Actual Comics

So I guess one of the questions you’re asking yourself upon reading this blog is: does this guy actually write anything? I do and although as the blog title suggests I am some distance from being somebody, or anybody for that matter, I recently had a short story accepted for an anthology called Work! An interesting mix of the workers movement and its music, Work! couldn’t be more relevant than in this current climate of financial turmoil, where the fat cats get paid off while the workers join the ever lengthening dole queues.

Work! is the brainchild of Tim Twelves and Eric Palicki, bringing together a number of short stories based on the songs and anthems of the workers movement. From John Barleycorn to Sloop John B, the songs are used as the base for creators to interpret and re-imagine into stories that are relevant and interesting. Being Welsh my contribution focuses on the coal mines. Coal mining was a huge part of Wales at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century, employing anywhere up to a fifth of our total population. My great-grandfather was a miner, my grandfather was a miner and so many friends and family from the area at the time were miners. As such it has had a huge effect on the national consciousness and it’s landscape. But it was dangerous, very dangerous at the start of the coal boom. So I wanted to write something a little bit sobering and relevant to the tough conditions everyone, young or old, worked under. In a list of suggestions Tim posted, I came across this: http://www.bobdylanroots.com/miner1.html which gave form to an idea I’d been chewing over since I read about the anthology.

Obviously I’m not going to give the story away, I’d rather you read it and all the other stories in the anthology the way we hope you will, book in hand. But I can give you a decent idea of what’s to come from myself because a few weeks back Tim e-mailed me the first images of the pencils for the story, by a talented artist named Chris Fenoglio. So here are the first two pages of pencils with more about the Work! Anthology to come later in the week.

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