Great slapstick moments

I don't know if I'm any more accident-prone than the next person. My wife thinks I am. I am a man who has managed to step on a rake so that it cracks me on the head. I've also really slipped on a banana skin. I'm the only person I know who has done that. The funniest bit about that last one was that as I lay there on my back in the pouring rain, I was convinced it was dog muck. And I was now lying in it.

Anyway. Yesterday I managed to stick a spade through a wasps nest in the garden. Two of them had stung me on the wrist before I knew anything, and I was instantly surrounded by a swarm. I fled to the house and sprayed my wrist with Waspeze. I then became aware of buzzing coming from behind my ear and I could feel something in my hair at the back of my neck. "I can't see anything", says my wife from a safe distance. By now I was whimpering like a dog that knows its going to be beaten. So my wife sprayed my head with fly killer. "It's going to be so pleased with that," I thought, and asked for a comb. My wife was still sceptical until we managed to comb out the dying beast. I had a headache for the rest of the day. Courtesy of the fly spray, I guess.

I think this episode tells me I need a haircut. Though if I had short hair yesterday, the little bugger will have stung me on the head and got away with it.

Making Pages

Having been converting some of these stories for the page in parallel with producing the latest on-screen episodes, I've been quite struck by the differences. Pages proper have a quite different rhythm.

Each collection of frames on a page have to add up to a kind of whole together. You have to think about whether the page "ends" or whether it sets up the next page, and how the two halves of a double page spread work together. There's also the rhythm that's set up by the number and size of frames on each page. Maybe a bit like notes in a bar in music - is the page made up of a lot of crotchets, or a single breve?

The slideshow versions on the other hand are maybe closer to anime. You can occasionally fake up a frame to seem narrower, or skewed in some way, but you're essentially stuck with the regular landscape format. The rhythm is also much more staccato, and it's much harder to alter the pace. Having more words per page is probably the most sure-fire way of slowing the reader down, I think. Or maybe having an image that's quite hard to read. Though I've not really tried that sort of thing much. Probably the Zee-without-her-glasses-on scene in the epilogue to Reaching the LEARNER is the closest I've got. The repeated frames in the epilogue to Up close.. was another attempt. Making the reader work harder to move on.

Anyway, that's about the sum of these reflections so far...

Policy Police: Return of the repossessed #5

The new one hits the streets at last! You can find the comic in THE STORIES tab, under the heading, Return of the Repossessed.

It's been a bit of a mad dash this month cuz I dedicated time to getting the book sorted. Also this was an episode I found very hard to get started on. But once I got beyond the first frame I really enjoyed doing it. Then I deleted the first frame by mistake and had to redo it. Humph.

The second half of this episode is inspired by the boiling pit of irrationality that has been aroused by the current administration. Bit nostalgic, really. Very 1970s. For some people its a heady cocktail of the personal, the political, the painful and all manner of other things beginning with P. All bundled up together.

New Policy Police book hits the streets

Policy Police: Rapid Response is a collection of all the short stories that have been published up until now.  It's available in 2 formats:

Pocket edition - 5"x8" - the same size as the others I've done to date
Trade edition: - 6"x9" - that bit bigger for the more ostentatious or short-sighted reader.

The proof copies came this morning - managed to elicit some guffaws from my wife, which is all the market testing I need. Click on the little icon in the right-hand column or this link here.  Or in the SHOP once I've updated it.

Excavating the old Policy Police stories

Or at least it's felt a bit like that. Some of the stories I've redrawn for the upcoming book are approaching two years old. It's made me very aware of how different the stories look these days. The early ones were pretty rough, but that didn't matter, really. I was just pushing ahead with the story and showing myself that I could put words and pictures together in a way that other people could respond to.

I pretty much took Paint as far as any sensible person could, and Manga Studio has definitely moved me up several layers by comparison. And there's so much in it that I haven't really tried yet. I'm sure that in a year's time I'll be looking back at the stuff I'm doing now and realising all the other stuff I could have done....

I'm really tempted to go back to the original story (for the third, maybe fourth time depending how you count) and re-draw it, to make it look as good as I think the new one does. But perhaps that way lies madness. Probably better to try and think of new stories. Less boring for the readers I think.

Policy Police: The next book

I'm over half way through remastering the short stand-alone stories for print. I've set myself the target of getting the next book out in June. So I reckon I'm on course to do that.

As a taster, here's the very short story "Going Green" done as a one-pager. You can click on it to make it bigger.

I did the original overnight following a meeting about our department's lack of green-ness. I added the cleaning product at the end to make explicit something that was only implied in the original, and to give the thing the feel of an advertisement feature.

Policy Police: Return of the repossessed #4

Episode 4 already. No Faren at all in this one, though it has happened before. Once I think. You can find the comic in THE STORIES tab, under the heading, Return of the Repossessed.

Up until this story, most episodes have been introduced with a sentence or two in Faren's voice, giving some context to what was to follow. However, cuz there are parts of the current story (like this episode) that Faren is not privy to, I did consider having some introductions in the Kid's voice. In the end, I followed Wittgenstein and decided that "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

While I was in Tokyo just recently I did a lot more traveling in lifts than I am used to. Our apartment was on the 12th floor, and a lot of shops are multi-level affairs. Anyway, the experience inspired me to set the second part of this episode in a lift. I had originally scripted the encounter to take place in a corridor, but I felt the claustrophobic environment of the lift would add to Tex's discomfort. Also it gives his little speech in Frame 19 the feel of an "elevator pitch" - that this was something he'd rehearsed for moments such as this. Though it doesn't really have the desired effect.

Talking of desired effect, the lift pictures haven't come out very well, but I've decided to go ahead and publish anyway. Might redo them over the next couple of days.