Cloud 109

I must be I reckon the newest recruit to the Super Comics Adventure Squad and it's a real honour to be rubbing shoulders with people whose work I was pouring over on a weekly basis until the sad demise of the DFC. I must thank Garen for the invite and briefly explain my connection with what I still regard as being the most exciting and innovative comic to have appeared in the UK for the last twenty five years.

I did have a contact with David Fickling and although we had talked before we had never managed to work together, so I was intrigued when some two years ago I received an email from Will Fickling canvassing me for any ideas for a comic strip to appear in a new and top secret project, which as it turned out was The DFC.

I was of course very flattered to be approached but the truth was I was just too snowed under with commercial work to be able to devote myself to preparing a comic strip proposal but the idea had definitely lodged itself in the back of my mind.

Some twelve months later and with economic armageddon looming I began to anticipate a slight if not serious lull and using the maxim of viewing the resultant downtime as an opportunity to be exploited I made a call to David Orme a wonderfully inventive writer who I'd had the privilege of collaborating with on a couple of series of "Spoof Manga" books under the title of Boffin Boy. The books were really off the wall and David's ear for teen dialogue made the characterizations even richer. So we set about devising a story about three teenagers, Gina, Cary and Rabby all living in a dystopic and dysfunctional world like all real teenagers, whose one source of self fulfillment is via an online cyber lounge called Cloud 109 where they can recreate themselves as glamorous avatars and gain credits to advance themselves in Cloud 109 by engaging in a series of games that unfortunately for all concerned start to go horribly wrong.

By the time we'd got our proposal up and running the DFC was on the brink of disappearing but by then we were commited to making the fershlugginer thing happen.

Several months on and we're still determined to make it happen and to this effect I've recently launched a blog called simply Cloud 109 where we intend to make postings on the progress of our project. We'd of course love to hear from you and any feedback would be greatly appreciated.