He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
The fog is always watching
Do not run, there’s no escape.
(Happy whatever you’re celebrating from James Weaslegrease, Nimue Brown and Keith Errington who are collectively to blame for this blog post)
If you’ve been paying close attention to the blog, you may have found yourself wondering, when is Hopeless?
You may have noticed that our guest writers don’t all operate in the same timeframe. Nils Visser brought a story to us that connected with his Wyrd Woods. Martin Pearson’s Squid and Teapot stories relate directly to history as we know it. Keith Errington’s Oddatsea places Hopeless in a steampunk sort of history.
Is it all just chaos? You might reasonably ask.
Well, yes and no.
I have an entire other novel (Spells for the Second Sister) that turned out to hold the key to all of this. I’ll be self pubbing that one in the foreseeable future, for anyone who gets the urge. One of the central concepts in that book is of a tidal reality. Places move in relation to each other, and many places exist that are versions of the same place. When the tide is out, they’re all distinct and separate places, but as the tide comes in they merge, overlap and sometimes crash messily into each other.
Hopeless exists in that tidal reality. People who have read New England Gothic will already know that Hopeless has layers, and that its many different places all in the same place. As a consequence, it’s a relatively stable point in a constantly shifting universe.
This is also part of why it’s so hard to leave. It’s not just a case of getting out, but of getting out to wherever specifically you want to go. The tides of the universe are just as likely to throw you back at the island as the local sea currents are.
Hello again people (and others)
I’m going to talk about a graphic novel cover again, but I’m also going to talk about the art mischief we got up to with this whole volume.
When Nimue and I pondered what to do for the cover of the Outland edition of Hopeless, Maine -Sinners, we thought of the book as a whole and the visual theme we played with. In Sinners, we borrowed (ahem) from famous iconic paintings and bent them to our fell purpose. Or , looking at it another way, we payed tribute to some of our favourite art and artists from history. So, for example, here is the original painting by John Everett Millais-
…and here is what we did to it, with Mellisandra standing (floating) in for Ophelia.
Pre Raphaelite artists certainly predominated for this sort of treatment but there was also a chapter cover titled Foggy Night.
So, for the wraparound cover for the new hardcover edition we went back to the pre raphaelites. We needed an image that could be tuned to our theme, and that might be recognisable as a source of inspiration. We chose The Magic Circle by Waterhouse-
and turned it into….this.
So…there you have it. Find a copy of Sinners to see what other terrible things we have done, or wait for the Outland campaign for the hardcover edition.
We hope, as always, this finds you well, inspired and thriving.
Those of you who follow us on Facebook may have noticed that we’re talking a lot there about the last graphic novel. This is Survivors, and we’re getting close to finishing it. Survivors is the last graphic novel in the story arc, and it’s the last Tom/Nimue graphic novel you are going to see. They’re just too time consuming, and we need more time to actually have a life and do other things.
However, that’s not the final instalment for Hopeless, Maine, and a number of things come next.
We’re still working on making a film. We’ve been set back by the plague era, but not totally thwarted. Expect to see news on that as and when we have any.
We’re going out with live shows. You can find The Ominous Folk of Hopeless Maine at events in the UK. We want to do more events, which will be easier when we’re not also trying to make graphic novels. We’ve got some big ambitions for the performance side in 2023, big enough that we have to start working on that this summer. Please do suggest events we might throw ourselves at – we can go out as folk, steampunk and theatre. We’ve been to a Goblin Masquerade. We’re open to suggestions.
Otherwise, we’re moving into illustrated fiction. Both Sloth Comics and Outland Entertainment have already expressed a willingness to publish books that have more words in them. We’ve got a new story for you, set after the graphic novel series. It’s called Mirage, and Dr Abbey has been our co-creator for this. It’s a standalone novel, (we’ve tested it on the innocent) but it will probably be more amusing for people who already know the story to this point.
So long as we have ideas for stories, we’ll keep doing illustrated novels. We’ll likely have each of these stand alone, because that’s much less stressful for everyone. It’s also really important to us to only bring you new things if we feel like we have something worth sharing. We are not fans of things that are stretched out forever, recycling what few ideas they had in the hopes of milking every last drop from the cash cow!
There are also some not-Hopeless plans being explored, and we’ll point at those from here now and then when it makes sense to do so.
Survivors should be with you in 2023. Mirage should follow that in a smooth sort of way. Meanwhile we try and figure out a happily ever after for the creative team.
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.
Hello again people (and others).
As some of you will know, we are working on translating the Blind Fisherman (The prelude to Hopeless, Maine) to film. Towards this end, I’ve started sketching settings that will appear in the film to help me visualise the settings so that I can move on to storyboarding. Once the script is finalised, we’ll storyboard and go on from there. In order to help make all of this possible, I’ve begun studying producing and other aspects of filmmaking. We have a studio, cinematographer, production design and an art director. Our plan is to make this the first in a series of Hopeless, Maine set films.
In the words of our cinematographer, Gregg McNeil ” We’re making a strong statement with this first chapter of the Hopeless Maine Anthology and we hope to continue this with other filmmakers, directors and storytellers each weaving their own visual tale.”
We will keep you up to date on our progress!
Hoping this finds you well, inspired and thriving.
Hello again people (and others)
One of the amazing and inspiring aspects of steampunk is the collaborative energy and what can happen when creative people combine their passion and creativity to bring new things into the world.
This project started because we had long admired the outfits and creativity of Nimrod Lancaster and Fiona Sawle at steampunk events in the UK. We met them at Steampunks in Space (which happens here) and gave a print of this image to them in the hopes that they would adopt it as a costuming project.
They took the print away with them and soon we began getting photos like these…
John Naylor was brought in to assist with the masks . He introduced Nimrod to Fossshape and helped him make the rigid part of his mask.
This is the first part of a series on this stunning project and we will show more progress, the outfits and the unveiling at Sanctuary in the following posts…
Child Sal to the Dark Tower Came is the name of the first Hopeless Maine story I ever wrote for Tom. It happened long before I started working on the graphic novels. There are now three versions of the art for this story and they appear in order below – Tom’s first illustration for my short story, the version in The Gathering and Dr Abbey’s version. The words are new, and mine.
The title comes from a vague memory of reading Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. I don’t really remember the poem, except that it was miserable. The dark tower of this story is really a lighthouse, a light tower once it gets going. It’s an important image in terms of the history of the project. It also feels relevant now, because it comes in the story at a moment of profound loss and despair for Salamandra. It’s about having nothing you can really do, and yet still doing something.
Child Sal to the dark tower came
With windblown hair and eyes aflame
The sea and sky call out her name
And life will never be the same.
Child Sal in boots too loose by far
Led by her ancestral star
None would dare her entrance bar
Deserted tower, door ajar
Child Sal in loneliness comes in
To empty rooms devoid of kin
And hopes a new life to begin
A home to make, a future win
Child Sal to the dark tower came
And here in secret hoped to reign
Until her heart comes home again
Across the sea, to Hopeless, Maine.
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.