by Leeann Hamiliton

When it comes to reading a self-published comic by an emerging talent a touch of wariness can creep into your expectations about the title. It’s a tough feat for anyone – no matter his/her experience – to do everything successfully for a comic book title.

Happily, Leeann Hamiliton’s first two comics in her Finn & Fish cycle prove that this young woman can indeed do it all.

As a fan of mythological stories I was excited by her premise: a comedic view of the Irish myths about Finn McCool (Fionn Mac Cumhaill), which features the Salmon of Knowledge as Finn’s sidekick, evoked through a Manga style.

Part of the humour of the story is how Hamiliton pitches this duo. The Salmon appears as a ghostly apparition that emerges from Finn’s forehead, and prompts Finn into all kinds of trouble. The question is, who is in charge? As it reads on the inside cover, Finn is described as ‘Giant of Legend. Now underprivileged brat pestered by smart fish.’

The first issue is the origin story, which is told in a series of flashbacks, handled deftly. Thus we discover that Finn was raised to be a warrior, but was rejected from the King’s Guard because of his lack of ability as a poet. He takes up with the scholar Finnegas, which leads to his inadvertent acquisition of the abilities of prophet and poet from the Salmon of Knowledge.

It’s the Salmon that urges Finn to find a girlfriend (for poetic inspiration), which introduces us to Sabh, who is sometimes a woman and sometimes a deer. Sabh is literally a doe-eyed woman who seems as much in love with the Salmon as she is with Finn.

The second issue deals with Finn’s first quest: to subdue the Fairy Aillen, who burns down Tara regularly after lulling everyone to sleep with a song. Finn – reluctantly – takes on the task especially as he must imbibe poison to resist the Fairy’s music.

Since I’m familiar with Irish myth I knew the main storylines, but I thought in a couple of places Hamiliton wasn’t exactly clear about the relationships. On the inside cover Sabh is described as the Mother of Oisín, instead of Finn’s girlfriend (and I’m never too keen on women being described only in regards to their relationship to men). Since Finn has the gift of prophecy he sees occasional images of the future, including his son with Sabh, Oisín, but Oisín is never identified by name in any of his amusing cameos.

It’s a minor problem, and one that could be easily rectified if the issues are reprinted, or when they are collected into a graphic novel. It highlights the difficulties of being one’s own editor.

Otherwise, Hamiliton’s début is remarkably clever – the dialogue is funny and smart, and her artwork is impressive. Her panels layouts are strong and interesting with terrific lettering and sound effects. The action scenes in issue two are dynamic, and I particularly liked how Finn climbs up the Salmon’s ghostly trail for a smack-down on Aillen – it’s a quintessential Manga moment.

Traditionalists might have some problems with Hamilton’s spin and choice of spelling, but most importantly she hews to the spirit of the stories while infusing them with a fresh, entertaining perspective. The comics would be a perfect introduction to excite young people about Irish mythology.

Based on these two comics I expect Hamiliton could easily establish a career in the comic book industry, and anyone looking for new talent would be well advised to seek her out now.

You can keep up with Maura’s own writing projects via her site here; her own recent comic work Róisín Dubh #2 was reviewed here on the blog by James.

The Strumpet is a tasty new trans-Atlantic endeavour from the folks behind the highly regarded (and much recommended) Whores of Mensa, with contributors from the UK and US scene, including Patrice Aggs, Jeremy Day, Lisa Rosalie Eisenberg , Kripa Joshi, Megan Kelso, Ellen Lindner, Mardou, Tanya Meditzky, Lucy Sweet and more. From the description: “There are tales of saris, Wranglers, chickens, comics conventions, Kate and Wills, and even a flea or two.  The Strumpet  will have the same sass as Whores of Mensa – but with a new global reach!  We don’t call it a transatlantic flight of comix fancy for nothing – for this issue we have artists all over the US and UK, uniting two comics scenes long overdue for a love-in. ”

The guys are using Kickstarter to raise some funds by taking pre-orders that will help them print more copies and also keep back issues in print for longer – suggested donations start from a mere 2 bucks (US) that will also get you a digital copy, which is pretty darned good value. Given the folks involved I’d say supporting this should be a no-brainer for anyone who loves quality Indy comics work. You can see some of the contributors in a video on their Kickstarter site here. (thanks to Sarah Mc for the heads-up)

Outstanding Artist: Joseph Lambert, I Will Bite You (Secret Acres)

Outstanding Anthology or Collection: I Will Bite You, Joseph Lambert (Secret Acres)

Outstanding Graphic Novel: Gaylord Phoenix, Edie Fake (Secret Acres)

Outstanding Story: Browntown, Love and Rockets: New Stories No. 3, Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics)

Promising New Talent: Darryl Ayo Brathwaite, House of Twelve Monthly #3 (Comixology)

Outstanding Series: Everything Dies, Box Brown (self-published)

Outstanding Comic: Lose #3, Michael DeForge (Koyama Press)

Outstanding Mini Comic: Ben Died of a Train, Box Brown (self-published)

Outstanding Online Comic: Hark! A Vagrant, Kate Beaton

League of Volunteers

By Robert Curley and Barry Keegan

Atomic Diner

This quickly paced comic neatly sets us up for a story that mixes Irish mythology with the
genre of superheroes in a fantastical alternate history setting. Crucially, it’s the way that the
myths and historical aspects are dealt with so well that makes this comic so special.

Volunteer is a strong term in Ireland, meaning much more than someone who gives time, what with the Irish Volunteers being one of the organisations involved in the 1916 Rising and the term in Irish being used by later republican groups. Irish mythology, rich as it is with stories from word of mouth, which has entertained over the centuries, and all children in Ireland have heard of Fionn McCumhaill, is something which takes real skill to incorporate into modern fiction and here neatly transposed into a world of Masked righters of wrongs, a creature who wailed on the same battlefield as Cú Chulainn is summoned. Brilliance.

Set in ‘the Emergency’, the time of Ireland’s neutrality during the Second World War, the comic first introduces The Druid in the second century, having a vision and transporting himself to where he predicts a great fight will occur, and darkness will befall, and other fighters will need his help.

We are then in 1941 and find a group of Germans landing in Ireland in a Messerschmitt 323 ‘Gigant’ transport plane, assisted by a spy. The Nazis are intent on setting up machinery to call forth a legendry evil to help them with their war.

The Glimmer man and The Archer interrupt these activities and destroy the Nazi’s equipment, but not before the Nazis summon an immortal of pure evil into the world, one who had been imprisoned in a void by Cú Chulainn. This creature, the Bocanach, soon rejects with curt actions any idea of working with the Nazis as he confronts the leader of the Nazis and uses his powers to see what their power really is, and sees it as bankrupt compared to his own.

The Bocanach is a Celtic mythological demon of the battlefield. In lore it is goat-like, and is said to have shrieked when Ferdia and Cú Chulainn fought during The Cattle Raid on Cooley. Here we see it portrayed as a powerful sword wielding demon, with a goat skull for a head.

As the pace slows for a moment, we can see that the Druid in the guise of a crow has been watching all. At the scene of battle, with the German soldiers slain, we find there is time for intrigue in the relationship between the Glimmerman and The Archer as the Glimmerman raises the issue of the Spanish Civil War.

Undoubtedly comparisons with Hellboy and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen will occur, and in fairness there is commonality, but this is in no way a derivative work, and is in actual fact worthy to stand next to these better known comics as another fine example of the unusual superhero team that is mixing history, mythology and comic heroes together.

In simple lines, more is alluded to—there is reference to a group of mystery men and women in the thirties, and how De Velara has formed a new division within G2 of meta-humans. Catherine Malone, once the Emerald Scorpion, now cryptographer, is second generation; her father was the original Scorpion who fought on the Western front as well as being a member of the Wild Geese. These teasing pieces of information are so stuffed of ideas and potential. For instance in a short piece of dialogue we are given insight into the history of one of the characters, the Archer, who fought on the royalist side during the Spanish Civil War, while we also meet the Red Scorpion, daughter of Black Scorpion. It’s all beautifully worked in and these glimpses of how and what is going on in this parallel world is great.

Our title, League of Volunteers, indicates those who have stepped forward to fight. The army of The Irish Free state had a G2 department. This was the military intelligence agency in Ireland during the emergency, and although you would be right to think that the term G-man if applied in the 40s would obviously be derived from the usage by American gangsters for men of the FBI, in 1919 there was a ‘G’ Division in the Dublin Metropolitan Police, which was a specific anti-guerrilla force, and the term G-man was used.

It’s this sort of historical understanding, that makes the comic shine. It’s not some ersatz form of schlock anglicised rubbish, churned out in some diddley-di fashion. You don’t need to understand the historical undercurrents to get the story, but there is depth here, that as an Irish reader, made me smile, and may intrigue readers who may not share that level of historical understanding and yet may desire to know more. There’s no lack of confidence or need to change Philosopher’s Stone to Sorcerer’s Stone among these lads.

The artwork is neat and clean and captures the mood, intensity and also action to good effect. There is definite detail in much of the technology, and Barry Keegan must have done some research, while the flow of the comic is smooth and nicely done. Keegan’s artwork is neat, expertly detailed in places, and it follows the pace of the story very well. The comic is black and white, but here, greyscale is used to add a not so much a noir as a 40’s sentiment and this adds nicely to the feel of the story.

Irish mythology is ripe for this type of story, while the genre of superheroes is still very strong, there can be no denying the rise of War, Western and crime comics in the 21st century, and here we have a superb mix of well researched history and mythology and great superhero action in one package.

(Only Skin #5 by and (c) Sean Ford, published Secret Acres)

“Recently, we got an e-mail from a couple of guys currently in the Navy, who are interested in publishing comics. We responded that they should be prepared to flush a down payment on a house right down the toilet. Having spent some time hanging around the (sort of) ill-fated Highwater Books in our youth, there were some things we learned, that we share with people who have asked us about publishing comics:

Never publish anything without the cash in hand to pay the printers.

Don’t get into contracts on books that won’t fit the schedule, let alone your budget.

Keeping prices low is great, but too low and you’ll never get the money back to print anything else.

Funny that we couldn’t always follow our own advice. We initially underpriced our books and gave ourselves such razor thin margins that we occasionally lost money on sales because of shipping costs. Secret Acres originally intended to put out a book a quarter, which sounds like a plan, until you consider that we don’t have investors. We had to cut three books from our schedule, which kept us awake at night for months. As for cash in hand, well, throw in a divorce and a move and it was borrow or fold.

Yet we did not fold. We got picked up by a bunch of stores, Diamond be damned. Our guys were starting to show up in Best American, and on way more than a few end-of-year “Best of” lists. We were rolling full steam ahead through 2009. In 2010, we wised up and started this blog, which got us a lot closer to you than Facebook ever did. A book with our logo on it got an Eisner nomination. The future was bright, and then 2010 caught up to us.”

Hello Forbidden Planet Readers! This is Richard Cowdry of Somersault “fame” giving his picks of the year!

This year I probably read less comics and books than in any other year since I learnt to read. I also saw maybe one new film. Somehow though I had plenty of time for mindless internet time-killing. Anyway, I did read a handful of small press titles, and I’m happy to say there are a few pearls out there. I’ll try and explain (briefly) why I liked what I liked.

1) Radio Times (AKA Mind Your Manners), co-authored by Peter Lally and and Paul Ashley Brown

This comic, starring Donald Hamilton, is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read in ages. It’s inspired by the Carry On films and the worst British sitcoms, and it turns the innuendo dial way up past 11. Paul Ashley Brown is an artist I know mainly for his Browner Knowle series, which is a melancholy mixture of comics, poetry and illustration. Browner Knowle is a good series, but PA Brown brings a whole new energy to the art on Mind Your Manners, possibly due to a love for the subject matter and forgotten British sitcoms.

Meanwhile, Peter Lally’s story is funny, dirty, edgy, funny, menacing, then funny again. In fact, only Peter Lally could have written something as outrageous as this. Brown and Lally’s styles work perfectly together, and the result is something really different to anything else on the comics scene. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, and I did laugh out loud… which felt very good. If I had to make one criticism, it would be that the cover doesn’t quite do the comic justice. This flyer is nicer:

2) Trains Are Mint 6 (online comic), by Oliver East.

I was way behind most people in getting into Oliver East’s work. It was only at the end of last year that I read his first Blank Slate collection. I liked the book… it was unlike any comic I’d read, perhaps more like outsider art than comics, which wasn’t a problem. However, I wasn’t reaching immediately for the next books in the series (I knew I’d read them eventually).

When Trains… issue 6 was was released online last February, I wasn’t too sure what to expect, but I welcomed it as a chance to see what the artist was up to. Turns out it was great piece of work that shows how far the artist has developed in just a couple of years. I found the comic very inspiring; the combination of East’s unique style, and the almost unbearably sad subject matter had a profound effect on me. One thing I love about East’s work is that it’s so much his own thing. He’s totally out there on his own! He kind of fell into comics by mistake, doesn’t seem influenced any of the usual suspects, and boy, is he prolific! He knocks that stuff out. Yes this is inspiring stuff that somehow feels like Real Art. It also made me slightly ashamed of my own work, which reallies so much on comic book cliches.

3) Hootiebits the magic owl, by Ralph Kidson

The author of this comic has been toiling away in the UK small press since at least the 90′s. It always feels good to get a new Ralphie comic in the mail, but this new one is my favourite of his. Reading it again on the train home yesterday, I was reminded just how dark and surreal it is, as I constantly tried not to laugh (it was the Quiet Coach). It’s a wild, fucked up ‘n’ freewheeling ride, and anyone who likes Ralph’s stuff will want this, and for anyone who doesn’t know his comics, this is a great place to start. Also worth seeking out is Kidson’s new mini : Oily Pelican.

Special Mention: Ethel Sparrowhawk issue 2, by Steve Tillotson and Jemima Von Schindelberg

This came out last year but I only read it a few months ago. It’s a great, moving story of modern desperation. Written with real empathy and depth of feeling by Von Schindelberg, and illustrated by S.Tillotson in his constantly improving style. I particularly noticed his original character designs (especially the faces), and great depictions of bland British settings. This is a world I can relate to! The comic also includes a perfect visual depiction of someone waking with a hangover.

Whether read as a stand alone issue, or the last chapter in Ethel’s story, this is the good stuff. Personally I’d love to read more of Ethel’s adventures. Ideally these two would do a graphic novel together… and if it doesn’t get published then there’s no point in anything anymore. It’s all just bullshit!

And while we’re with Richard, a wee reminder for the launch of The Comix Reader, at the Crown, 51 New Oxford Street, London, from 6.30 pm on Wednesday 2nd February:

(a panel from Katie’s self publishing tips for comics creators, by and (c) Katie Green)

by Masha Solon and Katriona Chapman.

Tomatito Press

Five is most definitely not comics. It’s very much an illustrated book, or possibly, by virtue of it’s length and style, a simple, but rather lovely illustrated poem.

So why is it on here, on the FPI blog? It’s not comics. Not really even close. But it is part of a movement that sits alongside comics, running parallel to comics and encompasses a lot of comic artists.

It’s the handmade, self publishing movement. Like so many small press comic artists right now Solon and Chapman have decided that if they’re publishing this book themselves, then they can take the time and effort to make it a truly beautiful, handmade object.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and it seems to me that the handmade works could easily be seen as a separate area of comics altogether, far away from superheroes and without the big publisher need of the mass produced literati style books of Clowes, Seth, Ware et al. The recent trip to the Birmingham Zine Festival merely cemented the idea in my head – this is a different way of doing things, and it’s no wonder that the comic artists partaking of this whole handmade thing chose to ally themselves with fellow handmade artists rather than comic artists – they simply have more in common with them.

That’s why, when I received Five, unsure of whether it would really fit onto the blog, I figured screw it, why not. It might not be comics, but it’s appeal to certain comic fans will be strong. So here it is……

Even getting the package open shows you how seriously the two artists involved are – the handmade, handsewn book comes in a card sleeve, with matching bookmark and a custom fitted card frame to make sure it reaches the intended recipient in perfect condition. That obsessiveness and attention to detail is what makes the handmade movement so appealing – everything is precious and full of passionate attention to getting the little details right. That and the beautiful, individual books they make of course.

Five is all about dreams, and about flights of fantasy. We start in the bath, with a mind just wandering away. And then we’re set free with the bather, and begin a lyrical and poetic trip across the world, free as the birds that fly from her fingers. With it’s simple ideas of a near transcendental journey and it’s sparse, lyrical style, it reminds me rather of the work of the great Michél Gagne. High praise indeed.

Chapman’s black and white pencil drawings across the pages of Five are tight, intricate things, and quite lovely to look at. With so little text the pictures have to do the heavy lifting, have to charge the mind with images and fill it with ideas. And Chapman’s lovely work does just that. You meander over them, absorbing the details, letting the sparse words play across the images.

It might not be comics, but it’s still a lovely little book, put together with immense passion for the work. Solon and Chapman are talking about more self published works – they will be a pleasure to see.

Five is available from the book’s blog site.

(Sarah with the Vern and Lettuce collection at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, pic from Joe’s Flickr)

Cartoonist and illustrator Sarah McIntyre first came to my attention via her Vern and Lettuce strips in The DFC. Since then, I’ve been following her work both online and in print. She’s a fantastic artist whose mini-comics never fail to make me smile. In this interview (cross posted with Down The Tubes), Sarah talks about her art education, the links between comics and picture books, and why she sees a healthy future for the British comics scene.

MB: Are you a formally trained or self-taught artist?

SMc: A bit of both, really. A very kind art teacher give me after-school oil painting classes, starting when I was five. I spent the next six years mostly painting kittens, puppies and rather tedious landscapes, but it made me love mucking in with paint. My high school art teacher was also great in that she didn’t make me follow the class assignments, just let me set my own projects and get on with them, even if I had to stay through lunch break or after school. I took a few oil painting classes from a wonderful and slightly dotty Hungarian woman who collected filing cabinets full of dead crows that had been run over on the road in front of her shop, so we could draw them.

(‘Dear Diary’ mini comic showing a teenage Sarah with her dotty Hungarian art teacher, by and (c) Sarah McIntyre)

I didn’t think I could earn any money doing fine art, so I studied Russian at university. But in the States, we have this great option of completing a ‘minor degree’, which is half a regular degree, so I did my minor in History of Art. And the professors there let me fudge the requirements a bit so a lot of that time was spent drawing life models in the art studio instead of memorising slides. Before my last year of university, I spent two years in Moscow, running around its galleries and museums, teaching myself a lot about Russian painting and its arts and crafts movement at the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century. Until I realised I couldn’t live on the pay of three dollars an hour, I worked in the Moscow branch of Shakespeare & Co bookshop, and we hosted these marvellous arts evenings where I got to meet loads of fascinating painters, sculptors, writers and poets, and occasionally I’d get to see their studios.

I spent several years working as an illustrator, just taking a few evening classes here and there. My favourite short course leader was Elizabeth Harbour, who set loads of brilliant little book projects, similar to the kinds of things you see at small press fairs now. She’s the one who got me set on the path to making full books, not just drawings. About five years after moving to London, I enrolled at Camberwell College of the Arts to do my Master’s degree. I was lucky, it was the first year Janet Woolley began leading the course, and it was still small, only 14 students. (I think it’s over 50 now) Jan combined being a total powerhouse with being quite mumsy; she really cared about the people on her course and looked after us at the same time as pushing us hard and being utterly frank with us. What I didn’t learn on that course, I was able to pick up from the Association of Illustrator’s Business Start-up classes and seminars led by the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators. And Ellen Lindner on my course started me off learning about comics, pointing me to the kind of comics I actually liked, not the kind I’d seen when I walked into mainstream comic book shops.

(early comic made in art college, in response to reading ‘On Sight and Insight’ by John Hull, by and (c) Sarah McIntyre)

I think it wouldn’t have been too difficult to slide through the course without doing much; I tried to come up with at least one piece of artwork every day and I think that decision made all the difference. I only felt I’d made my first real breakthrough about a week before the final show. Jan and the Graphic Design leader actually let me set up a second, separate show in the hallway because my work had changed so dramatically between the stuff I’d carefully printed up for the exhibition and the artwork and comics I’d been doing in the meantime.

MB: So when did you actually start making comics?

SMc: When I was about eight years old, I used to make a magazine called ‘Family Favorite’ and leave it on my neighbours’ doorstep, ring the bell and run away. I think the first comics I ever made were for that magazine, and they were copied, possibly even traced, from Archie comics. But all the comics I ever read in the Seattle Times or Archie seemed to have funny punch lines, and I didn’t think I would ever be able to do that. And I read a few of my mother’s stashed-away story comics (Jack London’s ‘White Fang’, a couple fairy tales) but they were so old and brittle that I didn’t think people still made them. I didn’t even connect them as a storytelling medium with the funnies in the newspaper. In fact, the linework and colours looked so polished to me that I never even thought about real, live people making them at all. Maybe I thought they grew on trees or something.

I think my first comic was a little book I made for my dad for his birthday, telling his life story from my point of view. It was more of an illustrated book that a comic, but if would have fit in with minis you see at small press fairs. My first comic I made at art college was a double-page spread about some yobs throwing a beer can into the Thames and then the river bursting its banks to take revenge on everyone. Ellen gave me some good tips on it and it made me start thinking more seriously about making comics. I read a book called ‘On Sight and Insight’ by John Hull about the experience of blindness and thought I’d write a graphic novel with a character in a soundscape environment, simulating blindness, but in a visual way, using typographical artwork. That subject was WAY too big for me at the time and I had to shelve it. I made a couple travel minis and took part in an online comics jam with some people on LiveJournal. Then the opportunity came up and I cheekily promised David Fickling I could do a page a week of comics for the DFC. I practically had my fingers crossed behind my back when he asked me if I could do it; I had absolutely no idea if I could, and I sweated bullets. But I approached Vern and Lettuce like a children’s book, just drawn within panels instead of pages, and the editor didn’t ask me to stop, so I figured it must be okay. I was overwhelmed when people started telling me they liked it.

MB: What did producing Vern and Lettuce, a weekly comic, teach you in terms of making comics and also the business, deadline, discipline side of being a comic artist?

SMc: I was already used to deadlines and discipline from making picture books, although I still had a lot to learn about the business side of things. When I started with David Fickling, I was approached by one of the best agents in the business and she’s made my work phenomenally less stressful.

In terms of making comics, I’d never submitted more than a few single illustrations in digital form, and I still had a lot to learn about Photoshop. I still only really know what I need to know, but I try to keep things simple by sticking as closely as possible to the methods of traditional printmaking. For Vern and Lettuce, I tried to think of the layers in Photoshop as the layers in a screen print, one layer per colour. I hate the overly slick, airbrushed effects and gradients so many people rely on in Photoshop; it often it makes beautiful linework look like cheap pizza flyers, or makes everything look muddy. But I love the imperfect, slightly textured look of hand painted signs, and I saw some gorgeous revolutionary posters in Moscow in places like the Mayakovsky Museum. They owe a lot of their visual power to the fact that the painters didn’t have many colours of paint, they just made do with two or three tins. With Photoshop, I can access millions of colours, but if I just stick to a few, my work looks so much better. There’s a lot of experimentation in Vern and Lettuce with this; I was very strict with myself in the first few pages, then I started to introduce more and more colours until about episode twelve, when I got frustrated and reined in my colour palette again.

Writing was also difficult, the relentless pace of the weekly deadline. In the beginning I had a few weeks to play with, but then I took a holiday and after that, I was finishing bang on the day the strip was due for print. There’s this tricky thing, just like in picture books, where there’s supposed to be a sort of ‘flip’ at the end of the story. It can be a joke, but it doesn’t even have to be funny, just something to give the strip closure and make the reader look at things a bit differently. A lot of the other DFC people I talked to started their stories with this end point in mind, but I never did. My way of working was just to put Vern and Lettuce into a situation and see where they went. They’re so real to me that I can hear exactly what they’d say to each other. And sometimes they defied tight little endings, they still weren’t very domesticated animals. A few times they got me into a real panic and I’d ring up my DFC colleague Woodrow Phoenix, who lives nearby. He would patiently look at where my strip had gone and then walk me through to the end of it. It’s been the same working in a studio with Gary Northfield; it’s shown me that endings aren’t magic, that much of the job just requires focusing and taking things to their logical conclusion, and then one step beyond. I think it’s the ‘one step beyond’ that looks like magic to the rest of us. (I think DFC artists James Turner and Jamie Smart live in the land of one step beyond.)

(Airship, a comics jam with David O’Connell)

Doing comics jams with David O’Connell also helped me get my writing out of terrible ruts. In a comics jam, I can’t get pig headed about where a strip is going; when I hand the next page over to Dave, he always takes it in a direction I would never have dreamed up. When I get his page and start on the next one, it’s almost like a completely fresh story. That really helped show me that there’s never one solution to telling a tale, the permutations are infinite, and when I’m stuck, instead of blundering on with something dull, I can step back and send the story flying in a completely different direction. And writing with friends makes things more fun. Vern and Lettuce were great to me that way, in introducing me to so many amazing comics friends who know how to combine hard work with being a bit silly.

MB: Can you give me a couple of examples of ‘flips’ from your own work?

SMc: Well, things such as the raisins in Vern’s cake ingredients, which turn out to be something much less palatable (see below). Or the little stowaway moles that parade out of the airship, just as Vern thinks he’s going to get some peace in his park keeper job.

MB: You make comics and picture books. What’s the difference between the two? Is there a difference? Is any distinction arbitrary, they are, after all, both collisions of text and art? What do picture books do well that comics don’t and vice versa?

SMc: This is a huge subject, I can do long workshops on the answer to this, and it needs me to show lots of visual examples. But I was amazed with The DFC, at how smoothly I could transition from picture books to comics. In the old days, a lot of picture books had very simple formats: a picture, possibly in a box, with text underneath. But there’s more of a move to vary formats in picture books now, and make the text intertwine and work with the pictures. I’ve always liked doing this, and never wanted to leave it solely to the book’s designer. Often in picture books, you’ll see several small images on a page, which picture book editors would call ‘vignettes’, and comics people would call ‘panels’. Many picture book people (Russell Ayto, Mo Willems, Posy Simmonds, Raymond Briggs, Satoshi Kitamura, loads of others) have been using comics formats for years, even if they wouldn’t have called it that, or wanted you to call it that. I remember the surprise of learning that Maurice Sendak’s 1970 book, In the Night Kitchen, was a direct tribute to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. I always knew it as a picture book, but of course, it’s a comic, too, and a love letter to comics.

I don’t think there has to be any boundaries between picture books and comics. I think they can flow into each other entirely seamlessly, and keep people developing their visual literacy well after they’ve moved on from reading only children’s books. And it lends added sophistication to children’s books, when kids can read a book that’s slightly above their level without it being a huge break from picture books to text-only novels. I think this merging needs two things to happen: Editors need to overcome their prejudices against books looking too much like comics, or ‘cartoony’ (a damning adjective in an editor’s office). And I think this is happening, as they realise there’s a market, and librarians go nuts trying to get their hands on these books that ‘reluctant readers’ will pick up. (You can see this happening with picture book publishers such as David Fickling with his DFC Library, Walker Books, a bit with Templar; and even more so in the USA with Toon Books, Scholastic Inc and others.) Some editors are starting to warm up to speech bubbles, as a clear and vibrant way of showing who’s talking on a page. Children’s magazines such as Okido and Anorak are just getting on with it and making lovely non-traditional, kid-friendly comics. And some publishers are tentatively starting to experiment with publishing adult picture books, such as those by Audrey Niffenegger (although she had to prove herself first with a text-only novel).

It’s essential that comic fans do their best to let people know about the new books they love, so we’ll get a chance to see more of them. Write reviews, blog about them, make as much noise as you can.

(Vern and Lettuce, from pencils – above – to inks – below – and then the final coloured page – lower image, all by and (c) Sarah McIntyre)

The second thing is that comic creators need to go visit the children’s book sections in shops, see what’s happening right now in publishing, and accept that some stories can be told without having to rely on sexual clichés, excessive violence or bad language, and that it doesn’t make them a wimp for writing these kinds of stories. (I keep hearing comics people saying ‘I’ve got this amazing character, who fights THIS character, it’ll be awesome!’ And that’s their whole story.) I think sometimes people switch into a different mode when they’re writing for children, they get very patronising, clichéd, or even boring (because their adult comics rely on sex or cheap shock tactics and they suddenly can’t use them). Or they over-egg the pages with so many high-impact graphics that there’s no resting time for the eyes and it’s hard to read. There’s nothing wrong with a comic that has a single panel on a page. I think simpler formats with less panels may be a way forward for making comics for children. Reflections of a Solitary Hamster does this well: sometimes a single panel, sometimes two, three or four panels, but the large pages have plenty of breathing space.

Kids like clear stories with solid plot lines and well-developed characters they can relate to. I believe, if you can write an excellent story for children, adults will like it just as much as the children. I think it was Philip Pullman who said something about the difference between kids books and adult books: that adults remember what it was like to be kids and can relate to the experience, but kids have no idea what it’s like to be adult yet, even though they wish they could. So you need to keep that in mind if you’re writing about adult characters or including adult conversations in a children’s book, don’t talk over their heads. You can have more than one story going on a page at the same time, but the simplest story always needs to be the best one, don’t neglect it for subtext.

In terms of format, picture books tend to be shorter, full-colour, and better paid for the amount of work put into them. You might earn as much for a 32-page picture book as a 200-page graphic novel. Which means the picture book editors will scrutinise each page in much more depth. As comics get more popular (and I don’t doubt that they will), hopefully publishers will raise their payments for comics, but it may take the best comic creators getting good agents, or really learning hard negotiation tactics before this happens.

MB: What next for Sarah McIntyre?

SMc: A week after Vern and Lettuce comes out, I’m launching another picture book with the writer Anne Cottringer, called When Titus Took the Train. (You might recognise one of Anne’s other books, Eliot Jones, Midnight Superhero.) The editor and designer said they really wanted me to illustrate it because of my ‘comic sensibilities’. I originally thought they wanted it in comics format, but it’s more of a straightforward picture book. But there are bits of comics creeping in from all sides. Woodrow lent me some of his Western comics, such as Bat Lash, Buffalo Bill and Johnny Thunder so I could get into the wild frontier swing of things. The story’s about a kid named Titus who goes by himself on a big train journey, which gets more and more fantastical, so it’s not entirely clear what’s really happening and what he’s imagining. Bandits, white water canoeing, a T-Rex… actually, Gary helped me with the dinosaur because mine wasn’t looking nuts enough. I thrust a post-it note across the studio at him and begged, ‘Gary, please please will you draw me a T-Rex?’ He scribbled something in two seconds that was just PERFECT. So you might notice that my dinosaur looks an awful lot like Gary’s Derek the Sheep. (I call him Derek the Dinosaur. It’s one of my favourite spreads.)

(Gary Northfield lends a hand with some dino-design! This is the sort of thing that happens at the Fleece Station and, below, a spread from Titus Takes the Train which borrowed from it)

MB: Who would you like to big up, comics-wise, on both the small press and the pro’ scene?

SMc: I’m constantly amazed by the pictures Warwick Johnson Cadwell keeps making. Such amazing line work and colouring, and he looks every part the boat captain that he is. (I’m a bit smitten with him, can’t you tell?) He contributed to the first Birdsong anthology, and I’m also keenly watching the work of another contributor (and one of its editors), Will Kirkby. He also has gorgeous line work, and I’m hoping he takes his more epic, Japanese influenced tales and turns them back to his hometown in Sheffield to tell more personal stories. (But that’s just me, we’ll have to see where he goes.) Darryl Cunningham is on a roll after launching his hard-hitting novel Psychiatric Tales. Viviane Schwarz is working on a marvellous sheep comic with Walker Books and she’s posting its progress on her blog. My three studio mates at the Fleece Station, Gary Northfield, Ellen Lindner and Lauren O’Farrell all have amazing projects up their sleeves at the moment and we all joined together because we get so excited about each other’s stuff. We all work in slightly different areas, and I think some great thing are going to happen in the places where our creations cross over. And the DFC Library crew are making magic, I’m so excited by the books they’re putting out.

I think Nikki Gamble, who heads the Write Away website and huge picture book review database, is very hot on comics for children and teenagers, and sharing them across the country with teachers and librarians. So I’m hoping we’ll get a lot more comics in front of kids with the help of people like her, Paul Gravett and others, and the industry in Britain will make even more business sense to publishers and booksellers and really take flight.

(Sarah sketching in and signing one of her books at the recent Edinburgh Book Festival, pic from Joe’s Flickr)

Sarah’s Vern and Lettuce is published next week by David Fickling and you can follow her Live Journal for regular updates on her work, events and  plenty of lovely sketches; Sarah will be at the Wigtown Book Festival on Saturday 25th at 10am and on the same day there is one of her Morris the Mankiest Monster original pieces being auctioned for the very good cause of the Facing Africa charity, you can bid in person or online here. Matthew posts thoughts on his Citizen Badham blog and the brand new issue of Comic Book Heroes (from the SFX stable) has a special feature on the British small press comics scene by Matt.