a film review column for the Megazine.

I’d previously attempted to get into some other UK comics including those by Panini, Titan and Games Workshop. That Warhammer Comic folded three days after I sent my submission! I very nearly got into Commando, whose then-editor George Low, was fantastically encouraging. I also had a few scripts picked up by some excellent small press comics, including FutureQuake, Something Wicked and The Girly Comic.

KH: Why comics? Why not prose fiction or screenplays or some other form?

AW: I’ve always loved comics, but I never thought they were a professional option until I realised some of them actually took submissions. I remember doing these sample scripts for Panini. I had Spidey and Black Cat vs. the Lizard in a museum full of animated dinosaur skeletons. Night at the Museum came out a year later, dammit! And another one with Spidey and Ghost Rider vs. Carnage on a runaway train. I was surprised at how easily the ideas came, how naturally the process flowed and how much it felt like I already knew how to do this even though I’d never done it before, which was a bit spooky.

Other than that. I’d pitched tie-in novels, screenplays, radio plays and everything else that involves you having to write 30,000 unpaid words based on the vaguest possible guidelines on the off-chance that an editor might say ‘yes’ to a project that will consume your life and end up paying you less than if you were stood at a set of traffic lights cleaning car windscreens with your tongue! No, the freelance experience hasn’t left me feeling at all bitter. Why do you ask…?

The thing is, in my experience, the try-everything-and-see-what-sticks approach rarely works. I found it really helped to focus on one thing at a time, gather momentum and have a body of work – published or not – to stand on. Comics was really the first time I’d ever done that.

KH: You’re talking about something in your answers here that I think I haven’t seen talked about much by comic creators: the importance of cultivating a relationship with an editor. How important do you think it was to show you were ‘serious’ about comics writing by regularly submitting scripts?

AW: I guess you prove you’re ‘serious’ by actually being serious, by just doing your job as effectively as possible, by being practical and thinking ahead. When I was Future Shocking, I was scoring one commission for at least one rejection, so it was important to have a pile of finished scripts to shovel onto the fire. I figured any that got bounced would still have been good enough to polish up according to Tharg’s feedback and sent to find a home in the small press. That way nothing was wasted.

I think in terms of being ‘serious’ about what you’re doing, I remember reading an interview with Ken Loach in which he said if you want to be a successful filmmaker you’ve got to be more in love with filmmaking than with the idea of being a filmmaker. And it’s the same with writing, or art, or music or whatever it is you’re into. Getting starry-eyed and full of yourself or starting to think about developing your ‘brand’ or whatever will only distract you. When I got the greenlight to write the first series of Age of the Wolf, I spent the first few weeks in a daze, thinking, ‘Bloody Hell, I’m actually gonna be writing a series for 2000 AD! How awesome is that?’ I got so carried away with the romance of what I was doing I lost sight of the best way in which to do the job and my first draft of the series breakdown suffered because of that.

Luckily, Tharg The Wise And Munificent has always been on hand to keep me on course. Since my very first commission, every single bit of feedback has been noted and referred back to. Having constant pointers from a detached and experienced editor makes it easy to deal with bad habits and blind spots. It can be embarrassing when your editor points out that you’ve made a goof, but it’s a good way to learn.

KH: Did the movie review column help in terms of getting work at 2000 AD in that you were in regular contact with Matt Smith?

AW: I’m not sure exactly how much the movie column helped. I guess you’d have to ask Matt. But my always being a good boy couldn’t have hurt, always meeting the deadline and the word count, and making sure the copy didn’t read like it was written by a stoned orang-utan with a Wikipedia fixation – and I’ve done enough sub-editing in my time to know how often that’s the case! In that sense, writing for the Meg and the Prog is the same as writing for any other outlet. As a freelancer, it’s your job to make the editor’s life as stress-free as possible. And when it comes to writing comics scripts, I’d extend that to the artist and the letterer too.

KH: How did the review column come about?

AW: I was early for a screening for another magazine and was mooching around Borders where I found a copy of the Megazine featuring a review of X-Men 3. I didn’t realize the Meg published reviews and, as a jobbing film journo, you’re always on the look-out for paying outlets that may be small enough to not have a dedicated film writer on their books. I sent a query email to the 2000 AD website and Matt got back the following day, asking if I could do a round-up of the month’s genre releases. He never asked me to stop, so I kept going for almost three years.

It was a bit of a dream gig, but orchestrating the screenings, check discs and images was a nightmare. In the end, the organisational side got too much to handle and I had to let the column go. Some of the bigger magazines for which I was writing were dying off and I suddenly found PR departments bullshitting me more often than usual, until I was almost literally fighting for a seat in the preview theatre. I’ll never forget that screening of Aliens Vs. Predator… It got to the point where I was pretty much paying to write the column.

Of course, the other thing was I wanted to concentrate on writing scripts for the Prog. Film writing was only ever meant to be a means to an end, so it was time to call it a day. I explained all this to Matt, who was brilliant and asked me to find a replacement. Luckily, I was friends with Andrew Osmond, who is a much higher profile journalist than me and has no problem getting past the velvet rope. Plus, he’s one of the most articulate, knowledgeable and insightful film journalists in genre circles right now, which helps.

KH: Why didn’t George Low being enthusiastic about your scripts turn into an actual gig at Commando? What’s the story there?

AW: The feedback I kept getting from George Low at Commando was that he’d published stories like mine a zillion times before. Unsurprising, really, given that the comic’s been around for five decades. No matter how much research I did or how offbeat I made the story, I just couldn’t get a submission accepted. George Low was really positive about my writing and said he wanted to see more from me, but in the end it felt too much like stabbing in the dark. Commando turned out to be a bit of a Moby Dick for me, to be honest, and I’m planning to give it another go soon.

KH: Which of your Shocks/Terror Tales are you proudest of and why? Conversely, which would you like to go back and re-write?

AW: I’ve hidden behind some of the best artists in the business. If I had to pick a favourite, I’d probably say the Terror Tale, Lost Property, which I did with artist Warren Pleece and letterer Ellie De Ville. This was the one about a guy who returns lost property to the ghosts on the London Underground. Actually, it was Tharg who came up with the idea of the ghosts needing specific artefacts in order to move on. And my wife came up with the ending. Warren’s a terrific storyteller and character artist. He’s also great with atmosphere. I was also really pleased with the Tharg’s 3riller I did with Death Sentence and Rex Royd artist Mike Dowling. I’ve never worked as closely with an artist on a comic as I did with Mike on that one and we were really in synch over what we were out to achieve.

Having said that, I’d happily rewrite everything! I’m one of those insecure writers who can’t read anything they’ve had published without seeing anything other than the mistakes I feel I’ve made, and I just squirm at the thought of anyone reading them. Having a new series coming out tends to fill me with dread. When a comic I’ve written comes out, I’ll set some time aside to see what I’ve got wrong and take notes. I started out with a two-page Word document listing the things to remember when writing a comic. Five years later, I’ve got 200+ pages in a ring binder stuffed with Post It notes, clippings and scribbled down quotations.

KH: Looking back specifically on your first Future Shock, A Terrible Hunt, what are your thoughts and feelings about it?

AW: This was the one that fell into a black hole after David Leach left Rebellion. I got to resubmit it once Tharg started commissioning some of my other stuff. It turned out to be my first published script, but the second commissioned by Tharg (after Adventures in the War Trade, which I did with Staz Johnson and Annie Parkhouse).

I think Terrible Hunt actually works quite well. The low squirm-factor on my part may be due to PJ Holden’s artwork. I’ve only just noticed, he put a sea monkey head on the wall of the trophy room! Sweet!

KH: I got the impression reading your movie column that you’re a big fan of horror stuff. I was a bit surprised to find during my research that you hadn’t written more Terror Tales (my memory had tricked me and told me you’d written a whole lot more). Which do you prefer, Terror Tales or Shocks, and why?

AW: I think Terror Tales are generally easier to write than Future Shocks, which can be a real challenge to anyone who’s still finding their feet. But then again, nothing beats a Future Shock that can pull off a fresh idea – or at least a fresh angle on a hackneyed idea – and a well-delivered twist. Terror Tales can get away with just a satisfying climax, which isn’t quite as demanding as a twist – which is a very specific type of satisfying climax.

I reckon good twist stories are like mousetraps and you really need to have an understanding of narrative engineering in order to set up a good one. I got mine right maybe once or twice, and even then I tended to overcomplicate stuff. I learned a lot by reading short stories by writers like Saki, John Collier and O Henry, who all keep their tales dead simple. One of the things I’ve noticed in their stuff is that the twist is usually in plain sight the whole time! I hate it when writers pull a twist out of a hat at the end with no reference to anything that’s gone before. You can’t have the main character suddenly reveal at the end that he was his own clone from the future all along without having established that cloning or time-travel are possibilities within the story!

I think twists use the same psychological tactics as magic tricks and street hussles, and part of the pleasure in reading them is in being ‘had’. But what makes the Future Shock writer’s job so difficult is the fact that the reader is actively looking to catch them out from page one! And this makes it harder to foreshadow the ending without giving it away. We’re all so bloody smug and postmodern these days, aren’t we? I’ve found that Terror Tales don’t put you under quite as much pressure. It’s enough for a Terror Tale to be scary, unsettling or shocking. But there’s a reason these things are considered an apprenticeship at 2000 AD. It’s because they’re all so bloody hard to write, but also a great way to learn how to write comics.

KH: Were you surprised when Dandridge received his own series? What would you have changed about that first one-off if you’d known he was going to return?

AW: I’d actually conceived Dandridge as a series from the very beginning. I love British ghost stories and used to read all those Usborne ‘World of the Unknown’ books when I was a kid. I got to thinking about all these ‘real’ ghosts from around the country, the Enfield Poltergeist, Borley Rectory and so on, and how they all felt like individual personalities, like these unique little treasures. So I figured what if people collected ghosts in the same way they collected antiques? In what kind of world could such a market exist? I also had this feckless dandy character floating around that I really wanted to write, and from there the whole thing just clunked together like a Transformer.

Ideas just kept coming and coming, all these scenes and characters and adventures. I thought if I ever get the chance to do a series for the Prog this is what I’ll pitch. But at the time, I hadn’t had anything published and getting a shot at a series seemed a bit pie-in-the-sky. So I got it all down in this horrendously overstuffed Future Shock, which ended up as a Past Imperfect alternative world story. Once the story had reached the twist, I still had to resolve Dandridge’s character and the easiest way to do that was to kill him off. As it turned out, this was the perfect thing to do.

I assumed that if the series ever came about, then I’d have to set it in some kind of Edwardian steampunk era. Until I saw Simon Davis had done this beautiful teaser picture for Ian Edginton’s Ampney Crucis and my heart just sank. I love Edginton’s work – really elegant, literate stories full of these really slick ideas – and I figured there was no way I could compete with that and that Dandridge was going to be just another case of, ‘Oh well, someone got there before me’. But in the end it forced me to think harder about how to make Dandridge different.

So I focused on an idea I had about exploring a sort of post-steampunk world, one in which all that scientific certainty and imperialistic optimism had given way to irrationality and the supernatural and everything had just gone to shit. The British Empire had failed and become a ghost of its former glory. This world could easily be the ‘Ghost Town’ described by The Specials, but with Dandridge as this sort of Adam Ant figure, full of charm and life. The shallowness and the romance and the politics of the eighties made it a perfect fit for Dandridge, so everything I’d set up in that Past Imperfect turned out to be just right.

KH: Why the change of artist, from Warren Pleece to Jon-Davis Hunt?

AW: I was in the middle of writing Return of the Chap, which was the five-part launch series, and I knew Warren was on board. I also knew Dandridge, who was now a ghost, had a magic jacket that would allow him to take on a physical form. And I knew the coat could transform into all these different outfits like a pop star with an unlimited wardrobe. But I needed some kind of default setting, some sort of iconic ‘costume’ for Dandridge. I had all these elements in mind, but no idea how to combine them into a coherent look and I didn’t want to dump all my notes in Warren’s lap when he was on a deadline.

So I asked Jon, since we’d just finished working on Age of the Wolf, how I could possibly make this work. About five minutes later he’d come up with this sketch, which was just perfect. The white frock coat and the red sash just said it all. I could imagine Peter Wyngarde or Johnny Depp swaggering about a haunted house dressed like that. So I included it in the script and Warren went with it. Tharg gave the following five-parter, The House That Dripped Devilry, to Jon, which came as a nice thank you for his contribution to the first series.

KH: What do you think makes a good comic artist/writer? What qualities are needed?

AW: I know very little about artwork beyond ‘Oooo, that’s lovely’ or ‘Errr, that looks a bit wonky’. But from what I’ve picked up listening to artists, I think nice splash pages are all very well, but storytelling has got to be key. You can tell when an artist has really thought through the action taking place in the script. Looking at Tiernan Trevallion’s work on Absalom in the Prog recently, he’s got all these telling details: the Sellotape around Harry’s mobile, the dead pot plant in his flat, the open flick-knife on the dashboard of his car. I don’t know how much of this stuff was in the script, but it all gives an insight into the story and its characters and the world, and brings everything to life without you even realising. I think character expression is also important, since the characters are the reader’s portal into the story. Again, look at what Trevallion did in Absalom and what D’Israeli did in Low Life. Just an extra line on a character’s face can make all the difference between the reader ‘getting it’.

As for writers, I think – again – storytelling is crucial. Going back to Absalom and Low Life, the writing on these is so simple and direct. It’s not cluttered. You know where the story is on every page. You know where the characters are going, what they’re driving towards. You’re not at any point fuzzy as to what the hell’s going on and yet it’s all happening in a completely unexpected way and the story is constantly surprising you.

But also what makes these two series stand out for me is how they deal with character. I think you’ve got to work really, REALLY hard to make a character feel alive within the space of five pages of action-heavy comics, to make them linger in your head long after you’ve put down the book. And it would be so easy to let characters like Absalom and Dirty Frank become these one-note, one-joke ciphers, but as you’re reading them, you’re really seeing who they are and why they do what they do. And then to find yourself identifying with and even liking a character who’s completely mental or a complete shitbag. That to me is really great writing. And when a writer and an artist are in synch like that the whole story just sings, the pages can’t turn fast enough and you find yourself poring over them again and again when you’re supposed to be doing the ironing or whatever.

KH: How did Age of the Wolf come about?

AW: This was another cherished idea that I hoped to pitch as a series one day. I wanted to do something that explored a different angle on werewolves. One of my favourite movies as a kid was The Company of Wolves, which I ended up getting a bit obsessed about at the time, probably because the lead actress looked just like this girl I fancied at school. Anyway, what I love about this movie is the way it explores ideas about the werewolf and moulds them into all these different stories and meanings. A bit like Clive Barker did in the Books of Blood, taking these genre tropes and mutating them into something completely different. As soon as I started researching werewolf folklore, I found out that what we consider these timeless werewolf legends are really only a very narrow cultural strain that didn’t really come about until the 1940s with Lon Chaney Jr in The Wolfman. The idea of this cursed guy who turns into a wolf every full moon is all well and good, but it’s really limited dramatically, there’s one way a story like that can end. And it doesn’t explore this wealth of wolf and werewolf folklore that runs through Britain, France and Northern Europe, stuff which is really gnarly and disturbing and more akin to Fight Club than The Wolfman.

Anyway, I pitched the series out of this paranoid fear that someone else would come along and write it before me – or even worse, write it better! I got very excited and perhaps a little too carried away with my own ideas, thinking I’d better get this in now as I may never get another shot. There were whole sequences I had to drop in order to make the thing fit. I had this big siege in the mall on Oxford Street and a lot more stuff with Pete the homeless dude. I think Jon’s spectacular artwork got me out of a lot of trouble.

KH: Did you write that first series with a sequel in mind? And has the sequel taken the direction you planned or gone off in another direction?

AW: The first story kept growing until I couldn’t fit everything into the first series. And it wasn’t long before I had this whole other story about a ‘Mad Maxine’-type character doing all this Robin Hood parkour stuff in a post-apocalyptic forest. Once the first series of Age of the Wolf was finished, I queried Tharg on the possibility of doing another. He said he’d be interested in seeing two more, which we could headline as the ‘three ages’ of the wolf. Since the story is based on all these Norse ideas of wolves and fate and stuff, I thought it might be interesting to take Rowan through the three forms of the Norse fates – the three women who spin the threads of our lives – the maiden, the mother and the monster. In the first series, Rowan’s the sacrificial maiden. In SHE IS LEGEND, she’s this protective mother of the people, and in the last one she’s going to be… something else…

But I also wanted to give the reader something different with each series, so each one could stand alone and let anyone pick it up without having to have read anything before it. So far, it’s all gone pretty much according to plan, although the characters in She Is Legend ended up taking the plot in some unexpected directions.

FPI would like to thank Alec and Ken for sharing their thoughts on the blog, thanks also to Tharg’s human avatar Matt Smith and to that man Matt ‘Madman’ Badham; the Megazine #324 is in store and available online now.

Jack Davies, Catherine Reda, Luke Bayliss & Harry Griffin-Hayes, Sammy Borras, Lily-rose Beardshaw, Sarah Fogg

Inspired Comics

Hmm. The urge to pepper this one with hideous puns and food references is almost too much. You’ll forgive me “pepper”. I promise that will be the last of them.

Right then. Six comic strips all on the subject of food. All wrapped in a gorgeous, fun, sweet cover by Sarah Fogg. By the same comic collective, and featuring many of the same artists as Science Fiction Octuple Feature from last year.

Sadly, the cover here proves to be the high point, only really matched by Sarah’s own contribution; The Mysterious Land Of Under-Noodle. That was nearly as cutesy and sweet as the cover, a six-pager of territorial trouble between the forces of food species, all fighting over the gigantic mushroom that plunges into the broth sea…

(Sarah Fogg)

The other five strips all try really hard to do their thing, but for one reason or another they’re all a little under-par. There’s a good mix of styles and themes though, but no-one really delivers a fully formed, interesting story.

Jack Davies was one of the highlights of the last Inspired Comics anthology Sci-Fi Octuple Feature, but his Many Years Ago story here is pretty but confused, his storytelling a little all over the place, each panel looking attractive, but the relationship between panels not as good as his previous work. Again, promise, but not quite there.

Catherine Reda’a Bunnies Incorporated Into Various Food Items is simply a cute gag done too long – a single page would have been funny, but 5 pages, with 28 iterations of the same gag is really pushing it. In the Sci-Fi Octuple comic she took three pages to do a cute bunny gag that worked so much better.

The Italian Dish by Bayliss and Griffin-Hayes I simply didn’t like. Clumsy story, stilted dialogue, and no, not in a classic film-noir sense, grubby art too focused on the close-up to really give any sense of transition. Nope, didn’t like it, and that makes two for two from this team.

(Sammy Boras)

Sammy Boras’ Food Wars is a good looking strip, and tells a story of a TV cooking contest in readable fashion, but there was simply nothing that really hooked me in, it’s just lacking slightly, right on the cusp of impressing me.

Lily-rose Beardshaw is a weird one. Last time I saw her work I moaned about the reproduction and the muddy feel. But here it is again with The Butcher and the Tattoist. I’m beginning to think it’s simply her style, and I’ve got to say it does nothing to sell her work to me. There’s a talent here, most certainly, but it’s too hidden. And a story that says very little, wants to say a lot, and simply comes across as poor, badly worked out, and confusing doesn’t help.

(Lily-rose Beardshaw)

So ouch. That was a little harsh. I never like being quite so critical. But the most frustrating and annoying thing about Eat Me! is the potential that’s here. Davies, Boras, Beardshaw are all promising so much, yet just underwhelming here.

Next time? I do hope so.

You can of course see for yourself at Inspired Comics, where Eat Me is available to buy.

It’s been a little while since I checked out the most recent postings on Better, Drawn, the site that showcases comics works addressing mental and physical health issues. Simon Moreton flagged up one strip, Don Depresso by Asidewalk, on Twitter recently and I had to have a look, followed by a visit to Asidewalk’s own Tumblr blog for a browse at some more postings. Some are several panels, others only a couple, but there is some interesting work in there and a nice sense of humour shining through coping with the Black Dog, well worth a wee look.