The Amazing Spider-Boy
A week from today, I make my comics debut.
Issue #183 of Panini’s UK-based younger readers title The Spectacular Spider-Man features as its lead story an eleven-page strip titled The Amazing Spider-Boy, plotted by yours truly (with a script by the excellent Ferg Handley, and art by the equally excellent Carlos Gomez and Gary Erskine).
Naturally, only doing a plot outline for a story is a world away from actually scripting one, but nevertheless, this is a pretty big deal for me in terms of making a first tentative step into the industry – as anyone who knows me knows, writing comics is about the one thing I want to do for a living more than anything else (or at least, you know, on an equal footing with writing big-budget TV drama and comedy). And Spectacular Spider-Man, while not as well-known as its American counterparts, is a terrific title – it pitches at a younger audience than your standard adolescent-upwards modern-day Marvel title, but still features (along with sister title Marvel Heroes) an array of terrific British talent turning in dynamic and entertaining stories.
You’ll be able to find the issue for three weeks from Thursday 19th March in all good UK newsagents (including WH Smiths), various supermarkets (Waitrose seem to be quite good at stocking it) and other assorted outlets. Not sure about the availability in direct market comic shops (as it’s a UK newsstand title rather than a US Diamond-distributed one), but I know that the Forbidden Planet megastore in central London usually stock the title. So, go on, give it a try. Not wishing to sound too big-headed, or anything, but it really is rather good.
(meanwhile, since I haven’t updated this thing since late last year, I will get around to gathering up what I’ve been up to at some point, I promise! Although it’s mostly a few magazine articles that are no longer out in shops. I’m great, me.)
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A new 4Talent piece is up, interviewing Paul Cornell and talking generally about the Birmingham International Comics Show that took place last month. It’s a good little con, although despite Paul’s comments about liking the atmosphere I think Bristol still feels that bit more exciting. Not my best piece to date – through no fault of Mr Cornell’s, he’s an excellent interviewee due to (a) being extremely friendly and easy to talk to, (b) always having lots to say and (c) being very good at coming out with brilliantly soundbitey journalist’s-dream type quotations – but worth a glance, I suppose.
Latest news on “The Spectacular Spider-Boy”, by the way – planned issue date of end of February. Watch this space.
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I keep forgetting to post about this, so let’s get it down now while it’s still vaguely fresh and timely. I recently found myself in the excellent position of being on the other end of the phone to one Frank Quitely – otherwise known as Vincent Deighan, otherwise known as one of the absolute greatest artists in the modern era of comic books. The interview was for Den of Geek, and you can find it here, and I think it came out rather well, all things told.
Elsewhere, the first “sequel” to my earlier “Where Did It All Go Wrong?” piece should hopefully be in the next issue of Micro Mart (out Thurs 9th Oct) – this one’s on websites, and there are further articles tentatively planned for the coming months, as well. And as of this week, I’ll be doing reviews every week (or, at least, every week the show’s on air) of the US Office for DoG.
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Where Did It All Go Wrong?
Those with an inclination to pick up the fine weekly computer publication Micro Mart this week (Thurs 11th – Wed 17th Sept) will find that yours truly has managed to clog up a whopping six pages all by himself. The article, titled “Where Did It All Go Wrong?”, looks at once-dominant software that has subsequently fallen from grace – for example Internet Explorer, Palm OS, Championship Manager and a few others. It’s quite a fun piece – as well as some obligatory digs at Apple, I get to tear into RealPlayer and sneak in references to I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and Doctor Who. And, years after reading PC Zone reviews of the latest Champ Man, featuring screenshots of the game with the reviewer’s name all over the title bar, I’ve finally got one of my own into a national mag (right). Even if it is of a six-year-old version of the game, this might be the moment where I truly feel I’ve arrived.
While I’m here, I might as well do a quick roundup of other linkage to recent stuff, just to keep the links permanent if nothing else. I don’t believe I’ve mentioned Noise to Signal since its relaunch, but it’s going fairly well so far (complete with some lovely header graphics courtesy of, er, me) – new stuff of mine has included the (now woefully out-of-date) Paul Cornell interview, a dissection of the first Watchmen trailer, and the first of a new monthly comics column where I’ve dragged up the old “Panel Beating” name once again. I’ve also done some comics talk over at Den of Geek – in fact, going on a bit of a Superman-fest, first picking my ten favourite stories of all time, before pontificating for a bit on how I’d go about refreshing the character for a movie. And, a few comics reviews a week aside, that’s about it for the moment…
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Tags: Den of Geek, Micro Mart, Noise to Signal
Well, it didn’t take long for this to fall into updating habits as bad as my personal blog, but in the interests of trying to keep things comprehensive, here’s a round-up of recent Stuff…
First off, because I don’t attempt to keep up with enough blogs as it is, I’ve started a new one. This one wasn’t actually my idea – I’m collaborating with Karl Eisenhauer, who decided he wanted to do a new blog about Liverpool FC. So, here it is. Not wholly sure how we’ll get on with it long term (jostling for space in a crowded marketplace – it’s far less “niche” than either Comics Daily or F1 Colours), but we’ll give it a decent crack. And I’ve done a rather fetching header image of some Subbuteo players (the name of the site, 741, refers to the old Subbuteo “team code” for Liverpool in the early ’90s), though I do say so myself.
My big writing news of late, though (even though it was, ooh, nearly two months ago!), came from the Bristol Comic Expo, where I won a competition run by Panini to pitch a story idea for their Spectacular Spider-Man comic – a UK newsstand title aimed at slightly younger readers (7-11 year olds, I think) than the usual US direct market stuff. My winning story, “The Spectacular Spider-Boy”, is going to be scripted, drawn and published in the mag at some point in the coming months – so keep ‘em peeled for more news on that. I’m already unnaturally excited about the fact that a page-and-a-half synopsis I’ve written has to be sent to Marvel (YES, MARVEL) for approval…
Another place I’ve been in print lately has been, once again, Micro Mart. While I’m still looking to get some longer pieces published (including one I’m STILL working on), I’ve had another shorter contribution to a group article – this one on “Frustrating Computer Problems” go in, in this week’s issue #1011 (er, only on the shelves until the end of today, but still) – when the issue’s been gone for a little while, I’ll probably stick it online.
And finally, here are some links to a few reviews. There’s my final Doctor Who review of the series, of the first half of Steven Moffat’s two-parter for NTS, and for the same site a review of the latest Half Man Half Biscuit album. Reviews for Den of Geek, meanwhile, have included the DVD of Bill Forsyth’s classic Local Hero, Jamie McKelvie (there’s that name again)’s Suburban Glamour trade, and a new special hardback edition of Alan Moore’s Batman : The Killing Joke. More recently, I reviewed the trade of Strontium Dog : The Final Solution and wrote another “Ready Reckoner” piece, this time on erstwhile Doctor Who villain Davros in advance of his return to the new series. And although I wrote the review weeks ago (and saw the film weeks before that), the wonder of the embargo means that my review of Wall-E, the latest Pixar film, has finally been published. I think it’s a fairly decent piece, actually, one of the better ones I’ve done.
And Comics Daily continues to grow (including the addition of Julian Hazeldine to the writing team) and attract new readers, although since it’s been so long since updates there’s little point in linking to every review! That said, we recently posted a “Jeph Loeb Day” special, a sequel to our successful Ultimates 3 issue #3 dissection to “celebrate” the fact that issues #4 of both Ultimates and Hulk, two of the worst titles in the industry right now, were coming out on the same day… but really, for updates to CD, the best thing to do is just… read the site!
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Recent Work
Just a few more recent things. In case you hadn’t guessed, I’ll probably do one of these roundups roughly weekly, if there’s enough stuff to include…
Doctor Who : Planet of the Ood review (Noise to Signal) – I have a self-imposed rule about Who reviews – I don’t want to write publicly about anything written or directed by clients of the agency I work for (no-one’s ever told me to do this – I just think it’s fair that way, as I won’t get accused of any conflicts of interests). Unfortunately, this actually rules out just about everyone who works on the show, so there are only a few episodes I can cover. This was the first one this series – the only others will, I think, be “The Doctor’s Daughter” and the Steven Moffat two-parter (sadly, no, we don’t represent the man who wrote “Blink” – it’s probably our biggest failing as a company). It’s also my first piece of note for the soon-to-be-relaunched NTS in a while (although I do have some good stuff coming up); shame it’s a bit of a dry, processional piece, far from the best thing I’ve written lately. Decent ep, though.
X-Men : Divided We Stand review (Comics Daily) – Ah, here’s that whole “conflict of interests” question again. I suppose it’s possible that one day Jamie McKelvie will work on a bad comic (I can’t imagine him turning in duff art, but you never know, he might be asked to draw something horrendously-written by someone else), and it’ll be difficult to decide whether or not to write about it (I’d rather just not say anything than be dishonest or slag off a friend’s work). But in the meantime, this is probably the closest – an anthology title veering from “alright” to “a bit naff” in the most part; but, all bias aside, his and Matt Fraction’s story was by far the best thing in it. Note to self, though – reviews of forty-page anthology books within a 500-word-or-so scope should not be undertaken lightly.
The Office season four, episode ten review (Den of Geek) – yep, another one of these. Actually, while there was plenty of new stuff to say about this one (it being markedly different to the one before, and also a fair bit funnier), I might have to rethink the idea of reviewing it each week. This ain’t Lost or Who – it might get rather difficult to say something new every week. We’ll see, anyway. It’s a CHALLENGE, I suppose. Incidentally, on the Monday (i.e. first update day) after that Guardian piece, the top three listed articles on DoG’s front page were by me (this), James (weekly comics column) and Rachel (Battlestar review). Marvellous.
Batman #675 review (Comics Daily) – D’oh. I made Batman the headline review on CD this week, expecting something EXCITING after the build-up of the last few issues. And it turned out to be somewhat flat. Never mind. Given that we like to maintain some variety in the weekly structure, it might have been a mistake doing this one as the Thursday one – as it’s only a couple of weeks until the first part of a story ominously titled “Batman RIP”. Then again, do any of our readers actually care about – or, hell, even notice – the weekly review structures aside from James and I? Thought not.
There will be some more interesting things to post on here in the coming weeks, I promise. It’s not just going to be recaps of a few random crappy reviews. Anyway, it helps me keep track of things, even if you don’t care. So there.
And meanwhile, I’ve possibly been talked into possibly starting (or, co-starting) another blog. More on that soon. Spreading myself too thinly? NOT A WORD OF IT. Although, really should sort out some new F1 Colours content in the not-too-distant…
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Geek in the Guardian
Ooh, national newspaper in “mentioning a website I write for” shock! I almost thought this was something of a landmark, the first time something I’d been involved in had been written about at such a level – but then, of course, I’d forgotten about this (scroll down to “Postscript”).
Still, a very nice writeup. Should bring in a hell of a lot more traffic, as well – so I’d really better get cracking on reviewing this week’s Office in preparation for it…
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Recent Work
Just a few links to recently-published stuff :
The Office season four, episode nine review (Den of Geek) – I might try and do as many of these as I can each week as the rest of the season goes on, although I don’t think DoG is short of Office fans, so I may just do them occasionally…
Dusting Off : The Shade #1 (Comics Daily) – For those who don’t follow Comics Daily, each Wednesday James and I take it in turns to review an older issue from our collections. This week, I covered the first issue of this excellent miniseries, spun off from James Robinson’s Starman.
Titans #1 (Comics Daily) – I’m not really used to my comics reviews getting picked up on in other places – but this review, of a quite controversial (because it was crap, but about well-loved characters) issue was not only quoted on the Newsarama blog, but also on a blog that describes itself as “A compilation of articles on gender in comics and comics fandom“. I’m guessing the reason they picked up on it was the distaste I expressed at the writer and artist choosing to reinforce all kinds of bad comics stereotyping by having a female character gratuitously lounge around naked for three pages – while at the same time attempting to justify it by piggybacking onto a not-really-connected issue (I’m certainly one of those people baffled by the attitude of certain sections of American society to the portrayal of sex and nudity in the media when compared to the portrayal of violence; but on the other hand, that argument is not an excuse for blatant objectification). I’m not sure I’ve ever been cited on the subject of gender issues, before. It’s quite a novel feeling.
It’s been a quiet couple of weeks, actually (although less so on the non-journalism front – I’ve been getting some work done on sketching out ideas for my drama series). Some good stuff coming up, though – got quite a few articles planned for the Noise to Signal relaunch, a few things being worked on for Den of Geek (including, hopefully, the commission of a weekly feature) and also a bit more Micro Mart work…
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