Continuing my plan to add colour to some of my stories, here are the first two Astorial Stories books now with added colours. The third story, The Building Trade, is also coloured – just not sent to the printer yet. I’m planning to complete all five mini-comics from the original series, plus The Floating Dan Affair, and possibly the unpublished story The Final Balloon – a total of seven minis in all, if I can manage it. For these reissues, I’ve excluded the footnote annotations that were a feature of the original publications, but may decide to put them all online later on.
Another day I’ll publish some sort of summary of what I was trying to achieve with this short run of 1986 mini comics, but suffice to say for the moment I think the colours add a lot to the original drawings, which were incredibly minimal and sketchy. It’s as though they’ve been waiting for 38 years for me to come along and complete the picture. When scanning the original art, I decided to leave in all the blemishes, paste-up marks, pencil lines, and traces of the large amounts of Tipp-Ex which I applied so generously at the time. All these glitches add to the finished result, for me, and in places the Tipp-Ex and crude marker pen swipes achieve an almost painterly effect.
Each comic is £2.50. A5 size, 12pp, full colour. Prices below include post and packing.
