Disturbing Horror Stories In A Twisted Vein...

Bomb Scares, our long-awaited horror anthology one-shot, is the first big 2010 release from Time Bomb Comics!

Those of you who follow such things will know that Bomb Scares was originally slated for October 2009, but a catalogue of mishaps and problems ensured that the finished copies arrived back to us one day after Thoughtbubble - thus ensuring it had missed the 2009 convention season completely - and will therefore kick off our 2010 convention season at Hi-Ex in March.

(Of course, the ingrained curse that Bomb Scares seems to have come with isn't quite finished with us just yet - at time of writing Time Bomb's appearance at Hi-Ex is till a bit up in the air, due to my wife Suzanne's imminent onset of labour! Should things all go smoothly over the next 10 days all three of us will be travelling to Scotland as planned, should things get more complicated then none of us may be fit to travel. So we're crossing our fingers at the moment!)

I know it's traditional for publishers to big their own releases up, but Bomb Scares is a pretty special piece of work and at 56 pages for £4.00/$5.50. Ten stories, eighteen creators, and one anthology that contains as wide a range of styles and horror themes as you would want. I reckon there's pretty much something for every horror fan inside - from psychological terror to gruesome body horror and of course a liberal sprinkling of zombies - and the finished package lives up to the book's strapline: disturbing horror stories in a twisted vein.

The eighteen creators that are featured in Bomb Scares are equally diverse. We have a story by respected comics creators Gary Crutchley and Shane Oakley, and rapidly up and coming writer Richmond Clements. Then there's the rest of the creators - John Cahill, Katja Lindblom, GM Jordan, Alec Robertson, Chis Young, Rachele Aragno, MC Carper, Montos, Anglada Kamarasa, Andy Dodd, Gordon Robertson, Scott Mitchell, Jonathan Darque, Dino Caruso and Steve Tanner. Some of those you may recognise already, but all are names to watch out for in the future.

The good news is that nobody has to wait until convention season starts up again to own a copy. Bomb Scares is already available through the online shop at http://www.timebombcomics.com/ from anywhere in the world and we will be looking to get the anthology into some of the more indie-friendly comic shops before March. Nostalgia and Comics in Birmingham has already sold out of their first batch!

Another Couple Of Bites!

Following on from Keith Page's wonderful colour promo for London Calling last time, here's a couple of Keith's quite wonderful interior pages from the upcoming one-shot. One thing that was a pleasant surprise was Keith's traditional approach to lettering - all carefully written onto the pages themselves. In this day and age of computer generated lettering fonts and captions it really stands out as something special, don't you agree?

A LITTLE NEW YEAR TASTER!

So welcome to 2010!

To hopefully whet your appetites for what could be Time Bomb Comics' biggest year yet here's a little taster about our big 2010 release: More details coming very soon!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2010!

Yes, the blog has been extremely quiet of late, but we have a whole flurry of Time Bomb Comics news updates on the way in January - including details of some brilliant releases over the coming eighteen months or so.

So until the New Year I'd like to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a very rewarding 2010!

Cheers!

Time Bomb Comics at BICS 2009

It's that time again!

Time Bomb Comics will once again be exhibiting at BICS and will of course be marking the occasion with the release of the 100-page graphic novel The Furies, written by Steve Tanner with artwork by Andrew Dodd.

We'll also have previews of a few of our forthcoming projects including:

Bomb Scares - An anthology that promises disturbing horror stories in a twisted vein. Ten stories from a mix of brand new and established creators (including Shane Oakley of Albion fame) that have been carefully blended into a chilling cocktail of both graphic and psychological nastiness.

London Calling - Ealing Studios meets Hammer Horror in this uniquely British one-shot featuring artwork by well-known DC Thomson "Commando" artist Keith Page.

Primetime - An outrageous murder mystery in a media obsessed future city where everyone wants to be caught on camera. Written by Steve Tanner with art from talented newcomer Paul Thompson.

Of course as well as The Furies all of our previous releases will be available at BICS 2009 too, and we'll be more than happy to meet and chat with any existing or aspiring creators all weekend about future project opportunities.

Enthusiastic PR aside, I'm personally really looking forward to another weekend of total comics indulgence in the heart of Birmingham! Not one who needs an excuse to buy some more comics, I'm looking forward to getting my hands on all the latest releases from the wide and diverse creators and publishers who make up the UK comics industry. Accent UK, Markosia, Insomnia, Renegade, C2D4, Cinebook, Orang Utan, Fallen Angel and of course Time Bomb are just a few - every year the full list seems to be getting bigger and bigger!

See you at BICS 2009!

Silence is Golden?

Well, it's been quite some time again since the last Short Fuses update. That doesn't mean that nothing much has been happening since June - far from it - but more that what has been going on has been taking up all our time and focus. And I must be honest, I thought it best to keep schtum until I had something to say!

So since June Time Bomb's focus has been making sure that The Furies is finally done and dusted. We've been going over the pages again and again, fine-tuning where we could and making sure that all our intended revisions have been done, and doing those last minute tweaks that no creator can resist on the eve of the printer's deadline!

I'll be the first to admit bias, but when I received the completed printer's proof back the other day I thought it looked like a great little package. A perfect-bound 100 page graphic novel in a bookshelf friendly A5 format. Unlike our previous one-shots we've printed The Furies with Bristol-based Fallen Angel Media, a very indie-comics friendly set-up headed by Mal Smith, who's also instrumental in organising the Bristol Small Press Expo. I'd recommend FAM to anyone after our experience of them - and I can see us using them again in the not too distant future.

So, barring some as yet unforseen catastrophe The Furies will be this year's BICS release from Time Bomb Comics which maintains our BICS batting average a treat. Of course, that's not to say we don't care as much about the other conventions - it's just that as we first launched Time Bomb Comics with Ragamuffins at BICS 2007, and followed that up with Dick Turpin and the Restless Dead for BICS 2008 the Brum show has become our unofficial anniversary show.

There's also a chance we may have another one-shot debuting at next month's BICS as well - but those unforseen catastrophe's that avoided The Furies have hit our Bomb Scares horror anthology book with a vengeance. Vanishing files, missing creators, exploding laptops - the gestation and publication of Bomb Scares is turning into a fair horror story in itself! So with the best will in the world we may be saving that for November's Thoughtbubble.

Still it does seem appropriate in saving a release titled Bomb Scares for the last big UK comics event of 2009 - that way we finish the year with a bang!

Finally The Furies!

It's been a few weeks since the last Short Fuses entry, but it's great to be back with some news of the next Time Bomb Comics release: The Furies, an original graphic novel written by Steve Tanner with artwork by Andy Dodd. The Furies is a dark, apocalyptic tale of prophecy and belief. Set in the year 2012 Britain has become more dirty, more sordid and more violent. But 2012 is also a year of prophecy, and something is going to happen. Something bad.

Those awfully nice folk who bought a copy of our first two one-shots will recognise the above image, as both Ragamuffins:Stitches in Time and Dick Turpin and the Restless Dead featured a teaser ad for The Furies on their back pages. Now, Ragamuffins was released in 2007 and Turpin 2008, so I confess we've taken a rather Hollywood stance on the phrase "coming soon", but from our point of view two years is just a drop in the ocean.

You see, The Furies is quite different from any of our existing or forthcoming releases, in that the whole story was conceived, written and drawn more than twenty years ago when both Andy and myself were callow, spotty youths with far too much time on our hands. It was the first major comics work we embarked upon after producing a slew of shorter stories for the 80's small-press scene, and was to turn out to be the last thing we seriously worked on together until we produced Ragamuffins so many years later.

Originally, this dark apocalyptic tale was accepted for publication in the late 80's anthology Ground Zero. Ground Zero was one of those semi-pro-amateur-zines that always seemed to be launching at the annual UKCAC conventions and was never heard of again, but unlike many of it's brethren Ground Zero lasted a mighty three issues before biting the dust. It even advertised its final issue in 2000AD! Debuting in Ground Zero #1, with Andy providing a Furies-themed cover, only three chapters of The Furies ten episodes ever saw publication. The whole story was complete, done and dusted, but it now didn't have anywhere to go and so we both moved on to other things.

Jump cut to 2007, and I decide to form Time Bomb Comics with Andy after getting in touch with him after a good fifteen years or so. We're discussing what comic we should launch with when Andy reminds me he still has all the art for The Furies tucked away somewhere safe. We toyed with having The Furies as our first release, a four-issue mini-series, but then we decided on our one-shots-only policy and The Furies would be better kept for later. Two more years later as it turns out.

However, it's finally time. The Furies will finally be released complete and collected, and of all the comics we've released so far this is one I'm most nervous about. You see, 99% of The Furies is my writing and Andy's art as teenagers. It's raw. Reading it through again after so many years there were some sequences that I still thought worked great - I mean, I'd challenge anyone to read chapter one and not want to know what happens next - but there were some bits that read the opposite. The urge to re-write was almost overwhelming. As it is, we gave everything a slight edit just to paper over some of the cracks and make it more contemporary (for example, originally it was set in the year 2000, now it's in 2012). Every creator wants their work to be the best it can be, after all. And back in 1985, when I wrote The Furies, it was.

So I've been looking at the forthcoming release as kind of a director's cut of a movie that was never originally released in the first place. It's been tweaked and tidied and cleaned where it could be, but not re-cast or re-shot. It's an original, not a re-make. But that original has it's flaws - and that's why I'm nervous.