I Spy CGI

It's funny what can prove difficult to draw. Cylindrical spaceships, for example, should be pretty easy, except try making them look interest- ing... the only way to get a bit of dynamism is to use fairly strong end-on perspective, and at that point, getting them to recede convincing- ly can be a bit tricky... they're so simple, you see, there's nowhere to hide your mistakes.
Hence the use of CGI for something that looks as if you should be able to draw it with your eyes shut. It was the same with War of the Worlds... in a story packed with fiddly Victorian architecture and complicated Martian tripods, the only thing I used CGI for was lending the right weight and grandeur to the huge, featureless Martian cylinders...

Free Fall

It's always struck me as funny that, on the whole, comics shy away from showing characters in zero gravity. You can understand it in film, for though modern effects have made it possible to do protracted free fall sequences (think Apollo 13 and Red Planet), it's still a budget-stretching exercise and presumably awkward to film; with comics there's no such restriction.
Even so, there's been a tendency to stick with the convention of artificial gravity (a short scene in Bring Me Liberty being the only exception that leaps to mind), possibly because of a fear that the zero-gee environment would distract from the storytelling.
Ever in search of new ways of spicing up talking heads sequences, I decided to use free fall in the last part of the Great Game. The scene in question is mostly exposition, and there were some worries the effect might be too distracting (when I introduced the idea, Ian asked me if I'd consider having the characters wear magnetic boots), but in fact it seems to work okay, and it has one unexpected benefit; having the characters able to drift around freely makes it a lot easier to fit the speech balloons in :-)

Time Lag

One of the things about making a living from comics is that you have to be fairly conservative about working methods - your continued survival depends on being able to turn out X pages a week reliably and consistently.
The upshot is that I tend to do most of my experimenting in my sketchbooks, and even when I find something new that I like, it can take years for it to percolate into my commercial work.
The sketch shown here, done in the autumn of 2003, turned out to be the seed of something that I hope will come to fruition in Stickleback, my next big project after The Great Game. I've already given it a try-out in a short strip I've done for the Semana Negra book festival in Gijon (northern Spain). At the same time, I can't let myself get too enthusiastic about new ideas, since I still have sixteen pages of The Great Game to knock on the head, and that's six weeks'-odd worth of work...

A Shameless Plug...

Opening double-page from the Ian Edginton interview by Matthew Badham. Artwork from Red Seas, right, by Steve Yeowell. Cover from Leviathan, integrated into layout, left, by me. Design by Pye.

...for this month's Judge Dredd Megazine which features an interview with my old partner-in-crime Ian Edginton. It's an excellent read, illustrated with lots of images from our joint projects, including a preview of the cover of the forthcoming Leviathan collection (I don't have a date on that yet, btw, but it's definitely coming forth).
They've also used my 2002 photograph of Ian, which funnily enough, is more of a thrill than seeing my artwork used; I suppose I'm used to being in print as an artist, but not as a photographer.

Also, 11/10 to editor Matt Smith for finally reprinting one of Mike McMahon's stonking colour strips from the 1981 Judge Dredd Annual in full, albeit slightly over-livid, colour. IMHO, the six colour strips McMahon produced for the 1981 & 1982 annuals (along with Slaine: Sky Boats and The Last American,) represent his best work, and have been unjustly neglected for a long time. I hope we'll see the other colour strips reprinted in the coming months.

Above: page two of Compulsory Purchase, written by John Wagner (writing as John Howard), art by Mike McMahon, reprinted in The Judge Dredd Megazine 247. This copy scanned from the 1981 Judge Dredd Annual.

(If you've missed this issue (Meg 247/25 July 2006) at the newsagent's, you can order back issues from Tharg's Future Shop on the 2000AD website)

Busy, Busy Day

Finished off the Dredd cover this morning, started on a new batch of Great Game pages this afternoon, including designing a new generation of Martian cylinders (see above). Even managed to fit in the weekly Salsa class, at which the ratio of delicious wiggly girlies to sweaty hairy manly types stubbornly remains at 3:1.
Never mind.

My Dredd Still Has No Nose...

...and now he's gone a funny colour too :-)

Part-finished inks for the Dredd cover. The weird colours will help me mask off bits of the drawing when I'm colouring.

Thought For The Day

Don't get it?
The Incredible Hulk is the trademark and copyright © Marvel Enertainment Group, Inc.
The Incredible Hulk was created by Stan Lee & Steve Ditko.

More Burbling About My Workspace

Hall Of Aberrant Kittens,
originally uploaded by The Glass Eye.

2006 was The Year Of Being Given Calendars - we received six in all, of which two were cat calendars, one from Bad Cat and one from Page-A-Day.
Surprisingly, the Page-A-Day calendar has provided the best contributions to my Hall of Aberrant Kittens (click on image for details.)

Draw The World Together

A quick plug for the Draw The World Together art auction, to raise money to help underpriveliged kids around the world. My contribution is a double-page spread from the last episode of Leviathan (above).
Because all my work is done on computer, there's no original artwork, so I'm supplying an A2 durable photo-print of the above, plus an original sketch in real honest-to-goshy-goodness ink on non-imaginary paper (see end of post).

Organizer Boo Cook is working like a demon to get everything together for the auction on August 9th, but at the moment this year's contributions aren't yet up (there's a page that says "auction closed" but that's from last year). I'll re-post the link once the site has been updated.

Sometimes The Magic Works...

Today I ar bin mostly pretending to be Ron Cobb.

Thinking Inking

A big "Tu es le Grandpere maintenant!" to my old mate Paddy Lamb for putting me on to a new working method, though it took me long enough to start using it.
He probably won't even remember the occasion; one night perhaps eight years ago at his folks' place, showing me photocopies of Roy Crane's Buzz Sawyer newspaper strip that he'd brought back from the Kubert School, he pointed out that many of the old artists used to add the spot blacks before inking in the outlines. Now as a self-taught inker, this struck me as a bit mad; I'd always inked outlines first and kind of assumed you had to.
I had a try at it when I got home and found it terribly intimidating. In the end I gave up on the idea and pretty much forgot about it, especially as all my work at the time was colouring. Still, it must have been percolating in the back of my head, because a couple of weeks ago, when I was racking my brains for ways to speed up my work on The Great Game, the notion surfaced again.
What changed this time I'm not sure; the move to working on computer (meaning all the chunks of black are now editable) probably has a lot to do with it, and you never know, my skills may even have improved a bit in the last decade (chortle). Whatever the reason, I took to it like a duck to water; it's quicker because I'm not drawing a load of lines that I then black out, and the drawing somehow looks a little more elegant too.
So eight years on, I suppose I should say, "Enfin, tu es le Grandpere, Paddy!"
Bliss.

The Careful Art Of Playing With Other People's Toys (Nearly)

One of the great things about my job is the number of opportunities I get to nourish my inner ten-year-old; in fact, one came about two months ago, when I was drawing the voyage to Mars for The Great Game #2.
I had to design a troop-carrier rocket for the long journey, and while earlier rocket designs for The Great Game had been inspired by classic needle-type 50's designs (such as the rocket from The Quatermass Experiment), this sequence (where we show in detail all the stages of the flight from Earth to Moon to Mars) seemed a natural opportunity for a tribute to the "launch porn" sequences from such Gerry Anderson TV shows as Thunderbirds. By happy coincidence, my favourite childhood spaceship (yep, I was one of those boys) was the giant Mars probe Zero X from Thunderbirds Are Go/TV 21, so that was the natural inspiration.

Troop carrier takes off from Rendlesham Spaceport with Quatermass-style RAM Cruiser in foreground, half-completed inks over rendering from 3D program.
The coloured lines indicate detail that will be painted in rather than drawn (smoke and flames in this case).
The chequer effect on the CGI makes it easier to drawn in additional detail by hand.

When you're working professionally, you have to be careful treading the line between "tribute" and "plagiarism," but luckily, the script called for an upright Apollo-style rocket, whereas Anderson's Zero X took off horizontally from a runway on two pairs of detachable wings. By taking details from the original and transferring them to the new upright design, I think I've made something which will evoke the original for those in the know.

Troop carrier separates from nose cone and lifting bodies over the English Channel,
half-completed inks over rendering from 3D program.

Incidentally, did anyone else find it odd that the Zero X used a heat-shielded nose cone for take-off, but not when re-entering the Earth's atmosphere? And does anyone else find it worrying that I'm still thinking about this sh*t when I'm pushing forty?

*i

Cover for The Great Game #1

Quick sneak-peek at the back and front covers for The Great Game #1 - designer Amy Arendts has done her usual excellent job. I spent the better part of two days on the front cover, but in the end, I think the back - which I bashed off in about half an hour - is a better piece of work. Typical.

This was my original rough sketch for the front and back covers - am I Mister Design-On-The-Page or what?

Thought For The Day...

Hairyplane!

There's been enough wittering from me the last few days, so I thought I'd show you some designs from the first issue of The Great Game, which will be out soon; this is a VTOL biplane airliner inspired very loosely by the old Comet jetliner.

I first do very rough ink sketches to work out the shape; none of these are exactly the finished version, but they help to pull the ideas in my head into focus.

The next step is to build the plane in a 3D modelling program; if this seems like cheating, the process was inspired by the working method developed by Frank Hampson's team on Dan Dare. They would build detailed models and photograph them; I make rough models in CGI and work from those.

Most of the elements (wings, engines & fuselage) are taken from free models supplied with the program; I rearrange, scale and distort them to get the look I want, which is much quicker than trying to build from scratch, especially for a newbie modeller like me. The chequer pattern on the plane (and on the slabs in the background) is to help with drawing in additional detail in perspective.

This is the half-finished drawing; the plane has been inked in, and the other elements roughly drawn in following the perspective from the CGI rendering.Details like cockpit windows are much easier to draw by hand than to model.

"An author can type one mile as easily as he can one foot."

So said Harry Harrison,* and it's a thought that often springs to mind when I'm working on a script by Ian Edginton.
Now don't get me wrong; Ian's not one of those writers who write impossible panel descriptions, ("A thousand indians come over the rise, each one wearing a wristwatch showing half-past three. The cavalrymen have turned away from us to look at them. Their faces are grim. Oh, and by the way, this is the first of sixteen panels on this page and there are four large blocks of text in this panel ) in fact Ian's scripts are so challenging precisely because he has a great sense of what will fit on the page. He also has a wonderful visual imagination (possibly better than mine), and a determination to push me to my limits. With every batch of script I get from Ian, I know there'll be one page in there that will make me go "Oh f*ck, how do I draw that?" but I also know that dreaded page will be the best thing in the book. Look at my most memorable images (the charging teddy bears from Kingdom of the Wicked or the beached mile-long ocean liner from Leviathan ) and you'll see Ian's handywork.
(Sometimes he admits he purposely sets me something complicated to draw when he's behind with script and he needs to keep me quiet for a bit - sort of Calpol for the comic artist)
When you get a script, some things leap off the page as being difficult or time-consuming; others sneak up on you, and yet others just balloon in complication until you keep finding things you've missed every time you think you've finished. Part three of The Great Game contains a sequence set in an abandoned alien city; there are big set-up shots I knew would be complicated (especially with my mania for drawing architecture) but the surprise hold-up was on a smallish panel showing an empty refectory. All those chairs and tables, you see.
In perspective.
You'd think that drawing a room like that would be quicker if it's not full of people, but the opposite is true; if it's packed full you can pick an angle where the people in the foreground obscure much of the background, and just imply that there's lots of stuff behind them. If there are no people, there's nothing for it but to draw lots of chairs and tables.
In perspective.
(Confession time - actually, like many of the backgrounds and vehicles in The Great Game, I built the room in a 3D modeller and traced off from the rendering; though by the time you've done that, it's no quicker than plotting the perspective yourself, and the inking still has to be done by hand.)


Four stages of the accursed refectory panel; Top left: CGI rendering, top right: rough (for editorial approval), bottom left: inks traced by hand from CGI rendering, bottom right: final coloured version.

The current page I'm working on in part 4 - and here I have to be careful not to give away the ending of the story - features a rain of small, liquid-filled glass globes onto the surface of a planet. The globes burst on impact and liquid splashes out. Luckily, my drawing programme (Adobe Illustrator) has a neat feature called "symbols" that lets me make a single globe and then "spray" hundreds of copies of it onto the artwork. The copies can be shoved around or scaled, and they remain tied to the master drawing, so when I decided they all needed more highlights on them (or different highlights to match the lighting in different panels) I only had to edit one master drawing and all the little copies updated themselves to match. Neat. And in this mood of self-congratulation I was just about to wrap the page up when I had a horrible thought.
On the last panel on the page, the big, dramatic, half-page panel, most of the globes are meant to have hit the ground and smashed. This meant that everything in the panel should be covered in little paintball-splats. And by "everything," I mean tanks. Lots of tanks.
In perspective.
Still, now that the cursing is over, the page is put to bed and my RSI has stopped twingeing, I have to admit that, as per usual, that page is probably going to be the best one in the whole issue. I say "probably" because I haven't got all the script for this issue yet, so there may be something even more baroque lurking in wait for me.
And if so - well, I'll curse, but in the end, the issue will be even better, and that'll be no bad thing.
You do, after all, have to keep these things.
In perspective.

*from Mechanismo, Reed Books 1978, ISBN 0 89169 504 4.
*u

Alex Toth, No "Buts-"

It was from Diplodocus Peacocks' photostream on Flickr that I found out, belatedly, about the death of Alex Toth.
One of the great draughtsmen of comics, Toth was also one of those figures about whom a "but-" always hangs like a black cloud. For all his great ability, Toth never worked on material that reflected his talents; so unlike his contemporaries, Jack Kirby, Gil Kane and Joe Kubert, there are no great Toth characters, no body of work that can act as a fitting epitaph. There are a couple of volumes of reprints, mostly sketchbooks with the odd strip thrown in, beautiful to look at "but-" not much of a read, if truth be told (that said, they're more than worth picking up for the beauty of the drawings alone - as an all-round Toth Source-book, I thoroughly recommend Manuel Auad's Alex Toth Black & White , from which the above illustration is taken).
The brief epitaphs on the Internet seem to put this down to Toth's reportedly "difficult" character and unwillingness to compromise, yet these qualities could also be said to be true of fellow great outsider Steve Ditko, who co-created Marvel's signature character, Spiderman, and went on to create The Question, Mister A and The Creeper in a career that determinedly pushed farther out into the wilderness with every passing year. Ditko can even be said to have introduced a new form to American comics; the Polemic Comic, characterized by his collection Avenging World, in which the narrative comic and the diagram dance a libertarian waltz across the pages, and the raising of taxes to pay for free medical care for children is likened to highway robbery.
Out beyond the limits of commercial publication as Ditko now is (he effectively has to self-publish), he will leave a legacy which is strikingly and distinctively his.
Perhaps Alex Toth simply wasn't a distinctive enough writer to become a Ditko. If so, he never found a Stan Lee to plug the gap for him. Either way, that nagging "But-" still remains.
And it was that "But-" that led me to Toth in the first place. Spotty and in my teens*, I remember reading an interview with Brian Bolland about his then up-and-coming strip for Escape magazine, "Mister Mammoulian," wherein he mentioned that he wanted to create something of his own in order to (quoting from memory) "avoid ending up like Alex Toth." That comment stuck with me, and although it was many years before I was in a position to pick and choose projects, I've worked with an eye to making something that was distinctively mine from the very beginning. Eighteen years on, I have a small library of books in print with Dark Horse, with more coming out this year from Rebellion, most of that due to my partnership with my own House of Ideas, Ian Edginton. The rights to a body of my early work from Deadline magazine revert to me next year, and I'll be looking to get those back into print too.
I have many friends in comics who have, and continue to, make a far steadier living than I ever have, but all their work belongs to others. Owning your own material can come with a heavy price, too, because a publisher will never give you as much money upfront for a creator-owned deal. Comics is a marginal business, and the days of big advances are long gone; last year, a poor dollar conversion rate meant that my cheques from Dark Horse were barely covering my outgoings. Nevertheless, if I possibly can, I will weather such storms for this reason; I want a body of work that, however poor, is unique to me; my little scratched graffito on the cell wall of life.
And for that determination, and the results therefrom, I thank Alex Toth, as much as for the beautiful art he created over the years.
No "Ifs," no "Buts."


*as the result of a financial settlement with my paternal grandparents, I agreed never to be "a teenager."
Illustration © 1995 Alex Toth, from Alex Toth Black & White, Auad Publishing 1999, ISBN 0-9669381, used here for review purposes under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

My Dredd Has No Nose

Tharg-in-residence Matt Smith has kindly given permission for me to post these pencils from my upcoming cover for 2000AD . Dredd will have stuff behind him, of course - but if I showed you that, it would give the game away :-)

The Precarious New Perch Of Goldmine The Lizard

My poor old 17" Apple CRT monitor has finally given up the ghost. It's foolish to get sentimental over inanimate objects, I know, but it's been part of my daily working life for the past five and a half years, seeing me through most of the work that's made my name, including Scarlet Traces, Leviathan and WOTW as well as most of my Dredd stories. Sadly, it has to go; it's developed an increasingly-less intermittent fault where the picture will suddenly become vertically compressed like the title sequences in old pan-and-scan movies from Sunday afternoon television in the 1970's.
I was dreading having to find a replacement; CRT monitors are becoming rarer than hen's teeth, and my experience of LCD screens (from my laptops) was not vastly encouraging. After a bit of research on the Internet I was persuaded enough that technology had moved on to take a chance on a 19" TFT monitor by Formac, a German company whose excellent Firewire hard disks have been entrusted with my archives for the past year or so. I took delivery today, and picture quality is as good as my old monitor, there's none of that contrast-shifting that plagues my laptop screen, and the styling is pretty Mac-like (you can get them in a variety of finishes to match your particular Mac if you care about that sort of thing; I went for iBook white because it was cheapest).
This left one last problem - given that the new monitor is much thinner, where will the Colony of Guardian Toys that lived on top of the CRT now live?
They've had to shift to the top of a nearby bookcase, and the cast of thousands (including Gamera, Playmobil Devil and Mister Wingéd Frog) have given way to Goldmine The Lizard, who finally gets to embrace his destiny; Jeremy Dennis bought him as a monitor lizard for me back in 1999.
So now, instead of being peppered by a shower of lightweight plastic toys every time I knock my desk, there's a satisfying thud as Goldmine's glittery, sand-filled body hits the deck.
Bliss.

"Fear Not," Said He, For Mighty Dredd had Seized Their Troubled Minds

The trouble with getting to draw a character that you've loved since childhood (at least, one as susceptible to interpretation as Judge Dredd) is working out how you're going to draw him. When Alan Barnes offered me my first Dredd strip back in October 2003, that was what leapt to mind. I've never been one for sketching other people's characters in my own time, so though I had a clear idea of what I didn't like in a Judge Dredd, that didn't really add up to having a clear idea of what my Dredd would look like.
I've done 40-odd pages of Dredd in the past three years, and sort of groped my way towards a version I can live with, but it wasn't till someone asked me for a Dredd sketch at Bristol, and my hand slipped as I was roughing out the shape of the head in pencil, that I suddenly saw what I really wanted my Dredd to look like. I made sure to do a quick rough drawing to make sure I wouldn't forget the proportions (above), then set Old Stony Face aside to bash out more Great Game.
Then just the other day, Tharg-in-residence Matt Smith obligingly asked me to do a Dredd cover for 2000AD (don't have a Prog number, but it's needed by the end of June). So pretty soon I'll get to do my "proper" version for real...
Bliss.

A Sad, Strange Criminal Was Harvey Dent...

Lucky the half-face cat survives another winter...,
originally uploaded by The Glass Eye.

On the way back from the shops, spotted Lucky the cat for the first time this year. Despite having an eye gouged out and his little head dinted in, he's very friendly, bless him, though his injuries do give him the genuine Two-Face grimace when he meows.

Bliss.

Packing it all in

Want to know what being a comic artist is about? Packing, that's what. I always start out with the intention of making some great new thing that'll redefine the medium, but in the end, it's always comes down to packing, cramming it all in.
The first thing is the script - now I have to say, I'm lucky working with Ian, who's very good at pacing and always gives me breathing room when needed - but even so, the first task is packing all those panels into the particular format rectangle that is your page, packing them in such an order that they'll make sense as a story when the reader comes along. Because comics, oh dearie me yes, comics is all about telling stories.
(And it has to be said that a script is itself a masterly feat of packing - fitting characterisation, action, plot and dialogue into a fixed number of pages is a task that Ian sweats blood over - drafts and redrafts and angst, oh my).
So how to approach the task? Pick the panel that seems most important to the story, pick the one that contains lots of detail, make those the biggest, fit the others around them, that's my usual approach. Not as easy as it sounds, because the panels can only go in a certain order if you're going to be able to read the page, and there's always one awkward sod that never quite fits where you'd like it to go.
The second step is the first in microcosm; fitting the action and the captions/speech balloons into each panel - but sometimes the flow of the action from panel to panel means it's sensible to place the figures so meaning the speech balloons would have to go in the wrong order, so it's back to altering the composition or tweaking the page layout until everything can be made to fit legibly. Luckily, working on computer means I can save the fine tuning until quite late into the process if I have to - say if I think of a drastically better way of doing things after I've started inking.
But still, it's very like coming back from the shops with a load of frozen food and realising you've forgotten that the freezer is already full - it's all got to go in and it always does, but sometimes, you have to take everything out a couple of times before you work out the right order.
This packing business leaches off the page and colours the rest of my life too. As a freelance, control of my time is my own, but I still have to dedicate so many hours a day to work. It can be difficult maintaining self-discipline, though the spectre of poverty is a great motivating factor - no workee, no eatee, no pay mortgage, end up on streetee.
Still, the shopping does have to be done, the meals cooked, the loo cleaned, the conservatory wrapped in foil to prevent summer meltdown. There's never enough time and I'm never fast enough, but the pages are looking good, and even though there never is enough time, somehow everything gets done in the end. I'm not having to work through the night yet, but it'll come.
So does all this packing-in make me feel like packing it all in? Not a bit - I love this life and I'm sticking with it. What I am going to do is go to bed now so I can make a 5am start tomorrow.
Bliss.

Jim Fixed It For Me!

Wacom Repair,
originally uploaded by The Glass Eye.

Heartfelt thanks due to my Mum's partner Jim who succeeded in fixing a dodgy connection on my venerable Wacom Intuos tablet. No repair place would touch the thing, and apart from finding the cash for a replacement, I hate the idea of dumping something that's been a "faithful friend" for so long - it sometimes depresses me to think of all the stuff - phones, computers and peripherals - that we're forced to throw away because of planned obsolescence. So since he could do no further harm,, I gave it to Jim to have a look at. He's not an electrician, BTW - but he does have a knack for sorting things out, and he takes a mischievous delight in opening and repairing sealed units.
It took him about ten minutes to crack the sealed casing using a jeweller's screwdriver, a table knife and some matchsticks (!) - and if you've ever wondered what's inside the case of a Wacom tablet, the answer is another sealed unit - a disappointing-looking flat metal one with four wires going into one corner.
It turned out to be more difficult than simply stripping out a damaged wire, but after a day or so Jim cracked it and it's back working - my favourite bit of the repair is that under all that tape is a section of plastic bendy straw acting as an armature to protect the cable. Heath-Robinson* for the 21st Century.
I did all of today's work with it, so that's one small one in the eye for the Beast of Planned Obsolescence.
Bliss.


*or Rube Goldberg if you're American.

So Whatever Did Happen To Scarlet Traces 2?

Getting a comic off the ground can be a stop-go business, and despite getting the go ahead for The Great Game in early 2004, various production hold-ups meant I didn't start drawing the first episode (with the exception of three test pages, see inset) until March 2005.
Since the previous Christmas we'd been hearing occasional murmurs that Jeff Wayne (who produced the 1970's War of the Worlds concept album, and who held the European rights to WOTW) was looking to produce a graphic novel to exploit interest in WOTW generated by the Spielberg film. He'd approached Dark Horse in December 2004 but they hadn't been able to come to terms; in April 2005 we heard he'd returned to negotiations, and with the film so close, a deal had been struck allowing us to do our own adaptation from the Wells novel, Because we could use my designs for the Martian tripods, the adaptation effectively became Scarlet Traces #0, giving us a trilogy to sit on the bookshelves. What's more, schools and libraries would be more likely to stock a WOTW adaptation, giving us a bigger market for our own books.
Dark Horse were willing to reschedule The Great Game for the following year. The drawback was that there wasn't time to get a 60-page graphic novel finished before the film came out, so in an odd mirroring of Scarlet Traces, three-page chunks of WOTW were posted on the Dark Horse website as I completed them (it's still up, see links). I designed the pages to be broken in half so they would fit on screen without scrolling. The artwork was finished at the end of November 2005 and WOTW the hardback graphic novel was released last month.
So, if you saw The Great Game solicited in Previews last year, that's where it went - but I'm back on the job now and thundering towards completion...
Bliss.

The Story So Far...

1992: dashing young comic writer Ian Edginton enlists rancid young comic artist Matt "D'Israeli" Brooker in a project called Scarlet Traces, a murder mystery set in a post HG Wells' War of the Worlds Victorian London, where Martian technology has been harnessed to create spider-legged Hansom cabs and heat-ray pistols.
Following a mere 8 years of ceaseless effort by Ian, the project is taken up by Coolbeans Productions as a partly-animated web comic; when Coolbeans folds in 2002, a daring reprint deal sees Scarlet Traces first serialised in The Judge Dredd Megazinein the UK, and then, finally, published as an 88-page hardback graphic novel by Dark Horse Comics in 2003.
Scarlet Traces does well enough that a sequel, Scarlet Traces: The Great Game is commissioned. And now, read on...