She Rides to the Sabbath

Well now, it’s been a busy month since my last post!

 

Life continues unabated, as usual- working full time and trying to cram comics and music (as well as some actual free time) in around the edges is still just about holding up, even if the house could really do with some more spring cleaning and our dog Tia continues to pester for walks and attention. Since last time, I’ve started working much more strenuously on pulling together a pitch for Brigantia, my big project with incredible artist Melissa Trender– we’ve gone over the scripts, tweaked bits here and there, discussed story ideas and character motivations and I’ve even driven out to the Peak District to take some reference photos of a particular part of the landscape that inspired one of the scenes in the first issue. Our next step, once we have some sequential pages and character designs to really sell the world and the story of Brigantia, will be to research exactly who we can pitch to! We have a few publishers in mind who we’d like to approach, some more ambitious than others, so we’ll see what happens. Better to aim high!

 

In the music sphere, this past weekend saw me play one of the biggest shows I’ve ever done with Northern Oak- we supported pagan folk metal band Moonsorrow at a venue called Fibbers in York. Moonsorrow are one of those bands who are very highly-regarded and “famous” in the underground metal scene, but not really outside of it- they’re not going to be on the X-Factor any time soon, but they’ve played the main stages at some of the biggest metal festivals in the world and have a legion of devoted fans. We were very honoured to get the chance to support them, especially since our flautist Catie is a huge fan of theirs, and I think we did a great job with the half-hour set we had- the pictures I’ve seen so far certainly look impressive, the crowd were shouting for “one more song” when we’d finished and we’ve had one great review come through already. I’m hopeful that the show will have given us some good exposure and earned us some new fans, so fingers crossed!

 

That’s all for now- I should probably get back to (real) work, bleugh. We out! *mic drop*

Chris

Website Updates

New year, new start! 2015 LET’S DO THIS.

I’ve finally gotten round to doing some updates on my website- adding the various projects that I’ve been involved in over the last year, changing up the appearance and generally sprucing the place up a little. There’s still some more tweaking that needs doing, but at least it’s starting to look a lot more fleshed-out!

This year is going to be a big one for me- we’re going to be touring and playing a host of gigs to promote the new Northern Oak album, which came out in October 2014 (and had a slew of excellent reviews- check ’em out if you don’t believe me), issue #4 of Professor Elemental Comics is being officially launched in Leeds in March and then we’re aiming to get issue #5 out for Thought Bubble 2015 in November! On top of that, myself and Melissa Trender are going to be working hard on preparing a pitch for our Brigantia project so we can finally get that moving, and I’m hoping to make some progress on the Promethean Foundation as well once issue #5 of Prof Elemental is out (issue #5 will contain the second part of the Locomotive story that began in issue #4, and I sincerely hope that people will love the character enough that they want to see more of him!)

*deep breath*

So yeah, it’s going to be a big year. In the words of the almighty Becky Cloonan- COME AT ME, 2015!!

Chris