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A4 Issue Four
Posted on 28th October 2023 by pj

If you prefer you can download the pdf here.

My unending gratitude to Matt and John Yuan (deputy publishers of 1First Comics) who volunteered way back on issue 1 to proofread (off the back of a plaintive twitter plea) and ending up both being great proofreaders and even better editors - constantly encouraging and giving little notes that never alter the fabric of the story but always help.

Stories this issue:

Notifications, Memories of War, Cold Caller, The Civil War, The Monster, Sign Unseen, Ghosts.

A4 Issue Four Notes!

Gah, two stories with War in the title. So annoying. Hadn't spotted it until now, but there it is. It will be my eternal shame.

There were two things drilled in to me from English lessons in secondary school (which I did rather enjoy, I loved writing, and was told to apply for O-Levels early, so I did, and then I didn't do any work because I was fundamentally lazy - so failed it) anyway, the two things: never use the word got/gotten (I think this was my teachers personal bugbear, with teenagers writing "I got given a book then got a clip round the there and got out of there, before he got me" even I'm uncomfortable seeing the word "got" in anything I write) and never repeat a word if you can help it (obvious "I", "and" and so on are all fine). So two wars. Not good. Am annoyed. (Should point out, this is entirely a quirk of my own making!)

From hereon in there will likely be spoilers!

I had planned on a halloween all horror special - or at least as best as I'm able, but of course, I couldn't quite come up with every single story as a horror, so let's start with the least horror like story:

Notifcations

I suppose this and Ghosts share a very common through line, rejection and knowing the person who rejected you never even thinks of you. For a full exploration of this idea, watch the amazing "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind".

Memories of War

There's a lot going on in the world, and much of it can be traced back so far that you'll never find the beginning point (hello from Northern Ireland!) - and the question is, if everyone lost their memories would those wars still continue. (this story optimistically says we'd all stop, I have a horrible feeling we wouldn't)

Cold Caller

Phew! Lighter fair! Actually there's a different story that uses the same sort of idea (the no-hawkers caveat that many people have at their door) I've been sitting noodling as a short comic for a few years (how many? oh man, it's embarrassing to tell - but let's say I first thought of it pre-pandemic) it would be far too long to do as one of these stories, so this slightly different version of it popped in to my head.

I am pretty proud of that title though, it came late - after I'd written a bunch of the stories and I was thinking "gah, now i need a title" and ping! there it was!

I did want to do stuff that was just a smidge lighter than last issue, because I've been told some of this stuff is DARK. I think of it all in the abstract, words on paper rather than real monsters. But we're haunted by the real and the imaginary, I suppose.

The Civil War

I saw a writer (a good writer;   it'll be a good book) talking their new Zombie book and it got me thinking, that zombie stories tend to be the ultimate "yeah of course I was the assehole prepping for the end of the world, and look, I WAS RIGHT" and I thought "what if instead of it being zombies, it's that everyone was just really really nice to each other ... oh... those asseholes wouldn't change..."

The Monster

I'll be honest, andI bet readers can tell, I shoehorned frankenstien in too this (because I wanted monsters, dammit)

Here's my orginal story idea from the apple notes app:

He had fragmented himself, Pumping his entire written and audio corpus through AI Large Language Models, and created an army of bots, one for each of the balkanised social media platforms. And he was finally free. Free to get on with work.

Is it better? it might be.

Sight Unseen

This could be policitical satire, I suppose. In the hands of a better writer. Instead it's simply a piece of fiction.

Ghosts

Gotta be honest, I just loved the shape and sound of the story. I love that it works on a couple of levels.  It pretty much came out fully formed, and so short. Honestly this is the joy of these shorts, there's not an ounce of fat on the idea, there's no point trying to extend it, and there's a sort of poetic quality to it. Anyway, might be one of my favs.

 

Hope you enjoy it, I would love to know what you think - you can fire me off an email to pjholden at gmail dot com if you like!

October Fest

Posted on 15th February 2024 by pj

For reasons unknown, schedules being weird and wot not this October sees not one BUT two things I’ve done come out, the first is Soul Plumber from DC Horror (this is one where I pencilled a few pages for John McCrea, you’ll never see the join though!)

And the other is the Monster Fun Halloween Special. To be honest, I did the art for that about a year ago, so had no idea when I’d see it, nice that it’s finally coming out (I also didn’t know it was going to be an ongoing title – hoping that was something that developed over the past year and if you want, you can probably read something about the health of rebellion’s comics in to that – a new comic launch in this climate? Amazing)

Here’s  John’s cover for Soul Plumber (it’s a grueseome, sweary comedy about a catholic kid obsessed with religion who accidentally builds a machine that can extract demons from the possessed. At least that’s what I think is going on)



Me and John Reppion (and Len O’Grady) revamped an old character into a new character for this, hopefully if it goes down well, we’ll get to do more.

I wish I knew it was going to be an ongoing, because I pitched an idea to John for Leopard from Lime Street story (we kicked it around when he was visiting around xmas) that we would have loved to have done for it. Who knows, maybe if it keeps going for long enough we’ll get to do it…



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Well, shucks I tried…

Posted on 15th February 2024 by pj

But I don’t think I can do anything with patreon that feels worthwhile doing, so I’ve paused the next payment cycle with the intent of unpublishing my creator page in the next month or two. Thanks for anyone who stick with it. 


I’ll go back to blogging on my blog (www.pauljholden.com) or tweets. So no advanced peeks (but I was always a little wary of doing that any way, it didn’t feel right…)

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Webtooning in…

Posted on 15th February 2024 by pj

Webtooning out.

DC have recently launched a new Webtoons only comic strip (for those that don’t know webtoons is a ‘platform’ – which hosts comics, the comics are formatted as massively long vertical strips designed to be read on a phone (essentially Scott McCloud’s “infinite canvas” idea finally made real, and really popular). And as such it’s really the perfect format for comics on the phone. It’s odd that long horizontal strips never took off, but here we are. Webtoons boasts readerships in the hundreds of millions – an utterly headscratching figure.

Webtoons originated (so wikipedia tells me) in South Korea. So, of course, they tend to favour anime/manga style art and stories.

Marvel Unlimited -Marvel’s app and platform that lets you subscribe and read a massive amount of marvel comics – has realunched and has included marvels new “Marvel Infinitity” line – basically the webtoons format (Marvel’s infinity line is not to be confused with Marvel’s Infinite comics which where another internet only format that used the form really really well but we’re rather burdensome to produce   ) 

As it happens I quite like the Marvel Infinity comics, probably because stylistically they’re much more in line with the western art styles (plus I have pals who’ve drawn some). 

Some of it makes more use of the format than other and it’s interesting seeing the different approaches as people learn this new format. 

So, I thought I’d try my hand – purely as a way to test what the story telling can/can’t do and what I can/can’t do. The results (typo’s, crappy art, et all) is here it doesn’t look good on a big screen at all, optimised for phone really.

And I thought, well, if there’s an audience and money maybe I should think about doing something more than an experiment, so I went to my balcony and kicked around an idea and then wrote a script. It’s a fun little thing, I think. 

But I’m torn.

On the one hand, new platform, new audience. On the other hand – well, I’m gonna be a tiny dribble in that big ocean and before you can make any money on the webtoons platform you need to hit massive, massive numbers of readers (a doable figure if you invest a consequential amount of time and energy in to it)

And I just wanted to dip in, and dip out. So now I don’t know. I don’t know if this fun little strip should be a webtoon or should be just a traditional comic (though if it’s a traditional comic I’m not even sure what I’ll do with it, it’s too light and frothy for a 2000ad pitch and I’m not even sure where I’d pitch it to outside of that, short form scifi? who knows.)

 Anyway. decision making is hard.

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