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:

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!

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.

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.



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.

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.

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.

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:

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:

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:

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...