I was in Perth at the weekend.  Just sayin’.

Tune in on Monday as the story continues …in spaaaace!!

The Pickled Past kicks off where Push the Button ended. Adventure awaits…!

I’ve been working pretty hard for a few months now building up a big buffer of pages and, at the time of writing, I have just finished page 26 of this 34 page story.  The reason I have been doing this is so that I have three complete stories drawn up by the time I exhibit at Thought Bubble, a comics Convention in Leeds (England) on 20 November.  My hope was that I would be able to combine the first three stories into a book, and it is now starting to look like I will be able to do this.

When I started planning  Girls in Space at the end of last year, it was my intention to create the comic is a format that would be easy to turn into a book collection.  At that time I looked at production costs.  I realised very quickly that colour was significantly more expensive than black and white, but I also knew that I really wanted a colour comic.  Therefore the only way I could make an affordable colour book would be to make it smaller than the standard US graphic novel size.  Therefore, I designed the comic to work in a Manga-sized format (this is the reason why Girls in Space has quite a large font in comparison to graphic novels).

The book will probably be printed digitally (I’m looking at my options just now) and I’ll keep you posted on progress.  I’m very excited to see how it will look.  I’m currently thinking about what to put on the cover.  Hmm… what would sell?  I know – I’ll call it “Harry Potter and Girls in Space”!

Meh.  I’ve got eight pages to think about it!

I tend to think of The Prototype and Push the Button as set-up stories, laying the foundation upon which future stories will be built.  The Pickled Past will be the first brick laid… wait where is this building metaphor going?  I’m going to have to call in the union.

Either way I had a lot of fun writing it.  I hope you enjoy it.  Page one, as usual, on Monday.

Two stories in the bag.  Air punch!  Yes, folks, this is the concluding page of Push the Button.  I can hardly believe we’ve reached this point already!

So now that the story is complete, it is as good a time as any to reflect upon it.  Push the Button ended up being something of a Frankenstein story in the sense that it was made up from various elements sewed together.  The first part of the story involved a lot of housekeeping, establishing where the characters lived and what they intended to do following the events of The Prototype.  Then once all of that had been taken care of, two separate plotlines developed.  The spacegirls went on a taxi mission in the bus, and Zoe attempted to get a job to fund her spaceship detector project.

If I’m honest, most of this story was pulled together from ideas I had had in my notepad for some time.  Zoe’s story was essentially a handful of standalone comic scenarios in which she gets fired.  Several of her pages were originally intended as Dr Sheep and the Aardvark strips but I never got a chance to use them.  On the other hand, the spacegirls’ story was mostly written two years ago when Girls in Space was brain-pooped into the world (technical term).  At that time I knew I wanted to write about two girls flying around the universe in a VW Camper Van and I wrote a few pages of the hippo storyline to explore the characters and concept.  Therefore, most of the new writing in this story involved me linking together all the pre-written elements.  It was a challenge to turn it all into a (hopefully) coherent story.  I hope you enjoyed it and didn’t feel it was too disjointed.

So, this story is over, what now?  Well good news, compadres, the next story is loaded up and ready to begin!  Come back on Thursday to see the cover and title.  The story itself begins this time next week.  It’s another 34 page story, which means that it should take us through to Christmas!   Terrifying!

Thank you so much for reading Push the Button.

I am a little concerned that people might feel as if  Zoe’s storyline (at least in Push the Button) ends in disappointment.  All that hard work getting a job and making a spaceship detector turned out to be for nothing.  Or was it?   For one thing, there’s nothing disappointing about pizza!  Zoe’s role as a translator will also be the seed of future stories.

I can hardly believe it but Monday brings the concluding page of Push the Button.  Miss it and miss out!

My cat is staring at me.  I think she wants me to stop typing.  I’d better do as she requests.