I’ve started on a new short story. This will eventually feature in a collection of short stories around a loose railway/trains theme. This one is provisionally titled “At Fourteen Minutes Past The Hour” for now and I have finished pencilling and inking the first page, if only to work out the general style of the rest of the pages. I haven’t quite finished writing it yet so I’ve got to be careful not to pencil any more pages until I am more certain of the overall structure this is going to take. I have learned from my past mistakes, when I meandered for far too long in some past short stories. In fact, I lost the plot structure completely in my story “The Cafe Terrace” and that is my least favourite story of the last collection and it took the longest to finish drawing as I struggled to tie all the strands together. This time, I intend to finish writing the story from start to finish before doing the pencilling, only refining the narrative as I ink the pages. I am taking a lot more care about my drawing as well as the panel borders this time, so it will hopefully, look like a more polished product than my past comics.

Anyway without further ado, here’s the link to the story on Smackjeeves, it will be updated at regular, if rather long intervals, as I have to squeeze in other work, etc. in between.
http://fourteenpast.smackjeeves.com

Smackjeeves is a real timesaver and I will be using it from now on as a dumping ground for my unfinished short stories, instead of putting them in hidden links on my website. It will definitely free up some time that would otherwise be spent building temporary pages to hold the images.

The fonts I am using were downloaded free from an excellent new site for retro fonts called Fontdiner.com as well as www.dafont.com and they are:

  • Font-On-A-Stick for the narrative
  • Kraash Black for the sound effects
  • Rumpelstiltskin for the sound effects