Looking back on the year just gone and trying to gauge what I actually did from the 2023 Wall Planner I’m about to rip down and recycle. What was exciting, what was worthwhile, what was frustratingggg. What needed a good quick kick to the knackers.
The freelance writer’s life is sort of the swan metaphor. Sometimes not much seems to be happening above the surface but there’s all kinds of kicking and occasionally panicked webb-y flapping going on down in the watery regions. It’s there in my January diary entries – meetings about two TV pilot scripts I’ve written that are in varying stages of development and that the world heard nothing of in 2023, and could easily hear nothing of in 2024 either. Hopefully, not, of course, but you put a load of work into these exciting things, usually written on ‘spec’ – no money up front, you write them, you give them to your Agent or Manager or both to try and sell for you – they manage to sell them to exciting Production Companies, and then these scripts get notes and rewritten and sometimes the companies decide they want to “package talent” which means sending the script to Actors or Directors and sometimes both, and waiting… so much waiting.
That pattern continues throughout the year, pretty much when it comes to my TV and film work (more on that later). But at the same time Pye Parr and I were prepping PETROL HEAD ready for release by Image Comics in November. As I covered in the prior post, Petrol Head was probably a year and a half’s work before people got #1 in their hands. So throughout the year there’s scripts being written and a whole load of organisational work, especially when we got to solicitation – contacting press, organising interviews, Pye and I getting an animated trailer made. Sometimes I think this is the purest moment in any project – everyone putting their creative energies into something that hasn’t gone out into the world yet. It’s getting incredible pages of art in your inbox and just enjoying making something before pesky reality things like Direct Market Orders come mooing into focus (it felt the right time to go with a bovine theme).
Petrol Head was just a joy throughout this year. I know that’s easy to say and sounds like typical writer-y bullshit but it’s had a purity throughout. Scripts I’ve loved with a joyful tone, characters that just instantly pop, Pye’s art and his visual storytelling and the colours have all been wonderful. It’s a rare treat when you’re checking lettering PDFs and thinking there’s hardly anything you’d change. It’s exactly what we wanted it to be.
Just some random Petrol Head stuff off the Hard Drive… (Hey, Hard Drive sounds like a character for the second book…)
I’m skipping forward here but by summer we were getting Comic Pros’ reactions to #1 and everyone seemed to love it. We put together some Press quotes PDFs of which I can now only find one…
We finally released in November, got amazing reviews, drove up to Thought Bubble Convention and spent a whole weekend selling Petrol Head issues and posters and stickers and got to enjoy that warm glow of a lot of people telling us how good it is. Hey, we’re going to be millionaires!
Narrator’s voice: they did not become millionaires.
The Comic Market’s a tough place these days. Maybe not millionaires. Maybe.. let’s sell enough to keep this going. One Petrol Head series a year, perhaps. The Hellboy model. Get a lovely row of Graphic Novels on people’s shelves. We both love the series. The characters grow on us all the time, the cast list seems to grow every issue, and we sort of want to keep them all around, we like them so much. And closing out the year, we had a number of interested parties enquiring about the Movie and TV rights. So, we’ll see where that goes.
Go check out the Petrol Head website at http://www.petrolheadcomic.com
And you can buy Issues 1 and 2 here: https://www.petrolheadcomic.com/pre-order
Issue Three is in shops Jan 10th I believe. Here’s some preview pages. The colours alone…:
Hybrid there, on the final page with his Robo-Cookies. Possibly the Petrol Head character that is most me. Which is worrying.
As others have said before me, you can put a load of effort into Film & TV but comics, for the most part, actually get made. Petrol Heads 1 & 2 came out way better than we could’ve hoped. More coming in 2024. Thanks for supporting it.
HERSHEY: THE COLD IN THE BONES finished our four-series run in 2000AD and, in my opinion, it got better and better as it went. The final book, in particular, by Simon Fraser & I, came together in a really pleasing way. Don’t try and reach for the big spectacular, just dig down into character. An exploration of Barbara Hershey, who’s been a regular in 2000AD for decades, who is dying and trying to come to terms with who she is, and who she was, before she goes. The last episode might just be one of the best single scripts I’ve written. Hopefully Rebellion will collect The Cold In The Bones in Graphic Novel form at some point soon. Maybe alongside JUDGE DREDD: POISON, which came in at the tail end of the year and had Dredd hunting down the person who murdered Hershey. Art here was by PJ Holden and colours Pete Doherty. It was me telling a twisty, turny whodunnit with Dredd as the detective as opposed to the breaker of heads. Maybe that was why it worked so well, as I found it quite refreshing to tell a Dredd tale where he doesn’t pull his Lawgiver once.
The BATTLE ACTION mini-series came out in the summer and featured two stories by me – MAZOR EAZY with art by Henry Flint and DEATH SQUAD with art by PJ Holden. I read Battle as a kid, so this was a blast, and being part of the team featuring people like Garth Ennis, Keith Burns, John Wagner, Torunn Gronbekk, John Higgins, Patrick Goddard and more, and travelling to the Enniskillen Convention in Ireland to promote the launch – then a bunch of us heading to Rathlin Island for a few days’ walking, talking bullshit and drinking, this was all a big highlight of 2023.
You can order the Battle Action Graphic Novel here: https://shop.treasuryofbritishcomics.com/catalogue/RCA-B0231
Jim Lee and I co-created Emilia Harcourt for Suicide Squad… seven years back? (yikes) Since then she’s appeared in a number of DC movies and was great in James Gunn’s hugely enjoyable Peacemaker. So it was great to bring her back from the dead and give her a little background depth in the DC Universe in BATMAN: THE BRAVE & THE BOLD for a three-part story.
Looking at my accounts for the year, a lot of 2023 was spent writing Judge Dredd stories that’ll be released in 2024. One is ‘A Better World’ by Henry Flint, Arthur Wyatt and me. It looks spectacular, with Henry taking Arthur and my scripts and rejigging the storytelling into incremental character/dialogue beat panels. I’ve worked with Henry a lot over the years and this honestly might be the best work of his career.
And ‘Rend And Tear With Tooth and Claw’ by RM Guera, Giulia Brusco and myself. Guera’s an extraordinary storyteller. The detail, the atmosphere, his constant need to find the truth of a scene and a story. It’s pretty inspirational.
What else happened in 2023? CLA$$WAR was rereleased as a Graphic Novel by Image Comics in the summer. Great to see that back out in the world.
I seem to remember I spent most of January writing another spec TV pilot that I’ve been collaborating on with a pretty prominent Hollywood TV Director. Will that come to light in 2024? Hope so.
We signed contracts on a screenplay for a movie that I’d written the year before. Again, I refer you to the above paragraph. But, exciting.
And one of the highlights of 2023 was going to the set and seeing a movie I’ve written being filmed in September with actors actually speaking dialogue I’d written. Can’t share any details yet – I will when able. But it’s currently being edited. There’s hope of a trailer before summer. Barring act of God, that should actually be a TV/Film thing that actually goes out into the world. Coo…
Happy New Year! Thanks for buying my comics. See you in 2024.
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