How time flies. A year ago we were fresh faced young scamps at our first comic convention (in Leeds). Now we are grizzled veterans with the attendant emotional scars, gearing up for this years’ Thoughtbubble on Saturday 21st November. For the first time ever I am actually prepared. And by “prepared” I mean not still setting up two and a half hours into the actual convention. Only one thing remains in question – that is whether issue 12 of HFTF will be back from the printers. They are cutting it a bit fine, it has to be said. Of course issue 11 will be available for the first time at a convention, but I was hoping to have 12 as it’s… well… better.

Never fear, dear readers. We promise to hide any crushing disappointments and not be “Captain Bringdown”. You can rest assured that we will be sparkling, witty and accomodating. Failing that our musical director Ol has promised that he will perform a song on his ukelele for everyone who buys a comic. Actually that seems a little excessive… maybe we’ll hold back on the musical accompaniment and just keep it for the people who buy our “high end” stuff (basically, the collected editions).
So whether you buy anything from us or not, come over and say hello. You’ll need something to do while the queues to see the popular artists subside. Talking of which I see some of my favourite comic book creators are in attendance. Duncan Fegredo, Frazer Irving, Frank Quietly… honestly I can’t decide who to stalk most.

Thoughtbubble is nearly upon us, so that means we have a couple of competitions for you. First of all it is the Great Hope For The Future Reader Cameo Challenge. Actually, it’s not much of a competition or a challenge, and despite the punning name of this post, has nothing to do with Twitter, but I have decided that anyone who buys one of our fantastic products at Thoughtbubble this Saturday gets the chance to APPEAR IN THE NEXT ISSUE. I believe the appropriate response to this is “W00T!”.  Here are a few things to bear in mind:

1. The more stuff you buy, the better your chances. Hey we have a massive post con drinking binge to support.
2. The next issue is set at an event primarily attended by young, cool, sexy people. If you are in fact a young, cool, sexy person your chances of appearing are significantly greater than if you look… y’know… more like me
3. If you don’t make it into the next issue  (ie all the “slots” are filled) you’ll pop up in a subsequent one. Although I doubt we’ll be inundated with requests, frankly, so that’s probably not a problem.
4. It would help if you’re easy to draw.
5. If you’re a stormtrooper it might be a bit tricky to justify, story wise
6. Of course all of this depends on the life of my camera batteries, or the availability for replacements

So far, so awesome. The second competition is the Great Hope For The Future Twitter Feed Scavenger Hunt. All you need to do is follow me on Twitter and wait for the special super secret tweet. I was going to make it some weird riddle that you need to work out from a series of fiendishly cryptic clues, but I can’t be bothered so it’ll just be some clearly signposted daft phrase that I will tweet between now and Saturday morning (depending on when I remember to do it). Come up to our table during the convention and repeat the stupid phrase, and you’ll get a free comic. Free stuff, just for the brief embarrassment of saying some gibberish to a complete stranger? Every comic book publisher should do that!!

I bet Dan Brown is shitting himself! Yes the new Hope For The Future collected edition is out now, and courtesy of our pals at Fallen Angel Media Printing, it looks fantastic. Including issues 9-12 (with the customary cleaned up art and occasional redrawn panel), as well as Crystal Tips (from Judge Dredd Megazine issue 256), Godiva Jones, Warrior Princess of Mars (from the UK Web & Minicomix Thing Anthology 2009), and various previously unpublished strips. You can get it from us over on our shop page or pick one up at the forthcoming UK Web & Minicomix Thing this March 27th at London’s Queen Mary University in Mile End.

Dino-Saw-Us is a sticker collection game thing, running at this year’s UK Web & Minicomix Thing. And the above pic should prove, as if any proof was needed, that we will be participating. And that I need to cut my fingernails!

Here we have the trailer for the new Hope For The Future Collection. Our last two trailers for HFTF were greeted with worldwide acclaim, and grown men were seen to weep openly in the streets and embrace their former enemies, inspired by the sheer awesomeness of extremely limited animation and a burst of some tasty tunes.

This is no different, as you can see, but this time we decided to write some lyrics in order to fully express the mind manglingly cryptic themes of this epochal comic book series. The ideal musical medium for this was naturally a vaguely glam rock mid paced guitar stomp, with plentiful harmonies, because, as Brian Eno says,  backing vocals solve everything (although he’s never heard my nasal rasp). Many many thanks to our resident musical director Oliver for putting the whole thing together, and to our pal Ben who played the bass.

Let’s not forget the real message here, which is BUY HOPE FOR THE FUTURE BOOK 3, which is something you can do at the UK Web & Minicomix Thing, next Saturday, March 27th at London’s Queen Mary University in Mile End.  You can also buy a bunch of our other crap, pick up our contribution to the Dino-Saw-Us project, get a sketch, or just say hello. We will probably have Quality Street. I also have a four page strip in the Dinosaur Themed Official Anthology, but that’s the last time I’ll be doing fully painted comics as it takes too long!

Even though our Be In The Next Issue Of The Comic and Twitter Feed Scavenger Hunt went down like a fucking lead balloon at November’s Thoughtbubble, we’ll be doing the same thing here, so if you want to appear in HFTF issue 13 pop over and buy something, or repeat something from our Twitter feed to us to get some cool free junk.

It’s customary to write a report of a convention you’ve attended as soon as humanly possible, but frankly they’re all pretty similar, so to minimise the risk of repeating myself, here are some pictures…

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it turned out no one had seen this…

… despite my best efforts to pimp it. Turns out it could have been shown there, on a big screen, if only I’d been aware of it. I will endeavour to have it projected onto that Dalek building in Leeds this November when Thoughtbubble rolls around again.

As we were setting up, some bloke whose name I didn’t get, casually suggested we draw “any old thing” and put them on sale. We baulked at this for about 5 minutes and then proceeded to spend the rest of the day scribbling away. People seemed to really like the sketches and snapped them up, especially those that featured HP Lovecraft’s much loved eldritch monstrosity. Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo of my favourite stupid pun of the weekend: Cthulhu Live At Leeds. Maybe we should do some in advance for next time? Having said that we still have a few left over, so if anyone buys a book from our store I’ll liberally chuck some in! I still have my “Edward Cullen: What a cunt!” pic, so, y’know, form an orderly queue Twilight fans!

As ever we met some great people – a few of which seemed to actually be fans. Someone (again I didn’t get anyone’s name) started a conversation with “what I like about Hope For The Future…” as if it was a real comic like Maus or Cable or something. The most frequent comment was that the art style changes from issue to issue. That’s… er… at least partly intentional I can assure you.

So there we go for another year. We came, we saw, we sold some comics, we had a few drinks, and we then spent seven hours stuck in traffic on the way home. Thanks as always to anyone who bought anything, and massaged our fragile egos. Enormous overdue thanks to our mate Jim who every year puts us up and provides us with food, booze, oyster cards and a seemingly unlimited supply of terrible terrible horror movies on DVD. These are the ties that bind

With Kick-Ass, we are now in the peculiar position of comic book movies that refer more to movies than they do to comic books, right down to star Aaron Johnson’s perfect reprisal of Tobey Maguire’s voice over in Spider-Man. I guess Mark Millar writes film treatments first and comics second (if the execreble Wanted is anything to go on), but in this case it works brilliantly. The film has been universally praised, although certain reactionary news sources have predictably claimed that it is the end of civilisation as we know it. The Mail writer seems to think that an eleven year old girl in a purple wig constitutes a “sexual image” (!), and gets in a right old tizz about the swearing and violence, branding the film “evil” and “amoral”. But, most heinous of all is the fact that the film was written (read: adapted) by Jane Goldman who just so happens to be married to Jonathan Ross. To The Daily Mail, Ross is, along with immigrants and gay marriage, destroying the very fabric of Britain. But anyone who did this can’t be all bad.