This is The Ominous Folk of Hopeless Maine, singing about werewolf romance, at Raising Steam 2022.
The lyrics are over here! https://hopelessvendetta.wordpress.com/2022/05/13/werewolf-love-song/
Tag Archives: .Ominous Folk
Life after graphic novels
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.
Ominous Folk strike again
Back in December we recorded two new Ominous Folk songs. This first one was written by Nimue and will be in the next Hopeless, Maine live show
Haul Away Joe is a traditional sea shanty, which we have shamelessly mangled. There aren’t any jellyfish girls at all in the trad version!
Ominous Folk
The first time that three of us went out to sing folk music (Tom, Nimue, James) we offered ourselves up as A Cupful of Tentacles. The MC said ‘testicles’ by accident and while that’s an amusing story, it doesn’t really work for singing out.
We’ve been developing a performance side to Hopeless, Maine for a while now, and have recently added Susie Roberts to the mix. Susie is an excellent harmony singer and rounds out the sound in wonderful ways.
This weekend we took a Hopeless Maine show – stories and songs held together by a script – to Festival At The Edge. We were also busking at The Town That Never Was – a steampunk event. Raising questions of how on earth to present us, what to call us, what works in a program and has the flexibility to cover a multitude of sins.
‘Ominous Folk’ was a description I hit on for the steampunk programme. It works – it gets across the essence of what we’re about. It expands nicely – The Ominous Folk of Hopeless Maine. It also leaves us room for other things and could be wired into titles for other activities. For example, A Murder Mystery with the Ominous Folk of Hopeless Maine – which I’ve been wanting to do for years.