Stickleback: London's Burning Part Seven References

Page One: Stickleback's London

This view is accurate in terms of the locations of landmarks and the positioning of the river bends in perspective; however, at the altitude necessary to take in this sweeping view, the individual landmarks would be vanishingly small, so I bumped their sizes up by a factor of five or so to make them visible.

As well as real landmarks such as Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgare Square, The Houses of Parliament, The Tower of London and Tower Bridge, we included the following planned or imaginary buildings:

1) The London Eye - a giant Victorian Ferris wheel, placed, like its 21st Century counterpart, opposite the palace of Westminster.

2) The Crystal Palace - here still occupying its original site in Hyde Park.

3) William Thomas's proposed giant pyramidal cemetery - designed to hold up to five million dead Londoners!

4) The proposed mausoleum for Sir Isaac Newton (the smaller pyramid with the sphere on top). We used this building as the new Greenwich Observatory (where Spry's office was located) in Scarlet Traces, but here it's been moved off Greenwich hill, to make way for:

5) John Flaxman's 200-foot-high statue of Britannia, proposed circa 1800 but never built.

Page One: The Mimsie

Though balloons using actual boats as gondolas is a common steampunk trope, the design of the Mimsie is meant to echo certain characteristics of that fine four-fendered friend, Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, for reasons that will become apparent in the next item.

Personally, I couldn't help but think of Noah and Nelly.

Page Two: Potts

Inspired by the inventor hero of Ian Fleming's 1964 novel (and subsequently 1968 film) Chitty-chitty Bang-bang. Our Potts has been having a hard time of it, and is indebted to Stickleback to boot.

Lowlife: Creation Part Seven: Work-Life Balance

One of the perks of the job: I do my page layouts in the local café

I've talked before about loving the lifestyle of a comic artist. You certainly wouldn't do it just for the money, at least not at my end of the market. Not that I'm complaining about how much I make relative to others in comics, it's just that from a financial point of view, almost any other form of illustration pays better for the number of hours worked.

So why do it? I love storytelling, I love world-building, and yes, I love the connection with an art form that's captivated me since childhood. Comics are cheap to produce and so offer the creator the possibility of total control. I used to say I could spin a whole world out of a few pounds worth of paper and ink; these days a Mac, a Wacom tablet and the necessary software pushes that budget up a bit, but still, the principle holds. Even on high-profile work for 2000AD, I enjoy a surprising amount of control over what I do; as an artist I have to follow the writer's script, but within that I'm free to make decisions about page layout, framing and viewpoint. 2000AD editorial has always been very hands-off - unlike many other publishers, they don't demand to see roughs or pencils; they just send me the scripts and I deliver the artwork.

The various stages of a comic panel. I know exactly how long I should be taking on each of these steps
Lowlife: Creation © 2009 Rebellion Developments/2000AD
Lowlife created by Rob Williams and Henry Flint

One great thing about the freelance life is that no-one cares how, when or where you work, so long as you deliver the goods on time. It does require a certain discipline, though. I always keep careful track of each job, sub-dividing it into different tasks (roughs, pencils, inks etc) and giving each task a sub-deadline within the overall schedule. So when I start work each day I'll know how much I should have completed by the time I break for lunch, and how much needs doing in the afternoon and evening. This kind of breakdown has a further benefit; it means I never need look more than a few hours ahead, which is useful when I'm starting a long project. If, at the start of the first episode, I'd really thought about the amount of work required to finish Lowlife: Creation, I'd have found it more than a bit off-putting, even with twenty years experience under my belt.

Something I've started looking at recently is the timing of my day. When I first began life as a comic artist I was dependent on my family to help support me, and one strategy for persuading them I was serious about my bizarre choice of career was by starting my day at 6am. Though there's no real logic to it, there's an unbreakable association between hard work and starting early. When you get up for work and discover your offspring has been up for a couple of hours already, it creates a strong positive impression.
The problem came once I became established; there was no longer a need to impress anyone, but despite my hatred of early starts, I was hooked on them - at least, I found I didn't get anything done if I woke at a more reasonable hour. Winters were horrendous because I'd get up every morning to 2-3 hours of cold and blackness. Also, even starting at 6am, I found I couldn't get to sleep before midnight, limiting me to 6 hours sleep a night, which I had to augment with siestas to keep myself going.
Finally, I took myself in hand, largely because I was feeling permanently tired, and now that I'm past 40, living in a constant state of sleep-deprived stress was seeming more and more like a bad idea (the number of comic artists from earlier generations who pegged out at their drawing boards in their 50's is truly frightening.)

These days I have less time for this kind of thing
Daleks © 1963 Terry Nation

So, starting in January I made a concerted effort to shift my day round to a schedule that suits my body clock, and to get eight hours sleep a night. I now get up between nine and ten every day and work until at least 1.30am. Much to my surprise, I'm keeping on top of the work, and feeling much better for it (in January I was losing an hour's daylight by getting up later, but the morale-boosting effect of getting up in daylight was incalculable). There are a few drawbacks - losing another two hours a day to sleep constrains activities like blogging and Dalek photography, and it's not that much fun going back to work at 11pm when your body's telling you to go to bed - but still, I feel better in myself and there is a deep satisfaction, after twenty years, in finally getting to live the bohemian lifestyle :-)

Stickleback Part 7 References

Still a bit zonked following the completion of Stickleback: Mother London - 19 pages in one month, 12 of them in the second 2 weeks! (My normal output is 10-12 pages a month, my highest ever was 22.5 pages for Batman in 1998).
Here are the references for Part 7. This is the one I did in a hurry because of having to sort my accounts out, so apologies for the odd dodgy bit here and there.
What's next? I'm already fully booked for the next couple of months, and I'll tell you more in the next post...

Page One - The Monarch Of The Glen

A reference to the famous 1851 painting by Edwin Henry Landseer, also a guest appearance by miniature Dachshund deluxe The Captain.
Regular 2000AD readers will have seen The Captain before; in Leviathan, the illicit hooch Captain McLean's Old Rot Gut is named after him (and he appears on the label). He's also the co-star of Captain McLean's Last Case, a Tale of the Leviathan from Prog 1465 (also in the collection). I understand that my old mate Mike Collins also put Captain McLean's Old Rot Gut into American Gothic, his and Ian's horror western for 2000AD.
Guest appearances by The Captain are a sub-set of our ongoing persecution of Aberdonian comic shop owner Mike McLean (see reference 3 for details).

Page Two - Runes

In the main panel, the runes under the image of the tree on the far wall spell out a message in English. The same message recurs on page three panel two.
If you want a go at decoding it, use the Anglo-saxon Futhorc.






Page Four - The Ongoing Persecution of Mike McLean

In the foreground, the three characters are meant to resemble (and I mean meant, my skill at likenesses is not great) the gang from Asylum Books And Games in Aberdeen. From left to right, Seonaidh*, Ultimate Steve and proprietor Mike McLean.
Mike's an old mate and has been making guest appearances in my comics since 2000. He appears as a dodgy punter in a strip club in Lazarus Churchyard: Finality (2000), as a judge in the control room in Judge Dredd: Tempus Fugitive (2004), as a victim/identity of the Nosferatu in Judge Dredd: The Horror in Emergency Camp 4 (2005), and as the Scottish anarchist who blows up the BBC in Scarlet Traces: The Great Game #1 (2006). His various cameos have had him blown up, sucked dry, and reduce to a twisted mass of scar tissue. I'm surprised he's still talking to me.
The character of Captain McLean from Tales of the Leviathan: Captain McLean's Last Case (2006) is only roughly based on Mike, because Ian and I didn't want Tharg-in-residence Matt Smith wondering why the same guy was always turning up in our stories.
Mike always gives a pained howl of "Oh God, not again..." whenever we give him a cameo, but on the other hand, he's admitted to me that they always sell twenty extra copies of anything we put him in...

*pronounced, "Shawny."