Alas, all good plans…

Due to family matters I’ve had to pull out of BAF now. Apologies if you were going to come along but with so much going on I’m sure there’ll be more than enough to keep you entertained. Sorry.

To be perfectly honest, when I suggested to some friends at work that we try and produce our own comic I didn’t really think that we’d get it finished. After all, those sorts of projects nearly never actually get done and there were times when it looked like that might happen. But amazingly enough we persevered and here it is :

40 full-colour pages of video game daftness featuring yours truly and a superstar cast of friends who I’m definitely not going to mention here because they’ll outshine me and this is my blog It’s daft that I haven’t done this before because I really enjoyed the entire process of writing, illustrating and designing. My strip is a suitably daft mickey take on video game tropes called Pulsar Crash

and I also did all the editorial pages that help break up the stories. You can get your own copy over at dinkybox but I’ve also set up a little blog for Smart Bomb HERE where you can read it online for free. Yep, that’s right, for nowt. I ummed and ahhed over that but figured that I really wanted to get folks to come and take a look more than anything. Anyway, the printed thing is so much nicer than just reading on screen and also comes with a free gift (in the great tradition of British first issues) and an eco-friendly slip case. Hopefully, anyone who was keen would want to pick up an actual issue. Isn’t that the new super economic internet model?

We enjoyed doing this so much I’m already onto number 2

You may, or may not, know that in my copious spare time I co-own (with my much better half – Sue) and run a little online toy and art supplies shop called dinkybox and while it can be hard work (preparing all the product images can get a tad tedious at times) it’s also great fun, especially when I get to do all the other graphics. Originally, we had a little white romper-suited guy as a mascot and recently I’ve been upgrading him and adding some friends. It’s a little bit like having our own toy range

The little guy buried in the snow with his tail sticking out is Elvis

I guess I should start thinking of names for the rest of them at some point.

The idea is rather like the Qee and Dunny in that they’re based off the same design and then customised a bit. There are six of them in total, one for each of the ESP Zener test cards (given away by the little icon on their forheads) and one secret variant chase! I’d like to maybe do some t-shirts at some point and I guess, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking of some little vinyl figures which is probably why I did them in a clean, airbrush-y style.