Little Brown Bird festival run continues

This Friday Little Brown Bird has its Scandinavian Premiere at Minimalen Short Film Festival in Trondheim, Norway. We are the opening film of six being shown as part of the Horror: Ramaskrik presents strand of the festival, which has been running for thirty-six years. You can see the full festival schedule and get tickets here.

Closest to home and in the county where I grew up, Little Brown Bird is coming to the South Coast next month. We have been selected as part of the short film program at the inaugural Screams by the Sea festival in Bournemouth on February 10th. Find out more here.

Read Back to Work for free

I've wanted to write something for Outre for some time, but sod's law always prevailed and I tended to find out about the latest issue just after the submission process had completed. 

“The Outré anthology is the brainchild of Norwegian comic book creators Magnus Aspli and Glenn Møane. Both fans of short stories, we started toying with the idea of launching an online anthology with a strong emphasis on quality and meaning.

With Outré we aim to deliver a thoughtful and unique product with superb quality in art and storytelling. To feature stories by hungry creators who have something to say.”

Thankfully, I heard that Magnus and Glenn were looking for submissions for their 6th collection, Grotesk early enough to be able to submit an idea. An email from Magnus got the ball rolling and it was great to have a theme to build an idea from. I was looking forward to writing a short story again and to delving into the world of horror once more. 

“The work begins for Outré #6. This time we’ve got one goal in mind: create the most unsettling and unnerving little anthology possible.

Our theme is along the lines of “uncannily weird” or “weirdly uncanny” - whatever fills your cup. Outside-the-box horror. Fresh, untouched territory, no classic monsters or tropes.”

I had an outline for a story called 'Back to Work' completed relatively quickly, which was approved with a few tweaks and amendments. From there I pulled the script together, which then went through the editorial process before being accepted to appear in the anthology. 

I turned to the Comics Experience workshop to find an artist, initially collaborating with Federico De Luca (John Carpenter's Tales for a HalloweeNight) who has a realistic style and a real talent for the genre.  When Federico got too busy to complete the story, he's since been working on Creepy for Dark Horse, I returned to the CE workshop looking for a replacement.  This is Federico's take on Page One of 'Back to Work'. 

I was very happy to hook up with Gustavo Vasques, another artist on the CE workshop. He'd posted some of his work in June this year that I really liked and I'd been quick to suggest a potential future collaboration. So when Federico had to step off the project, Gustavo was the perfect replacement. Working with Gustavo has been brilliant, I've never had an artist deliver multiple layout options before (I plan to post those in the coming weeks, once the story has had the chance to do the rounds) and that really got me thinking about story flow and page composition. 'Back to Work' was a true collaboration in every sense and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. Here is Gustavo's take on Page One, before a slight change in colouring direction was decided upon. 

As often happens, I tighten up the dialogue on receipt of the art and then things were passed over to Mick Shubert the excellent letterer that Magnus, who edited the story, assigned to us. 

You can read 'Back to Work' here and you can download all of Outre 6 as a PDF here and it will soon  available on Comixology.