The image above is by Engine Comics artists/writer/letterer/editor/publisher Baz Renshaw. Baz has been around the UK small press scene for some time. You may be familiar with the magazine Red Eye (due to return very soon) well, Baz created that. You can find out more over on www.enginecomics.com or read this review by Down The Tubes.
This is the story of how the Aphelion mini-series came to be. If the stars align we will finally have issue one available in time for Thought Bubble 2023. But how did we get here?
The Beginning
Let me introduce myself. I am Troy Martin, a self-employed personal trainer and nutrition coach (www.tmfitness.co.uk). Back in 2019 my good friend John Sellings, a professional VFX artist who’s portfolio includes work on the TV Series The Crown, Kings Men: The Golden Circle and the animated film Abruptio, invited me to join him and actress Dani Thompson in a little collective called Sweet Nightmares. Originally, the plan was to make short horror films. John knew that I had been getting back into creative writing as a leisurely pastime and felt that I could help in coming up with ideas, writing screenplays or even short stories.
Over a few pints of ale and a charcuterie board one evening John and I brainstormed some ideas and came up with a vampire character loosely based on Dani. That character became Albion Winter. I went away and started to create a back story for the character. A couple of months later and John and I had co-written a screenplay for a ten minute short film - maybe I’ll share that script on here some time if you want to see it.
We got as far as starting pre-production on the film and then a minor event in the form of a global pandemic struck, and all plans for filming got shelved as we went into lockdown.
Now I need to back-track slightly.
Like most boys my age, I grew up reading comics. In fact, had it not been for comics I might never have learned to read because I had delayed reading comprehension and would resist reading anything that didn’t have pictures. My parents, therefore, were more than happy to encourage me to read comics. I started out reading some old Beano and Dandy annuals my brother had given to me. As I got a little older he gave me some more, this time they were Victor and Warlord annuals. These pretty much got me hooked on ‘boys comics’. I would try to pick up old comics at jumble sales and school bazaars. You could always pick up old annuals, old weekly titles like Battle, Misty, Lion, Valiant, and Commando comics. Commando, for those who are unaware are small 175mm x 135mm 63 page (typically one to three panels per page) one-shot war stories.
On a side note, I had a submission for a Commando Comics accepted last year and that should be hitting the shelves towards the end of this year.
By the age of ten I had become a regular reader of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic 2000ad. War, Sci-Fi and horror themed comics are definitely my bag. For what it’s worth, I have never had an interest in American Superhero comics. I guess you can blame Pat Mills and Alan Moore for that. But, like so many others, I fell out of love with comics some time around the late 90s.
It was around 2015 that I discovered comics on Kindle and started re-reading some old Judge Dredd collections and fell back in love with the format. While developing the Albion Winter screenplay I had decided to come up with a back story for her main antagonist and decided that I wanted to develop it as a comic.
I had no idea how to format a comic script or how to develop a comic. I read a few blogs about writing comics, most notably Alec Worley’s blog - you can find Alec hanging out right here on Substack under the nom deplume
. I purchased the 2000ad script book and studied that too. After coming up with a script format that felt natural to me (I still don’t know how to use indents properly). I wrote a sample script, just a ten pager and found it a surprisingly natural way to write. I’m not a details guy so writing reams of description in prose just bores the arse off of me and the whole idea of ‘painting pictures with words’ just doesn’t get me excited. I suppose I’m too matter-of-fact to be the romantic type - if I want to paint a picture, I’ll paint a f***ing picture! - yes, I’m weird.Anyway, after writing it I put a message in a 2000ad related Facebook group simply asking for advice on how to create a comic. As luck would have it, Baz was in that group and replied to my message offering to explain everything I wanted to know.
We chatted and he read my script and was intrigued, he wanted to know more. I explained the premise, the world and the concept of this Vampire story set in Ancient Britannia. He loved the idea and said he wanted to draw it - it was fate!
Baz added a bunch of ideas, the vampires couldn’t be vampires, we needed to do away with all the traditional vampire tropes - I was more than happy with this, I had planned to remove much of the religious iconography from my vampire story anyway. So, instead of Vampires, our monsters are called Sanguisuga.
I wrote the first 30 page episode, it was rough around the edges… very rough! Baz had a style in mind “no text captions with first or third person narration”. A couple of rewrites later and, between us, we had come up with a strong episode to introduce the world, the characters and set up a much larger tale.
Baz was a huge help, he effectively mentored me and I will always be in his debt for this. I later enrolled on the first year of Scott Snyder’s comics writing 101 e-course. Hours of listening to Scott enthusiastically breaking down three act character arcs transformed my writing. I 100% believe it is entirely because of this course that my submission to DC Thomson’s Commando Comics was successful. I had the opportunity to thank him in person at Thought Bubble 2022 - Scott got emotional, he’s a genuinely good bloke.
Okay, back to Aphelion. It was decided that this would be a 4 part mini-series. That has since been extended to 5 episodes. Aphelion has been written for three years now, so it’s well overdue! Shortly after we began developing it Baz was commissioned to work on a crowd funded Dr Who-verse series from Cutaway Comics called Lytton. That took Baz away from Aphelion for a year, then some unavoidable complications further delayed the book. But, finally, we are getting close to having issue one ready for your eyes.
Hopefully this has whetted your appetite. I will do some more updates charting the journey to Aphelion but for now, I think I have waffled long enough.
Don’t let the bed bugs bite.
- Troy
Brilliant! Glad my daft blog helped, Troy. :D