ROMO 2, Week 20
Normal Service will... ahh, what's even 'normal' anymore?!
Circumstances have once again overtaken me this week, my best efforts remaining far from my best. So instead, and meantime, here’s a quick blast from the distant past:
(photos courtesy of James B L Hollands all the way from the Land of Oz, Australia)
The above dates back almost 30 years (!) to 1997, and is the front cover to a collected edition of a series that originally ran in the UK’s independent Deadline magazine ('the home of Tank Girl') - the second edition of it though, hence the ‘Best Graphic Novel’ award from that same year’s UKCAC or United Kingdom Comic Art Convention!
See, “I coulda had class. I coulda bin a contender. I coulda bin somebody instead of a bum, which is what I am." Hopefully still am - a contender and not a bum, but feeling somehow akin to both at one and the same time. The Weltschmerz can be crushing…
Above: a rare colour spread from that selfsame second edition of End of the Century Club (Best Graphic Novel, 1997!), in a book that was otherwise mostly black and white.
This was created using some kind of early colour photocopy process, unique, brief and of its time (pretty sure it wasn’t Risograph - already invented certainly, while not yet broadly available - but certainly something pretty close to that). Pete Pavement, publisher of the much-missed Slab’o’Concrete press and I kind of went to town with it.
This week has also seen the release of the UK Comics Creator Survey’s 2025 Research Report. I was a contributor to the findings of this, parsed in brief below, and they make for sobering reading. All 99 pages viewable here for those who’d care to:
https://www.thecomicsculturalimpactcollective.org/
So that would be one of the factors behind my being some way crippled by depression. I’ll get back up and carry on fighting fairly soon (I have to!), but, as everyone surveyed would most likely agree, the constant fight to survive gets to be pretty exhausting, practically, spiritually, and mentally. I’m sorry to share that burden with you but… y’know? None of this happens nor does it persist as if by magic. Humans are involved.
FAIR WARNING to all Subscribers…
Everything I’ve posted here since starting out in October 2022 (!) remains available in the Archive feature: production blogs sharing 2 whole books - one in prose, chapter by chapter, called The Circle Squared; and the other showing almost but not quite every single page of ROMO the WolfBoy Book One.
In about SIX WEEKS from now, somewhere between the middle to the end of June, I’m going to be taking down the content showing ROMO the WolfBoy Book One.
This, Book Two’s Process Blog, will remain, as for the time being at least will the alternating posts featuring Circle Squared (I remain unsure if anybody ever read any of it).
This is because a couple of months after that the second and paperback edition of ROMO Book One will become available in bookshops, not only in the UK but also in the USA. I have to give it every chance for good sales it can get if I am going to be able to afford to make more books like this first one. So that means, for now at least, limiting the digital release of the same material.
So if you haven’t taken the opportunity so far to read it, or to read all of it, then GET TO IT!
Except - If there’s a way to keep the ROMO Book One posts remain separately available to paid subscribers only then I will also do that - fair’s fair.
That is all.
Let’s end with something Jolly. I made this myself, although of course the original was created by the genius of Jack Kirby and remains © copyright to Marvel stroke Disney:
And, in the interests of impartiality and balance, here’s also a little pop at DC/Warner:
JLbAit, featuring (mostly gender-swopped) characters from the Justice League of America, © DC Comics - L to R: Wonder Woman, Superman, Atom, Aquaman, The Flash, Batman and the Martian Manhunter. Oh what fun!
Next Week: actual progress on ROMO Book Two… please Gawd let it be so!!