Nick Bryan

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MOONFRAME – New comic entering orbit!

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In the course of 2018, I wrote (and endlessly re-drafted) the scripts for three standalone one-shot comics. The first of these was The Little Deaths of Watson Tower, which came out in October and seemed to go over well. I won't list every  reaction, as that's what my Twitter is for, but ending the year by placing #48 on Pipedream's indie comics top 100 list was a lovely capstone.

Anyway, that comic is still available, but I've now got the second one ready to go and it is called...

Moonframe

In the near future, the moon has been pressed into service as a warehouse for the vast data archive created by our constant internet use.

But now those billions of cat memes come under threat from a computer virus. Two astronauts must travel through this strange landscape to save them, completely alone apart from the passing thoughts of everyone.

This is a new twenty-page sci-fi/horror one-shot, atmospherically illustrated by Lucas Peverill (Futurequake, Sliced Quarterly) and lettered by DC Hopkins (Star Trek, Accel, Trespasser).

It's a spooky, darkly funny and ultimately emotional story combining Black Mirror's dark tech satire and The Martian's sincere battle for survival in space.

For anyone interested in reviewing the book, you can email me at nick@nickbryan.com.

 

The comic debuts at the True Believers convention on February 2nd 2019, marking my first ever table selling at a comic convention. So if you're around Cheltenham that weekend and fancy buying some stuff, come on along.

And for anyone not in Cheltenham, it'll be on sale on my Gumroad shop in print and digital forms as soon as I get back from True Believers and press the go button.

If you want to see how convention prep is going, here is a sweet picture of me preparing my sales pitch. (And for anyone curious about the third of those one-shot scripts, you can see an art snippet by Robert Ahmad on the left of that banner.)

The Little Deaths of Watson Tower – OUT NOW!

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Exciting news, universe! Mere days after my announcement post (as the printers were very quick), you can now buy The Little Deaths of Watson Tower, a new standalone comic written by me and drawn by the sensational Rosie Alexander!

If you want to see more info about the comic, there’s a dedicated page on the site with some talk, a bigger cover image and a three-page preview of the excellent interior art.

Or, if you’re the sort of good, nay, great person who buys all my stuff cos you know you’ll like it, you can go straight to Gumroad to buy the PDF, or also the print edition pictured to the right!

As I said in the other post, we’d love you to get this spooky bit of skeletal comics in time for Halloween, but if you want the print edition by then, we’d recommend ordering pretty soon.

If you’ve any interest in reviewing/covering the book somewhere, or stocking it in your shop, do get in touch! Either via one of my many social medias if you have them, or email nick@nickbryan.com!

The Little Deaths Of Watson Tower – COVER REVEAL! COMING SOON!

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So, to my lasting excitement and terror, my first full-length comic as writer is on the verge of happening.

This is The Little Deaths of Watson Tower, illustrated by Rosie Alexander, and you probably know that already, because your eyes went straight to Rosie’s gorgeous cover below rather than reading this blurb first.

This is a fun, slightly strange comic about a bunch of kids dealing with death, skeletons, and the great unknown. It’s funny, sad and curiously uplifting.

All of which is enabled by Rosie’s art, which is luscious, evocative work and sells the comedy and emotion every bit as well as it does the ghoulish antics. She’s definitely going places, and I’m thrilled to have joined in at this early stage.

Here’s the first couple of panels…

It’s twenty pages, black and white interiors as above, with a colour front and back cover, and since it’s got skeletons in it, we’re hoping to get it to you by Halloween.

At the very least, the PDF should be on sale by then. If everything goes flawlessly wonderfully (i.e. if I haven’t made any mistakes in my print set-up), we may even manage to post out print copies to reach you for the big day.

So if you want to keep on top of ordering it when it comes out, you can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, sign up to my mailing list or I suppose I also have a Facebook page.

Oh, and you can also follow Rosie and her work on Instagram and also Twitter, and you should as it’s good. Thank you. More soon.

Late-2018 Anthology Comics Extravaganza!

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In one of those weird coincidences that might later turn out to be a conspiracy, it appears every short anthology story I’ve written in the last year or so is coming out within the same few months. I’ll add all these to the ‘Other Work’ page as well, but if you’re here looking for the latest hot updates, her’s a tasty wedge (with a bit more ramble about each one).

Something Wicked 2018

I’m a big fan of the team at Futurequake Press, as they made one of my first published comic stories happen in the form of The Half-Baked Sacrifice, now available both in the relevant issue of Something Wicked and in my quickly homemade anthology Comedy & Errors.

So it’s good to be back there this year with a new story called ChitChatChum, which I wrote last year, and if you head on over to FQP’s blog, you can see a snippet of the lovely art by Mike Walters.

I wrote this quite a while ago, so I was pleased to revisit the finished version and discover that, yes, I still find it enjoyably grim. Particularly if you enjoy some Black Mirror-esque tech/body horror, this might be right up your alley.

You can buy the anthology from FQP’s website here, or on Comixology in shiny digital.

‘Work’ Anthology from Work In Progress comics

Beginning around the start of this year, I’ve been going to the Meetup group Work In Progress comics, where a bunch of London comic creators meet up to chat about comics, creation and their feelings about both.

It’s been a great group to get to know, thanks especially to the excellent Joe Stone for his work running it, and as luck would have it, this year they put together a group anthology which I was able to get into.

This is a collection of stories on the theme of ‘Work’, and I contributed a two-pager called Retirement Plan with art by A.I. Miller, who I met through my work with The Comic Jam. I like our story a lot, it’s got some strong robot melancholy, and I also think it’s a really strong anthology as a whole which is definitely worth your time.

I’ll add the buy-online link when I have it, or, again, if you’re at Thought Bubble, Joe should be selling it form his table.

If Anthology – ‘Horror’

Lastly, I’m also in the 2018 If Anthology, collecting a group of stories on the theme of ‘Horror’.

For this story, I decided to reunite the 2017 Christmas story team of myself, artist Robert Ahmad and letterer DC Hopkins for a five-pager about the dark underside of cute-seeming internet cats called Jenny & Max.

It’s a story which threads the needle between adorable and scary in a way I’m quite pleased with, helped by the art really selling the cute kitty and DC Hopkins going above and beyond to make the fiddly mock-Instagram layouts work.

I’m aware it’s part of a much larger anthology, but if you want to grab the book to read my story, it’s up on Amazon, or you can order it from your local comic shop using the info here.

HOW TO WRITE A COMIC – “Lily’s Voyage”

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So, whenever I tell people I’m writing comics, they always ask, with an air of interest, how it actually works and what that involves. They never mistakenly believe I’m the artist, though – apparently I just don’t present the air of someone who can draw.

Still, in a bid to demonstrate the process and rob me of any artistic mystique I might’ve had, I’m going to take one of my one-page comics, first presented on The Comic Jam, and show you how it was made in punishing step-by step detail.

The one I’ve chosen is Lily’s Voyage, with art by Brian Flint, because it’s one of my favourite comics I’ve done, yet runs only one page long so this blog won’t run to novella-length.

It was originally posted as part of ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ week on the Jam. You can see the layout to the right or, again, click through if you want to see it at a bigger size.

I’d recommend reading the thing at least once before I yank it to literal pieces. Seriously, do it, it’s cute. If you want to read it in print, it’s also part of the Comedy & Errors anthology I’m currently selling on my new shop. (CAPITALISM.)…

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“Comedy & Errors” – New anthology zine out now!

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So, if you follow me on social media (which you should, obviously), you’ll already know about Comedy & Errors, the 17-page black and white anthology comic-zine I created from scratch to sell at the South London Comic and Zine Fair communal table.

Well, that event happened, and now I have around twenty copies left from the small print run I did. If you want to own one of these, I have lashed together a small online store (so small, it contains one item) for the purpose of selling it at £2.50 a pop.

Again, I stress – there are twenty of these. Unless demand is off the charts, I may not go back to press for a while. (At the earliest, not until I next need something to sell at an event.)

So if you passionately want this thing, I would grab one. And yes, if you’re unlucky enough to see me in person, you can probably pre-arrange to buy one IRL and save the postage.

So, what’s actually in this comic? As you can see on the cover, there are seven stories:

So there we go. Get it here. As you can see above, yes, many of the stories are available online, but especially with comics, I think there is something about the printed object. I’m definitely excited, but I wrote it and it’s my first one, so…