Not Dead

Only Dreaming...

Some seas are more troubled than others. Stand by.

A plug

Something a little different today.

Good friend of the team, Cameron Rogers, makes his debut today with his new novel Music of Razors. It makes its brave debut in the international waters of the book trade.
This is a tremendous acheivment for an Australian novelist.

Do yourselves a favour and order it from Amazon. Yanquis, purchase it in stores. I've read it and if you like things dark, if you like things scary and, above all, if you like things human, get it.

I've read it and I loves it good.


We all hang together or we all hang seperately.

Progress Report

Hey guys. Clearly we've hit a few snags on this project. Pretty much every early stumbling block we can hit on, we've hit on. The bad news is, everything is delayed for a few months. The good news is, these are the kinds of problems, if you have to have 'em, you want to have them up the front end.

Everything is cool. The project is still totally all on track, we've just had to go and hammer us some proud nails.

In the meantime, why don't you all get yourself ready for Waldo, Burn's new book, written by some Hollywood type called Cox. You can read all about it soon enough when we got us some good links. I've seen it and if alienation, urban paranoia and crazy ass violence is your bag, and I'm willing to bet it is, you'll be laughing.

Back soon.

Christian.

Read, Interviewed

Christian Read was interviewed by popular culture guru Grant stone about EK2 (and more besides, including his work Phosphorescent Comics, other projects for Gestalt, Dark Horse...) for broadcast on the Faster Than Light radio show in early 2007.

We have a copy of the interview available to download right here [13mb, 22-ish minutes @ 64kbs].

Editorial Intrusion #2

Sometime early in the new year (or it could've been late in the old year for all I can remember), the second draft of the first script segment arrived. Christian had tightened up a good deal of the script -- the introductory scene of the principal bad guy, for example, comes across far more powerfully than in the first draft. Whereas the villain seemed to lack substance in the previous version, he now feels tangible with real menace to him. You get the impression that he could take The Kid out whilst also mirroring certain aspects of The Kid's own character.

I still harbour concerns about the density of dialogue per panel, and the characterisation of one of the minor players -- and again, these concerns have been put to Christian and I now await the next draft.

Tempus Fugit

Buried in the responsibilities or supervising the printing and distribution schedules for Gestalt's inaugural publication, "Character Sketches 2007", this production diary has suffered a notable absence over the past few weeks, but with that particular book being printed even as I type, my attention turns back to upcoming projects such as this one.

Evolution Of A Page #3

Pencils for the page in question... Soon, the ink.

Evolution Of A Page #2

Step two.

Detailed thumbnail.

Evolution Of A Page #1

Alright, sorry I'm late.

Been a bit busy here....

I'll try to make this a weekly thing, but bear with me please.

For now, "the evolution of a page"

Happy now, Read? I posted something.

Sometimes you just have to cheat

That's all there is to it. You have to cheat.

EK is constructed almost entirely out of 'real world' concerns. All the mythology and monsters mentioned are 'real'. The guns, the horses, hell, even the doorknobs are real. The magic is real. It all comes from concerns people had and have over this side of the mirror.

But sometimes, though, sometimes you have to shoehorn something in. Bend it a little. It's kind of cheating. 'Massaging the story' someone once said to me, and I like that. Of course, 'Braveheart' was massaged and we were left with a story that was historical in so far as yes, there's a place called Scotland...

The next scene I'm going to write in EK is based around the idea of rune-magic. Seidr, Viking sorcery. Sort of. And I'm going to invoke a few terms from that particular philosophy. The thing is, the scene I'm writing will require a bit of loose interpretation, a bit of ignoring of the facts. The vast majority of readers will neither know nor care about my slippery idea. Those in the know will see what I'm doing. And I'm not exactly sure what percentage of my audience, or Burns', is particularly interested enough in runic interpretation. Probably a few. I've got some canny ones.

However, you'd be amazed at the kind of mail you can get for these little slip-ups. People love to catch them. Some can be quite malicious.

Fiction, however, has one special freedom. And that's the freedom to lie like a motherfucker!

Sometimes you just have to trust that people trust you to know what you are doing and let you cheat a little. Besides, if they wanted to read an essay, they'd be sadly disappointed with my little tale of bittersweet horror cowboys.

Besides, the scene has loads of outdoor voodoo shagging...

Burns, Interviewed.

CB Burns was interviewed by popular culture guru Grant stone about EK2 (and more besides) for broadcast on the Faster Than Light radio show in early 2007.

We have an advance copy of the interview available to download right here [10mb, 20 minutes @ 64kbs]. Well worth a listen.

Editorial Intrusion #1

Mr Read, true to his word, delivered the first 20 pages of the new 'Eldritch Kid' script to me earlier this week and, as one of his Dark Masters (as he prefers to call me - I'm sure it is a term of respect), I was somewhat buoyed by its receipt. You see, from my experience with comic creators, it can be quite rare for them to meet a deadline, even when that deadline has been self-determined. Christian said he would get it to me, and he did. Dedicated and professional. That is surely how to win a Ledger.

But enough of that.

As per the intention of this site, I'm going to give a brief commentary on the script-to-date and my editorial response to it. Prior to receiving this script draft, all I had read was a 3-paragraph synopsis of the storyline.

In first draft, the script was promising at first read-through. There was sufficient exposition from early character dynamics to introduce the Kid to new audiences without spoon-feeding or boring those already familiar with his slight character flaws into submission. The supporting cast was starting to shape up nicely from interplay among themselves, although there was still something of an anticlimax that was working to undermine the overall narrative progression. Yet without a solid grasp of where the characters and story were headed, this anticlimax could simply be a subtle manoeuvre to unveil aspects of the central 'villain of the piece' over time, to wring out the sordid details and use his lack of a moral centre as a mirror to our anti-hero, the Kid. How to be sure? Ask the writer.

Notes made, sent to Christian, yet to hear back.

Artists, lazy, lazy artists.

Well, Mr Burns was supposed to have some art up on the blog by now but apparently drawing is hard or something like that. 'I'll get to it man but I'm busy', he opined on the phone today. 'I was doing a phone interview about EK2.'

Let me tell you something, aspiring comic writers, you don't win Ledger Awards with that kind of attitude! The only thing to do in a situation like that is harangue! Whine! Whinge! Threaten! Tell them that they are demeaning your genius with their refusal to drop everything and assuage your ego by drawing! That's what I did and...

...I'm refining the technique.

So just a quick one tonight.

There's two dreams involved with the creation of The Eldritch Kid and they seem to have come to me to entirely strip me of all notions of research and pondering.

A mate of mine told me about a dream he had. He was sitting down to play a game of Dungeons and Dragons with the members of the band, 'The Highwaymen'. The only thing he really remembered was Kris Kristofferson saying 'Hell, I fucked a Cherokee. I should get to play the elf.'

It was, suffice to say, a memorable image to someone as enamoured of both being a giant nerd and country music as I am. (Bearing in mind that what I think of country and your average station programmer thinks may not significantly overlap...)

It clicked something in me. From ridiculous seeds, things grow. I'll get to what it sparked off in my mind another time but the seeds for that melding of fantasy and gritty reality were perhaps planted with that foolish dream.

Then I had a dream. It was the first six pages of Eldritch Kid. Fully formed, a prodigy, an Athena, ready and complete in all ways. The characters, the lines, the scenes. I awoke knowing the name of the character, his visual, how I wanted to introduce him but also the Kid had a friend. That's Ten Shoes Dancing, the Oxford educated highbrow Lakota shaman. He's not in EK 2 so I won't go into him too much here.

But that was it. All my plan and inventing, thinking and cooking up and bang, the damn subconscious mind steals your thunder.

I felt almost cheated until I realised something... I really, really loved the story that played out in my dreams. I suppose it is immodest or vulgar or something but, well, I really fell in love with the whole idea of the Eldritch Kid that early afternoon. I wanted to know more about him, to get to know him. Possibly buy him breakfast and get an apartment with him from the sounds of that last paragraph.

But that was it. The Eldritch Kid was ready to go. I had a proposal and now all I needed was an artist. There was only one man to turn too. A young punk I had made the acquaintance of at a comic convention who had a brilliant portfolio but, more importantly, great music.

Next issue: Enter! Burns!

Love is kind of crazy with spooky little girl...

Of course, as much as I love the cowboys, the tough guys, the brutes and fallen nobles, the stink of horse and the suck of mud, lighting matches on your jaw and all the rest, I also love the spooky, black cat hair and the mojo bone, the conjure and the fetch stick and strange sigils and the Latin imprecation.

We've met before, you and I.

I was the kid in the library, his head down in a book when he should have been playing in the sun. The one who read all the books on UFOs and Loch Ness Monsters and weird Aztec crystal skulls and the Egyptians with their brain surgery, lightbulbs and beer. The one who could tell you exactly which episode of 'In Search Of...' was about to play based entirely on the size and shape of Leonard Nimoy's moustache. (I have a dream, that one day I will, Marenghi-like, get to host my own weird happenings and history show... dreams and dreams) The one who poured over encyclopedias like 'Man, Myth and Magic'. Who knew all the ways to kill a werewolf and vampire, who scared himself stupid with every ghost and alien movie he could blag his way into seeing. Under the blankets with a torch, reading fascinatedly about Don Calmet, the Bimini Wall, Ponape and Sean Manchester and all the rest.

You know the kid. Hell, if you're reading this, the chances are good that you probably were that kid at least once.

But what really got me, what kept me fascinated, from the day I could read until the second I write this, was magic.

Pretty much every interest I have ever had in my entire life has spun off from this central preoccupation. This endless fascination. Nagual and Palo Monte, those blood and bone shamanisms. The austerity and complexity of the Western tradition, the elaborate practicality of Bon and Buddhism, the sexy punk occultism of Chaos magic and its attendant ideologies and more. The idea that ritual and rite, the will and desire can somehow access the hidden rules of the world, that those who choose to hitch wagons to strange passions and intelligences to look behind the curtain fills me to this very day with a killing-jar intensity.

Like I said before, fun at parties, hey...?

It is not exactly surprising that I have written about magicians a fair amount in my career. The arrogant physicist Nathaniel from Dunwich, who saw magic as another way to perfect his knowledge of cosmology. Rose from the same work who saw emotion as magic and magic as permission. Gavriel from Witch King was a magician who saw magic as the key to fulfill any curiosity and pay back and slight.

All different characters, I feel. All sharing obsessions with myself. Possibly because I'm too lazy to think up characters who haven't read the same books as me. You be the judge.

I knew the Western story I was going to write wasn't going to be set in the real world. Not in the really real world, anyway. Too messy, too much baggage, not enough strangeness. So it was I turned my attention to melding these two genres; westerns and dark fantasy.

And all I knew was that I was going to have a cowboy magician. A savage savant. Man sworn to his own code and, in this case, sworn to other powers than those that walk the fields we know.

Writing itself is not fun. Well, it's OK and it beats heavy lifting and taking public transport for a living. I've been doing it professionally for a few years now and despite the fact you can go to work with no pants on and smoke at your cubicle, it must be undertaken with the discipline of a job. Sometimes, that's no so fun when the editors and Dark Masters are sending increasingly dire emails and throwing rocks as deadlines creep in. Or your mates are all going to the pub and you have wordcount to make.

But the real fun, the really real fun, the bit that is more addictive than needle or love, is the making up. Throwing nets into strange unconscious seas, looking for characters who are interesting enough to walk in their skin awhile. Plots that surprise and edify. Letting the themes whittle themselves out of thought. When you're a writer of fantasy, there's also cosmologies and cosmogonies and pantheons and histories and geographies to induce from the febrile inner world.
For me, Eldritch Kid really came to life with three things.

A friend's dream.
My dream.
And the thought that if I had one magician cowboy, what if I had a magician Indian? What if they were all magicians? What if magic was always real forever and everyone always knew it.

So I had another genre to play with - alternate history and a world filled with magic and monsters and a fevered hallucination of the West to play with.

Right, that's enough from me for now. Next time, I'll talk about those dreams and why I fucked off most of the alternate history stuff. I'll also try and convince CB Burns to make with the purty art.

Mothers, don't let your sons...

I love cowboys.

No, no, no.

I love cowboys.

That's clearly not surprising from a chap who is writing Western comics but hang with me a moment.

Violent, sexy, morally dicey, there's something about them that colonized my imagination. Tough guys, standing up to bullies, not interested in the Good thing, willing to do the Right thing, which is way more interesting to me. Men who achieve fine things through methods murderous. Oh yes. These men were not afraid, not intimidated, ready to carve out justice with iron and fist.

It meant something to young Christian and no mistake.

When I was a little kid, I lived in Canberra, Australia, on the outskirts. Back then, that city just ended like a curtain came down. Suburb, suburb, bush. If you've never been to Australia, one of the things you'll never realise is how prevalent the bush is. Leave a city and there it is. It goes on forever, scrubs and thick black trees. Dryness clings to everything. Long low mountains that arch out of the earth slow and strong. The colours change by the hour, going blacker and redder and stranger.

Cowboy movies reminded me of where I lived. Frontiers. Look one way, schools and shops. Turn the other, scoria and heat as far as I could ever see. Its funny, so much early Australian art, done by pale Victorian Englishmen involves pallid, overdressed figures staring into illimitable horizons, overwhelmed by scale. John Ford and Sam Fuller movies have that same feeling of overwhelming scope of land. Cowboys were there from the start for me and living big inside of my brain.

Lets move forward a few years and I started digging history. All sorts. Didn't matter what or where. WWII, Ancient Rome, the waves of invaders poor old England endured, a bad day at the post office in Dublin and all of it. Seriously, I'm super fun at parties... Then I sort of rediscovered cowboys. See, when you read history you have to balance out the stories of great men and women with understanding social orders, historical contexts, all that stuff. Very interesting of course but sometimes you just want to read a story about a badass just putting the beat down on a scumbag.

My friends, Western history is full of it. My spiritual hero Doc Holliday and his nemesis, Johnny Ringo, his romance with Big Nose Kate... my god. Fascinating man. The violent, smart, haunted John Wesley Hardin, Bass Reeves, the first black Marshall and genuine tough guy. Black Jack Ketchum, the little man with the soul of steel, Elfego Baca and all the rest. Love 'em. Read about them. Violent, brave men stamping their mark on history.

Yet, a look under the surface strips these guys of their myth. Big Nose Kate never knocked out a sheriff and saved her man from a burning building. The Irish gentleman Bat Masterson killed one guy in a gunfight. Wyatt Earp was as much a criminal as he was a lawman. Then there's the destruction of the Native Americans, the Trail of Tears, the scum Van Buren, the Mexican-American war and more and more. Don't look at cowboys in the light of truth if you want grand stories. It ain't there.

Sooner or later, I wanted to write about cowboys. About a frontier land, about a tough man dealing justice, about finding his way between Right and Good.

From the seventies onwards, movies and books became what they called 'revisionist'. The idea was that cowboys became bad guys and the Indians became the noble and put upon victims of white Imperialism. There's two problems with that. Firstly, it is swapping one didacticism for another. Secondly, academia comes along and says that finally the genre is finally growing up. As is usual, literature majors jump up and down, desperate to become taste-makers, never realising they are plain fucking wrong. Westerns have a long history of moral ambiguity and interest in opposing viewpoints. But revisionism muddies the waters. Things swung so firmly towards the revisionist point of view that I can't imagine writing a genuinely newly rebellious cowboy book without handsome white guys getting saved by the fucking cavalry.

No one wants to be a propagandist, writing about the West as a cheerleader for industry and cleruchy and ignoring all the ground that was legitimately made up by the revisionist movement. Then again, writing something boring and depressing strikes me as outside my interests as a fiction writer.

Wanting to write something about cowboys, wanting to write about grand figures of violence and justice, feeling weirdly hobbled by prevailing literary opinions, there I was, sort of trapped.

Then I remembered something. I love cowboys, I love history but... oh yeah, I'm a geek!

Which means I also love monsters. And magic.