Comics: Ostragoth

Sometimes writing and art combine to become something finer by far, and when I’ve collaborated with my friend Mark Pexton (check out some of his stuff at deviantART, he’s done book covers, and illustrations for Interzone among other things) that’s certainly been the case. Supervised by the supremely practical OneMonkey we became Ostragoth Publishing.

 

 

Boys Don’t Cry

Our first publication, several years in the making but emerging at last in 2010 (see my now largely-neglected comics blog for the backstory) was a graphic novel called Boys Don’t Cry, which is available as a free pdf (under creative commons license CC BY-NC-ND) here. We sold out of printed copies a while ago, unfortunately.

This is what the back cover says:

Teenage boys aren’t known for sharing their fears and emotions, so if you’re the father or sister of one, how do you know how he’s coping with his mum’s death?

Fifteen year old Hunter isn’t entirely sure himself, and even if he could put any of it into words, he no longer knows who to say it to.

So if zero pence sounds like a good price to pay for the beautifully-drawn saga of a bereaved teenage goth in Edinburgh, feel free to peruse and comment – there’s only so many people willing to buy an 80-page graphic novel by relative unknowns and I’d prefer to have more people read it. Particularly those that might not normally think of themselves as graphic novel audience material.

Boys Don’t Cry by Jacqueline Saville, Mark Pexton, Andrew Woods is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Reviews of Boys Don’t Cry can be found at Fenriswulf Books, and this blog by Sherina Ramlogan.

In 2014 Ostragoth were proud to support Stuart McNab, an undergraduate at Napier University, as he based his honours animation project on Boys Don’t Cry. You can read his blog about how he chose our graphic novel and how he went about adapting it, and you can view the finished animation here at madefire.com

 

 

The Moon of Endine

In 2011 Ostragoth released a 40-page SF comic, The Moon of Endine. If you’ve enjoyed any of my sci-fi or fantasy stories you might like this one about werewolves on a frontier planet, with Mark’s art taking it to another level.

If you’d like to buy an actual A5 hold-in-your-hand copy, then I’m afraid you left it too late. However, you can download the pdf (free under creative commons license CC BY-NC-ND) or just sit and page through it here (it opens up a full page when you click on it)…

 

 

There are more Ostragoth collaborations in the pipeline but two disorganised people with full-time jobs and other, separate, creative outlets doesn’t make for quick work. When the next one happens, you’ll find out here.