Well, it's official...

God, it feels like I've been sitting on this one for ages, but considering the amount of times it's been popping up on the Internets, I'm thinking it's maybe been the worst kept secret out there... Or it would be if, you know, anyone really cared.

So, yes, it's true: myself and Bryan Coyle have managed to blag a deal with Insomnia Publications to see the publication of an original graphic novel we've been working on called Babble.

It's been a long, hard struggle to get this into the hands of a publisher, there's no denying that; we've had some setbacks, some tears, some laughter and a whole raft of rejections from various publishers on both sides of the Atlantic - some of whom, it has to be said, were insanely helpful and supportive to a couple of chancers like me and Bryan. Needless to say, after all that, my ego's taken such a beating off the back of this, it's had to check itself into a shelter...

Anyway, Babble is a project that I've had kicking around in my life for a long time in various forms, but kept getting abandoned then restarted and rebooted, until I finally found the angle to make this work in the way it deserves. At least, I hope I've found the right angle. We shall see... Or, rather, you will, when it finally hits the shelves. If you decide to read it. Which you might not. That's up to you. I'm not going to beg you to buy the book. At least not yet.

Of course, this isn't the first collaboration that Bryan and I have worked on. We've had strips appear in Accent UK's series of themed anthologies, including ROBOTS (Previews order code: MAR083379), WESTERN (Previews order code: JUN090671) and the upcoming PREDATORS (due for release in 2010):

So, we're kind of confident we can pull this off. However, as I write this post, things are still in the early stages, and there's every chance this might fall apart before we can manage to get the book to the shop shelves. Of course, that's the natural pessimist in me. There's also a very good chance that we could actually pull this off. And, thinking about it, I think that's what's really scaring me about this...

If you want to know more (and God knows why you would), you can go check out the brand spanking new Babble website; initially, it'll probably be more of a production blog than anything else, giving anyone who's got an interest in these things an insight into how we're putting the book together, and then hopefully it'll become the main promotional site. You can find that here: www.babblecomic.com.

And, because we're so on the cutting edge of cool, we've also got a Twitter micro blog set up, which you can follow here: www.twitter.com/Babble_GN. To keep all the retro lovers out there pacified, too, we've added a MySpace page (www.myspace.com/babble_gn) and a ComicSpace page (www.comicspace.com/babble). All of these are linked from the main website.

So... Lots of sleepless nights and endless worry here I come...