The Coterie of Zombies

The Coterie Has Moved!

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 19:06:00 +0000

Just so you know, I won't be updating this blog any more. You can find me blogging at http://www.howardhardiman.com and you can follow my comics at http://www.thelengths.com and http://www.thepeckhaminvalids.com

Thanks! I'll leave this blog up here for a while until I know what to do with the archive, but it's time to move on and brighten up!

Protest is an act of Worship.

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:55:00 +0000

The relationship between the Occupation movement outside St. Paul's Cathedral and the Cathedral authorities has been portrayed as increasingly frayed in recent days, with the radio this morning describing the Bishop of London as having implored the protestors to move on from their camp.

I suspect that, just as the portrayal of the protesters as lacking in conviction by not staying the night when scrutinised by infra-red cameras or as lazy when they're not up at the crack of dawn every day campaigning with every passing businessperson, so I think the stance of those of faith is far more nuanced than seeing the protest as a nuisance to be moved on, and I credit the church with being quite open in their subtle cues of support for the occupation and the resistance to social inequality.

To me, the camp looks like a pilgrim camp and the protesters are modern worshippers. I'm not for a moment appropriating them into the church, because I've no doubt that they're atheist, agnostic, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and religiously diverse as well as Christian. In many ways, though, that's not at all incompatible with the image of a Protestant Pilgrim. At the very core of the Christian faith is the notion that there's no intermediary needed between humanity and the divine and that the role of the church is to provide counsel in times of celebration and spiritual crisis.

It's hardly as though Christianity doesn't have a historical stance on usury, either, as with most faiths, it used to consider the charging of any interest on any loan as a horrific sin, and it was one of the few things which provoked a violent reaction from Christ, who drove the moneylenders from the temple. That the Church now isn't being more vocal in its support of protests which are, I would argue, an act of worship, expressing a simple sufferance and sacrifice at the foot of a temple - two, in fact, being outside the temple of God and the temple of money, is a missed opportunity for the Church to regain the moral territory it should be quite rightfully holding. I'd even argue that with the gentle approach to most matters of spirituality and the hands-off way that the Church of England generally handles things like the literal truth of the Bible, they stand to regain a lot of lost credibility at a time when people are looking for moral and spiritual guidance.

Preach what you practice, please. Support a fairer society and come out and admit that the protesters are daring to stand up for what you, as Christians, believe in. Their messages may be muddled up in a confused symbolism of Guy Fawkes masks and high-tech tweeting tents and they may not always get their message across clearly simply because they accept that there should be no intermediary between a person and their conscience, if you'd like to call it that, or perhaps, that everyone has an immediate and direct relationship with God on matters of faith. It's different words to articulate the same thing, but the only thing that's gained by standing against one another is inertia.

Does it matter whether you learn "do unto others" at Evensong or from a protester outside in the rain, so long as you learn to live peacefully and you know to do as little harm as you possibly can to the world around you and you recognise that you are just one tiny part of something much, much larger than you can ever manage to hold in your head? Evensong is a call for a fairer, kinder world; as is the Call to Prayer; as is Diwali; as is the G20 protests; as are the people in the banking industries trying to ameliorate the harm the system inflicts; as are movements for democratic change; as is everyone who just tries their hardest to do what they can to do right.

Preach what you practice. This is my plan from here on in. No criticism of those doing their best to do no harm.

Camberwell MA Visual Art Exhibition opens today...

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 06:40:00 +0000

...and my work's a part of it!

Details of the show can be found here:

Camberwell College of Arts

It opens to the public today and remains open until next Thursday the 8th of September (except for this Sunday, when the college is closed) and you'll find my work in with the MA Illustration area. I'll be invigilating there on Tuesday afternoon and on Thursday and I'll be there for the Private View on Tuesday evening, so you can either come along and catch me there to say hello or you can know how to avoid me if you'd rather.

There's a small shared shop in one of the rooms in the Illustration area that has my comics for sale in it and in my display area there's also a couple of folders with original artwork from The Lengths and some of my watercolour paintings of animals. I'll also bring in some Badger art for the Private view, too.

I'd love to see you there.

It's been a phenomenal two years for me and an incredible journey, shaking off a whole raft of anxieties and fears I'd not even realised I'd still been holding onto about calling myself an artist. When I ran into a beloved old friend who I've not seen for a few years at the weekend, I was actually thrown when one of his questions to me was "...and are you actually now okay about calling yourself an artist?" I'd actually forgotten how much of a pointless panic I'd thrown myself into about all of that in the past.

It's strange to think how afraid I used to feel about the possibility of calling myself an artist, despite my degree and despite my ongoing practice, but it just wasn't the right time to step forward with something that felt so personal that it needed to be protected because it protected me. Foolish, really, because now I realise that the more I let myself just get on with the all of the aspects of identity I was trying to hide away, they protect me even more than ever before.

But let's not dwell on that, before you start to think about just how much my life might intertwine with Eddie's at some points. The simple thing is that even if I've spent the last few weeks getting caught up in the logistics of the show and slightly thrown at how expensive all the large format prints and fliers and business cards have wound up being so close to when I'm moving flat and being sucked into organising invigilation rotas and the like, I need to allow myself the chance to stop and enjoy the fact I'm crossing a milestone here.

This is me, finishing an MA in Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts, after turning up at the interview a couple of years ago having a portfolio of drawings done in felt pen on post-it notes and some hasty scribbles in a sketch book. Finishing an MA with some pretty strong technical drawing skills after getting a D in GCSE art and never getting over the sense that I'd never be able to learn to do figurative or representational drawing. Finishing an MA with the third comic about to go out to shops through a distribution deal after starting the course feeling utterly broken because of the hole torn in my arm, afraid I'd never be able to hold down a job again.

During the past two years I've had some pretty rough times; I found out that I'm epileptic, my relationship broke down, I was made homeless as a result and lost all of my money trying to sort it out; I had to walk out on my job, I've been surviving on disability benefits, I had to call off something with someone I was so in love with that I was starting to lose a sense of myself and I've been in and out of hospital more than I'd like to admit.

...but you know what? I've been so fucking happy I can barely begin to describe it. During the time I've been on the course, I've learned so much about myself, I've walked away from so many situations that weren't working and remained friends with the people I love; I've never actually gone hungry, I've never actually had nowhere to stay, I've grown into a circle of friends who I trust with who I am and I've got a really solid sense of who I am and what I do.

So, although the MA Exhibition might just on one level just be a display of one big picture of Dan in his duffle-coat that you can get your hands on as the cover of issue 2 of The Lengths, and the work I'm being assessed on is available from comics shops all over the place, seeing the work together in context in an exhibition setting like that, I realise now, has a personal meaning for me that I don't actually want to be flippant about or underplay.

It's been fucking amazing. The Lengths I've travelled, eh?

The Lengths 3 Previewed on Forbidden Planet

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 11:46:00 +0000

Our friends over at Forbidden Planet have run a preview of Issue 3 on their blog. Here's some of the kind words they have to say about the issue.

These first few pages show young art school dropout Eddie meeting his maybe boyfriend Dan, always fearful of the shadowy double life he’s leading being discovered. Personally I think Hardiman’s art here is the best of the series so far, with really solid storytelling, some neatly detailed body language and great backgrounds.

Very, very good stuff which should be which should be released in the first week of September and available from The Lengths webstore.

The Lengths is available here.

Laydeez Do Comics

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 11:46:00 +0000

Photo by Mike Medaglia: http://www.facebook.com/taoistartist

Last Monday, I gave a short talk at Laydeez do Comics in London, which is quite possibly my favorite comics forum at the moment, with a varied range of speakers, a very relaxed atmosphere and exceptionally good cake. It's also the first time I've done a question and answer session about The Lengths, rather than an interview for broadcast, so it was really refreshing to be able to face questions I think I might have shied away from on air or in settings where I don't know who's listening.

Talking quite openly about the degree to which The Lengths is emotionally autobiographical and is based around my own experiences in the sex, drugs and muscles section of the gay scene was surprisingly cathartic, given that the comic isn't directly about me. To be asked questions about how the masking effect of using the dogs in the comic allows me to be more honest was disarming and started a conversation about how so many of the themes in the comic that are stereotypically gay - the attitudes to sex, relationships, drugs and self-esteem - are nothing to do with being gay or being a prostitute, but that they're actually pretty standard.

So between that and the wonderful discussions around the other artists' work there that night, I've been in the studio this week and setting up my exhibition at Camberwell with a renewed sense of resolve and clarity about why I do what I do, which is a brilliant place to be.

Just a quick reminder: The discount code ILOVELONDON for 15% off at the web shop ends tomorrow.

"Raw, powerful and very real" Forbidden Planet on The Lengths

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 11:27:00 +0000

The second issue of Hardiman’s The Lengths continues his dark and emotional story of one man’s descent into a shadowy world of sex and drugs. It couldn’t be further from his adorable, all-ages Badger, but it’s proving to be a challenging and powerful series.

Forbidden Planet International

It's funny; in my mind I don't actually see Badger and The Lengths as being that different, with both stories dealing with urban isolation, depression and survival and with Badger having a not-so-all-ages stabbing sequence in it that leaves him sleeping rough in an alleyway among a heap of bin bags after chasing off a failed mugging attempt, but I take his point that The Lengths is much more up front about the territory it inhabits.

Nevertheless, I think he says some very encouraging things in the review, what do you think?

The Lengths 3

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 11:03:00 +0000

I've just received Issue 3 of The Lengths back from the printers and I'm really, really pleased with how it looks. I'm once again happy that I went with a printer who took the time to make sure I got it done by a litho process and that it was made with eco and ethical credentials I'd be comfortable with. It looks and smells great and I'm proud for taking the time I took with it.

I'll have it at my MA show and at the Laydeez Do Comics talk I'm giving next Monday and there'll also be an open studios event as a part of Deptford X that I'm taking part in that I'll put details up for when I have them, but it'll be in shops at the beginning of September and you can put an order in through my shop now and you'll get it by then as well.

Until the end of August, there's a sale on in the web shop; if you use the code ILOVELONDON you'll get a 15% discount off your purchases, too.

Dog whores love London. I love London. Who doesn't?

Coming Up

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:04:00 +0000

It's a bit of a strange time for all of us at the moment. I can't quite get myself out of that graveyard of hashtag tombstones of areas I love proclaimed scorched by the fires of the last few days. I could type and delete a hundred meaningless things while I'm tired, but instead I'll just get back to the things I do know.

I've handed in a big chunk of the work for my MA and it's almost finished and even though college was closed yesterday, I'm enormously proud of everyone on all of the MA Visual Art courses for the work we've all done. You're very welcome to come to the show. On the private view night, I will have copies of my comic, including issue 3 of The Lengths, for sale.

I'm going to be speaking at Laydeez Do Comix at the Rag Factory in E1 on the 22nd of July about The Lengths, again, I'd love to see you there. Apparently I need to make a Powerpoint for it, but I'll try not to laugh at myself too much.

Other than that, just as a little thing, for the rest of August, I'm offering a 15% discount on all items in the shop if you enter the code ILOVELONDON at the checkout where there's a little box to let you enter that, just because I think we all could do with a little bit of love right now.

Orders including issue 3 will be sent out in the first week of September when it's released - it's also going to be available then in your local comic shop, so be sure to support them by getting in and getting your copy locally if you can, especially at the moment.

Issue 4 Cover and Release Date Announced

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 13:25:00 +0000

This week, I send Issue 3 to the printers, ready to have it back in time for the MA show at Camberwell, which will be where I'll be launching issue 3. It should get to retail outlets across the UK at the same time, so if you can't come along to that to get it from me then, you should be able to get it from your local comic shop. It's worth putting in an order now, though; quite a few places seem to have run out of issues one and two. (I still have them in the web shop if you want to pick them up, though!)

If this is the first you've seen of The Lengths, it's a comic that's based around male prostitution in London, drawn from interviews with men who sell sex to men and from spending a lot of time hanging out in that crowd. As such, there's a bit of autobiography in there, but a lot of authenticity.

In issue 4, the first part of Eddie's story reaches its conclusion in Pay As You Go. Nelson takes him on his first job as an escort, while the older Eddie makes some awkward, poor choices about honesty and love, despite the advice of Peter and Tony.

Issues 1 and 2 are available from UK comic shops or from the web store. Issue 3 is released at the beginning of September and Issue 4 will be out at the beginning of December.

http://www.thelengths.com

The Lengths is a self-published, creator-owned comic by Howard Hardiman.

Time management.

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 22:23:00 +0000

Yeah. You can tell there's only a couple of weeks to go before the hand-in date for my MA and that The Lengths issue 3 goes to press next week and comes out in a month? Time management's a wonderful thing. Means I get to take videos of people feeding squirrels in the park sometimes.

The Lengths 3: Ford Closes A Deal

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 10:17:00 +0000

Ford closes a deal. (Click for full-size image)

I'm just finishing issue 3 of The Lengths, ready for it to go to the printers. I thought I'd share this one page from it with you where Eddie, in his alter-ego as escort Ford, shows his assertive side and makes a sale. Yes, there's a slight dig back at Chester Brown's Paying for It, where he, as a John, barters with sex workers, I'll admit that now, and yes, I have turned gay saunas into a Pac-Man game where you're chasing ghosts around in circles. I think I've just ruined any chance of them ever seeming sexy again - I'll just hear endless sound effects now.

Anyway, you can pick up issues one and two of The Lengths from my web shop, then issue 3 comes out at the beginning of September when my MA show goes up at Camberwell. Issue 4 will be out at the start of December. I think I might just need a party for that, don't you?

Betwixt at the Trafalgar Studios

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:13:00 +0000

So, last night, I got to see Betwixt!, which is playing at the Trafalgar Studios on Whitehall. I was a tiny bit geeking out about going because of the cast and had been wondering if Peter Duncan was going to be wearing a green checked suit or pushing his hand into anything squishy and poisonous to nod to the nerds in the audience, but mainly because of Ellen Greene being in it. I'll freely admit to keeping the DVD of Little Shop of Horrors though my ongoing sprees of throwing out pretty much all of my possessions and despite my misgivings about the edition I own not subtitling the songs (it's a fucking musical, what the hell are they thinking?) but that story of vaulted ambition and the grimy love story between the clumsy plant nerd and the love-bruised woman who can't see any more that she might still be deserving of love after the things she's done to survive? Totally essential education for all young people. I can't imagine for one minute why I had it on repeat, or why Sheridan Smith's Audrey had me crying when I saw it.

Still, to have the chance to come to a tiny studio theatre and hear Ellen Greene sing almost totally eclipsed any thought about what the musical might be like until we actually went in and I turned to Paul and said, "What if it's shit?"

Luckily, it wasn't bad at all. It's a really sweet story about a writer who can't find his next story and the avalanche of camp of a room-mate who flounce-tumbles into his life and how they sing their way at moments of emotional crisis into a magical world of evil princesses with supernatural powers, transplanted daytime-tv celebrities, post-decapitation romance and a fucking amazing kick up the arse song at the end from Greene about doing the things you know you should because they're beautiful.

It's a good response to a recession to react with joy and love in aggressive quantities. Yes, the bleak reminders that it's bleak are bleak reminders that it's bleak, but in many ways, a fun, camp, joyous musical about the magic of creativity is a really important call to arms right now, and I'm not for a minute going to slap that kind of sentiment down.

At the after show party, there were some people making comments about how it couldn't transfer to a larger theatre as though that were a bad thing. Some things are best kept away from that kind of machine. This is great for what it is, it's theatre that couldn't be anything but theatre and it's lovely for that. I don't think I'd have enjoyed it from a distance or in a crowd and I think the sentiment would be diluted if it were part of that kind of a machine.

I also got to meet and briefly speak to Ellen Greene at the party - much as I'd love to pretend she was some sleb or something, she came across as a wonderful, passionate woman who really cared about what she does and was engaged with how the message of her work came across, even if it involves her dressing in leather and fishnets to do it.

Yup, you caught me on an effusive day. I'll get back to being cynical soon, don't you worry.

The New Cross Code

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 21:50:00 +0000

While we were organising New Cross Turn Left, Ellen and I kept hitting these little amusing blips of panic, where we'd go from being excited lion cubs into being scattered little mice. (Ooh, mice! Cute!)

When we got emails from people saying, "Oh, I didn't realise..." or "How do I get there?" or when we realised we'd (well, I'd) not left enough time to do important tasks, we fell back on these three lines of defence against fuckwittage, stress and general meepage, whether it came from within or without.

If we were getting even the slightest bit stressed, or people were getting stressed out at us, or even in our vicinity, the New Cross Code came into play.

1: Chill the actual fuck out.
2: It's a party, remember?
3: Bitch, please. Did you not get the first two?

I think we've accidentally stumbled on some very useful rules to live by.

Bitch please. It's a party, remember? Chill the actual fuck out.

And yes, the swearing is important. This is New Cross. These things are an important part of our cultural heritage. We're both from very posh suburban households, so when we do a "bitch, please" face, it's with the subtlest narrowing of the eyes, the pursing of the lips and the most fantastic hair you could imagine.

On (Dis) Closure

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 07:26:00 +0000

At New Cross Turn Left yesterday, when I wasn't doing the usual organiser thing of being slightly panicked and poking my head around like a meerkat, making sure everything was okay and that nothing terrible had gone too badly wrong (someone laughed at me when I went to the bar with a pencil sharpener because they'd been using the same pencil for the tally sheet for a few hours), I actually had the chance to talk to a few people about The Lengths and it's started me thinking again about the way that the story I tell about the story shifts slightly when I tell it to different people.

It's a terribly judgemental way of being, and it's based on some horribly feral fear, I'm sure. When I talk to some, I play up the angle that it's about relationships and that it's about the interplay between art and mental health; with others I'll talk about how it emerged from a time when I hung out with loads of whores and dealers and porn stars and was out clubbing every weekend and it became strange to see a body that wasn't gym-trained or pupils that weren't splayed wide. Looking back, I'm not sure if I feel more pride about being able to spot the Titian in the National Gallery's major exhibition that the curators and I thought wasn't his or getting used to being able to tell what point someone was at on their steroid cycles.

Hues of pink and the turn of a brush or the puff of bulking and burning.

Ultimately, being able to give a talk on the Baccante doesn't preclude living like one of their number, so this urge to compartmentalise myself - an urge to divide and adapt - literally (and I use that to mean "on the level of a symbol within a story" not, "this is a historically accurate truth") would tear me apart.

It's ridiculous, really, because I think it's pretty obvious that I wouldn't be able to write a story like The Lengths without some personal experience beyond the interviews I did and that the emotional core of it is bound to be, on some level or another, autobiographical. Ex boyfriends who read it give me a look and say, "This is about why we needed to break up, isn't it?"

Having a life where you have to keep more than one CV is not a life and it'd be a misnomer to say it's a curriculum vitae. Of course you can't tell everyone everything, but this way of being where you need to remember which thing you have and haven't told which person is the kind of which-craft I think is a black art that's just toxic.

I make a comic about drug using dog-headed whores in London. I'm okay with that. The chances are that my concerns about it being too personal are totally misplaced and that, like my ex boyfriends, when you read it, it'll turn out that it's about you as much as it is about me and that we're all making the same stupid mistakes that Eddie's making.

--

If you've not picked up your copy of The Lengths yet, you can buy issues 1 and 2 from your local UK comics store or from my web shop here. I'll be giving a talk about The Lengths at Laydeez Do Comix on the 22nd of August. Issue 3 will be in shops in the first week of September, which is also when I have my MA show at Camberwell College of Arts and will have a little display of my work and my sketchbooks and development work from The Lengths up. The Private View (which, of course, you're all invited to) is on the 6th of September from 6pm and I'll have issues 1-3 to sell, as well as my other books and prints and other stuff there too.

All I can ever be to you is the darkness that we know.

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 08:46:00 +0000

In a weekend overshadowed by news of death, once again comes an inevitable temptation to protest about some perception that there should be some hierarchy of grief, some way in which the news of what happened in Oslo should eclipse the death of Amy Winehouse, or that those speaking of their sadness at her death are disrespecting those who died in the insane, brutal tragedy in Norway.

There's no such thing, of course.

Of course we find our feelings about Amy Winehouse's death a lot simpler to articulate. It's closer, in many respects, to many of us. The songs she wrote reflected truths about the way I've been - and am - living; her death is once again a reminder that it's a dangerous game I'm playing by living outside of the nine to five cage that would choke me far faster than I'd gag on my own tongue from kissing cute punk boys and tasting the ketamine on their smile or from using mine to lose hours chatting about art to the beautiful people whose love without which I'd surely drown.

I cheated myself,
Like I knew I would
I told you I was trouble,
Yeah, you know that I'm no good.

The death of one intimate stranger; the deaths of hundreds of strangers. There's no hierarchy, just that one's easier to talk about, easier to relate to.

I was at Justin Vivian Bond's show at the Soho Theatre a couple of weeks back and there was a line there about listening in to some people sharing coke in a toilet, saying "take what you need and give a little back" and how that should be the basis of a new economy. I think there's a kind of resonance there. Although Justin Vivian Bond's not one of the performers where that music's as if they found my letters and read each one out loud, there were clearly people in the audience for whom it was.

What kind of fuckery is this?

One man, alienated from the people around him, motivated, it seems, by a twisted drive to cause as deep a wound as possible between faiths and his people. It makes me cold to hear people describe "religious extremism" as a term to justify terrorist behaviour. His actions were not religiously motivated, just as the bombings in London or the attacks in New York were not religious in nature. They were the actions of wounded, angry people lashing out.

To say it's the actions of one madman is to distance ourselves from his actions, to wash our hands of him and to say that we have no collective responsibility for one another's actions as a community.

What he did really wasn't that difficult. Face it, I've done a chemistry GCSE. I pissed around and spent more time making the bunsen burners into flamethrowers and wishing I could get my hands on some magnesium to watch it burn, but if I could figure out that level of simple mischief, then I'm aware that it'd be a piece of piss for me to go online, read a little, then visit the chemist downstairs, some of the hair supplies shops in Deptford and a few other shops and I could make a viable device that'd get a much better kill ratio than the ten for every suicide that the 7/7 bombers managed, proving that it was a lack of education that led them to feel so horribly alienated, more than a religious imperative.

In some ways, we can take solace and draw faith from the knowledge that we all could do what this one man did - when I saw a man kick another man to death all those years ago in Leeds, my fear for a long while was that he could have been any of us; that we al have the capacity to kill with that kind of feral brutality, without needing weapons or plans. It took a few years to realise how amazing it is that we're all carrying with us the capacity for murder, but we do not.

It's beautiful, really, to think that this kind of thing doesn't happen more often. That we look after one another well enough that when a woman loses her job, she doesn't drive her car straight through those kids crossing the road; that we don't let out those little demons we have on our shoulders all the time. That we know the wickedness and cruelty we're capable of, but that we choose to cage those monsters and instead co-exist.

Where we've let people down, I think, is with looking at people like Amy Winehouse and the man in Norway and by seeing them as different to ourselves. By saying we find a drug addict hard to relate to, then rushing out to pick up Now! to get a fix of schadenfreude is a cruel irony. To say we don't understand how someone goes berserk and attacks people, then to change seats on the bus to avoid sitting next to the person you think looks a bit weird means you're a part of the problem that creates those monsters.

I'm not saying we fired the gun or that we drove her to her early grave, but just as we let those kids down who blew themselves up in London because they felt alienated and angry and wanted to leave a mark, we have some collective responsibility to recognise that it's an unfair society and a society that divides and distances people that is the tragedy here.

We only said goodbye with words
I died a hundred times
You go back to her
And I go back to black.

The Lengths Issue 3 Preview

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 09:54:00 +0000

In a city full of temptation, you measure relationships in dog years. When you offer temptation for money, managing anything more than the hour you're paid for is a challenge. After three unexpected months with Dan, Eddie is finding it harder to keep his work away from his love life. The first encounter with Nelson in the gym that led him away from his friends plays through his mind and takes him back to the start of a story of sex, drugs and unrequited love.

Issue Three of The Lengths will be available from all good UK comics retailers at the beginning of September and from http://www.thelengths.com - be sure to let your local shop know to reserve you a copy.

I will be at New Cross Turn Left on Sunday the 24th of July and at the London MCM Expo in October and Thought Bubble in Leeds in November. I will also be giving a talk at Laydeez Do Comix on August 22nd about The Lengths. It'd be great to see you at these.

You can catch up with issues one and two of The Lengths either by picking them up through your local comic shop or by ordering them online here.

The Lengths Issue 2 is out now.

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 07:56:00 +0000

I'm very proud to be letting you know that issue 2 of my comic, The Lengths is out in all good comics shops around the UK this week as well as being available through my web shop.

If you're not aware, it's a comic based around a series of interviews I did with male escorts working in London a few years ago and tells the story of Eddie, one young escort (working under the name of Ford), who's struggling with trying to do the job while craving both the adventure it offers him and the prospect of a relationship with an old friend from the art school course he ran away from when he was seduced by a muscular stranger in the showers at his gym.

As much as it's a comic about a handsome, troubled, promiscuous drug-using gay prostitute who struggles to come to terms with his identity, it's not actually an autobiographical story, but I do recognise that there's a lot of myself in there and this project is very much a labour of love and I'd very much like for as many people as possible to be sharing in that. Oh, I suppose that's the promiscuity showing itself there again, perhaps. Seriously, though, this is a project that's been years in the making and is something I very much believe in. This is the second issue of eight and I'd love to have your support through the duration.

Pick up a copy of the comic at your local comic shop (they can re-order it and issue one if they've run out - most places sold out of issue one), buy it direct from the web shop if you can't get to a shop, come along to see me at the Birmingham Zine Festival this Saturday or at New Cross Turn Left on the 24th of July, too.

What would also really help is that I'm doing this pretty much alone, so I don't have a big marketing machine behind me on this like a bigger publisher would have, so it's amazing that I've been able to get a distribution deal, but it means I've got to try to do the jobs of a whole company. I have some help, but getting the word out about the comic is really important, so if you can blog about it, point any journalists you know my way, tweet your thoughts, review it on facebook, +1 it on google, start a thread about it on discussion forum sites you're a member of... all of that kind of thing would be incredibly useful. People are getting to hear about the comic and it's humbling and so deeply moving when I meet strangers who know the characters I've created as though they were their own friends, but the survival of the title relies on people getting to hear about it, and while I'm a very small player trying to get a comic out where my competitors are film companies churning out 52 titles at a time, it's really useful if you could help out however you can.

Anyway, that aside, I need to get back to the studio to finish issue three, in which both the raunchiness and the wanting to take Eddie to one side and seriously have words with him reach new levels. It's the issue where we see him meeting Nelson for the first time.

http://www.thelengths.com

The Pirate King would like his crown back now, please.

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 07:23:00 +0000

I am, apparently, the total King of Scavenge. Here's me, modelling (yeah, I'm a model, remember!) a hat and t-shirt that people had left abandoned in the mud at Glastonbury. The t-shirt is a bit of a bizarre one, it's really not something I'd normally wear, but it's great cotton and it's huge, so it's nice and cool in this stuffy heat and the hat's got a nice grungy vibe to it. I'm a bit surprised that people left them behind. But then, I'm amazed at people leaving boots behind in the mud.

On the last day, I had this massive seizure which, frankly, has scared the crap out of me a bit. Collapsing, twitching on the bus with about one hour totally missing and about three hours that I can't remember even though I was up and supposedly conscious is a bit horrible. The thought of how exposed and vulnerable I was, that I didn't even remember that I had bags until a long time after, let alone realise someone might have taken them made me insanely thankful I hadn't travelled alone.

So, just like the people who were fool enough to leave their spirit animals behind just because they got a bit muddy (what were they thinking - these things are endangered!), and the weekend warriors who walked out of their boots onto nails and needed tetanus injections (not like the guy who got the poppers burn from falling asleep with the bottle open in his jeans pocket and wound up with his jeans melted into his leg - how drunk or mashed was he?), I think I left something behind when I came back from Glastonbury.

Hello, you guys! How you doing!

(Loads of introspection, Star Wars quotes and surprises follow after the jump)

Seriously, though, how much ketamine must he have taken not to have noticed to have let his jeans melt into the side of his leg? The nurse I got chatting to said she had to send someone to the on-site supermarket to buy toothbrushes to try to scrape out some of the grit and fibres from the chemical burn. You learn the most amazing things when you start talking to strangers.

Anyway, things I left behind. Not just the sunhat I bought when it suddenly stopped raining and I got a burned nose. I think I've come back with a shorter fuse, having left a little of my willingness to protect other people before myself behind. It's been a little ugly over the last week, a little bit like all the tiny things I'd not said for a very long time that I'd kept stirring and churning in my heart have been spilling out.

A river of black bile, like a poison victim or a child undergoing an exorcism. What came out, so far from context, was jumbled chunks of distorted shapeless wounded hurt and anger, like some blind, chtonian Caliban, suddenly crawling hungry into the centre of a town.

What came out might have made sense had I just said something at the time, rather than catching those words as they rose and clipping them back, thinking I was protecting myself and the other person from pain; not realising that I was letting a garden of thorns slowly tangle around my lungs with the stubs of all these jagged things I'd never just cleared the air with.

It's a lack of respect for the strength of other people and there's an arrogance in assuming that because I know I'm strong enough to shoulder anything the world throws at me, I should just endure, and by enduring grow strong (as Dak'kon would say). After all (as Kreia would teach), when you kill the monsters to save the village, you get the XP, but no-one in the village levels up and you're being cruel in the long run. Protecting people from conflict ultimately helps no-one. She also said:

"It is all that is left unsaid upon which tragedies are built."

I think I'm totally down with that at the moment.

Oddly enough, in spite of coming away realising how much anger, grief and pain I've kept locked away inside me, I've also come back feeling myself a lot more (not like that, you bonobo hustler!) and I've got such a happy on. Perhaps that little death was exactly what I needed. A reboot. The rumbling low-level depression I realise I've been living under for the last year or two seems to be lifting at last.

As if I didn't need any further nudges that I needed to get all of that crap out of my system and focus on just being myself and doing my own thing, on Monday, I found these beautiful specimens.

Yup. That's right. Three in one day. Different finds, all meeting my rule of single pieces that I find in the street. It really is like someone's trying to tell me I'm on the right path. Or that they really like my tattoo. Both things work for me.

Anyway, this has been a very rambling little letter to myself, mostly about when Star Wars used to be good.

"It is only through interaction, through decision and choice, through confrontation, physical or mental, that the Force can grow within you."

Pride Sketches

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 15:52:00 +0000

I know there's some people who reckon there's all sorts of very important reasons to invest in some very expensive drawing tools and I know that I've been drawn into that kind of thinking at points, too, what with owning a Wacom and a copy of Manga Studio Pro for drawing, but I think I'm kicking back against that a little at the moment.

Maybe it's because of how detailed I'm making the work on The Lengths for issues 3 and 4, knowing that the style will shift again for 5 and 6 when it gets a bit weird (weirder) but right now, I'm kind of loving the thing of taking a £2.50 pad from Paperchase around with me and a set of pencils (2H-2B) from WH Smiths that cost the princely sum of £2 and a pencil sharpener that cost about the same.

Okay, so I could probably have gone even cheaper, but I was in a panic at Victoria station on my way to install an exhibition at Red Gate Gallery because the person who was meant to do it was sick and their computer is in German and no-one else knew how to get anything to work, so naturally, I went along to get everything done, having previously only really planned to head along to help my friend set up for the private view. I didn't know that I knew what "clean print heads was in German", so even though it was stressful, I'm feeling pretty good about myself.

Student, overheating on Victoria Line at 2pm.

Old Compton Street, 21:45 Friday

Old Compton Street, 21:50, Friday

Costa Coffee, Old Compton Street 12:50 Saturday

Awesome Hoodie with Attached Jumper

Old Compton Street, 21:55 Friday

Dancing Women of Infidel

Pole Dancers, Northern Line 01:10 Saturday

Infidel DJ Booth (I was being jostled, so this was quick)

Whu?

Superpolicewoman with Pride Cape

Infidel Dancing Boys

Photography is so passé

You're so right.

So tired, lads, I can't be arsed drawing you.

It's combat vest and suit jacket time!

Why aren't we together now, Jonathan?

Fucking storming raver.

I got caught.

All the lines. Working.

Rainbow pants, rainbow shirt, tesco bag. Awesome.

Glastonbury 2011: fashion in illustration

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 18:49:00 +0000

So, I did warn you that I spent a lot of time sketching while I was at Glastonbury, right? Well, just like last year and at at last year's London Gay Pride, I spent a lot of time looking at what people were wearing and thinking about the different characters and different lives they all represented. I'm prepared to admit that because I was sketching people as they walked past, some of them aren't exactly accurate, more that they're what I could remember of people rather than exactly what they were wearing, so if you're, say, the woman who was wearing a hi-vis jacket with a frilly skirt and MC-Hammer pants underneath and wellies, I apologise now if I got your hat wrong or if you've wound up wearing your friend's hat. I've tried to capture people as best I could, though, before we get into a Hari-gate Spa of accusing me of going off to make these up from look-books.

There are more people I drew, of course, and hundreds of thousands of outfits I couldn't manage to draw. The man dressed as a horse who got his cock out to piss in the middle of the field at West Holts was just too grim to deserve any more attention than he was getting, for instance, but I'm sure that those of you who were there have your own stories to tell of amazing outfits I've missed.

I'm vaguely tempted to get some cards or prints or something put together of these, like a little zine of sketches of people from different events I've just sat at and been looking at people at. Really foolish idea?

Don't forget: my comic, The Lengths, is out in your local comic shop now. Issue two comes out on the 6th of July. It's also available by mail order from http://www.thelengths.com - Cheers, ears.

Glastonbury 2011: Lost Boots

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 08:13:00 +0000

Abandoned Boots

Wellie Graveyard

A footprint-shaped spot of untouched grass.

----

Don't forget, you can get my comic, The Lengths, in your local comic shop or from www.thelengths.com - cheers ears.

Glastonbury 2011: Body and Soul

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:40:00 +0000

Lizz is the Queen of Fire

Last year, when I went to Glastonbury, I think my sense from it was that I could quite happily ignore all the bands and still have an amazing time, so when Caroline sent me her clash diary and asked what I thought, I replied: "I think clash diaries are anal."

To be fair, she can be forgiven because she has to let the people at Deafzone know where she wants to be so there can be sign language interpreters in place, so she's forgiven. Plus, really, all in, it's not like any of us can really say, hand on heart, that anal's not something we wish we all were getting a bit more of in our lives.

Speaking of things I think we all wish we had more of in our lives, I think that part of the surprising appeal of Mumford and Sons is the poetic and spiritual content in their songs, which marks them as quite unusual for a band that could fill the field in front of the Other Stage with everyone chanting along with every word to songs about awakening their souls and asking for some power to keep the earth beneath one's feet.

To me, this just reminded me of something I think I've talked about before in this blog - the sense I get that it's not the literal truth of a religion that actually matters, but that the mythology of stories has a different kind of truth - the difference between mythos and logos in philosophy, I suppose. The time at Glastonbury made me reflect quite a lot on this and how important the truths of mythology are to me as an artist and as a writer.

On the first night, I watched people gather at the Stone Circle, where almost everyone was drunk or on drugs, there were naked women dancing in the mud and the rain, people smeared in earth and paint and blood. Drums and brass bands led people in song and dance as the sun fell in the sky and there was a wild edge to the night that always seemed to be just one step away from descending into total carnage. In the crowd, robed figured patrolled with their tall staves in their hands, looking pleased at the chaos around them at the party. Midsummer is, I suppose, a reminder that what you have is about to slip away, so you should enjoy it while you can; it's about to disappear from you.

On the second morning, I talked to some of the people who ran the Common Ground Café. We talked about how ill-prepared many people were for the weather; how odd it seemed to come to the festival without any notion of how enormous and powerful nature would be compared to you, and what kind of pride you were showing to come along in flip-flops and no waterproofs. They talked about how they had formed out of a group of drug addicts who found a a faith in God and began living as a religious commune in the seventies and had stayed together since then. They seemed one of the most genuine, kind and friendly sets of people at a festival where those traits were pretty abundant anyway, so I enjoyed my time with them, and the people there would always make time to talk to me about what I was drawing and to chat about other things.

Common Ground was one of the few places to eat where you could get food for less than seven pounds, so Lizz and I found ourselves more than once in the Hare Krishna tent where they offer food to those who need it. It was a painfully humbling sense to be taking food, knowing that their charity was making a very genuine difference to me. I wasn't sure how to react. There was an odd moment where I was sat next to Lizz and we both had drinks next to ourselves. I couldn't remember where I'd put down the drink I'd been given and I almost said, "Which one's mine?" which suddenly made me wonder at what point I'd started to think about something that I'd accepted as charity as belonging to me and not to anyone else. Had someone else taken it, could I have felt affronted? On a wider level, I started to wonder about why we feel that way about any thing we buy or sell or give or accept - so I suppose the charity of the Hare Krishna tent gave me an interesting insight into one of the tenets of their faith.

I spent some time in the Healing Fields, getting reflexology and osteopathy, both of which were fascinating and helpful - the reflexology was particularly surprising because of how emotional it was. She pushed at two points on my feet, then started, saying, "I'm going to stop that - you're holding in so much pain; I'm sorry - I think I might have nudged at something there." She was right - a flood of thoughts I'd not even realised I'd been avoiding had pushed through into my conscious mind out of nowhere when she touched my foot. The osteopathy was a similar thing - he said that there are two points that are commonly related to seizures - one at the neck and one at the base of the spine. He then touched the two points where I've been having loads of back and neck pain. We looked at each other, both said, "oh..." He said he was going to try to relieve the point in my neck, but not go further in because otherwise I could well have a seizure, but when he went near it, he kept finding that I was unconsciously trying to protect it from him.

I said I wasn't in a rush; he gave me a grimly serious look and twisted my head around with some firm force. I felt a flood down my spine, felt for a moment as though I was going to go, then I was ok. I found I could move more freely than I had in a long while. We chatted for a little while, then he and the reflexologist sent me away with a very warm farewell. As I went to pick up my bag, I realised that I could feel the fingers on my right hand that I've not felt properly for years. That was almost as emotional as the mental block that the reflexologist had nudged. When I returned to London, the pain returned within a couple of hours, which is making me quite seriously wonder what's really causing all this.

I also spoke to a dealer about near-death experiences, a Christian Monk who left because he fell out with the church over its views on homosexuality, then returned to his Faith after falling in with a tradition of Druids and realising that their values wound up within British Christianity, and a former sex worker who talked about how she's now married and raising a child with her husband and has almost finished a PhD because she wanted to make sure she gave something back to society.

When I spent a week seeing so many different expressions of faith and worship, I can't help but think it's such a shame whenever people start to think that believing in one thing devalues others. Why some might say that the prostitute's devotion to helping others (throughout her life) might be seen as less spiritual than the monk's life in the order. Why people consider the Hare Krishna people risible, but accept a dealer talking about drug experiences in which people die and come back and think that's cooler than sharing food with people who need it.

Whether it's dancing in a stone circle around a fire to drums or to cheesy disco with a topless go-go dancer smeared in paint and glitter and a cute guy in the NYC Downlow (yeah, I did that, then kissed him goodnight after walking him back to the VIP areas, unaware that it had turned into a crime scene while we were dancing); whether it's cracking backs or rubbing feet; whether it's chanting Hare Rama to a group of unappreciative kids coming down from the night before who could easily afford their own food or former addicts building a café in a field - the way I see it, its all different jigsaw puzzle pieces in different streets and that's exactly how I love it.

Block 9

Glastonbury 2011

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 06:33:00 +0000

Why, yes, it was muddy, then it was hot. On the first night, the crowd was grumpy and drunk in a grudging way, all snarls and bad moods. When I was walking back to my tent, I overheard a group of men shouting at a woman for not joining in with their impromptu Oasis howlalong. One said to her, "Fine! Don't sing along, you stuck up bitch. I hope you drown in the mud in your sleep."

I almost packed my tent up and left then - I couldn't see where this conversation had been, nor could I see what happened next, but it was typical of the kind of atmosphere we'd walked into on the first evening while everyone was getting their bearings. I remember thinking to myself that I wouldn't wish that kind of thing on anyone, and that I hoped he learned a bit more respect for other people in case some kind of karma came back to bite him quite soon.

Who'd have thought that only a couple of nights later, I'd be kissing a fit guy just outside the gates to the VIP camping grounds at the very time they were turning into a crime scene? Not me, in so many ways.

There are so very many thoughts I want to share about all the things that happened at Glastonbury but I think you'd probably hate me if I piled it all into one big post, so I'm going to try to be a good blogger and spread it out across the week. For now, though, here's a picture of the lovely legion of litter pickers off doing their work. Given the amount of stuff they must be dealing with today, I salute them.

What Kind of Artist Are You?

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 17:02:00 +0000

I've been thinking lately about the different ways that people seem to make and build careers as artists and of the things I wish I'd had explained to me a bit more clearly when I was at art school first time around. Now, this is very broad-brush stuff and I'm quite sure that there will be so many exceptions to these that it'll all fall apart if you want it to, but I'm finding that this is quite a useful way to be thinking about approaching a career in art if you're just starting out.

It strikes me that there are three general ways of being an artist as a job, to the point where I wonder if we could do with slightly different words for each to differentiate between them, because most people when they know that they are artists start out not quite knowing what type of artist they want to be and get tied up in knots trying to work out why or how they will express their vocation as an artist.

I use that term very deliberately, because in my view, artists (be they writers, performers, painters, poets, educators or however it manifests) occupy a very similar social niche to the one that has in the past been occupied by priests, shamen and the like. I'll explain a little more at the end.

As I say, I think there are three main ways of approaching a career in the arts, and although there's some room to move from one to another, it strikes me that you can only really do that with any success once you've achieved some mileage along one path first. Let me have a go at blurting out what those three paths seem to be before I go way off track though.

Option 1: Objects of Desire

This would be the artist we most commonly think of when we imagine an artist, so someone who sells a painting or a sculpture for a large amount of money that's more than the material worth of the object itself, so what people are paying for is the idea of the object as much as the object itself, and the status of owning it. The painting, the sculpture, the installation is rare or unique and the artist makes few works, which enhances their value and they're kept by their buyers for the possibility that they'll increase in value in future as often as being bought out of love for the object or the idea behind it. The artist is not the focus of their public's attention, but the work is and both the artist and their work has a mystery to it that enhances that sense of it being more than its physical reality.

I know that I sound like I'm being a bit cynical about this kind of work; I'm not - I think there's something truly magical about this kind of art when it works, and the reverence and awe with which it is treated is well-deserved and it's largely because of those moments when this kind of art really excels that I'd say I think of art galleries as being the closest experience I have to what others would find in a church or other place of worship. That sense of a power and a beauty that's beyond you and moves through you.

Option 2: Project and not Object

The artists who work like this are the kind we hear the least about, because if artists are moved by a vocation of mystery and faith, then they are the nuns who study their scripture and then work selflessly in the community as an act of faith. This kind of work is the type where the artwork is not the physical object or the performance that's produced, but the manner in which it happens or the interactions that create it. It's the work of theatre in education projects, it's the work of the participation producer projects at the South Bank Centre that make large-scale art by involving hundreds of people who otherwise would not engage with art. It's the work undertaken by artists who use their talents to share their passion to educate others and to share their faith in the power of art and stories on a human level.

Yes, it's a little hard to reconcile this with the traditional model of how we see the work of an artist, but when you think about how many artists live, doing artist in residence projects where they directly share their passion and knowledge and don't live for the celebrity status or the sale of the object they create, but for the process of sharing the journey along the way, you realise that many fine artists, performers and writers work in this manner and that it's a brilliant way to be an artist.

Option 3: Accessible and Multiple

This kind of artist is someone who makes art which sells for less money but to many people. Print-makers who do large editions, craftspeople who set up shops on etsy or wherever and, yes, comic book creators would all fit into this category. Where the Option 1 artist makes few works that sell for larger sums of money, these artists make more and sell to more people. While it sounds like this is a more straightforward route to get into, it's surprising how many art schools seem to discourage it, perhaps because they're themselves wanting to get the status of scoring the big name artists who'll get gallery careers. Where Option 1 artists have a high status of mystery and allure to them and Option 2 artists are often invisible behind the effect their work has, these artists build an audience to whom they must remain directly responsive and accountable, and there's a lot to be said for making friends if you're this kind of artist.

Right...

Now, I said I wouldn't witter on too much, but I think one of the difficulties I think I've had and that a few people I know face, too, is that if you're trying to move down two or all three paths at once, you're going to be spread too thinly and you're going to impede your chances of getting anywhere with any of them.

If you're selling cheap prints of your work on a shop online, a top-end gallery might be less inclined to take you on as their next big project, because the exclusivity of your work is compromised. Similarly, if you're trying to maintain the intellectual mystery of an Option 1 artist, then project work won't come your way. Similarly, if you're building up project work in residencies, the friendly relationship you'd need with audiences for doing option 3 can suffer if you're not careful.

That's not to say you can't do more than one - if Grayson Perry can do projects with families in the Foundling Museum, then obviously you can do Option 2 work when you're an Option 1 artist, but you need to be set up in one field before you move into another.

I don't know how useful any of this stuff might be, but it's a bit of a brain dump for me about some things I've been mulling over for a while about getting a sense of who and what you are as an artist.

What kind of artist are you?

-----

Quick last-minute reminder: I've got issue 2 of The Lengths available to pre-order ready for its release on the 6th of July. Head over here to order your copy: http://cutebutsad.bigcartel.com/ Oh, I guess that makes me option 3. Rah!

MCM Expo, The Lengths and More

noreply@blogger.com (The Pirate King) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:07:00 +0000

Well, there's a lot of stuff to catch up on at the moment! I had an utterly amazing time at the MCM Expo, of course. You know it was awesome because I was there. Duh, it's a no brainer, really. Add to that the sneaky preview that I brought along some copies of issue 2 of The Lengths and that there were some amazing people like Lizz Lunney, Becky Cloonan, Timothy Winchester, Marc Ellerby and blah blah namedrop namedrop I'm such a celebrity I was drinking whiskey with... oh yeah, that's just insane. I'll stop. Suffice to say, the stupid cavalcade of what the actual fuck aside, it was actually incredibly humbling to be feeling like I actually belong at that place and that there were people who made a point of coming over to find my work and to talk to me about my comics and the characters in them in a way that made it seem that Eddie, Dan and the others are as real to them as they always have been to me.

That, to me, totally outranks any pissing contest of which big name comics person I got to talk to, in the end. The person who looked to my friend Sarah and said "I'm actually quite nervous" before pouring telling me about how much the comics I have been making have meant to her was a timely and humbling reminder of why I want to tell these stories in the first place, rather than getting caught up in how busy the day was with selling. It's what those sales mean that matters. Of course, the fact I can now pay off some of the printing costs isn't something I'm turning my nose up at at all, either.

All the busy in the actual show meant I didn't have much time to shop for comics of my own, sadly - I pretty much only managed to pick up Becky Cloonan's Wolves, Kate Brown's Fish + Chocolate (which possibly needed a trigger warning about how sad one of the stories in it is - oof!), the newest book from Tpcat and Tom McNally and the amazing Giant Days book. I think there were other things, but it's only been a few days. You don't expect me to have unpacked yet?

I got interviewed for a couple of comics podcasts, but I'll let you know when they're up. Mainly though, it was the usual mad cavalcade of cosplay and chaos interspersed with beautiful moments of friendship, art and tenderness that make the whole scene great.

But enough of sticking my entire arm down my throat to make myself vomit all over you! Here's a picture of Sarah, reading Issue 2 of The Lengths.

It'll be coming out in shops, like real actual real shops in the beginning of July. Insane. I will be updating the online shop to make it so you can order yours so you can get it on the day of release. In the meantime, if you've not got issue 1 or the ace poster, you kind of need to get your fucking act together and sort that out. Forbidden Planet says so. Issue 1 is in shops already. Isn't that mad? Shops! Actual places you can go into and talk to people about what things you might like? Mad!