The Next Comic Strip Submission---Pixy Wood

Well, here we go again. Well almost!

No sooner is one comic strip submission winging it's way over to the good old US of A than another idea is creeping like ivy across my drawing board and coalescing into a new idea.

Now this doesn't mean I don't think Tales from Toonsville has a cat in hells chance of selling, quite the opposite. I wouldn't have produced it if I didn't think it would have as good a chance as any other, but as I said in a previous post: 'This doesn't say you have no faith in the one you've just dispatched, it's just a way I have found to keep the hope alive and the odds my favour: the more I produce, the more they see my name. And the more they recognise my work the more likely they are to pay it even closer attention. And that, my friends, is more then half the battle'.

But that said, every time I complete a strip I can't see me ever creating one that I love so much. You see, I immerse myself in my art and ideas and every pencil stroke or scratch from the dip pen sees me imagining myself doing this for a living.

I guess I just love cartooning that much.

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Over the past week or two,  I've been uploading to Instagram a lot of close ups of the panel work from my new strip, and I thought it would be nice to both post some of them here and talk a little bit about the new idea.

Pixy Wood, the name of the new proposed comic strip, has been with me for many years in one form or another. It was originally based on my grandfather's amazing tales of the Little People---the little spirits of his native Ireland---and when I was old enough to draw with any confidence I started to work up these characters.

Over the years they have grown and developed: been reinvented and redrawn in so many formats.

Pixy Wood (yes I know I've spelled it wrong, it was a conscious decision) is a cross fantasy/folklore strip that has, in it's time, been a children's novel, a picture book. A graphic novel and been through several incarnations as a comic strip. In fact when I was last attempting to sell an idea to the top five syndicates, Tribune Media Services showed it some real interest and in a personal letter I was told it was voted down by just one vote. So Pixy Wood could very well have been a staple in newspapers since the late 1990's. But it wasn't to be.

But now I have resurrected the strip, given it a new direction, repositioned and tightened up the personality and character traits, brought a few new characters in and changed completely the strips format.

Where as Pixy Wood always used to be a gag a day strip based on the daily comings and goings of a bunch of eccentric woodland spirits, it has now morphed into a docu-soap with longer stories being broken up by smaller ones before returning to the larger tale again.

There are a few stories being dealt with in the first 30 or so strips that'll make up this syndicate submission package. 

Dram O'Mara and Zymurgy P Lonnegan

Over the weeks that I will be showing them here you will hear of stories as odd as the Egg of Thritsella, the giant Eagle; Eejit Hunting Season; the 4:30 ant bus and the annual Pooka bake-off.

Pixy Wood has always been a vehicle for the part of my brain that deals with the fantastical and magical and the part that creates stories that wont fit into any other genre or strip idea I may have.

Oh and for the sheer hell of it, here's a few more snippets from the next comic strip submission to the big five US syndicates.

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Now onto part two of this blog.

I had originally intended to run the serialisation of a Sleepy Hamlet story over the next five to seven weeks and illustrate it. Unfortunately I have just discovered that under the rules of Kindle Singles, none of the stories they publish can have been published or posted anywhere else; they have to be original pieces of work, so sadly I cannot do anything about that for now as I wish to submit this tale to their editors.

However I may serialise the first three chapters of my already published novel the Night of the Village Idiots which is available on Amazon to download now. I will, of course, illustrate that as well. But that is for the future.

But for now you will have to put up with me bringing forward an idea I originally had planned for sometime around June/July.

Brabbles & Boggitt are not new characters to this blog as anyone with a very long memory will remember. I published an entire 46 page tale here in weekly segments a couple of years back. and I've recently written another story that I wish to pitch to comic book publishers around the world.

But in the meantime, and just like I did with the Tales from Toonsville strip, I will be serialising each of the eight comic pages that go toward making a pitch. So once again, you get first shot at the feature before anyone else...lucky old you!

Anyway, to wrap up this lengthy post I'd like to invite you all back next Friday for Part I of the Brabbles & Boggitt tale title the Blue Elves & the Shoemakers.

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Next Wednesday I will be taking you through the process of producing a watercolour caricature. I've done one of these before, but seeing as it was very popular and you do like my tutorials, I'm going to do another one for you, then we'll have more tutorial work, talk of other comics projects, more sketchbook corner, new comic book and comic strip submissions and..and...well it's just all too much but very much fun indeed, and it's all here on your Diary of a Cartoonist & Writer. 

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