Villa un united

I've been doing the villa comics main characters for a couple of years now and it's become a regular for me; although it's not weekly regular or even monthly. But quarterly.

It's still great fun to be involved in but a very strange process and here's why.

Normally in the comics industry you have an editor, who knows about comics and the industry in general, a writer who's honed his or her craft over the years and an artist who is talented in a likewise fashion. On the Villa comic it's a weird situation; an almost hybrid form of production, in fact, and here's how it works: The writer produces a very good script, it then goes to the PR department, not the editorial, but the PR department, who are, no doubt wonderful at what they do, but what they don't do is editorial. That's a whole new discipline of its own.

The PR department then re write the script how they think it should go and they pass it back to the writer who sends it onto me. I draw and colour it up and forward it to the clubs' editorial department who see all kinds of mistakes that they would've seen the first time round and corrections have to be made.

Why oh why can't it be send to the editorial department in the first place, I hear you cry. I couldn't agree more, but sometimes good ideas, like spring water, take a long time to filter through the thick layers of common sense and pride.

That said, I've always enjoyed producing the pages for Villa and I could be doing similar ideas for Coventry City and Wolverhampton Wanderers. Who knows, maybe they'll have an editorial department that they actually use.

The samples here are from the pages of the latest comic and last issue took four pages from me, next time I hope it's five; I love to draw and my capacity to sit and create knows no boundaries.