It is a new... year? (Patreon)

To the best of my recollection, the first year where I really knew what year it was, was 1984. I remember new year's day 1984 rolling around and those digits being clear and present. So this is the 40th anniversary of me knowing what year it is. And to celebrate, I have decided not to retire from comics, but instead to deliver red hot #content on the solemn understanding that you are willing to tolerate it and, in some cases, even pay for it.

Thank you for the kind comments on the final Steeple issue. It wouldn't be an exaggeration that I told friends, when writing the story, that it would be "a final issue made up entirely of cliffhangers". I wrote a list of character names and parcelled out a couple of hanging plot threads to each of them. You can read this as my leaving the story open for continuation at a future date. But it is also, I think, valid to read it as an invitation to the reader's imagination. 

As a kid I read a lot of fantasy books, and when a five-book saga reached its conclusion, there was a deadening effect as you reached the end. Perhaps we flashed forward to a future date where the young hero was a grizzled king. Maybe everybody had reached a state of satisfaction that meant that, at last, their long road was over. Someone noble had probably, oh dear, died. Or maybe the last book was just a stroboscopic retelling of the book of Revelations designed to melt a bookish 9-year old's mind. All of these things were possible and none of them were entirely satisfactory.

My favourite end to a series of books, the one that really stuck with me, was the end of the Moomins ("Moominvalley In November"). In the final book, the titular characters were absent, and one read the fast vanishing pages in the company of second stringers and newcomers, hoping to find them, until, on the last page, the light of a ship appeared on the horizon that we were told might be them, returning home. I think this was the literary baller move that first shaped me as an author and I may not have been ten years old when it happened. 

Fig 1: I believe this is the edition I read.

I created my little comics universe a quarter century ago, to make something I felt was missing from the things I read. The older I get, the further away on the horizon that missing something feels. And just as when we remember, the things we think we recall are actually, the ever-changing memory of a memory, I now often ask myself to recall a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of young adulthood. The image is so grainy that I couldn't tell you what I'm looking at. But there we are. When I started, I had very little skill, and all I could do was try to capture what I was feeling. Now I have to use the accumulated skills of those 25 years to summon up whatever it was that was so abundant back then. I have to trust that what comes out is what I think it is going to be.

So it will not surprise you to hear that the next story, after the conclusion of Steeple #20, will be a two-part Conan the Barbarian story. He's out of copyright. No one can hurt me now. I've written the first part and despite never having read a Conan comic (I have read the prose stories), I am certain that it is - and you can quote me on this - the greatest Conan comic story of all time.

I will leave you with some of my preparatory sketches. Speak soon.

Fig 2: a Brythunian chieftain

Fig 3: the Cimmerian

Fig 4: a thief, caught in the act

Fig 5: a minstrel... or a mage?