A robot, in disguise

I hope you have been enjoying Hell On Wheels, as it moves into its final week. Like Kit + The Wolf, it draws on the first comics I made as a child, the Marvel UK Transformers comics that made me want to make my own. Now that I've moved in my new house and begun to settle back into a routine, I can literally set childish things aside. The difference may not be immediately obvious.

Of course, it is a hubristic act to think that you can make a Transformers comic, because no characters are harder to draw. I had a little bit of shape language from drawing them endlessly when I was young - the reason I can reiterate the basic shapes of those characters now, on demand. But actually getting a character exactly right, over and over again, required me to do what I did when I was 9 or 10 - draw that character repeatedly until I found their shape. Here are some selected sketchbook pages from this process.

I had to find a balance between a recognisable shape and just drawing Cliffjumper or Smokescreen or something.

I tried some bug-eyed heads, and some hornless heads. There are two heads on the right that are purely recreational.

More heads. This went on for ages.

The "twist my head off" idea unlocked the character of Gareth. A downbeat Welsh robot, voiced by Mike Bubbins.

Surf Tony the Pretender was never going to make the cut, was he?

Planning the cover for part one. I wanted it to look like an Alex Toth Hot Wheels comic. And it did. It looked just like a Hot Wheels comic.

There will be a week's break after the end of the current story on the website, I am not delighted about this but I'm in the midst of writing the follow up to Great British Bump Off, which will take five weeks, and follows two weeks I took off to move house and then rebuild my mind and body subsequent to moving house. I'll try to find a fun thing for the Patreon to fill this deathly gap. But given my current energy levels, I might get lost looking for one.