Black Sails, Disco Inferno

My new novel has a home, and will be published by late June!

Saying it’s “mine”, however, is a wee bit egotistical.

This baby belongs as much to American writer and mate Renee Pickup (she wrote about her part of the process yesterday at Do Some Damage), who helped pen the thing via our Trista & Holt comic – creating a key path to follow within the story – and Frantz Kantor, my partner in crime on the Magpie strip, who kindly gave permission to use a beautiful (and oh-so-appropriate) painting of his for a wraparound cover.

The art above is just a part of that piece, as a sampler.

So, in a nutshell, this novel is the culmination of feedback, support and critiques from good mates, media people, fellow artists, and writers.

And it would not exist without the support of family and friends.

For this book we’ll be going through David A. Ross‘ Open Books imprint, since we very much respect their indie stance and the way in which the team there look outside the box in terms of promotional strategies and simply supporting authors.

The secondary source material for this novel – some might already know it’s based on medieval romance Tristan and Isolde, or Tristram and Iseult – is the comic book series Trista & Holt, which I write and illustrate.

It wraps up with #15 in May.

However, we just licensed the series to Project-Nerd Publishing in the U.S., so it’ll start appearing there in print from summer in a semi-colourized version.

Just a few minor revisions on the original, I swear.

The series has been getting some incredible reviews (whew!), and just this week Nevada McPherson took a good, hard look at #12 for Graphic Policy, while Paul Bowler @ Sci-fi Jubilee and Steven Alloway at Fanboy Comics reviewed #13.

Meanwhile?

Artist/co-writer Graeme Jackson and I are going full steam ahead on our new comic series Crash Soirée, which will be launched in the pages of Oi Oi Oi! #9 in Australia in a few months’ time – alongside Magpie Ep. 3.

Here’s a sneak preview of Episode 1’s splash-page.

We have some mad plans in mind for this series, some of which relate to both the world of Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa? and Magpie – starting with a legacy character who isn’t actually Bullet Gal. Yet is.

Finally, I muck around with muzak on the side, mostly as Little Nobody since 1996. Yep, 20 years… zounds.

Thanks to Nicolas and Edurne Lutz, I now have a double-vinyl 12″ LP out via their label My Own Jupiter in Europe. It’s titled This is Tokio (intentional misspelling, I swear!) and is available at places like Juno Records and decks.de.

Techno/electronica with a skewed mentality. Just my cuppa. 😉