Before I get onto exciting new things, an announcement. Sadly, because of Covid-19 hitting the comic industry in all sorts of hard ways, the previously announced Cla$$war reprint through Image won’t be happening. Hopefully we can make that reappear down the road when comic retailers and companies are in a healthier shape.
Those guys (above)? They’re not in a healthy place.
Old Haunts #1 finally hit shops this week (June 10th) after being delayed due to the pandemic. It’s a gangsters and horror creator-owned title by Ollie Masters, Laurence Campbell, Lee Loughridge, Sal Cipriano and myself. And it looks stunning.
Imagine Goodfellas meets Jacob’s Ladder. A bunch of retiring gangsters in Los Angeles have to meet for one last night before the biggest deal of their careers. But the ghosts of their past come for them. There’s all sorts of touchstones here, but we were aiming for “What if Michael Mann and David Lynch got together to make a movie.” Things get strange, and creepy. Very, very creepy. And Laurence Campbell and Lee Loughridge have made a stunning, cinematic masterpiece out of my & Ollie Masters’ script. It’s the type of fiction that doesn’t offer easy explanations and sticks with you afterward. Where the horror is subjective and mind’s eye personal. Did I really just see that?
Here’s the cover for the upcoming #3.
Ollie’s the writer of vertigo’s The Kitchen, which was turned into a Hollywood movie, and Boom’s Snow Blind, which is also on the way to being a Hollywood movie. So plainly I’m hoping he keeps his run going. We’ve co-written Old Haunts. A process where we break the story together, then split each issue into ten page-chunks. I do first draft on one half, he does it on the other half. We pass our sections back and fore and each does an edit on the other’s. And you hopefully end up with a finished product with a unified voice and you can’t see the join.
Old Haunts is a 5-issue series from AWA and if you can’t get to your local comic shop you can order it digitally from Comixology here: https://www.comixology.co.uk/Old-Haunts-1/digital-comic/862659
I mean, look at that lighting… Lee Loughridge knows what he’s doing.
Beating Old Haunts into the shops by a week was the start of a new 15-part Judge Dredd MEGA-EPIC (they call them this in 2000AD) called End of Days. It started in 2000AD 2184, with a creative team of Colin Macneil, Chris Blythe and Simon Bowland. Coming onboard later in the story will be Annie Parkhouse on letters and Henry Flint on art. It’s a classic Judge Dredd creative team.
Colin, for instance, drew one of the great Judge Dredd stories – America.
And Henry, I’ve worked with a bunch of times on Dredd now. On Titan and most recently, the critically-acclaimed The Small House.
You can buy our prior Dredd collections here:
https://shop.2000ad.com/catalogue/graphic-novels/more-dredd/XB573
‘End of Days’ is, really, what it says on the tin. It’s the end of Dredd’s world. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have come to Earth, an apocalyptic storm rages and the nuclear missiles are overheating in their silos across the globe of their own volition. There’s a line that stuck with me from The Small House where Smiley told Dredd that this is a world that died long ago, it’s just been the Judges that have stopped humanity sliding down into the pit. This is the Judges not being able to halt that slide any longer.
So Dredd, Anderson and a small crew are going to have to travel across Dredd’s world to find the Horsemen and kill them.
That lone rider – heading to the Great Wall of Mega-City One with a warning (and the severed head of an actual Angel in a sack) is – minor spoilers – another of my characters from my time writing at 2000AD. And it’s someone who doesn’t belong in Dredd’s universe at all.
The walls of reality themselves are breaking…
This is a big old cosmic, apocalyptic road movie in the style of The Judge Child epic, which I loved as a teenager. Those McMahon Titan Reprint covers were the stuff of my pivotal Dredd moments. About the same time that City Of The Damned ran in 2000AD, which, again, is the type of Dredd story End Of Days wants to be, I guess. An impossible, fantastical mission to attempt to save the City.
And it has hard-hitting dialogue like this:
Also out this last week was The Roy Of The Rovers Summer Special. This was meant to be a Euros Special but, again, the pandemic put a halt to that and we had to pivot story-wise. It’s a great package. Two new comic stories by me and a prose story by Tom Palmer.
The first of my Roy stories continues the main Melchester Rovers narrative from the novels and graphic novels, as Roy and co head off to a European friendly tournament. Cracking art by Elkys Nova.
The second story is a bit of a thrill, inasmuch as I get to work with the classic Roy Of the Rovers artist of the 70s and 80s David Sque. We were delighted to get him to return to the characters he brought to life back in Roy’s heyday, with ‘Old School’ where Hot-Shot Hamish, Mighty Mouse, Johnny Dexter and more old favourites come together for a Legends tournament.
You can buy the Roy Summer Special and our Roy GNs and Novels here: https://royoftheroversofficial.com/shop
What else has just been released/is on the way? The Smash Special came out recently which has a fun 8-page The Spider story by myself, John McCrea, Mike Spicer and Simon Bowland.
And the Battle Special is coming soon. Which features a Destroyer story by myself and PJ Holden. Commandos below….
There’s some secretive stuff going on with TV work. As Si Spurrier, Ollie Masters and myself are currently developing a TV show with a production company. Exciting. But there’s nothing concrete we can say about that for now. More soon, we hope.
Stay healthy and safe, all.
Follow
Recent Comments