Just a quick post this time to say the Shop is now re-opened. Get our new comics straight to your door, pay via PayPal!

The Shop is now open

In Anglise, the peace has been kept for centuries by
Knights, an elite caste of magic-using warriors serving
the code of strength, skill and honour; ‘Fan Dan Go’.
The year is 1975, Imperialist rebels fight on the streets, armed with deadly magical rayguns.
Who’s gonna put them in their place? Knight First Class, Rekki Lune! The fiery, foxy, flare-wearing firecracker armed witha hundred pounds of steel and a short temper….oh, and some of her friends
A collection of the first three chapters of Fan Dan Go,
the webcomic by Kate Holden updated weekly at
fandangocomic.com

Volume 1

110 Pages Full Colour

Shop – Fan Dan Go

IndieManga’s first anthology. The book is approximately 100 pages and features the following exciting things:

Fell by Kate Holden
Alice Fogarty Hates Small Towns by Sally Jane Thompson
The King’s Silver prose story by Rebecca McCarthy
Rake: Drink & Driving By Kate Holden & Rebecca McCarthy
Valley of the Shadow by Anna Fitzpatrick

Shop – Origins

Features five self-contained short comics by Anna Fitzpatrick, Sally Jane Thompson, Kate Holden, Rebecca McCarthy,  and Sarah Burgess.

130 Pages.

Shop – Legends

Aer is the most talked about superhero of her generation, smart and powerful she has defeated many a villain. But very little is known about her. Where did she come from? where did she get her powers why does she fight?

Doug is an under achieving journalist whose life has been consumed by an obsession with Aer. When he literally finds the right kind of dirt on her, he realises he has the leverage he needs to get the worlds first exclusive on the elusive heroine.

What happens when Aer finally lets someone in?

24 pages B/W A4.

Story by Rebecca McCarthy Art by Chris Pullen

Shop-Heavier than Aer

IndieManga will be at the MCM Expo at table K4 29th and 30th October ( Saturday and Sunday, Friday is looking unlikely).

We have 2 new books out, if you can’t make it they will be available to order from IndieManga.com after the con:

Heavier than Aer ( A4 28 pages black and white)

By Rebecca McCarthy Art By Chris Pullen

Aer is the most talked about superhero of her generation, smart and powerful she has defeated many a

villain. But very little is known about her. Where did she come from? Where did she get her powers why does she fight?

Doug is an under achieving journalist whose life has been consumed by an obsession with Aer. When he

literally finds the right kind of dirt on her, he realises he has the leverage he needs to get the worlds first

exclusive on the elusive heroine.

What happens when Aer finally lets someone in?

Fan Dan Go volume 1

Story and Art Kate Holden

Over 100 full colour pages plus extras, collects chapters 1-3 of the web comic

Fan Dan Go’ is an action comedy comic set in the Retropunk Fantasy land of ‘Anglise’, a magical alternative version of 70′s England. It’s about the adventures of a group of hip young Knights trying to keep the peace and make a living.

IndieManga at MCM Expo!

With the relaunch of the site, I felt it was a good time to start with some fresh tutorials. Manga from Scratch was a bit old, a bit verbose and not clearly planned.  So I’m doing some new ones. This is ‘Make Great Comics’, and this is our first instalment: Concept.

One of the questions often asked of creators is ‘where do you get your ideas?’ The idea or concept is simultaneously the most and least valuable commodity in the creative process. Obvious without ideas we are nothing, a good idea is a wonderful thing, after all, but in the end, it is an insubstantial concept and its success depends heavily on the execution. An idea that never gets made into something that can be shared is functionally worthless, a good idea drawn and written badly is a waste and meanwhile, a very dull sounding idea can transcend its humble foundation through excellent writing and art. Ideas are literally the stuff of dreams.

-How do I come up with good ideas?

The first thing should always be to consider what you find interesting.  A place, a feeling, an action, it could be anything. Have you ever been just in a place and seen something interesting and your thoughts have gone off on a strange tangent? Or observed something in your life that your mind squirrels away for later? A good creator sees gaps and oddities and thematic links between things.  You need to open your mind to those links and start thinking ‘outside the box’ to use a horribly clichéd term. Personally I like to start with spider diagrams! I love spider diagrams! You start with a word and come up with words relating to that word, and words related to those words, spinning out a web of fascinating links and ideas. Let’s demonstrate here. I’ve given myself the starter word ‘Chess’:

This is just a small, quick one (five minutes or so). There are avenues I haven’t explored such as ‘game’ and ‘man vs computer’, but this is just to show you how it works. As you can see, a pretty basic one word idea has taken us to some very interesting places. Our chess themed comic could be about a working class black guy fighting an unending struggle for social mobility against a society run by powerful white people. It could be a fantasy story about a Knight who has a strange, pathological desire to take the most convoluted path they’re presented with, unable to settle down and take the simple ‘straight ahead’ road. It could be a story about a Woman who has to work twice as hard as her male counterpart and achieves far more, yet is never seen as important. It could be a story about a battle that keeps being fought, yet both sides forget it has taken place the next day and go to fight again. All this from just the name of a boardgame! Try taking a word you like, or flicking to a random dictionary page, and seeing where your spider takes you.

-Idea Katamari

I have a few comics which I call ‘Katamari Comics’. A Katamari is a ball of collected bits and bobs, like in the video game ‘Katamari Damarshii’. Sometimes I have an odd idea, and I think hmm, that is an interesting idea, but on its own it’s not really enough to make a whole comic about, so I file it in my head and/or write it down in my ‘ideas book’. If I come up with another idea that is of a similar ilk, I may tack on other ideas to it, creating a resulting combination of ideas. My webcomic is just like this. It’s a combination of a couple of characters I came up with for another comic which had a very lacklustre concept so didn’t make, but liked the two knights (Rekki and Subo) mixed with a desire to make something that was like a shounen action manga but with a female lead and aimed at a more female audience, mixed with an idea for a fantasy setting where it’s the 1960s/70s.

-Idea Books and Boards

It’s a good idea and very inexpensive to get a book or a computer folder set up for jotting down ideas and collecting inspiring images.  I use mine to record interesting thoughts, concepts, things I’ve seen in dreams, character ideas, word play, mythology… Just about anything I think is interesting! Any old notepad from a stationary shop will do. Just keep it to hand. Look for thematic links between your concepts, read lots of books, try different hobbies and visit interesting places. There is inspiration everywhere if you just look for it.

Make Great Comics! Part 1: Concept and Brainstorming

The old shop is now offline, the new (and I hope easier to use) Pay Pal shop will be up after Expo, when we can divide up new stock. This Expo will be really interesting

Shop offline

You don’t have to spend a fortune finding the good software and tools for writing comics. A lot is available for free. Here I’ll briefly guide you through my favourites.

Libreoffice – Libreoffice has basically taken open over from Open Office as the free alternative to Microsoft office. So if you want a decent quality free word processor I highly recommend it.

Celtx - Celtx can technically be used to manage the creation of a whole project. There are places to add character bios. In fact it automatically tracks new characters. I use it mainly for it’s script writer, it also has a dedicated graphic novel export format which exports comic scripts into table like formats, dividing each panel up into different boxes.

After the Deadline a free spelling and grammar checker that you can get both as a Libreoffice plug-in and as a web browser plug-in. It’s grammar checking is really intelligent and I find it much faster and more accurate than other similar tools. If you’re worried about your writing being sent off to their server to check you can also host it on your own server.

Wikidpad I’ve not had a chance to use this and compare it with Celtx’s project management tools, but those of you writing longer more complex stories might want to give this a go. It basically creates a wiki locally on your system, so you can create universe ‘bibles’ , to keep track of stories, research etc.

Useful tools to use when writing comics

Heavier than Aer my collaboration with Pockets it’s finally almost complete!

Aer is the most talked about superhero of her generation, smart and powerful she has defeated many a villain. But very little is known about her. Where did she come from? where did she get her powers why does she fight?

Doug is an under achieving journalist whose life has been consumed by an obsession with Aer. When he literally finds the right kind of dirt on her, he realises he has the leverage he needs to get the worlds first exclusive on the elusive heroine.

What happens when Aer finally lets someone in?

HTA will be on the IndieManga table in the October 2011 MCM Expo and available online shortly after.

Heavier than Aer