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.

The boy with the Skeleton Key

Billy Graves: Bonesman is a strip we're running all this week and next over on the Mirabilis blog. Think Randall & Hopkirk (the originals, not Vic 'n' Bob) crossed with Grange Hill, plus a dash of Sapphire & Steel. Oh dear, I'm showing my age...

New Knights of Camelot

Yet another of the strips that got pitched in the DFC's early days. In fact, we could fill an entire comic with these babies, couldn't we? We should call it the DFSequel :-)

Anyway, this was New Knights of Camelot. Fifteen minutes after King Arthur's death, Morgana comes looking for the crown - and all that's left to stop her are a bunch of squires and stablehands. Oh, and the ghost of Merlin.

More on the Mirabilis blog.

Shadowquake & Shnookie

Shadowquake is an evil killer robot. Shnookie is a little pink bundle of joy.

They may be toys, but who can really say? One thing’s for sure: Shnookie loves Shadowquake, and Shadowquake loves Shnookie.

Sadly, if evil killer robots are built for anything, it isn’t love.
Thus, devastation and hilarity await them on every date.

This is a simple little something I threw into the DFC Pitch Cauldron last year, so as to give my poor head a break from the brainmeltingly demanding process of developing Cellmates. Opening with a sequence of weekly date by date disasters - the episode where Shnookie takes Shadowquake to meet her Grannie is just shocking - there may even be scope for it to expand into a proper demented soap opera.

A blast from the past...

...And I mean the distant past, as this was the cover layout that Russ Nicholson did for one of the books in the Fabled Lands role-playing series that I co-wrote back in the mid-'90s.

I always like working with Russ because he is such a powerhouse of ideas. Ask him to come up with a fantasy setting, as we did for this book The Court of Hidden Faces, and he'll devise the costumes, rituals, architecture, fantasy creatures. I can go home early!

Take those flying buttresses in the background. They were so the city could get up and walk. Russ didn't get that from Mortal Engines, which was still five years in the future; we were in a meeting at Macmillan and he just threw it out, sketched what he meant and was right on to the next idea.

Russ did the pencils on Kingdom of Feathers, which was one of the DFC's nearly-but-didn't strips. It's a shame we never got to see that. He's one of British comics' most unfairly neglected talents, I think.

Cellmates - DFC Strips That Never Were

Or "a tale of one boy and the billions of oddballs who inhabit him". It's all about ten year old Jake, who's as blissfully unaware of the psychedelic cartoon universe buzzing away inside him as his inhabitants are of him.

Thanks to Garen for asking me on to show some clips and chat briefly about the pitch...



I was invited to submit something towards the close of 2007 - that was a giddy, invigorating email and no mistake. Original comics? For younger readers? In the UK? My girlfriend and I leaped straight at this idea we'd had hanging around for a few years and started banging it into some sort of coherent shape. A year and a half later it's still very much a work in progress, but slowly getting there...




...although sadly unlikely to ever appear in it's intended home. Maybe. Like many others, I'm not quite ready to talk about the DFC in the past tense.

Wherever it goes from here, none of this microscopic tomfoolery would exist without the comic and it's editors having been around to encourage and support it. A hefty shout out to them, particularly Will.

And another 'Could've run'

Following Andrew's lead, here's what I was doing that got me invited to this blog, Astrodog. Initially I was asked to contribute something in a half page format, but I guess half page strips were scrapped as after I sent these I was given the go ahead to do full pages. It would've been 16 one page episodes if it'd appeared. I intend to rework what I've done so far (all pencilled) to double the length and pitch it to whoever I can find, but I really can't think of a place as perfect as The DFC.

Another 'Could Have Run'

One of the other ideas that myslef and Mr Cobley were pitching at the time of TheDFC was META-PHYSIX. You may have seen the illo before and it has appeared in Dez Skinn's book Comic Art Now. Its still a project that we very much believe in and there is a growing possibility that a spin off from this will be picked up by a Canadian publisher very soon. Fingers and toes crossed for that one. Myself and Jason are working on the proposal over the next few days.

Night of the VAMPANDA

Here is another strip I kept meaning to get around to... or more accurately, threatening Editor Ben with. VAMPANDA!


The pitch:

Dave Van Helsing, second-cousin-twice-removed of the famous vampire hunter, has no idea of his family's unusual legacy, and has set up in business as the proprietor of a small garden centre. But a dark shadow haunts its aisles and tea shop... the shadow of the VAMPANDA! It's a fairly straightforward Roadrunner / Wile E. Coyote set-up: Vampanda wants to eat the garden centre's bamboo, Dave wants to stop him. And, using the full range of his evil vampiric powers- blood-sucking, shape-shifting, flight, mind control - Vampanda always wins.

I got myself into a bit of a metaphysical conundrum though, as Vampanda exists in the fictional universe of Mo-Bot High as Asha's favourite cartoon, so I - the creator of that universe - could not logically exist within it as the creator of Vampanda. I was considering producing the strip using a pseudonym so as to circumvent this tricky ontological quandary, when I realised that I was just massively MASSIVELY overthinking things, and went and had a nice lie down instead.

(cross-posted from Neill's blog)

Captain Rad

Following on from some of the alternate DFC pitches that have been posted, this was a strip I started working on but never got the opportunity to complete.
It was a newspaper-strip in format that dealt in campy Sci-Fi, over-the-top set pieces and silly humour (the only type I'm capable of!)
Hopefully I'll get the chance to pursue it again further down the line but for now here's a taste!

"We manufacture miracles"

This was one of the ideas Leo and I pitched as a DFC strip. Fangleworths was a factory run by robots. They built the kind of way-out gadgets that used to feature in articles about the way we'd live in the future. Except that future never arrived - instead of anti-gravity galoshes and teleport tubes, we got iPods and... er, more iPods. So Fangleworths was constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. They do say write about what you know :)

The team line-up there is (left to right) Chug, Fidel the inventor, Boomer, Rummage the "dog", Nettie, and the big guy is Stacks.

We had some idea the strip would be created in Lightwave. Leo actually had made all the 3D models, not just the characters but the factory itself.

Fangleworths would have been for younger kids than Mirabilis - so probably a better fit with the readership the comic ended up with, I think now. But, much as I like our robots, I'm glad we went with Mirabilis instead.

Zhanna - Adventures in Time and Alternative Realities

I never did come up with a title for this, but it was one of my proposals for The DFC, and the one I remain most excited about. Because it was a story that featured time travel, and because that theme clashed with John Blake, it was put on the back-burner. But I definitely want to get going on it one day!








The tale features the adventures of Zhanna Maria Anapel Lydoni-Bute, who lives a rather secluded life in 'the big house' with her parents, and new boy in the village, Martin Kreikenbeek, who stumbles into the grounds of Zhanna's home after being chased by school bullies. It's high adventure from then on... naturally.

Monster Maker

This is one that myself and Simon Furman had had in the portfolio. I LOVE this project but Simon didnt like the contract enough when it was presented so it didnt get any further.
An 11 year old boy called Jonas and a whole bunch of monsters :-)

Kid Ninja!

Back when I first went into the DFC offices to pitch I took in four ideas, from which Ben and Will had what in retrospect I see was the very good sense to pick the thing that would, once properly kicked into shape, become Mo-Bot High. I thought it would be fun to post some stuff here from one of the ones they didn't pick....

Kid Ninja!

He is a kid, who is a ninja!

Can you believe they didn't go for a high concept like that?

Here is the 'movie poster':

And here are some of my sketchbook development pages:


Admittedly, it perhaps was not the world's most original concept on paper, but there was some character and story stuff in the pitch that I really liked and will no doubt end up using somewhere, one day!

(Cross-posted from Neill's blog)