ROMO 2, Week 15

All in colour for a dime - see a comic as it's being printed!

A weird one this week.

I’ve been dragged away kicking and screaming from progress on pages for ROMO Book Two by other business - but also by exciting developments.

Not least of these was the news that the imminent revival of A1 Deadline - a merger between 2 anthology magazines from the 1990s that both prominently featured my work - is at the printers. Want to see a live video of the thing being bound?

Noisy video courtesy of big Dave Elliott, the head honcho of A1 Deadline. Just look at the SIZE of that place. It’s a HUGE printshop somewhere in Canada.

Those interior pages you can see both hanging up and piled up deep on a palette right at the start of the video are MY pages! You can recognise Page One of my story, just as it’s seen RIGHT HERE:

There’s myriad art techniques going on in there. Coloured card, coloured pencils, some airbrush and masking, Process White paint… All of it Analogue, Nothing Digital at all. It comes from 1994, where it originally appeared in A1 number one from Marvel/Epic.

So, there’s that. By now the bound copies will be in the air, winging their way here before fulfilment of the Kickstarter campaign that funded it all, and then making their debut at comic shows and marts and comic shops all over the world. Hotcha!

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What Else This Week?

Monday

I was mostly recovering from a late night watching this year’s OSCARS, ‘live’ from LA, USA: something we’ve made a tradition of staying up for, for the last 15 years - partly because you can never guess what to expect on the night, as past years’ scandals have proved!

Tuesday

I continued to wrestle mostly with overhang business from continuing to try and sell Book One. Part of this will be finessing a brand new cover design for the second (paperback) edition, coming out September 1st - and due in very soon as well.

More on all of that right here fairly soon.

Wednesday

I spent some time in jail - HMP Lewes, to be exact, where I shuttled between their library and art room, before delivering a ROMO-based workshop to about 15 of the prisoners there (we have in the past been encouraged to refer to them instead as ‘customers’, but any self-respecting inmate would tell you where to shove that! minus euphemism). The theme of this afternoon workshop was ‘ANIMAL MAGIC’.

And I’ll be doing the same again (twice!) next month, in HMPs Rochester and Cookham Wood, on the way to facilitating the set-up of a ‘manga club’ at their request there.

Thursday

Sadly, I was absent from the desk for a funeral, to honour and celebrate a dear old friend and songbird that had made it to no less than 95 years old!

And today, Friday,

Aside from a MAJOR computer malfunction… well, see for yourself:

Work in Progress: MORE painting, but this time, All Digital, Nothing Analogue. Panels on the way to being composed into the first of five pages for a short piece on sexual health. It has a 1950s setting, so the notion is to try and evoke/suggest the fast and loose primary-coloured stylings of the lurid and scandalous pulp paperbacks of and from that bygone era. This sort of thing…

An additional workout on my new iPad that will hopefully lend fresh skills and techniques that, you never know, might come in useful when I’m back (soon) working on future ROMO pages!

And that was The Week That Was!

Whatever next??

Should anyone want to see more Process from behind-the-scenes, if enough people make the request, I’ll break down one of these new pages and show it in all its separate layers. Those that fancy that, let me know in the comments, and if there’s enough…