MHS

SELF PROMOTION

My Self Promotion really began with the work that I was doing last year. I first contacted Uproar Comics about possibly working with them on a Belfast Zombie comic which I had been working on. Uproar Comics are a Derry based company, with their main focus being on a zombie comic entitled "Zombies Hi" set around the Walled City of Derry. For this reason I thought that the idea of having a short off shot story set in Belfast might appeal to them. 

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The style that I was working in at the time was of a more cartoon style as the subject matter was to do with the troubles in Belfast and the sectarian nature that still exists in City to this day. With the additions of the more comedic style I was using I thought this would soften the blow of the sometimes controversial subject matter.

Zombies Hi first submission.

My correspondence with Kevin "Gio" Logue went on for another week or so before they approached me with an offer to work on a One page story entitled "Love Never Dies" a very short script with pretty simple directions arrived in my inbox, for five panels. I had never had to take direction on any of my work before to this extent, so although exciting I felt I had to stick to the directions very strictly, now I would have made some suggestions for change, such as instead off the Zombies in panel two standing at a gate with a camera straight on, I would change that to a low to high shot with the zombies coming over the wall with a simple plaque saying City Cemetery, but as this was my first piece of published work I decided not to rock the boat. What follows is the original script I received from Kevin.

Working title: Love Never Dies

Panel 1:  

Zombied hands reach through the bars of a cast iron gate.

Caption 1: YOUR HANDS DONT FEEL RIGHT HONEY.

Panel 2:

 Front on shot of the gates, we see the zombies reaching through. Either side of the gates stands pillars, an iron arch stretching between them reads “ City Cemetery”. On the ground the shadows of the zombies stretches towards the reading.

  Caption 2: I KNOW I SHOULDN’T HAVE LEFT THE WALLS, BUT I HAD TO COME HERE...

Panel 3:

Looking down onto some headstones, there shadows long from the moon behind them, the vastness of the graveyard stretches before us.

Caption 3: ...DEATH HAS CHANGED THESE DAYS HONEY.....

Panel 4:

Looking straight on we see a shovel is stuck into a pile of dirt and just behind it is the lid of a coffin dirty with mud.

Panel 5:

Looking down at a dramatic angle, we see the head stone reaching towards us an angle on top of it. There is man, ragged and stubbly he is rested against the head stone, one of his legs hangs in the open grave beside him. One of his hands grasps a bottle of jack daniels whilst the other holds the hand of his dead wife, that lays in the open coffin next to him.

Caption 4: ...I JUST THOUGHT MAYBE ..I MISS YOU...I JUST HOPED YOU’D BE BACK....IN ANY  FORM

Below is the finished page that was printed in the Fourth issue of Zombies Hi

 I am actually in the middle of writing a short 3-4 page extension of this story, which Kevin has agreed to look at once I have the pages ready.

From this one page story it gave me more confidence that I could produce my own more complex stories and perhaps delve into the writing side of comic books in a more in depth way. Intially I had the idea to try and produce more work for Uproar Comics but decided that I may not have been at that point yet and having the single page story was enough to get my name out into the whorl of Irish comics and that was really enough for now.

The next step was to start to give myself an online presence, and the easiest way at the time was start off with a Facebook page. www.facebook.com/MatthewHSmythIllustration set up in November 2011, this was a good format to get my work on now with 110 likes and rising the page has a portfolio of work ranging from some the early Illustrations to teaser pages for my later web comic. I have used the Illustration to sell prints of my work with moderate success.

Illustration for Sale on the Illustration page

During the rest off the year I kept in touch with the Uproar guys with ideas bouncing back and forth even going as far as to spend a week of my work experience working with them. Nothing else really materialised due to time constraints on both sides. I still keep in fairly close contact with the guys especially Danny McCloughlan, artist, and Kevin, colour and Art Director. 

The next project that I worked on was the Edgar Allen Poe book printed via The Pittville Press. A short 16 page book telling my version of the events surrounding the mysterious Poe Toaster. A shadowy figure that would visit the original Baltimore grave of Edgar Allen Poe to leave his tribute at the grave. Two roses, one for Poe and one for his Wife Virginia, raise a toast with a glass of Cognac and leaving the bottle. At the time of completion I decided to contact the Edgar Allen Poe museum website and ofer them the chance to display the book on their website. 

Screen Shot of E-mail

Unfortunately I didn't receive a reply from the Poe website, but all in all I thought it would have been quite nice to be featured on the website as a nice tribute to the Poe Toaster.

Page From Poe Story

I was informed of a Comic book creators group based in Belfast by Danny. I was invited to join the group via Facebook and was able to go down and meet with them on my visits back to Belfast. They are a creative group who meet up and basically talk about comic books and show our work to each other and critic each other, it's a very healthy and enjoyable experience to be a part of. The group includes a wide range of comic creators not just from Belfast but from all over Ireland. From these meetings I have meet such influential comic book creators such as PJ Holden who works consistently with 2000AD on the very successful Judge Dredd comics among other titles, John McCrea who produced the art work the Garth Ennis books "Dicks". More Importantly it gave me the opportunity to meet a writer by the name of Andy Luke. 

After showing Andy my work that I produced for my comics Hunt-Part One and Hunt-Part Two we decided to meet up to speak about working together on a book that he had received backing for. The meeting went well and he explained that this would be a collective group, each taking a story and producing it in their own way. The book is a collective of true scandals surrounding high Government officials of the 19th Century and the cover ups that took place. 

I myself have selected a fairly dark story that is about an official that like the company of young boys and the cover ups that take place to prevent the scandal from being revealed, things don't change much.

The book will provide me with a lump sum payment and also entitle me to a Royalty percentage at the end of each year, providing the book makes a profit. This is the first time that I have had this experience and so far so good, not problems with contracts and everyone gets their far share of the work that they produce. This wouldn't have came about without me being introduced to the Comic Book Creators group. 

Although the project isn't due until late May, so I still have plenty of time to get my roughs into finals. The reason behind the delay is down to my work that I have been producing for my own self owned comic book and web comic.

Around the same time as meeting the CBC I also got in contact with a group of people from in and around Belfast who were putting on an exhibition for local artists to show case their work, the exhibition was entitled "Thou Art Skint" the premise of the exhibition was that any artist could apply for a space and once accepted they could display as many or as little pieces of their work as long as the pieces were priced for under Fifty Pounds. I was accepted with my Loki God of Fire series Five prints each with a run off between 5-6, off which I sold a grand total of 5 prints. Although this was a small exhibition it was quite successful and received promotion over the Radio and has allowed the curators to apply funding and keep the exhibition in different forms. Some of my prints are still with one of the girls who runs the exhibitions and will displayed at upcoming events

Above: Three Pieces from the "Thou Art Skint" exhibition.

This brings me onto the main part of my practice, my own self created/owned comic books. Hunt - Part One and Hunt - Part Two, I have been trying to make these comics for about Four years and this year I finally had the opportunity to make them. Originally it was all one comic, the idea hasn't changed much but the back story has been expanded greatly with Hunt - Part One, which has given me much more scope to add depth and reason to what he becomes in Hunt - Part Two and who this man is and what drives him to do what he feels has to be done. 

Pencil Study: Detective Fox

With the production of both Hunt - Part One, being produced as a hard copy comic, as opposed to Hunt - Part Two being a web comic, this has taken up most of my year to get them both ready to be shown to the public. Taking them both from scratch and taking on all aspects of the work, writing, pencil, inking, lettering and arrangement it has taken me until very recently to start to be able to promote them both properly. I did release some pages, without text, through my Illustration Facebook page, but they really where rough pages.

First attempt at page one for HP1

At the beginning of Hunt - Part Two I was using both a blog website and my Illustration page to show the first few pages, but I eventually released this was getting me nowhere as people would simply look at the page on Facebook and not actually go to the blog site and engage fully with the web comic. 

I first got in contact with the owner of the Bad Haven website, which was set up by a comic book fan named Mark McCann. The website has steadily grown and has recently hit the milestone of 300,000 new hits a month, a staggering amount for a comic website only a year old. I first spoke to him about possibly getting the web comic up on his site in early December when I had only around 4 pages, he wisely informed me that before we progress I should have at least ten pages up so that a reader get more involved with the story, a fair point I thought. 

Since then I have been in contact with some of the writing staff and a review of both Hunt-Part One and Hunt-Part Two will be going up on the website. This also lead to my first phone interview with the writer Steve Hobson, a regular contributor to the Bad Haven site. This should boost my online presence greatly, with getting a percentage of the traffic visiting the Hunt-Part Two web site, which is always a good thing to get people talking and sharing with there friends.

I recently had a review on the HP2 comic from Mike Lynch at Abandoned Comics. My pages views have been steadily increasing, since putting pages 10-17 my page views have actually increased by nearly 90% and rising. 

Also I have received two ore reviews back in time for this presentation, one from the good people at BadHaven written Steve Hobson who I have met before through the Belfast music scene but have had little contact with him around the comic book scene, in fact I was unaware that he was interested in comics so when Mark informed me that Steve would be writing the review I was slightly apprehensive, but it is actually a very good review(see review page). For the interview it was the first time I had to do a phone interview at the request of Steve. All good experience and very encouraging. Hopefully with the review it will boost my online presence.

I have also been in contact with a number of other Irish comic groups, including the good people at Uproar Comics, at first there was an idea of possible putting the Uproar tag on the web comic and getting a link on their website, at first I thought this was a good idea, but as I deliberated more on the subject I came to the conclusion that this would not be in my best interests, I would feel that I would, maybe, have lost a bit of control and it felt as though I be would signing my comic over to them. 

Through later discussions I steered them away from that idea and instead they said they would do a review of both the comics and upload that onto the blog, leaving me with more control and not feeling as though I would have to answer to some one about my own creative out let. This has became quite an important decision which I will explain later on.

The next review came from the Uproar artist Ruairi Coleman, again this was a very good review for both Hunt - Part One and Hunt - Part Two. Most of my contact with Uproar has been through e-mail but I have met Ruairi at one of the CBC meeting in Belfast and he seemed a bit taken aback with my work, I'm not sure he knew how to take it but from the review he was suitably impressed, again this can be found in the review section of this blog.

Apart from Uproar I have been promoting both comics through as many Irish Comic outlets that I possibly can. I have contacted a number of web sites, including the web comic pod cast team at The Comic Cast, unfortunately their pod cast only comes out once a month and they explained this month is full but they would certainly keep me in mind for the month after that, and from what I have heard they are men of their words. Following the Nerd have also been contacted but as of yet no reply.

I recently contact Irish Comic News website asking for a review but unfortunately they wouldn't be able to facilitate me for a week or two. Although the founder did contact me and said he enjoyed the online comic and invited me to have a space on their Irish Comic creators page, which will give me more exposure at place my name along side such notable Irish comic creators such as PJ Holden, John Robbins, John McCrea and a number of other well known Irish comic artists, make room for the new guy people.

As for Hunt - Part One, with my current printing costs I will be able to make a profit from the small run of 50 which will allow me to continue producing the series. I have slight dilemmas to over come first and a bit of haggling to get past before I will be happy letting them out of my hands to either an independent comic shop or to a retailer, such as margins and how much promotion I would be granted, and if promotion would be taken out of any profit. I have heard of a small comic shopping opening called Ennis books, which will be a place for independent comic creators to display work, but this again depends on percentages. I have spoken with the owner of Forbidden Planet in Belfast before about perhaps putting my comic in there, he agreed at  the time but that was a while ago and we would have discuss terms, although I feel he would be quite generous.

A little closer to home now, with a limited access to a comic book culture in Cheltenham I have tried to maximise my presence firstly by producing a selection of flyers showing images of my work with contact details and also URLs to both my web comic and also my illustration page. 

I placed a poster and a stack off flyers in the comic book shop Proud Lion, I also took a stack of flyers to The Frog and Fiddle and a poster as well, my thinking being that if someone is bored in the bar and they happen to have acquired and i-phone then they can peruse my web comic while waiting for a friend or possibly a lover. A small tactic that I have used is to make myself sound more important than I am, as you will see in the flyers below I don't simply state that there is a web comic by Matthew H. Smyth, I word it as "A new web comic..." therefore implying that there is in fact more in existence. I have in fact seen people logging on while I have been frequented said bar, purely for research purposes you understand. 

Along with the flyers and posters I have also printed of some rather fetching business cards, this idea did not appeal in the recent past but on further consideration in the right place at the right time if I am able to produce something that will help a perspective client remember me then they are a great tool to have at your disposal.

After University I would like to experiment possible with the idea of stand alone pieces more and perhaps get some alternative exhibitions on with some of more horror influenced Illustrations and exploring the grotesque and the grotesquely beautiful as I feel that some of my stand alone work is strong enough to stand beside any other artist in Belfast and command the space it inhabits.

I mentioned earlier about being concerned about giving up control of my own created characters, well after considering that fact it gave me a different outlook into which direction that I would like to take when I return to Ireland, yes I still would like to work with Abandoned Comics or Uproar comics and perhaps submit stories for some of there characters, for example the Love Never Dies story, but what I am really interested in doing is building up my own comic book company under the name of Lethal Comics. I understand this will not be a quick process and will not reap any real financial rewards for some time but I believe that in time I will be able to carve out a company that tells edge and interesting stories that will keep people coming back for more. 

Matthew H. Smyth