Tag Archives: comics

Art of the island

Survivors cover.

2 Comments

Hello again people! (and others)

It’s a strange and interesting time for us. We are finishing up the final volume of the Hopeless, Maine graphic novel series and this is the conclusion of something that has been a huge part of our lives (Sometimes too much a part of our lives, sometimes not enough) It brings up memories and associations that I could not even begin to list or describe adequately. It’s been woven into the last decade of our lives (plus a bit) inextricably and it’s a big part of how we got together in the first place!

So, finding an image that would feel right to us and also, hopefully, to all of you for the final graphic novel cover was a pretty big thing. We’ve had a theme in the Sloth Editions for the covers. It’s always Sal performing magic of some sort. We needed that element and something that suggested the huge changes and events that take place in Survivors. It was Nimue, of course, who had the concept. Sal, holding the island, And…not in her wrappings. In a simple dress. It was and is, perfect. (In ways you will not really understand until next year when the book is released) Nimue posed for a reference photo (Again, perfect) and I drew it out, putting the island in perspective and surrounding Sal with the eyes that we have seen before. Nimue coloured it, I did a final clean up and reestablishing of the lines, scanned and added some of the magic effects and small highlights in Clip Studio and here we are. I very much hope you like.

I am, as always, hoping this finds you well, inspired and thriving.

Tom

Art of the island

Survivors in progress

Leave a comment

We’re currently working on Hopeless, Maine – Survivors, which will be the last graphic novel in the series, wrapping up this story line.

It’s probably also the last graphic novel we (specifically Tom and Nimue) do, unless someone other than Tom is overwhelmed by the desire to draw comics pages. It’s such time consuming work.

It isn’t the last Hopeless Maine story, it’s just that we’re moving into other ways of sharing island life. There will be more books and more art.

Here are some pencils in progress. As Tom keeps saying on social media ‘I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about here.’

Hopeless inhabitants

Hopeless Characters

Leave a comment

One of the things we’ve done ahead of the gallery show in Okinawa is produce a line-up of characters from the comic. This, we gather, is something Japanese readers love to see in relation to comics and that sharing this kind of image would be a much more Japanese way of doing things. It was entertaining figuring out the heights of the cast in relation to each other.

When we started work on Personal Demons, Tom was in the US and I was in the UK. The colouring happened digitally. Sinners is the first book I coloured on. So it’s been interesting for me to look at those characters in their early stages and think about how I would have coloured them.

If you’ve read Personal Demons (the first half of The Gathering in the UK edition) you’ll know that it is not an especially colourful body of work. Tom is not fond of working with colour – which is how I got involved in the first place!

This is the first time I’ve coloured Miss Calder as a living person with skin tones. It will probably be the only time I colour young James or the unnamed young lady who dominates the first book. It was also an opportunity to assert what terrible taste Doc Willoughby has – he’s been benefiting from Tom’s muted tones as no one has been able to see quite how garish and ridiculous he really is.

News Item, Uncategorized

Hopeless, Maine returns to North America with Outland Entertainment

3 Comments

Hello people! (and others)

We can now reveal that Hopeless, Maine is returning to North America with Outland Entertainment! The first two volumes will be printed and released soon, along with illustrated prose novels by Nimue Brown and Keith Errington and the Hopeless, Maine RPG is in development and may well be out at the same time. Here is the press release! 

Cover art – collaboration between Nimue and myself.

Uncategorized

Hopeless Optimists – an update

Leave a comment

Hopeless Maine volume 4; Optimists, has been delayed. We’ve been affected by the virus and the book will be out later than intended. Sorry about this!

Part of the issue is that Sloth is not a big publishing house, and like much of the independent comics market, depends on events to sell books. With all events cancelled, things have been hard for Sloth. It’s not been a good time to invest money in printing a new book.

As creators we’ve also been hit. We lost work – although thankfully not all of it, but enough that it has impacted on us. Unhelpfully for Hopeless, Tom is the one who has had more paying gigs come in, and it’s made more sense to take those and let Hopeless wait a bit.

We are a fair way into Hopeless Maine Optimists. It should be out early next year when we hope there will be more scope for taking it to events. After that we have one more book to go to complete this narrative arc, and hopefully that will be a bit less affected by the state of the world!

What happens after Hopeless Survivors, is an interesting question. We don’t quite know at this point, but pondering is under way. We had thought Survivors would be the last Hopeless graphic novel – they take Tom about 6 months and they don’t pay for six months of full time work, which is challenging for us as a household. However, there may be entertaining and time efficient ways of keeping on making comics, and we are exploring that at the moment and seeing where it takes us.

Art of the island, Uncategorized

Annamarie Nightshade as seen by Dr Abbey and by Tom.

Leave a comment

Hello people and others!

If you have been following the blog, you will know that we are working with the altogether amazing Dr Abbey on a (growing) number of projects. Here is an amazing complex and utterly gorgeous design of Annamarie Nightshade in his style. The scan does not do it justice entirely as there are touches of silver and gold that catch the light as you move the piece. Below this is  an earlier drawing of Annamarie by Tom Brown for contrast.

More of this to come, and news of further collaboration. Please stay tuned!

Hoping, (as always) this finds you well, inspired and thriving.

 

Annamarie

annamarie_nightshade_colour_by_copperage_ddgutm0-fullview

Art of the island

Hopeless Plotting

Leave a comment

We are indeed, plotting, and at the moment, the plotting looks a bit like this –

At the moment, Tom and I are working on Optimists – the penultimate book in the Hopeless Maine graphic novel series.  Next year we will be making the final book in the series – Survivors. Our plan from this point had been to stop doing graphic novels – Tom has just had his sixtieth birthday, and comics are labour intensive the way he draws them, and the decision was to move into smaller pieces and more illustration.

Note the use of the past tense.

Right now we’re not sure what the plan is, but experiments are under way and I’ll post updates as we have them. Which is likely to be soon, because one of the implications here is that we might be able to work a lot more quickly on some things, while giving Tom time to really dig in with the more elaborate illustrations as we go.

We might be able to have the best of many worlds, with time for the kind of art Tom does, and more of a manga style for Hopeless some of the time, and enough time to tell more stories.

We’ve known for some time now that Doctor Abbey would be more involved with Hopeless Maine as we move forward. We’re still figuring out how that works, and we’re collectively excited about the possibilities.

 

Hopeless

Hopeless Maine and diversity

Leave a comment

One of the things that really bothers me with fiction and comics is the way that bad history and white supremacy get in the mix. The number of times I have seen people suggest that including People of Colour in a situation is woke and historically inaccurate is distressingly high.

The problem is that so many people have got their minimal historical education by watching films that were made by people who were racist and/or had other issues. American films from the first half of the twentieth century would cheerfully have white men playing people from anywhere in the world while failing to include People of Colour in times and places they most assuredly would have been. It’s not improved much since then.

The evidence is widespread, the art, the historical information, the written records, the photographs… Ignorant of actual history and fed only a whitewashed history, some people get really cross when faced with better representation.

The oceans of the Victorian era were multicultural places. People working on boats worked on whatever boats they could. If you lost a few key crew members to accident or illness, you’d take on people wherever you next landed. Crews were diverse.

And therefore we can confidently say that people with an option of shipwrecking off the coast of Hopeless, Maine would also have been diverse. We’ve populated the island with people whose ancestors came from all over the place and had no intention of getting stuck here! We’ve also kept it deliberately vague because we don’t have the knowledge to depict the specific experiences of people from around the world. It’s a balance to try and strike – inclusion but not trying to speak for people. We’re very aware that the publishing world lacks for diversity, and that representation matters.

We’re not good history, we’re wilfully anachronistic, and we like to play with things. But we’re still more accurate than the whitewashing.

Hopeless Film

Film Studies with Gregg McNeill

3 Comments

Having spent a lot of time at Steampunks in Space talking about early films with Gregg McNeill, we clearly had homework to do. Film is not a medium I’ve ever worked in and I don’t have a very visual mind. I have written scripts – for the comics, and also for mumming sides, so I knew just enough to know I was out of my depth. We set out on a process to steep me in old films in the hopes that this would enable me to write a viable script.

Some of it was a bit random, as Tom and I wandered about on youtube and online archives. Some of it was very deliberate as Gregg steered us towards things, and alerted us to details we should be considering. How the text boards are done. How the sets are put together. The lighting and mood. I would have to write for period appropriate technology, one camera that can’t move much, a small budget… there was a lot to think about.

Several period films became key to us during this process. One was Nosferatu – the way the lighting and shadows work there. The one that most impacted on me was The Cabinet of Dr Caligari because of the way in which the sets are painted. I realised this was the kind of look I wanted for us, and after consulting with Gregg it became apparent that this might be the most realistically affordable approach for us.

Having started this whole venture from the observation that there are parallels between silent films and comics, it because vital to dig in on those mechanics. A silent film needs a script for the actors to work from, and it also needs text cards to support that and guide the viewer. Gregg directed us to early Buster Keaten films for the most effective and minimal use of text cards. That became a bit of an obsession all by itself and there is a part of me that wants to make that kind of film. This may be a story for another day…

So much would depend on finding a team of people for the human characters who could embody what’s going on and get it across. The acting style in silent films is not the same as modern films. I admit that I love the more overblown acting approaches, and for several of our characters – Durosimi and Melisandra – that would make a lot of sense. The more we looked at films, the more aware I became that I needed to know who I was writing for. It wouldn’t work for us to have a script and try to cast it.

There was only ever one person I wanted to have playing Annamarie Nightshade. There is only one person I could imagine playing Melisandra. But would they be up for it? And who else should be in that team?

Check back next week for the next instalment of how we did all the crazy things…

And do have a look at Gregg McNeill’s patreon page – https://www.patreon.com/DarkboxImages

Births, Deaths, Marriages, Island News

Chris Mole joins the ranks of the uncertain

Leave a comment

Chris ‘The Mole’ Mole shipwrecked on Hopeless Maine five years ago, the sole survivor of a ship that had, as far as anyone could tell, been swept backwards through time. Where most shipwrecks just lie around breaking up while we frantically try and salvage them, The Eldritch Whale simply blinked in and out of focus for a couple of days. There was one, final damp plopping noise, and the strange craft was never seen again.

For the duration of his time with us, Chris Mole perplexed islanders as much as we seem to have perplexed him.  His questions were always challenging, especially his desire to know when people come from, and not where. We know Hopeless Maine has an odd relationship with the state of Maine to which we properly belong. None of us have seen the mainland in a while. We know from what washes in that our attire and speech may be a bit eccentric compared to what goes on inland. But the suggestion that we are temporally out of place has been unsettling.

It makes far more sense to assume that we are perfectly fine here on this island, and that Mr Mole had somehow moved through time towards us.

None of this goes any way towards explaining the digging. My personal hunch is that nominative determinism was at play here. How could a chap called Mole not feel a tug towards the pick and spade? For five years, he dug small holes all over the island, and still, no one knows why. What did he hope to find, or achieve? What did he dig up? No one knows.

As is often the case with island deaths, we can only infer the demise of Chris Mole. No body has been found – he may have fallen from a cliff, been swept out to sea or eaten by something. He may have become undead. He may be with us still but in some non-corporeal form brought on by something he dug up. He may have fallen into one of his own holes and somehow buried himself.

What we do know is that his pick and shovel were found beside a small hole just off the Fish Hill road. There has been no sign of him in any of his usual haunts in the past week. Until or unless a body appears that might be attributed to him, he will join the ranks of the uncertain – and we will shout his name at the sea, the sky and the land on each full moon until we know what happened, or we forget to mention him.

 

Find out about Chris Mole’s comics here – https://www.chrismole.co.uk/comics/

And join the kickstarter that killed him – there’s plenty of room in the mass grave for anyone who regrets not having got in for a personal obituary – just let us know! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/countrostov/tales-of-hopeless-maine