As of time of writing, the Final Order Cutoff of PETROL HEAD #1 is three days way – October 16th – it only took around two years to get to this point, so I thought to mark the release of my and Pye Parr’s new creator-owned comic from Image, I’d write a little about how something like this actually comes to be.
While sharing some pretty art, obviously.
Oh, and before I go on, can we get out in the open that the unwritten subtext of this post is PLEASE GO ORDER PETROL HEAD ahead of FOC (Final Order Cutoff to you). Pre-orders are the lifeblood of new creator-owned titles. You think ‘I’ll wait until it’s in the shop and pick up a copy then’ but you go to your shop and they only ordered two and there’s none left and… argh.
So, subtext becomes text. We love this book and have put a shitload of work into it, as you’ll see. If enough people buy it we can keep doing it. ORDER!
Onwards…
So, if memory serves a few years ago I was following Pye Parr on Instagram or something (my memory is trash, so take everything said here with a pinch of salt). Pye was posting posters of futuristic racing cars with robot drivers They had amazing bright colours and a real sense of fun about them. Behold.
These things felt like a comic just waiting to happen. So I dropped Pye a line and asked if he’d considered doing just that. Making a creator-owned comic in this sort of world, with these sorts of colours. He said yes. Great. But you have a few such conversations over the years with different creators and they only come to reality if everyone concerned actually puts some work into, y’know, building a world, characters, a dramatic, propulsive narrative. That sort of thing.
Admission time. Also, I’m not really hugely into cars the way that Pye is (should I be saying that?) And I wondered if I could find a story that would make me passionate to tell it about robots driving cars. Hrm. I didn’t know. (Turns out the answer was yes).
Still, at this point a project has probably a good 90% chance of falling apart.
So, who was this comic about? Pye and I both come from the 2000AD school. He was the designer on 2000AD for a good few years before going freelance. I’ve written for 2000AD for 20 years. 2000AD is like a British comics Yale or Harvard, Cambidge or Oxford. Some of the best comics and creators of the last 40+ years have come from 2000AD.
So, the classic 2000AD method of launching a succesful strip is to call it something punchy, often with two syllables, and it’s the lead character’s name: JUDGE DREDD. STRONTIUM DOG. ROGUE TROOPER. NEMESIS THE WARLOCK. So, who was our lead?
We came up with the name Petrol Head. This is a book about cars, right? So our lead robot should be someone who has a head that spews petrol.
And Pye got to designing. Here’s some very, very initial doodles… Probably done while he was thinking what the hell I was on about asking him to draw a robot with a car engine for a head.
This photo is marked May ’21. Yikes. Here’s another one:
He needs an exhaust pipe on his head, I think I said. My main other note was that he should be something of a bruiser. Like Ben Grimm or Ernest Borgnine (I keep coming back to Ernest Borgnine for some reason. He was the model for the character Primo in Old Haunts) but a robot. By June we had this (below), with Pye coming up with all sorts of ideas for our boy and how he would work. He’s not quite there in this one but he’s not far off:
And you can see Pye’s cover design sense. The moment I saw that image I thought we were onto something good.
By June 21st Pye sent this through (below). And he’s there… Fully formed. The exhaust pipe belching out smoke. The cigar. The big bruiser of a robot. Even the ‘Yo’ that Pye drew – that felt like it informed his character. It informed the tone of the book. The thumbs up, the smiley face. Fun.
OK, so we had our lead, and our title. The story? That just seemed to suggest itself given our lead character – and when things are written from the basis of character, you’re usually on the right track,
He’s called Petrol Head, he’s a polluter in a world where that is very much not in fashion. So – a climate emergency angle. It’s the future and humanity has been forced to live in domed cities due to the environment decaying to an extreme point – you go outside those domes, you die. The Petrol Heads were race-driving robots – a future sports angle (again, very rooted in classic 2000AD) – who were built for our entertainment, because they could crash and burn and explode and no one gets hurt. But technology moved on and upgraded and the Petrol Heads became obsolete.
And now we had our underdog angle. If he’s the alpha of top tech, he’s not so relatable to a fleshy, human audience. He’s obsolete and grumpy and unwanted? Ah, now we can feel something for him.
And the Climate Emergency angle immediately offered up our narrative drive, our propulsion for the story, our macguffin – what if someone came up with a cure for the Climate Emergency? This needed to be a sci-fi action/chase comic, with bad guys chasing Petrol Head and him outracing them. They need to want something (to not let him get away with the cure) and he has to want something (to outrace them and survive and get the cure… wherever it needs to go). Characters need to want something. They can’t quite get it.
Oop, we had a story.
We knew if we wanted to fully own Petrol Head we’d be looking to publish it through Image Comics. Which meant putting a killer pitch document together which we could then send to Eric Stephenson, Image’s Publisher. Pye’s design skills meant that the pitch ended up looking by far the best of any pitch I’d ever been involved with in my career – 95% of my pitches have probably been just text, usually over two sides of A4. But this was a case of providing Image with a document that effectively looked like Petrol Head the book already existed and was fully formed. I think that’s what you have to do with Image. Say to the reader of the pitch: “look, we know exactly what this is already.”
Here’s our pitch front page.
“Get Ready For The Non-Human Race!” was a pretty great tagline. Again, as with most things with Petrol Head, it came pretty easily. That isn’t always the case, trust me. But a lot of things clicked.
And again, you really want your pitch to say to the person reading it – this is already there and ready to go. So we decided to put together some test pages to help sell the concept.
And here was LUPA, Petrol Head’s ‘co-driver’ on his mission. The daughter of a brilliant scientist who may have just found the cure for the Climate Emergency. We wanted this to be an ‘all-ages’ comic. My daughter was 12 at the time so I figured I’d cynically use her as a focus group/basis for Lupa in some respects. The grumpy, obsolete robot – I could write grumpy and obsolete, no problem. Write from experience etc.
The all-ages aspect of Petrol Head, and the visual and tonal approach – a lot of that came from my writing Roy Of The Rovers GNs the last few years. Writing for a ‘Young Adult’ audience meant that I tried to cut back on the amount of panels on a page, cut back on exposition (no bad thing) in captions, cut back on overly ‘clever’ internal monologue tricks. The storytelling was open and direct and emotional like a soap opera. And it really worked. I thought it stripped away some of my previous self-indulgent writing tendencies and produced some really good comics with a lot of heart. It all felt accessible to people who maybe didn’t normally read comics. It was an approach I wanted to bring to Petrol Head.
So, Image went for our pitch, which was great news. Now we had to make the comic.
The intention was always to make issue one a double-sized first issue. It seemed to be the vogue for Image #1s and you’re going to sell more for a #1 so charging an extra dollar at $4.99 for 42 pages of interiors – that seemed a pretty good deal.
And 42 pages meant that we could let everything breathe. I wanted to come in with a character scene to open the book. Something that spoke to the history of the Petrol Heads, to build the world, and that said – even though our lead is a robot, he has feelings. And, hopefully, to immediately make him kind of endearing. When we first meet him he’s placing a metallic rose – that he made himself – at the grave of a fallen old friend. He has a soul.
But you’re also aware that this is an issue one, and you can’t hang around before hitting people in the face with your core concept – in this case this is a book abour high-speed racing robots in a future city. And also, Pye is amazingly good at drawing cars, and racing, and kinetic speed on the page in a vaguely Akira-like way. So – play to your strengths. Quick.
And they’re off.
I knew Pye would be great at this part of the book, and his colours would really pop and everything would look spectacular. The fantastic surprise as we went along and the pages started coming in, was just how good his visual storytelling was. Everything was super clear. There were great acting performances from the characters.
Another thing that happened during the scripting process of #1 was that Dave showed up. Dave is a talking robotic blue tit who Petrol Head made. I think he arrived because when it came to write these scenes, I realised that Petrol Head was living alone, lonely, in his run-down garage. Which is fine, but then you realise that he has nobody to interact with. And that makes for some dull pages, potentially. I really didn’t want to do internal monologues and caption boxes, as I’ve said. So Dave showed up, and he was sarcastic and funny, and suddenly made the Petrol Head scenes a load better.
Dave’s a smart arse. And he’s got a moral core – as we find out. And Petrol Head made him. Which means that Petrol Head has a moral core. Even though he’s not the most sympathetic character at times in #1. But the dialogue worked and Dave immediately popped. Especially when he’s shooting a cat with a lazer from out of his butt.
Petrol Head poking his head of his garage and telling Dave off because he “can’t concentrate” is blatantly me ranting at my kids. I confess. Mea culpa.
And any story needs a big bad guy. Ours is a City Adminstrator called ‘The O’ who is so intelligent his brain is HUGE and he has loads of eyes because he needs to keep a look out over the entire city. It’s an amazing design by Pye.
That dialogue is pure ‘Imperial Officer reporting in to Vader’. Busted.
The O-Zone. The domed city our story takes place in. Those colours…
So, it turned out that Pye could not only draw and colour the book brilliantly, but he designed the crap out of it too. We were both REALLY pleased with our clever, clever, CLE-VER license plate logo. Yes, we thought, that’ll grab the eye.
And then Image said that having the numbers in the logo made the title kind of hard to read. Fine, easy fix. But the license plate is still an absolute winner, right?
And then at the last minute Pye said “let me try something else a sec.” And he did, and we both looked at it and went “Shit, it’s better.” Sent it to Image. They agreed. Argh.
These are our covers by the way.
Go radioactive on the colours, was the general idea. Make them pop on the shelves.
And we were fortunate enough to have Laurence Campbell, who I’ve worked with a bunch on Sword of Hyperborea and Old Haunts, most recently, to kindly do us a variant cover. With colours by Pye.
Good innit?
So, that’s how we made issue one of PETROL HEAD. Only took around two years. And it’s in shops on November 8th from Image Comics for just $4.99. It’s a beautiful thing and it’s turned out even better than we could’ve hoped, I think. It’s funny and exciting and has real heart.
If you want to order it from your local comic shop, the Lunar codes for the four different covers are:
Cover A by Parr – Lunar Code 0923IM323
Cover B by Parr “Green” – Lunar Code 0923IM324
Cover C by Parr “Purple” – Lunar Code 0923IM325
Cover D by Laurence Campbell – Lunar Code 0923IM326
If you can’t get to your local comic shop we created the PETROL HEAD WEBSITE just for you. You can order/subscribe to the series online at:
https://www.petrolheadcomic.com/pre-order
We have also done a bucketload of interviews that can be accessed here:
https://www.petrolheadcomic.com/interviews
That’s the other thing with it being creator-owned. It’s up to you to sell/promote the book/contact retailers. We haven’t counted up the hours but it’s not far off as much time put into the business side of things as it is creating the comic. Doing an Image book is a bit like starting up your own small company.
So we really hope people like it and buy it, and keep buying further issues… Like issue two…
Anyway… GO ORDER PETROL HEAD #1 right now!
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