harkerandcritchley

New Harker and Gravestown!

2011-07-08T20:36:00.002+01:00

Breaking news! Vince and I are about to start work on a brand new Harker graphic novel, that we're planning to post free online in fortnightly segments, starting in August. PLUS!! We're also about to start serious work on our first Gravestown graphic novel, which we'll also be posting online in fortnightly segments. Each and every week you'll get either new Harker or new Gravestown - for free!!!

More news as we get it ;)

Mad Wirral Bohemians

2011-05-08T17:38:00.002+01:00

I've been invited to join the Mad Wirral Bohemians (mostly made up of old friends of mine). You'll find my page here: http://madwirralbohemians.weebly.com/roger.html
I'm not sure what the plan is with the group, but I'm hoping that at the very least my long delayed project with fabulous comics illustrator Mark Wayne Barrett might finally come to fruition...

hi to new readers and old alike! :)

2011-05-07T21:19:00.007+01:00

I think this is as close to a mission statement from Harker as we'll ever get ;) Click to embiggen, as always.
Vince and I are planning to be in Bristol this coming weekend, hope you will be too!
Oh, and I've finally finished the first Harker novel 'The Murder Club' - I'm planning to find a publisher for it (and for it then to be an ongoing series of books, as I'm already working on the second), though in the meantime, I'm thinking of putting it on Lulu...
Maybe in time for Bristol? Could be a plan...
Oh, and if you're interested in reading the first chapter (now heavily revised and reposted just a few minutes ago), take a look here:
Part 1
Part 2

Cover for Armageddon Patrol

2010-11-27T08:51:00.002Z

As Vince continues to draw our new project Gravestown, and I continue to colour Harker, Vince has taken time to draw a cover for John A Short's Armageddon Patrol - isn't this rather wonderful? Click to embiggen!

Roger and Vince in Torchwood Magazine

2010-11-19T16:24:00.002Z

Just thought I'd let you all know that Torchwood Magazine #24 is now out in all the finest newsagents, and it features an 11 page Torchwood strip in full colour by me and Vince - hope you enjoy it!

In other news, although our website is currently out of stock of both of the Harker collections (we sold the very last ones we had at the Birmingham comic convention), we're now doing a small reprint, so if you're missing one of them and want to order, pop back next week and we'll have some in stock!

And I'm still colouring Harker - will post another page in a few days :)

Roger

Harker in colour

2010-11-10T16:11:00.002Z

So today I started colouring Harker. Two pages down already, another 240 to go. Why would I be doing this? Are there fiendish plans afoot? I couldn't possibly tell you ;)

Harker: The Murder Club - part 2

2010-11-09T12:11:00.004Z

Here's another excerpt from the forthcoming Harker novel, continuing from part one, which you'll find here. Hope you enjoy!

-----

Harker sighed with relief as he emerged out of the room and into the daylight, back amongst the living. It was a perfectly sunny day, not the kind of day he wanted to spend idling with the dead.

He made his way towards his car, which was parked amongst a small group of police vehicles at the end of the leafy cul-de-sac. The morning London traffic was a gentle rumble in the distance, masked by the trees. Large Victorian dwellings lined the quiet road around him, each of the houses set back from the street, hidden behind tall gates and even taller trees. It was suburban London at its finest and most expensive. Harker couldn't decide whether he loved it or loathed it. He was in a funny old mood this morning.

He took a long drag of his cigarette and leaned against the bonnet of his old Morris Six, lost in thought. The cigarette tasted good as he drew on it slowly, allowing the smoke to drift down his throat, taking the time to savour it before blowing it out casually through his nostrils. Smoking was a bad habit he clung to with enthusiasm, if only because so many sanctimonious people disapproved of it so thoroughly.

He eased back against the car and sighed to himself with vague self pity. It wasn't just the corpse that was getting him down. He knew he was using that as an excuse. He was still stuck in bloody London, that was the real issue. They were supposed to be a mobile team, moving around England to deal with whatever cases came their way, and yet here they were investigating another murder in this godawful city. A not-so-mobile team, then. He hated this place. It was dirty and old and decaying, and it was packed with tourists and rats and far too much traffic. A place of impatient people, ignorant drivers, one way roads and grime.

He had been hoping to be able to take a break. This constant wallowing in death was never good for him and it had been a while since he had been able to put his job behind him. Whitby was delightful at this time of year, and it was where he had wanted to be today. He was supposed to be on holiday. Then Critchley had phoned him and told him that there was another case for them and his heart had sank. More death, more corpses, more problems to be solved. Harker wanted to be building sandcastles, not rooting around in morgues in this godforsaken city. London always smelt of death to him.

Harker finished his third cigarette of the day, flicked it onto the ground by the side of the Morris Six and stubbed it out with his toe. He noticed Critchley wandering over to him.

"Sorry about this, guv," said Critchley. "I know you were fancying a break. I didn't want to call you but they insisted it had to be you."

The detective sergeant propped himself up against the car bonnet alongside his boss. He pulled out his sunglasses from the pocket of his immaculate black suit pocket and slipped them onto his nose, gazing up into the cloudless morning sky. Birds circled lazily overhead, enjoying the early morning sunshine. Critchley took a deep breath of fresh air, pleased to be away from the lingering smell of death, hoping the scent wouldn't cling to his new suit.

"We investigate multiple homicides, Critchley," said Harker, watching with quiet disdain as a splatter of bird crap landed on the front windscreen of his car. "Where's the first body? Where's the first murder? Is this even a murder? Why are we here?"

"Isn't it a little early to be getting all philosophical on me, guv?" Critchley gave his boss a cheeky grin. Harker cast him a withering look in return which the sergeant playfully ignored. "But there is at least a chance that this is a serial killing. Apparently there was another death here a week ago. Some bloke drowned in the swimming pool. So this is the second one in a week. They thought it was enough of a coincidence to at least call us in, given that we were in London anyway."

"Our fame clearly precedes us," Harker replied wryly. "We need to be careful of this, Critchley. Suspicious deaths happen in London all the time. I don't want us to get stuck here. I hate cities. Especially this one."

"London's a terrific place," Critchley said, brushing aside Harker's practised cynicism. "So much to see, so much to do. It could be a lot worse you know. I mean, we could be in Leeds."

"Don't even joke about it." Harker opened his cigarette packet and tugged out another one. He tapped it on the box, slipped it between his lips and lit it swiftly, popping the lighter back into his pocket. "So tell me what you know about this one. I've seen the corpse. I need some context."

Critchley pulled out his Blackberry and leaned next to his boss against the bonnet of the Morris Six, reading from the information he'd been sent. "This is the Mayfair Gentleman's Club. I'm sure you saw the sign at the door. It's owned and run by a Mr Arthur Quincey. The place is members only, full of rich people with nothing better to do all day than smoke pipes and gamble on the horses."

Harker took a disdainful look towards the Club behind them, set back from the road and surrounded by ornate iron fencing. The Club was housed in a gothic Victorian pile, with huge windows and elaborate baroque detailing. From where Harker was stood, the building appeared relatively modest in size, situated amongst simple gardens and neat lines of trees, but a glimpse along the side of the house revealed just how far back the building continued. It was clearly a large, exclusive and expensive place in which to spend time.

"Yes, thank you Critchley," Harker grumbled, scratching his arse. These early starts did nothing for his piles. "I'm well aware of your prejudices against the upper classes. Can we move onto the more pertinent details of the case please?"

Critchley smiled and continued. "I'll start with the first of the two deaths if that's okay. Everything in its right place. That's what you always say."

"Just get on with it Critchley." Harker took another drag on his cigarette.

"Well apparently last week some big American financier by the name of Charles Burrell Junior drowned in the indoor pool here."

"This place has a pool?"

"It's got a pool, a gym, a bar, all kinds of stuff guv. I had a bit of an explore before we looked at the corpse."

"It's alright for some. Anyway, carry on."

Critchley returned to the notes on his Blackberry. "At the time it looked as if there were no suspicious circumstances to this first death. Burrell had been drinking heavily and sniffing coke in the shower room, and then he drowned whilst taking a swim. So the investigating team concluded that it was death by misadventure. They're still doing the paperwork on that one down at the station and then this happens."

"This Burrell bloke was a drugs user? Can't rich people find anything better to do with their money?” Harker took another long drag of his cigarette and watched with mild disinterest as Jenny Griffin's forensic team walked in and out of the gothic building, ferrying various bags and mysterious apparatus. “So what's the name of our new corpse?"

"Our hanged man is Robert Allison," Critchley replied, checking his notes. "He was something big in the banking industry. Do they still call them fat cats? Or fat bankers? Anyway, he visited the Club regularly and the guy earned more money in a day than you and I see in a month. He's officially the first suicide they've ever had in here. He's also, it says here, the brother of William Allison, Assistant Secretary at the Home Office."

"Well now we know why they called us in," Harker grumbled. "Bloody politician's privileges. This Club is probably full of the loathsome little reptiles."

"Politicians, Lords, foreign dignitaries. This place attracts a wealthy clientele, guv."

"So that's two deaths in a week in the same Club. I can't imagine the owner is going to be especially thrilled by that." Harker took another tug on his cigarette and mulled it over for a moment, glancing up at the impressive facade of the Victorian building. This was just the sort of place in which he could see himself retiring, if it wasn't for all the rich nobs and the fact that it was obviously well beyond the range of his income.

"Okay Critchley, you know the routine. Talk to friends and family members and whatever work colleagues he had. We need to find out if this guy had a reason to want to kill himself. Put uniform on that for now, will you, and slip me any statements you think I need to see. Was there a note?"

"No note," said Critchley, double checking the report on his Blackberry. "Suicides nearly always leave a note. Why wouldn't he leave a note?"

"Maybe he left it somewhere else. It could be back at his house or maybe on his email or something."

"Who emails suicide notes?"

"I don't know, Critchley. You tell me, you're the bloody computer whizz kid. Get that checked out too, will you?" Harker thought to himself, tapped the excess ash from his cigarette and took another pull from it. "I'm wondering why he'd do it so publicly. Suicide is a private thing and this is anything but private."

"Maybe he wanted to be found. Maybe he hoped that someone would interrupt him before he did the deed. A cry for help and all that. Would someone try to hang themselves as a cry for help? Might be considered a little extreme."

"Two deaths in a week." Harker brushed aside Critchley's response. "Two deaths in the same place. Did you know that almost never happens? And whenever it does my nose starts to itch. Always assume the worst, Critchley, it saves so much time."

Harker took a last puff on his cigarette, flicked it away into the gutter and tugged his tatty linen jacket straight. "Go find out what's taking them so long to remove the body," he said, easing himself off the car bonnet and striding towards the entrance to the club. "I want to be in that room. In the meantime I'm going to go and talk to the owner, our Mister Quincey."

Radio interview with Roger and Vince

2010-10-28T23:40:00.002+01:00

You'll fins a fifteen minute interview with Vince and I, hosted by Alex Fitch, recorded at the Birmingham International Comics Show, at the following link: http://panelborders.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/panel-borders-gravestown-valentine/

Vince and I talk about Gravestown, Harker, the use of locations in comics, the way we work and the handling of the horror medium amongst other (hopefully) interesting topics. If you download the mp3, you'll find our interview starting at around 24.35, following the phone interview with Alex de Campi. Hope you enjoy it!

Harker: The Murder Club - part 1

2010-10-26T23:00:00.007+01:00

Okay, so as I mentioned in a previous post, self-publishing the first Harker novel through Ariel Press is a really bad idea. However, serialising it (or at least a portion of it), turns out to be a rather good idea. So let's do just that. Here's your first weekly taste of brand new Harker, starting with the first few pages of Chapter One. This is still a work in progress, but I think I'm close to a final draft now, though there may still be slight changes when it's finally published. I hope you enjoy this first taste, and come back here next Monday for the next instalment!

****************

Harker knew a violent death when he saw one. Corpses and cornflakes were part of his regular morning routine. He'd have preferred a cooked breakfast, but greasy food was never a good idea before visiting a corpse. He could never be entirely certain he'd be able to keep it down.

Today's example was particularly gruesome: a lone body suspended by the neck from a rope in the centre of a small, darkened room.

It wasn't pretty. Harker didn't want to look at it. The face of the corpse was an unpleasant shade of purple, the swollen flesh tinged with flecks of pale blue. The eyes bulged wide open from their sockets. The mouth was gaping, the tongue black and protruding. The rope around its neck creaked as the hanged man swayed slowly back and forth, a horrific pendulum.

One glance was definitely more than enough for Harker. It was making him feel queasy and he didn't need to see his breakfast again. He was already regretting the smoked kipper. Dead people unnerved him at the best of times and the tongue thing was making matters infinitely worse.

Around the body, Jenny Griffin's white-clad forensics team got on with their work, crammed into every corner of the room. The dangling corpse was photographed from every angle, the cameras flashing again and again, freezing the corpse in time.

A final photoshoot for the family album, Harker thought to himself. Look, here's me stood in front of the caravan in Bognor Regis. And here's me riding the donkey on the beach in Skegness. Oh, and here's me dead. I'm not really at my best in this one.

Harker forced himself to take another quick look, absorbing the details. The dead man was middle aged and heavily set, dressed in a brown pin stripe suit. His collar was snagged on the rope, distorting the fit, but he could see that the lines of the suit were tailored and sharp and the tie was conservative and classy. There was a gold watch on the corpse's wrist.

The clues were easy enough for an experienced copper like Harker to read. The body was a businessman with expensive taste and plenty of money. Underneath the corpse a small stool was laid on its side, discarded where it had fallen. It certainly looked like a suicide, but Harker had learnt never to take things at face value.

The team fussed with relentless efficiency, recording and bagging every last detail. Harker stood in the centre of the room, keeping his gaze well away from the corpse and forming a calm and quiet presence amongst the chaos. A few moments of silence for him to ponder the scene and to take it all in. Complete concentration was everything in this game.

"Want me to have a delve around, guv?"

Briefly startled, Harker turned to DS Critchley behind him and raised an eyebrow irritably. Critchley grinned back, unconcerned. The young sergeant was looking as sharp as ever: his new black suit fitted him far too well, his shoes gleamed, his head was freshly shaven and his goatee was trimmed to perfection. Harker gave his assistant a weary look and sighed, unable to muster a similar enthusiasm. He desperately needed some caffeine.

"Help yourself Critchley. Try not to get in the way." Harker ran his fingers through his own ruffled and tatty hair, feeling tired and crabby. He tugged ineffectually at his own crumpled jacket and yawned. "But don't let them take the body down until every inch of this room has been photographed and catalogued."

Critchley trod carefully around the forensics team, his gaze darting across the room as he took everything in. "Yes, I think they know that, guv."

"I don't care if they know it. Make sure of it anyway. It's what you're here for. Don't let them miss a thing."

Harker loathed early mornings. Even his shoes didn't feel like they fitted properly today. He glanced down at his feet and noticed that the laces of his scruffy old Converse sneakers had come undone again. He slid down to tie his shoelace, popped up again just as quickly hoping that no-one had noticed and took another furtive glance at the corpse. The body stared back at him glassy eyed, as if screaming to be allowed down from the rope. The fingers of the corpse were clawed desperately. Harker shuddered at the sight and quickly turned away. This wasn't helping his mood.

Critchley moved closer to take a better look at the body. He slipped his Blackberry from his pocket, tapped in a few notes and took some photographs for reference. He noticed the corpse staring at them both and gave it a cheeky wink in return. The corpse looked on passively.

"No sense of humour, some people," Critchley quipped. "So do we reckon this was a suicide? I've not seen a hanging before. Do they all look like this?"

"Pretty much. But something about this one doesn't sit right with me." Harker took another look at the face of the corpse and then just as quickly tore his eyes away. Critchley stepped closer to the body to get a better look, ignoring Jenny Griffin's raised eyebrow as she dusted for prints nearby.

"Please be careful," she reminded him, tugging with irritation at her white overalls. "I don't want your feet stepping on anything important."

"Don't worry luv, I know what I'm doing."

Critchley leaned into the corpse. He studied the face, lingered for a few moments and rubbed again at his goatee thoughtfully. "He does look a little startled, I'll give you that. Could it have gone wrong? Maybe he intended to break his own neck as he dropped and it didn't happen. So the rope tightened around his neck and he's stuck there slowly throttling himself to death. It's not like he could practice it first or anything."

"If you're going to hang yourself," said Harker, looking around the room, looking anywhere but at the ghoulish corpse, "well, that's a pretty elaborate way to kill yourself, don't you think? Suicide is something you plan, not something you do on a whim. If you're going to go to all that trouble, I'd say you're pretty damn sure you want to get it right."

"What are you getting at?" Critchley stepped over the fallen stool under the body's feet, noting it's position.

"If you're that determined to be dead then why struggle? Look at his face, Critchley. Look at his clawed hands. This man struggled and fought for his last breath. Why would he do that?"

"Panic? People panic when they can't breathe. It's an automatic reaction."

Harker grumbled dismissively and took another look around the room, scanning and storing it in his memory. "Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age. I'm going outside for a cigarette. Come and get me when the body's been taken down, I can't bear to look at it any more."

"Will do, guv." Critchley watched as his boss turned and left, and smiled with slight embarrassment towards Griffin. "You know what he's like. He hates getting up this early."

Griffin tutted audibly.

(more next week)

Creating Gravestown: 2 - plotting

2010-10-22T11:21:00.003+01:00

Plotting is where the real work starts for us. It's all very well thinking about a project and talking about it and doing lots of fannying about, but for our working method the plotting session is crucial, as it's where I try to transfer those images in my own head into Vince's head, so that we're both visualiising the same thing, and where he throws in his own ideas to improve and refine it.

Vince and I do this at the pub. More specifically we do this at the Dormouse pub in York - in the summer it has a lovely outdoor area that is perfect for thinking and exchanging ideas, and when colder it has roaring fires and scrummy food. Writers like roaring fires a great deal! There's nothing quite like a good roaring log fire and a refreshing pint of beer to really get my creative muscles working - most of my best ideas have been aided by a small dose of refreshing English ale.

I'd spent the weekend whilst at BICS giving Vince as much detail as I could about Gravestown, particularly concentrating on the novel I wrote three years ago, which would form the basis of the opening elements of the story. So the plotting session was all about refining those ideas, both of us throwing in a whole bunch of new ones, waving our arms around expressively, pulling together a full storyline for the first six issues so that we'd know where we're heading. Once that was done we zeroed in on the specifics of issue one.

We've always done this the same way, throughout our work on the Harker monthly. Once I have the issue firm in my mind, Vince gets his pen and paper out and draws 20 boxes on the page - one box for each page of the comic. Here we block out the pacing of the issue and I tell Vince what I need - it might be a full page here, two pages for conversation there, three pages of action here, giving him the main images in my mind (in this case the house, the doors, the bridges, the pump room, the cliff face, the spooky child etc) and placing them in their right context (and of course the right order) so that Vince knows what happens and when. Vince scribbles notes into each box as we talk, until we're both satisfied that the pacing feels right and all those pesky boxes are filled with exciting stuff.

Armed with all of this information, Vince takes the notes home and works them into twenty pages of rough thumbnail layouts - effectively the entire issue is drawn rapidly with stick men, working out the storytelling (i.e. where the characters are placed in each panel to tell the story in the most efficient and exciting way - one of Vince's real skills) and blocking it out carefully. It's just like drawing storyboards for a movie, getting those camera angles right before the photo shoot.

You'll notice that there's still no script at this stage - Vince and I work 'Marvel-style', drawing the issue first and then scripting over the artwork. This leaves Vince much freer with the artwork, able to add his own ideas and flourishes, and makes the scripting a little more fun for me.

As of today (Friday) Vince has now finished the thumbnails, so the next stage is the photo session, which we're doing tomorrow afternoon. On Monday, the drawing begins...

Gravestown and novel update

2010-10-21T16:22:00.002+01:00

Vince and I had the plotting session for issue one of Gravestown on Monday afternoon - I'll write a specific post about how we go about this in a day or two, though I thought you'd like to know we're working hard here. I understand Vince is already constructing backgrounds based on his own thumbnails, and we have the photo session on Saturday afternoon for the character work, which is always fun.

I've taken advice from a few people in the publishing industry, and they've told me that self-publishing Harker: The Murder Club (my first Harker novel) through Ariel Press is a really (really) bad idea if I'm hoping to get a publishing deal for the Harker novels through a mainstream book publisher (which of course I am). Unlike the comics world, in book publishing there's a huge prejudice for anything that hints of self-publishing due to piracy and trademark issues, and I've been advised that I could really be shooting myself in the foot if we publish the novel ourselves first. So you may have to wait a little longer, but be of good cheer, at least it's almost done! (oh god!)

BICS 2010 aftermath

2010-10-18T18:21:00.003+01:00

Vince and I are both back from the Birmingham International Comics Show, both knackered from standing behind the stall for two days but delighted with all the attention we got. We did so well with our sales that we're (very temporarily) completely out of stock of both the Harker collections and various copies of the comic, though we're doing a small reprint of the collected editions, so if you weren't able to get one at the convention, wander along to our online shop and we'll sort them out for you pronto. If what you want is currently out of stock, either drop us a brief email or come back next week, we'll be able to sort you out.

We also sold a large bunch of the original 1997 version of Gravestown, written and drawn by me with huge amounts of help from Mark Wayne Barrett. The new version that Vince and I are working on is very different - a terrifying and gothic fairytale - but it was lovely to see so many copies of that first, now rather dated version fly from the table in response to our announcement of the new project. I hope those of you who bought it enjoyed it for what it was - my first stab at what would become an ongoing obsession over the next few years, refining it over and over again until finally arriving at the version Vince and I are starting now.

We had our first full plotting session today (which I'll talk about properly over the next day or two), but for now I'd like to mention how lovely it was to meet so many of you. I think the question I was asked more than any other was "When is the Harker novel out?" and i could finally give a definitive answer: the end of the month! I've finally almost finished editing Harker: The Murder Club, and it'll be on sale in November. So don't go too far away ;)

Creating Gravestown: 1 - preparation

2010-10-14T18:05:00.008+01:00

Here's another widescreen view of the promotional image for our new Gravestown comic - click to embiggen! Drawn by the very wonderful Vince Danks, of course.

I'm going to take you through the process of creating the first issue of our new monthly project, and you're in right at the start of the process as we haven't started yet - the hard work begins on Monday, so let's look at how we arrived at this stage and where we go from here. Hopefully this'll give you some insight into how a comic gets from our heads and into your local comic shop, whilst at the same time documenting what we hope will be the start of a terrific new series that you'll come to love - fingers crossed!

A little context: why aren't we doing Book Three of Harker?
As mentioned in earlier posts, Harker is currently temporarily held up whilst we negotiate a book deal. Once the deal is in place we'll be back to work with our two detectives, but in the meantime we were missing producing a monthly comic, and had the choice of two projects I've been developing: Mad Girl or Gravestown. We'll be doing both eventually (and obviously returning to Harker too), but Vince chose Gravestown as the one he wanted to get his teeth into first.

Where did the idea originate?
The basic environment of Gravestown has been in my head for at least 20 years, originally used as a venue for role playing games run with a small group of friends (including Vince). When Vince began to self-publish his Sapphire series I developed the idea into a comic, of which one issue was published about ten years ago. It was written and drawn by me, with huge art contributions by the very talented Mark Wayne Barrett. We did make a start on issue two, but didn't get very far.

To the left is the cover to the unpublished issue two, but after this it languished for some time as a project I always hoped to return to. Three or four years later the concept reappeared as an unpublished (and ultimately unfinished) children's novel, and was then completely revamped two years ago for a full length adult novel.

It still didn't feel right. The project was crying out to be a comic, but I knew I just didn't have the skill to be able to draw it and do it justice. With each new version the concept had grown and new ideas had come in, and I needed an artist with real talent and bagloads of skill and enthusiasm. Oh look - there's Vince!

What stage are we at now?
We're right at the start of the process. Vince and I had our first creative summit this week (at The Dormouse in York, our regular venue for such sessions) at which Vinnie suggested we produce it as an ongoing monthly comic, and I immediately agreed. I adore working to a tight schedule, it gives me a huge buzz, and I immediately welcomed the chance and said yes before Vinnie had the chance to change his mind. Vince had already made copious notes (which tallied up with my own ideas) and had produced a few character sketches and the gorgeous test piece at the top of this post. He'd also worked out a monthly schedule (as he has done previously for Harker), so we'd know where we needed to be each day in order to get the comic out on time. Clearly I wanted to get straight to it.

This weekend we're in Birmingham for the BICS comic convention, and as we've done previously we'll be using our time there to flesh out the basic concepts of the comic and the characters and come up with a rip-roaring first book that'll hopefully leave you eager for more. I have enough for the first two issues, but at the moment everything I have planned is in flux, waiting for Vince to throw his own ideas in and turn it into something new and wonderful. So the hard work this weekend will be pulling that together and plotting a first six issue arc with Vince, with a beginning, a middle and an end and lots of lovely cliffhangers along the way.

All being well, I'll be able to report back on Sunday evening with the results of these plotting sessions, because the real work on Issue One starts on Monday! If all goes to schedule (and we're very strict on this), the first issue will be complete, including the cover, this time next month. We'll then pass that to Diamond, secure distribution and we're off and running.

By the time Issue One arrives in the comic shops somewhere around February next year we'll be working on Issue Four, so expect lots of updates in here and art previews before the first issue hits the streets. We're going to be promoting the heck out of Gravestown because we think you're going to really love it - more to follow in the after-BICS post on Sunday when I'll be revealing a little more about just what the series is about, and taking you through the way Vince and I co-plot...

Gravestown preview

2010-10-13T22:25:00.002+01:00

Thought you might be interested in a little preview artwork from Gravestown, just to whet your appetite. Isn't Vince rather wonderful? Click on the image to embiggen, as ever.

Preparing for BICS

2010-10-13T18:03:00.003+01:00

As I mentioned in the previous post, Vince and I will both be in Birmingham at the BICS comics show at the Think Tank, Millenium Point this weekend, and we'd love to see you. We're pretty easy to spot - I look a lot like Harker (though with a small beard - see the cartoon to the left) and Vince looks a lot like Critchley (though without the small beard and with more hair). So if you see two blokes wandering around who look just like Harker and Critchley, that'll be me and Vince!

We have a table across the weekend, so by all means come up and say hi there (we'll sign anything, chat to you about whatever you like and maybe even try to sell you stuff), but we're there from Friday evening through to Sunday teatime, so if you see us in the bar or just walking around, please do say hi - we're there specifically to meet you, so don't be shy or imagine you'll be unwelcome, we like talking to you.

We won't have a great deal of stock - we're almost sold out of Harker books and back issues, and we're not doing a reprint until the publishing deal is finalised, so if you're missing something, this weekend is the time to buy it! We'll be there mainly to promote our new Gravestown series, with preview artwork and sketches prior to starting work on issue one on Monday - ask us all about it!

Oh, and keep an eye on the blog here - now that we're working again there'll be lots of posts coming up, so keep checking back and spread the word - Gravestown is the comic to buy!

Torchwood and Gravestown

2010-10-11T22:35:00.002+01:00

I'm a little late announcing this, as Vince and I have only just been able to confirm it ourselves, but we'll both be at the British International Comics Show (BICS) this coming weekend (16th-17th October) at the Think Tank in Birmingham - more details about the event here. As always we'll have a table full of Harker goodies - please come and say hello to us, we'd love to meet you.

Vince and I have just this week completed an 11 page strip for Torchwood Magazine #24 (the November / December issue) available in all fine newsagents, and the strip will also be in the December issue of the Torchwood Comic - I've included a preview page of the artwork to the left - click to embiggen!

Harker itself is still held up due to ongoing negotiations with a major publisher, which should bring the strip into bookshops worldwide next year. Book Three (as mentioned below) is hoped to be part of these negotiations, so you will be seeing lots more Harker (Book Three is planned to be 180 pages, with more to follow) but for the moment, like us, you're going to have to be patient. We do promise, however, that there will definitely be lots more to come.

The novel (The Murder Club) is also very close to completion - more news on that shortly!

In the meantime, while we wait for more news on Harker, Vince and I have now started work on a brand new monthly strip called Gravestown. We've been building up to it for a while, and work on the strip begins with a vengeance as soon as we get back from Birmingham. Expect lots more news about this over the next couple of months, as we'll be launching it in the New Year (we'd have it out sooner, but you have to work about three months ahead with Diamond, the distributors). We will, however, have promotional pieces to show at BICS, and it'll have the same mixture of thrills and humour that you've become accustomed to in Harker.

If you can't make it to BICS, keep an eye here on the blog, there's a lot on its way, and we think you'll like it :)

Harker news (i.e. where's issue 13?)

2010-06-27T19:53:00.006+01:00

You might be a little concerned given how quiet it's gone on the Harker front the past couple of months, wondering if perhaps you'll see any more. Worry not, we'll be back before you know it! The current hiatus (as I mentioned in the editorial in issue 12) is due to ongoing negotiations with a major publisher that we hope will secure the long term future of the comic. Contract negotiations inevitably always take a while, so although Vince and I are busting to get to Book Three (the New York adventure currently called You Only Die Twice), we're holding on for the moment until we've finalised a deal. The colour pages I've included here should give you a hint as to what's currently under discussion.

More than that I can't tell you, but the minute we have firm news, I'll be announcing it here. Exciting times for us!

In the meantime we're keeping very busy here. I was asked at the Bristol Convention by half a dozen of you when the Harker novel The Murder Club will be out. I'm currently working on the third draft of the novel, editing and improving as I go, working on it every day. My target is currently to have it out through Ariel Press by late July (and I'll also be seeking a mainstream publisher for it), but that might drift into August, depending on how the rewrites go. Again keep an eye on the blog here for updates - theoretically I could release it as it is now, but I want it to be as good as it can be, so be patient and I'll have it with you in the next month or two, all being well. The story falls between Books One and Two (almost immediately after The Book of Solomon and just before The Woman In Black), and it features the same humour and repartee between Harker and Critchley, with a storyline encompassing five murders and a thrilling climax in the tower of Big Ben. I'm also hoping to twist Vince's arm into drawing a few illustrations for it. It'll be worth the wait, I promise!

We're also about to produce a one-off Torchwood strip (more details of that as soon as contracts are signed) and in the Harker hiatus, Vince and I are working on a three issue strip currently called 'Mad Girl'. Details for that project are so secret that we only ever speak about it in hushed whispers. The plan is to release it through Ariel Press in the Autumn, but that will depend on Harker - if we get the go-ahead for Harker, we'll put Mad Girl on a back burner, so again I can't give a firm timeline yet.

So lots of things happening behind the scenes that I can't talk about, but we're both very busy on all this stuff, so don't go too far, there's lots to come...

Harker Issue Twelve - annotations

2010-06-17T10:19:00.005+01:00

Page One
We thought it was a bit of a stretch that Critchley would have his phone with him whilst still in his football kit - where did he get it from? Vince did ask the question (and even suggested having Critchley back in his suit, having quickly changed after the match), but I thought the idea of Critchley in his kit was funny and wanted to keep him that way. So we decided he just had time to grab his phone on the way out. Works for me ;)

Page Two
We've been planning this foggy run across the moors (a blatant, shameless steal from The Hound of the Baskervilles) since the start of the story - if you check the various newspapers Vince has been drawing throughout Book Two, you'll catch a number of references to the fog rolling in. And a running gag of Vince's about how bad the Whitby football team is. I have no idea if this is true, and apologise profusely to the local team if they're actually doing rather well. Luckily no-one seems to have told them yet ;)
Those readers who know Whitby well will also know that the moors are actually a couple of miles away from the town. In Harker's world we've changed that, a convenience of fiction.

Page Four
It was Vince's idea that our own monster hound should be really friendly, especially as we'd had him lurking on the sidelines for a few issues. I heartily approved.

Page Eight
"I'm a friend to all animals" is a little personal joke that I often say myself. The truth is that most animals seem to have a complete distrust of me, and I thought it would be funny to have Harker suffering from a similar problem. I think that most dogs would at the very least growl when Harker was close by.
"Maybe Timmy's fallen down a well" is a reference to the Australian children's series 'Skippy', in which the kangaroo of the title seemed to be perpetually telling humans about the latest catastrophe to have befallen his owner.

Page Ten
Critchley in a football kit climbing down a rock face because a dog told him to. I'd like to see the police report on that one too. I love the expression Vince has given the dog here when he's looking up at Harker.

Page Twelve
It's a rule of detective fiction that if you have a chase on the moors, someone has to end up sinking in a mire. Which again dates back to The Hound of the Baskervilles, of course. I remember as a kid that a week never seemed to go by on telly without someone getting stuck in quicksand. It was either that or being threatened by a rattlesnake. You never see either of those these days, drama has become much more sophisticated. It's our pleasure to help redress that balance. *coughs*

Page Seventeen
Another convenience of fiction here, in which we have the moors leading all the way to the clifftops. We're very deliberately riffing on classic detective and romantic fiction here - the clifftop conclusion and the plummet into the unforgiving sea.

Page Nineteen
I forgot to mention it in the script here (and will pick it up in subsequent collected editions) but the lights you can see in the distance in the bottom panel are intended to be the policemen with the dogs that we saw earlier, finally arriving on the scene.

Back from Bristol!

2010-05-24T11:01:00.012+01:00

My goodness we're exhausted... but we had a wonderful time! On Saturday particularly we had a constant stream of people at our table, resulting in our best single day at a convention ever, and we did pretty well on Sunday too. It was lovely meeting everyone who came to our table, whether old readers or new - I hope you enjoyed what you bought, and if you need more, pop over to our shop at http://www.arielpress.com/store.html - we'd be very happy to provide you with lots more Harker goodness!

Oh! And since this is very much a 'hello' to new readers who discovered us at Bristol, please feel free to add me in Facebook if you like - you'll find me here: http://www.facebook.com/roggibson and there's also a Harker Facebook fan page here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=72916292039 - either of those are the quickest way to find out when new issues are published and what news is coming up, but keep an eye in here too for latest news. If this is your first time in here, you'll find annotations to every Harker issue in the column to the left here - but don't read them before you've read the issues - spoilers ahoy!

And for regular readers who weren't at Bristol - issue 12 is out! It'll be showing up in your local comic shop over the next week, or you can buy it directly from us in our shop. Go get it now! Critchley gets stuck in a bog! (Not that kind of bog). (Though that's not a bad idea).

Sadly no Eagle Awards nomination, but I've taken a look at the results of the initial voting today and they're bizarre - I won't single out individual results, just take a look yourself and see how many of these you've actually heard of: http://www.eagleawards.co.uk/vote.aspx. Quite the strangest results I've ever seen, and in many cases I suspect this reflects who has the most friends on Facebook and Twitter. Why on earth didn't Paul Grist pick up a nomination for Favourite British Colour Comic for Jack Staff? No mention of Grant Morrison? Various IDW Doctor Who comic strips in multiple categories? Tony Lee in nearly every category? And Space Babe 113? Really?

Oh well! Must have a word with that grumpy oaf DCIHarker and tell him it's about time he tweeted more often, but he's so frequently abusive that it's best not to nag too much...

Next things coming up: "The Woman In Black", our collected edition of issues 7-12 (of which we had advanced copies in Bristol), and then in July, the long-awaited first Harker novel "The Murder Club", which is worth the wait, I promise!

Oh, and one other item of news: we're currently in negotiations with a major publisher (whom you'll have heard of) for Harker - I can't say anything yet as we're in the contractual negotiations stage, but watch this space, I'll let you know more once things are a little firmer...

And why is Vince drawing pictures of Captain Jack Harkness? hmmm, curious...

Harker Issue 11 - annotations

2010-05-13T19:22:00.004+01:00

Cover
I told Vince that what I wanted for this issue was a real feel of the old British football comic strips from the 1970s. I was never a big reader of such things as Roy of the Rovers, but I read my fair share of football strips in such comics as Valiant and Lion, so I passed on a few old annuals for Vince to use as reference. I think his cover here (and his football artowrk inside the issue) really captures that 1970s feel, with Critchley recast as the hero of the day, scoring the winning goal. I'm particularly fond of Harker in the foreground here - and especially his belly sagging over his trousers, emphasising his dour expression.

Page One
We're back at the ruins of Whitby Abbey here, next to the hotel, with Jasmine Burn's body having been rescued from the well.

Page Two
The well, shown at the bottom right of panel one here, does actually exist and is easy to find next to the Abbey.

Page Three
A nice little detail added here by Vince in panels 4 and 5 - Harker tossing his cigarette into the well in panel 4, and Griffin looking at it with a certain amount of disgust in panel 5. Vince adds these wonderful little sight gags a lot, and I always enjoy them when I get to see the art.

Page Five
Just another little detail here - Harker really is something of a throwback, with no real idea how to operate anything even vaguely approaching modern technology. I've always felt that there were two reasons why he refuses to carry a mobile phone: 1. He finds them generally irritating and 2. He knows that he wouldn't have the first idea how to operate them. And why bother to learn when he has Critchley there to do that stuff for him? This attitude is all very well (and very much in character for Harker) but it got him into a whole heap of trouble back in issue six - alone, in danger and unable to all for assistance.

Page Six
Another little visual joke added here by Vince in panel three: "Windows is waking up - it'll still be rubbish though". We're both Mac addicts at heart.

Page Eight
Strolling through the centre of the old part of Whitby here. I've never been to a Whitby Goth Weekend myself, but Vince goes at least twice a year, so I'm assuming he knows better than anyone else the kind of characters you'll see. Including the cat costume!

Page Nine
I really enjoyed writing pages eight and nine - both Harker and Critchley are very close to my own worldview - they each represent different sides to my own character, and also, to a certain extent, my relationship with Vince, who has been my best friend for nigh on twenty years. So yes, I do grumble about style over content, but I also think that George Romero is one of the cultural highlights of the last century. It's fun to be able to split these parts of my nature into separate characters, and I do try my best not to be as grumpy as poor old Harker, who got left behind culturally about thirty years ago.

Page Twelve
I'll admit here (and throughout most of this issue) to poking fun at Emo goths, but I do it out of affection. That's my defence, anyway ;) Quite a few of Vince's friends are goths, so I may need to keep my head down for a while...

Page Thirteen
Look! In panel one! Vince has established the presence of the brolly that Harker uses over the page! It's these little details that make him such a pleasure to work with.

Page Sixteen
Whitby Gazette are just about the dirtiest team I think I've ever seen.

Page Seventeen
Just in case you think this is all out of nowhere... here are a few clues that we seeded:
- Check out page ten of issue #7, where Cranford mentions his bad leg - which he received, of course, in the car accident. The accident is also mentioned on page five of issue #10 (where Jasmine is talking to Cranford on the phone) and on page seven of the same issue, where Cranford murders Jasmine.
- And check out Cranford's reaction to Agatha Fletcher on page five of issue #7, particularly in panel three (where he recognises the rings on her hand, which he'd seen on her steering wheel when her car hit them) and his demeanour in panels four and five. This has nothing to do with her rude behaviour, and everything to do with recognising her. This also explains why he happened to be outside her room at just the right moment on pages eight and nine of the same issue - he'd been hanging outside just to confirm his suspicions.
- You'll also notice Cranford is present at Agatha's death on page sixteen of issue #7, looking a little dark and rueful.
- And you can see him looking particularly shifty on page eight of issue #8 when Critchley is questioning him.
- His reaction on page twelve of issue #8 should also make more sense - he faints because he's shown the dead body that he thought he'd disposed of the night before. Must have been rather a shock to him...

Page Twenty
Something of a fictional convenience here. Whitby football ground isn't actually right on the edge of the moors as depicted here, though the moors are only a mile or two away. We've joined the two of them up for the purpose of the story - this is an ever-so-slightly alternate Whitby in Harker's world.

Eagle Award Nominations

2010-04-09T23:34:00.011+01:00

Hi everyone!

We've just found out that HARKER has been nominated in this year's Eagle Awards in two different categories:

- Favourite British Black and White Comic Book
- Favourite New Comic Book

We're thrilled and very flattered, and we're keeping our fingers tightly crossed!

Only the five most popular of the nominations will go through to the final vote, so we very much need your support. Please (please!) vote for us.

All you need to do is to visit:
http://www.eagleawards.co.uk/nomination.aspx
and then pull down the choices in that category.

We'd genuinely appreciate your support - and indeed would be thrilled if you feel you want to nominate us in any of the other categories. Please vote now, and thank you! :)

Harker Issue 10 - annotations

2010-04-02T11:29:00.002+01:00

Cover
Vince is a regular attendee at the Whitby Goth Weekends, so I have to assume that this is fairly representative of the kind of people you'd find in a pub during such an event. Whilst I don't like to identify too closely with grumpy old Harker, I have to admit that I'd feel just as out of place as he does on the cover here...

Page One
A beautiful establishing shot here, all entirely down to Vince as this wasn't mentioned in the plotting session - a gorgeous gull's eye view of the hotel, with that bay window in the final panel being the location of Jasmine's room.

Page Two
Jasmine is referring here to a very subtle scene in issue seven. I can't be more specific about it here as it would be a potential major spoiler, but when you've read the whole story, check back and you'll spot it.

Page Three
The wafer thin mint Critchley mentions is the one that finally explodes the unfortunate fat man in Monty Python's Meaning of Life. Once seen, never forgotten!

Page Six
The music playing in the background here is "She Sells Sanctuary" by The Cult - a personal favourite of mine, but clearly not to Harker's taste. Whitby Goth Weekend is a bi-annual get together at the town, in which hundreds of goths invade the town, enjoying all kinds of events and gigs.

Page Nine
This pub gag is one that Vince and I came up with months ago, and we've just been waiting for a suitable opportunity to place it. It was originally meant to go in earlier in Book Two but was squeezed out by events, so we were delighted to find space for it here.

Page Ten
The Sweeney was a classic 1970s cop show starring John Thaw and Dennis Waterman, known at the time for excessive violence and hard hitting themes. "Life On Mars" and "Ashes to Ashes", featuring Gene Hunt, were directly inspired by the show.

Page Twelve
John Lennon was killed by obsessive stalker Mark Chapman in New York in 1980, outside The Dakota, just across the road from Central Park. We'll be visiting that area in Book Three of Harker, which takes place in New York.

Harker 11 out now!

2010-03-25T21:51:00.005Z

Harker 11 is shipping to the usual comic shops as we speak - look for the cover on the left! If you ever liked Roy of the Rovers (or even if you didn't) you'll love this issue ;) Oh, and did I mention that we reveal the murderer?

And if you happen to be at the Hi-Ex convention this weekend, you'll also be able to pick up a copy of issue 12 a full month before it hits the comic shops! (cover to the left, click to embiggen).

And if THAT isn't enough, we'll also have a VERY limited edition print run of the collected Harker Book Two: The Woman In Black (collecting issues 7-12). Click to embiggen again!

Who says we never treat you? ;)

Harker 11 cover

2010-01-18T15:08:00.003Z

The slightly late-running Harker 10 (held up due to Christmas) has now gone to print and should be in the shops late next week. You can also download a pdf version (and buy the comic online) as usual at http://www.arielpress.com/store.html

And just in case you thought we ever get any rest here at Harker Towers, here's the cover for issue 11, out next month - click to embiggen! :)

We're also very flattered (and indeed leaping up and down!) to have made Forbidden Planet's Best of the Best 2009 list, which you can see here - thank you!
http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/2010/the-best-of-2009-masterlist-fpi-style/

Harker Issue 9 - annotations

2009-12-08T13:56:00.004Z

Cover
They used to say that corpses on the cover sell comics, so Vince has given us two here. Harker, of course, hates the sight of dead bodies, which is why he's looking from behind his hand.

Page One
"It's blue, have you seen it" - just in case this isn't clear, they're discovering the corpse here - the very same corpse we saw drifting in on the tide the previous evening, in issue #8.
We've done a lot of location photography around Whitby for this story, to get the setting as authentic as we can - Vince got this unusual overhead shot of the bridge here by asking very nicely at a solicitor's office, explaining why he needed it. They very kindly let him into an upstairs room, so that he could get the best angle for the establishing shot I'd requested.
You'll note the 'Whitby Gazette' sign on the sign of the white building - that's actually there, and also provides a neat link to something fun that we have planned for issue #11...
For those wanting to accurately place Harker's hotel, it's the building at the top right of the panel (which is in reality a Tourist Information Centre for the Abbey).

Page three
And there's the Whitby Gazette sign again in the first panel, just to make sure it's noticed. Fishboy (panel two) was the Denizen of the Deep in Buster comic in the late 60's and early 70's. He had webbed fingers and toes, could breathe underwater and talk to sea creatures.

Page four
This is intended to deliberately echo page seven of issue #1 - the arrival of our heroes on the case. You'll note that the conversation about sandwiches is similar to the one in issue #1 too. There's also another quick appearance of the Whitby Gazette, and Vince's ongoing visual gag about the local football team's woes.

Page six
Contrast Harker's method for getting the local police out of his hair, in comparison to Critchley's more reasonable approach in issue #8.

Page eight
Marine Boy (panel one) was an early Japanese anime cartoon shown here in the UK in the 1960s. He worked for Ocean Patrol, could breathe underwater using his 'oxy-gum' and had boomerangs as his main weapon.

Page seventeen
Here's the iconic Whitby Abbey again. In our version of Whitby, the wild grassed area alongside the Abbey continues straight to the moors - a little artistic licence there, as anyone who knows Whitby will tell you, but we needed to mess with the geography just a wee bit for the story, as you'll discover in issue #12.

Page nineteen
As acknowleged by Harker, this is a reference to the Grimpen Mire, into which the villain Jack Stapleton meets his fate in Conan Doyle's famous Sherlock Holmes story 'The Hound of the Baskervilles'.

Page twenty
And there's the black dog again - a further Holmes reference, as well as being a local Whitby legend (the folklore tale of the Barghest, a spectral black dog that preys on lonely travellers). Dracula takes the form of a black dog in the Bram Stoker novel 'Dracula', though the local legend predates Stoker's incorporation of it into the novel.

Cover of issue 10

2009-12-02T21:50:00.002Z

Here's the cover of the next issue, due out on 15th December (just in time for Christmas!)
And for all those who ask me about the Harker novel 'The Murder Club', I'm working heavily on rewrites as we speak, and am hoping to have that out in time for Christmas too - watch this space!

And don't forget to follow DCI Harker on Twitter: http://twitter.com/DCIharker/

Harker on Twitter

2009-12-01T08:45:00.001Z

Harker now has his own Twitter account, in which he'll be making grumpy tweets on a daily basis. Please feel very free to add him, and feel equally free to annoy him as you please. Expect random abuse and thinly veiled accusations if you attempt to engage him in conversation, enjoy him, and please tell your friends. Retweeting of his more outrageous statements very much encouraged!
Yes, it's sneaky viral marketing of the Harker comic - but I think it might also be lots of fun ;)

You'll find him here: http://twitter.com/DCIharker

Harker - Strange Deaths

2009-11-30T17:17:00.003Z

And I've just finished my second novel (fourth novel in total): "Harker - Strange Deaths". Check out the Nanowrimo winners badge, right here - I rock!
I've been asked repeatedly when the first Harker novel 'The Murder Club' will be available from Ariel Press - tomorrow I'm going straight back to work on the second draft, and I'm still very hopeful of having it ready in time for Christmas. I'm also hoping to get a small selection of illustrations from Vince in it too, but we'll see how busy he is with the comic (he's hard at work as we speak on issue #10 so I don't want to interrupt him).
If there are any publishers out there interested in publishing either (or both) of the Harker novels, do get in touch, as we'll only be releasing a limited edition through our own shop.
Oh, and in other news - in a couple of days I'm going to be launching Harker's Twitter account... fun should ensue...

Roger

Harker Issue 8 - annotations

2009-10-27T15:28:00.006Z

Okay, hang onto your hats (if you're wearing hats) and away we go...

Cover
Last issue we gave Harker the solo spot (given that it was pretty much a solo Harker issue) and this time we give Critchley the cover, for the same reasons. I especially like Harker on the bumper car, ramming his car into the other one and frightening the small child. Completely Vince's idea, he has a dark side too, clearly!

Page One
"aaaroooooo" is officially our first sound effect in the series so far. I decided right at the start that I wouldn't be using any captions or sound effects, but I think I can get away with this one, since it's almost a speech balloon (okay, so it's the black dog's speech balloon, but give me a break here!). It's often the little details in Vince's art that I enjoy, and here in panel one you'll notice he's added a sign saying that Agatha Fletcher's murder mystery event is cancelled - obviously, of course, as we killed her last issue.
DI Barnett is the typical local copper who doesn't want those poncey Southern coppers on his patch - it's always fun playing with the archetypes, and I make no apology for it, as in many ways it's what the series is all about.

Page Three
And here we see the difference between Harker and Critchley. Harker would have simply told Barnett to naff off, in no uncertain terms. Critchley is way too polite to do that, and instead smoothes things over pretty well.

Page Five
Griffin arrives, as sour as ever. Making her a regular part of the team was something we came up with whilst writing the previous book. It had never been part of the plan, but I enjoyed writing her so much in Book One that I decided to keep her. Her approach is again at odds with Critchley - like him, she also left a scenario in which three members of the opposite sex were showing an active interest in her. Critchley wasn't bothered, for him his job is everything. Griffin has an entirely different response, of course.

Page Ten
This first panel is the ruins of the abbey, looking towards the hotel, which we can see in the middle of the panel in the background. You'll note the fog drifting in at the bottom of the panel.

Page Twelve
Anyone who lives in or knows Whitby will know that, like the hotel, this little fairground is a complete invention. A fairground there would actually be washed away every time the tide comes in, but hey, we needed a fairground, and I liked the location. We did dabble with the idea that the fairground could be up on the clifftops, but this suited what I wanted better. I love the slightly sombre mood Vince establishes here, fully in keeping with a quiet little seaside resort in the early evening. No tthe sort of thing that Critchley likes, but perfect for Harker.

Page Thirteen
Gaah! I've just seen a typo! That's so very annoying. I'll pick it up for the collected edition, but of course Harker should be saying "discount".

Page Fourteen
The bizarre building on the bottom right panel does indeed exist - walking up the steps next to it from the beach leads towards the pier, where we next see our detectives. I don't know for certain what the building is, and haven't been able to find a guide that mentions it, but considering it's position and the portholes circling it, my guess would be that it's an old coastguard's hut of some kind. It appears unused and derelict now.

Page Fifteen
We're on the West Pier here. I don't believe the lighthouse is in use these days, but we decided it would be, especially with the fog rolling in.
Harker here is giving my own view on such shows as Rosemary and Thyme, Murder she Wrote and many others - the kind where the sleuth stumbles across the crime and feels compelled to solve it. We'll be coming back to Harker's love of The French Connection at a later date, when we reach Book Five.

Page Sixteen
Okay, admit it - did you spot the body floating in the water in that first panel, the first time you were reading?

Page Eighteen
Fish and chips, for the benefit of our American readers, are a typical English seaside delicacy. The fish comes covered in gorgeous crispy golden batter, the chips are what you might know as fries (but much bigger), and they taste best eaten out of old newspaper with lashings of salt and vinegar. Yum!

Page Twenty
This is the one hundred year old Whitby swing bridge, which splits in two and opens up every half hour, usually attracting lots of onlookers and queues of traffic waiting to get across. The bridge swings horizontally, hence the circular look to the ramps here, and the large gears to the left.

Cover of issue 9

2009-10-10T19:57:00.002+01:00

Here it is, hot off Vince's work desk - the cover of issue #9 (which'll be released on 1st November) - click to embiggen as usual. They used to say that corpses sell comics - well, we've got two of them, so it should be double sales on this one ;)

Birmingham International Comics Show (BICS) 2009

2009-10-05T20:44:00.004+01:00

Hi to those of you whom we met in Birmingham, both old and new fans alike! We had the best weekend we'd ever had at a convention, with huge sales of the new trade paperback collection of issues 1-6. If you were there but weren't able to buy it at the time, go take a look in the Harker online store, where you can buy every issue of Harker to date, and the new collected edition too.

You can buy new issues of Harker from us on the first of every month in the store (issue 9 will be out on 1st November), and we're also available in a number of stores around the country - check here to see where you can buy Harker, and I'll be adding two more stores to that list this week (one of which is Gosh in London).

If you take a look down the menu at the side here, you'll find annotations to the first seven issues, with number eight to follow next week.

As for the convention itself, we had a lovely time! So many of you came up to us and said such lovely things about the comic, and it's always wonderful for us to get some real feedback from you - hopefully you all like issue eight, literally hot off the presses as we only got it from the printers ourselves on Friday.

I do think BICS need to sort out a much better venue for the launch party, preferably with no disco, as networking was impossible in a room with such loud music. Just a nice pub with some food would be ideal, I'm sure. It was also a shame that there was no official bar for the saturday night, as again networking was impossible (no-one knew where everyone else was) - I think if those two issues could be solved, next year would be hugely improved. We were certainly very happy with the venue and the organisation, and will definitely be attending again next year!

Thanks to the organisers for offering us a chance to talk to all of you, and I hope you all enjoy your new Harker comics! Keep coming back every month - we've been monthly for eight issues and we never miss a deadline, so stick with us, there's loads more to come!

For those of you more interested in the trade paperbacks, Book Two will be out in March 2010, and also look out for the Harker novel 'The Murder Club', which will be available on 1st November.

Right, back to the scripting for me...

Harker Issue 7 - annotations

2009-09-29T00:51:00.005+01:00

And away we go with annotations for the first of six issues making up Book Two: Murder By The Book...

Cover
Vince didn't tell me what he was doing for the cover of this issue (I simply asked for some kind of scene setter featuring Harker) and I was bowled over by this gorgeous shot, which feels very Cerebus to me. Harker here is halfway up the famous 199 Steps (known by some as Caedmon's Trod) in Whitby, which leads from the old town up to the ruined abbey on the cliff tops (and also up to where we've situated the hotel where Harker is staying). He's trying to light a fag whilst ducking from the gulls, just in case you were wondering, though I like the ambiguity of the image a lot. This also serves as the first panel of the book because...

Page One
...because here in panel one, you can see he's arrived at the top of the steps and is approaching St Mary's Church, which lies right at the top of the stairs.
Harker is singing to himself here a song called 'Mary', which you'll find on the Exposure album by Robert Fripp (which also features Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Tony Levin, Phil Collins and Daryl Hall). The lyrics were written by Fripp's girlfriend of the time, Joanna Walton, who later died in the Lockerbie tragedy of 1988.
He's singing it as the lyrics describe his relationship to his great grandmother, whom is clearly Mina Harker, from Bram Stoker's Dracula book, and also, of course, from Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Our Inspector Harker doesn't live in Moore's wonderful League universe, so this Mina is no more or less than the character from the novel. Though his great grandfather might interest you, and it's not going to be who you think it is. I've said too much already...
Harker is clearly a regular visitor to the grave.
Those familiar with Whitby might note that Vince has pulled the abbey closer to the church in that shot in the last panel, just so that you can see it.

Pages Two to Three
Right in the middle of this gorgeous shot by Vince of Whitby harbour, you can see the 199 steps, leading up to the church and the abbey. Vince and I know Whitby very well, and we went on location just prior to starting the story to get the flavour of the town (just as we did with the British Museum environs for Book One). I'm rather looking forward to our trip to Portmeirion in four months as we begin Book Three...

Page Four
The Grand Hotel here is (in real life) the Abbey Tourist Information Centre and youth hostel.
Agatha Fletcher's name derives, of course, from Agatha Christie (writer of the Poirot novels, amongst many others, and a central influence on Book Two) and Jessica Fletcher, the heroine of the truly dreadful Murder She Wrote. I can't begin to tell you how much I loathe that series, for all the reasons that Harker talks about in issue eight. In this issue we very deliberately use a typical Murder She Wrote set-up (murder takes place whilst detective just happens to be there, investigation ensues), but you'll see this typical set-up come crashing down in tatters in issue eight, as we discover that Harker is not going to play that particular game willingly. This very much encapsulates our approach with the Harker series - take the standard television and fictional detective's formulas, and mess them up good. Hopefully this issue should really have the feel of an opening 20 minutes to a typical Poirot or Murder She Wrote episode, but watch as we subvert it all, beginning in issue eight...

Page Seven
Harker here is singing again: 'Perfect Day' by Lou Reed. Fortune's kipper shop really does exist, not far from the foot of the 199 Steps (and in fact, once you get there on some days you can smell it from there). I urge you to go visit, they sell the most wonderful kippers, and the interior of the shop is like stepping back into the past.
The shopkeeper says 'Be seeing you', an intentional quote from The Prisoner.

Page Eleven
This is actually the interior of The Station Hotel in York, which had just the sort of cheesy, nasty interior we needed. Here we've transported it to Whitby, just to irritate Harker. We're cruel like that.

Page Twelve
Harker does indeed read Conan Doyle - we saw him (possibly) steal a first edition copy of 'A Study In Scarlet' from the British Museum Reading Room way back in issue one.

Page Fifteen
Check the woman stood at the bar in the top panel on this page: Angela Lansbury, who played Jessica Fletcher, with a brief cameo. She's probably appalled at the hatchet job we're about to do on her series, which seems rather unfair given that she stopped making it about fifteen years ago.

Page Seventeen
'Fog Warning' in the newspaper - something that will play a major role towards the end of this particular six-parter in issue 12.

Page Eighteen
Harker here is already showing his reluctance to being drawn into this scenario, something we expand upon in issue eight.

Page Nineteen
Amusingly, Critchley here is claiming not to have been taken in by the whole Satanist thing in issues 1-6. Clearly he's got loads of charm to go with it, though, as had he not been called by Harker he looks almost certainly on for some fun with these three girls here. It's to Critchley's credit that he doesn't think twice about answering Harker's summons - his dedication to the job is absolute.

Page Twenty
Vince drew a gorgeous shot of the abbey here, and in the first print of the comic version it came out all black. Below is what the page should have looked like (click to embiggen)...

Harker Issue 6 - annotations

2009-09-28T21:05:00.002+01:00

Here we go with annotations for issue six, hold onto your hats...

Page One
Harker uses a Zippo, which makes him something of a smoking enthusiast as far as I'm concerned.
You'll notice here his habit of talking to himself - partly a plot convenience for those moments when he's alone, but also an interesting view of his odd, scattered mental condition. He speaks to Critchley as though he's there with him, to calm his own nerves, but there's clearly more to it, and we'll be exploring this as the series moves on.
Harker is not a man of action, incidentally, and is making a rather stupid move here, one which almost leads to his death.

Page Five
If there's a theme to Book One, surely it has to be tea and coffee. It's clearly something of an obsession for Vince, who seems to have our characters constantly indulging in caffeine. No wonder Harker is always so wired...

Page Seven
Vince spent some time researching abandoned tube stations and the like for this issue. The poster is authentic, and there is indeed an abandoned British Museum tube station, now completely sealed and inaccessible from the surface. The mummy haunting story is also authentic.
The comics that Harker is referring to here are probably the adaptations of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere TV series, which depict a society living in the labyrinths under the surface of London.

Page Eight
The Phantom of the Opera is of course the classic novel by Gaston Leroux, since adapted into any number of movies, shows etc. Issue six borrows a lot from that story, which featured as the title character the tragic, disfigured Erik, who built a home for himself in the cellars underneath the Paris Opera.

Page Ten
A ladder that leads up from the underground labyrinths straight into the British Museum? Ridiculous, I know, but it's a conceit I pretty much borrowed from Neverwhere, and helps to bring our plot back to the place it began.

Page Twelve
I especially like Vince's little visual gag here, on the sign in front of the vase that Harker grabs. I told Vince I wanted him to smash up as many of the exhibits as he wanted to in the Museum, but he ended up being remarkably restrained - he probably likes it in there too much.

Page Fifteen
This is the Grenville Library, which is just off the Great Court. Usually it's not quite so messy, of course...

Page Sixteen
And we return here to the Reading Room in the Great Court of the museum - pretty much the first thing you see as you enter the museum, so I'm sure most of you will be familiar with it. The murderer drags Harker up to the spot where he was talking to Critchley in issue four, precisely where he had the premonition of his own death.

Pages Seventeen - Eighteen
I'd say it's pretty much completely impossible to smash a car through the rather heavy doors at the entrance to the museum, let alone fit a car through them, but I felt that John Woo absolutely wouldn't care about such a piffling detail, and consequently neither do we.

Page Twenty
I strongly suspect Vince has been spending all the profits from Harker on helicopter trips... I really must have words with him...

Harker Issue 5 - annotations

2009-09-28T20:39:00.002+01:00

And here we go with annotations to issue five...

Cover
They used to say that corpses on the covers of comics sell more issues. This being just a dead hand, we can't really consider it a serious attempt to test the hypothesis.
You'll notice that Harker is looking at the books on the floor - this is a lovely bit of subtlety from Vince, who knows only too well that Harker really dislikes the sight of blood and dead bodies.

Page One
Hopefully it's obvious from the script, but this takes place early the following morning from the previous issue. In the bottom panel they're passing the Russell Hotel again, just opposite Russell Square and a stone's throw from Russell Street tube station.

Page Two
'Feel free to take the first look, Critchley' - again here we have Harker's reluctance to look at dead bodies, something of a disadvantage for a homicide detective.

Page Three
...which of course is why Harker is holding his hand to his own mouth, to stop himself being sick.

Page Eight
And here we discover the copy of The Book of Solomon, stolen from the bookseller after his murder and planted there by... well, I won't spoil it.

Not much this time I know, since it's mostly resolution of the plot, so I'll keep going on issue six in the next post...

Harker Issue 4 - annotations

2009-09-28T18:41:00.003+01:00

And here we go with more annotations, this time for issue four...

Cover
One day you'll see pictures of this cover in every branch of Starbucks in the land. This little sight gag very much reflects Vince's deep love for Starbuck's coffee mocha - a daily ritual for him, he has one every morning, and BOY does he grumble when we're away somewhere for a comic convention or some such and he can't find a Starbucks somewhere.
As I think I may have mentioned before, this street (Montague Street) is literally just around the corner from the British Museum, but please don't go staring at the front door of the two houses if you find them, because they're not really the homes of Satanists, we just made that bit up.

Page One
It really is illegal to smoke anywhere indoors in England, except in your own home. This is bound to be an ongoing issue for Harker, given his chainsmoking. I'm inclined to believe that he starts off every day really badly - Harker isn't a morning person.

Page Two
Critchley is with the girl from the British Museum here - the one he chatted up in the first issue, and whom he mentions at the close of issue three.
Aleister Crowley was, of course, the famous English occultist, dubbed at the time 'The Wickedest Man in the World'. Should you be interested, there's a wealth of information on him in wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley
If you were wondering, Vince tells me that Critchley drives an Audi TT.

Page Three - Four
It'll become clear that what we're doing here is contrasting Critchley's lovely, sunny mornings with Harker's more miserable ones. I don't know why I find that funny, though maybe I just like torturing my lead character, who knows?

Page Five
The owl story that Harker is relating is actually a true story. Vince is a very light sleeper and always has been, and for years he's amused me with stories of various wild animals that seem to keep him awake at night. For a couple of years he was harrassed most nights by an owl outside his window, whose hoots would keep Vince awake until the early hours. Even thinking about it now makes me giggle - Vince just finds the whole thing terrible irritating. Just this month he was plagued by wasps outside his window. Nature is against him, I think.

Page Six
The deja vu that Harker experiences here is a premonition of his own near death, which occurs in that very same spot in issue six. Which is also why his back is hurting.

Page Seven
And here we see Harker and Critchley taking that short stroll around the corner to our Satanist's houses. We did think about providing a map in the collected edition (complete with Harker's car to drive around it) but decided against it, in case anyone knocked on the doors and asked to see the underground chambers. *cough*

Page Eight
Oh look, it's Mister Johnson. I wonder where he's off to?

Page Nine
Mre Johnson stays behind as her husband departs, which hints at the ongoing affair she's having with Randolph, revealed later.

Page Eleven
Did Alan Moore really write a book on Demonology? Dennis Wheatley was a writer of occult fiction, who was especially popular in the 1960s and 1970s. I can thoroughly recommend the Hammer Films version of his most famous book The Devil Rides Out, which still has the power to chill, and which of course stars Christopher Lee.
As for the lever in the bookcase which opens the secret passage, I can only apologise, but it made me laugh.

Page Fifteen
Vince spent some considerable time designing a computer model of this chamber, as we thought we'd be using it again (basically so he could rotate it to be viewed at any angle), but in the end most of those scenes were cut and it barely got used. The method worked well for him though and proved a big time saver, so he's already used it since on interiors in Book Two.

Page Sixteen
The book referred to hear is, of course, The Book of Solomon, which the bookseller had retrieved to pass on to Harker and Critchley as requested. The book is later planted in Randolph's study by... well you probably know by now, but I won't say just in case.

Page Twenty
And there's that authentic Moonchild poster again, which I mentioned in previous annotations. I really love old bookshops, so this seems a particularly gruesome death scene to me. And people say they want colour in our books! *shudder*

more annotations to come...

Comics Bulletin Sunday Slugfest

2009-09-28T00:05:00.002+01:00

I thought you might be interested in five reviews posted today on the Comics Bulletin website - Harker has been featured in their Sunday slugfest, and it was a real delight for me to read five reviews in one go! They all seemed to like it, though poor Thom Young (hi Thom, if you're reading) kind of missed that Harker is very deliberately postmodern, and that we're using the conventions of television detective dramas (in this instance Poirot, the awful Murder She Wrote and Sherlock Holmes) in order to poke a little bit of fun at them, and twist them playfully for our own purposes. Once he's got that, I think he might like the comic a little more ;)

Anyway, here are the reviews, on the whole really positive - and I was genuinely thrilled and delighted to read them!

http://www.comicsbulletin.com/reviews/125408653416476.htm

Preview of issue eight cover

2009-09-15T23:01:00.002+01:00

Issue #8, the second of our new six part story 'Murder by the Book', is right on schedule as always (we never get behind schedule here, the very idea of it happening brings us out in hives), and will be winging its way to the printers in ten days. The collected edition of issues 1-6 is also nearing completion, and should be at the printers on Friday (with, we hope, much better print quality than the comic). So with all this activity going on, the best I can do today is show you the cover to issue eight. And here it is - click to embiggen!

New Forbidden Planet review

2009-09-11T21:11:00.001+01:00

I don't really like to mention reviews we're getting, as it seems sort of smug and stuff, but this new one from Richard Bruton in the Forbidden Planet blog (hi Richard!) really has to be mentioned, as firstly he's so very enthusiastic about what we're doing, but also, more importantly, he really gets it. This review made me and Vince grin all afternoon like two happy monkeys who've just found a huge crate of bananas.
So here it is :)
http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/2009/harker-issue-7-its-great-but-you-all-knew-id-say-that-by-now/

Harker issue 7 available now!

2009-09-02T22:55:00.001+01:00

Just a reminder that Harker 7 is now available - you can buy it direct from our online store at http://www.arielpress.com/store.html or it'll be available in the shops listed here this week: http://harkerandcritchley.blogspot.com/2009/07/where-can-i-buy-harker.html

We've mailed the comics off to the stores today, so expect it to be there by the end of the week!

Hope you enjoy the beginning of our new six part storyline!

Ongoing Diamond frustration

2009-08-07T20:05:00.002+01:00

Here's the cover of our book collection of the first six issues (click to embiggen) - the book which should have been in Previews this month, and wasn't. To catch up those of you unaware of all this - six months ago, when we published issue one, Diamond took us out of the Previews catalogue from number two onwards, as at that time we didn't achieve the minimum orders required for them to carry the comic. We did, however, receive assurance that they would still run the collected edition in the August issue of Previews. Fair enough, we decided, and we carried on publishing, doing our own publicity and distribution, reaching the point now where we're getting tons of good reviews, sales are very good, we're making a small profit and the comic is safe for the forseeable future, coming out on a strict monthly schedule with no problem.

So we open the August Previews excitedly, hoping that at last we're going to be able to break the US market as well... and it's not in there. Our UK Diamond liaison (who's a fan of the comic and who seems to be as frustrated about this as we are) explained that there's been a change of management at Diamond US, and that they took a look at the orders for issue one, and decided on the basis of that not to carry the collected edition. Which is nonsense, of course, as we were practically unknown when issue one came out, and now we're making a real impact, with UK comic shops coming on board eagerly, wanting to carry us, and the comic becoming a big success over here.

So that's where we are right now. We will be publishing the collection, distributing it ourselves as usual, so expect to see it in the usual UK comic shops in late September / early October. If you're in the US, however - well, the best we can do at the moment is suggest you order it in our online shop next month. We're very happy to take US orders.

Hopefully this will be resolved soon - I'm going to try pitching to Diamond US again, explaining our success over here and pointing them towards reviews, but at the moment we're still only available in UK shops and in our own online shop. We're trying to get a book deal with a serious publisher which would get our collections into the US market, so as soon as I know more about that, I'll let you know :)

For the moment - issue seven comes out on 1st September (the start of our new monthly story), and look out for the collection in the usual UK shops late-September to October. In the meantime, the first six issues are still available, many of them in the shops listed here. Forbidden Planet have just taken a big batch of all six issues this week, so if you've missed an issue, give them a call, they should be able to help you out - or try any of the other shops in the list - and we have some here too, in our shop, if you don't live near any of those comic stores.

More news as we get it! Issue seven due in three weeks - and it's a funny one ;)

Revised schedule

2009-08-01T08:02:00.002+01:00

Harker #6 is out today! See the previous post for the cover preview, and the ever growing list of comic shops where you can pick it up! It's probably likely to show up in the shops on Thursday next week, but if you want it sooner, head straight for the online shop to pick it up today.

You'll notice in the editorial and the inside back page that we talk about the collected edition being available in the August edition of Previews. We've found out to our dismay that it's not there, but it's not our fault! We're not sure what's happened, but we've already emailed Diamond and asked them to solicit the collection in the next possible Previews. We're very sorry to those of you looking forward to receiving it at the end of September - hopefully the delay will be minimal, and I'll keep you updated in here.

In the light of this, we have decided to abandon our idea of September being a 'gap month'. This is good news for everyone, as it means that issue seven will now be out next month (on the 1st September) with the start of our new six issue storyline, with the current working title of 'Murder By the Book', set in Whitby. It'll continue monthly, as ever!

So that's the news! Issue six out now! Issue seven out next month! Collected edition out... er... October (we hope!). Oh god!

Later this week - Roger's annotations for issue four!

Where can I buy Harker?

2009-07-30T18:01:00.008+01:00

Although you can still buy your issues directly from us in the Harker online store you can also buy your Harker issues from the following stores:

Planet Ace, 63-64 High St, Colchester, CO1 1DN Tel: 01206 762464

Daves Comics, 5 Sydney Street, Brighton, BN1 4EN Tel:01273 691012

Nostalgia & Comics, 14-16 Smallbrook Queensway, Digbeth, Birmingham, B5 4EN Tel: 01216 430143

Page 45, 9 Market Street, Nottingham, NG1 6HY Tel: 0115 950 8045

Gosh Comics, 39 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3NZ Tel: 0207 636 1011

Forbidden Planet Cardiff, 5 Duke Street, Cardiff, CF10 1AY Tel: 02920 228885

Worlds Apart, 58-60 Lime Street, Liverpool, L1 1JN Tel: 0151 707 0839

Forbidden Planet Edinburgh, 40-41 Southbridge Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1LL Tel: 0131 558 8226

Forbidden Planet Glasgow, 168 Buchanan Street, Glasgow, G1 2LW Tel: 0141 331 1215

Forbidden Planet Dublin, 5-6 Crampton Quay, Dublin 2 Tel: 0035 3167 10688

Forbidden Planet Belfast, 52-54 Ann Street, Belfast, BT1 4EG Tel: 028 9043 8744

Forbidden Planet Manchester, 65 Oldham Street, Piccadilly, M1 1JR Tel: 0161 839 4777

Travelling Man York, 54 Goodramgate, York, Y01 7LF Tel: 01904 628787

Travelling Man Leeds, 32 Central Rd, Leeds, LS1 6DE Tel: 0113 2436461

Travelling Man Newcastle, 43 Grainger St, Newcastle, NE1 5JE Tel: 0191 2614993

Travelling Man Manchester, 4 Dale St, Manchester M1 1JW Tel: 0161 237187

I'd encourage you to phone ahead before you drop in, to make sure that they have copies available, and you should be able to place a regular monthly order for Harker at any of these stores, and pick up any back issues you might be missing.

More news and Roger's annotations for issue four next week!

Harker Issue 3 - annotations

2009-07-24T08:51:00.002+01:00

Issue six is at the printers, and Vince and I did a little happy dance, Book One completed on schedule. No rest for the wicked though, and we're now well into Book Two - I'll have the covers of issues 6 and 7 to show you in a couple of days. First though, more annotations, this time for issue three...

Cover
This is Harker and Critchley sat outside the Museum Tavern, a real pub directly opposite the British Museum and just a few yards away from the Gosh comic shop. The pub was the work of architect William Finch Hill, well known for his music hall designs. In the early eighteenth century a pub called the Dog & Duck stood there, its name reflecting the hunting that took place on the surrounding swamps and ponds. The British Museum was built in the 1760's, at which point the pub changed its name. Past customers apparently include J.B. Priestley, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Karl Marx.

Page One
Harker makes the point that the scene before him is particularly cheesy - a plot point that goes over Critchley's head. As a comic and fantasy film geek, discovering a scene like this has to be a real pleasure for him, and he believes in the reality of it. Harker, of course, isn;t fooled so easily.

Pages Four - Five
Here we have the first hint of the true nature of the cult - four of the ten cult members here refer to the sexual aspect of the cult's activities, and you can safely assume the other six are simply being evasive about it. Check out the chap in glasses fourth from the right - that's Mr Johnson, and you'll be seeing him again later. The woman to his right is his wife, Mrs Johnson.

Page Seven
The poster behind Simmons in panel five is the cover of Moonchild, a 1917 novel written by famous British occultist Aleister Crowley. The plot involves a war between rival groups of magicians (an echo of our own story) over the fate of an unborn child. Grant Morrison made much of this in his magnificent comic series 'The Invisibles', which I'd highly recommend.

Page Eight
"I'm a dead man. I'm dead." A particularly accurate prediction - Simmons is the next murder victim, as we'll see next issue.

Page Ten
A lovely little detail here from Vince - have you noticed the spider on that pile of books to the left in the top panel?
"Stay away from any Wicker Men" - a wry reference to The Wicker Man, a very wonderful 1973 film featuring Christopher Lee as the leader of a cult on Summerisle, and the terrible fate of policeman Edward Woodward. There was a remake a couple of years ago, but ignore that and watch the 1973 original.

Page Eleven - Twelve
A slow pan from the steps of the British Museum, through the gates, and across the road to the Museum Tavern, beautifully drawn here by Vince.

Page Thirteen - Eighteen
This six page sequence split the critics, half loving it, half a little uncomfortable with it. We knew it would be a little controversial but were keen to give it a go, as an experiment in a different kind of storytelling. The pub interior here is the real interior of the Museum Tavern. This sequence falls at the direct centre of the six issue story - it's the middle of the book - and as such I think it's one of the most important scenes, summing up the story so far, the difference of opinion between our two detectives, and the relationship between them. Check out the little storylines Vince gives to the other characters in the pub, which I have Harker referring to obliquely in the script, in a nod to the early stylings of Alan Moore - it's a fun technique to use!

Page Nineteen
"Wonder what the bird at the museum is doing tonight?" Clearly she had the evening free, as we'll see at the start of issue four...

Harker Book Two

2009-07-12T10:02:00.002+01:00

With issue six due to go to the printers in a week or so, Vince and I are already working on Book Two of Season One, which will be serialised through issues 7-12, starting monthly in September. A hugely creative couple of days was spent in Whitby (where the currently untitled Book Two takes place), in which we thrashed out the detailed breakdown of each issue, working out what needs to happen and when, and we took hundreds of location photographs for reference while we had the opportunity, making the most of the amazing scenery the place has to offer. We're really excited and itching to get started!

A sign of success...?

2009-06-23T12:59:00.003+01:00

I can't help but notice (following a quick ego-google to check for reviews of Harker) that Harker issue 1 is now available on a file sharing site as a download. I'm not sure how to react to this - it's sorta nice in a way, because at least someone thought it was worth the effort, but really - if you want a hi-res pdf of the comic, you can get it directly from us for just a quid. One measly quid (or a dollar fifty). And that's a quid that goes directly into keeping our comic going, we're not spending it on fast cars or loose women or anything (not yet, anyway). We really do value every sale we make. Once it's out there for free on fileshare sites, we lose sales, and we do need every sale we can get to keep going, y'know...

So whoever put it out there - I'm guessing you really liked that comic! That's brilliant, really it is! But it'd be much cooler if you were to tell your friends about the comic, direct them to our shop, and say "yeah, it's true! You can get a 20 page comic for just one pound!" That would be nice. Rather than, y'know, ripping us off and stuff...

When Vince and I get rich and become arseholes - then you can rip us off, deal? ;)

As a suggestion, if you really like the comic, and you're interested in putting some of it out there to help with some viral marketing, we'd much prefer you to use Issue Zero. You'll find it in the downloads section of our shop here, and it's completely free to download. It has an exclusive five page strip, plus the first seven pages of issue one, and we're very happy for that to go on as many fileshare sites as you like. Do with Issue Zero as you please, spread the word with that one - that would make us much happier :)

In other news, Vince told me he'll have issue six finished by Friday! The end of our first book (of many)! I'm guessing he'll then go for a dance without his socks on!

Not that I'm gonna let him have more than a couple of days off before he starts on issue 7...

artwork previews

2009-06-18T00:06:00.004+01:00

hmmmm... what could these be for? (click to make 'em bigger) They dont appear to be interior art, there's no word balloons... and why has Vince redrawn that shot of Harker and Critchley from issue one? Are these pin-ups or something? What's going on here? What are they up to? I'll tell you in about... oh, six weeks...

And in the meantime, we've been picking up more terrific reviews - we were especially pleased with this one from the Forbidden Planet blog, which has brought us loads of new readers - hello everyone who's new around here! Please continue to spread the word about us if you can - nag your comic shop to stock us if they don't already (just ask them to give us a call), write reviews, tell your friends, we're very dependent on word of mouth, so if you like what you see, tell everyone you know!

Issue Five goes to the printers this weekend, so expect it to be available on schedule on 1st July, with issue six (the final issue of Book One) following on 1st August. Did I mention that the murderer is revealed in Issue Five? Well he is!

We're still working hard setting up Book Two, which starts with Issue 7 on 1st October (and monthly thereafter, as usual). Vince told me he'd had a fantastic idea for the cover of issue 8, and when he told me, I laughed uproariously! You're going to love it.

Anybody care to guess who the killer is...?

More reviews!

2009-05-28T23:28:00.003+01:00

Here at Harker Central we were doing a photo-session today - my back's killing me after it! Vince is a hard taskmaster! Oh - and you might be interested to know that issue four is due out on Monday - hurrah!
We've picked up more reviews in the past couple of days - here's one from Jason Sacks of ComicsBulletin, who has also interviewed us. I'll let you know once the interview is up. You'll find the review here.
And there's a review of issues one and two from Clark Liles here - many thanks Clark!

Right, I have scripting to do! Yikes!

Roger

Issue Five cover preview

2009-05-23T18:00:00.003+01:00

Here's a preview of the cover to Harker #5 - click to embiggen!

Issue four is on it's way to the printers as we speak (just got the editorial left to write), and it's a fun one complete with a joke or two, cheering you all up before we plunge down into the climax of the story in issue six. Vince is well on with issue six right now, so we're still bang on the monthly schedule, and nicely settled into it. Now if we can just get back into the Previews catalogue! Hopefully from issue #7, if we get good orders on our first collection.

Oh yes, that's a thing! Not sure I've mentioned this before. After issue six, which will be out on 1st August, we'll be taking a month's 'break', with issue seven out on 1st October. Though for us it won't be a break at all - on 1st September we'll be releasing the first Harker collection, with a whole bunch of lovely extras in it (all of which we'll need to work on during our 'month off' - ah well!).

Book Two, currently untitled, which starts in issue seven from 1st October is the six issue Whitby story I've briefly mentioned before - it's now fully plotted, and Vince and I are eager to get to it. I won't spoil it for you, but expect lots of fog, piers, cliffs, moors, and more than a hint of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. Oh, and you'll be finding out a little about Harker that might just surprise you.

Oh! And one other thing we'll be releasing in September during our 'month off' - a Harker novel: The Murder Club. I finished the first draft of it late last year, and have posted a couple of excerpts in the Fans of Harker Facebook page - I'm dashing through the second draft as we speak, so that we can release it at the same time as the collected edition. It'll have some lovely illustrations by Vince in there too - wonder if I've mentioned that to him yet...?

And finally *gasp* - we've had another really good review, this time from John Freeman on his down the tubes website - you'll find the review here.

Right, I've got that editorial to write! Off I go!

Roger

Harker Issue 2 - annotations

2009-05-15T23:23:00.004+01:00

A busy day here at Harker Central, as Vince and I nipped to the pub this afternoon to sort out the layouts for issue six (a big exciting chase, very action packed, I'm sure you'll love it!), to make a list of the things we wanted in the first collected edition (map, cut out dolls, cut-out diorama, a long interview, covers, these annotations... it should be a nice hefty book once it's all put together), and to discuss Book Two which starts in October. I've got the plot pretty much nailed down now, and we're itching to get to it - just one more issue to go and we're there! Issue four goes to the printers at the end of this week, and just wait until you see Vince's gorgeous cover to issue five!

Anyway, I'm waffling - here we go with annotations on the Harker Issue 2...

Cover
Our most popular cover so far, and I love it too. Vince and I have to stand in front of that cover, all giant and blown up behind us at comic conventions, and it's very odd standing in front of a poster that looks so much like us... though we always deny the resemblance!

Page One
Isn't this amazing? I asked Vinnie for an overhead shot of the British Museum, and he delivered this. Absolutely stunning. The houses where most of the investigations have been taking place are on the street directly to the right of the Museum, close to the top of the page.

Pages Two - Three
My favourite piece of Harker art ever. I'd like this double page spread framed and on my wall. I especially love the way the shadows are falling - it's mid-summer during this story, incidentally.

Page Four
The idea of numbering these panels came late in the day, just to help clarify that our detectives are visiting a whole bunch of different bookshops.

Page Six
Further to the ongoing book-nicking activities of Harker and Critchley (after Harker pocketed that copy of A Study In Scarlet in issue one), keep an eye on the book that Critchley is looking through on this page.

Page Seven
You'll note in panel three that he's still holding it...

Page Eight
And look! In the last panel! He's taking it with him! Cheeky sod...
Remember this bookseller, you'll be seeing him again.

Page Ten
Vince generally prefers to use real locations, and this rather bleak looking building really is St Pancras Coroner's Court, the most local place for a body found in that area to be taken. Note in panel two that Critchley makes another mention of Hawksmoor, revealing his comic geekery. It's safe to assume he's probably a massive fan of From Hell.

Page Eleven
This is Jenny Griffin again, whom we met in the first issue. Harker's love of old bookshops is something he shares with me. Check out Critchley straightening his tie in the first panel, as he's about to talk to a pretty girl. Harker, on the other hand, couldn't care less.

Page Thirteen
There's the Russell Hotel in the background of panel one again. In panel three Harker makes a joke about the number 23, referring to the 23 Enigma. It's been used before in comics by Grant Morrison, particularly in his superb Invisibles series, and you can find some general information about what he's talking about here.

Page Fourteen
That bizarre building in panel one is the 'London Gherkin' designed by Norman Foster.

Page Nineteen
Vinnie may correct me here, but I do believe that's a statue of Shiva the destroyer in panel one, here disguised as Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance.

Page Twenty
If this looks cheesey to you, it's intended to. "Make it as much like a black magic ceremony in a Hammer movie as you can" I said to Vince. "Ultra-cheesey." The reason for this will become clearer in the next couple of issues...

Bristol Comics Expo 2009

2009-05-11T18:12:00.002+01:00

And so we're back from the Bristol Comics Expo, and what a marvelous time we had! Vince and I had our best sales ever from a convention at the Small Press Expo on Saturday, which seems to confirm that Harker is a success - issues were flying off the table most of the day, and we were delighted with the reaction. If you bought Harker for the first time over the weekend, I hope you enjoyed it - keep coming back for more, as we're on a monthly schedule, with issue 4 due out in less than three weeks (on 1st June), and each subsequent issue coming out on the first of every month. If you can't find us at your local comics store, let us know and we'll get in touch with them - and you can buy issues directly from us in our online store at http://www.arielpress.com . Postage is free, you only pay the cover price of the comic.

People I met over the weekend: lovely conversations with Joel Meadows, editor of Tripwire magazine; Jay & Selina from Factor Fiction; our old chum John Short; the affable, hugely talented Lew Stringer; the always smiling Mark Buckingham (he'll always be Bucky to me); Martin 'Biff' Averre from Planet Ace in Colchester (which we need to visit - wonder if he'd let us do a signing there some time?); Paul Grist (whom I wanted to buy stuff from but sadly I had everything on his table, darn it!); the cheerful lads from the Geek Syndicate (who gave us a brief interview which I mumbled through like an amateur - oh god!), the rather wonderful artist David Hitchcock, and many more besides.

If you're new around here, check around the blog, go visit our website, and if you're on Facebook add me as a friend or join the Harker Facebook group 'Fans of Harker'.

Coming up in the next couple of days - annotations on issue two...

Roger

Harker Issue 1 - annotations

2009-05-04T20:21:00.003+01:00

Don't forget that we'll be in Bristol this weekend. You'll find us at the Small Press Expo on Saturday 9th May, from 10am - 6pm at the Mercure Holland House Hotel, Redliffe Road, Bristol. Come and see us, have a chat, buy the latest issue, and I'm sure we'd happily sign it too if you ask! We'll be in costume as Harker and Critchley (oh god!)!

Okay, come and accompany me for a stroll through issue #1 of Harker - I'm going to be careful not to give away anything that'll lead you to the murderer as we're still in the middle of the story, but otherwise let's dive in...

Cover
There's absolutely a Watchmen riff going on here, and it's intentional. Vince's original cover for issue one was a much more basic shot of Harker and Critchley stood with their car, and although it was drawn delightfully, it lacked impact for me. We discussed the iconic status of the famous cover to Watchmen #1 (the Smiley button with the blood soaked drain) and decided to think of a similar image that would sum up the series at first glance. And so here we have harker and Critchley's shoes, checking out the blood on the pavement. Harker's wearing the scruffy Converse, with Critchley in the smarter black shoes.

Page One
This is a real church in London, literally just around the corner from the British Museum, one of six churches designed by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, who in recent years has become a little more notorious due to references in 'From Hell' by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, the poem by iain Sinclair and the book by Peter Ackroyd, all of which pretty much label him as a dark necromancer. So the perfect place to leave a corpse in a Satanic killing, naturally...
More information about the church here, and the true history of the architect here.

Page Two
If you're counting, you might have noticed that this first issue has 22 story pages, whereas usually we have 20. The two pages here at the beginning were the last to be drawn, to help set the scene. Poor Vince must have spent a fortune in train fares, having to trudge all the way to London every time I spring something like this on him...

Page Three
This is a very violent page, but I felt it was necessary to establish a context for the murder. Sometime murder is very ugly indeed. My feeling is that this is all the more brutal for not actually showing anything - all the violence is in your head (or between the gutters, as Scott McCloud suggested in 'Understanding Comics'). A very powerful page from Vince here.

Page Four
Echoing 'From Hell' again here, with the language in the style of the infamous 'From Hell' letter, and our corpse deliberately looking very much like a Jack the Ripper victim.

Page Six
Here we first meet Jenny Griffin, in charge of forensics on the case. Griffin was Inspector Harker's original name - I've always liked it, so transferred it to her instead.

Page Seven
Ahhh, the iconic money shot. Harker drives a Morris Six, in case you were wondering. The classic car is intended as irony, as are many of the details about our two detectives. Harker (the comic) is for us a celebration of everything we love about tv detectives, and as such our duo are a real mix of other detectives. I think I described it best in our Extra Sequential interview: "Harker is what would be the result if the TV shows Morse, Columbo and Waking the Dead all had greedy monkey sex together, with Starsky and Hutch as the stepdads and Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie as the grandparents." There's also a hint of Gene Hunt in Harker's cocksure attitude, and a little of Monk in his mild ADHD symptoms. Harker is always crumpled and a little tatty around the edges, whereas Critchley is never anything less than sharp.

Page Eight
You'll notice this from time to time - Harker has very bad people skills and is also rather shy, and he doesn't especially like having to talk to anyone. Critchley generally does that for him, with Harker hanging back, concentrating on the clues. For all his bluster, Harker is a delicate soul.
"Architect. Do you read comics?" Critchley here is referring to 'From Hell'. He's clearly a comic fan, and something of a geek about it.

Page Nine
Note the gut on Harker - there's some middle age spread going on there. He's in his early fifties, with Critchley in his early 30s. Harker, as you'll see, is easily distracted.

Page Ten
We decided right at the start that there'd be no caption boxes and no thought balloons. Vince gets around this artfully by using signs on buildings.
Note Harker standing way back - he really is squeamish, and doesn't like the sight of blood. Something he shares with Morse, of course. Griffin is consequently being especially ghoulish. Her little joke, I expect.

Page Eleven - Twelve
The black background is intended to echo the dark, moody lighting you see a lot in Waking the Dead, where they hardly ever seem to turn the lights on. More Ripper references here and on the next page, and more echoes of From Hell.

Page Thirteen
"If it's a letter 'B', I vote we bring David Lynch in for questioning". Critchley is referring here, of course, to Twin Peaks, in which the killer (Bob) concealed the letters of his name under the fingernails of his victims. Critchley really is uber-geek.
"Look! I'm a fish!" Critchley must have pocketed the eyeballs in panel 1 of page twelve.
"Can I be the first to say the game's afoot?" Sherlock Holmes, of course.

Page Fourteen
They're driving past the Russell Hotel in the first panel, a huge gothic hotel that dominates Russell Square, around the corner from where the murder took place.
I was going to add a 'ring ring' sound effect to panel three, but decided that sound effects were out too. Critchley is talking to Jenny Griffin, obviously.

Page Fifteen
Check out the middle panel. The house to the far left is the home of Randolph, who we'll meet in issue two. This is Montague Street in London, around the corner from the British Museum, and a stone's throw from the church where the corpse was found. Most of our story takes place in this small area of London - which may be familiar to comic fans as the location of the Gosh comic shop.

Page Sixteen
I'm not sure if there is a sign outside the British Museum, but no captions allowed, so needs must! From the angle we're looking in panel two, Gosh comic shop would be more or less behind Critchley's head here.
Note that Harker is a chain smoker, probably due to nerves.

Page Seventeen
The first of many shots of the British Museum that poor Vince has had to labour over. I can't help it, he just does them so nicely.

Page Eighteen
For those of you who have never been (and you really should), the bizarre structure in panel one is the British Museum Reading Room, which is situated right in the heart of the Great Court in the British Museum. Walking in and seeing it for the first time is a thing of wonder, it a triumph of architectural genius, in my opinion. More information about it here. You'll be seeing it again a couple of times in Book One (issues one to six).

Page Nineteen
Critchley is a ladies' man (unlike Harker, who prefers not to have to talk to them at all). You'll be seeing this girl again briefly in issue four.
"A Study in Scarlet" was the very first Sherlock Holmes novel (I'm sure you know this!)

Page Twenty
"It was a dark and stormy night" - this first cropped up in the novel 'Paul Clifford' by Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, though it's achieved more fame through Snoopy in the Peanuts comic strip, who starts all his fiction that way.

Page Twenty-One
Do we think Harker is quietly nicking that copy of "A Study in Scarlet" in panel four? Looks that way to me. Shifty bugger.

Page Twenty-Two
The Key of Solomon, the book that gives us the title of Book One, actually exists. More information about it here.

Hope you enjoyed that! Annotations on Issue #2 next week, once we're back from bristol. Hope we'll see you there!

Roger

Comics Bulletin review

2009-05-04T16:17:00.002+01:00

There's a lovely review of Harker issue #2 by Jason Sacks of Comics Bulletin at the following link: http://www.comicsbulletin.com/reviews/124149381165952.htm - many thanks Jason!
Just a reminder that issue #3 is now available from our website - and come and see us at Bristol this weekend! Vince has agreed to wear the Critchley suit! Hurrah!

Roger

lotsa Harker news

2009-04-27T23:52:00.003+01:00

Hi everyone! Just a reminder that Harker issue #3 will be available from Friday - you can buy it directly from us in the Store section at our website http://www.arielpress.com for only £1.95 (and we still have a few copies of issues 1 and 2 available if you've missed out).

If you live in York, you'll be able to buy issue three on Thursday (a day before release date) at Travelling Man in Goodramgate, and we're also available at Ace Comics in Colchester, Page 45 in Nottingham, Gosh in London (I think, you might have to ask), and the other Travelling Man stores in Leeds, Newcastle and Manchester are picking us up too. We're also hoping to get into the Forbidden Planet chain - if you have one in your town (or indeed any other kind of comic shop), ask if they'll order us in and tell them our website address! Or better yet, take in a copy and ask them why they aren't stocking it! We'd be delighted to provide them with a regular order.

Please bear in mind that one or two of these shops have only just started to stock us, with issue three being their first, so it'll take a month or so to get the ball rolling. If in doubt, give them a ring first and ask if they have a copy in stock, and if not, tell them how marvellous we are!

We need to spread the word - there's a free, personally signed copy of your favourite issue to any of you who manage to get your local comic shop to place an order! That's not much of a prize. Maybe we should throw in some chocolate too ;)

Oh! Don't forget that we'll be in Bristol in a couple of weeks. You'll find us at the Small Press Expo on Saturday 9th May, from 10am - 6pm at the Mercure Holland House Hotel, Redliffe Road, Bristol. Come and see us, have a chat, buy the latest issue, and I'm sure we'd happily sign it too if you ask! I'm trying to persuade Vince that we should do it in costume as Harker and Critchley - he'll look very natty in his suit, I'm sure!

Hope we'll see you there!

Roger

Heading to Bristol

2009-04-19T11:36:00.004+01:00

We have a new review of issue two right here: http://extrasequential.com/2009/04/12/harker-2-review/ Many thanks Kris! We're happy to link to any other reviews, so please let us know if you post one and I'll add it in here.

We're also trying to get Harker into as many comic shops as possible, and we'd like it to be in your local comic shop - if they don't currently stock it, please tell them about us, and that they can contact us through our website at www.arielpress.com. We'd be very happy to supply them with our comic each month, and will take orders either big or small! Our biggest current supporters are Ace Comics in Colchester and Travelling Man in York - you should always be able to find a copy of the latest issue there, and don't forget that you can also order the latest issue from us directly from our shop on the site - slipped into an envelope by Vince himself!

Issue three will be going to print this week (I just have the editorial to write - my next job after this!), so we'll have it with us when we visit Bristol this year. You'll find us at the Small Press Expo on Saturday 9th May, from 10am - 6pm at the Mercure Holland House Hotel, Redliffe Road, Bristol - come and see us, have a chat, buy the latest issue - and I'm sure we'd happily sign it too if you ask! I'm trying to persuade Vince that we should do it in costume as Harker and Critchley - he'll look very natty in his suit, I'm sure ;)

Oh! And in other news, I've been working on the plot for Book Two (issues 7-12) and it's fun! Set in Whitby during a goth weekend, and issue eight features Harker and Critchley in bumper cars...

That's all the news that's fit to print!

Roger

Harker reviewed on comicbookresources.com

2009-04-06T21:38:00.002+01:00

We've picked up another review this weekend from Greg Burgas of comicbookresources.com - many thanks Greg! Here's a link to the review - we're the second comic reviewed, so you need to scroll down a little bit.
And just to reassure Greg (and the rest of you out there), issue two is indeed out now, and issue three will be out on 1st May, right on schedule! We're about to start work on issue six here, so there's lots more to come...
If any of you spot any other reviews that I haven't seen (even bad ones!), please let me know, we're keen to link to them!

roger

Issue Two out now!!!

2009-04-05T15:08:00.003+01:00

Rather belatedly, I thought you'd all like to know that Issue Two is out now!! It was released on 1st April, and you can get it from our website at http://www.arielpress.com - you can either buy it as a downloadable pdf, or if you prefer you can order a printed copy of the comic direct from us (and popped into an envelope personally by Vince!).
In other news, there's a long interview with me and Vince now available here:
http://issuu.com/extrasequential/docs/extrasequential2
We're on pages 32-41 - it's our first official interview, and we're really pleased with it, so many thanks for that Kris! Good luck with the magazine! :)
Read the interview first, and then go grab yourself a copy of issue two! It's got artwork like this in it! (click to embiggen a bit)

Ariel Press website now online

2009-03-17T19:01:00.002Z

The revised Ariel Press website is now online - you'll find information about Harker, about Vince and me, there's a shop where you can buy issues of Harker (so far just the first, but the second will be available on 1st April, and monthly from then onwards), and there'll be free downloads too - check the 'downloads' page now for a free copy of Issue Zero, which contains the first seven pages of Issue One, plus a brand new five page Harker strip! We're planning to put up a new free download every week, so keep the site bookmarked!

That's all the news that's fit to print! Go do some exploring in there! :)

Issue Two on the way

2009-03-13T21:06:00.003Z

Forget anything I might have said previously! It's not 100% certain yet, but it's looking very likely that we've been able to secure a deal that makes printing and distributing Harker ourselves much easier. I'll confirm it as soon as I know, but it's looking very good that you'll be able to order issues of Harker directly from our Ariel Press website - that's proper comics, not just the downloads I've previously mentioned.

We're also hoping to be in as many comic shops as we can - it's going to mean dealing with the distribution and ordering ourselves (more phone calls for poor Vince!) but it's looking much more viable now.

Keep this blog or the Fans of Harker Facebook site bookmarked, and look out for our relaunched website in the next couple of days, which includes a shop where you can order the comic directly.

I'll also be listing in here any shops where you can buy it, once we've got all that sorted.

So in the meantime, we're still on course for Issue 2 to be available from 1st April - certainly as a download, but also (fingers tightly crossed!) as a comic you can hold in your hands too!

Oh, and we'll be at Bristol Small Press comics convention in May, so you'll be able to buy issues 1 to 3 there too...

We're all excited here! More news as I get it....

Welcome to new readers!

2009-03-06T22:11:00.003Z

Issue One is out in the comic shops! Welcome new readers! :) I hope you've enjoyed the first issue, and thanks for buying it, there's lots more Harker to come...

Due to circumstances very much beyond our control (i.e. Diamond having to drop distribution of our comic for the time being - more details below), we're going to be offering issue two onwards as high resolution downloads, direct from our own website. Issue Two will be available on 1st April for just £1.00 / $1.50 direct from the download area of our new site, due to go live after the weekend. Please bookmark the Ariel Press site, as we're relaunching it next week with information, extras, free downloads and a shop.

We're also going to be giving away free downloads every week - next week we'll be giving away the seven page Harker Issue Zero, with an all-new strip, and each week there'll be other free goodies - podcasts, videos, artwork, interviews, and general Good Stuff!

You can also find us on Facebook: go visit the Fans of Harker group here: Fans of Harker - I'll be keeping it updated with the latest news, letting you know when new blog posts are in here, adding photos, sketches, interviews - and please feel free to add me as a friend too - I'm listed as admin of the group, click on me and add me, I'm happy to have you along!

And please feel free to comment or give your reviews either in here or on the Facebook group - and check out the rest of this blog, full of stuff about the creation of Harker, and our plans for the comic.

I'd love to know if you find or write a review of Harker online, and I'll link to it in here and in Facebook. We're also very happy to be interviewed, no matter how big or small your readership - drop me an email, and we'll answer any questions you might have!

It's lovely to have you on board - keep us bookmarked, keep your eye on the Facebook site, and look out for the nonthly issues - we're about to start work on Issue Five, and we're eager for you to start enjoying the stip!

Issue Two due out as a direct download on 1st April - don't miss it!

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Roger Gibson

Fans of Harker on Facebook!

2009-03-05T22:47:00.003Z

Issue One is due in the shops any time from today onwards - I'd give you a date, but I don't know - but it's in the process of shipping, so ask at your comic shop!
You can also find me on Facebook - go visit the Fans of Harker group here: Fans of Harker - I'll be keeping it updated with the latest news, letting you know when new blog posts are in here, adding photos and general Stuff - and please feel free to add me as a friend too - I'm listed as admin of the group, click on me and add me, I'm happy to have you along!
Twitter to follow...

Issue One imminent!

2009-02-26T23:22:00.002Z

Hi everyone! Just a quick heads up that Harker #1 is due in the shops any time now. We've shipped the printed copies to Diamond, so we think it'll appear in the comic shops either next week or the week after. Keep your eyes open, and look out for the cover to the left. For the collectors amongst you, this is a different printing to the dummy version we sold in Birmingham - and in all honesty, we'd like you to buy it anyway!

Vince and I were very (very!) flattered to get an appearance in this week's Lying In The Gutters, the always hugely entertaining comics gossip column by Rich Johnston. I'd like to just re-emphasise that all this means is that Diamond aren't going to distribute us after the first issue - it absolutely doesn't mean the end of the comic (anything but!).

Check out the two previous posts for more information on what we're going to be doing, but the upshot is - next month, we'll be offering (the already completed) issue #2 as a direct, high-resolution download from our main website, probably for around a quid or £1.50 (certainly no more than that). The following month, we'll be releasing (the already completed) issue #3 in the same way, and the month after that, (the already completed) issue #4, and so on, right through to issue #6. We'll then be releasing a printed collection of these six issues (in September) in the usual way through Diamond, and it'll be in Previews as normal.

Whilst all of this is going on, Vince and I are gonna ride out this storm, keep our fingers crossed that by the end of the year Diamond have a rethink in time for Volume Two, and we'll also be looking for a publisher. It's not ideal, we know, but you can still get your monthly fix of Harker starting in the next week or so, and the collected version is still very much on! Bookmark my blog here, and I'll keep you updated on developments, and on the release date of issue #2 (probably the first week in April).

And just to emphasise to new readers - this has nothing to do with us as publishers - we're currently working on issue five, and we want to be in the comic shops, but we're currently victims of Diamond's new policy. We're eager for your support with the downloads, and we don't think you'll be disappointed. Get hold of Issue #1 and see what all the fuss is about - and if you can't get one from your local comic shop, get in touch with us, our online shop will be opening next week to tie in with the launch.

And on a more prosaic note - those of you who bought those advance copies of Issue #2 at Birmingham - guard them well, as with no printed version of #2 forthcoming (for the moment at least), they may well become collectors items... don't say I didn't tell you!

Roger

Distribution - here's our solution!

2009-02-23T22:31:00.004Z

First of all, huge thanks for all the emails and comments in respect of our distribution crisis. I do, however, have very good news! We've worked out what we think is a really good solution - not precisely what we had in mind when we started this project, but we think it's a good solution.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that in about three weeks, copies of Harker issue 1 will be appearing in comic shops in the UK and the US. We're hopeful that these comics will sell well, of course. On the inside page of issue one, we talk about how we're a brand new British comic, and that we'll be appearing monthly. Given that we're working on issue five, we had every reason to believe this to be true when I wrote the editorial, and by the time we realised this wasn't going to be the case (due to the distribution problem discussed in my previous post), it was too late to change it, as the issue was already being printed. So how to get ourselves out of that one without looking stupid...?

First solution - we've definitely decided, at least for Book One, to abandon the idea of individual comics. Although Issue One will still be appearing in the comic shops, there won't be a printed version of issues 2-6. Instead, we're finishing issues five and six as planned (as I speak), and will then solicit a collected Book One in Previews - which will be a 140 (or so) page book containing what would have been issues 1-6, plus Issue Zero, plus extra stuff (a map, some cut out dolls, text pages, interviews, sketches etc).

However, we're guessing that (as with the comics), it's going to take three or four months for the collection to actually arrive in the shops, as that's the way Diamond / Previews works (you solicit three months ahead of it arriving in the shops). This would mean a long gap between the comic and the collection. This we don't want.

And so here we arrive at Our Cunning Plan - part two of our grand solution!

We're going to offer issues 2 to 6 on a monthly basis, as downloadable comics. They'll be cheap (maybe a quid or £1.50) and contain what would have been the printed versions, had we been able to get them distributed. So Issue One comes out in March in the shops (most of you reading this already have that, of course, from meeting us at the Birmingham convention), we'll release Issue Two, on a guaranteed date so that you know when it's coming out, as a download in April, Issue Three (again on a specified date) in May, and so on, right through to Issue Six. We'll then time the printed collection of these issues to be out in the comic shops in September, the month after we release Issue Six as a download.

We think this will work, and it's the best option we can come up with. Those of you wanting your monthly fix of Harker will be able to get it, starting with the first issue in three weeks in the comic shops, and then downloads of issues 2-6, one per month. You can choose to wait for the collected edition, of course, but if you want a fix each month, it'll be there for you as a high resolution download, including covers, editorials, letters pages etc, just as the regular comic would have had.

We don't think anyone has tried this with a regular monthly comic before, but we think it'll work. It also won't cost us a thing - we already have a website and a shop, currently undergoing redesign in time for the launch, and most of the material is already finished - so we may as well give it a go, as there's nothing to lose. We think this is a good solution, and it'll give us a chance to really test the market before we leap into Book Two.

I'd very much appreciate comments or emails - we may only get half a dozen people downloading it - or we may get hundreds. But then, they said iTunes would never work. Let me know what you think.

So one way or another, we're now definitely getting these darn comics out when we said we would, followed by the collection - hurrah!!

Roger

Distribution frustration

2009-02-17T12:23:00.004Z

Here's another page from our Issue Zero - click to embiggen!
Vinnie and I weren't able to make it to Inverness last weekend, which was a shame, but in retrospect we're rather glad we didn't. We've just received notice from Diamond Distributors that since our order numbers fall below their new limits (imposed over the last month or two, and talked about a lot elsewhere - check Rich Johnston's Lying in the Gutters archives for more info), they won't be carrying Harker beyond issue one. They're also not going to honour any orders placed on issues two and three, despite already having listed both.
This is, of course, immensely frustrating. Vince and I are currently halfway through issue five. We could have launched Harker six months ago, and have waited and waited for Diamond to finally get us in Previews - and then they do, and then they pull out again. Maddening!
The upshot of this is that anyone who buys issue one from their local comic shops, which talks about how it's monthly, will be unable to find issue two. If you're one of those readers, I apologise, but it's not our fault. We have issues 2, 3 and 4 finished, issue 5 almost done - but getting them in the comic shops - now that's the real trick, isn't it?
So it's back-up plan time.
Initially, we're looking into other distributors - Haven Distribution seems like it might be a good bet, and we'll be talking to them this week to see if they're going to be able to offer us a good deal. Fingers crossed!
Other options - finish issue six (the end of book one) and jump straight to the collected edition. Diamond have said they'll happily carry that for us, the required order numbers for such a thing are much lower (and definitely easily achievable), so that's very tempting. We'd effectively be going the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen route: abandoning the monthly comics altogether, and releasing Harker as 140 page graphic novels, two a year. We're currently very tempted by that route, as we could have a completed Book One ready by the middle of April, easily.
Another option - find a publisher! We'd be delighted to be published, so if you're a publisher, please get in touch, we'd love to talk to you. We have lots to show you, and we're almost five issues ahead already...
Another option - make the issues available on Lulu. Dunno if that's workable really, too expensive for the readers, I'd guess.
So on top of all this, I have a small plea to you, dear reader.
If you've read and enjoyed issue one (or indeed issue two, if you bought it at Birmingham), please review it on your blog. Even if you only have one reader, please review it. Tell us about the review, and I'll mention it here and I'll link to you in the blog.
Twitter about us. Tell your friends.
Pass on copies of artwork from issue one or two if you like. Anything that will help us get noticed, as we need to build up some momentum here. If you'd like to interview us, for your blog, for your fanzine, for whatever, we'd be very happy to be interviewed. Drop me an email, the answer will be 'yes'.
We have four issues already that we really want you to be able to read. In a couple of weeks, we'll have the fifth issue - we'd like you to read that too!

Any thoughts? Would you be happy reading it as a collection, not getting individual issues? I do wonder if that's perhaps the future, and the best way to go - longer between initial hits (you'd only get two books a year), but much bigger chunks, of course.

Comments gladly accepted! :)

Issue Zero preview

2009-02-03T17:00:00.002Z

Less than a week and a half now to our launch in Inverness - I've just been upstairs in Vince's studio posing for more Harker photographs for issue five, and we've also created an Issue Zero specifically for the Inverness convention, which includes a brand new five page Harker strip, unpublished elsewhere. Here's page one! Hope we'll see you at the convention!

Roger

Extra Sequential interview

2009-01-23T23:13:00.004Z

I got an email from Kris Bather from comicbookjesus and extrasequential this week, requesting an interview purely on the strength of seeing us in Previews - which makes it officially our first interview! You can read it right here: Extra Sequential issue Two

Also, why not head Kris's way and read his review of issue one - officially our first review too! We're delighted with the review, for obvious reasons!

Harker now available in Previews!!

2009-01-19T10:40:00.004Z

It's been so quiet in here - sorry about that! Just a case of enjoying myself too much at Christmas, and then a ton of work here at Harker Central as we approach the end of Book One. Vinnie is halfway through issue five (Book One is six issues in total - then we'll be continuing immediately onto Book Two, of course), I'm tightening up the script for issue four - oh, and here's the cover for issue four (click to make it bigger, as the actress said to the bishop)...

We're now in Previews! Look under 'Ariel Press' and you'll find us right there - please ask for us at your local comic book shop, we need every sale we can get! Even if you bought one of those advance copies at Birmingham - order it again! We need your support, and those advance issues will hopefully make you a penny or two on eBay eventually ;) Issue one is in previews right now, and we'll be in every month now for the forseeable future, as we're monthly (and by the time issue one comes out, in March, we'll be six issues ahead, so there's no need to worry about gaps between issues, there won't be any - hurrah!! We're really excited about the launch, and we'll be at the Hi-Ex comic convention Inverness on February 14th-15th, promoting the comic, so we'd love to see you there!

Oh, and if you do show up at our table, we'll have an exclusive mini-comic available, featuring a seven page preview of issue one PLUS a brand new (unpublished elsewhere) five page Harker strip specially drawn for the convention (and awaiting my dialogue for it as we speak - Vinnie has already completed the artwork, and it looks mighty fine!).

Right, enough waffle for now! Please go order our comic at your comic shop this week - it's in Previews, under 'Ariel Press' - you'll thank me for it when those early issues are worth a fortune in a few years time! Oh yes! ;)

Oh - and given that we're building up to the launch, both myself and Vince (either together or separately, depending on your interest / whim / favourite / most hated) are very much available for interviews, big or small, whether you have thousands of readers or just half a dozen, in print or online. Just drop me an email, and we'll be happy to oblige!

Right, I need tea...

The Murder Club - completed!

2008-11-29T20:50:00.003Z

Apologies for it being so quiet in here - I've been typing like crazy to get the novel finished - and today I did it - hurrah! First draft of The Murder Club completed a day ahead of schedule, currently running to 50,154 words - phew!

I'll be taking a week off from it now, and then leaping into the second draft over December, probably adding another 25,000 words.

In comic news, Vince has pretty much finished issue four, so I'll have that to script next week too - should be fun!

Don't forget to ask about Harker at your local comic shop - Issue One should be available to order in the next Previews (or if not, certainly the one after), and we'll be in monthly from then on - so place that regular order!

rog

Critchley has a car too...

2008-11-11T23:31:00.003Z

Vinnie is still hard at work, and this issue we finally get to see Critchley's car - here's a sneak peek...

Apologies for it being so quiet in here, we're both very busy behind the scenes, Vince with the artwork to issue 4 (almost complete, I understand), and I'm still working hard on the Harker spin-off novel - I've written 19,000 words of the first draft in the past 11 days, and it's all going well so far! The old fingers are suffering a little from all the typing, but heck, it's fun!

We do have some news - we've just heard this week that Diamond Distributers have happily accepted us for inclusion in previews, which means we're now off and running! We're hoping to be in the next Previews, though if not, it'll certainly be the one after that, and then in every one each month. Look for us in the 'Ariel Press' section - I'll let you know as soon as I've found out if we're in the next issue. If you spot it, we'd love you to make a regular order with your comic shop - and tell them how good the comic is!

Right, I've already typed 2000 words tonight - I'll be back later in the week!

Roger

Creating issue 4: penciling

2008-11-04T17:31:00.002Z

Vince is still working diligently on the artwork for issue four - I'm expecting to start seeing the finished artwork imminently (at which stage I'll talk through the way I approach scripting over it), though in the meantime, here's a photo of Vince sketching away like a trooper. I took this one last week, so I believe he's currently at the inking stage - I'm very excited to see how it'll look!

In the meantime, I'm making really good headway on the Harker spin-off novel, with a working title of 'The Murder Club', and set firmly between issues six and seven of the comic. I'm 7,000 words into the first draft of the novel after four days (and consequently ahead of target), and I'm pleased with the progress so far, getting to the end of the second chapter as we speak. Though I think I may need to start drinking more caffeine...

11th Doctor CONFIRMED!!!

2008-10-30T18:31:00.002Z

Vinnie is still working on the artwork for issue four, so in the meantime... following the news that David Tennant is quitting as the Doctor after the specials next year, I can exclusively reveal the identity of the 11th Doctor - yep, it's me!! Here I am in the first publicity shots, with my new assistant Daisy!

You heard it here first...

The Murder Club

2008-10-24T11:56:00.002+01:00

Vince is well on with the pencils for issue four - he showed me a couple of pages yesterday, which looked rather wonderful, and I took a photo of him working on one of them which I'll put in the next post.

This is obviously Vince's busiest time, battling away on the 20 pages of issue four and keeping to the schedule - though it's also my quietest time, a couple of weeks where there's nothing for me to do on the comic. For me at the moment my work is done - Vince is perfectly capable of working without any further input from me (apart from the occasional words of encouragement when he's looking a little weary) and all I can do is wait patiently for the finished artwork to arrive in a couple of weeks time - at which point I suddenly become active again and start working hard on the script.

So what do I do when I'm twiddling my thumbs, waiting to get started? Well, mostly I put my feet up, but to fill in some of that time, this November (for the fourth year in a row) I'm participating in Nanowrimo - and this year I'm writing a Harker spin-off novel for it! Hurrah!

For those of you not familiar with Nanowrimo (National Novel Writers Month), the challenge is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month, starting on November 1st, finishing on November 31st. I failed on my first attempt in 2005, crashing and burning at around 10,000 words, though succeeded pretty easily in 2006 (writing a contemporary science fiction novel called 'Loop', about an individual's desire to live forever and his struggle for identity when it all goes horribly wrong), and winning again in 2007 (writing a big, rather epic fantasy vampire novel called 'Gravestowne').

So in a week's time, I submit myself to the torturous daily deadlines for a third year running, and this year I'm better prepared than ever before: I have a complete plot, all of the characters, a beginning, middle and end, and a whole bunch of events along the way - even a sub-plot to keep things interesting. All of this advanced work should help to take a little pain out of the process, though it's fair to say I'm going to look a little baggy eyed by the end of November! Expect me to be whining about it over the next few weeks...

As I mentioned, it's going to be a Harker & Critchley novel, which will be set immediately after the events of the six part story we're currently working on in the comic (it'll slot in neatly between issues 6 and 7). The current working title is 'The Murder Club'. Once complete at the end of November, I'm planning to make it available from the blog in here - and Vince has already said he wants to throw in a few illustrations too. Hooray!

Continuity-wise, as with all of our stories, it'll stand alone (so you won't have to read it, it's just another case for our boys, with no long term continuity ramifications), but I think it'll be fun - and of course, written very much in the same style as the comics. Plot-wise, it's a little too extensive to fit into six issues of the comic (which is why it's perfect as a novel), and all being well, it should be the first of a series of books based on the comic - as I need something to do to keep me busy whilst Vince is scratching away in his studio...

Can't wait to start - I want to start right now! Gaahhh!

Oh, and in other news, I can now confirm that Book Two (issues 7-12) will now take place in Whitby, and on the moors nearby, and is likely to feature murders, mansions, sandcastles, fish and chips, and gloomy goths. Oh no, I've said too much! ;)

Roger

Creating issue 4: photo reference 2

2008-10-20T17:33:00.003+01:00

And here's a photograph of Vince in his special Critchley suit, being Critchley. I can't help but notice that he only sent me photos of himself in which he looks normal, whereas in the three of me he provided to choose from, I look utterly ridiculous. The swine! :)

Creating issue 4: photo reference 1

2008-10-15T22:50:00.003+01:00

Okay, we're now at the photo reference stage. Vince and I have both been using photo reference in our comic strips for years - some consider it 'cheating', but it's used by many comic artists (Alex Ross and P. Craig Russell are two high profile examples who have always been honest and upfront about it), and it's a terrific tool, speeding up the drawing process, and taking a lot of the hard slog out of drawing comics. Particularly crucial, if you're going to use this technique, are very strong layouts, and good models prepared to exaggerate their movements and expressions, and really 'act' for you. As I've already mentioned, Vince did full thumbnail layouts for all 20 pages before taking a single photograph, working out his storytelling (i.e. directing the comic, working out camera angles, and how best to tell the story panel by panel - this in itself is a particular skill, and something which I think Vince excels at).

Vince generally prefers to shoot each character separately - it means he has to be really confident with his layouts and know exactly what he's doing, to make sure that the different characters match up, but it ensures that he can concentrate on each character individually, getting the performance he needs from each one. I've participated in a large number of photo reference sessions as a character over the years, and they're definitely fun when there are more people there, but they do descend into chaos, so I can definitely appreciate why he works this way.

For me, playing Harker, the sessions are long - we started them yesterday, continuing today until we were done. His sessions for Critchley are equally as long, and this is why we use ourselves as the lead characters - we're always there, and we're always available. I have a Harker costume - a battered old pair of Converse, tatty jeans, green shirt, black tie, green jacket, and a belt that I tighten too tightly, to help with Harker's beer gut. Harker also stands and moves in certain ways - many of these we've worked out together as we go along, so that I can try to inhabit the character - he's ten years older than me, so I also try to look a little more haggard than usual - he's rather shabby (in comparison to Critchley's stylish perfection).

Once in front of the camera, Vince is very much in charge. I took the lead role in the plotting, explaining what I needed, desribing the scenes I needed, with Vince chipping in and throwing other ideas in there - but by this stage, Vince has now taken those ideas, worked them into a 20 page comic, and knows just what needs to happen, panel by panel. Rather than throwing in ideas at this stage, I trust Vince implicitly, posing in whatever manner he needs, allowing him the freedom to visually direct the story any way he sees fit. Expressions are exaggerated, movements are exaggerated too, always trying to make it a big, engaging performance - Harker needs to be big in every panel, to always be watchable, to be engaging and funny, so we work hard on each shot, until Vince has exactly what he needs.

So here's a shot from the first stage - getting Harker right - this is Harker driving his car somewhere in the first four pages of issue 4. Next post - Vince as Critchley...

Creating issue 4: backgrounds

2008-10-13T22:17:00.003+01:00

So I made good use of my weekend away to shoot some backgrounds reference photos for an upcoming scene in issue four for Vince. Here's one right here.

Whilst I was away, Vince finished the storyboards for the issue, so tomorrow it's photo-reference time - expect photographs of me looking ridiculous over the next day or two... oh god! Hopefully I can get some of Vince too, though I may have to do a dawn raid to get 'em...

Creating issue 4: layouts

2008-10-08T20:05:00.009+01:00

Today was a busy day here at Harker Central - I was in the studio, sorting out a few little changes to the script and lettering for issue three, just making sure it was how I wanted, and we've now finally put that issue to bed, forging fully ahead on issue four.

In his room, Vince was working on his layouts for issue four, based on our plotting session last night. Working from the notes he makes during the plotting, Vince does stick-man sketches of each page, panel by panel, working out roughly the storytelling for the issue, how the action flows, what the characters will be doing, how they move etc. He uses these layouts as a guide for the forthcoming photo reference sessions, and also as a guide for what backgrounds he needs and how to pace the issue.

This is a particularly crucial part of the process for Vince - although in places I've been specific about what characters are saying, what they're doing, how they're reacting, in other places I've left it much more open. As a for instance, we have a three or four page introduction to the issue, showing Harker and Critchley making their separate ways to the Britsh Museum - last night I described roughly what I was after, talking about the contrast between their journeys (Harker all tension and road rage, Critchley zooming through the streets more relaxed in his flashy sports car, emphasising the comedy), and giving Vince the credit sequences of The Persuaders and The Prisoner as visual cues. The details of this are up to him, and when the art is done, I'll then script over his drawings, taking my cue from what he's drawn. It's a really satisfying way to work, and creative for both of us.

The next stage is the photo-reference session, which we'll be doing after the weekend. I'm away until Monday (some of which will be spent in London, taking photographs in the British Museum for issue four for Vince), so things will be quiet until then, but I'll be back on Monday evening with the next stage in the process - see you then!

roger

Creating issue 4: plotting

2008-10-07T21:39:00.000+01:00

Okay, as promised, let's begin to document the creation of issue four, so that you can see the process that we go through. I'm going to try to show you each step - although this is specifically issue four, we go through this same process for each issue, always in the same order. The process began four or five months ago, when Vince and I initially put our heads together to work out a detailed plot for the first six issues (which will form the first complete story). We started this at the Bristol Comic Convention, discussing the characters, coming up with a few hopefully fun twists and turns, and agreeing what our two leads were like. This initial stage was very much a joint thing, both of us chucking in ideas, until we finally arrived at a general storyline we both liked and thought would be exciting to read.

Over the course of the following week, I took my notes away and refined this into a three page document, detailing the plot for each issue - probably about half a page of guidelines for each issue, and the major parts of the story as it progressed. It's this 'master' document that you can see in my hand in the photo above (all photos in this post taken a couple of hours ago, at tonight's plotting session at our local pub). Vince, meanwhile, started gathering the visual references he was going to need, visiting London to take loads and loads of photographs of the Russell Square / British Museum locale where the story was to take place, and working out the look of our characters.

So... before I get bogged down in the initial creation of the story (I'll come back to that another time) - there we were at the pub this evening, bringing with us that master document, some paper and a pen, and our mighty brains...

Vince then listened patiently as I went through the main beats of issue four, first giving him an overview. On the train back from Birmingham, I'd come up with a new six page opening sequence that we were both excited about, so the first thing to do was get that down, and work out how we could fit it into what we'd already established. Typically, Vinnie draws small thumbnails of each page (see this photo and the next one), around which he takes notes as I talk. We take it scene by scene, where I describe roughly what I need to happen in each scene, and tell him how many pages I think this should take up, sometimes specifying full page images, sometimes giving him specific things I need the characters to do, but also giving him plenty of leeway to interpret this in whatever way he wants. The visual side of it (as we'll discover when we get there) is pretty much entirely down to Vince, so this session is all about breaking down each scene for him, and letting him know what needs to happen. It's a small variation on the 'Marvel style' that Stan Lee used to use back in the 1960s, and we've found it works very well for us. Clearly, there's no script at this stage, the art comes first.

By the end of the session (which typically takes us no longer than an hour, over beer and crisps), Vinnie has a page of notes and small thumbnails, detailing what happens page by page - and it's not all just a one way process, Vince throws in ideas and comments as we go along, pointing out any inconsistencies, throwing in things he thinks will work - we've found that two minds are better than one at this stage, and is probably one of the most enjoyable parts of the collaboration, no ideas stomped on, each of us free to guide the process. As a rule, however, I'm mostly in charge at this stage, the story my responsibility, which Vinnie then takes away and fleshes out when he gets to the full thumbnails... which we'll get to next time...

Drop in tomorrow for a little more about what happens between thumbnails and the photo sessions...

roger

Birmingham Comics Show 2008

2008-10-06T17:34:00.000+01:00

Well, we were there - were you? Chances are, if you're reading this you were, and you probably bought a comic from us too - hope you like the new Harker strip, and that you'll be back for more! Here's Vince behind our stall...

So - what was it like from the creator's point of view? Well, Vince and I arrived on Friday evening (after a 3 hour train ride from York to Birmingham) and checked into the Brittania Hotel (not to our tastes, I'm afraid, but at least it was central). We made our way to Bennett's, where the pre-show party was taking place - three bands played live music, and I'm sure it was all very good, but it was WAY TOO LOUD and impossible to talk in there. As a creator, an important part of these events is meeting up with people you only see a couple of times a year, catching up, doing some networking etc - all of which was impossible OVER THAT INCREDIBLY LOUD NOISE, DROWNING OUT EVERYTHING, but there you go! So since we couldn't really talk to anyone, Vince and I got a little tipsy and giggly, ending up inventing a new sport (gas racing - which, we decided, involves racing Heath Robinsonesque gas powered sleds down steep, winding roads). We're working on sled designs as we speak, I'm sure it'll catch on ;)

Saturday morning saw us staggering out of bed, just about coping with breakfast, and arriving at our Ariel Press stall as bright eyed and bushy tailed as we could manage. We probably looked terrible, but everyone who approached the stall was polite enough not to mention it, and our excitement grew as copies of Harker began to fly off the stall rather quickly.

We were stood right next to Paul Grist, the creator of the very wonderful Jack Staff strip, which was something of a thrill for me - I've been reading his comics for years, and he was producing the brilliant Kane long before we dipped our toes into the world of crime comics. As readers bought our comic (most buying both issues one and two - marvellous!), we asked some of you to let us know what you thought of it - thankfully no-one asked for their money back! Lots of you came back to tell us personally how much you enjoyed it, and I'd like to say how lovely that was for us - ideally I'd have given each of you a hug, but the table was in the way!

Saturday night was more drinks at Bennett's (thankfully a little quieter), spending most of our time with Factor Fiction's Jay and Selina, and old friend John Short, and their chums - a good time was had by all, and I managed not to overdo the beer this time. Sunday morning was still another struggle out of the bed (8.30am on a Sunday! Insane!!!), but another good day for us, with a flurry of copies being sold literally as we opened up the stall, and then steady sales for the rest of the day. David Lloyd complimented Vince on his artwork, and took away a couple of copies, and we had really good conversations with Nabil from Travelling Man (who suggested a signing, which we're definitely up for) and Biff from Ace Comics (who seemed to like it too, and offered plenty of advice. We'd love to have shown it to Vertigo (as much as we love self-publishing, we're always open to offers), but there was no sign of Karen Berger - maybe another day!

Again on Sunday, a number of you came back to the stall just to tell us how much you liked the first two issues - I hope we showed how grateful we were for that, and please never be embarrassed to come up and say hi to either me or Vince if you see us at one of these events - I'm always delighted to know when you've enjoyed the comic, and I'll always happily talk Harker with you, sign copies, accept gratuitous compliments etc - it's half the fun of doing the strip!

I think my favourite reaction all weekend was from a reader who has bought our comics before (and I really must apologise, as if you told me your name, it's gone right out of my head - we met so many readers this weekend) - it turns out that he was on the police force for 20 years, many of which he spent on the Flying Squad, and he loved the comic, telling me a couple of gruesome morgue stories. If you're reading this, please drop me an email - I could definitely use an official police advisor to make sure I get the procedural stuff right - can't be too careful!

We tried to make sure everyone who bought a copy of the comic knew that issues 1 and 2 that we had on the table were advance copies that we had printed ourselves, just to see if people liked it. Thankfully, it seems as though you do - by the end of Sunday we only had three copies of #1 left, and five copies of #2, a really successful weekend for us!

Harker will start to appear in your copy of Previews some time over the next two or three months - we're just waiting now for Diamond distributers to confirm when the first listing will go in. As soon as it's there, I'll let you know here in the blog, and from then on it'll appear every month. As mentioned below, we're already working on issue four, and finding the monthly schedule very easy, so you can order with confidence!

We'd appreciate your support, if you did like the comic, by telling friends and (especially) your local comic shop about us, as we'd like you to be able to buy Harker from your local comic store. To do that, they have to place an order. We'll be doing all we can to promote it ourselves, but word of mouth is good too - so please tell your friends! If all goes to plan, the 'official' issue one should be out in the stores in January, and then a new issue each month from then onwards - hurrah!

Right, I've rambled on enough for today - pop back tomorrow, as I begin to document the creation of issue four, step by step, as we produce it...

roger

Just back from Birmingham 2008

2008-10-05T23:11:00.000+01:00

Vinnie and I just got back home to York after the 2008 Birmingham Comics Show - I'll write a proper post tomorrow, but I just wanted to mention what a brilliant time we both had, and how lovely it was to meet our first new readers! Hope those of you who bought our first two issues of Harker thoroughly enjoyed them! Please let us know what you think (either by commenting here or by emailing) - for now, I'm completely pooped, so here's a couple of photos.

More to follow tomorrow - oh, and I'm the good looking one with the beard and slightly more hair...

click to make 'em bigger!

roger

cover previews

2008-10-02T20:10:00.000+01:00

Since we've finished them (well, I say 'we' - Vince has finished them, all I've done is look at them and go 'oooh!'), here's the covers to the completed first three issues of Harker.
We'll be starting work on issue four over the Birmingham Comicon weekend, plotting over beer in the convention hotel bar, and Vinnie will be forging ahead with the layouts on Monday...
I'll be looking over his shoulder as he works (and as I work too), so keep dropping by, as over the course of the next month, I'll be showing how we put issue four together, step by step, taking you through the process...
Click on the covers to make 'em bigger...

How Harker began...

2008-10-02T19:50:00.000+01:00

So as I mentioned in my own bio, by summer this year I'd long ago decided that the comic career had to be put on a back burner, concentrating instead on novels... until the Bristol comics convention this year.

Vince and I were in the bar, taking some time out from a busy day promoting the glossy final issue of Vince's long-running Sapphire comic, and the conversation turned to how Vince had intended it to be his last hurrah in the self-publishing world, feeling that the rewards couldn't really justify the long hours of pain involved in creating it. I know that pain only too well, of course, from the work I'd put in on my Gravestown comic and the strips in Raven, and I mentioned to him again (as I have many times before) how I felt that collaboration was the key - find some other idiot to do half the work, and suddenly everything seems so much brighter.

I asked Vince if he really did intend to retire from comics, as he had hinted in his editorial in Sapphire. He replied that it wasn't so much that he wanted to stop drawing comics, it was just that he really fancied doing something completely different. It transpired that what particularly appealed to him was the Griffin comic strip I'd begun in the final issue of our Raven anthology from a few years back. Griffin was a quirky detective, with a cocky sidekick, and although I'd enjoyed putting together the first part, it was clear that as Raven had long since bitten the dust, I had no further plans for the character. "Feel free to take him if you want," I said, "Do as you please with him, I'm happy with that, he's yours if you want him, I'm not using him". Vince replied that although that would be nice, he didn't want to work on it on his own, he'd had enough of the solo thing to last him a lifetime.

Well, quite frankly, I'd had two or three pints by then, and I was an easy target. "Well, what if I were to write it for you?" I foolishly suggested, taking another swig of beer. Vince saw how easily I'd fallen into his cunning trap, and by the end of the evening, we'd not only talked and talked and talked about what such a comic would be like, we'd even begun to flesh out the structure of the comic, the first story, and the way we saw it progressing afterwards. These conversations continued the entire weekend, every spare moment we had, our minds racing with ideas, plot suggestions, delightful twists, character development - it was probably the most intensive plotting session I'd ever had, and very much a precursor of what was to follow.

By the end of the weekend, we'd fleshed out our first three stories, got a good grasp on what we intended to do with the strip and what our two lead characters were like, and had even decided we were going to do it monthly...

a short comics bio of Vince

2008-10-02T19:18:00.000+01:00

Here's a bio written by Vince, originally from the Ariel Press website:

" I set Ariel Press up in 1997 to publish Sapphire, a paranormal espionage story that was more influenced by the things that I enjoyed on TV rather than in comics. Prior to this my first foray into the world of comic creation was back in 1986 when I became involved in a project with Richard Piers Rayner called 'The Solthenis'. A brave idea by Rich to self-publish in the days when there were very few people attempting it, but it sadly came to an end when Rich was understandably lured away by DC to work on Hellblazer.

I was then offered some inking work on Redfox by Chris Bell and Fox under the Valkyrie Press banner (two other brave self-publishers) and my first paid work (not a great amount of money but very exciting!)

From there I was offered some strip work by John Freeman who was editor of Dr Who Monthly. This was even more exciting as not only was the pay much better but I was a big fan of Dr.Who (still am for that matter). I also did a strip for the Red Dwarf Smegazine and some inking work for the Marvel UK superhero line.

At this point my comic career hit a bit of a brick wall as my style didn't suit superhero work and that's where the bulk of professional comic strip commissions come from. Self-publishing, with all it's creative freedom, seemed to be the way forward. Sapphire was first, then an attempt at producing 'a good Saturday night's TV in a comic' with the anthology title 'Raven' and then a Sapphire graphic novel, which was the first part of a two part story. The second and concluding part is now also available.

The latest project is Harker, something that again feels like a natural next step. Raven didn't work for various reasons but the idea of creating 'good TV in a comic' material is still one that both Rog and I feel excited about. It also seemed to make sense for us to work together - I didn't want to work on my own anymore and Rog is a good writer. Between us we're finding that sticking to a monthly schedule is not a problem, something that I was never able to do on my own with Sapphire.

For any fans of ghostly folklore there is also a book that I've published under the Blue Angel Press imprint called Haunted York. Written by me and photoshop illustrated by Ariel Press associate Ian Forster it's a collection of some of York's best known ghost stories. Not a comic but Ian has made it look very pretty! More details at www.hauntedyork.com."

two days to Birmingham...

2008-10-01T16:27:00.001+01:00

Vinnie and I are gearing up for the Birmingham Comics Show (October 4th-5th) - by the time you read this, it'll probably be long gone, but for us it's the first test of the new Harker comic. Originally we'd set this as our 'official' launch date, but since the earliest that issue one is going to be in the shops will be January, it seemed a tad too early to be making a big noise just yet. We're producing a monthly comic (by the time issue one comes out in the comic shops, we'll be working on issue six), but one of the problems of being so far ahead is that if we sell advance copies of the completed issues one and two this weekend, our new readers won't be able to get hold of issue three until March - five months away! Such are the complicated vagueries of comics distribution.

Still, we're planning to take a few advance copies of the first two issues anyway, though we'll be telling anyone who buys them that they're very advance copies, and the monthly thing won't kick in for them again until March. We'll even have a dummy copy of issue three with us on the table - all the artwork is finished, and I've half-finished the lettering, will have that complete by early next week (as soon as we get back from the convention, basically).

And then it's straight on to writing and drawing issue four, in which we witness another gruesome murder, and the chase for the killer hots up - good thing too, since we need to wrap it up by issue six in time for the next story to begin. Have I mentioned the plotlines we have coming up? Well, issues 1-6 are the Satanic cult murders around Russell Square, London - issues 7-12 will be a series of murders at a country house (not so much Morse and Waking the Dead this time, more Sherlock Holmes and PD James) - issues 13-18 will be set in New York (think French Connection, Kojak and Starsky & Hutch) - and then... well, that's enough to be getting on with... assuming Harker survives the thrilling chase scene in the catacombs in issue six - oh no! I'm saying too much!

a short comics bio of roger

2008-09-21T22:31:00.000+01:00

I grew up in Scarborough, on the North-east coast of England, in the 1960s and 70s, a glorious time of chopper bikes, Fab ice lollies, Top of the Pops, the very wonderful Doctor Who and bouncey orange spacehoppers. My first comics were sketched in thick blue rough books at school, little miniature comic strips featuring 'The Uggs and the Blots', strange round headed creatures who had weird adventures and held signs saying such enigmatic things as "UG!". I was clearly destined for greatness from an early age.

More than anything at school, I desperately wanted to be a comic artist, it was always right at the top of my list of potential future careers. I was brought up initially on a diet of classic British comics such as Whizzer & Chips, Topper and the Beano, wonderful weeklies on tatty old newsprint, that I'd read over and over again. In the late 60s I was seduced by American superhero comics, first of all through the Power Comics line (Fantastic, Wham, Pow, Smash and Terrific) and I was quickly hooked, hunting for whatever 'real' American comics I could find at market stalls: dog eared old copies that I treasured, and read time and time again. As Power Comics slowly became absorbed into IPC, I had to settle for Valiant and the like, reading the adventures of Janus Stark (whom I'd love to write some time) and the rest - until in 1973 I was able to return to my new love, when the British Marvel invasion began, and my lifelong love affair with comics really kicked in.

As the 70s wore on, more and more 'real' American comics began to become available, and like many young readers at the time, I became hooked on Claremont's X-Men comics, joining the X-Men fan club, and quickly meeting friends who would come to have a huge influence on my creative life. Leaping in with both feet, I took on the editorship of fan club offshoot X-AP (a loose collective of fellow fans writing and drawing their own material), and I began to draw my own comic strips (all terrible), becoming part of a larger group of active fans, creating our own fanzines and strips long beofre the internet (or even computers) were around. It was a terrific few years - I soon split from the club and formed my own APA, called Early Spring, and wrote and / or drew a number of comic strips for the quarterly collection, including some Doctor Who stories, a rather wobbly adaptation of Michael Moorcock's The Chinese Agent, and other solo stories and collaborations with other (generally much better) fan artists and writers.

Eventually I became active enough in 'fandom' that I was asked by Martin Skidmore, at that time the editor of comics magazine Fantasy Advertiser, to interview Richard Piers Rayner (left), who was then the artist on Hellblazer, and who also, like me, lived in York. It was to be a meeting that would have a huge effect on my life.

Through Rich I also met Vince, who was working as art assistant to Rich, posing as the photo-reference model of John Constantine, and also producing his own comic along with Rich, called The Solthenis. The three of us became firm friends, and Vince has since become my closest friend, the two of us sharing a house for the past fifteen years. I found myself also appearing in Rich's comics (anyone with the Swamp Thing Annual he drew will see me featuring as Brother Power, and I'm in other places too), and I began to experiment with the technique myself, trying to find ways to make my comic art look as it looked in my head - though it was always a battle.

As Vince began to experiment with his own strips, my own creativity was picqued again too, and as Early Spring wound down and Vince began to publish his Sapphie comics through his own imprint, Ariel Press, I began to work on two comic strips with the wonderful (and still pretty much undiscovered) cartoonist Mark Wayne Barrett, with whom I'd worked on various comic strips in Early Spring.

The first of these two projects to see the light of day outside the smaller world of fandom was Gravestown (the cover of issue one to the left), which was released through Vince's Ariel Press, with Mark and I working closely together on both art and plot. We made a good start on issue two, but sales of Sapphire slowed down, Vinnie wasn't able to break even, and Ariel Press Mark One slowly ended - but there was more to come, we don't give up that easily...

Vince and I had bigger ideas, and we talked a lot about producing a comic that was 'like a good Saturday night's telly' - the result of which was the Raven anthology (left), containing Vince's continuation of his Sapphire strip, my solo photo strip 'The Bishop', and the second of my projects with Mark, Dan Druff (and its later spin-off, Mad Girl, this time produced solo). It was a hugely productive time.

Clearly, however, the world still wasn't ready for us, and when Raven failed to sell in the numbers we'd hoped, I came to the conclusion that perhaps a comics career wasn't going to happen. I was confident about my writing abilities, but continued to have doubts about whether I really was cut out to draw my own strips.

Still, I continued to try, even though despite my best attempts, I felt that my artwork was never going to reach a standard with which I was happy, and drawing was sometimes like pulling teeth - my last solo strip in Raven was the detective comic Griffin (of which, more later), and with that I quietly withdrew from drawing comics, and concentrated on my strongest skill - writing.

Discovering Nanowrimo (National Novel Writers Month) I threw myself into novel writing, and at last I felt I'd found the medium with which I was happiest, producing an adaptation of the Gravestown comic, and also a science thriller called Loop - the novels went well, and I was sure that the comics career was over, putting all that nonsense behind me.

Until the Bristol Comic Convention this year (2008), and a discussion Vince and I had in the bar... of which more to come...

Harker Central

2008-09-16T21:57:00.000+01:00

Welcome to Harker Central! I'm your host, Roger Gibson, and I'll be guiding you playfully through the creation of the Harker comic, and offering various little DVD type extras to those of you wanting a little more than just the basic package. If you've got this far, then you must really like the comic - in which case, come and join me on the comfy sofa, kick off your shoes, pour yourself a cuppa and relax - you're just the kind of person I love!

It's a little strange writing in here, I have to admit. It's unlikely that you're reading this any earlier than January 2009 (by which time the first issue of the comic should be in the comic shops), and it's probably more likely that you're actually reading this some time far off in the future, perhaps when Vince and I have been creating the comic for five years, and we're now tired, decrepit has-beens to be laughed at and scorned. Still, to those of you who have joined us early - welcome! Hope you'll enjoy the journey, as we take you behind the scenes on the creation of a new British monthly comic. Of course, I'm writing under the assumption that we'll actually ever end up with any readers - right now, with the comic still Top Secret and Officially Under Wraps, I'm just talking to meself. Oh well. La la la!

Anyway, this is just a quick hello - next up, I'll be telling you who we are, and how we got here... (well, we got here out of our Mummie's tummies, of course. But I mean, more specifically, how we got to be working on this comic together. Sorry, I really must write more clearly...). Not a very gripping topic of conversation, I know, so I'll do my best to make it funny, with photographs making us look like tosspots, so that you can point at us and laugh in public places - oh, hang on, they do that already... hmmm...

roger