Home is where the heart is

A Bank Holiday treat for you all your horror lovers, here's a story that appeared in the 5th issue of everyone's favourite Halloween comic, Hallowscream. Written and lettered by my most excellent self, and pencilled, inked and coloured by the splendiferous, The pXd.

The idea for this 5 page story came from purchasing my own house from a lovely lady called Jennifer who had lived in the house her whole life. Inspiration comes from all around.

 

Not Everyone Deserves a Second Chance

First post of the year! I believe that's called 'slacking'. So, to make up for my laziness, allow me to post another story from the archives of West.

Not Everyone Deserves a Second Chance is a 3 page sci-fi twister which first appeared in the 2012 issue of The Psychadelic Journal of Time Travel. Arted by the knee-tremblingly talented Dave Thomson, it looks bloody amazing. Hope you enjoy the story.

I have another 4 page strip included in the 2014 issue of PJOTT which is launched on March 15th 2014. You'll be able to buy this, along with previous issues, via their Comicsy shop.

The Anti-Social Network

This little one paged freak show appeared on the back cover of the first ever issue of AAIIEEE!!! and also in Paragon #13 both available here. Paragon's master of ceremonies, Dave Candlish, put out a shout for a one page horror script to fill a gap in his comic. Your's truly beat the competition to win prize place and have the script drawn by Dave himself. Enjoy...

The Wanbies

Huzzah, it's Friday! Let's celebrate it with a lovely comic strip. The Wanbies first appeared in issue 4 of Hallowscream and is drawn by the awesome Neil McClements. Like a knight in shining armour Neil stepped in at the final hour after the original artist was forced to drop out due to personal reasons. What a ledge!

Yours truly was on lettering duty for this bad-boy. Done in Photoshop. Skillz.

Teddy Bears Picnic

As a writer of scripts, there's nothing better than snagging a badass artist to draw your story. For this two page tale of terror I was lucky enough to find Glen Ostrander, a gloriously talented penciller. I'd been saving this story for a while as it required an awesome artist to pull it off. It appeared in the 2011 edition of Hallowscream.

When starting off as a writer, you're blind to many of the faults within your own scripts. It's a bit of a Dunning-Kruger situation; you're not aware of the errors within your story, because you're not skilled enough to see them. With this story, I could tell I was on to a sure fire winner.

Short one or two page horror stories are the best so it ticked that box. Taking a classic such as the Teddy Bears Picnic song and giving it a twist also works because EVERYONE knows it. Tick. The familiarity is already there so I could just concentrate on telling yarn as quickly as possible.

The length of the words I was using from the song dictated the number of panels and length of strip. The rhythm of the six lines of the song worked perfectly as six panels on the first page, with the seventh and final line demanding it's own splash page.

It was like the coming together of pieces of stone tablet, an alignment of planets, the formation of Girls Aloud - just pause and take in the full horror of the artwork on that second page. Proper nasty, love it.

Pirates

Really should have added an exclamation mark to the title of this comic!!!

Pirates, arted by the skilled Nathan Allen, appeared in the 2011 issue of Hallowscream.

Like the previous comic strip, I'd mark this script down as one from the 'early years'. By that, I mean it's more of a mind-vomit script writing style, rather than the more measured writing approach that I have no adopted, that involves thinking more, checking spelling, editing and re-editing, and generally being increasingly mature and considerably more poncy.

It Wasn't Me

It's Friday so let's enjoy an old comic strip what I did write back in 2010. This story was ably drawn by the talented Carol Kay and appeared in the second edition of everyone's favourite horror anthology, Hallowscream!

Mr Fatty

Next up from the back catalogue is Mr Fatty first published in Hallowscream 2010. This strip was actually drawn by my own fair hand, although technically I did in fact cheat (see below).

I claim to have drawn this myself but the vast majority of the imagery was indeed borrowed. The backgrounds are all genuine images that have been distorted, and the characters within the strip are traced from other comics such as Eagle and Scream! That's the magic of Photoshop.

Mostly Haunted

There's only so many short 1-2 page stories you can write before needing to branch out to larger tales of terror. 'Mostly Haunted' is a 5 page parody of the UK TV show 'Most Haunted'. It appeared in the 2009 issue of Hallowscream.

Again, I sketched the layout for this strip, I even drew a different version with pencils and inked the lines! It was, however, not really up to standard so this version was kindly drawn by artist Carol Kay.
Drawing layouts myself allowed me to control exactly what I wanted from the artist. It's not really something I do anymore, having learned to trust artists to deliver my scripts in their own special way.

Buzz

This was my second story, which again, was drawn by the talented Andrew Milne, and appeared in Hallowscream 2009. At this time, myself and some comic loving buddies were planning our first Hallowscream.

As you can see from below I had sketched an initial first page, which I believed made use of a very clever optical illusion. Unfortunately this idea was pooh-poohed by the artist as unworkable. Rather that waste the excellent creepy imagery of the reveal page I sketched a another page with an alternative story.

The artist took both these pages and reworked them in to a single page, and a great job he did. However, as the artist re-scripted the story, I no longer feel 100% comfortable claiming this is a story that I’d written. Based on my idea, sure, but some anal writing nuance means I can never truly claim it as my own.

This isn’t really a problem. The script was done in the spirit of collaboration and I’m cool with that. These were my early frontier days of script writing and I was still finding my feet.

Stone The Crows

This was my first comic strip since I was a wee child. I'm a huge fan of one page shockers and this fits the bill perfectly. It appeared in the 2009 issue of Hallowscream.

The idea for this strip came while driving past signs advertising the Belbroughton Scarecrow Weekend. The signs had lifeless scarecrows hanging off them and of course my finely tuned horror brain kicked in to gear.

Originally titled 'Scarecrow Scare', I actually sketched this bad-boy out myself but was fortunate to have the skilled Andrew Milne on hand to draw it proper like.