005: NEW FUTURES

HAVE T-SHIRT, WILL TRAVEL.

Good morning from Yeovil, Somerset, a town where, if you stand outside the local Spoons pub on the third Tuesday of each month at precisely 11:14pm an Omega Beam will transport you to Uuanos, the Secret Hollow Moon of Neptune, where you will have fabulous adventures in the labyrinth of interlocking cities that lay beneath its frozen methane surface. Or you may get refused entry by the bouncers. Dress code: space-suits and Ugg-boots.

First up: a BIG HI to the latest wave of subscribers who jumped on a few days ago - welcome aboard! Hope you find some things here that intrigue or delight you. There’s no sneaky-devious masterplan to this newsletterzine - except to create a safe, calm oasis for those of us burned-out / bummed-out by years of social media bombardment. The only game plan I / we have is to try’n build some new off-road hamlets where we can regroup and reboot ourselves and build smaller, quieter communities based on mutualism and shared enthusiasms. It’s time to have some fun and rekindle our passions for cool, interesting shit away from the 24/7 shoutathons created by the ranking-engagement algorithms of our once-favourite platforms. The only thing I wanna optimise here is optimism.

And secondly: a big THANK YOU to all you early adopter weirdos for sticking around! I’m glad I’m not shouting into an empty bucket... ‘cos that would just look silly, though it would probably get a billion Yikes on ClikClok. You people - and your crow / wood pigeon companion-familiars - are the beating heart n soul of HUMANE DEBRIS and I thank you from the bottom of mine.

If this issue-episode seems a lil heavy on the comic-book side of thing, fret ye not: I’m waiting on a couple music-related QnAs at the moment, so stick with it, ‘cos the balance will undoubtedly shift to something else next time round. I’m trying to keep the zine fresh - keep it rotating like a Sushi Table - giving it a slightly different emphasis or feel each time round.

I’m writing this in the afterglow of the Lawless Comic Convention in Bristol. Only went up for a few hours on Saturday afternoon, but managed to catch David Roach’s Best of Britain Comic Art Exhibition sourced, I believe, entirely from David’s own incredible original art collection - and also caught up with David himself. We had an extremely interesting chat - maybe it’s something he and I could continue on here - about the visual precursors to what we might recognise as comic-strips. My own instinct - and I’m not an expert - was that maybe some of their ancestral forms can be traced back to caricature portraiture or societal-satirical illustrations by artists like Hogarth:

David had taken this idea further: he’d found actual sequential examples of Ur-‘comics’ dating back to the 1700s. It certainly fired up my imagination, so - yeah, maybe I’ll try’n get him on here to chat about this.

Anyway, back to Lawless. First person I bump into was my old artist pal, Conor Boyle, who co-created THE SCREAMING HAND! with me. And it was a real delight to discover that someone at the con had commissioned him to do a Screaming Hand sketch. One day, Conor and I will get the first TSH! season finished up. Think I wrote 8 or so episodes so far and Conor illustrated a sizeable chunk of those, as well as taking on the thankless task of size-reformatting the 3 episodes that originally appeared in The 77 and colouring them. Yes, that’s right: THE SCREAMING HAND! in ghastly, ghoulish colour!

Then I got abducted by BATMAN: FIRST KNIGHT artist Mike Perkins and spent a very chilled, fun hour or two in the bar where we were joined by my FALL OF DEADWORLD collaborator, Dave Kendall, Ian Richardson and John McCrea where salacious, unrepeatable anecdotes were shared, along with fond reminiscences of the people who came before us and mentored us. Making comics is a collaborative endeavour, but much of the heavy lifting is done by self-employed individuals working from home, so conventions are our equivalent of a Water-Cooler Moment where we briefly get to hang with colleagues, to gossip, plot and dream. Later, David R and I nipped off to chat with the amazing Peter Doherty who’s been working with us on NIGHTMARE NEW YORK and, before that, on the Science Fantasy strip SAPHIR. So good to finally chat with him. It was a short, very hectic afternoon: thanks to everyone who came up to me in the main room for a natter, including, I was heartened to find, subscribers to this very newszine. HI-YA! Some extremely cool, interesting and funny conversations were had. Let’s do this again, soon as I’m next allowed out in public / my cave / Prison Dimension Z.

In the meantime, try’n carve out a few Water-Cooler Moments for yourself and your own friends. Reclaim the word ‘office’, turn it into a playpen, not a sweatshop. It’s time to come together, to laugh, plot and dream.

Yer pal, Kek

I’m Kek-w. I write comics, films, TV and, um… other things. I also make music and art. If you enjoy this newsletterzine, please consider forwarding the Subscribe page to a pal: https://humane-debris-ed6dfb.beehiiv.com/subscribe. Quick! Let’s hop the next Omega Beam and relocate to Uuanos before the billionaires get there. I hear the weather’s nice and the sky is green.

But if this is all too much or not enough, that’s cool too: there’s an unsubscribe button lurking at the bottom of the page. Thanks for swinging by and taking a peek. Adios! 

WRITING COMICS WITH KEK

Okay, so here’s Part Two of a look at my own comic-book writing process. Last time round we picked up the trail from an old script of mine for an episode of THE ORDER and showed how the late, great John M Burns created a gorgeous page of art from it. This time, we’re going to reverse-engineer the script (which I’ve reprinted below) back through time n space to its starting-point in my head, ‘cos scripts don’t appear, fully-formed, via some form of Immaculate Conception - though there are weeks when I wished they did!

Next: I’ve managed to find and dig out the original outline I did for that episode. At that point, a few years back, I was already starting to break my outlines down into individual pages, so that they were somewhere in the ballpark of a Marvel Method style ’script’. These days, my outlines are even more detailed and include dialogue and caption roughs - some are polished enough that sizeable amounts of dialogue and descriptive stuff end up in the final script - it means I’m not ambushing my editor with new stuff in the Full Script version and it speeds up the scripting process. Having said that, this year that’s all likely to change - it’s time to switch things up, I think - and I’ll probably migrate to a more minimalist approach. Anyway, here’s the precursor to the page above:

The most obvious difference between the outline and the script is that I realised that it made far more sense to have the first page ending with an angry Captain Belair accusing Ben Franklin of having kept slaves. He’s not the hero / white saviour here, though he’s started thinking he is. It’s a BIG emotional / dramatic beat - a reversal - so let’s end the page at that point, so that readers want to turn the page and find out what happens next. It’s very obvious in retrospect, but it was only when I transitioned from an Outline (basically, typing out loud) to moving to a formal first draft Full Script that I noticed my structural / pacing boo-boo and tightened things up.

Now, I had a good look through my records and couldn’t find the hand-written material that particular outline came from. But there’s a good chance its precursor was something like this roughed-out page from one of my favourite ORDER episodes: “The Girl Who Fell From The Stars”.

This was one of those instances where a sizeable chunk of the episode just fell out of my head and into my biro: ratatatat. So I was already seeing the page broken down into panels in my head as I was writing it. I’ve said before in interviews that very often the characters will tell you their story or what they want to do next - all you have to do is listen - but you need to have a very deep and clear understanding of your characters, their back-stories and motivations before you get to the point where that happens. Often, the process isn’t anywhere near as fast as the example above and there’s a lot of staring off into space, walking, procrastinating and scribbling down fragments until they make sense and something takes shape. But the more you do it, the easier it gets. Sometimes, though, things can get… messy. Like this:

But, you know: it’s fine. It’s also okay to write in your sweat pants. Pages like the one above (and I have archive pages that make that one look tidy by comparison) aren’t for my editor or an artistic collaborator, they’re for me. Only I need to understand them. They’re Brain Dumps - one of the many paths you can take from synapse to script - they spark scene ideas, dialogue seeds, character tics, the beginnings of beats. At some point, parts of the page above will morph into something that resembles a page breakdown. Actions and dialogues will organise themselves into Story. Sometimes it happens quickly; sometimes it don’t. It doesn’t matter how you do this - what method you use - as long as you get there. Something I did for a while (and I’m thinking of returning to soon) for a series or two of both The Order and Fall of Deadworld was laying out flashcards to get a sense of the wider story - stuff that might occupy 2 or 3 episodes or more. Here are some I kept and found from the Fantastic Voyage series of The Order:

Again, these are just for me. It doesn’t matter how goofy or cheesy or minimal the content might be: they’re just visual stepping stones to map out part of a story: a route to go from A to B to C. A way of prising words, shapes and colours out of your head. The tools can vary from story to story, series to series: notebooks, scraps of paper, index cards, a whiteboard, the back of your hand: if it doesn’t work, then try something else until it does. There’s no right or wrong. The great thing for me about flashcards is I use them to throw in Wild Cards - verbal spanners in the works - simple phrases or even single words that disrupt the story and take you somewhere unexpected, kinda like a storyboarding version of Eno’s Oblique Strategies. I’ll leave you with this one that will chill the blood of any Fall of Deadworld readers:

Speaking of Dark Judges… er, I mean, cops…

KID SHIRT’S CRATE DIGS

If you like your Black Metal raw, no-fi fuzzy and caked in layers of morbid dirt and icy disenchantment with all the hiss-distorted, ferric-furry, tape-stretched non-fidelity you’d normally associate with the station-ident of some ancient Cold War era Numbers Station, then Keys To The Astral Gates And Mystic Doors are the band for you. The duo - Pit Dweller and Ludwig the Bloodsucker - hail from the frosty blacklands of Madison, Wisconsin, and have the most beautifully arcane Metal logo ever. This is from their sold-out debut album of demos and it’s wonderful. A thousand blackened, wind-blasted hails!

Mannequin Records is a Berlin-based label set up by ex-pat Italian, Alessandro Adriani, that specialises in Coldwave, Synthwave, old school Industrial and EBM, releasing both contemporary music and classic 80’s albums by acts like Bourbonese Qualk and Nocturnal Emissions. As someone with more EBM, Italio Disco and Belgian New Beat records than is probably healthy, I confess I’m enjoying some of the stuff they’ve released by French producer, Arnaud Rebotini. Rebotini scored the soundtrack for Dario Argento’s 2022 movie, Dark Glasses. Some of this stuff wouldn’t sound out of place in a Nicolas Winding Refn movie. It’s Post-Ballard, Post-Crash, and JG’s vehicle collision eroticism has been co-opted by admen and film-makers into commodity fetishism. This is all shiny, gleaming surfaces, tinted glass, purple neon vaporwave nightscapes and I looove it.

My old pal, Tom Ford aka Peverelist aka Pev has a new E.P. out. I first met Tom when he was managing the legendary Rooted Records shop back in the 00’s, one of the crucial hubs for Bristol’s emergent Dubstep scene, along with his own Punch Drunk label. Like many of us, Tom became a bit disillusioned and bored when Dubstep morphed into abrasive mainstream Skrillex style BroStep in the second half of the decade, losing its liquidity, bounce and inclusive vibe. But Tom’s sound had already been evolving from the get-go, grafting Techno onto a Dubstep chassis and vice versa. A decade on and Tom’s journey with Livity Sound, a label he formed in 2011 with Kowton and Asusu, continues. Here’s to many more phases…

Livity put on regular events in Bristol. Here’s one I visited recently featuring Miami DJ, Nick León.

Next time round, we’ll hopefully be back to having a music-related a natter with some interesting people…

CHILL WITH KIKI

And now it’s time to close our eyes and rest. Let’s dream of a Better Tomorrow, a Better Life, a Better Future. New futures we can build together. xx