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Help!
Posted on 12th January 2024 by pj

About Emma Newman

Emma Newman writes short stories, novels and novellas in multiple speculative fiction genres. She is a professional audiobook narrator, and a Hugo Award winning podcaster. Her current podcasts are ‘Imagining Tomorrow’ and ‘Tea and Sanctuary’. www.enewman.co.uk

The Script

Comic script - this is exactly what happened to my son in the small hours of this morning. I only saw the messages when I woke up, and he told me what happened once he was awake. It made me laugh, and I immediately thought it might make a fun comic and Beanie agreed!

A young man (if you want to base him loosely on my son, he’s 16 years old, tall, short brown hair, blue eyes) is about to leave his room but spots a huge spider on wall next to the door (it is on the wall that the door would rest against when open and the dressing gown hanging on the back of the door would brush against where the spider is) . 

He is terrified of spiders, so he can’t open the door. It’s the small hours of the morning.

He leaps onto his bed on the other side of the room, a bookcase blocking the line of sight between him and the spider and tries to phone his Mum who is sleeping in her room across the landing, and message her on WhatsApp, but her phone is on ‘Do not disturb’ so there’s no answer. 

Panicking, he phones friends until one finally picks up - ‘Help! There’s a huge spider in my room!’

Friend: What colour is it?

Beanie: Black? Brown? I dunno! It was BIG

Friend: You’re okay, I don’t think they can climb.

Beanie: IT’S ON MY WALL! (throughout the rest of this exchange the friend also now freaking out is just making Bean panic even more!) 

Friend: Oh, that one can climb then! Just dash out the door!

Beanie: It’s by the door, I can’t get out!

Friend: IT’S IN YOUR ROOM?! 

Beanie: Yes, I told you this!

He peeps round the bookcase. The spider is gone!

Beanie: It’s gone!

Friend: THAT MEANS IT COULD BE ANYWHERE!

Beanie’s eyes flick to all the posters it could be hiding behind, and all the clothes and stuff on his floor it could now be lurking under.

Beanie: YOU ARE NOT HELPING!

He hangs up and hides in the duvet. If you think that a final shot on the spider’s hiding place would be a good ending, do add that in, but happy to end it on Beanie hiding.

 

Artists Notes

One of the goals of the project was to try and work with as many writers as possible, and so I told every writer "Don't worry - I'll take any format of script" - there are sort of comic script standards, and attempts have been made in the past to really hammer them in, but for the most part every writer I work with works a little different anyway. That said, this script required a lot of thinking about to get the most out of the story (you can argue amongst yourself whether that's what I did).

Firstly there's a sort of action limit in comics, every action will usually require one panel - character opens door, walks through door, locks door? that's three panels. I felt like, on this script, there was too much going on to fit in the super limited single page I had, plus some of the action I wanted to build it up a bit more, so I knew I'd be putting a bunch of panels towards the getting ready to go out (because build up build up build up build up PUNCHLINE!) I also knew I wanted the dialogue interaction to have that ratatatat rapid delivery, which meant I'd get a single panel for that set of dialogue. This meant brutalising the story a little, cutting out the contacting of his mum and going straight to the friend. I also wanted a little end note on the spider - I thought that would be fun, a happy little chappy. (remove the last spider panel and the page feels like it's not quite finished - it's a figurative and literal full stop)

The manga shading effect/speedlines came after I'd drawn it and realise it would work better with a little bit of manga (tonally too, fits a teen), and the coloured lettering was because I needed someway to quickly distinguish the two sets of dialogue (I decided to eschew clip studio's balloon lettering tools a) because it would take ages to get exactly how I want it and b) because I thought I could add more character to it that way. The background of the room is pretty much a direct tracing of my teenage son's bedroom (which is so quintessentially teenager it looks like a set from a modern John Hughes teen comedy). (And it's all my son's work, he's done that all without parental help)

Anyway. This was finished the day before publication, but I think it turned out ok.

Oh, and because I drew it, and then slathered lettering all over it, here's the page without dialogue...

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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