The Orphans Who Had Parents is now cheaper to buy! I’ve put a black and white edition up in my Lulu store, £2.80 plus p+p. Enjoy!

So, as promised, The Orphans Who Had Parents is now available to buy as a paperback graphic novel. Huzzah! Visit my shop at Lulu.com here to get your hands on it.

I’ve also put the Splatterworld story up as a magazine-style book to buy, in case people were interested in that.

Final character design for my Cambodian orphanage comic. Sister and brother Ary and Peou.

I entered the Comica Graphic Short Story Prize last week, thought I’d share it with you all! Wish me luck and all that. :D

Also, because Tumblr doesn’t seem to want to upload a full size image, check out the bigger version here: http://i.imgur.com/lRtSE.jpg

A dabble at making a comic diary of a Steampunk’s day to day life with a fake etching print effect. I want to make a longer, more exciting diary at some point (maybe I’ll do real etchings :O ).

Poole

My entry for the Stan Lee competion on Talenthouse. Vote for Poole with either your Facebook account or through SMS (standard rates apply, just make sure you select your country for the local phone number!) or even vote with both! :P You can vote here: http://tinyurl.com/voteforpoole

Paula Steinerman, 22 years old.

Powers: Negative Empathic Switching; To absorb the energy of people’s negative thoughts and evil intentions such as fear or hatred, leaving the person with temporarily deadened emotions, then to transfer them to others through the form of dark mind blasts as a weapon or more subtly such as manipulation of thoughts and feelings.
Poole can contain such energy for a period of time but if she does not choose someone to transfer it to it will eventually pool out to the nearest host, which means friends and allies risk their minds being taken over by hatred, fear or evil.

Bio: Paula Steinerman developed Schizophrenia in her mid teens. Suffering from frequent but relatively mild Schizophrenic attacks, Paula was able to grow into a young woman without letting her illness completely take over her life, although she did become very introverted and somewhat distrustful of others.

At the age of twenty-one, Paula took part in clinical drug trials for an atypical narcoleptic used to treat the ‘negative symptoms’ - depression, extreme apathy, deadness - of Schizophrenia. After taking the new drugs, Paula started to suffer far more greatly from her ‘positive symptoms’ of Schizophrenia; delusions, hearing voices, paranoia and the feeling that she was being controlled by someone else.
Paula later discovered that the other patients in the same trial had suffered a similar reaction, but as they had already typically suffered from stronger attacks than her own the increased madness had driven many to commit suicide and others suffered from sudden and fatal brain ruptures.

One night, after being walked home by a male friend from a bar, he tried to assault her. Immediately, Paula was overcome with evil thoughts and voices telling her to abuse her attacker. At the same time, her attacker suddenly slumped back as if all harmful intentions had been sucked from him and he had been overcome with depression. In her fear and confusion, Paula focused the evil intentions that had manifested inside her on her attacker and he was sent flying into a wall before gaining his senses again and fleeing.

The untested narcoleptics that Paula had taken had countered her ‘negative’ depressive symptoms by allowing her to temporarily absorb the emotions of those around her, although when such emotions were so strong and so full of negativity it had a similar effect on her as a major Schizophrenic attack of ‘positive’ symptoms and the original host of the emotional energy is drained, leaving them with the extreme apathy of Schizophrenia’s ‘negative’ symptoms. Due to Paula’s illness, it took her some time to be understand whether the effects of her power were her own delusions or not.
Sometimes she’s still uncertain.

This comic was in response to a brief set by Marine Studios for their Adventures in Comics exhibition which starts today. The only rules were that it had to be two pages of a certain size… and be titled ‘Mechanical Elephant’.

I’m doing my dissertation on Steampunk… perhaps some influences snuck their way in here. :P