It feels like only a month since I told you that Steeple #2 was out. We were younger then, more innocent, unafraid. But maybe there is a chance to recapture the sweet feeling of those earlier days, because Steeple is BACK BACK BACK with issue 3. There’s a five-page preview here.
This issue: windpower, NIMBYS, “mini-rapture”, surf priests, cream teas eaten “the wrong way round”, and much, much more. No comic features more unique and troublesome incident than Steeple from Dark Horse Comics, written and drawn by me, coloured by SARAH STERN and lettered by JIM CAMPBELL. Plus, there’s another stellar variant cover by Transformers legend NICK ROCHE and colouring giant JOSH BURCHAM!
This Saturday and Sunday (November 9-10) I will be a guest at the Thought Bubble Festival at its new home at the Harrogate Convention Centre. You’ll be able to find me at my table (18, in the Comixology Originals hall) most of the time, but not for a chunk of Saturday (12-3pm) because I am doing two panels and between them, let’s not make any bones about this, I will be eating my lunch.
I don’t know what I’m going to bring to sell, I have to raid the garden shed for items, but I will always draw for you if you come and see me and there isn’t a queue, and I’ll always sign your books. It’s the very least I can do.
Saturday panel program:
Goodnight Giant Days (Room B, Queen’s Suite, 12.10-13.00) “From its origins as a fill-in story on his webcomics site Scary Go Round in 2011 to a 55-issue run at Boom!Box with five Eisner nominations and seven international translated editions, Giant Days is an unusual series in mainstream comics, a sitcom about three friends at university.
As the series comes to an end, its writer (and occasional artist) John Allison talks to Claire Napier from Women Write About Comics about where it all went right. The laughter, the tears! How do you squeeze five years of material out of a six-issue series? Where does John get his “crazy ideas” from? And what will he do now the Giant Days are over?”
Lunch (Location t/k, 13.03-13.56) John buys a lunch that is probably worse than anything he would make for himself at home if he wasn’t here but which is gratefully received regardless. You will have to wait and see if it was a hot or cold lunch. He buys a chocolate bar which he saves to eat at 4pm in a display of self-restraint you, reader, will never match if you live to be 100.
SILENCE! To Astonish (Room A, Queen’s Suite, 14.00-14.50) “Watch Gary Lactus and The Beast Must Die of SILENCE! and Al Kennedy of House of Astonish inflict daft games, badly researched questions and ill-advised impressions on a very special, hand-picked, crack group of comic professional victi-err… guests.
House to Astonish is Scotland’s longest-running comics podcast and has been featuring comics news and reviews for over ten years. SILENCE! is the world’s only comics podcast.”
The very final issue of Giant Days, the double-length As Time Goes By #1 special, is out today. Do not be fooled by the numbering scheme – there will be no #2. Find out how the ladies are getting on, one year on. Get it in your local comic shop or on Comixology,
Thanks to all my collaborators on the series – artists Max Sarin, Lissa Treiman, Yulia Madrigal, Jenn St-Onge and Caanan Grall, inker Liz Fleming, colourists Whitney Cogar and Jeremy Lawson, and especially letterer Jim Campbell, there for every issue. And special thanks to my editors, Shannon Watters, Sophie Philips-Roberts and Jasmine Amiri. Without all of you I could not have done any of this.
Indie comics don’t get to put out 58 issues these days except in borderline miracle circumstances. Almost no comics do. Thank you to all our readers for coming back, month after month. This felt like I remember comics being, which was my hope all along. It has been a joy.
– John
COMMENTARY
I thought it might be fun/interesting to write some commentary for this issue – something I never do – but obviously if you are reading in trade or haven’t cracked GD:ATGB (as I will now refer to it), STOP HERE BECAUSE THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.
STOP
I MEAN IT
I CANNOT HELP YOU ANY MORE
OKAY
Now, strictly speaking, issue 54 was the finale. On paper, right at the start of the Boom! series, I had a dream allocation of 18 issues per school year. I didn’t know what I’d put in those issues, exactly, but that seemed like enough pages to get things done. Six issues per term. I think in sixes for episodes because UK sitcoms tend to be commissioned in batches of six. Unfortunately, with four issues per collection, one book would have been two short. So for issues 55 & 56, for a long time, I had the hopeful words “two-part finale” written on my whiteboard. I did not know what the story would be. For a long time, I was quite worried that I would never know what the finale would be.
Cognisant of the fact that PEOPLE HATE ENDINGS OF EVERYTHING ALMOST EVERY TIME, and as a student of TV series endings since childhood, I knew I had to try to land the plane, and when I did, people would throw tomatoes at me. So in issue 54, I wrote the straightest, nicest ending that I could. Perfect. Then I wrote a one-year flashforward.
BECAUSE I LOVE THE ENDINGS OF ALL TV SHOWS EVEN WHEN THEY ARE VERY BAD AND I HAD A LOT OF ENDINGS STILL TO WRITE.
But first: Scott Pilgrim.
The first issue of Giant Days, the self-published one that is in “Early Registration”, features a big fight, Daisy yogic-flying through the air, hair extensions on fire, and any more hyper-real situations. Like anyone with any sense at the time, I loved Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim books and perhaps leaned a little too heavily on them with that first mini. After the 47th person at a con said they liked the first Giant Days, that it “reminded them of Scott Pilgrim”, I determined that I should remove that aspect of it. But the truth is, without SP, there probably wouldn’t be GD, so for the finale, a full eight years after I got “a bit too Scott”, I relaxed my rule. Once more, people would be allowed to fly through the air (where appropriate). What could anyone do to me? It’s the final issue. Also, Max Sarin is an incredible artist so the flying through the air would be 100x as good.
Next, I thought about all the endings I had seen. It’s impossible to please everybody, but what if I attempted to do all kinds of ending in one ending? Futureshock ending? Sudden, abrupt, committal ending? Mad peril ending? Talky, reflective ending? But I also wanted to focus on the main three, Daisy, Esther and Susan, rather than wasting pages waving off various satellite characters. So it had to be a proper Giant Days story, not a mad parade.
It’s up to you to decide whether I executed the ending that I wanted to successfully. I was quietly pleased with it.
+++ VERY SPOILERY NOTES ON THE ISSUE FOLLOW +++
Page 1: There are no UK offices of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Page 2: I’m sure there are nice Cressidas in the world but I am also sure there are no poor Cressidas in the world. These are not nice Cressidas.
Page 3: Saffy and Daisy are a thing. I really wanted Daisy to have found happiness with the anti-Ingrid, someone who had the traits of Ingrid that Daisy found attractive – mainly confidence and intelligence – but in a kinder package.
Page 4: I was followed on the morning that I started writing this script by a Twitter bot whose profile pic was a middle-aged Asian woman and whose profile read, simply “portable tamping pickaxe”.
Page 5: Thank Max Sarin for all the queer representation in the backgrounds of this book because if I was drawing it, most of the people in the periphery would look like characters from a 1970s Ladybird book. Thanks Max.
Page 6: I think there are more mentions of lathes in the run of Giant Days than appear elsewhere in the entire body of American print comics. I do not own a lathe but David Malki (of Wondermark fame etc) does and when I found out about it, it haunted my thoughts.
Page 7: I wanted to Shelley to be in this issue briefly, as a nod to the wider Scary Go Round universe. I like that she showed up right at the end of the series, issue 52 is one of my favourites.
Page 9: A Super Hang-On machine. This is an incredible metaphor, a message from the cosmos for Esther. I was so pleased with how on-the-nose this was that I applauded myself.
Page 10: Derek Dooley lore. Derek Dooley is a Sheffield footballing legend, I hope no one thinks I am making fun of the fact that he lost a leg. I just wanted people to look him up on Wikipedia and know his name. They named a bit of the ring road after him.
Page 13: Susan has gone on a real journey of self-acceptance and now rather likes her own face. I, on the other hand, have always liked her face, and bear in mind that inevitably I draw it with piranha teeth.
Page 17: The “hating book” is from JP Martin’s “Uncle”. Beaver Hateman writes the names of his enemies in a hating book.
Page 18: The flat mouse incident happened to me a week or two before writing this issue. I wish I’d kept it but I am not sentimental about dessicated rodents.
Page 19: At school, someone said that they had three sisters and they “moult like cats.” It has stayed with me.
Page 21: Bungalows and Bears is real, I had the best roast beef I have ever eaten there once. Next time I went, the beef had changed. Not the same. I still don’t know how they did it.
Page 22: I think “Old London Soup” was something shouted by a character, once, on Steve Wright In The Afternoon on Radio 1 in 1990. I don’t think it’s a real thing. I don’t even know if I dreamt it.
Page 24: Susan gets punchy, as the prospect of things going a bit “early Giant Days” starts to loom.
Page 25: I think that’s me in panel 5, I just spotted myself. Also, look at Esther in panel 1! She looks like a Donya Todd drawing, she’s coming apart.
Page 27: Things get well sad manga here and I’m not even joking?
Page 28: The ladies are at one of my favourite Sheffield cafés, Alyssum, very near Susan and McGraw’s flat on Crookesmoor (which you can stand outside if you really want to). It’s one of my favourites because its name sounds like my name, of course. But the service is also excellent.
Page 30: An all important shout-out to New Scientist.
Page 32: I decided that the end of the issue was where the Scott Pilgrim rule would be broken, partly because I wanted to see Max draw some really loopy things. What ensues is even better than I hoped it would be. It’s both a tip of the hat to Bryan and fanservice, me being the fan, of Max.
Page 37: We are running out pages. I did this on purpose. This is exactly the feeling you got watching a sci-fi/ fantasy show’s final episode when the clock is three minutes from the end and they have still not beaten the “big bad”.
Page 38: Derek Dooley, Sheffield’s favourite ever man, does it again from beyond the grave. Well done Derek Dooley.
Page 39: Very very very pleased with Esther’s shrug in panel 6.
Page 40: We end without a clear answer. I don’t really know what Esther does next, I never have. I just have the sense she’ll be all right.
Issue 2 of STEEPLE is out today (October 16th, 2019) in comic shops and on Comixology, 22 pages that I crafted using only the windmills of my mind (with colours by SARAH STERN and lettering by JIM CAMPBELL).
This issue: bad bicycle maintenance, “drill music”, indolent youth, a glimpse inside a very confusing black mass, and a lot of very community-spirited works. And mermen! I’m giving it all I’ve got.
With a variant cover by original GIANT DAYS artist Lissa Treiman, through the auspices of Dark Horse Comics, I hope you will pick up and enjoy Steeple #2. Here’s a preview.
I know that a few people will be keen to use the new Sidecar feature in MacOS Catalina with Clip Studio Paint. I’ve seen a few early impressions (from Brad Colbow amongst others) who thought it was a bit rough and ready.
I did initially struggle to connect to Sidecar, getting “your iPad has timed out” messages, but I opened the Music app and with my iPad recognised in that, it played ball thereafter.
I use Clip Studio every day – both the iPad version and on my Mac with a Cintiq. The iPad version is great (once it came out, I ditched Astropad Studio because it was unnecessary), and using the desktop version with Sidecar is inferior to the native app. You can kind of pinch to zoom, you can three finger swipe to undo and redo, but neither of those feel as good as two-finger tap undo or the fluid gestures of the iOS version. You can’t go landscape, either.
The iPad’s native pressure curve is very stiff, so you need to adjust the pressure curve in your Mac installation of Clip Studio (CLIP STUDIO PAINT > Pressure settings). You need to set it to look like the curve on the iOS version… like this…
Problems
I’d seen reports of “blobby” strokes but I struggled to produce these, only getting one or two. I did have to turn stabilisation up to 15 (something I have to do on the iPad version of Clip too) – I don’t use it on the Cintiq. But the lines I produced with these settings were pleasing and didn’t feel any less natural than my other set ups. I’ve not tidied any of these up. I am quite a fast draw-er normally so I tried doing slow ones too.
These are only first impressions but I hope the pressure curve tip is useful. Until next time (there will not be a next time) – GOODBYE.