Anyway - second issue of my micro-Beta Ray Bill epic Godhunter hits in the US on Wednesday and in the UK on Thursday. Its cover looks like this…

And there’s a five page preview featuring some Korbinite/Herald of Galactus cosmic fisticuffs.

Will be interested to see what people make of the whole thing.

Anyway, as part of it, we got together in a pub and did a ridiculously rambling 90 minutes interview, some fragments which Matt cut and used in the zine, as well as an extract from the first, unpublished Phonogram story. Which is all very fun, except it’s not the whole story, and Matt - on a train to Canada - clearly wanted to take another swing at it. When you’re as close to Phonogram as Matt is, writing about it is like wrestling with fog.

It’s a fun take and an accurate portrait of the mentality - stress the “mental” in that sentence - which leads to Phonogram.

Go read.

Jamie and I saw Longbox in an earlier demo at New York Comic Con in February and were impressed. In fact, I was so impressed I made sure that a clause related to this kind of sales was written into the next comic contract I signed. Clearly, I have no idea if it’ll take off. I hope it does. I also think that Longbox does so many things right that it’s got the best chance I’ve seen for a digital-comics-format system to do so. This would be a good thing. In fact, possibly a necessary thing.

On a personal level as a reader, I’m in the market for digital comics and have been for a while. I do fall into the camp which believes that reading on a screen is a little inferior to the print copy. Conversely, I also fall into the camp whose ability to buy singles is limited. Not primarily by money – by space. I haven’t the room. I believe that single issues can be beautiful, life-affirming pop objects – there is a reason why Jamie and I did The Singles Club the way we have. But for most comics, which I buy primarily for the story, I am looking for a reasonably priced, easily accessible way to get hold of them at the same time as they’re available in other places.

More so, the reduced price means that I suspect I’d be following more books than I am right now. If I don’t have the worry of space plus the reduction in price… well, I’d be less bloody picky. I’d follow books which I’d even vaguely like. And most importantly, I’d be sure to find something I’m interested in. In the Indie field, I’ve been looking for a copy of CHEW and OLYMPUS since they came out. And no bloody luck. This immediately solves that for any book on Longbox.

Should shops and the traditional direct market be worried? Yeah, a bit. This could be bad for them. I don’t think it will be.

The thing with the lower price means that even if the talked about voucher systems – where you can get money off a real world trade if you buy the digital singles – don’t emerge, it means that I’m far happier double-dipping and buying both digital singles and trades. I’ll throw away six dollars on single issues which make up a trade and still buy the trade if I love it enough. Right now, only books I absolutely adore do I buy in both formats. If it’s six dollars lost, that would reduce to mere love. Hell – sampling a single issue for a dollar and then buying a trade if it impresses me enough strikes me as fairly likely. Point being, for me, I suspect my purchases in comic shops would at worst stay stable (as in, I buy the same number of trades as before, which is the majority of my purchases) and at best, increase considerably (as in, since I am exposed to more books, I buy more of those books). And this is only talking about the existent comics market. Longbox seems perfectly capable of opening up comics access to many more people, who will eventually want to buy something physical, even if it’s not for themselves. People like giving presents, y’know?

That’s me as a reader of comics. Let’s talk me as a creator, specifically as one half of Team Phonogram.

We have a few problems. Firstly, we make no money. Secondly, our comics aren’t available in enough places. Thirdly, we make no money. I say that one twice, because it’s the biggie.

Let’s deal with the smaller one first: while certain shops stock us very well, the vast majority don’t. Issues disappearing within hours of them arriving is pretty common. We lose any kind of casual floating readership who may just fancy the look of it. If someone reads a story about Phonogram and walks into a shop, they probably won’t find it. They’ll walk out. They’ll probably forget it. And that’s our basal-to-optimistic level. When we get stories about shops who literally refuse to order the comic, we just wince. Even worse, our comic has a considerable readership outside the traditional comics readership. Many of these don’t even live near a comic shop. Many of these may not even know that comic shops exists. Some of them are a bit Emily Aster and will refuse to go into comic shop on principle.

It’d be good to have a way to sidestep that.

The money problem’s the bigger issue. As we’ve talked about before, the single sales of the Singles Club were lower than we’d hoped for. They’re level with series 1, but due to the addition of colour, any profits evaporate. We make no money on the singles. We probably make a loss. We do well on trades – Rue Britannia is just about to go into its second printing. The first printing was about three times what we sell in issues. I suspect The Singles Trade club will do well too.

But long term, that isn’t a solution. At the moment, with our current methods, a third series of Phonogram is entirely impossible. Frankly, Jamie is too old and too talented to starve for half a year again. Even if he was willing, I wouldn’t want to ask him. If we’re going to do a third series, we’re going to have to work out a new methodology for it. We’re chewing over the options, and have a variety of purely hypothetical plans, but…

Well, if we sold as many copies of an issue on Longbox as we do at retail, Jamie would have close to a living wage. If we sold half as many, we’d have rent money. Even if we only sold one copy, we’d make more money than we do now. As I said, we make no money from the issues. While a dollar an issue (minus Longbox’s cut) may seem not enough to someone who doesn’t know the economics of comic production, it really is perfectly acceptable.

In other words, a model where we do all single issues on something akin to Longbox and then, when completed, collect in a real trade for a paper-audience is something which seems feasible. It’s certainly more feasible than what we do now. I suspect a lot of indie creators in a similar position to Jamie and I feel the same.

Will Longbox be a success? I hope so. I hope the big four publishers find a way to work with them, as a system which will be most effective if it’s comprehensive, and I think all publishers would gain a synergy by doing so which would actually help themselves more than trying to do their isolated own things – and actually, as a side-effect, help the rest of the industry too. But I also don’t think it’ll necessarily fail if they don’t - I think it’ll just slow down what I think could be a major step towards rejuvenating and reinventing the industry. Because this is going to happen eventually. I’d rather it happened now.

This post has been brought to you the word “hope”. It’s one of my favourites.

This is the biggest thing that I’ve done for Marvel so far. You can tell, because I was asked to do a load of interviews to tie into its announcement, which are all online. Here they are in the order I spotted them:

Newsarama
Marvel.com
Comic Book Resources.
IGN.

You’ll find a lot of riffs off similar points across the four interviews, I suspect - I think I namecheck “GENERATION KILL” in all of them. They also feature the same three Nord pages, which are awesome. They’re the sort of pages which, now that I’ve got them back, I find myself inspired for future madness I’ll work in later in the series.

I’m trying to balance several aims with it. I want to be a worthwhile tie-in to the whole Dark Reign event while simultaneously being something which works as a single story for someone who just likes Ares - hell, someone who doesn’t even know about the Marvel Ares. That’s the things with the mythological characters in the Marvel U - because they have one foot in classical myth, their concepts can be grasped by just about anyone. I mean, the basic high concept of this one is “Ancient God of War put in charge of training group of soldiers”. I think that’s pretty compellingly universal. I suspect it’s probably the Marvel book I’ve done with the widest appeal, even without tying into Dark Reign. You should dig it. I certainly do.

****

Actually, while we’re talking comics, you should go and read the CBR article on Longbox. It’s basically an Itunes-for-comics solution. I think it could be big. Moreso: I hope it’s big.

If you can’t make out from Jamie’s fuzzy camshot, it’s Marvel Heroes and it’s a proper comic. That being, a comic with a free gift on the front. A gun which fires a foam rocket! People often wonder how they could improve Watchmen. My answer would be to attach a foam-rocket launcher to the front. Hell, it’s a way to improve anything. I dug Anna Karenia, but I’d have dug it more with a model train tied to the front.

Marvel Heroes is a proper UK-style kids comic, published by Panini. Rather than being in the Marvel Universe proper, it’s the characters just given to writers to play with out of context, turning out pure-pop kids comics. By which I mean, proper sub-10 year old kids comics, which in the UK means… well, it’s the first time I’ve been in the kids mag section of WH Smiths since I actually was a kid, but it’s interesting to see how these magazines have changed. They’re all enormous. They all have excellent looking things stuck to the cover.

On the other hand, they haven’t changed at all. As well as having a couple of new comics in Marvel Heroes - sitting alongside mine is a POWER MAN strip - it’s got the mass of features which make up a brit kids mag. There’s crosswords. There’s a poster of Thor. The comics are introed with a characters stat-sheets. There’s a schematic of the X-men’s Blackbird. There’s a page of art, some of which I’m scoping to replace McKelvie. There’s a HOW TO COPY WOLVERINE page. Best of all, there’s a cut-out mask which allows you to pretend to be a sentinel and scare any neighbourhood mutant. It’s quite the package, and was passed around excitedly at the phonodrinks. I took a photo there, because my brother - by his birthday rights - bagsied the gun, and I had to give it him.

My Story? It’s a Thor one. The basic idea is that the Trolls have invented a device which allows them to pry what humans are thinking. They look up Ulik, their leader, to find he’s being insulted and his power doubted. Of course, they’ve accessed a web-forum where someone is ranting about how Thor’s villains suck. The Trolls invade earth looking for vengence. It’s called War of The Trolls. Is it above a 6 year old’s head? Who can tell. If not, there’s plenty of other comedy to distract them, including a bit where an elderly lady bullies Ulik. Also, an important moral to teach the youth. That is, don’t slag people off on the Internet. You may be killed by a furious invading army of mythological creatures.

Don’t do it kids.

Was a fun thing to do. I’ve always fancied writing an actual proper kids comic, and it was fun to do it. Available from all news-agents, etc.

New issue of Phonogram out today in the UK (And yesterday in the US). Just got my comp copies, and it’s probably the densest yet. The David McNamee Knife interview packs over 2000 words in a couple of pages alone. Should be available from any good comic shop. If you would like a preview, look here. I’m compiling all the reviews here. Yet another really impressive bunch. I was a little worried that because Emily is a lot - er - spikier as a lead than either Penny or Marc, people may be turned off by that. Except it seems that Phonogram’s readership likes total bastards as much as phonogram’s creative teams.

(I’ve linked to the earlier reviews a lot elsewhere, so let’s call out a couple of new ones. Ron Ifanboy made it his pick of the week and Against Acedia did some actual detailed reading how how Jamie works a panel. It’s good to see people grapple with this kind of stuff, as it’s such an important part of the comics form.

In other news, we’ll be having some Phonogram drinks in the Ben Crouch off Oxford Street from 7:30 or so. Pop along if you’re in the area.

BAYOU Vol 1: Jeremy Love’s Bayou is being serialised on DC’s web initiative Zuda, so there’s no need for you to buy it to read it. You probably will anyway. Chatting to a London shop-staffer, and he talked about how Freakangels was the Avatar book which got most people coming in and asking after it - despite the fact you can get it for free. I think it’s even more so with Bayou, which is a book which demands a physical artifact. Set in the American 19th Century South, it’s kind of an earlier-period Alice with the parlour-game concerns of the English Upper/Middle Classes replaced with a fantasy woven from the South’s history of slavery and civil-war. It’s emotionally direct, beautifully cartooned and pretty much essential.

YOUNG LIARS, Vol 2: MAESTRO: Or the point where The Young Liars turned its engine up from pretty mental to FULL BORE MENTAL! HANG ON! IT’S COMING APART IN MY HANDS! I’ve bought in the trade despite having the issues, which I burned through the first 13 issues off in an enormous rush and then proceeded to immediately lend out to a friend so I could have someone to talk to about it. I don’t even know if it’s any good or not. In the classic sense, it’s gone beyond being merely credible, to being actively incredible. It’s alive and beautiful and - perhaps inevitably - it’s been announced that its been cancelled and will wrap up at Issue 18. Lapham promises an ending, but even if it just stopped, it’s worth buying into this. Hallucinogenic pop comics which reminds me of a lot of the odder Vertigo material which has become scarcer in recent times, in favour of more grounded material. The best of which are as good as Vertigo has ever been, but not literally as mad. It’s… hell, put it like this: It’s telling that Peter Milligan wrote the intro for this baby. In short, Young Liars is like an orgasm, but cleverer.

CROSSED 4, 5: I caught up with a bunch of Avatar I missed too. Things aren’t quite as grim as the opening three - the third, especially, was about as Dark as even Ennis ever gets. Still brutal, volume-up post-apocalypse post-zombie-genre horror, but setting up more detailed character work.

ABSOLUTION 0: Cheap introduction to Christos Gage’s long-awaited Avatar Superhero comic. As the interview material has put it, the Superhero as Serial Killer. Compelling and driven. As I like to say when watching the SHIELD, “No Good Can Come Of This”.

ANNA MERCURY 2: ULTRASPACIAL DREADNOUGHT VANAHEIM 1: When I write that title, it does sound like the world’s best football game. Anna Mercury is Ellis hitting that Smart Action-Movie itch. No-one writes fight scenes as visceral as Ellis in the anglophile market, and Mercury’s a place to play with that, some cross-spacial space-fun and the phrase “Ultraspacial Dreadnought Vanaheim”. Mercury’s the star, of course. I think she’s a genuinely clever pop-character design, in how she walks a few lines which are terribly easy to fall over.

IGNITION CITY 1,2,3: Finally got hold of a copy of 1 so I could actually read this. Deadwood with Pulp Science Fiction heroes, as implied. Downbeat, vicious, sad. I may write more on this anon, but Ellis in disappointed-futurist mode is always something that resonates.

UNWRITTEN 2: Forgot to pick this up, despite asking where it was. I got distracted by lasers or something. Bring up because the first issue was probably the strongest introduction to a new Vertigo series since Y: The Last Man’s. Carey’s last Vertigo book, Crossing Midnight, always seemed slightly overlooked, which is a shame as it was deeply atmospheric. I suspect that may have partially been due to its slow first issue. THE UNWRITTEN, conversely, motors. And it motors for a dollar for the first issue. Good nature-of-stories fantasy.

INCOGNITO 3: Man, I forgot this one too.

BETA RAY BILL: GODHUNTER 1: This was fucking awesome!

More seriously, seems to have gone down pretty well. After the first couple of full reviews were cold to mediocre, I decided to stop peeking at the Internet discussion while I finished off the third issue. After doing that, I wandered in and was pleasantly surprised. Reviews, especially in the blogosphere, ended up warm to very warm and podcasts particularly seemed enamoured. Hearing a long serious debate about Bill’s Plan puts a smile on my face. There’s even a review I can link to which manages to be positive about it and hit its big ol’ themes without spoiling its twist. If you’ve read it, you may like Chris ISB making it his pick of the week, But Before I Kill You not reading too much into the dialogue and Beta Ray Bill Blog getting agreeably hyperbolic about it.

Just saw the Surfer/Bill fight last week, which is splendid too. Er… buy it?

Other stuff: I did an interview with Ready Up about Games Journalism, as part of their Five Lessons season where they’re interviewing Journalists about a variety of topics. I talk about creativity, primarily, plus throw a lot of Secret Origin Of Kieron Gillen stuff. Go read.

Though with a big old logo on top of it. There’s an eight page preview of it here. It’s $3.99, but apparently includes a re-print of Walt Simonson’s Beta Ray Bill origin, which is great for the reader and a splendid chance to be made to look bad by being put in the company of a master for me.

Just one thing: if you’re planning on buying it anyway, I’d advise avoiding reviews. From the ones I’ve seen so far, there seems to be an inversely proportional relationship between how much someone likes it and how happy they are lobbing around spoilers. So the guy who really dug it says literally nothing bar you should get it, the guy who disliked it drops his take on the issue’s reveal in the second paragraph and the guy who was pretty nonplussed walks a path between the pair. Which does make sense, if you think about it but worth warning about.

It’s been fun writing this one. It’s my first multi-part story in the marvel universe, so I’m getting a chance to use some more of my toolbox than I get to use in a stand-alone story. Also: cliff-hangers. Also: punching.

“I am Ulthar of the Axe!,” screamed Ulthar of the Axe with the full force of his famous lungs, rousing sleeping children from their slumber for a good half-mile in all directions.

The hero stood in the centre of the room. A half-dozen thuggish men lay around his feet, beaten to unconsciousness by his fists that looked more like a flanged mace than implements of manipulation. A grin, twisted monstrously by the angry old scar cut from the corner of his lip to the corner of his eye, ran rampant across his face. It grew all the more unruly as a simpering bar-maid approached. She passed him a tankard of ale made for a half-giant, twirling a flaxen braid around one finger. He proceeded to down it in one before an astounded, adoring and amazed crowd.

Scattered cheers broke through the astonishment, before turning into a general tumultuous hail. They were drinking in the company of Ulthar of the Axe… and he had just beaten six armed men in front of them. That meant they – everyone – was connected to the saga of the greatest hero of the age. And he was everything the bard’s sang of. He stood a head clear of the tallest man in the village, his arms so large that if somehow disconnected could be used as battering rams, his face so noble that passer-by’s could swear a crown of crowns adorned his brow, his eyes so fierce to look as if they were plucked from a wood-land tiger and shoulders so wide and firm that were he to stay still long enough a wise builder would use them for a foundation for a castle.

He reached to one side and pulled the famed Axe Head-cleaver from the oaken table, which he had left, ever mindful of fairness, during the fight. He reached to the other and slid the hand around the trim waist of the buxom bar-maid. And then he spoke genially to the crowd.

”Who defeated the serpent of Thrill?” stated Ulthar, “Who made the beast with two backs with the Minotaur Queen of the lonely isle and lived to kiss and tell? Who wiped the devil tear from the cheek of the one true messiah? Who retrieved the sceptre of faith from the pits where it has laid for ten-times-ten-times-ten-thousand years? Whose name was spoken of in prophecy by the great desert magi since words existed to form it? Who sacrificed his very soul to the demons of abyss to secure the land from harm, and then fought his way to the very heart to reclaim it? Who lead the last army of the Day against very the night itself? And who won?”

His rhetorical oratory hung in the air for a second, the crowd enrapt.

“I! And I have traveled from the ice pits of the north to the burnished desert and no-man who lives can match me!”

He grinned, “Now – I will take this fine girl of your town and retire for the night. It has been a pleasure.”

At which point Armadillo-Traffic Jones XIII entered the bar, cast a measured eye around the room before walking directly up to the hero. Every set of eyes were upon the form of the platonic serving maid.

“Are you…” she checked her notes, “Ulthar of the Axe?”

He nodded once, mutely.

“Excellent”.

And with that she raised her hand and sunk elegant fingers into his chest. Her fingers curled around his thick rib-cage and, with a little grunt, tore off the front of his torso. Ulthar watched with horror as she reached into the pulped mess of his torso and withdrew his still-beating heart.

The silence was broken only by the indelicate slump of the great hero collapsing backwards, the great man releasing a suitably heroic flood of fluids across the bar’s dirty floor.

Delicately Armadillo placed it in a bag, alongside forty-seven similar organs before unfurling her shopping list and checking off the first item: Four dozen world-hero’s hearts.

Eventually the barmaid, blonde hair streaked scarlet, managed to regain some control over her body and stumbled the words that everyone in the bar desperately wanted to say.

“You… you …you’re…” she gulped, “beautiful”.

“Yes,” Armadillo agreed before turning to leave, “Yes, I am”.