A sample of the book, comic and magazine covers on which I've worked... Some of these were published, others were entirely speculative.
Created for a convention in 2003, and (pretty obviously) based on the old Fantastic Four covers... The figures on the front cover were drawn by Peter McCanney, I did the rest.
(The odd black shape in the background of the front cover sparked more than a few puzzled queries - but now, the answer can be revealed: it's the hole inside a Wilkinson Sword razor blade!)
The same team who ran They Came and Shaved Us ran Zombiecon in September 2008... This one is based on an old Penguin paperback. The illustration on the front cover is by Charlie Adlard, suitably aged and weathered to fit in with the battered look of the rest of the book.
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I created the fake magazine Sprout for The Brentford Mercury way back when. The first two issues (four pages each, including the cover) were based on boys' comics of the 1970s, so for issue three I decided to tackle the girls' teen magazines my sister used to read... The photo on the cover is one of my earliest pieces of photo-manipulation: this girl doesn't actually exist (I created it for my Jaye Carroll alter-ego just in case the publishers wanted a photo of the author, but unfortunately it was never used). |
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The cover for the programme book to Dublin's Phoenix Convention (commonly abbreviated to P-Con) in 2009, at which Doctor Who writer Paul Cornell was Guest of Honour - hence the attempt to duplicate the opening titles of that show. The programme book was printed in black and white, but here, for the first time, you can see how it originally looked in black and white and lots of other colours! |
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When this fake cover appeared in an article in the Judge Dredd Megazine, it actually fooled a few people into thinking that that comic really existed. Success! The Dredd figure was by Dredd's co-creator Carlos Ezquerra and scanned from an early issue of 2000 AD - I loved the image but Dredd was facing the wrong way, so I flipped it horizontally... Which meant that his shoulder pads and badge were now on the wrong side (which explains why Dredd's holding his gun in his left hand, rather than his right): I had to redraw them by hand while trying to keep to Ezquerra's style . To make the image look suitably aged, I dug out a bunch of comics from the same era. After thirty years any comics printed on newsprint have a certain look: desaturated colours, bleeds from the following page, and so on. I spent far too much time trying to replicate that look! |
For an article in Judge Dredd Megazine. I'm a huge fan of Alan Moore's work but I couldn't resist creating this fake book. It's not so much intended as a dig at Mr Moore's legendary verbosity as it is at the rabid fans who will read anything and everything the man has ever written (myself included).
Another competition entry for 2000 AD Online... The brief this time was nicely flexible: "We've Got it Covered" - either a 2000 AD cover re-imagined, or something else given a 2000 AD flavour. I decided that it might be interesting to see what the comic could have looked like had it been published 100 years earlier.
Observant readers will notice that I've re-used that great Carlos Ezquerra pic of Dredd - the right way around this time.
I didn't win... But there is some considerable comfort in knowing that the winning entry - CraveNoir's absolutely superb rendition of Judge Dredd if the story had appeared in Eagle in 1950 - was adapted from my script for the first episode of Judge Dredd: Year One!
Created for April Fool's Day 2010, and posted on the News page of Hi-Ex's website, this successfully fooled a couple of people into thinking it was real, which only tells me that they didn't properly read the accompanying text...
Hi-Ex guest Michael Carroll writes that he has just received the first copies of his new hardback novel Look Over There (if only they'd arrived last week, in time for this year's convention!)
Michael writes: "It came out even better than I'd hoped. With a project like this, there was always the chance that something could have gone wrong with the production. But I'm happy to say that the finished version of Look Over There is as effective as I'd planned."
Michael is, as always, tight-lipped about the plot of the novel (he says he's allergic to spoilers!), but according to the official press release from Pool Flair Publishing: "Look Over There takes the reader on a terrifying voyage to a world beyond horror. It is a book so enthralling and so frightening that three of our editors actually begged not to work on it. Where most horror writers try to cram as much scary stuff as possible into their novels, Look Over There succeeds because Michael has done the opposite: He began with what he calls a 'standard horror tale' and then carefully and painstakingly removed each of its main elements, one by one, diluting the story right down to its current state, where - at first glance - the book appears to be blank. In reality, however, what he has created is the world's first Homeopathic Horror Novel."
Look Over There is available now for only £14.99 in all good bookstores, or on-line from Pool Flair Publishing's website.
The clues that this is a fake: "Pool Flair" is an anagram of "April Fool", the link to the publisher's website comes to this one, and, well... A homeopathic novel?!
"Look Over There", incidentally, is also the title of a imaginary movie - created by my wife Leonia - that stars all those vaguely recognisable actors that make you go, "I'm sure we've seen him / her in something else..."
