Spandex 6 cover - behind the scenes!

These bloody covers never work out the way they’re supposed to!
The original cover idea for issue 6 is something I’ve had in mind for at least a year. I’d seen a picture of the singer Nikka Costa and I loved the body language of it, so I wanted the Diva issue to look like that.

So the time came to draw it and I spend a looooooong time on it… I reckon it was almost a month. And of course, then I decided it wasn’t right for the issue (plus I hadn’t captured what worked in the original picture). Damn.

I put it on the Facebook Spandex page and it received a great response, but it wasn’t what I wanted any more.
Pretty much before I’d decided to dump that cover, I saw a photo of the singer St Vincent in Q Magazine – it was on Boxing Day this year – and it gave me an idea for a new version of the cover.

Plus it played to my strengths – I love drawing hair – so the thought of drawing all that blonde hair appealed to me.
So I sketched it, and then drew it – the first version I drew was the one I went with. Then I had the dilemma of what version to go for – a black and white version (with just the eyes coloured), a red version with a white Diva, or a full colour version.



After a few days of carrying the images around on my ipod and looking at them, I decided the colour version was the one to go with (it was a close call with the red one though!).
So there you go! The story of issue 6’s cover!

Issue 6/Me UPDATE!

Blimey I haven’t ‘posted’ anything for a while, have I? Oops! I guess I do a lot on the Facebook page and Twitter. Well anyway, here is what I’ve been up to, if anyone is interested!
Spandex 6 is coming along frighteningly well (touch wood) despite my only-one-year-old scanner playing up like a bastard. If I have to uninstall and then reinstall it once more I will not be happy! (Actually I seem to have to do it every day, so I will probably 'be not happy' tonight!)
But yes, the issue is coming along well, mainly because I have my new computerised font and I’ve tweaked the one I used in issue 5, so now I don’t have to do any extra work to it, hooray!
Yet again, the cover has been a bit tricky, and the cover idea I was going to go with – a design which had been planned for a couple of years now – has been dumped at the last minute by something I came up with on Boxing Day and which I prefer (it's actually based on a portrait of the musician St Vincent!). I’ll be ‘revealing all’ soon!
I should also say that I am very nervous about this issue. It contains one of the series’ biggest twists, and I think it might shock a lot of people. Honestly, I am bracing myself for the reaction - but I am standing by my story.
I can also reveal that this issue will come with THREE MINI-COMICS!! Yes, I decided to give the issue a little something extra, and I think the mini-comics will be fun to sell at conventions too. So basically, I picked three characters and three artists I wanted to work with, and I wrote the stories – and the mini-comics will be in different shapes and sizes. It feels a little bit weird ‘giving away’ my characters to other people as I am quite precious about them, but I don’t mind with this project, to be honest, and it frees me up a bit, not having to draw. So anyway, the mini-comics are:
BEAR-MAN & TWINKLE with art by Rob Wells (his comics are so funny, I only recently discovered him! And Rob always gives Spandex a good review on his website, so I guess it’ll be awkward if/when he comes to review this one!). This mini-comic will be a kind of 3-panel gag strip format thing and should be fun! You can see a preview pic above!
HAG by Garry McLaughlin. This will be a nasty little horror story, and Garry likes doing those!
CHERRY BLOSSOM GIRL with art by T’sao Wei. This will be a kind of poetic/haiku thingy, exploring how Cherry Blossom Girl came to be.

In other news, I’m working on pages for the 3rd issue of Rol Hirst’s excellent Too Much Sex & Violence series, and will also be contributing to Grant Springford’s Abnormals Anthology (Abthology).
I think that’s it, other than plans to release a ‘Complete O Men’ collection – well volume one (of 5) anyway! It’ll probably be around 300 pages, and I’m currently scanning the pages! I’m not going to change any of the art (which was pretty bad in places) but annoyingly I will have to do a bit more work on it than I’d have liked – there are lots of white and black spots on the art that need to be tidied up. I really wanted it to just be a case of scanning the art in and that's it, but ah well. I will also be creating a new cover for it – should be cool!
Oh and I'll also be doing a few cons - the first one is the London Superhero Con on 25/26 Feb (the one with me and someone called Stan Lee as the top guests!) (Kidding about me lol)
Ooohhhh and finally - is anyone still reading this? - Eagle Award nominations are open so if you fancy voting for Spandex as Favourite British Colour Comic, I'd be eternally grateful!!

All of the trading cards, revealed (spoiler ban lifted!)

Now that a fair few people have read Spandex 5 (in particular, most of the people I didn't want to see spoilers), here's a pic of ALL the trading cards available with issue 5! I think it's quite fun to read the issue and put names to faces (I didn't have room to name everyone in the issue!)

Spandex trading cards

In case you haven't seen 'em, here are the Spandex trading cards! I'm giving one away free with every copy of Spandex 5 - which is on sale on Saturday 29 Oct, launching at the MCM Expo! I'm also giving away a free J-Team mini-manga comic with the issue.
There are 64 trading cards in all, but I'm only showing 48 cards here, for spoilery reasons.

O Men piccie

Ooh, Stephen Newbold did this lovely O Men pic on his blog! Very cool!

Spandex 5 UPDATE!

Hey guess what guys – I’ve just sent Spandex 5 to the printers (for a proof copy, I’ll print a couple of weeks later).
Normally, I aim to get an issue done for the Thought Bubble convention in late November, so I’m dead early!! And thank god for that, because every issue seems to get delivered on the day I need to get my train to the con, and it’s always right down to the wire!
It’s so weird, maybe I’m getting quicker – I’ve actually been going out socialising more, so I’m surprised I got it done so quickly (especially as the issue features about 80 characters).
One thing that helped was making my own font. Normally I hand-letter, scan and then do major tidying-up, but it was proving time-consuming, so I tried a different method. The font took me a couple of months to make, and I’m under no illusion that it’s perfect – I think the jury will be out... But hopefully it just about does the job and I will be making tweaks on it for issue 6.
So anyway, issue 5 is all about Liberty and we get to learn her origin, and we follow her as she investigates what happened to her team-mates in issue 4. She ends up fighting just about every villain in the Spandex universe, plus gets a bit of help from some of the good guys too (that was so exciting to do). I think it’s a fun way of exploring the universe, and a slight homage (/piss-take?) of comic crossovers. Will Liberty find out where the team are... And will there be a shock ending...? My lips are sealed lol...
I think, after the shocks of issue 4, people will find this one a bit different. Generally it’s a bit lighter in tone, with a bit of a dark subtext, and the shocks are more story-related instead of issue 4’s out-and-out shockers. For me, though, it’s all about experimenting, and if you don’t like this issue, just stay tuned for issue 6, which will turn everything on its head (and it’s pretty much what the series has been leading up to).
I’m not going to do an official announcement of the issue just yet, as I’m still working on my little free ‘extras’ that come with the issue - I’m making a manga style J-Team mini-comic and 70+ mini-trading cards. The manga story, to be honest, is just me experimenting and having fun and seeing if I can do it (ie, tell a story in Japanese comic style, which is the reverse of how we do it), and hopefully the trading cards are just nice and attractive.
I've popped a rejected cover for this issue up above (it was based on a James Bond novel book, but I felt it was too much of a rip-off!)
Anyway, please stay tuned!
(Oh, and I’ve already started drawing issue 6 – I’ve made a start on about 10 pages woo hoo!)

Melancholia

I saw this movie on Sunday. I can’t believe Empire gave it 5 out of 5!!!
Maybe it’s just one of those movies you need to be in the right mood to watch.
I could sum the movie up fairly quickly – in fact I’ll do it now, obviously spoilers ahead:
Kirsten Dunst gets married but throws a wobbler and ruins it all, then a blue planet is heading towards Earth, but then it seems to go away again, but no then it comes back!, Charlotte Rampling throws a big wobbler and rides around on golf cart, then Kirsten Dunst gets naked, Kiefer Sutherland wimps out and kills himself in a horse stable, and well, I won’t spoil the ending, but the arty end-scenes they showed at the start of the movie were better.

Okay, no more spoilers from here.
I think what this movie was trying to do was quite clever – Kirsten’s character couldn’t handle her life, but then when the planet was heading towards catastrophe she was fine – unlike her more level-headed sister who lost the plot. But did it really need two hours to say this? Two very drawn-out hours?
And the science seemed really dodgy. There was a planet hiding behind the Sun? Really? Wouldn’t a planet heading towards Earth have more of an impact – wouldn’t the sea go crazy? Even I know that, and I’m not a scientist.

Still, it was very ‘brave’ of Kirsten to go naked, and she does have large bosoms. I was shocked to see her full-nude scene in the trailer... And I’m sure you ‘saw more’ in the actual film...