Classical Comics - three new books etc

Latest news (from the north, east, west and south): The three other books Ive written for Classical Comics are in various stages of develpment. Here is the cover to THE CANTERVILLE GHOST and SWEENEY TODD, plus three interior art pages from WUTHERING HEIGHTS by John M Burns. I am very pleased to see John's beautiful painted work and i hope the mix of his art and my script can come up with a good version of this story (which i preferable to a bad version). His JANE EYRE book for Classical didnt really feel quite right to me, so our WUTHERING HEIGHTS book will hopefully come out better. Jesus and buddha - im doing a book with John M Burns!

Declan Shalvey is also doing a great job on the SWEENEY TODD artwork, and - again - this is going to be a better showcase from him that the FRANKENSTEIN book he already did for Classical. I thought that book was great, i loved it - but Declan's art on SWEENEY TODD is even better! My Celtic brother... click on the post title to go to the Classical Comics web site.

Other books: the BUSKERS book is almost finsished, all 122 pages of it. Been working on this since last summer. Isn't it always a bit sad when you comer to the end of a book that's been with you for so long? It's like a favourite flatmate moving out...
but then we have the beautiful published book to look forward too! Plus, of course, there will be a film version of this story too. Dear Alan Moore has a stance of completely distancing himself from film versions of his books. and i very much admire that. What individual will power to say no to both the fame and the money! To paraphrase Napoleon's comment about Goethe: " There is a MAN, and I was expecting just a guy from Northhampton!." But in this case,Im off the hook - as my comic book version has been made BEFORE the film version, and the director JEYMES SAMUEL gave me and Michiru Morikawa a lot of frredom to do the book in our own way. I read on Jeymes' blog that he is now workng on the soundtrack for it with Damon Alburn, of the band BLUR. Groovy...

The AX collection, with Top Shelf, is progressing, but a little slowly - 400 pages takes a while to do! But we are approaching half done now and each of the little alternative Japanese manga stories contaned in it are fxxing wonderful! Odd, playful, sad, reflective, funny, deeply personal, scary, exciting, moving, original - its all there. This book is really going to be a gem.

THE STORY OF LEE, with NBM publishing, has started up with a bang, we are up to 20 pages of the art done so far, myself and Chie Kutsuwada. I'm ahead on the script, up to page 50... in honesty (not lies) its a mixture of joy at how its turning out and fear that I am not making the script BITING enough... I need to think more about how I am really going to make it come ALIVE. The begining of a book is a bit like going into a party of strangers where you only know one person, who is anyway at the back of the room somewhere. A scary/exciting feeling - and you only get into your stride once you've been there a couple of hours, and then, maybe not at all. It might be a terrible party where no one talks to you, and you feel a big failure. Or you might pull it off - relax, enjoy tourself, become popular. Can you dig what i mean? Anyway, I've been to Hong Kong, where the story is set, a few times now, and taken hundreds of research photos, observed and asked about some aspects of HK people's behvaiour. So that should help me make this 'party' a success.

But, possibly the biggest news is that - at last - I got a contract to do a book with Kodansha in Tokyo. They are the biggest publisher in Japan, therefore i suppose also one of the biggest in the world ("THIS world, the one we're standin' in the now?", as Ricki Fulton once said). Ive been working for 2 years to get this contract - popping up to meet publishers and editors in Tokyo, writing scripts samples, making art samples with various good manga ka etc... and now its paid off. The book is a long historical manga, of the type I love to do, based on the classic bushido samurai text HAGAKURE. The artist is Chie Kutsuwada and she is about to start on the script. Yokkatta!

QUOTE TODAY:
"This is why we must keep passionately striving after what constitutes a story: how should we orient our efforts to renew or, rather, to perpetuate the novel?"
- Georges Bataille, 'Blue of Noon' appendix."