What Ho, Black Sheep

I have mentioned before that i was working on a few other comicbook ideas besides Ramsden... in fact i just realised i wrote this...

"Probably the one that is closest to becoming a thing is the one with the 1920s vigilante. It's a sort of British hero pulp that i've been describing to friends as Bertie Wooster crossed with Batman. It started out as a throwaway idea and snowballed into something i think might be quite fun and interesting."

...almost exactly a year ago.

So the "something new" i have been teasing is actually something i have been working on in secret for a long time.

Anyway as i mentioned all those months ago i came up with a comic about a 1920s vigilante... and i called him the Black Sheep.

Really.

It's about a man who returns home from the Great War and struggles to fit back into society.

Britain has changed since the war... the war created a generation of monsters and lunatics and lost souls struggling to cope in a world which has moved on without them... a new breed of villainy is appearing... new enemies and threats are emerging from all corners... everywhere there is suffering and injustice and cruelty.

It is clear to our hero that the authorities are out of their depth and ill prepared to cope with this new world of horrors... but the war had taught him all about horror.

So he determines to make a stand and do that which the authorities cannot to stem this tide of anarchy.

But really it's about a man in a funny outfit getting into fisticuffs with cockney gangsters, evil hypnotists, bitter dwarfs, mad scientists and inventors, amoral vamps with remarkable profiles, wannabe fascist dictators, cranky monkeys, secret societies, disreputable spiritualists, psychotic tramps, and a criminal mastermind that no one knows exists.

Or something.

I had some things i wanted to do that i was never going to be able to do with Ramsden because of the setting.

I wanted to create an iconic British comicbook character... or at least try. I love the old American comics and pulps and newspaper strips from the 1930s... classics such as Batman, the Shadow, Dick Tracy. I wanted to create something similar to those... but done in a very British way.

I also wanted to play in the same sandbox as P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie... but to look at their 1920s Britain from the gutter and explore the seedy underbelly.

And finally i wanted to comment on some of the things i saw happening around me... and it struck me that a lot of those things... the coalition government, the recession, the mass unemployment and strikes, the surge of support for racist organisations such as the BNP, the recent war, terrorism, celebrity culture, drug culture, the redefinition of gender roles... were analogous to things that had happened in the 1920s... history repeating.

So... that's the idea.

Over the next few weeks i'll talk a bit more about this character and his world... i have put a lot of thought into this one so there should be lots to talk about... and maybe some of it will even be interesting. I also have some designs and sketches and photomanips i can share.

Anyway it's out there finally so i hope it isn't too silly.