Last Friday I went up to the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art where New Writing North were hosting one of their roadshow events - a one-day workshop for writers that included an afternoon slot on graphic novels and getting an agent. I was to talk a bit about writing comics, and Oli Munson (of Blake Friedmann, and my agent) was to discuss the business of agenting and how they deal with publishers.

It was a valuable and interesting experience for me, and enjoyable too. Most of the questions from the writers early on were about getting an agent, and how you could get on to their books (and Oli was very enlightening on this subject). I got the impression (and I may be wrong) that most of them weren't too interested in the comics aspect, though when I got to explain a bit about how comic creation could work, with someone else as the artist if you yourself couldn't draw, and how the comics market was a very different creature from the generally perceived one of superheroes and children's funnies, there was a lot more interest in the subject, I think. I take the world of comics for granted sometimes, and forget it can be a completely alien world to the uninitiated. Having said that, quite a few of the writers who spoke did have some kind of experience of comics and 'graphic novels'.

Information I disseminated included that it is now quite acceptable for almost any kind of story to be told in comic form (referencing Alice in Sunderland as we were in the north-east), that there are numerous markets for writers to find a place for their scripts (adaptations for Classical Comics, stories for children in The DFC, 'comics-lit' for Jonathan Cape, small press opportunities for experimentation and testing the water), that manga is not all about sex, and that, yes, Persepolis was a story told in comic strip form before it was an animated film.

Afterwards there was a bit of mingling and Q-and-A-ing. One chap had brought along his comic for some advice. It had been drawn on computer with a mouse, with characters drawn once then copied and pasted at different magnifications for close-ups and full-length shots. It wasn't of a professional standard, but from just an endurance point of view I was impressed with the mouse-drawing! And to show how things have changed over the past few years, it's just the kind of thing that would probably get some kind of following as a web-comic - though maybe it was a little text-heavy for the screen (I know... look who's talking).

The train journey home had an interesting moment when a girl on her mobile phone gave away the plot-twist to the novel she had just finished reading, rendering the book (title clearly announced) unreadable to an entire carriage of south-bound travellers. I did try to get a bit of scripting done, but was starting to nod off a bit by then. I had been up that morning at six-thirty and got back home just after nine, with most of the day spent on trains. Huge thanks to Oli for the enjoyable company all day, and to Liv for inviting me to New Writing North.

From Newcastle University's Courier and Pulp... those darn 'goblin and cyclops' comics!

In the new year I'm planning on a fairly major overhaul of this website, but in the mean time I thought you might be interested in a little look back in time...

Below, on the left, is a screenshot of the first Rainbow Orchid website from 1997 (click it to see a bigger version), when the actual strip was only 3 pages long. On the right you can see the 2003 Flash version (click to see it, though it's not fully functional).

Three comics newly purchased this week, all lovely and good: Pocket Full of Rain And Other Stories by Jason (Fantagraphics), Dororo vol. 2 by Osamu Tezuka (Vertical), Elephantmen: War Toys vol 1: No Surrender by Richard Starkings and Moritat (Image).

There's a great interview over at John Freeman's Down The Tubes with David Fickling, publisher of The DFC.

"My feeling was that the reason we didn't have weekly comics any more was nothing to do with people not wanting them or children not liking them, it was much more to do with a failed business model and, rightly or wrongly, I didn't see that there was anything we could do about that until the Internet came along."

As part of New Writing North's Autumn calendar of events, I will be taking part in a Q&A session about writing comic strip stories (aka graphic novels), and also about getting an agent and graphic novel publishing in general, with my agent, Oli Munson of Blake Friedmann.

This is part of NWN's roadshow and takes place at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art on Friday 24 October 2008. You can learn more about the event here, and you can download their entire programme of events as a PDF from this page here.

The new Egmont UK website has gone live, and it includes a page specially for The Rainbow Orchid. You can see it by clicking here, or click on the screenshot below.

I do love a magazine that's full of good stuff... as opposed to one that is full of adverts and leaflets and costs an arm and a leg! I want to give a quick mention to a couple of the former, recently received.

An event to be celebrated is the publication of issue 15 of the Jack Kirby Quarterly, edited by Chrissie Harper and published by Dez Skinn's Quality Communications. Chrissie produced the first issue of JKQ in September 1993 - fifteen years ago, and its present incarnation lives up to its publisher's name - quality. The articles are all deeply fascinating and come from writers including Paul Gravett, Kevin Eastman, Marv Wolfman and many from Chrissie too, including some fantastic interviews with Jack Kirby himself, and quite a moving one with his wife, Roz, not long after Jack's passing. Of course it's stuffed full of 'King' Kirby's effortless-looking artwork, much of it very rare, and photographs too. The whole design of the magazine is lovely.

I'm not hugely familiar with the work of Kirby, though I find his work (and output rate) astonishing. When I was into super-hero comics, aged 11 to 13 or so, I was hooked on DC comics (especially the New Teen Titans), whereas Kirby is mostly connected with Marvel, though he did work for DC, and others, too. Actually, to suggest Kirby 'did work for Marvel' is rather ludicrous - he practically created the Marvel universe!

Today I find super-heroes somewhat ridiculous, though I think that's mainly because they are written into a world that is a bit too realistic for people in skin-tight spandex (especially the female characters, who seem to come from the mind of a drooling 14-year old boy). The super-hero comics of yesterday were of a much larger-than-life 'other world', and worked better for that in all their zany glory, and there is no doubt Kirby was a master - if not the master. Despite my lack of Kirby knowledge, I found JKQ 15 to be hugely absorbing. This is a publication bubbling with positive creativity, celebrating inspiration and imagination - the good stuff of comics, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. Get your copy here.

Yesterday I received the latest issue of The DFC (no.16) . Now, I'm never going to be able to give a fair and unbiased review of this new weekly kids' comic - I've been involved with it for two years - but I really think this is growing and developing into a fantastic title. Whatever your tastes, there will be something in The DFC that you'll enjoy, and there's a bewildering variety of art and story styles on offer, from cartoony and fun to serious and adventure-filled. I've enjoyed a handful of both, and there's always new stories coming, so it's well worth keeping up with.

Friday's issue had a great page with all the covers on... I know it's an advert, but I'm going to reproduce it here anyway. Click the picture for a closer look, and click here to go and see those back issues.

A deranged native with an hypnotic drum commands an army of giant spiders from a lost valley to conquer the jungle. Fantomah watches! A scientist, driven mad with hate, creates a horde of chemical creatures, invisible except for their enormous flaming hands, to destroy everything in their path. Fantomah observes! A wealthy tycoon, bent on destroying all modern civilisation, captures a pride of Royal Panthers and unleashes them on the streets of New York to set his ambition in motion. Fantomah sees!

Fantomah, 'mystery woman of the jungle' and 'the most remarkable woman ever known', was the Ayesha-like creation of 1930s comic artist, Fletcher Hanks. She's one of the most astonishing comic heroes to grace the pulps. After watching various evil-doers set their nefarious plans in motion she soon decides enough is enough and transforms her beautiful Jean Harlow visage into the form of an angry blue skull. She flies effortlessly on 'concentrated-thought waves' to confront her opponents, sometimes as just a terrible floating head, giving them fair warning to cease before she dishes out her justice.

For the drumming native, he is stopped in his tracks by Fantomah's will-power, then ensnared in a mass of jungle grass before being fed alive to the very spiders he tried to command. For the warped scientist, he is hung from the tallest point of a dead tree where, under Fantomah's power, the flaming hands lift the tree into the air then dash it to the ground - but before it has hit, the villain has died of fright, after which his body is lifted up into a vapourous cloud summoned by Fantomah. And as for the ambitious tycoon, he is whisked across the seas and through the air back to the jungle where Fantomah regresses him to caveman form, before leaving him at the mercy of the enormous panthers he took from their natural environment.

Fletcher Hanks was brought to the attention of the wider public thanks to Paul Karasik, when Fantagraphics published his collection of Hanks' strips in the 2007 volume 'I Shall Destroy All the Civilised Planets'. The other main strip Hanks produced was Stardust the Super Wizard, resembling (but pre-dating) Mick Anglo's Marvelman and with powers that are a cross between Superman's and a dose of occult black magic - with tales just as inventive and bizarre as Fantomah's.

Looking for further information on Hanks reveals that he is a fairly mysterious character. Most of the currently available biographical information comes from his son, Fletcher Hanks Jr., after Karasik visited him at his home, wondering at first if he had discovered the artist himself still alive. Judging by dates given on the internet (the main sources being Lambiek and Wikipedia) that would be truly amazing, as they provide a birth date of 1879. I wondered about this date and decided to do a little research on ancestry.com to see what I could dig up.

I was able to find information on the 1900, 1920 and 1930 U.S. census returns, a 1911 passenger list for the S.S. Oceana travelling from Bermuda to New York, and the Social Security Death Index, to come up with the following data: Hanks was born in New Jersey on 1 December 1887 to William Hanks, a minister, and Alice Fletcher Hanks, the daughter of English immigrants (I wonder if Fletcher was her maiden name, or maybe her mother's?) William and Alice married c.1885 and Fletcher is the only son of theirs I could see. He appears on the S.S. Oceana manifest, in 1911, aged 22, with his mother, returning to New York from Bermuda, and even at this early stage gives his occupation as 'cartoonist' - it would be fascinating to see what kind of work he was doing then. This was just before he married Margaret, with whom he would go on to have several children, including Douglas, Alma, Fletcher Jr, and William.

In his interview with Karasik, and in other places, Hanks Jr. has said his father was an abusive alcoholic who left the family for good in 1930, much to the relief, apparently, of his wife and children. The 1930 U.S. census (which was taken on April 14th) shows the family still together in Talbot County, Maryland, with Hanks described as an 'artist'. Also living with them is Hanks' 75-year old widowed father. While being careful to remember that such family stories should always be taken as just one person's point of view, one can't help but wonder what led the elder Fletcher Hanks to go down this dark path. What was his own childhood like? Did he struggle as an artist? (He wasn't a great artist, though his strip work has an attractive if crude quality, and he must have been frustrated at not being able to turn his talent into riches). What happened in 1930? Perhaps his father died in that year, and that freed him of his responsibility to a family he couldn't support during the lean years of the Great Depression. Who knows? Most of the comic strips available seem to have been produced from 1939-41, though Karasik has since discovered at least one as late as 1945.

In fact, since the publication of 'I Shall Destroy All the Civilised Planets' last year, a whole load of 'new' Hanks strips have surfaced, enough to warrant a second volume, 'You Shall Die By Your Own Creation' (for publication in 2009). I did write to Paul to find out if he was aware of the Hanks facts I had discovered (certain he would be), and indeed he was - which hopefully means he's researched even further into Hanks' life and will be presenting a more comprehensive biography in the new book, which I eagerly await. (I did go and update the Wikipedia entry though).

According to his son (who died earlier this year and whose own life story is pretty amazing in itself), Fletcher Hanks' body was discovered frozen to a park bench in New York, not in 1970 as some internet sites proclaim, but in February 1976 according to the record. Not a bad age (89) for an alcoholic, but not a pleasant end, if true.

I couldn't resist drawing Fantomah, and may do a Stardust to accompany her soon.

Hopefully you're well aware of one of the best comics to appear on the web - Tozo, by David O'Connell. If not, you've got a lovely bank of archive material to get through where a fantastic tale of the city of Nova Venezia will unfold, all starting with the murder of mercantile inspector, Luco Lello. And I have just completed a great interview with David which is now online... so please go and read it!

Now, two things connected with Philip Pullman. Firstly, he gave a terrific overview and argument against the proposal to age-band books at the Society of Authors' Conference at Robinson College in Cambridge this last weekend, and you can read his well-reasoned address right here.

Secondly, my brother is taking him to task for repeating the tired old criticism of saying David Lindsay's classic science-fiction novel, A Voyage to Arcturus, is a badly written work of genius. Go and read his learned opinion right here.

A few quick things to mention...

Jonathon Dalton has completed his A-Z! He didn't waver once, and even while being away for a few days continued to draw and post the winning vote - whoever it had to be. His A-Z has turned out to be a superb collection. Highlights for me including Vampirella, Tamara Drewe, Asterix, Luther Arkwright, the Yellow Kid - and not forgetting Julius Chancer. Don't forget that there is still Mitz's A-Z of Villains, currently up to the letter N.

And speaking of the Yellow Kid, the Caption auction a few weeks ago included a set of prints of my A-Z, but I needed to go and get some better quality prints done. As a thank you for the auction winner's patience I asked if they wanted a sketch, and here's who he chose...

And there is more excitement still to come. I have just completed a great interview with David O'Connell, the creator of Tozo, and that shall be posted in a couple of days or so. So check back soon!