Oh no! Chimpsky, locked in his own tower block surrounded by brain controlled cits that are all friends and all, now, absolutely set on killing our ape chum!
Here’s the first few pages in black and white from this week’s 2000AD!
And since I’ve been pretty lax in posting Chimpsky stuff over the past several weeks it’s been running, here’s some fun background extra inf… for the most part Ken just described these scenes of Chimspky in the different areas of his Megablock as outside or inside, so that gave me some free reign to just start designing areas of a block we’ve never really seen, so food areas, an alien garden, shopping precincts, all that stuff. It also allowed me to do a fun little King Kong moment…
You’ll notice on this preview, that I somehow forgot to draw legs for some of the characters in the top right, this was fixed before print, but oops!
Also, Makrill! The Ocean Sent “It Stinks” absoloutly inspired by my eldest who must’ve been 11 or so when he was told about scented candles and he asked if there was one that smelled like Mackrell – which he loved – no, son. No. (He’s now 18 and insists it would’ve been a good idea…)
The Devil’s Hour is a six part Amazon Prime drama about a woman haunted by something, a child who seems to be absoloutly emotionless and a mother who talks to herself. All while Peter Capaldi sits in a prison cell being enigmatic and coy.
Prima facia it’s your standard crime drama with some hints at supernatural, and feels like a british version of True Detective Series 1 – and from this point forward –here be spoilers (after the drawing)
Not a great likeness, but a 15 minute Peter Capaldi painting done in clip studio
Ok, slowly but surely over the episode, through flashbacks, flashforward and things that look like hallucinations it feels like maybe this is a show trying to make us feel the madness of a central character and Capaldi’s serial killer schtick is maybe someone playing with the main characters mind.
It’s a story about a man who lives his life over and over again, each time trying to save more and more people, sometimes by letting the air out of tyre he doesn’t have to rewatch them crash their car because of a tyre blowout as he’d done in another life. Sometimes it’s by catching and killing someone before the kill someone else.
And I’ll be honest, even up to the last few minutes of the last episode I was thinking “wow, how are they gonna turn this around in to a normal crime drama and “it turns out it was all a dream” – and they don’t.
I loved it. Thought it was great, hauntingly supernatural with a time travel twist (though as Nick over on twitter pointed out, he has more or less the exact same powers as Moira McTaggert in Jonathan Hickman’s X Men run – Nick is a writer and has a cracking collection of short stories here.)
Unusually in a show with a single show stopper premise, it was also prepared to expand that out and look at different ramifications that could have. In fact, despite Capaldi being our protaganist it’s almost entirely focused on Lucy Chambers whose emotionless son seems to be able to see these other lives.
Clever premise, not exactly as youd think, and a good show which sort of leaves on ah “what will they do if they get a second series…” and in a way that explains why Chambers is the way she is.
So, in the current arrgh!-what-are-we-all-gonna do panic, people have started to move on to a variety of other social media platforms, making a nest for if twitter just implodes (and honestly, I’m not convinced it wont).
So here’s other places you can find me, but in all honesty, I’m hitting a point where I too old and tired to try and burn up another platform, so I don’t expect these to be anything other than unused life rafts.
Let’s start with instagram (which I have used more than the others)
https://ello.co/pjholden Oh this one is still working! Actually it looks pretty good, artist focused. Unlikely I’ll ever use it. Man, just checked and my earliest notification from it looks like sometime in 2014…
I’m eschewing facebook entirely (at least I’m nothing but a lurker on there, no friends, don’t want any friends, just want to occasionally look at some lovely art by some artists I like)
Twitter has been an absolutely invaluable place for me to find work, and be offered work (current gig, in fact, came about precisely because of twitter) and so, as much as I’ve been tempted to I’m unlikely to delete the account, but I HAVE given up the blue tick of validation, which to be honest, weighed heavily on me for a number of reasons – even pre Musk. It always seemed silly I had a blue tick and a number of much better known writers/artists didn’t have one, and getting one seemed weirdly arbitrary. Post Musk I felt like a lot of the criticism I had of how Musk was handling the *new* blue tick of verification (which isn’t verified beyond, you know, you paying for it) was easy to interpret as me going “but my blue tick is special and so I don’t want anyone else to have one” – removing the tick has made me feel weirdly relieved about criticising what’s going on and lifted a slight weight of whether twitter was a job or not.
My threshold on facebook – that tipping point where I went – NO. NO more. Was when I was looking at some people who wanted to friend me and I was spending days, weeks, months agonising over whether to friend them and I realised it had become an unpaid job, helping facebook gather accurate information about it. It was the unpaid part that got my goat, so it went.
The thoughts of paying twitter to actually help it give me more focused advertising seemed bonkers.
Anyway, blue tick gone now. Faint feeling of relief.
Back to my first love of blogging, maybe. I started blogging before blogs existed. Hand coding entries on a static web page. WordPress is a bit easier. A bit.
(if you’ve got a tick and you want rid of it, the answer is change your username to something else and then change it back and boom! blue tick be gone!)
I’ve pretty much binged all of SAS Rogue Heroes this week, based on the true story of the origins of the SAS. And look, honestly, I’m deeply conflicted, I’m not sure real characters should feature in gung ho whiz bang boys own adventure stories about WARS! (which this show clearly is, even as it also suggests that the characters were not unaffected by what was done by them) and a lot of the real people in real life were … not pleasant, and this arguably strips all the unpleasantness away and leaves very much movie style heroism.
BUT the whole show is a bag of fun. WWII by way of the James Gunn suicide squad, I suppose. Mixing the music of George Formby with Ace of Spades, and the action sequences are visceral fun.
Plus, it did make me pick up the book it was based on and start reading it, so I’m certainly not taking it as read that the people we see on screen are the people they were in real life (and certainly even the books say a lot of these guys were largely unknowable and by all accounts, frequently just awful human beings).
(The real characters in war stories is something Garth Ennis avoids, when he does include them it’s usually as side characters who if they speak usually do so with the actual words attributed to them in historical records)
Anyway, you should check it out if that’s your bag. And I suspect if you’re following me on twitter or blogs or my work at all, it probably is your bag…
A couple of days ago I decided to finally collect a whole bunch of my little silly one / two page strips together into a single collection. Bundling some one page future shock style stories, the holiday strips and a couple of autobio comics (incl the one about my mum) and sticking it up in gumroad.com It’s called PJ Holden’s Short and Curious (a title I was very pleased to have come up with).
It’s priced at free or pay what you like (owing to my inexperience with gumroad I’d initially set the price as $2+). Anyway I have some numbers, firstly my plan wasn’t to make money (making money in comics is hard, and I’ve seen smart publishers lose money on comics, so no way would this comic hit any where near what I’d make if I were paid to do it)
But I was curious to see how much I’d make and how many people would download it.
First of all, lots of people paid way over the odds – thank you, you crazy fools! I think I averaged around $4 per sale (many were more generous than that!)
So there two sets of numbers – one is from twitter. How many people see a tweet and click a link.
I have a following of about 15k followers on twitter, and in order to get these numbers I had to push QTs of the original tweet every few hours for a day or two.
Slightly depressing. 22k impressions for 480 engagements is 2.1% rate!
So … is it not hitting the right people? I dunno. I could risk some promotion on twitter, and that be worth playing. When it comes to gumroad and the comic the figures look like this:
Twitter
203
30
14.8%
$135
Direct, email, IM
44
8
18.2%
$28.17
pauljholden.gumroad.com
6
1
16.7%
$5
bing.com
2
0
0%
$0
com.google.android.gm
1
0
0%
$0
forums.2000ad.com
11
0
0%
$0
lm.facebook.com
6
0
0%
$0
m.facebook.com
9
0
0%
$0
I’ve been told by a few people that a 14.8% conversion from looking to buying is pretty damn impressive. So thats great! (and is even higher when people are emailed the link)
The country breakdown is pretty interesting too:
🇺🇸 United States
35
3
$8
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
192
25
$123.17
🇫🇷 France
2
1
$3
🇮🇪 Ireland
10
3
$11
🇬🇷 Greece
2
1
$3
🇦🇺 Australia
5
1
$5
🇳🇿 New Zealand
6
3
$15
🇿🇦 South Africa
1
1
$0
🇩🇪 Germany
4
1
Somehow the United States, where I’d assume the majority of people might have come from, only had 35 visitors and only 3 purchases – THE SAME NUMBER OF PURCHASES AS NEW ZEALAND. That’s peculiar – surely? (I mean not that they’re the same, but rather, that the US is so low…) I’m not sure whether that’s just because I have a lot less US followers than I realised or the comic wasn’t being seen during US awake hours
So I’ve made a grand total of $168 (I think that’s after fees) but by the time that gets to me, maybe £120? at any rate, that’s actually enough pocket change to print the thing up and drop it off to my local comic shops or other venues that MIGHT be able to sell it, and really, that’s the fun of self publishing, isn’t it?
This was a silly little idea that I had simply from the notion of a hard boiled detective describing some really long legs (you know the sort “she was the kind of dame whose legs had their own zip code” sort of nonsense) believe it nor, page 2, the punchline, didn’t occur until I was describing the story to my son, Thomas (even at age 14 a prolific maker of comics) and then I realised that oh my god, I could make that joke – it was all there! And he literally said “oh my god dad, you can’t do that joke that’s terrible” (but he was laughing and aghast, the perfect reaction). My describing it as “and that’s how the dream ended” is a bit of a fib, it wasn’t a dream, obviously, just a silly idea – but that sort of justified all of it.
I definitely enjoy cartooning and feel liberated to do so when I’m the central character, almost like it’s a license to be silly – or at least be less precious. Once I’m writing another character I tend to clamp up and over think, but when it’s me its] just flows out (even when it’s super ridiculous).
over The course of the week doing these has been pretty valuable, I think, I went from “i dunno if I can write something bup it doesn’t matter if it’s a bit crap looking” to “actually I think I could write any stupid story I can think of and draw it quickly as a comic and it’ll look decent”. Certainly it’s not something I’d expect to send to 2000ad, but actually if it turned up in the right venue I’d not be offended by it (Laurence Campbell has suggested some of them wouldn’t have looked out of place in deadline)
I know I’m gonna lose momentum though, holidays coming to a close (three days at home) and then Iol be on holiday again in Paris, but I won’t have any opportunity to work then, though I might still bring my sketch pad and some pens in the off chance.
Decided to pare back and try and just enjoy doing something silly again. I don’t think it’s terribly clear in this strip that I’ve been drawing all of the comics in a large A4 sketchbook, so there’s always a sketchy quality to them (I don’t even have a ruler with me, for goodness sake!) and I dunno if it’s obvious that that the big joke here is I’ve shifted perfection away from quality and on to quantity, which is just as unhealthy really.
Still they’ve been fun to do, and this is the first one that I’ve really liked how I’ve lettered it…
Last day of holidays tomorrow, I have an idea for a strip, it’s a bit silly, and hopefully I’ll have time to do it. But even so, six pages of free comics so far. That’s not bad!
So, this comic clearly follows yesterdays, I was thinking “what would I do if someone did come back in time and shout “Buy Apple Shares!” at me, and the reality is… not much really.
Time travel element aside, this is entirely autobiographical – in 2006 I did legitimately think “I should buy apple stock” and then … didn’t. I literally had no idea how to proceed. This unnerring sense of not buying stuff that will go up in value has also stopped me buying shares in Google when it did its IPO (I was using google from university around 95?/96? so had come to really much prefer it over things like Yahoo, and thought “Well, everyone will eventually use google…” oh how little I could know) I did not buy shares in google either.
Somehow, I think I got distracted while writing it “Buy apple shares” became “Buy apple stock” and I’m two minds – do I go back and add in panel three “I should say “BUY APPLE STOCK” – which introduces the idea that I DID go back in time and I’ve got another chance and I think changing the word to “STOCK” will work where “SHARES” didn’t – or do I just replace any errant use of the word “SHARES” with “STOCK” – not sure, a decision for the inevitable non-collection!
Anyway, hope you’re enjoying these. I’m getting a little too caught up in how to make them look good instead of just goofing around. My son (Thomas, now 14 and maker of his own comics) quite likes ’em, and said they remind him of some art I have on the wall – that art, dear reader, is from my first published work – Holy Cross, published by Fantagraphics, that was drawn in a not disimilair style, which makes me wonder have I been lying to myself about how I draw all these decades?
Holiday Comics Day 5
Script, written in notepad , looked like this:
Panel 1: soldier hacking through jungle
Caption alone
Panel 2: close up of arm. Bubbles around a festering bite mark.
Caption I think I’ve been bitten.
Panel 3: standing in jungle. Being him statues of ancient Burmese gods.
Caption totally alone.
Panel 4 his face as he looks up skyward. Night.
Caption you can see the star s from here.
Panel 5 amazing sit from the web space telescope.
Caption it’s glorious.
-ENDS-
I wrote this at 5am, It’s only notable because I don’t normally script them at all. Mulling over a few things I wanted to do, one was do something with all the Chindit stuff still floating around my head – I learnt how to draw those bloody hats, so I’m doing more of it, dammit.
Wanted to draw abandoned Burmese statues in the jungle (something I didn’t draw for Lion and the Eagle) and I wanted something to marry that up with all the space Web telescope doing the rounds and … well, that was it.
Sometimes you do these things and you edit and rewrite as it goes, and somehow there’s a few ways to interpret some it and so you end up trying to ease up on some and lean harder on others. As drawn panel 3 caption said “But civilisation is out there” and that could lead you to conclude that the chindit didn’t consider whatever he found in the jungle as civilisation (it wasn’t my intent, but certainly I could see how that could be read as that). “I think I’ve been bitten” felt tonally wrong, but I dunno, it could all do with a rewrite. Somehow the little me talking to camera strips are a lot easier to write the dialogue for as they are me writing letters to myself, more than anything.
Anyway, a slight depature and somehow a companion piece to this other story (which I eventually retitled ALONE)
(Holibobs was a word my mum used a lot for holidays, I’d entirely forgotten about it until there now)
So I’m on hols, one week in Rathmullan – this is our regular escape from it all. We book a little holiday house and the kids get their own room, we get a dish washer and a tumble dryer and day trips with me, typically, squeezing work in between it all.
Here’s the first three, with some notes!
Day 1 – an actual conversation I had with my wife, in the car. When she told me we’d be in france for a week I felt sick. Three days in Disney land, three days in Paris. Then I thought – jesus what’s wrong with me. The truth is I love drawing comics, but I’ve spent most of during covid trying to squeeze as much work in as I can. And I’m not sure how to reset that.
Ok, the little one page comic is also work, but it feels like a different thing. An act of defiance. I had fun doing it. I could only lay my hand on one pen and I thought, let’s just use that.
Day 2
It’s early to start getting into toilet stuff, but here we are, eh. Again, another actual thing that happened – I should’ve gone to the loo when I left, and I found walking on dry sand (collapsing, as it did under my feet) was destablising to my tummy and it was a source of constant danger (next time, I bring immodium). We went out of pizza after this (gluten free for me, because cramps and loo visits are the GOOD options …) and it was pretty much the same thing. Basically if I eat, I need the loo 15 minutes later. Regular as clockwork.
Day 3
A prompt from twitter “If you could travel back in time and only tell yourself three words what would they be…” – my initial thought was “Remember don’t ever…” and just leave it hanging there. Saw quite a lot of the “Buy Apple Stock!” messages but surely that would depend on when you see your younger self and how much your younger self is aware of what apple is. (This has sparked a follow up comic, but you’ll see that tomorrow)
Anyway, this has been a fun exercise. I might even keep it up. Day 3 was a pain for the art though, days 1 and 2 I had no really good tools so used the big thick pen I had, day 3 I found a smaller pen and decided to up the quality but that leads to more thinking and more work that needs rescued, so a stupid idea. Stick with simple.
They’re all drawn in an A4 SAKURA sketchbook, pencilled in HB .5 inked with a Winsor and Newton pigment pen 1.0 (except day 3 which was inked with a 0.5) photographed on my phone using a scan app “Scanner Pro” which ups the contrast, and straightens the image up (even if the camera is at a funny angle). Then pumped over to Procreate on the iPad pro where I use the levels to clean it up and export as a decent sized PNG.
I suspect I’ll keep it up for the hols at least, even if I am now super tempted to keep going and then collect 30 days worth in a small press comic… that’d be stupid though…
