Wednesday 24 December 2008

Saturday 20 December 2008

The Colour of Money

With 2008 drawing to a close, we've been making good progress on Massacre for Boys in Colour #1. I have completed my script for a new Walking Wounded mini-adventure and Steve has been prepping some of the other material we're shoving in at no extra charge.

Our web strip Bosher's Goals: Hands on the Trophy has never appeared in print and we both feel it deserves to and that MFBIC is the perfect opportuntity to set that right. To complement the story, Steve's produced a new Bosher pinup:


Bosher in black & white



But wait, that's not in colour! Surely everything in a comic called "Massacre For Boys in Colour" should be well, in colour. Damn right:


Bosher Le Fizz


A very Merry Christmas or if you prefer, Happy Holidays to one and all.

Sunday 14 December 2008

Whatever Happened to Massacre For Boys?

Ah, hello again.

Bit of a gap since the last post, due to a few non-comics issues, not least the fact my appendix rather inconveniently decided to burst! Still, a rather hastily convened operation fixed that little problem, and I'm up and about again now.

Our plans for next year have changed somewhat. As Walking Wounded #3 is in no way going to be ready for the Thing we've decided to push that back and put the finishing touches to Massacre For Boys in Colour #1 instead. This is, as regular blog visitors will recall, our anthology title that we've been slow-cooking for a long time, and that we're now almost ready to sign off on.

As a late addition we're adding a new Walking Wounded strip inspired by Paul Harrison-Davies' zombie pinup. I'm just polishing the script now. This will be in addition to the already announced wonders we have in the pipeline, including an exclusive massacre-style superhero adventure, The Crusader: Honey Trap with art by Bolt-01 and colours by Richmond Clements.

In other news, Steve has finished art duties on his latest Futurequake assignment. I'm hoping to post some examples soon...

Sunday 9 November 2008

Plague of the Zombies

A double whammy of shuffling undead action this week.

The inestimably talented Paul Harrison-Davies has contributed the following Nazi Zombie pinup to Massacre For Boys In Colour #1:

Walking Wounded Nazi Zombie

I love Paul's work (check out MY robot! on his ComicSpace page) and am personally thrilled that he has contributed to our title. The pin-up is intended to trail the return of the Nazi Zombies to the pages of Walking Wounded in WW#4. If it wasn't for the lack of aforementioned zombies in MFBIC#1 then this would probably be the cover.

Paul's also blogged about this piece and re-imagined it as a book-cover, which it could so easily be...

Meanwhile, Massacre's regular artist has not been leaving the field of re-animated corpses untrampled either. Steve's zombie strip for Nicolas Wilson is now available here:

Survival: New Corpse Smell

For those that love their special features, you should also check out Steve's sketches and the text version of the story.

Sunday 2 November 2008

And a Third Thing...

We're now confirmed attendees at:



The Thing is taking place at London Mile End on Saturday March 28th 2009. This will be our third consecutive year exhibiting and it's always a great showcase for indie comics. The bigger conventions such as Bristol and Birmingham mix up the big names with the small fish and it can mean that whilst those events are great too, many of the visitors are not really into the wild side of comics. At the Thing everyone who goes knows what they're in for.

Mr Thing has done a great job on the show website this year, and he's maintained the tradition of the home page displaying a random picture from any of the exhibitors. Our random picture is this one:

mfb-fp-09



You may notice it's from our contribution to last year's Thing Anthology. That's because we don't have any art available for this year yet. Steve's still working on a strip for Futurequake but hopefully he'll finish that soon and move on to Massacre stuff again.

I love the Anthology, it's a real plus for the show and it's really nice to see your work in a high-quality colour book. This year I suggested the theme, which is "Mars", and have already penned our contribution, which is a change of direction for us but also really in keeping with the whole Massacre ethos.

Roll on March 28th!

Sunday 26 October 2008

Will There Be A Comics Credit Crunch?

So, in these days of global finanacial crisis I guess what millions of people around the world are really wondering is will it affect British comics?



Well, to a cetain degree it already has. As the Forbidden Planet blog has reported, this year's Bristol convention is going to be much smaller than in previous years. The credit crisis is explicitly blamed, although I am not entirely convinced this is the whole story.

It's personally annoying that Bristol has down-sized in the year we were hoping to debut there, and by all accounts exhibiting is now invitation-only, which of course favours established names and not new talent. Still needs must, and I am hopeful that assurances for normal service in 2010 prove accurate.

Besides, I am not exactly flush with cash at the moment myself, so a large bill for doing Bristol is probably not what I need. As it is, I will be funding Massacre's likely appeareance at the UK Web & Mini Comix Thing by the proceeds of eBay auctions and - if I can find enough crap I don't want anymore - the printing costs for Walking Wounded #3 will be financed in the same way.

Still regardless of my own slightly straightened-circumstances (I work for a bank, possibly not the best of sectors right now) I am committed to ensuring that Massacre for Boys continues. And thankfully comic-making is not paticularly expensive, so we're pretty robust in the face of the looming, inevitable recession.

At the top of the tree, I do hope that Rebellion will be alright. 2000AD I'm sure will continue but there do have to be fears for my own favoured title, Judge Dredd Megazine, which is now a fiver a month, including a bundled second comic of reprinted recent material. I actually think it's a good product, but it does seem an obvious cutback for cash-strapped fans, especially long-term customers who have read all the reprints when they first came round.

Sunday 19 October 2008

Zombies Zombies Zombies

Massacre artist Steven Denton writes...

When I’m moonlighting outside of my role on Massacre for Boys I like to challenge myself with all manner of strips and collaborations. One of my more lengthy recent collaborations had been with Nicolas Wilson, who’s web strip Survival is of interest to any fan of zombie action, but is not the strip that kicked off our creative endeavours. No, well over a year ago now I placed an ad on Digital Webbing looking for a collaborator on a fantasy comic I wanted to crank out at high speed to take my mind off my messed up little life. Out of the masses of replies I got 2 writers struck me as being genuinely good and Nic’s pitch included a monkey, everything is better with monkeys.

For quite a while we developed the idea for a fantasy comic but due to the simple size of the undertaking (no cranking out unfortunately) it remains in the development stage. This is probably quite a familiar tale in self publishing, big ideas seemingly going nowhere, and I’m sure I’ll talk about it again later. For now, however, what is important isn’t what we haven’t done but what we have. What we have done is a six page Zombie story, all completed lettered polished and good to go. New corpse smell (spunk apparently, read the strip and you’ll know why I said that) is the tale of one man and his hatchet.

wilson-zombies-detail2

Due of the collapse of the global economy Nic hasn’t been particularly contactable recently and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have much in the way of free time on his hands. The small press is about the long game, projects fail if you give up when they seem like they are going nowhere and you never get anything done if you can’t find a way. I’m sure that our fantasy comic will see the light of day eventually and mostly I’m sure of it because no one is getting paid.

Saturday 11 October 2008

Knowing Me Knowing You

Alex Finch interviews Massacre For Boys writer Chris Denton.

What was the initial idea behind setting up Massacre For Boys?

Steve and I were both big comic fans as kids and we did quite a few of our own strips together. Last of all was this Walking Wounded story, The Resistance That Went Mad. A pastiche of all those great Battle, Victor and Commando comics we loved. Fast forward ten years and we still liked this particular strip and wanted to publish it. Just for the hell of it.

So I looked seriously at how to to go about self-publishing, found Smallzone and we put what became Walking Wounded #0 together. At that point we didn't have a brand name. I liked Clergyman Comics but Steve wasn't keen. He preferred Stickman Comics and we did actually put that on the back of the issue.

However then we found out there are lots of web-strips and suchlike all going under the title "Stickman Comics". So we needed a name again. I'd put in "originally published in Massacre For Boys" as a throwaway joke for the inside front cover. Just to pretend this was reprint material really. But Steve liked it, I liked it, so Bingo! And the name's stuck.


banzaicard3



And has that changed in any way?

Yes, because we decided to it properly. We chatted and talked through all these ideas we used to have and had been dormant really whilst we flirted with film-making and went to university and generally spent our time on other things. Publishing something from our formative years brought that all back into focus and we agreed to develop Massacre For Boys into something that was genuinely top class. We're not there yet by any means, but I think with each new story we get better and slicker.

What would you say your main influences are?

Obviously Alan Moore, the only bona fide genius the medium's ever produced, Neil Gaiman who's the only person who's got close to being as good as Moore. I love 2000AD, naturally and particularly the 80s vintage. My most cherished comics memories were probably provided by Scream! There's also more unsung stuff such as Union Jack Jackson, Spaceman in a Spitifire (Which is my favourite ever issue of Commando), Computer Warrior from Eagle and One Minute Murphy that I literally wouldn't be writing what I'm writing if I hadn't read.

Let's not forget that I have consumed plenty of DC and Marvel superheroics, and some of that's probably rubbed off too. More eclectically, there was this Star Trek annual by Peter David that was amongst the most perfectly written comics I've ever seen and that's stuck with me even if neither Trek nor David's work interest me much now.

Outside of comics, I am a bit of a cineaste with fairly wide-ranging tastes. I am not sure how far I'll be believed, but the films of Powell and Pressburger have influenced my comics work more than just about anything else, except possibly the prose of H P Lovcecraft or the entire ouevre of Hammer Horror.

Walking Wounded takes us into a quite unsual comic's genre - what attracted you to this?

Well, it has started out as a pastiche of 70s British war comics, although we are gradually moving away from that. I like this genre for several reasons, not least of which is the possibility of depicting a major struggle between good and evil that actually happenned and that's just about in living memory. It also helps that the British were fairly unambiguously heroic, so you can portray them positively without coming over as a nutter.

Interestingly enough, we found that trying to push Walking Wounded #1 at least year's Thing as a "pastiche of 70s British war comics" was a great way not to get a sale. It seems this is not a genre that is particularly well loved or missed. We did much much better with the surely immortal phrase "Nazi Zombie Action!!" and if I'd had any sense I'd have put Nazi zombies into issue 2 as well because that is surely what the public want to see.

At least we have included a super-powered Nazi assassin!

The other characters that feature on Massacre For Boys, like The Holt Brothers and Bosher's Goals, are very different to those found in The Walking Wounded - is the idea to be as diverse as you wish to be?

Kind of. Bosher is really a Walking Wounded spin-off. It's the same kind of idea applied to Roy of the Rovers style football strips. I've got plans for more Bosher stories in the same web-strip format and I really love the way Steve's art works on a football strip. Unlike me, he has no interest in the beautiful game, but he's just so suited to football comics it would almost be a crime if he doesn't illustrate any more!

I'm not sure we're ready to do Holt Bros yet, and indeed we are putting off work on the first issue of that for a while. It's not a pastiche of anything, and only very loosely fits into the "Massacre for Boys" camp. In fact it will probably not appear under that label at all in the end. I think the world needs an Edwardian paranormal detective series, but we are fine-tuning our skills on Walking Wounded first because we want the Holts to be professional quality, and professionally published.

We have more Massacre for Boys characters waiting in the wings. Jimmy Baker Animal Hatmaker makes his debut in the 2008 Thing Anthology. It's quite a silly one-joke concept but it's also probably the most commercial strip we'll ever do. Jimmy will definitely have further adventures. There's also this superhero character we've got called The Crusader. He patrols a middle-American city in the 70s and is quite a lot more rubbish than standard costumed avengers. We used him for a very short mobile comic but there's a lot more to come.

The master plan, if you can call it that, is to connect all the Massacre strips with a single background story that spans all of them. I don't want to give too much away about this except that medicinal jam and Napolean Bonaparte are both heavily involved.

And of course The Holt Brothers featured in Judge Dredd The Megazine, how did you feel about that and their small press section in general?

I felt pretty good about it! In truth it was an opportunity that came up too early, but you have to grasp these things when you can because they may never come round again. I think I'd written the first half of Walking Wounded #1 when I broke off to work on the Megazine submission, and Steve ended up drawing it before working on Walking Wounded #1 at all. The lettering in both is a bit ropey because we simply did not know how to do it. With the latest issue Bolt-01 has taken over lettering duties and it looks so much better, so I kind of wish we'd had him on board before.

There was about an 18-month gap inbetween having the story accepted for publication and it actually appearing in the Megazine. That was a very nervous time, I can tell you, as I was pretty worried the slot would be cancelled before our turn came around. There were also quite a few other period horror small press stories and absolutely no war-related ones. This made my theory that a Holt Bros effort would be a more distinctive bet then using the Walking Wounded seem rather ridiculous. When it did finally happen I was actually pretty distracted by the birth of my son, which was almost simultaneous, so didn't really get to enjoy it then, although it is something I can savour now as a lifelong ambition achieved.

All in all I thought the Holt Bros strip worked very well and was not out of place amongst the pro strips by any means. I know there have been some misgivings expressed about the Megazine's small press slot, not least because they get people's work for free. However I think it's fantastic because of the exposure it gives to work like ours that would otherwise struggle to reach a wide audience. I am not really in it for the money and don't care about not being paid for that script. I'm sure Steve will be working for Rebellion properly soon. In any case, it's not quite true to say the Megazine got it for free, as they sent us a very welcome pile of graphic novels when that particular issue hit the shops.

How do you feel about the small press industry?

Largely positive. There's a thriving scene, fuelled by the reach of the web and the low cost of digital printing. To be honest we couldn't have done very much ten or fifteen years ago because the print quality would have been so low. Now, however, the only prerequisite is an artist of sufficient talent and you can make extraordinarily slick comics for peanuts.

Of course, not everyone who does this is an undiscovered genius, but there are some great comics out there. I feel an honourable mention must again go to Bolt-01 who co-runs Futurequake Press, which is pretty much the small press flagship.My favourite small press title is probably Zarjaz! and they've now taken it on, adding to what was already an impressive role-call of comics. There are plenty of others doing interesting things as well, off the top of my head, and by no means exclusively, Monkeys with Machine Guns, Bob Byrne, Edd Egg, The Goldfish Bowl and P J Holden.

And If you could change anything about your experience in the industry so far, what would it be?

That 2000AD would have accepted my "Paulie and Zue" Futureshock. It was great I tell you, great!

What can we expect from Massacre For Boys in the future?

At least one more issue of Walking Wounded and probably several. I'm thinking it will be a six issue run and I'm already well into writing number 3. We've got plans to bring out a collection of our existing work as Massacre for Boys in Colour, which will probably be done to mark an appearance at a big comic show, possibly Birmingham. Some more Bosher, eventually, and perhaps a Jimmy Baker book.We're also going to broaden our horizons and do stuff that's outside of Massacre for Boys. If we can just think of a damn name....

Alex Finch is a writer, researcher, actor, stage manager and former celebrity Text Jockey.

This interview first appeared on the old blog, but I wanted to make sure it also has a home here.

Sunday 5 October 2008

Massacre in the Megazine

In September 2006 I penned an article for the main Massacre for Boys website that was supposed to coincide with the publication of our Holt Bros story in Judge Dredd Megazine. By the time the strip actually saw print the article was well out of date so I never published it. However, looking back it is quite interesting, and so I am presenting the piece here:

In January 2006 Steve and I were already working on a Walking Wounded strip, the soldiers versus zombies WW2 "epic", Island of Terror. I had written about half of it when I came across news of the forthcoming Small Press segment of Judge Dredd the Megazine on Bugpowder. Basically, the offer was that self-publishers could get about 6-pages of their work showcased in the UK's second greatest comic. There was some controversy amongst the small press community about whether this was a good thing, mostly it seemed because contributors to the segment were to be unpaid.


Holt Bros panel



However. as new entrants to the comics world and 2000AD fans to boot it was an opportunity too good to pass up. We discussed the possibility of submitting a portion of Island of Terror or indeed a specially written Walking Wounded 6-pager but much as we love those characters they are a bit limited in their appeal, relying as they do on some kind of familiarity with 70s British war comics. So we turned instead to the idea that we were always planning to use after doing an issue of Walking Wounded: a pair of Paranormal Investigators based in Edwardian London called the Holt Brothers.

The requirements for the story were actually quite complex. It had to function as both an introduction to and a trailer for Holt Bros, but also we were determined that it would be a standalone story in its own right. There's no way we wanted to disappoint Megazine readers with some incomprehensible beginning to a tale they would never finish. The plans I had for existing stories were all much longer, so I had to come up with something else that could be slotted in before the first issue of the Holt Bros comic proper.

Looking at my ideas for the series they were pretty action-horror orientated, so I decided to focus on a different aspect of their world and go for a dose of detective fiction. The concept of The Locked Room is that a basic mystery is established and then we see how such things play out in the Holts' world. For my own amusement, I derived the names of all the supporting characters from the world of Dr Syn. I came up with a quick first draft which got the story about right but was light on characterization. A second pass fixed that and it was over to Steve...

I was expecting the artwork to be dark and moody, full of shadows and fog. However, Steve decided to accentuate the detective elements of the strip rather than the gothic ones and instead he came up with panels that are bright and rich, full of period detail. It's a decision that was absolutely right. Laying on the Hammer pastiche from the word go would have been a massive mistake, much better to tell the tale on its own terms.

The prospect of exposure in a professional magazine forced us to confront the thorny issue of lettering. Previously Steve had hand-lettered our work but that was not likely to impress reigning Megazine editor Matt Smith. Steve has a friend that can letter to professional standard so approached him about the work. Initially he agreed but then pulled out, whuch was probably to the good as Steve then took on the duties himself, this time using Photoshop. It wasn't his favourite ever assignment but Steve took to it like a duck to plum sauce and the end results are pretty fantastic.

The strip was ready by the end of March and I submitted it to Matt on the 31st. Happily, it took him about 30 minutes to reply in the affirmative. We were delighted, not just for the exposure but also because this was the first real validation of our efforts to progress in the comics world. Suitably heartened we returned to Walking Wounded. Once we're finally done with that (not long now) it'll be time to return to the Holts, starting with a rather promising scenario featuring killer spiders in Whitechapel...

Chris Denton 14/09/2006

Of course, by "not long now" I obviously meant "By the end of the decade. Possibly."

You can read the Holt Bros story that appeared in the Meg here.

Saturday 27 September 2008

The Massacre For Boys Story

Welcome to our new bloghome! To mark this momentous move I thought it might be quite cool to briefly recap The Story So Far...

In our teenage years back during the mid 90s, my brother Steve and I would create our own comic strips. The last and best of these was a 26-page war story pastiche called Walking Wounded: The Resistance That Went Mad.

Fast forward about ten years to 2005 and our interest in comics was resurfacing. We saw that that was a thriving British small press comics scene and thought it might be cool to get involved. We had this strip lying around that had never been published and so decided now might be the time to put it out. So we did:

Walking Wounded #0


Well, we liked Resistance but obviously it was not a reflection of our abilities in 2005. Therefore, happy at how easy it had become to publish in decent quality we pressed on with plans for an all-new Walking Wounded story, Island of Terror.

Quite early in the creation of this issue we became aware of the Judge Dredd Megazine small press section, and specifically that they were open to submissions of completed strips. Although we hadn't been going long we decided this was an opportunity too good to miss and fairly quickly knocked up a 6-page detective-horror story featuring Holt Bros, Edwardian paranormal investigators and again originally a product of our teenage years.

Thankfully, Tharg liked it and accepted the story. (It finally appeared after 18 months in Judge Dredd Megazine #261. You can read the strip on our ComicSpace page.) Buoyed by this unexpected success, we proceeded with what was to become the first issue of Walking Wounded proper:

Walking Wounded #1



The reaction was quite good, if not spectacular. We launched at the 2007 UK Web and Mini Comix Thing, selling a couple of dozen copies or so. There was enough encouragement to continue and we were definitely getting better with each new page. This process of improvement was greatly enhanced when Futurequake Press luminary Bolt-01 came on board to letter the second issue. Steve had been doing some art for FQP, who are imho the leading publishers of the British scene, and we'd met Bolt at Bristol so it was great when he agreed to contribute.

The second issue of Walking Wounded was ready for Thing 2008, and we went back knowing we had a much stronger product this time:

Walking Wounded #2



Fortunately we weren't the only ones who felt Walking Wounded was now pretty decent. Rather amazingly, it got nominated for Favourite Black & White Comic - British at the 2007 Eagle Awards (which took place in May 2008). We didn't win, but did go to the ceremony and had a great time. For us just to get that amount of recognition was fantastic.

So hopefully now we're on an upward trajectory. Walking Wounded #3 is written and a new title, Massacre For Boys In Colour, is virtually finished. Bolt-01 and his compadre Richmond Clements have lent their considerable artistic talents to a superhero strip that will be headlining the MFBIC debut.

We'll probably stay quiet for a few months now, getting it all together, but our goals for 2009 are to play the big shows and make more of a splash then ever...

Tuesday 23 September 2008