Captain Winston Bulldog UPDATED

For those unfamiliar, CAPTAIN WINSTON BULLDOG is a comics hero very much in the tradition of British weekly comics of the 1970s, old-school 2000AD, and old-fashioned British heroes like Dan Dare, Bulldog Drummond, Biggles and the like - given a 1990s twist with a dash of daft humour, a pinch of satire, a wee bit of politics and lots of action. The strip is set in an alternative Britain named Union Britain (formerly Blighty) where some intelligent mammals and vegetables have evolved alongside people, so there are 3 types of people: humans, mammalians and arboreans. Bulldog is a mammalian and the only non-human Captain of an airship in the Aerial Defence Force. The most popular supporting character was SAMURAI COMMANDER KEIKO PANDA of the Nippon Lightning Fleet, his counterpart in that world's Japan, and she cropped up regularly in the self-published BULLDOG ADVENTURE MAGAZINE (later retitled BAM!). BAM! ran from 1993 on and off until 2005, after which Neill Cameron and I produced BULLDOG: EMPIRE, a 60-odd page epic Bulldog story co-starring Keiko Panda. It was picked up for professional publication in the MAMMOTH BOOK OF BEST NEW MANGA VOL 1 in its entirety thanks to the good taste of Ilya and Neill's hard work and talent. You can buy the remaining copies of EMPIRE from Neill's website. The Manga book is out of print but you can still pick up copies on Amazon and Ebay. KEIKO PANDA returned in the second Manga book, still available from booksellers such as Amazon - where it's currently only £3.50! - this time drawn by the amazing Mitzi.

I don't have a title yet for the new BULLDOG comic (I'm open to suggestions) that I'm working on with lots of creators, but I'm thinking about a couple of possibilities. The plan is that I'm currently working on a short script (almost) per day and then sending it out to artists for drawing, in order to have it printed ready for BICS in October. Most are people who were associated with BAM! and / or small press comics during the 1990s and early 2000s. And then there's some lovely surprises! Artists involved in one capacity or another, in no particular order are: Andrew Wildman; Neill Cameron; Jim Cameron; Mal Earl (see his illustration in this post); David Goodman; David Candlish; Marl Bickley; Tony Lawrence; Nick Raybould; Mitzi; Stephen Prestwood; Graham Pearce; Simon Perrins... and more to come! It's the whole range from professional to self-published and I've been bowled over by the response. If you are an artist familiar with Bulldog and his world, and you'd like to contribute an illo or a few pages of art for no money and little recognition, feel free to contact me here, on Twitter or on Facebook.

The other thing is: the plan I have is to donate a proportion of the cover price of each issue to charity. And the chosen charity will be DRAW THE WORLD TOGETHER.

As well as Marvel Comics, Transformers and DFC legend Andrew Wildman, Dr Who artist and all round comics titan MIKE COLLINS will also be contributing artwork to what is starting to look like a packed compendium of British comic art!