Getting a comic off the ground can be a stop-go business, and despite getting
the go ahead for Scarlet Traces 2: The Great Game in early 2004, various
production hold-ups meant I didn't start drawing the first episode (with the
exception of three test pages, see inset) until March 2005.
Since the previous Christmas we'd been hearing occasional murmurs that Jeff
Wayne (who produced the 1970's War of the Worlds concept album, and
who held the European rights to WOTW) was looking to produce a graphic
novel to exploit interest in WOTW generated by the Spielberg film.
He'd approached Dark Horse in December 2004 but they hadn't been able to come
to terms; in April 2005 we heard he'd returned to negotiations, and with the
film so close, a deal had been struck allowing us to do our own adaptation from
the Wells novel, Because we could use my designs for the Martian tripods, the
adaptation effectively became Scarlet Traces #0, giving us a trilogy
to sit on the bookshelves. What's more, schools and libraries would be more
likely to stock a WOTW adaptation, giving us a bigger market for our
own books.
Dark Horse were willing to reschedule The Great Game for the following
year. The drawback was that there wasn't time to get a 60-page graphic novel
finished before the film came out, so in an odd mirroring of Scarlet Traces,
three-page chunks of WOTW were posted on the Dark Horse website as
I completed them. I designed the pages to be broken in half so they would fit
on screen without scrolling. The artwork was finished at the end of November
2005 and WOTW the hardback graphic novel was released last month.
So, if you saw The Great Game solicited in Previews last year,
that's where it went - but I'm back on the job now and thundering towards completion...
We now have copies of Scarlet Traces and Kingdom of the Wicked ( both plus bookplate) to sell direct - please contact us for details. If you'd like to contact Ian Edginton, click here. |
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