Well, I’m in Cheltenham, I think. Largely on my own at the moment, so have taken the time to have some me time. Me time is important, guys. (Me time involves eating some food and having a nap, this stuff isn’t hard – just let me sleep!)
Found this at the hotel:
Which was lovely and made my wife even more regret that she’s not here. I’m gonna use it as a paper weight, as I don’t really drink.
(Though now I think it’s from the hotel chain as a gift because I think we were supposed to be staying at the Queen’s hotel which is dead centre in Cheltenham instead we’re staying at a different hotel which feels like it’s in the middle of nowhere – this would appear to be the fault of the hotel)
Because this place is so out of the way, I’m largely confined to barracks for the moment (the nearest tesco express is 1.4 miles away!)
Still, that means I can sit and do some work (yay!) so here’s an inktober I didn’t think I’d get time to do.
When I do this inktober / monsterober / helltober things I draw them and then try desperately to think of something that would be funny with them. This just popped in to my head whole.
Anyway, depending on how things go (will I open and drink this Prosecco… maybe…?) I might drunken blog later. We’ll see.
Ok, my timing isn’t perfect, but might actually be a good thing. I’m off to Cheltenham tomorrow for the book-fest meeting Derek Landy and doing a talk. Will be back on Monday, that means I’m unlikely to get much done beyond reading a book and signing some books (hopefully) so no inktober/blogtober for me (well, I’ll try and blog, we’ll see!)
As I write this, my very basic stats tell me we’ve had 500 visitors to the webcomic, that’s a good start. It’ll shrink, of course, and hopefully pickup again. As I said before I’m not sure what a measure of success is here, but building out the infrastructure and figuring out HOW to do this has been useful in and of itself. As an experiment I’ve also uploaded it to tapas, with a plan to run it there every Wednesday (a few days behind the blog here) to see if there’s a different audience over there (or indeed any audience)/
One I do like variety, but it’s tempting to draw multiple strips in a week and that produces samey-ness. So I’ve already drawn two fantasy strips one week after another, although one is outright comedy and the other sort of dark fantasy, because I drew them within a day or so I ended up in a similar place art wise. So I’m giving a bit of time between the two Christmas episodes to see if my brain can’t come up with something different.
Organising working with a lot of writers is hard! Anthologies are hard! they’re all lovely, it’s just my level of competence is low for this sort of work.
I need to be a lot better at contacting websites about PR stuff. It’s very much I want people to see it, but I have no idea how best to do that. I should be less afraid of just straight up asking, what would help you to publicise this (because those websites need content as much as I need people to see the thing exists)
Probably my biggest asset right now is my mailing list of 360 people, and so I need to figure out ways to build that up (and ways to offer content in it that is unique and useful)
I think I got the branding nearly right, calling it “PJ Holden’s Null Space” is a little cringe, I admit, but I think I need to brand every project that I get involved in with my name. Because A4 could be anything, Null Space could be anything. But lobbing my name on them in front gives nice clear water between “PJ Holden’s A4” and “A4”. That said, when I talk about these things I’ll be dropping the naming and just going with A4 because otherwise I’ll look like an egocentric monster. And I’m only one of those things.
Self hosting was a tough call, I did – years ago – set up a website for a thing such as this, channelhex.com, but I never used it for anything and over the years the naming has felt more and more pointless. So I’ll probably let the domain go. I did try hosting it there, but it became “PJ Holden’s Channel Hex hosting PJ Holden’s Null Space” (well, not really, but it could’ve IT COULD HAVE!)
There’s a chance I’m going to throw a version of it up on tapas, which I think will bring a lot more eyeballs to the strip. (I’m a firm believer that comics need to be read by an audience otherwise it’s just a very enjoyable four-five hours spent in your own company drawing a comic for no one to read) I’ll likely do it so it comes out midweek, behind this website. We’ll see.
Anyway, bookmark it, tell your friends – tell all your friends! Next week The Victim by Tade Thompson
Well, I’m still trying to figure out the name of my undead detective. Was going to go for Johnny Ghoul, but turns out this is such a great idea lots of people have used it. Ugh. Back to the drawing board.
Today I pencilled a page of it (actually pencilling a second right now too) and here’s a sneak peaky…
Actually very happy with how that pencilled page has turned out. Archangel (the city of monsters) is a sort gothic art deco world, where it’s either snowing, raining or just night time. So if I do more stories there, there’s a lot of lore to explore.
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Still churning through the walking dead, I suspect it’s not really a show you should binge, but I’m sort of innoculated against the worst of it because I’m wathcing it while I work, so frequently miss stuff – much as I did with Ashoka, in fact it’s only after I saw someone mention it on twitter I discovered that the storm troopers where zombies??? Flew right past me (much like abolt from a storm troopers weapon would, those dolts can hit the side of a barn dead or alive)
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Tomorrow the site launches. I dunno what to expect? An audience? I dunno. I’ve stuck a kofi link (it’s on every page, god I hope it’s not annoying) it sort of floats at the bottom and you can donate whatever you fancy to me. Obviously I’ve site costs (but, so far, they’re minor) and time costs for doing the work, but you know, I’ve taken that on myself.
What will success look like? Doing it was the real reason to do it, if you see what I mean. But an unread comic always feels sort of sad to me, so I’m hoping we get some numbers. We’ll see.
I’ll be sending out my newsletter tomorrow (tinyletter.com/pjholden) just to announce it on there. My newsletter has gotten a bit of a lease of life since I started the A4 ‘zine, I’ll post on there every time I get one together, and I’ve about 360 people in the newsletter. Let’s hope that bumps up. But I will only send it monthly… except this month, where I’m giving myself an extra bite of the cherry because of the null space…
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Blogtober continues, as does inktober and monstertober and helltober and I dunno what else. Anyway, here’s my inktober drawing for today, Cthulhu….
Or Johnny Ghoul, or Johnny Spade (or, from twitter and Ian Lineham, Johnny Coffin) are all names I’m mulling over for a funny little four page detective story set in Archangel, City of Monsters (where humans comingle with vampires, werewolves, cat-ladies, zombies, invisible women and any kind of monster you’d find in a b-movie).
I’d originally written the part of the detective as a human (this city has ‘em) but it just felt wrong, and then I realised why – he was, frankly, the dullest character on the page. So I mulled it over some more, and I honestly don’t think there’s any story couldn’t be improved by including Frankenstein. So I rewrote it for Frankenstein’s monster as detective, including making all of his dialogue mumbly and murmery and using heavy text captions, which was much funnier (to my eye) but still … not there yet.
Then following a few serious binges of the walking dead, which I’d stopped midway through series one, because I had young kids, one of whom had been in and out of hosptial a LOT when he was younger and I was too squeamish to deal with the tv show after that – but now my kids are 18 and 15 and I no longer lie awake at night worrying about them, so let’s blow up all the zombie children Rick Grimes. Anyway, after a bunch of walking dead, I thought – let’s make him a zombie. And the name Johnny Rotten, Undead Detective popped into my head and I thought “Yup!”.
So I refigured it and scribbled up some detailed layouts for the four page script and it all worked. It all worked lovely. If I’ve time I might spend it drawing this up.
But of course, I’m left thinking … that name… will it be a problem? So I’m in a bit of a limbo state over the name.
I still love Johnny Rotten. But Johnny Zombie has rhyme appeal even as it feels a bit generic, Johnny Ghoul is good, but suggests he investigates the undead or something and he’s not, he’s just your average gumshoe in a world of monsters. Though I did like Johnny Spade, suggesting graves and Sam Spade. Anyway, I will read any comments and take them on board.
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I do wonder if anyone is reading this, it feels like the early days of blogging where you were guaranteed that no one would read it, then slowly, through webrings and rss feeds and just a gradual constant drip drip of blog posts you’d find that yes, people were coming, and then twitter became an massive dopamine mine, you could hit again and again multiple times again. I suppose this is healthier. I’d like people to read it, but not so many I can mess up my career by saying something stupid (I do remember other artists saying they enjoyed my blog but they’d never post any of the things I’d post just in case – these weren’t horrific opinions they were simply me admitting some days I couldn’t draw very well. It’s still the case, but I’m better at keeping it to myself.
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Oh still at the old Inktober thing. Running out of funny things to do with it already. We’ll see… (I don’t check the list until I’m doing that day then I have to read it and go “Oh!”) this was done with pen and ink, not a medium I’m any good at any more (or ever, really) god, I miss being good with a brush. I suspect I need better glasses. And hand-eye coordination. Computers have ruined me for traditional art!!!
I opened my notes app on my iphone and typed A4 Issue Four. Somehow I’ve still got ideas.
(For those that don’t know, A4 is my monthly ‘zine with micro stories in it and you can download it free, and, ideally print and fold it to make a neat little standee – it’s a pretty clever idea if I say so myself)
The writer/educator Una McCormack is taking copies of A4 along to her writing workshops in CERN. Which… I might be wrong here… but I think that makes me… a… scientist? I’m unsure.
It’s cool, right?
Anyway, the way it normally works is I’ll be driving somewhere, start thinking about stories for A4 and then hit upon some idea that I think might be a nugget of something and start figuring out how I’ll tell that story – like telling a joke. Nice to know nearly 16 years on twitter was all worth it. (Not really)
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Friday last week is possibly one of the most expensive days of my life, early at 8:46 I phoned the dentist, luckily the had an appointment free, so I wandered up the street (it’s very close) only to find that they’re making the shift to private (theoretically keeping NHS patients, but the reality is all of their resources are moving to private, so you’ve no mission of getting an appointment) and introducing a monthly charge (along with regular charges for the various procedures) at 9:20 the dentist told me I needed a tooth out (I’m not proud of this, I blame a certain level of foolhardiness in my twenties when I’d go days without brushing my teeth) so he yanked that out. But, luckily it was NHS still – so only cost me £14. Reeling from this, I went home, whereupon the guy who did our kitchen had arrived to pick up the rest of his money for fitting it. Then, not an hour later, the guy who had done the maintenance check on our gas boiler turns up, figures out there’s a fault and then tells me to repair it is gonna cost the guts of £1000.
Honestly, I’ve had better days.
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On the work front, I’m waiting on scripts, I’ll normally not talk about stuff coming up because I’ve always been superstitious about work – until it’s finished and in print it may never happen. (I’ve had things that I’ve been paid for not come out, luckily not many, but enough to make me wary) but right now I’ve a six months worth of work waiting on turning up, it’s the sort of platonic ideal of work for me – just enough to give me something to do, but not so much that I can’t keep my tinder dry for the odd short that might crop up. Of course, if it’s the only work I do for six months it’s gonna be a cold, cold winter. So we’ll see.
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Catch up on the old Inktober nonsense. Thought it would be fun and add a bit of something different if, as well as doing the helltober sketches instigated by Ben Templesmith I added an appopriate motivational message to them. Of course, this was a stupid idea. I could have told you it was a stupid idea. AND YET. Here we are.
I missed yesterdays, so here it is:
OF COURSE, this is the sketch that took three attempts and is still bloody awful looking. Ugh. Anyway, more success with todays…
Altogether much better, granted I started with a known image of the xeno morph and then I just tried to PJ it up. (In a good way)
Also, man alive the idea of doing a motivational message was stupid, originally this was going to be “Blood is thicker than water” and then I added the egg and it just popped into my head. And here we are.
But then I accidentally had a spare minute, so I decide to join in with the October inking. Who knows if I’ll do one a day. I decided I wasn’t going to go the batober route (Chris Samnee has that locked down) the robotober month (Ian McCaig will destroy you) or Dreddtober (that’s my day job!) so I went with Ben Templesmith’s Helltober, 2023.
I did something similar the last time I did Inktober, though, but tried to find obscure horror old b&w horror movies (which included Creature from the black lagoon and a few others from this list)
Yesterday I banged out a little Noseratu, and I added a funny little motivational poster sound byte to it and I thought I’d spread it out to all my social media what have yous and see where it does best. And. Well. At time of writing on X (the formerly useful social media platform known as twitter) I’ve had 22 likes, on bluesky, that was outpaced early on with low numbers and then… then Neil Gaimen reskeeted it and boom – I’m currently sitting at 1.2K likes.
I’ve been on bluesky for a bit (certainly not as early an adopter as I was of twitter) but there really has been a remarkable ramping up of the numbers over there. It’s also – at least for now – filled with comic pros. I’m not saying twitter isn’t still a useful platform, but as musk shaves off the features reducing any chance of a decent reach (I have 14k followers on twitter, and that image has been seen by 888 people, 22 of whom have liked it) making it much much less useful. If that had happened without some viable alternatives I think we’d be sunk. I do wish mastodon had gained traction, but it’s slightly sticky techy start and extant userbase of linux-beards and complexty around picking a server made it … unattractive for people who just wanted a quick alternative to twitter. Bluesky, despite or because of the invite system – who can say – seems to have picked out a lot of the creative industry and is only growing. Sure they’re not the people who buy your work, but it’s just nice to be surrounded by people you know again.
Well, it’s been coming and it’s finally here. The AI bros are now insisting that the ai content mills can make comics.
Imagine a blender where you can churn every single piece of art until it’s a sort of unrecognisable mush, and then you say “Give me some batman” and it reconstitute a batman from that mush, pulling out the most batman bits it can find. If it’s pulled in enough batman artists you’ll maybe struggle to recognise where bits of this new frankenstiened batman drawing have come from, but if you’re any sort of comic fan you’ll look at it and go “ah! it’s clearly Mike Allred Batman from Batman ’66”
You know what you can’t do with something like that? Get a Kelly Jones batman, unless they’ve already mushed up enough Kelly Jones art. Or Mignola batman unless you’ve similarly ripped every Mignola batman drawing you can find. In fact, the thing hasn’t got an original cell in its body. But man it can imitate and flatten and deaden almost anything.
And of course, a lot of what comics is is what’s NOT there. White space, the panel gutter, the writers and artists intent leaving space for the reader to interpret. But no interpretation required in these the dead spaces.
To be honest, I have much more respect for someone who photocopies the same comic art to produce new work, because that is truly transformative and done with intent. (Tracers are still rotten)
The biggest danger with this stuff is it it totally destroys a generation of kids wanting to do comics, misdirected to think this stuff can do it, it will rob them of their voice and any future career. It’s slop and we can all do better.
Will it get better? No doubt, the dataset will expand. The prompt stuff will get smarter, maybe even the ability to keep consistent within a single comic strip will happen (right now you’ll have an Allred Batman for one panel then a Bolland batman for another) but it will never be able to create something from whole cloth, it will never suddenly become the next hot artist, it will never be anything but shitty zombie art.
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I’ve no time to do inktober this year – too busy and, if I’m totally honest, the thought of putting art up on twitter for it later to be grabbed by the content mills and churned into unrecognisable pap for it to be later extruded into a plagiarism patty with no nutritional value isn’t grabbing me, so, for a laugh I jokingly suggested everyone do a blogtober. Let’s get back to blogging. Let’s forget the mini thoughts of twitter where immediacy is all that matters, where, somehow the pushback against ai “comic art” has meant that the ai “comic art” is being seen by more people than real art is and where you can never truly give yourself time to think – let’s try and roll it back to when blogging ruled supreme (hah, I kid, that won’t happen, but still, it’s a nice thought). Anyway, I’ll still be posting on twitter and bluesky (and maybe mastodon) but I will also be trying to blog through the month. Let’s see when I lose track… I give it three days.
So, the cat’s out of the bag, as it were. Over at Comicon.com Richard Bruton has the scoop and much of the lowdown on what it is.
Null Space is a new weekly webcomic beginning on Friday the 6th of October, featuring a veritable feast of big name writers from scifi/fantasy – for many of whom this will be their first credit as a comics writer!
Each story will be self contained, set in its own world and be a delicate little gem of a one pager. This is my tribute to the Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Black Mirror and Inside no 9. I love an anthology.
The project started because I wanted to do another weekly thing, and I just happened to know a few scifi writers and so I propositioned them and suddenly I had a bunch of scripts. What was especially interesting to me was working with people who hadn’t done comics before. I figured this would be my one way to get them to write something for free!
To date, I’ve fourteen scripts in hand, of which I’ve already drawn ten. That’ll take us in to the new year, and depending on how things go, we might get beyond that. We’ll see.
Owing to the number of writers involved, it’s likely this project will only ever be web based. You know, like the old days, and as such you should point your bookmarks at https://www.pauljholden.com/series/null-space.
See you Friday for AdrianTchaikovsky’s delightful “Spider-Killer”.
I was at the Cork Comic Expo this weekend. Invited by Cork’s favourite son Will Sliney (I’ve known WIll a long time, and it’s been slightly baffling and yet not entirely surprising to see him rise to be a major celeb in Cork and Ireland and when his TV shows get bigger, eventually the world – you’ll see) (And the guys from The Big Bang)
It was lovely to see Declan Shalvey, Stephen Mooney and Nick Roche (as well as the guys from Rogue Comics and Limit Break and lots of other people whose names I will mangle so I will say it was nice to see you all).
Cork’s a fun event, it happens in a major shopping centre, so lots of people just walking through with no idea who you are – with the possible exception of Will, everyone knows Will.
A fair few people picking up Numbercruncher (over 10 years old, but still new to many people). I wish I had Dept of Monsterology still with me, I think that would’ve done well. Those that picked up books then slightly surprised to find I had anything to do with it (I think they just thought I was a stall selling books)
Good show, stayed with my brother and his family (they’ve been based in cork for years) but man Belfast to Cork was a struggle of a drive.
Hoping to find a contact for Dublin City Con, cus I’d like to do some more local cons. New York is out for me this year, but may be next year.
