In the summer of 2009 I printed up 500 copies of my first comic, Pictorial Showboat #1.. All of them are pretty much gone now, so I thought it'd be a good time to chuck up some documentation of it on here.
It's nice to think that the folks out there who've got themselves a real life copy of the comic have got something that can't be seen properly anywhere online, so that's why I'm not posting the original files of each page. I just took photos of each double page opened up. This means that you probably won't be able to read most of the text(!), but hopefully it'll give those of you who didn't get a copy an idea of what some of the stuff that's in there is and all the hard(ish) work that went into the thing.. If you do find yourself straining to see something on a specific page and you're dying to get a closer look at any of it, get in touch and I'll email you a full size page or two.
Even though I appreciate everyone visiting this ol' cybershack here, it's good to know that creative scribblings still find their way onto paper that people can hold in their hands and I'd like to say a massive THANKS to anyone who picked up, bought, sold, looked at, passed on, or just allowed me to give them a copy of the first issue of Showboat in the actual real world.. I'm still threatening to put pen to paper on #2. The whole of it is written and planned out in rough, but I'm yet to find the kind of time to ink it out that I had when I was on the dole, knockin' out the pages you can see below.
The first batch that went out came with one of these badges..
..and some of 'em even came with this free mixtape CD what I boshed out on my ones n' twos. It's got stuff on there that was referenced in the comic like Biggie and The Heebie Jeebies, as well as loads of other stuff from my record collection and some CDRs of bands me and my mates have been in chucked on there too.
Anyway, thanks to the magic of Soundcloud, you can now listen to Musical Showboat right here.. or even download it n' shit like that..
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The Son of Jor-El was shocked to see The Adventures of 'Vorderman'..
..and even that bloke who used to knock about with John Mayall picked up a copy.
I dug out this copy of the 'Sampler' that I put together before the proper comic was completed, too.. Like most of my stuff, it's probably worth slightly less than the paper it's printed on, but if you have still got one of these then you could probably look at this and say.. "I've got one of them."
It features a couple of the pages that ended up in the finished comic and my name on the cover didn't have my middle initial crammed in between it back then because I was yet to discover that the lobster guy had snapped up the tomnewell.com domain name.
As the Sampler was hastily thrown together to pass out at The 2008 Thought Bubble Comic Convention in Leeds, it also featured this strip on the back page, which I drew up especially for the event..
..I got some good feedback from the people who I passed the sampler out to that day. I'd especially like to thank Kenny Penman from Blank Slate Books, whose encouraging words helped me to carry on with putting the rest of the comic together. "Thanks Kenny!"
..More shouts going out to Kid Acne and Rupert at APG Gallery in Sheffield, who invited me to be involved in their Silver & Black exhibition a few months after the first comic had come out.. I thought it'd be a good chance to do a short follow up to Pictorial Showboat #1 so, as well as the Metal Fingered Ghostie print pictured above, I produced a limited edition run of silver and black Showboat Specials for the show..
