Manga Jiman update

I said way back that I was going to enter this competition. Now it's the last day of September and I've got 3 pages of 8 done. So it's not hopeless. A bit less than a week per page. But it'll probably mean another late Policy Police this month. I'm quite pleased with how it's going, though. I also have been thinking about where Policy Police will go after Christmas. Beginning to get ideas to fill what is an enormous void right now.

Policy Police: Return of the repossessed #8

I said I'd be late. But here it is, hope it was worth it. I'm feeling a bit too close to it to make any judgement. You can find the comic in THE STORIES tab, under the heading, Return of the Repossessed.

It's entirely an accident that security technology appears in this one. Though appropriate given this month's anniversary of 9/11. We all continue to pay through sacrificing our dignity and "giving the guys hours of fun". One bit I'm not sure works, is where the pretty young thinktanker dares to interrupt Artemisia. I wanted to make the thinktanker's crime pretty innocuous - I've seen this happen several times in my working life - so when the red mist descends and all the toys are thrown out of the pram, it's really quite unexpected. But very entertaining for the onlookers.

1000 views of Not Protectively Marked

Yay! 1000 views on Slideshare of this old stager. For whatever reason this has been my most popular episode by far. I noticed the other day that I was something like #3 on Google for "Not Protectively Marked"... well, as I implied at the time, Information Security is dull, and anything that can lighten it a bit is bound to be welcome. I redrew it for print recently and it appears in Rapid Response. It became evident as I was putting the book together that although it was an early story from me, it was much later in the timeline of Policy Police. Zee had to have been back and introduced to the Kid to make sense. So in PP time it takes place after the current story...

I'm going to be late this month, I know it

I'm just so behind right now. I've hardly done anything for the next episode - 2 frames so far. Mainly because of my comletely unrelated summer project. THIS Pretty much all of August was taken up with this beast and there's still lots to do. Working on the interior right now - cupboards and stuff in advance of its second outing weekend of the 9/10th.

Policy Police: Return of the repossessed #7

Here's the latest episode. I've been away on holiday, so hopefully can be forgiven drifting into the 2nd week of the month with this one. You can find the comic in THE STORIES tab, under the heading, Return of the Repossessed.

There's a commonplace idea that the public sector is a good and moral thing, whereas private sector involvement brings competition which is a bad or immoral thing.

In fact, there's plenty of competition within the public sector. Competition between departments or agencies for resources or reputation. Competition among individuals for position. All the competition that you'd find in the private sector is there, except competition to provide a better service at a better price. Keeping the "bad" competition while excluding the "good".

This is an an underlying theme in Policy Police generally, and surfaces in this episode as Zee's schadenfreude and Angelus' willingness to sell a "colleague" for a better pension.

Manga Jiman Comptetition 2011

The Japanese Embassy in London have published details of this year's Manga Jiman Competition. They offer big prizes and attract high-calibre entries. I stumbled across last year's late in the day, so there was not time to enter and anyway I just wasn't ready for this challenge. But this year I'm going to tie on my Hachimaki and ink in one eye of my Daruma and go for this one.

This year's theme is "New Beginnings" which has stirred up some thoughts that have been going round my head of late. I think I've mentioned before that I know in my head how Policy Police will end, though I don't know when. Having that in my head, I've left myself with the niggly thought, "what happens next". So this seems to be an ideal opportunity to take a bold step forward and try to answer that question with a pilot for the sequel.

It also offers me an objective test  for whether it's worth pursuing this idea. If I win a prize, I have a direction for the future. If I don't, then the idea can sink without trace and I go back to the drawing board.

Policy Police: Return of the repossessed #6

I'm a few days late this month. There are a couple of reasons for this which I'll tell you about below. You can find the comic in THE STORIES tab, under the heading, Return of the Repossessed.

First reason is that my wife submitted her PhD thesis at the end of June. A PhD thesis is a kind of black hole that sucks in all the available time from several parallel universes. So in general I've been “time-poor” as they say.

Second reason is that I had this idea to try something a bit experimental (for me). So in the middle bit of this one you get a bit of Brechtian alienation or something. In fact it's me under the influence of Japanese comics where characters often get more cartoonish when they're under the sway of some heightened emotion. Anyway, I nearly bottled out a couple of times, but now I'm glad I did it that way.

Three reasons. I wrote the above this morning before my battery gave out. Last night some bonehead(s) stole the copper connectors off the overhead power cables to our house. Who would have thought that scrap metal was worth risking your life for... Anyway, I've had no power or connectivity all day. So that has delayed me some more.