Green Skies Vol III Part II complete -and a sneak peak into Part III

The Green Skioes Vol 3 Part II has now been fully lettered, put into a source file and made into a pdf.

Which means that I am ahead of schedule BUT the cranky old PC has broken down once (and I no longer have the laptop)  so tomorrow I scan Part III and then Part IV. A new PC is out of the questionso I need to get the project finished quickly "in case".

In the meantime three UNEDITED pages from Part III

I am still here. Unbelievable, right?

I took a week off of The Green Skies to do various things while still promoting the books. I wrote some long posts for the AOP and CE3K/AE blogs, argued with my incompetent bank and painted up my 1/72 scale Sumerian infantry (96 of them -excluding the "character" King), 9 Sumerian chariots, 90+ Nubian warriors from 2 different manufacturers and then my Lizard Men.

Got that out of my system...but only a very tiny portion of the Plastic Mountain.

Today I tied up pages 22-42 of The Green Skies and I am about to start lettering pages 43 on.

If you have ANY questions ask me in comments or via the FB page or PM.

Now to text!

2002 A Little Midnight Horror

Back in 2000-2004 I used a Canon FC220 desk top photocopier to print off comics and mags. I decided that, because colour covers would mean going to a secondary source to print them, I would simply use colour paper covers -red, yellow, blue, green and so on.

A Little Midnight Horror was one of the titles. A one off for a very good reason. All the copies handed over to a certain zione service and the Travelling Man comic shop sold. Neither seller paid me. So I was out on the paper as well as the toner cartridge which at that time I was getting 'cheap' at £50  a go, I never got my money for other books either. Basically, crooked sellers killed off the publishing where two postal strikes and fraud by a bank that saw me lose £500 had failed. Titles I got ripped off on included Classic Western Action and the buky Comic Bits 1 and 2.

Sat up at 02:00hrs I noticed the red cover so got up and pulled out the book. It contains the original Rev Merriwether story -The Horror of 25 Hob Street- as well as Marked -later retitled to Village of the Damned. There was also David Stephenson's Hellfire & Brimstone (no idea what happened to David as he just vanished and never responded to letters). Pekka Manninen's Captain Gangrene strip Over the Edge was present.  Then there was an untitled werewolf strip written and drawn by Ben Dilworth.

Initially Dilworth and Andrew (Fantomex) Hope published A Little Midnight Horror and then a follow-up A Little Christmas Horror (not sure whether Hope had pulled out of the project by then and I am not pulling out boxes to get to the issue!).  I got various advance views of art and as soon as I saw the werewolf strip I went "ooh" and waxed lyrical over it to Mr Paul Brown over it.

So when I wanted to do a one off horror comic I included the strip -I believe it was initially printed on light blue paper) but in my version of ALMH it was on white paper which I think made the art stand out more. No credits or date given in the strip itself but I believe this was from 1986/1987?

The cover was by David or Chris Kelly (I'll need to dig out my old files to find out) who produced lots of super illoes for zines at the time including Arkensword. Again, Kelly vanished and if your letters never got a response you assume they had gotten "real jobs" and left comics!

But here is the werewolf strip I titled The Night Is Red.

(c)2020 Ben R Dilworth and Black Tower Comics & Books -all rights reserved

OUT NOW -Black Tower Super Heroes No. 5

A4

B&W

80pp

£6.00

https://www.lulu.com/en/en/shop/terry-hooper/black-tower-super-heroes-no-5-july-2020/paperback/product-m54m6n.html

It had to happen! Straight from the pages of Zero Heroes "the other guy" becomes....

CAPTAIN COSMIC!! 

No joke. 

Not an imaginary tale! 

Will Earth be happy with its new defender? 

You think it cares?? 

Also features Jack, The Iron Warrior, and enough action (with a touch of humour) to keep you happier than an adult entertainment channel (whatever they are) during lockdown!

Quick Update

It appears that I only lettered 6 pages of Green Skies yesterday. I thought it was more. Probably because the chapter I lettered was a tad emotional.

So today I lettered pages 7-21 so 15pp. I then cleaned up pp 22-40 to start lettering tomorrow.

Saturday to Monday I am taking off for housework and to complete some modelling projects including figure painting (I have 26x 54mm WWII Indian infantrymen and 98x 23mm Sumerians and 3 Sumerian chariots to paint).

Most of the material for Comic Bits No. 3 is sorted  but that publication is not due out until August.

Also scanned the pages for an Ally Sloper publication which may be out in August...or before.

Oh...and I'll be doing some acrylic painting for cover images.

My notes also say that I have to go on a quest for the omnitetrahedron of Umranakesh...stuff that I'm in lockdown.

I Found More Old Stuff

Just found the cover scans to these BTCG Adventure (volume 1) Nos. 52, 53 and 54 and oh sweet Fanny Craddock on a biscuit is my memory off!

No. 52 clearly shows the date box -"Sept 2000".  No. 53 was October 2000 and No. 54 was November 2000 and not 2003 as I thought!

These were from the colour covers run and the last, after Lis and Jen, Classic Western Action and Classic Adventure to come from my Canon FC220 desk top photocopier which had cost £200 and each toner cartridge cost (as refills) £50 whereas in Ryman and other stores it cost £160-175 per new cartridge.  Far too expensive to be kept going -especially since certain retailers simply refused to pay for the copies they sold and that includes a certain zine service that came along (£65 I was owed by them).



"The Ten Dancing Monkies" storyline included a little parallel Earth action, Wagner the Werewolf, Melmoth the Wanderer, the Monk and other old Penny Dreadful characters.  I no longer have a copy of No. 55, yellow cover, that concluded the story nor the original art.



Here is one that was ahead of its time. No. 53 introduced the illegitimate son of Chronos the Watchman.  "Chronos" having never fully recovered from injuries sustained while fighting the Dark Lord Kaos found his son had been chosen (no choice really) to assume the role on Gull Island. His son was "black". From the very outset Black Tower had many characters of (I hate this term) "ethnic background"  -Arabic, African, Afro Carribean, Chinese, Japanese and soon.  Notice the little "GB made" sticker at the bottom left.

At the time I had no computer programs or way to add text to strips or add text and design covers so it all looks pretty rough now!

The Skeleton Horseman (yes, I do have the very thick book containing this Penny Dreadful classic) along with his team of Red Hand and Paul Peril almost met the SGG in 1746 while battling Lord Perish in The Master Plan of Lord Perish which included a giant armoured mechani-man. Quite a few fans of Adventure and not just in the UK.

I had completely forgotten the "Little Terry" with the "It's Fun!" -since 2009 I've simply used "Comics Are Fun!"

Zine Zone No. 4, April, 1987. Lovely Terry Ford cover used to promote his strip in an issue of Previews comic...I think it was titled "Egg Chase". I was thinking about reprinting it as part of the Black Tower Anniversary however I have no copies of any of the 5 Previews and the art was photocopy not originals.

Jeezo I've wasted my life! 😆

But that is my latest find.

Be Judge By Your Work

I have a pretty nice collection of comics and comic related books going back to the 1800s. I also study comic book history. I read comics from around the world. I've interviewed many comic creators. Above all I see trends in comics and what changes saw declines in readership.

The Beano and Dandy threw out the formula that made the comic a must read back in the day -the titles started fading out in the 1980s and at the same time a top Thomson executive announced that "comics will be dead in ten years or less" (that was around 1983/1984) so by 1994 they were all gone? No but the problem is that if the bosses get an idea in their heads like that the comics are doomed.

On one of my regular visits to see former Fleetway Managing Editor Gil Page he showed me a huge stack of letters. I'd guess around 60. I was shown these after mentioning that there were no longer any comics for girls: "We get this many letters every week" he told me "but they don't understand there is no intertest in girls comics".  Now, statistically only about 1-2% of people with an interest in something would take time to write about it. I explained this to him and the response? "I wish you were one of the people in the boardroom!"

 Why? Well, there had been a number of projects put forward including ones using the old action heroes but the board had vetoed them all. Even 2000 AD was regularly checked by "The Board" -it could be as violent as it liked but when it came time for a copy to go to the board it was all toned down. Gil even liked some of the horror stuff I had done for Bastei in Germany -"I would love to publish a proper horror comic" he told me.

You see, members of a boardroom are there to count the pennies and not take chances on losing the odd 0.5p. They have no idea about comics or the people buying them and I was told how one board member at Fleetway was presented with a comic and "looked as though someone dropped dog poop on his plate" and he asked "What? Do I have to actually look at it and read it?"

The formula for a successful anthology series is not a difficult one. Obviously weekly comics can no longer be a thing but a monthly?  Why not?

The point Gil made was valid because as he put it "You eat, sleep and breathe comics daily" and that was why he tried to put me forward to do editing work -it was a suggestion certain people did not like but in the end the fact that I would need to be paid was the board's deciding factor 😂😂😂

Of course that led into the famous Robert Maxwell meeting. I think I would have had a better chance with Rupert Murdoch.

At the moment the fictional UK "comics community" spends 97% of its time arguing, lying about each other, back-stabbing and so on. Look at what work these 'celebrities' produce in a year. Not a lot. I've published 32 books this year with 10 others "in the works" and by the end of 2020 there should be over 140 books on the online store -in an earlier post I wrote that there were 141 books spread over 14 pages at the online store: my mistake as the actual number is 131 books.

I mention all of this as it seems certain people are trying to goad me into online bitch-fighting over former British comics.  I really do not care. Call me all the names they like -my work speaks for me and, after all, in this "strong, thriving comics industry" shouldn't they be working flat out? Just saying.

Comics should be fun and that is fun for creators and readers,

Influences...I Have A Few

When I was a little nipper living in Dalborn, Lippe, Germany I had my first glimpses of Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin et al.  It was via a brown tinted monochrome TV (the brown tint might have been due to a poor signal). It was wonderful to see the antics of these German comedians though I found Chaplin slightly depressing. Still do.

Obviously these people were not German comedians. Seeing them on TV back in England I recall a slight surprise becvause they weren't speaking German. But how can you not love Laurel and Hardy? In fact a duo looking mildly like them appeared in cameos in Black Tower stories before they became Reality Check Controllers.

Watching monochrome TV where shows or plays were full of solid black shadows and grey tones was fun -then colour TV ruined it all! 😂

The mid 1960s was a fun time in many ways and reading my first issue of Pow! (I wish I still had that) introduced me to a few new pals from something called "Marvel Comics".  Then came Odhams b&w Marvel reprints in parts (weekly). One strip hooked me more than any other: The Sub-Mariner and his quest to win back Atlantis. The strip quite literally made my brain go squishy and the theme of the character trying to maintain honour and win everything back stuck with me: Namor was literally the underdog but never gave up.  And the artwork by Adam Austin was breath-taking. In case you did not know "Adam Austin" was in fact Gene Colan and the Sub-Mariner work also got me into loving Colan's work.
http://hoopercomicart.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-sub-mariner-mega-post.html

When I saw a copy of Marvels Fantasy Masterpieces featuring the Sub-Mariner in a newsagents did I buy it or a pack of Plasticine? D'uh! And I have all of those issues including the major 1940s battle between Subby and the original Human Torch. Oh, some other fella called Captain America featured in the title as well as many old Timely "B-listers" and they were a big influence, too.

My biggest shock was discovering that a lot of the German Bastei comics I read were not German. I loved Mykros (and posted about him on CBO) and Fotonik...then I learnt that they were French creations http://hoopercomicart.blogspot.com/2016/09/jean-yves-mitton-photonik-meand-not.html Later I found out a lot of British weekly comic strips were drawn by non British artists,...what kind of crazy world was I in???

But then I discovered all sorts of foreign comics and in the early 1980s I found Manhua.

So black and white TV made me realise that you could do a lot with negatives on a page and not necessarily involve lots of stipling or cross-hatching, though I have used both. I think the Orson Welles movies -particularly The Third Man- showed how light and shadows work for atmosphere. If you look at a lot of original b&w art from American comics (All Star Squadron for one) it looks great and in many cases the colouring spoils the work. The Colan Sub-Mariner work sticks in my mind over the colour version but the colour version worked because they had an excellent colourist(s).

I have done colour work and it's even gotten praise but I tend to look at a page of b&w art and think "finished" because colouring, to publish, is far more expensive than b&w and takes up many, many more hours of work.

Black Tower Super Heroes, I was told by a now long retired Fleetway manager, is a lot like the old Lion or Thunder comics they published but with twice the number of pages. I checked my collection and Lion used to have 40pp which I never realised. It also had a mix of genres. So something obviously stuck!

But the influences you have to adapt to what you are doing and want -as a creators agent in the 1980s/1990s I saw so many strips that were obviously heavily influenced by Blade Runner or Evil Dead...one week I got 6 sets of submissions all featuring what were obviously Blade Runner.

You need to make sure that your influences do not border on rip-off or become so obvious that someone is going to say out loud "This is Blade-Runner! What a rip-off!"

We are always influenced every day and I think to say that in the 50+ years I have been reading I probably have been influenced!

Green Skies -The Final Countdown

Oh yes; when I get to work I get to work.

All pages sorted now so I can reveal how many Parts will make up Volume 3 as well as the page count.

There will be four volumes to be published in monthly installments covering October, November and December 2020 and January 2021.

Part 1 consists of 124 pp
Part 2 consists of 128pp
Part 3 consists of 132pp
Part 4 consists of 80pp

A whacking great total of 464 pages which breats Return of the Gods 331pp by a fair margin.  This is much expanded from what was to have been published in 2014, however, that would have been slimmed down from the then total of 500 pp.

The cost of each volume I am keeping down as low as I can, baring in mind the printers and print on demand company want their big chunk of cash. At the moment I am looking at a £10 per part cover price which considering the (please do not laugh) years it took to draw and eventually get to a publishing state is cheap. Return was only £20 for 331 pages but as it is clear no one wants a big book even at that price I have to adjust accordingly.

Remember these four parts DO NOT require you to go out and buy other titles to understand or complete the story. As someone pointed out: you could read Return and Cross Earths Caper as two separate self contained books and not read Green Skies (that type of attitude will keep me poor!).

I now need four eye-ball bursting covers (you understand that I do NOT mean covers with actual eye-balls bursting, don't you?) to finish it all off. After that I need to finish off (c)2020 Enfants Perdus (Lost Children) and ....no. I think you have enough info for now.

Up The Tower!

Green Skies Update

Normally if I announce that there is a new book on the way or put out a preview image that book appears the same day or the day after.

I announced that The Green Skies Vol. 3, Part 1 was completed a couple weeks ago. So where is it?

Well a preview/test copy has gone off to the Big Man in Osaka. The completed file for the book is stored.

You see, The Green Skies begins as soon as Black Tower Super Heroes is released. I am getting BTSH No. 5 ready to publish. The run ends at No. 8 and most of those issues (bar No. 8) are fully completed. So No. 8 should be out in October meaning the first part of The Green Skies will be out October/November and be released monthly after that.

I have just re-shuffled the pages for Vol. 3 Part 2 and can tell you it will contain 128 pages. This volume will contain major plot elements and ....no spoilers. There are deaths, though. And death in the BT Universe is permanent -no reboots.

If Part 1 had 124 pages why does Part 2 have 128? Simple: to help the plot and story develop and flow easily. It is a little extra work for me but as an Independent publisher I can be flexible on content.

It's good to be the Boss. Money is lousy, though ! 😂😂

I will begin the scanning of pages this weekend -I need a rest and have soldiers to paint and jobs in the garden!  Lettering will probably start next week by which time I will know how many pages are in Part 3 (I will NOT tell myself until that time).

There's your update :-)