Wednesday Night Link

Underfire are going to BICS

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:46:59 GMT

So, I booked the table for BICS 2009 about a week ago. This was close work, as Shane who runs it got back to me pretty quickly to say that we'd got the second to last table available - phew! Now there is just the scramble to make sure that we've got something ready to sell in time - and luckily for me I'm not in charge this time!

Anyway, we will have something to show for ourselves - a new issue of the new-fangled, relaunched Rapid Fire anthology, although I don't know exactly what's going to be in it yet as things get chopped around. Also, we're selling old comics and Rock Night too and so on and son on. I'm not actually sure that I'm going to make it though, which is a shame but I'm skint and it'll be my sister's wedding the weekend before - which will make me even more skint. We shall see what happens.

Interesting and Heartwarming News for once

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:19:21 GMT

Bloomsbury have decided to publish a book with an accurate cover. It's funny how difficult they seem to have found the concept. Anyway, well done Justine Larbelestier, for taking up the fight and winning!

(source: The Guardian)

11.46 ETA - P.S. Thanks to triciasullivan for pointing this story out to me in the first place a few weeks back.

Underfire Website

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:45:17 GMT

Once again I have been updating the Underfire Website in an attempt to make it something useful and relevent. This time that means porting over to the wordpress software and getting an easy to read archive online. It's not at its prettiest just yet, and I still need to write up some more of the supporting pages, but it works and enables a constant stream of interesting things from our archives, web-only short stories and excitement building previews to be ~~spammed~~ rss-ed to any that are interested. At the moment the first 5 issues of Rapid fire are online, and there should be more soon.

Woo!

web: http://www.underfire-comics.com/online
rss: http://www.underfire-comics.com/online/feed/
livejournal sydication: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/underfirecomics/

/self promotion

ETA: Just changed the addresses so that they point the right way - Facepalm.

Stuff that I wrote

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 21:56:04 GMT

I realise that I spend an awful lot of the meagre amount of time that I do spend posting on Livejournal basically laying into books that have annoyed me and writers that I think come up short. I am also aware that it is easy to be a critic when you have never made anything yourself, and possibly even easier to be a critic when you are a frustrated artist in your own right. I don't think that either of those two positions invalidate criticism inherently, by the way - yes, bitter people say bitter things but that doesn't mean that they are automatically invalid and they can still be important and insightful observations.

I also do not subscribe to the view that art or even artistic endeavour, validates itself. Just because you have something to say doesn't meant that you need to be heard. This is important because good art is important to the world, and in my view more important than the artists who make it. Bad art does not deserve recognition or reward merely because the artist expended a lot of effort in its creation, or indeed has no other means of subsistence. Art is bigger and harder than that.

I understand very well how harsh that statement above is - I know and care for people whose income depends on the quality of the work they produce and I would hate to see them lose their income because of a slip in standard. On a personal level that would be horrible, a real tragedy. In fact, my own security is based on the continued artistic achievements of the institution I work for and too many duff operas would send me back into the job market for sure. But that still doesn't validate the bad work in itself. Every job is precarious in one way or another, every life open to tragedy and we cannot escape it.

Having said all of that, I thought that it would be best for me to lay open my own cards - not in a 'look at me' way, but merely in a 'here I am' way. I write a lot about things that annoy me, about writing that doesn't work, and I also write about the writing that I am doing myself. I don't necessarily think that the writing that I do is great - certainly not always good enough to charge for - although I am working towards the point when I think that it might be. I am bitter about a lot of things, but this isn't one of them. I do what I do partly as a compulsion and partly as a hobby, but it's all fine. Anyway, my point is: if I'm going to be a critic, I may as well lay myself open to criticism as well, so here I am - and I'll link to this from my sidebar too - all my major work that is complete (save some serious editing that is probably required, as well as a proofread because no matter how many times I go through things I can never spot every mistake). It's free to read, to copy and to distribute as long as you don't change it and keep my name on it. If you have an opinion - please tell me about it.

Prose

The Death of the Marzipan Princess

A ~~big~~ ~~long~~ silly fantasy novel that was my first attempt to tell the standard quest and monsters story from a sort of progressive political viewpoint, where the force that wanted things back the way they had always been was actually the bad guys. It all ended a bit strangely, and it has some very dodgy sex in it.

The Necropolis and Beyond

A collection of most of the short stories I wrote up until I was about 20, bundled together into an odd structure based on a framing narrative written later and featuring some robots in a post-human wasteland. Very angsty.

Oh yes, and there's Harry Potter and the Brisket Loaf too.

Plays

I adapted two plays from books by the author Robert Rankin and staged with the now defunct Beggar's Experience Productions. They can also be found below, if you have any strange desires that involve attempting to put them on yourself then you'll need to contact both me and Robert for permission.

The Dance of the Voodoo Handbag

I'm still very proud of this.

The Book of Ultimate Truths - The Play!, frontispiece and appendices

Very raw, seeing as I didn't really know what I was doing at the time - but a hell of a blast at the same time - and it was the first official Rankin adaptation to be done ever.

Sound Mind

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:42:53 GMT

Why did I not reallise that Sound mind was a sequel to Double Vision. I would have got round to reading it much earlier...

Of Orcs, Grunts, and the lack of any decent subversion round these parts

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:01:26 GMT

I recently read the Orcs trilogy by Stan Nicholls - I ended up buying it at the airport before we went to Japan because for some reason I was getting worried that I didn't have enough to read, or that what I did have was too hardcore for holiday reading when I might want to relax. Of course, the opposite is ever true and because I actually was relaxed I had more headspace to read the *clever* books that I'd shoved in my bag from our bookshelf (Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison and some Kant that I wanted to try re-reading).

Although, the thing is, I was expecting perhaps naively that Orcs might actually be a somewhat cleverer book than most fantasy. I've seen the omnibus of it about a fair bit, and it has that sort of minimalist design and some decent pull-quotes on the back. But more than anything it talks about how the book is a total re-imagining of the relationship between orcs and the other fantasy races, a gritty look at a culture born for war and the possibility of that warlust being the final arbiter of peace. Big themes no? I should know by now never to trust the hype.

Oh my, was I mistaken. At first, although it was obvious quite quickly that the book (I'm going to call it one book - I read the whole omnibus as one, and the end of each book is so arbitrary within the scheme of the story that I can only imagine that it was just that Nicholls had reached his word count that he decided to stop) was as shallow as I have come across in a genre renowned for its shallow take on things, I at least thought that it was an enjoyable shallow - a sort of a rock pool in which one could splash about happily and look for shrimp and starfish and other small crustacia while the water turned red with the blood of your enemies.

The very first chapter is a very good piece of tough, heroic fantasy writing - it's just that the following 50-odd chapters follow the exact same formula (except for the one's where the evil queen rapes and kills her subjects for shits and giggles), only not as well and with less wry humour. In fact, the action is so nakedly formulaic that it actually follows a template, thus:

i) The Orcs are going somewhere - leader orc thinks/dreams something of importance to the plot.
ii) Wise orc or clever orc says something to leader orc, or he says something to one of them. it will be on a well worn theme (i.e. wise orc is wise, but old and touchy about it/clever orc is unhappy with the lot of orcs and wants freedom from bondage of other peoples wars and ability to fight own, orc wars).
iii) Tough orc and token dwarf start arguing and almost come to blows, only stopping because...
iv) Something attacks the orcs/The orcs attack something.

Similarly, the battle scenes are then constructed according to the further template:

i) Leader orc kills between 1-3 opponents.
ii) Leader orc looks about him in the slight gap before next opponent - each of his four command group (see distinguishable characters, above) kills a similar number of opponents, in turn. The order these are described in is mixed up, for variety.
iii) Orc soldiers kill various opponents - if required.
iv) If any opponents are left alive, or haven't run away, return to i).

And what's worse, no orcs die, from about chapter six of the first book to about chapter twenty of the second. Fighting is cool and stuff, I know, but when every battle ends with a variation of 'Stryke looked around at the wolverines, there were a few flesh wounds, but luckily nothing serious' you end up with absolutely no tension. Despite the fact that every main character can be reduced to a single sentence of speech repeated ad nauseum, they are still too precious to be killed.

Admittedly, there are chapters in which the orcs don't appear - these usually involve the evil queen proving both her power and the failure of the feminist project by having a strop and then killing someone/something in a petulant and or *sexy* manner. Also, sometimes the orc chapters start in the middle of a fight not resolved in the previous chapter, and finish with leader orc thinking something relevant to the plot. Controversial, I know. Finally, there's a bizarre section towards the end of the second book where they decide, arbitrarily and contrary to every other point in the story, to try talking to some people before they attack them, which breaks up the flow of fights, although not for long.

After all of this has gone on, the book at last decides to undo any point it might have been making about the necessity of orcs for the stability of the fantasy society, or even the possibility of them winning peace for all (like it says they do on the back cover, natch) with a sudden and pointless right-angle turn in the final furlong. All the way through the orcs have been killing and stealing across the land to find five objects, individually with unimaginable power and combined - well who knows? One thing is certain, that together they will somehow explain, and maybe even reverse, the land's collapse into frost and ruin. So when it turns out that they manage to send 20-odd orcs through a portal into a parallel 'orc world' before crapping out, becoming useless and causing the inexplicable collapse of the palace housing the portal, killing the objects' unspeakably ancient and powerful creator, his two surviving daughters and a couple of armies for good measure, wtf? is the very justifiable response.

So what is the book trying to say about orcs? How is it subverting fantasy tropes? To be honest, nothing, and it isn't. In the world that has been created the orcs aren't really orcs qua orcs - the attempt to subvert the trope of orcishness has lead to so many apologies for their behaviour that actually there is nothing interesting in their situation. They are gruff and they like fighting, sure, but that's much like the human protagonists of plenty of other fantasy books. There is nothing intrinsically monstrous, or even quasi-monstrous about them. In fact, the book goes out of its way to show how monstrous humans are in the setting, with one group in particular taking on the role usually reserved for fantasy orcs - ie a horde of indistinguishable, ceaseless aggressors who wish for nothing more than to rape the earth and crush all other races beneath their hobnailed boots.

And yet, at least the book is more fun to read than Mary Gentle's Grunts, which also does the orc subversion - this time keeping them in the role of essentially mindless monster/marauder. The main problem with Grunts (another book I got on an intercontinental holiday, btw) is that it is far too long for the premise - orc horde gets modern weapons, chaos ensues - especially as it skimps on the world building (in much the same way as Orcs does) with an incredibly generic pair of armies fighting it out in the background and not much else. The fact that the characters are meant to be one dimensional (as far as I can tell) doesn't help things either.

The thing is, I'm both depressed by these books and also secretly relieved. The relieved part is because when I still think that I might ever write something worth reading it is on these sorts of themes that my writing will be both touching and attempting to challenge, ie, the roles of and our assumptions about non-humans etc. within fantasy and what that says about our underlying relationships with difference. And I would be gutted if someone got there before me. But really, I am just depressed that this is what passes for subversion within the genre.

I'm going to try and write another post in the next few days about orcs, the problem with them, the fantasy of race and the possibilities of real trope subversion as this post is far too long now. Hopefully it will be a little better argued and not so ranty as this one (partly this was just a need to get this off my chest). But for now, this is it.

I did a meme

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:11:05 GMT

Rules
1. Reply to this post, and I will pick six of your icons.
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon glee.

I got myself tagged by fera_festiva

I don't know where this particular image came from originally but I like it as a sort of distillation of the internet's ability to absorb meaning and, through distribution processing, come up with things that shouldn't make sense but that are instantly understandable.

This is in my aunt's house in Germany. There is a guy that lives next door to her (or used to, I'm not sure he's still there) who makes boats and things entirely out of the bones of the chickens that he eats. I'm really gutted that I didn't buy one off him when I met him - he had an awesome looking workshop. Man, I love rural Germany.

Willow is seriously one of my favourite movies. I know how shit it is in so many ways, but it still makes me cry every time I watch it. I entered Bavmorda into the gore_sports Bash Wars tournament a few years ago but she was pretty roundly trounced. This image comes from a sweet, utterly unplayable, Willow board game from the 80's.

From the very first episode, Toshiko has always been the best thing in Torchwood. Susie died from cool, Harkness rhymes with darkness - which is naff, Owen was a rapist who had to wait until the second series for any personality beyond his dick, Ianto - while cool - is all over the place and Gwen is the kind of cop who cries at crime. As well as that, the writers of Torchwood are obviously working with the same set of cultural stereotyopes that I had at the age of 17, as Toshiko is very similar to a Mage: the Ascension technomancer I played in a one-shot about a shadowy team of quasi-governmental agents trying to protect a British city from the unknown threats of a universe too strange for the fragile minds of its citizenry to handle using technology they barely understand themselves.

Regardless, whatever you do, Toshiko can do it better. Science fact.

Based on fera_festiva's aborted but still worth reading fanfic Harry Potter and the Ocarina of Time, in which ~~me and her~~ Harry develops an obsession with gangsta rap and tattooing all of his dead friends onto his body and being all like 50 cent and stuff.

Paxman may well be the only force in the universe that is greater than Toshiko. Be afraid. Especially if you are a student.

The DFC is failing

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:31:35 GMT

Man, I was all like - 'hey, the DFC is for losers' when it started up, but now that it's actually having the money pulled from under it I feel really sad. I think basically, even if I didn't like it much, at least it was a real attempt by a big pblisher to do comics in the UK. Now we're back to square one (or 2000AD as it is officially known).

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:36:42 GMT

Ok, so this is not as well written or as full and wide ranging as I might like to make it, but I'm out of time and off on holiday soon and wanted to do it while it was freshly stirred up in my mind. It's kind of tangential to the whole racefail thing, but is also stuff that I've been thinking about for quite a long time (one of my sort-of-projects is working out a way of writing fantasy that isn't reactionary, and its harder than you'd think - regardless of my shitty prose). Basically, it's about the inherent divisiveness that you get in genre fiction, and as such is not really about specific instances of characterisation and how they may or may not be percieved, but about the artistic basics of SFF. Ah well...

One of the things that I have noticed in my own, incomplete, reading of the body of content that has amassed regarding the current racefail is that for all the (relevent and important) focus on the representation of specific, real world, people and culture there has been little insight raised into the much deeper, much more fundamental questions raised by the various genres present in SFF about 'othering' in general. A question that one might ask, coming into the middle of this sort of painful and protracted debate, could be 'why is it happening here?' The concepts and difficulties inherent in the representation of people who are 'not-you', and not only 'not-you' but 'not-like-you', are as old as literature; the pain felt by those dispossessed is as keen and as just across time and the barriers to publication as real within any genre. So why SFF?

The answer to this, I aim to show, is not because SFF is a special place: because it is somehow more open to 'outsiders'. It isn't - it just positions itself as outsider, and as such, any other 'outsider' that has gained entry will revert to in-group tropes as a way of maintaining their status - even if those tropes are to define oneself as part of a group of 'outsiders'. It is a very tight-knit place, a sort of closed system which I think attests to some, although not all, of the later violence as bad feeling is reflected inwards, but that doesn't account for the earlier emergence of opinions able to lead to such fractiousness. What it truly is, as a space, is inherently problematic.

SFF problematises difference. The reasons and methods of this are many and complex, and I shall try to describe them as best as I am able, but it is a central theme within the manifold of genres - even when the final message is one of integration. SFF is made up of a number of sub-genres, all with their own histories, narrative forces and tropes, but they have often been described as having in common one major aspect, which is that they explore humanity's encounters with 'the other' (and what it does to, and says about, our humanity). While on a discrete level that is also a description that applies to the novel in general, the key aspect of SFF is the expansion of that from discrete individuals to a global 'humanity'. It is the toolset used to present that humanity that takes us from the philosophical 'problem of other minds' to the political 'problem of other peoples', and this is by no means accidental.

Of the three major sub-genres, horror is probably the simplest to analyse. It specifically sets up the outside, the unknown, as threatening. Viscerally, that can be fun - but it shouldn't take long to realise that as a medium it exists on division and a violent fear of difference. The fear does not have to be unjustified, and the difference does not have to be that of the 'othered group' (it can be of progress, of regression, of violation etc.) but it is often expressed in relation to that group. The tropes and the allegorical power of those tropes to present this fear are based on, if not explicitly, groups that are not-like that of the protagonists. In this way it often violently and irrecoverably dissociates out groups from in groups.

Fantasy, as a genre, is more complex but essentially even more reactionary because its narratives are deeper. Genre fantasy comes in a number of different flavours, which are often read for complex and competing reasons, but one of its defining features is the existence of races of non-humans or meta-humans who co-exist with a 'base' culture that is, traditionally, human. While humans are depicted as versatile and encompassing all possibilities, non-humans are limited - they have predefined personalities and skillsets - and the ability they have to overcome this deterministic metaphysics is either limited by convention or stated explicitly as zero.

Even where a fantasy culture or race is not based on a real world culture, the allegorical basis of the creation should still be apparent. Fantasy stories, as with all stories, are a reflection of an element of life - and in this case that element is the concept of discrete groups between which true understanding is often figured to be impossible, of extremes of good and evil, and their inherence within individuals from specific groups, and of irreconcilable differences that cannot be surmounted and peace that cannot be achieved. While all this may have artistic validity, it nonetheless means that it is a fiction based on entrenched, forcible 'othering' of groups; the not-like you who can never be like-you.

Finally, sci-fi - which is the most open of the sub-genres to a progressive outlook, and yet is still predicated on the idea of difference. Ideologically, sci-fi looks forward where fantasy looks back and so the encounter with difference it describes is a novel one. Therefore it is the fiction of discovery, of expansion and of new, 'strange' horizons and of how we can interact with those to the furtherment (or defence) of ourselves. Remember that scare-quoted strange, though, because it will be important.

Sci-fi has another side to it, which is the well documented use of the alien as a metaphor for that which is currently problematic for the society in which the sci-fi is being written. While fantasy can often be seen to be using cultural stereotypes as a shorthand for fleshing out its other races it isn't doing, for the most part and ignoring for now the problem with orcs, what sci-fi is doing, which is representing groups explicitly as the other. And even when it isn't doing this, my original point remains: whatever is out there is 'other', it is 'strange' - with all the connotations of deviance and unknowability - it is problematic.

And so it breeds dissonance. SFF has a large scope for escapism and entertainment, and a smaller but important scope for the making of some very powerful artistic points. The use of allegory to explore difficult and prickly concepts without directly referencing the parties involved, or to extrapolate the ideas without getting bogged down in the detail, is a powerful and valid tool. And yet the language and the tropes and the convention that has codified, that was present in the progenitors of the genre, are intrinsically divisive. When one says that 'it doesn't matter how you represent the really other, the unicorns and the space monsters, because they can't complain, or tell you that you are getting it wrong' then that person is missing the point, because in SFF the relationship and representations of these characters is the key to your relationship with difference.

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:37:39 GMT

Autobeat operative Refridgeron is fully charged and back in action. Allallies rejoice, operations are go once again.

The car is working again

Catalogue of Woe

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:38:27 GMT

Moving house (again) in 3 days time.

The car won't start.

Story conference regarding next underfire project tomorrow. Haven't prepared.

Work annoying and busy

On the plus side, although it still makes me want to cry for various long and involved reasons, my big sister who is getting married this year, want's me to walk her down the aisle. This is one of the nicest things ever, but also sad. But brilliant!

Anti-Blogging

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:10:10 GMT

or possibly meta-blogging?

There appear to be a lot of reasons why I never keep up to date with blogs, much the same reasons that I never finish diaries, really.

One of the most practical is that, although I can type quite fast, I can't type as fast as I would like, which makes it a labourious process to get anything worthwhile down. Also, and probably more importantly, I can't type anywhere near as fast as I think, and so typing is a continuous effort of marshalling, slowing and returning to my thoughts which I have probably already left behind in favour of something more interesting. At the risk of sounding like an incredible t00b, it actually constitutes an effort for me to splurge a stream of consciousness, to blog about nothing other than the endless succession of days that I am a party to... so if I want to pull something interesting out of that morass then that is an even harder prospect.

Strangely enough, this problem doesn't hold so true when I'm writing with pen and paper - or at least writing some form of fiction; it's more of a communion when I do so, a generative state of mind where the mass of thought are laid out and given form. The pen-paper transition is a point of contact between the mental and the physical that contains within itself its own rules. Ink as avatar.

When it works.

But, even this is beside the point, as I'm not really writing now about fiction, but about journals, and I can't even write those by hand.

As I said before, my thought processes are faster than I can keep up with physically, and while i have the training and capabilities to systematise when I need to, and to construct arguments and logical through-flows should I need to - should I have something I feel is worth making the effort for. And this is my second big problem.

Partly its due to the fact that I don't find much that happens in my physical life to be of interest - in a sort of mundane way because a lot of it is so much the same as the things that everyone else does, but there is a more fundamental element to it too. Because, in fact, even when I do incredibly interesting and out of the ordinary things, I genuinly don't find them to be interesting in a general sense. Which is to say, I don't find them to be interesting in and of themselves. (Although, I do find it interesting when other people that I know talk about those things, so I understand on some level why other people might be interested in me talking about those things.)

Fundamentally, however, it is I think something to do with my very relationship with reality and experience. I don't necessarily judge experience, as in the things that have actually happened, as being superior to what didn't happen in the way that some would. The value of what hppened is diminished by telling only what actually happened - it doesn't tell you anything about possibility, only about actuality. It is interesting on a personal level, of course - when you know the people involved - and there is a definite use in historical-level data (funnily enough because it can be closer to stories in terms of the distance you get and the scope it encompasses), but biography is, to me, a generally dead area.

Fiction, on the other hand, is far more useful, because it tells you about the way in which people react (or impose reactions upon) hypothetical situations. Even if fiction is about the past, or about a fantastic quasi-past, it is still about futures - the futures of the charachters, which are undefined except through the act of reading/learning about them. Don't let the standard use of the perfect tense decieve you, stories are about what people would do in a given situation, not what they did do. The very fact that a story is not real also means that you can disagree with it in a way that you can't disagree with biography/reportage. Which means that it makes you think much more than biography/reportage. Which makes me much more interested in writing it... When I can get my self around to it (which is in itself a whole other topic).

Finally, there is the fact that the other stuff that I might blog about, I find myself not wanting to, because I am aware that it will probably make me comeacross as a complete bastard. Which is to say, IU have very high standards for things - not in a way that makes me look down on those things that I don't think match my standards - but in a way that means that just because I like something/someone doesn't mean I won't pull it up if its contradicting itself, making silly points or generally not being intellectually rigorous. This I get from my teenage years sparring with a couple of right intellectual bastards, but I don't apologise for it nor do I think that it is wrong. I just realise that, especially in type and on the internet, it is a recipe for wank and drama. (Its a recipe for drama in real life too, but I know how to cope with that because there are reasons why one of those people will always be my friend no matter how much we argue while the other one is someone I'm probably never going to see again now anyway.)

And, that's it. This has taken me some three days to write. It will probably sit at the top of my LJ for another three months before I get round to writing anything else to follow it up, which will no doubt in its turn be just as melodramatic. However, tonight I'm going to have a go at a 24 hour comic (although I'll probably have to do it in a few x hour stints), which should be fun.

Isn't life wonderful.

Anger

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 20:17:16 GMT

Cocking America.

This is a blanket statement, I realise. I shall qualify. I got really excited for a minute, because I thought that the new Quantum Gravity book was out. Then I got annoyed, because it looked like it had been out for a while and I thought I'd missed it, despite having been in a bookshop only last week or something. And then I discovered that it was out, but only in America. This is why I started swearing. It's bad enough getting spoiled on things like Heroes, but at least you expect to be on the lookout for it, cos it's an American series. I'm so mad, I think I'm going to have to start reading this Mercedes Lackey novel that's sitting by my desk.

err...

Borders Signing/Sketching Event

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:15:38 GMT

So, I've just realised that the last time I actually wrote a livejournal post was when I'd just finished failing my driving test and started on the getting drunk. The world has changed a lot since those heady days, but I do appear to have remained drunk for most of that time. Which is to say, that I still haven't passed my test (the next one's booked for the 18th of August) but I have had a birthday and been for a week in Plymouth with fera_festiva's parents, who have a well stocked fridge.

Also; retirement parties, comics meetings, other people's (fera's) birthdays... god, that was actually a really long time ago, wasn't it? I blame the alcohol on the not posting. That and the fact that I'm supposedly doing the first re-write of the novel I am apparently writing. Re-writing is rubbish, because it ties me to my computer - which is both headache inducing and conducive to pointless internet browsing which often ends up at /b/ anyway, sinkhole of the internet that it is. Which just makes me depressed.
However, over the weekend I had two things that have helped me in this respect, putting a new bulb in my desk lamp and the gradual shedding of my computer's internet capabilities. For reasons far beyond my ken pages like facebook and others have just stopped loading. Although only sometimes.

Regardless, there was excitement over this weekend, woohoo!, as Underfire had a signing/selling/drawing session at Borders. No-one, except for our friends and loved ones, really came to the table that we had had set up next to the kids section. At one point a woman did talk to us about how her 13 year old wanted to do comics, he himself didn't seem too convinced about it, but after looking at Rock Night for a little bit she very quietly put the book down and led her children away.
To pass the time we decided to do a live comic on the easel and paper that had been set up by the Borders staff. It was great, and we even got the three pages finished by three thirty, when we were due to leave and so duly headed don to the pub. The story was an epic tale of struggle across the ages, featuring the battles of Tri-Jaw and Combat Teddy, and I may post it somewhere if I can ever work out a way of getting it scanned. Definitely it will be a back up strip in the next anthology that we do.
So, some of it was fun. We sold one or two comics, and Bob did a drawing of a dragon for an attractive young lady. Borders have said that we can come back anytime we like, because we put in so much effort. And the beer afterwards was a great idea. A success, then, to a certain extent.

Thu, 29 May 2008 19:15:50 GMT

So I failed my driving test today. There is only one thing for it, to get systematically and rigourously drunk. The only reason I haven't started yet is because I was baking for most of the afternoon, that bit of it that I wasn't watching Diagnosis Murder.

After I found out I rang up work and told them that I wanted to take the rest of the day off as holiday, because I couldn't be fucked to go all the way up to Lewes, and as I mentioned, I would have spent the entire afternoon staring at my computer brooding anyway.

As it was, I went into town and got some comics put into the Borders in town. The guy there is realy cool and has been talking about getting us to do an evening or a day in store, either selling or giving a little talk or something, which would be amazing. More news on that when/if it happens.

Now, to the drink.

Reviews

Mon, 19 May 2008 15:09:48 GMT

Excitement.

Got a review through for my comic. It's a little bit ambivalent, but errs towards the side of positive, and I can't complain about the 'out of ten' it gives. I should be able to extract a quote for the back cover for the reprint too.

I was a lttle bit weirded out last night, reading the review, but only because I was very tired and this is the first time anything I've done has had this. I also took a bit of comfort in the fact that my employer got through their first review for the first production of the season this morning - a production which I have watched the many thousands of pounds it has cost build up from my vantage point in the finance office - and that got a much worse review with a lower equivalent on the star rating.

This is probably not the best way to think about these things.

Bristol 2008 Expo Report

Fri, 16 May 2008 14:12:40 GMT

Underfire Comics went to the 2008 Bristol International Comics Expo last weekend and a fun time was had by all. No-one had an actual camera so we didn't really get any pictures of the event, except for a few that I took on my phone - but fortunately I did get one picture which I feel summed up the entire event for us, far more so than would one of Stormtroopers from the UK Garrison parading cosplayers about, or that one Goth woman who's worn the same clothes for years on end and yet whose stand remains resolutely uninteresting. Behold, Jon at the layby where we stopped for a fag break on the way home:

Friday started things on good form, taking a 20 mile detour just outside Bath. We did get to drive through a town called Binegar, though, which has to be a bonus. That was four of us, Jon, Oli, Bob and me. We got to Bristol in the end, and even found the hotel, wandered about a little, had some falafal and made our first mistake. We asked if there was a WH Smiths nearby. We got a look like we had asked where to buy drugs, and the solemn response that you would have to go to Bath for that kind of thing.

Interesting.

Anyway, generally it was cool, we got our boxes of stuff from the boot and went over to the convention hall to set up our stand, picking up Dan Cox on a bridge along the way. We had a great moment of strangeness when we were there, as we asked the organisers if their were any backing boards left, and were initially greeted with a frosty 'no', but then he asked who we were, and we said 'Underfire... with Colin. Colin Dinnie' and suddenly there was a backing board available, and definately we could do something (even if the board only had one foot and so spent the entire weekend swaying precariously). It was great. It was like being in the Mafia, or knowing the secret code word, so thank you Colin for being so damn nice and getting everyone to know and like you.

Of course, the problem with having a backing board is that you need something to put up on it. More on that later. (Although Dan C had had the foresight to bring a frequent flyers poster, and we had a bunch of postcards with us too, so in the end it wasn't too bad.) And so, pleased with our work, we went to the pub. That was around 6. Eventually the rest of the Underfire team turned up and joined the drinking. We didn't get back to the hotel until about 1.30 am.

Next morning I got up annoyingly early and spent an hour and a half wandering around Bristol with Dan Bell. We were looking fdor somewhere to buy first painkillers, and then photocopying and raffle tickets and stuff. Photocopiers were their none. Seriously, everywhere was closed on a Saturday that would do it. This is a new experience for me having lived in London and then Brighton, you just expect things to be open. Instead, we just stumbled around this horribly flat (topographically), empty city, hungover and feeling increasingly lost. And we couldn't get anything to put on the backing board. Downer.

At 9 (I think) we hit the convention hall and started putting up our display, our paltry looking display of postcards and a few books pinned to the backing board. It was alright though, we made up for it with the table, which looked really good, and had a positive army of lego skeletons that were to be our main selling gimmick for the weekend. Anyone who bought a book got a skeleton for free (I've still got a bunch, actually, so if you feel like buying some of our books at the Underfire shop and you email though to the address that's on that page about the skeletons I'll shove a few in the envelope...). It was the best sales pitch I think we've ever had.

What was fun was that, with the books we had on the table we had something that would appeal to most comics fans. Jon's Cold Sweat Day Dreams is really 'alt' for want of a better word. Outsider art, that if you get, you'll really get. Dan Cox had a bunch of new stuff, including Human DK Dynamic and True Romance Comix #2 that occupied the sci-fi/action end of the spectrum nicely, and of course Rock Night sat in the middle like a colossus of er... apocolyptic proportions. It was our best seller too.

We did well, and sold a good 100 comics or so over the weekend, which was pretty gratifying. Talked to some nice people too, including an amazing kid who was only about 12 and yet really liked Jon's work. She rocked. Unfortunately we didn't get too much response on the actual quality of our work, although a bunch of people did take photos of the skeletons, the mini Watchmen characters that fera_festiva made and, on one occasion, my Pokemon shirt.

Saturday night was a drinkning night too, although not as heavy as the night before, and in true Underfire style we managed to completely alienate ourselves from everyone else. I'm starting to understand a little bit (or rather, I'm beginning to admit to myself) the reason why we're not that popular and well known (apart from Colin of course) within the small press community. It's because we're antisocial bastards who, rather than hang out and chat shit with everyone on the main bar, found oursleves a balcony that you had to get to through a conference room, and sat talking about a superhero who's special power was having a shitty finger... Bryan Talbot was on the balcony too, but we didn't talk to him either. This was where the quote in the cut text comes from.

Sunday was tiring, but we sold more comics, bought a few more comics and scribbled down some sketches. While I did manage to sell a copy of Rock Night to a superhero fan on the basis of four pages of incredibly badly drawn superhero pisstake I think the best trade actually came on Saturday when Iain swapped a sketch and a skeleton for a can of Stella from a drunk.

Umm, that's really it for my convention report. The huge coffee I had this morning is wearing off and I really ought to get some work done too.

Breaking My Internet Anonymity

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:15:25 GMT

This feels a little bit weird, not least because it's not a very good interview. It was conducted by email, and what with me doing it while very tired I forgot to actually answer one of the questions, and generally its a little bit stupid. But, more importantly, it is an interview with me about comics that I did. Woo!

Oh fuck. The Internet is Here

Comics

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:15:28 GMT

Our new comic has been printed. YAY!

It looks really nice too. Hopefully either this evening or tomorrow I will get a proper page for it up on the Underfire website.

Living in a Sci-Fi

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:00:17 GMT

Right, so, after my angry blip last week I think I'm feeling a bit better about the whole promotional thing. I'm still deeply unsuited to that sort of thing, my default position remaining one of reticence rather than boastfulness but I'm learning to live with it all.

In fact, I'm much better at this sort of thing when I have concrete project to follow with a clear, realisable goal. Hence, I have now finished the coding on the new online shop. After a false start last night where I used the wrong buttons from paypal and this morning spent replacing them when I should have been at work. Yay.

This is one of the things that I really like about the internet. I totally fucked up last night and uploaded something that was wrong at midnight, just before I had to crash out and I didn't have a chance to put any of the files onto my pen drive either then or this morning. But, I could come in to work, download the files, do all the changes in wordpad and then ftp them up again from a free browser-based ftp program (not one I'd want to use for big projects, mind, but the fact that I could do it at all is key).

It was brilliant, because I actually felt a bit like I was living in a cyberpunk novel. I mean, I know that technically its pretty mundane, but what I liked about it was the fact that just sitting at my desk, and not using anything that I don't have normally on my computer (and I don't work in IT or anything like that) I was able to jury rig my technology into doing something cool.

Now where's my damn jet bike?

Self Promote. Rant. Fail.

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:19:09 GMT

I had meant to do a post about all of this earlier in the week, but didn't get around to it. Anyway, exciting news, my life is now my own again. The comic has gone to the printers, and in fact I'm expecting to get the proofs in either today or tomorrow. This means that, all being well, the book should probably be ready by the end of next week. A full two weeks before Bristol.

I think that that's got to be some kind of Underfire record.

Of course, the next thing is publicity. Which sucks and is soul destroying. Partly this is due to the way that I have found, even if people say they would love to do this and that to help you promote your book, they don't, but it is also a general observation.

Self promotion is a bastard of an art form and a horribly tricky thing to get right, especially in the small presses and so on where there is no real core audience already out there, but rather a group of your peers (basically other fans) who may or may not be interested in taking a look at what it is that you're doing. Which is why the convention circuit is so important, because its a place where people are looking for something new, and - on the creators side - it doesn't take up all of your time.

Because time is the worst thing. As a fan of any media one generally enjoys discussing it with other fans, but doing so - i.e. maintaining a presence on various message boards and forums - requires a whole lot of time and energy, time and energy which as a writer/artist you have to put into your work. If you aren't then you aren't really a writer/artist etc, but one of those (many) people who would like to be the above, but never will be because they are too busy talking about how great they will be when they finally ~~start~~ finish work on this great idea that they have.

Well, that's a little prescriptive, it is possible to be both active creatively and in fandom, but to do so while also maintaining a full time job, relationship and maybe even a social life is not the easiest of balancing acts.

Anyway, what end up happening is that, as you are out of the loop and not a regular poster anywhere and so on, you (me) find a big problem when it comes to trying to inform people of the project that you have just finished (especially as, if you're like me, you like to keep quiet about things until they reach the critical mass point where they have to happen, in some form at least, - because there's nothing worse than having someone ask you 'what happened to that project you were mouthing off about last year,' when the answer is 'I never finished it'). No-one knows who you are and so if you start going on to coms and message boards with your great big unwieldy press release everyone ignores you like the spammer you are.

God damn, I'm such a whiny bastard I should get myself a livejournal and be done with it.

Oh.

Underfire Comics Business Plan: Draw Comics, ?, Profit.

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:50:30 GMT

I have discovered the secret of the '?': Bitter recrimination, angry infighting and procrastination followed by dangerous deadline chasing.

Actually, I do us a disservice, but still. I just got an invoice through at work and saw how much someone got paid to edit a programme, and I compared that with my reward for editing this comic - which is a headache - and felt that I had somehow come up short.

Oh well, just found out that I should have three more pages in today. I should just learn to love fear...

Holy Crap

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 09:34:12 GMT

Gary Gygax has died! This is a rubbish state of affairs, damnit.

I could write a big memorial thing, but that's not really my style, so instead know this: if I wasn't at work right now I would be drinking that man a toast, and I will do so tonight. That is all.

Roll on.

Rock Night Approaches

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:58:28 GMT

So close. So very close.

Things are actually looking up right now. The official deadline for finished art to be returned to me approaches imminently and there is actually every chance that, give or take a week or two, it will actually be adhered to - giving just enough time to letter and proof the comic before sending it of to the printers in early April. Wow.

As a progress report, of 100 or so pages of comic I have had in and lettered 45 - almost half, which is both encouraging and disheartening to certain degrees. Encouraging because most of the time in small press I'd have been lucky to have had in any pages by now, but disheartening because half does not a comic make and there really is no room for running late, because if we don't have the comic to sell by the Bristol convention then we... well, basically we're fucked.

Because we've already paid for the table to sell it from, booked the hotel rooms (although there is always HDKD! to pimp while we're there, and endless pointless back issues) and also mainly because Bristol is (or rather, conventions are, and Bristol is the only one we regularly attend) the only place where we can sell any significant amount of comics.

However, it's not completely doom, and in fact, as I said before, things really are looking up. I eagerly await the arrival of two full story arcs worth of art, around 20 pages, which I have been told are almost finished (and I've seen jpgs of one of those sets) - each with only about two or three pages left to finish off. I've seen inks of another three or so pages, and have received promises on three or four more.

In fact, I only have two story arcs completely unaccounted for, and one of those is in the hands of someone who has shown before that he can work to deadlines. He's been very quiet of late, which either means he's been beavering away diligently, or he just doesn't want to face me. Hmm. (That's one of the things that sucks about being an editor btw. People don't want to see you anymore - unless they want to ask you incredibly complicated questions... I'll be glad when this is over and I am editor no more - until I ~~get roped into~~ volunteer to do the next one).

As a special gift for reading this far (and not in the hope that anyone who reads this might want to buy the comic or anything at all) I thought I'd put up a couple of favourite, non-spoiler pages. w00t.

I would totally buy this book.

Crisis management!

I'm really only writing this because I have nothing else to do

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:34:40 GMT

I seem to say the same thing every time I post at the moment.

So, now, after many weeks of intense activity - what with moving house and having stupidly large amounts of work to do (well, compared with my normal workload) today I have had to spread a total of maybe half an hours work over a full 7-hour day. At least tommorow I'm taking a half day with the last of my holiday so it shouldn't be too painful.

What's good though is that I've (re)started working on Dr Stu while I'm here. I can just about make it look like I'm working because I do sometimes have to do some typing. So, even though I know that no-one reading this actually cares, except possibly fera_festiva and then as it's possibly changed quite a bit from the original idea as I've been writing it I'm not sure even she's going to be entirely excited by it. Oh dear.

The other thing that may make the eventual appearence of the Dr Stu stories a more likely experience is the immenant arrival of fera's computer, which hopefully this time will work. (After the last three orders got cancelled the one which did arrive, just before we moved, didn't switch on...) Having two computers rather than just the one which we have to squabble over will mean I actually have time in the evenings to write things like Stu, which are otherwise on the lower end of my list of priorities, as opposed to the lettering for Rock Night, for instance, or ~~destroying my eyeballs by continually going on the rule 34 website~~ hitting refresh on my friends page again and again.

Of course, there's still Phantom Hourglass to complete, so I wouldn't hold your breath.