WESTERN Preview Part 1: "A man's gotta do..."

With Accent UK's 2009 anthology WESTERN around the corner, I thought - purely in the name of shameless self promotion - that it would a good time to offer up some previews of A Fistful Of Steam Valves, the six page strip featuring in WESTERN from myself and Bryan Coyle.

The strip was originally conceived and written by me as a Steam Punk Spaghetti Western (hence the lack of dialogue on the preview page), but when Bryan got into the art, he drew on the influences of various DC Western comics of yesteryear. The finished strip is a strange mix of the two styles that somehow works...

However, Bryan and I can't claim sole credit for this strip. It's a long and convoluted story of how this came about, but a friend of mine, Billy Armstrong, stepped in to help out and did some original character designs for the main players in the strip, as well as providing some weird and wonderful technology designs that would populate this world we were creating.

I've been sitting on those since last year, dying to show them to the world, and over the next few blog posts, I'm going to do just that.

Unfortunately, not everything made it in to the finished strip - hey, we only had six pages! There's only so much you can cram into them! - but here, for the first [and probably only] time are the first of Billy's designs...

An iron horse... Seemed obvious in a Steam Punk Western... (click for larger view)

A rough sketch of our 'hero'... (click for larger view)

WESTERN will hopefully be available via Previews (more on that as it happens) and Accent UK's own website. It features a plethora of new and established talent, including Kieron Gillen, John Reppion & Leah Moore, Andy Bloor, Dwight MacPherson, Kirk Manley and Steve Bissette. You can find a the complete list of contributors at the Accent UK website. Go and buy a copy or two, and help the UK independent scene! And, you know, lie and tell me how much you love A Fistful Of Steam Valves...

More sketches will be coming very soon.