COMICS

Most of the comics you'll find in this section were made with the intention of them being printed, either by myself or by someone else; of course whether any of them actually GOT printed is another matter! For the older comics, I used a combination of hand-drawn artwork (pencilling and inking), with the pages scanned for cleaning up and finishing on the computer. As you may have seen elsewhere on the website, I've pretty much switched to entirely digital inking with our more recent artwork - it's quicker and with less mess!

INFAMOUS SCEE COMIC COMPETITION

Sucker Punch's superhero-inspired inFamous, a third-person free-roaming action game on the PlayStation 3, was one of my surprise favourite games of 2009. I had played the demo beforehand but, in all honesty, wasn't very impressed with it. One of the problems with game demos is that you don't always get the full experience of what the full game is like. You might be playing (as was in the case of the inFamous demo) a section several hours into the main game and thus you'll have missed out on all the build up to that point (e.g. story, character development, the whole learning curve of the game play mechanics, etc.). Thankfully though, as it turned out, the full game DID manage to rectify these problems in my opinion.

While the main game makes use of real-time 3D graphics, inFamous also features a lot of comic book-styled artwork for cut-scenes, and it was from this that Sony Computer Entertainment Europe ran a competition from their website. The task involved completing a comic scenario featuring the game's protagonist, "Cole MacGrath", having to stop a that was about to derail as well as saving a surgeon who was standing at the train station platform -- life just ain't ever simple for a bloke with electrical super powers, eh? ;) The competition template page gave you roughly an A5-sized space to work in. I did the initial rough sketch for this comic at that size before up-scaling to A4 for the final pencilling/inking/scanning.

Most of my comic artwork up to this point had been rendered primarily in black and white using "screentone" effects (the funny little dot patterns), which is more typical of manga-style comics than Western comics. For this project I wanted to use colour as I felt that a monochrome comic would not match the pre-existing style of the game/cut-scenes - I also tried to emulate the ink blot styles around the panel frames. From working on this comic, I'd say that full-coloured comics can be visually stronger than black and white pages, although obviously it depends on the initial illustrations. Somebody else at Sucker Punch (who judged the competition) obviously must have liked the comic as well as it won one of the runner's up prizes - Yay for me! :)

MANGA JIMAN 2009: EARTH INSPECTION

The third Manga Jiman competition involved the theme of the "sun". For this competition entry, my goal was to get, not only an actual story in the comic (as opposed to something like in my 2008 entry!), but also artwork with backgrounds. In my opinion, one of the typical stylistic features of "manga" is that they often contain really detailed pictorial sequences of motion (action sequences usually work especially well), but this often results in limited use of background imagery; if a single comic panel is only supposed to represent a fraction of a second's worth of motion, you'd wouldn't want the viewer to remain focused on the panel for too long as it could break the flow of how you'd intended the page to be read; hence why you get big panels with lots of detail, alongside smaller panels with a whole lot less in them. Manga-style comics use the artwork to tell the story just as much as the dialogue.

Science fiction is a genre, however, that does tend to require you to create a world through the artwork, which is different than if you were depicting a contemporary story or situation. I'll admit that the majority of the "aliens" in this comic do look "human", but this IS something I explain within the story -- whether there's any truth behind evolutionary markers that would result in species evolving into the basic humanoid shape is one that has yet to be proven, obviously! However, for a short comic like this, it makes it easier from an artistic point of view to draw "people", which we can all recognise as being just that. I could have just done the lazy thing of giving them all pointy elf-life ears but I think that's already been done... ;)

This is probably the closest we've come (so far!) to writing a comic with an environmental message, but I'd say that over all, the story is more about a general look at society itself. Not wanting to paint too bleak an image, as there are many wonderful things in life, but the top panels on page seven were intended to illustrate some of the more negative aspects of the world we live in. It's quite worrying, and also rather sad to think that were you to take a snapshot of the world today, would you focus on what is "good" about the world, or would just see the negatives? Typically, and you only have to turn on the news to see this, I'd say that negative aspects always tend to stand out more, which is sad. Well, what can you say? That's life.

MANGA JIMAN 2008: 150

The theme for the second Embassy of Japan Manga Jiman competitions was the number "150", which was a reference to the anniversary of cultural exchanges between the UK and Japan. This was a rather open brief to base a comic on. The rules for the competition stated that you did not need to reference specifically the anniversary, so it could have been ANYTHING really! I chose to go with a somewhat experimental post-modern approach to the theme, or possibly even the competition itself. Yes, I know what you're thinking: "Hmm, Vince clearly didn't have a lot of ideas for his comic this year!" Well actually, I'd say that there's quite A LOT going on in this comic, possibly more of an analysis of comics rather than a complete story in itself... But then again, since this was for a comic writing competition, the story was probably the main thing the judges were looking for! Oh well... :P

While the maximum page count for comic entries was increased to eight for this year's competition, I actually produced a ninth page (a fairly basic one admittedly as it didn't need über levels of detail), which appears as a background element within a number of the pages. Unfortunately, once again, this comic suffers from a major case of background art deficiency. Again, the main cause being a lack of time! Poor time management equals bad marks from me! Tut-tut! More of a problem is that it creates an "unfinished" look, which would be a fair description of this comic in all honesty.

One of the themes that the character "Cowboy" mentions is that of non-linear thought processes, which was one of the other areas of study that I worked on at university (uni wasn't just an excuse to go to the arcade to play DDR, make Shockwave games, and write silly comic strips - I did actually DO some work while I was there!). It relates to meta-referencing, how certain things within media can trigger memories of other things. These in turn can relate back to the original subject by referencing the latter. On a simple level, you can take cameo appearances as an example of this - characters from my old Super HEFiN comics appear in my 2007 Manga Jiman comic in a scene that is pretty much about fighting, i.e. the main thing that the Super HEFiN characters found themselves doing. If you dig deeper, you can find all sorts of referencing through one's artwork, which in turn can tell you more about the actual author/artist behind a piece of work (e.g. the "authorial presence" I refer to in my Major Study Outline Poster comic). These references, however, are NOT always explicit in how they appear. Quite often they will only be made aware by those with prior knowledge of the original source material. For me personally, with my own work this is often a deliberate inclusion. Not everyone gets the joke, not everyone will understand the references you include, and perhaps this then leads to a majority of the readership being excluded from aspects of the work they are unaware of.

Curiously though, for a comic that was so involved with the concept of non-linear thoughts and meta-referencing, I completely ignored any attempts at referencing previous work of mine in this comic. Normally we'd get at least ONE Super HEFiN cameo in at least, right? ;)

MANGA JIMAN 2007: KARATE-DO IT

The Embassy of Japan started their Manga Jiman competitions in 2007. The name of the competition roughly translates as "having pride in manga", and there is a specific theme that needs to be referenced in the comic entries. For this first year of the competition, you had to make reference to Japan in some way. I went for a more literal (although not nearly as much as in my comic entry the following year!) reference of having a karate tournament to win a trip to Japan. From a personal standpoint, I'd say it's quite hard to make reference to a country/culture you don't have a lot of contact with OTHER than through comics, cartoons or videogames. Any such attempts, in my opinion, would be fleeting at best -- quite possibly patronising, drawing upon media/cultural stereotypes at worst.

What I DO know about is karate, having trained in the martial art for over eleven years (I spent a fair amount of time during the last three years of training actually teaching and running classes myself), although I'll admit my experiences of the tournament circuit are rather limited. It's probably NOT much like in the original Karate Kid films, which is probably where a lot of the ideas for this comic came from.

Obviously you should be able to spot the cameo role from yours truly on page six, but there are characters from a few of my other stories that can be seen in the audience frame on page five, including "Khus" and "Simon" from Super HEFiN, and also "Joey", "Mandy" and her "Dad" from my Rising Stars of Manga comic entry, Changes (see below).

RISING STARS OF MANGA UK 2007: CHANGES

This was my entry in the third (and, alas, the final) of Tokyopop's Rising Stars of Manga competitions for artists in the UK and Ireland. It was shortlisted amongst the final twenty entries for the "People's Choice" award, which were chosen by a "public" vote on the Tokyopop website. The two lead characters, "Joey" and "Mandy", originally appeared (albeit in a completely different guise) in an experimental comic project I used as part of a scheme of work while on my PGCE course. That was where the basic premise of the two characters "going to the park" came from! Of course, there were a number of other factors that influenced the way the rest of the story eventually shaped out.

Looking back at this comic now, the artwork is pretty scruffy. This was one of the first comics where I trialled some crazy composite scanned inked pages with CG-drawn panels. It was kind of like working the wrong way around -- normally you'd draw out panels first, draw the art work, and then ink. This method, however, involved working from rough sketches to create the panels and speech bubbles on the computer, re-sketching on printouts of the panel pages, re-scanning to clean up before inking on separate sheets of paper, and then scanning those in and combining everything again on the computer, all the whilst hoping that everything would all match up in the right places!

Time restraints forced us to cut down a lot of the background details we had originally wanted. The main scenes we did get to illustrate (outside the train station and the shop, and also the West End cinema) were based on real locations using photo references. But hey: that's "manga" for you, right? A couple of nice background frames, then a load of speed lines and extreme close-ups of someone's eye to fill the page count! :P

There are a few cameo character appearances to spot with a few familiar faces to be seen on the first page, but the most blatant additions can be found on page 14 with the mind-blowing Super HEFiN: The Movie being screen in London's West End. You can't beat a bit of the good ol' "pencil throwing" action either - just ask Simon! ;)

MA DIGITAL PRACTICES: MAJOR STUDY OUTLINE POSTER

I created this comic as part of a presentation while we were studying for our Masters degree in 2003-2004. Towards the end of the course, we had to produce a "poster" that could explain some of the concepts and ideas we intended to explore as part of our final piece of work for the course. This did not necessarily have to be a literal poster (e.g. a big piece of paper with some pictures and text on it). Comics were not a theme I used a great deal on the course, but I chose to use the medium for my "poster" as it allowed me to communicate concepts indirectly through the use of dialogue, characters and illustrations. During the course of our Masters degree, my work focused on the notion of an "authorial presence" -- how an artist/writer communicates their ideas, and possibly even aspects of their own personality, through the work... Regarding what aspects of my own personality you can garner from reading this comic, well, I'll leave that for you to mull over in your own time!

The comic's title is a reference to one of the Hyperfiction interactive projects we also made while studying for our Masters degree, which you can play here. It's not so much a case of being an actual "adventure" - it'd be a pretty boring one if that were the case; it was more due to the title sticking over time so it got re-used a fair bit! The characters, "Freddy Golucky" and "Anne D'Land" that feature alongside myself (!!) in this comic, were created prior to our MA, while we were on the first year (of three) of our Bachelors degree. Mystery House Adventures (again, note the use of the word "adventures"), had initially been quite a short single project, but I liked the two lead characters and saw potential with the general banter and interplay between the two.

In this comic, however, there are three central characters. What I feel is important to keep in mind is that this piece of work is less about telling a "story" (as you would expect to find in a traditional comic), but that it was designed to communicate ideas through the medium of comics. You could say that the "characters" are talking/ arguing/beating each other up, but if you take into account the whole "authorial presence" idea, the only "voice" you are reading (hearing?) is my own... Kind of like what's going on RIGHT NOW, only I'm communicating to you through the medium of text. Pretty crazy stuff, huh? If none of the pretentious chat that comes from studying a Masters degree interests you in the slightest, at least you can enjoy the sight of me getting shoryuken'd by a pretty lady dressing up as "Trish" from Devil May Cry!