New Superhero Comic Book - the Mysterious Leo Fox

Leo Fox Comic Issue 2 - Digital Release

2011-06-19T10:45:00.000-07:00

Yes believe it or not - Issue 2 of Leo Fox has finally arrived. A mere six months on, you can now download and enjoy the digital release completely free of charge by clicking upon the following sentence.

GET ME MY FREE DIGITAL COPY OF LEO FOX #2 RIGHT NOW!

For those of you who are more 'digital immigrant' than 'digital native' some instructions follow.

The download is a zip file which can be opened and read like a comic book using a handy comic book reader program like this one:

GET ME MY FABULOUS FREE COMIC BOOK READER FORTHWITH!

So there you have it.

What are you waiting for?

Go and read it at once!

Leo Fox Comic Book Printed by Ka-Blam - First Proof Arrives

2010-12-05T05:19:00.000-08:00

The Proof of the Pudding...

Is in the eating. I staggered home from a friend's house somewhat drunk on London Pride last night to discover a comic book sized cardboard packet had arrived in the post.

After greedily ripping it open with childlike glee this is what I found:

It's an indescribable buzz to see the comic book you have been working on for two years appear in the physical realm as a real object, and a beautiful one at that. The guys at Ka-Blam have done a fantastic job. The colours pop and the atmosphere of the artwork is lifted immensely by getting the darkness into it that you miss on a backlit screen. It's much grittier and tougher than it looks on screen.

Take a look at these shots to see what I mean,

Take a look at some close ups too to get an idea of the detail and quality of the print,

OK I know these quick snaps don't really do it justice but trust me the printing is excellent.

Any problems? Not really, of course there are a few errors but sooner or later you have to just send the damn thing to print. I have been far too obsessed with fine details on this project and going forward I'll try to bear that in mind. It's been a huge learning curve but we cannot take 2 years to make one comic book again so we need to raise our game.

My conclusion at this stage is that print is always going to kick the arse off digital distribution systems. I will perhaps foolishly hang my hat on that right now. It is so much more impressive to hold a printed comic book than it is to read the thing on a computer it's hardly even the same experience at all.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone who voted for us in the competition at Talenthouse.

Leo Fox Comic Book Issue 1 Now Available to buy in Print

2010-11-24T01:50:00.000-08:00

I received this in my email inbox this morning...

unfitcomix,

Your comic "The Mysterious Leo Fox - Issue 1" has been added to Ka-Blam's Digital Comics Shops!
Here is the web address to the IndyPlanet listing for your comic- http://www.indyplanet.com/index.php?id=.

Yes, that's correct. We are in print! After two years of production you can finally buy and read the printed version of issue one. The cover price is $3.95 but you'll end up paying around $10.00 to ship it to the UK. That works out to about 7.00 GBP. Here it is IN THE SHOP!

The next step for us is to get hold of a copy and assess the quality. If it checks out OK we'll probably order a box full and start targeting blogs and magazines with copies for review.

More on that later.

Leo Fox Issue 1 sent to Ka-Blam for Print

2010-11-15T11:40:00.000-08:00

With great trepidation and excitement I can finally announce that Leo Fox Issue 1 has been sent to the printer. We've chosen Ka-Blam Digital Printing to do the job for a few reasons. Ka-Blam specialise in printing comic books (unlike similar services based here in the UK) and they have a reputation for turning out brilliant colours.

They'll also take care of a lot of the business stuff - they'll allocate us an ISBN number and bar code and we'll be able to sell the comic via their sister site Indy Planet. We can even distribute through their distro outfit Comics Monkey.

We're really, really, really excited about seeing the final version in print.

It's really happening! Take a look at this. Proof that order 22158 is in the system.

What happens next?

The guys at Ka-Blam have to get around to servicing our order, downloading our files and prepping them on their system.

Then we will order a proof copy, which will probably take weeks to cross the atlantic.

I'm hoping we'll see Leo Fox in print before the end of 2011.

Fingers crossed!

If you're thinking of using Ka-Blam - Stay Tuned for a technical post on how we prepped Leo Fox for digital printing - coming soon 'the science bit'

Unfit Comix throw Leo Fox into the Ring at Talenthouse

2010-10-19T09:41:00.000-07:00

Things got pretty exciting today when my illustrator friend Jenny Ball threw me a link to a SWEET competition at the Talenthouse Web site. Apparently they are offering a publishing deal on the new digital comics platform Graphic.ly and a mentoring session from a comics pro - Jim Mahfood for the best project to enter.

Well now, I did enter that competition faster than you can say - how does one enter? It's done. We are in the ring and ready to do battle with three of our best pages uploaded for voting. Choosing the pages was pretty tough but I think the pages I put up best reflect the narrative, the drama and the art. I'm hopeful that Mahfood will get the project because he's all into street art and such and we have that vibe going on.

Anyway, go and see for yourself! If you like the project then vote for it. You will have to sign up to the site to do so but hey, it's a pretty cool site.

VOTE FOR US HERE

New Features for Leo Fox Comic Blog

2010-10-17T01:53:00.000-07:00

You know when you wipe up some gunk in the kitchen and you realise you've made a clean spot? And then you have to do the whole kitchen? That's pretty much what happened here at the Mysterious Leo Fox Comic blog. I lost the html for the old layout so I had to bend my head round the hideous new blogger layout designer.

How do you win? Nice wide, white space to make it nicer to read! More ways to interact and comment and contribute and download free stuff!

You can now join the site using Google Friend Connect, 'Like' (Me Gusta - It's in Spanish, don't ask me why.) posts on Facebook or 'Tweet' anything that catches your interest. The posts are now getting properly tagged so you can read what interests you more easily without wading through the archive.

That's all! Now back to work. I have sworn before all the gods that Issue 1 will be printed and available to buy from Indy Planet before Christmas. There is much to be done.

Strange Things Spotted in Light Junkies on Flikr

2010-10-12T05:37:00.000-07:00

It seems that our worst fears have been realised. The Strange Things are real and now there is photographic evidence. We thought Leo Fox was just a comic book! We were wrong.

Props to http://www.flickr.com/photos/twincitiesbrightest/ for papping the strange things. Check out the http://www.flickr.com/groups/lightjunkies/ group if you like this sort of business.

A Bit of News and That

2010-10-06T09:13:00.000-07:00

I have moved to Brighton. Paul is still in Tooting so now we are physical some two or three thousand kilometres closer together. The result of which is as yet unclear. Has it changed our workflow? Not really except that we've had some long freewheeling chats about the future of Leo Fox (the next story arc after this one) and we've invented a kind of metaphysical framework for Leo's hand magic.

The benefit of being in Brighton as opposed to Barcelona is that it's a 1000 times easier for me to 'network' and I'm starting to think it's time to come down out of Unfit towers and meet some other producers.

I've already been introduced to illustrators and writers and I've only been here a month so things look like they could get really interesting.

In the mean time, it's important not to lose focus because after all, making the comic is largely about me being on my own in front of the computer and ploughing through the huge list of tasks in hand.

Right now I'm remastering Issue 1 - Clarifying the narrative, rejigging the layouts and using better fonts. It already looks better for it.

And finally, the new version of the cover is very exciting now thanks to Pablo's excellent design work...

Fonts & Ethics

2010-07-31T03:35:00.000-07:00

When I first tackled the issue of lettering Leo Fox I realised that I had neither the time nor inclination to master traditional hand lettering technique. (It's on the list of things to do before I die but hell people we have a project to finish here) So I decided upon an approach that blended hand writing style fonts with bits and pieces of hand lettered text scattered around.

I had been reading Bleach online and as Bleach is scanned and translated by enormously dedicated Manga fans it is lettered entirely by amateurs. This amazing level of dedication aside, the guys who letttered bleach used lettering that was sympathetic to the action and emotion being relayed by the characters. To clarify, the lettering was not uniform in style and could change to indicate different characters, moods etc. I liked this approach and decided to try and use it.

When we sent issue one to our contact in the industry the one thing he didn't like was the lettering. He acknowledged that he might be out of date in wanting to see uniformity but he raised it nonetheless. After all, in issue one every set of characters speaks with their own font.

Uniform capitalised lettering - the Marvel Way

The problem as I see it is this, if the lettering attracts too much attention it breaks the spell of the story by forcing the reader to pay attention to the way the story is told rather than the story itself. Now i'm more inclined to agree with this and I am considering reverting to a more uniform style of lettering. In fact i'm more or less copying the lettering style in Alan Moore's the Watchmen.

I use a simple 20 dollar piece of software called scan-a-hand to draw my fonts and convert them into TT. I want the final cut of Leo Fox to contain ONLY fonts that I have made myself so as to avoid copyright problems further down the line. But here is where the ethical question arises. If I copy another font by hand, thereby bringing in natural flaws and quirks and adding a few of my own details, is that OK?

I'd love to illustrate this post with examples but I can't because all my fonts are in a van in France. But that's another story...

The Fun Bit

2010-07-28T03:02:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite parts of this process is seeing initial sketches come back from Paul and especially when they are new characters I haven't seen yet. Right now, Paul is throwing uploads of page roughs from issue 3 into our secret facebook group from which we manage the project. (Yeah this whole project has been coordinated through FB - Perhaps a subject for another post...)

So I have recently seen Leah Fitz for the first time which was ridiculously exciting for me. I have a strong feeling about her, I think she could grow into a hugely powerful character and a real super villain for our times.

Issue 3 has been much tougher to write than the previous two. The script alone weighs in at 4500 words which is more than double the size of issue 2. I tried to keep it down to 24 pages but I doubt it will fit so issue 3 could well be a bumper size special. Fortunately Paul seems excited enough about the story to carry the extra workload of more pages. (It is a huge job to water colour every last panel)

I can't say exactly why issue three was so tough to write. Perhaps because our expectations have risen, perhaps because we had to bring satisfying resolution to a complex set of narratives, perhaps because endings are just hard work. But for all that the fun bit is that much more fun because now I can see it come to life in Paul's increasingly dynamic sketches.

I don't know much about comics but I know what I like.

2010-07-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

On the 11th March I recieved the following somewhat breathlessly excited missive from my paintbrush jockey, Wheeler.

"Okay stop what you are doing and take note. Homework this week, the greatest comic of all time. Elektra Assassin by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz. It has all them qualities we are grasping for, poetry, pace, epic story, amazing and original artwork, sheer brilliance! I missed this on account that I took it for granted, wasn't interested in Elektra as a character and sort of hadn't seen the artwork enough, but the recent refinding of Bisley had me realising his inspiration was sienkiewicz, and so one of the boys at work lent me the graphic novel. Its amazing!"

Some time later I found myself on Amazon with some money in the bank and thought I'd have a gander. Here is a picture of the book in question for all you jittery image obsessed readers who need a photo in between every par to keep you smiling...

Anyway I read it and it did blow me away. I still haven't fully got my head around it and I hasten to add that I'm not about to review it right now. It got me thinking about my relationship with comics. You see I came to Leo Fox as an outsider really, not having ever considered myself a comics fan. Paul on the other hand has grown up reading hundreds of the things.

In the past two years that we have been working on this project I have been systematically reading 'the greats'. I've gone through the Watchmen (In Spanish, because I can jejeje), the whole of the Promothea series, a wide range of Will Eisner and now Elektra. I'd also read Sin City, Dark Night Returns and a smattering of Batman in my youth alongside loads of Tintin and Asterix. I keep meaning to try some journalistic comics having dipped into Joe Sacco's Palestine and having absolutely loved the Waltz with Bashir movie, but I haven't got round to it yet. (BTW There is a fantastic set of video podcasts available on iTunes detailing a Stanford University project to make a docu-comic book called Shake Girl.) I am also certain I'm going to love the Sandman when I finally get to it.

I'm not eager to get into neurotic indy stuff like Robert Crumb. I'll try and keep an open mind to it and I did enjoy the Ghost World movie so maybe I should give it a try. And as for manga I tend to fall in and out of like with it but I do have a place in my heart for Bleach at least. (Again Bleach was a research suggestion from Paul - we see Leo Fox as a kind of European Manga) ((Incidentally Manga means sleeve in Spanish))

So what the hell is this post about? I'm still not sure but it's been fun to track my personal journey into comic books. What was yours?

Oh and as with love, the first cut is the deepest...

Strange Things Spotted in Newcastle Area, Stealing Cable

2010-06-19T03:07:00.000-07:00

Issue 2 Front cover - "How to" walkthrough.

2010-05-25T15:31:00.000-07:00

Hello!

Well its been a good couple of months but, like the writers of Lost, Pat and I are still working on the ending of this story even as we complete Act 2! As much as we began this comic in the spirit of Kirby and Lee, with their Marvel Method, what we have found in actually creating our comic is that stories have to have more depth than they did in the Silver Age. Therefore, what began as a simple adventure which Pat envisaged as 1 issue has become a monster, with supporting characters, inhabiting a storyworld with a rich history, all of which, you dear reader, may not even get to see in this first tale of ours, but which, believe me, has haunted our every waking moment and continues to drive the plot of poor little Leo's life in ways which at the outset we could not envisage! So, while we polish our little tale, and Pat frantically tries to resize and reletter issue 2 (after learning what "bleed" means to a Printer!), as well as rewriting issue 3 for the fifth time, I would like to present a walkthrough of how I painted the front cover for issue 2. In terms of my approach for this, it is similar to how I have worked on all the pages so far, but I have begun to use standard comic paper with guides, which is a little more expensive, but allows you to do all the work on one page without having to blow things up before painting. As for the idea, initially I tried something more abstract on canvas as with the first issue cover, but it wasn't working, so the idea with this cover was to portray the gist of what happens in the comic but to ramp up the tension by making all the dangers seem more immediate.

I started by sketching out the design using col-erase pencil, red for characters, blue for architecture. At this stage I tried a few things out for the composition, and having initially set the gates far back in the frame, I brought them forward to allow the Strange Things outside to be bigger and more defined. But from the very beginning I knew I wanted the image to have Leo looking quite small in the middle:

Next, I pencilled The definitive lines in...

...before using Lettraset marker pens to block out base colours, but having never used them directly on pencil before, I never realised that they smudged the graphite, not good, but anyway I could fix that later on...

Next I used watercolours to add detail, and texture.

Finally, highlights and were added with white acrylic paint, shadows with a second layer of marker, the pencil lines were inked. Then the whole thing was scanned into the computer and the levels tweaked to add a little boldness to the colour, to produce the finished image:

Which will be sent to Pat for lettering! So now you know.

Laters!

the Return of the Strange

2010-05-16T04:02:00.000-07:00

Looking back I can't recall exactly where The Strange Things came from. I have no recollection of making them up. It is as if they came with Leo, attached to him like a shadow or a reflection.

When I drew Leo Fox forth from my imagination, they followed him... unbidden.

They have remained in essence exactly what they were when they arrived in this dimension. They are anti-matter, they are chaos, they are the void dressed up as human beings for reasons of some cruel joke of the universe that we can barely comprehend.

When I first spoke about them to Ben and Paul the transmission of the idea was disturbingly flawless. They instinctively understood what The Strange Things were, even though I could never really describe them. Perhaps they were always there waiting for someone to notice them?

We knew that the Strange Things came when the reality storms struck and we also knew that they were creatures of the night.
We knew that they had some power to disrupt reality, reason and the very laws of physics.
We knew that they did not kill, but they somehow did something worse to any humans they could catch.
We also knew they couldn't go inside the homes of the citizens. They haunted the streets and the industrial zones and the wastelands, but they had no power in the jungle.

The Evolution of The Strange

The early sketches showed faceless hooded creatures, phantoms in urban sportswear. They seemed to hang on to form by a thin thread, always mutating, moving like nightmares.

During the production of "Leo Fox: Nan's Story" I was physically posessed by the spirit of the Strange Things. I learned to move like them and we filmed these movements. Using a process called 'Rotoscopy' we traced the frames of these videos and translated them into 3D animation.

Later, Ben Lycett remixed these movements from real life to create the hypnotic and elegantly disturbing movements of the Strange Things in the final scene of the film.

Now, several years later the Strange Things have evolved, ready for their iminent reappearance in "Leo Fox, The Sick".

The essence remains the same but now the creatures have faces and numbers. They still represent the indistinct fear of an immoral, inhuman, inner-city youth in ghostly hoodies felt by UK surburbanites. They also represent the deeper, more universal fear of the void, the psychological black hole at the edge of the mind, the thought that maybe 'all of this' means nothing and always has.

However, we couldn't rely on movement to supply the atmospherics in the comic book medium so Paul needed a visual re-think.

"Hey Paddy, had a brainwave today. The strange things. Talking about different universes and all that, and how we tried to portray that in video style, I had a root about for CCTV footage as reference for the strange things in the comic. The pictures I found are rather frightening in themselves...[They] perfectly capture the terror of the strange things. Some of them palpably make the hair stand up on the back of your neck."

Paul found new inspiration for the Strange Things by looking at CCTV footage. He created this mood board...

In the end, they came back to us again and posessed Paul one night. He frantically scribbled out the face that has haunted his dreams and mine ever since. We apologise in advance for showing this to you...

We can only hope that Leo finds a way to thwart them, before they leave his world and invade ours.

Thanks for reading.

Bedroom Revolution Continued

2010-05-05T16:17:00.000-07:00

I just added this as a comment but I thought I might upgrade it to a post because its worth saying in addition to what Pat has already said, and additionally, Pat is right. I'm very busy up ladders backstage at the moment, but still patiently waiting for Pat's next wordsplurge, so that I can pick it apart and throw it back in his aquiline face whilst shouting "Write it again Wordmonkey!", but in all honesty I think I see an end to this tale, once I finish getting married, buying a house, learning 12 backstage plots and whatever else life throws my way but, hey, its all as Unfit was meant to be, so read on!
I believe that there are other keys to the aesthetic which were there from the inception. Of course, work commitments and geography are having an effect on our work practice but originally the key constraint was equipment. Working with small computers and simple programs led to the idea of working lossy, Make do and mend, and also, work compact and portable. So that has been carried over into this comic project. I don't have a lot of space, so I work on A4 to draw and blow that up for painting. I use water colours instead of painting digitally to allow texture and accidents to creep in. And I also take chances with the work, sometimes coming close to destroying it and having to repaint over sections. But through this I have been able to come up with more efficient methods of painting, and have been able to play with lighting in the scenes. Mistakes for instance led to using tippex pens directly to add highlights that could then be coloured in the garage scenes. I think that this approach has run throughout the work and has led to trying things out, rewriting and reworking things and ultimately, streamlining the story. Whether this will lead to better work practice in future stories, or will only lead to more ways to rework and utilise happy accidents remains to be seen. But the ultimate philosophy of Unfit means that it doesn't matter. And that is that this is our story, our world, our characters, and our way of producing it, without deadlines and time constraints, simply for our own enjoyment, and this is what I really think Pat means when he talks of a bedroom revolution. So why not create your own story instead of reading one, or in fact watching a badly translated film of one? Its much more challenging,lots of fun, and ultimately more fulfilling!
PW.

The Bedroom Revolution

2010-05-04T05:57:00.000-07:00

We are of the generation that believed and continues to believe that a significant power shift is taking place in the way that culture is produced and more specifically, who it is produced by. Digital technology has opened up film, music, writing of all kinds, visual art and of course comic books. UNFIT was a collaboration born of a few key ideas related to this broader sense of the zeitgeist.

We surrendered all hope of commercial success is return for dizzying and total creative of freedom. We rejected outright the logic of tailoring a piece of art / entertainment to suit a mythical target market and in so doing made it unlikely that we would ever be able to quit our day jobs.

And those day jobs? I find myself writing this in a Tennis Academy in Spain. And Paul? He is probably up a ladder backstage of a famous musical in London’s theatre district. So the conditions in which we work as UNFIT Comix are somewhat unorthodox (Or is this becoming the norm?). To me at least (and I hope Paul will comment on this) UNFIT means the following things...

1.) Zero or Extremely Low Budget.
2.) Make It Work.
3.) Do it with what you have.
4.) Risk and Investment = Compelling work
5.) Ignore 'The Industry' but study 'The Masters'

I suppose that above all what is important to me is storytelling and using storytelling as a way have a deeper relationship with Real Life as it is Really Happening, Right Now.

I believe that we are creatures of fiction as much as fact and that therefore fiction is a very powerful tool. It is a tool for re-imagining our relationships with each other and it has for too long been in the hands of culture tzars, 'creative professionals' etc. Comics are an ideally accessible format for bedroom revolutionaries; especially now digital printing has evolved so much so maybe the bedroom revolution is just around the corner after all.

Imagine it! No more mass media. Just masses of media from the masses, liberating the masses. Oops! Wrong meeting...

A brief history of the Supreme Local Council

2010-04-24T06:23:00.000-07:00

Previous to the events of the summer of 1989, known colloquially as ‘The Great Delusion’, the ruling body of the estate was a typical British town council. The council was relatively new having been founded in 1968. Radiant Gardens had previously been under the influence of one of the borough councils of the greater city in which it was built. However, as Radiant Gardens and three other large housing projects were nearing completion in the late sixties it had been decided that the area required a separate council as if it were a town in its own right.

The Great Delusion had a strong impact on the council in various ways. Firstly, it removed three quarters of the area of its governance. The SLC town hall situated in Radiant Gardens survived but other council buildings in other parts of the district did not. Over half the councillors and council staff of 1989 disappeared and are presumed dead. Secondly, and most strikingly, it left the local council the only remaining organ of government on the estate.

The council had, without warning, suddenly acquired all the powers and responsibilities of central government. The shock of this almost destroyed the organisation. The desperate and terrified citizenry mobbed the town hall looking for answers and the councillors cowered inside with none to give. There were suicides. The incumbent mayor resigned and was later found dead in mysterious circumstances. The fate of the council balanced on a knife edge.

The turning point came when an ex army officer, Major Arnold Stephens stepped in with full support from the remaining body of police officers and declared emergency elections. Major Stephens ran for the office of Mayor alongside a liberal candidate for deputy Mayor, Aadarshini Rai. The campaign was short and there were insufficient candidates to fill the ticket, but at the last minute Leah Fitz declared herself candidate for councillor.

The arrival of Leah Fitz in the campaign was significant, yet in the panic of the moment largely unnoticed. Fitz had not been resident in Radiant Gardens before the delusion struck; she was one of some two hundred delegates at the science and technology conference of 1989. The conference centre did not survive the delusion but the hotel in which a large majority of the delegates were sleeping at the time, did.

Unbeknownst to most people, the scientists had narrowly voted amongst themselves against declaring themselves to be the emergency government of the estate. During heated and makeshift debates in the Novotel, a faction had grown up around the hugely charismatic and brilliant scientist Dr. Leah Fitz, this faction believed in radical technocracy. This is to say that they believed that only the highest scientific minds could deal with the disturbances the estate was suffering and therefore only they were fit to rule.

The opposing faction, who included the famous Mungo Parks, argued that the scientists should form an Institute for Research and place themselves at the disposal of the Town Council. Parks’ faction won the debate and Parks made a deal with Major Stephens.

As soon as it became clear that the seat of power was going to reside with the mayoral office Leah Fitz took herself and her key loyalists into the election and swept up twelve of the twenty two positions of councillor.

The election of 1990 had a turnout of less than twenty percent of eligible citizens. Many people did not even know it was taking place. However, by that time the disturbances of the great delusion had finally abated and something resembling everyday life was emerging in Radiant Gardens again.

Stephens’ council drafted and passed a new law as the first point of business. The new law abolished elections until further notice, accorded the council supreme emergency powers on the estate and gave the council power over legislation, crime and punishment, security, commerce, trade, industry and in short: everything.

Stephen’s styled himself as a latter day Churchill but was shrewd enough to keep the liberals on side with Deputy Mayor Aadarshini Rai promising that emergency powers would be abolished as soon as the estate was safe from the menace of the nightly ‘Reality Storms’.

In order to win hearts and minds, the SLC announced its rebirth with several PR stunts in close cooperation with the Institute. Firstly, the foundation of the Institution for AMP research was announced and early findings on the phenomenon of Anti-Mathematical Pressure were trumpeted as reasons for hope. Secondly the schools were re-opened and thirdly Mungo Park announced his great exhibition into the mysterious Jungle.

With kindness came kicks, and Leah Fitz’s first great political success was the introduction of the Compulsory Curfew. Fitz also began to display a disturbing talent for Realpolitik when she planted loyal followers in Mungo’s research team, a development which later was to have huge ramifications for the citizens of Radiant Gardens.

The Supreme Local Council that we encounter in “Leo Fox: The Silent, the Sick & the Rude” is ten years old and bitterly divided. Stephen’s has gradually weakened and taken to drink. Fitz has acquired huge leverage over the mayor’s office and Stephen’s is too weak to fight her off.

Only Rai remains to lead the opposing faction. A third and somewhat lunatic faction has also emerged centred around the ‘return of the king’, a desperate fantasy gaining ground on the estate. Believers are, to varying degrees, convinced that a return to absolute monarchy is the path to redemption.

The battle lines and areas of influence that each faction possesses are detailed in the following section.

Scripting, Scripting & Scripting Some More

2010-04-16T03:11:00.000-07:00

I am currently knee deep in scripting issue three of the series. This process has yet to congeal into anything like a systematic approach. Paul and I are still going back and forth, learning and experimenting and dealing with all the head bending stuff that goes with the territory of "making stuff", "Being Creative" or as David Lynch once tweeted "Objectifying the Subjective."

However, it is tremendously exciting. And by that I mean the story not just the process of creating it. (Although the excitement of the process is I think what gives the final product it's soul.)

What's that? Get specific you say? OK well I can give you some details right now.

Issue three is called "The Rude", and will feature a whole host of new characters including Detective Crowder, Leo's Nan, and finally Leo's arch enemy Dr. Leah Fitz. The story explodes into action from the first page and the plot comes at you like a ninja.

Doing issue three is in a way 'the fun bit' because it's the issue where all the tension built up in the first two issues finally erupts into action.

So I better get on and finish up the script then because I can't wait to see Paul's sketches.

The Post of Shame

2010-04-02T06:49:00.002-07:00

It seems that all our bold promises of regularly updated content have proven sham lies. This is par for the course with novice bloggers, so it won't surprise any of you.

Here we are with the 'post of shame', attempting to make everything better again, much like like a divorced father in a fever of guilt lavishing acts of frantic overcompensation upon his bewildered children.

The gifts in question are teaser shots from the upcoming Leo Fox issue 2 - "The Sick".

And here they are...

The Release - Click on the Cover to Download!

2009-08-20T04:06:00.000-07:00

We are proud to announce the release of the digital version of issue one. The complete first issue is now available for download by simply clicking on the image above!

Instructions for the layman on how to read the comics are available by clicking HERE.

If you can't open the file you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader which is available HERE.

While you are waiting for the download why not join our facebook group? It's right HERE.

Please, please, please if you do read the comic at least let us know and better still give us your thoughts! The comments are open on this blog and of course the facebook group too. If you prefer to comment anonymously just email us directly.

Patrick Potter - pjpotter@googlemail.com
Paul Wheeler - pual75@hotmail.com

Many thanks!

Also, watch out for all sorts of additional content for blog followers in the coming weeks and months.

We will be documenting our heroic struggle to get published and reflecting on our creative process in detail which we hope will make this blog a great document for other producers to read or indeed anyone who wants to get a look behind the scenes of this sort of thing.

Speak soon...

The Elevator Pitch

2009-08-13T07:05:00.000-07:00

This is the pitch that we're sending out to publishers...

The Mysterious Leo Fox – A Superhero for 21st Century Britain

The Epic Adventures of a Troubled Rudeboy Wizard on a Cursed and Magical Council Estate

Leo Fox is the Rolling Stones to Harry Potter’s Beatles. Why should fantasy always be set in posh private schools? What if Gandalf was a belligerent alcoholic?

Leo is every boy growing up in an area where you can’t play out after school because it’s too dangerous. Except that in his world ‘Radiant Gardens’ all the mundane horrors of petty crime have taken on the aspect of epic fantasy.

Leo is a classic superhero series with enough high octane action for the younger audience but the added depth of a richly textured story world, with real character development, tough questions raised and an emotional reality rendered.

The Crunch

2009-07-26T05:41:00.000-07:00

Every project has a crunch. No matter how informal or hobbyist your approach might be, sooner or later the crunch time comes. Right now i'm right in the middle of it. Having received all the final artworks from our illustrious pencil man 'Pabbers' I am about half-way through laying out the pages and putting in the ballooning and lettering. This is time-consuming (for a first timer like myself) in spite of shortcuts gleaned from blending fonts and handwriting with hand-drawn balloons.

Even so, what's all the rush? Well, apart from the fact that we'd quite like to finish the work before we die we now have a more external deadline. My comrade 'P Wheeler' is a grafter (hard worker) and as such when he found himself without employment in his chosen field (character animation) he simply took his 25 years of education and his MSC down the pub and started grafting (working) behind the bar.

He's also a great one for chatting up strangers and this has resulted in a fantastic opportunity for the team! Paul serendipitously got talking to a publisher who just happens to publish the occasional avant garde graphic novel and lined us up with a pitch. (no names yet - don't want to jinx it.)

So basically we have to get a rock solid pitch in the man's inbox by Friday coming. And I have 12 pages left to complete. So I shan't be posting any more this month! But I will talk more and indeed probably far too much in August. In the meantime, in the interest of maintaining your interest dear reader, I post a recent version of our front cover...

Writing a Comic - Where to Start?

2009-07-13T04:06:00.000-07:00

Pat and I first began talking about writing Leo Fox as a comic in May 2008 whilst I was visiting him in Barcelona. We both thought it was a good idea, but geographical distance seemed to be the major stumbling block. However, I have been a comics fan since I was about 13, and as such I had a pretty good idea how to begin.

A couple of Christmas's ago my girlfriend had bought me Stan Lee, the long time editor in chief of Marvel Comics's autobiography. In it he had detailed just how he had managed in the early sixties to write such a large volume of comics every month using what became known as The Marvel Method.
This seemed perfect for our needs, and pretty shortly, Pat had sent me a general overview of the story he wanted to tell.

The story seemed pretty linear to me and I told him so. Good stories don't just travel forward following the plot of the main character, they are (in comics anyway) always best when several narratives intertwine and come together. So we started to split up the story into several narratives, and we both did some reading into how comics work. Importantly we both read Scott McCloud's superb analysis "Understanding Comics".

So we started again, and this time we had something to work with!

The good thing about using the Marvel Method is that it leaves both the artist and the writer free to maintain creative freedom, however, initially it is a slow process. This is because every time the writer says " then person A bumps into person B", the artist has to go back to the drawing board and design a new character! Every time the writer says " person A goes over there" the artist has has create a new environment! In the first issue this was a slow process but it is these details that make a comic believable, and so we had a lot of talk over decisions like this.

some character design sketches I produced

I started creating characters for Pat to look at and when we were happy with them I started roughing out the individual panels. The way I worked was to just go for it, and not think too much about the finished page. Having little actual professional equipment, I simply sketched out rough panels whenever I got chance or series' of panels when it seemed appropriate, and kept a file of everything I had done. When I was happy with a particular section, I would scan these roughs into photoshop and work them into a layout for Pat to look at, adding textures and so forth, such as brickwork and graffiti to the rough sketches. We set up a Facebook group so that we could discuss the pages. Pat would take the roughs and add lettering for more discussion.

some of the stages of roughing and trying out dialogue.

Once we were happy with the rough layout I printed these off at A4, and went back to the drawing board. I used layout paper to trace the general rough, in some cases updating the drawing and neatening the pencils. At this stage we were thinking of simply creating black and white images, and I was inspired by some of Jamie Hewlett's work to maybe just keep the rough pencil line without going to the detail of inking.

Hewlett seems to keep much of the original pencil line with a little ink here and there, before colouring.

However, once scanned, although it looked alright it was not what I was hoping for. The problem was that I was using a small A4 scanner and so the pencilling wasn't strong enough. Also I had lost interest in the use of photoshop textures. To begin with they had looked good, but over a number of pages the began to look samey and detract from the drawing.

This first incarnation of the finished art wasn't quite right...

All through the last year I have been reading comics constantly. And not just the Marvel ones that I always favoured, I mean EVERYTHING. I have pretty much read the entire local libraries' supply. Ands that how I came up with watercolours, after reading a particular Sandman novel featuring the work of Yoshitako Amano.

yoshitaka amano's watercolours

So the final part of production for me anyway has been to blow up my finished pencils to A3 on a photocopier and watercolour directly onto that, before inking. Though the paper is not ideal, in some ways I like the wrinkles and so forth the water produces, and these add depth to my painting when they come to be scanned. This finally gave us a level of detail we could work with. I sent these finished pages off to Patrick, who is working on the final cleanup of the pages, and the lettering.

the three stages of artwork completion

Once this is done I'm going to do a final stage of digital cleanup and effects and that should be that!

So its taken a year so far but I think now we have worked out a system, the next 2 parts should be a lot easier to produce. I'm already up to the pencilling stage of part 2 and the roughing stage of part 3, so all these experiments have finally paid off, and hopefully as time goes by and I get better at this comic making business I'll be able to get better tools, a proper drawing board and chair would be a good start! And I already have ideas for speeding up the process!

thanks,
Pabs.

Enter the King of Pies

2009-07-07T15:50:00.001-07:00

Hi I'm Paul, the pictures guy* for The Mysterious Leo Fox and if you follow the link below you will come to a post I wrote on my blog about the project from last year when it was in its infancy. I hope to be adding new pics to this blog soon, Character designs and sketches I've done as we have fleshed out the comic along the way, so check back soon y'all!

Paul Wheeler - Diary of a 3D Artist

*(AKA 'The King of Pies')

Something is happening here...

2009-07-06T04:52:00.001-07:00

I realise that I tend to ramble. It's occurred to me that a total stranger to The Mysterious Leo Fox might need some basic questions answered. So, here is the shtick...

What the devil is this?

This is a blog co-written by Pat & Paul, two founder members of the UNFIT production team with the intention of introducing Leo Fox to the world. We will endeavour to make it clear who is writing what. (Basically, the fancy writing is mine. Paul tends to just use one clause sentences.)

Gary Gravel

Who the woozle?

Leo Fox - The Mysterious Rude Boy wizard who inhabits a bizarre council-estate afflicted by terrible anti-reality storms.

How the fudge?

Leo Fox is starring in the first production from UNFIT COMIX. This three part complete story arc is called The Silent, The Sick & The Rude and it is due to be published some time this coming Winter (2009).

Where is it!?

Sorry, you can't read it just yet but we will be posting all manner of sneak previews and related content here in the coming weeks and months. We may even publish the whole comic digitally for you but we need to figure out copyright issues and such first.

Why should I follow this blog then?

Because we shall reward the faithful. Because we will offer a glimpse into the inner workings of our production process. Because we will (and I promise) update at least bi-monthly with pics, thoughts, story world information, character profiles, secrets and much more.

There you go. Now I can get back to rambling.

How Long Has it Been?

2009-07-05T11:53:00.000-07:00

It's the Fifth of July 2009 and I sit in a top floor flat in Barcelona in the sweltering summer heat. To somehow draw a mental connection between this moment and that other moment when this project first came about requires considerable mental effort. Was that the same me?

Leo Fox, the Rudeboy Wizard has been kicking around for about five years now. Jesus! Five years! And where are we now? Well, right now Mr. Paul Wheeler and myself (Mr. Patrick Potter) are in the final stages of putting together issue one of Leo Fox's first comic book adventure - "The Silent, the Sick & the Rude."

We are proud of what we have on our hands and highly excited about getting it out there. Hence this blog. It's time to drag the project out of the shadows and shed a little light on it. We hope you'll follow us as we roll the dice at the great craps table of artistic production. Art is a casino where most players lose. We know this. That's fine. But we will do our best to make something a little bit special. And those of you who come in on the ground floor can gamble with us, on the off-chance that you can later, quite rightfully say, that you had a hand in the making of the myth.

In the meantime, where were we? Oh yes! How has it taken five years to get here?

I remember being in Middlesbrough, a dark and industrial town, studying computer animation. Siobhan Fenton was teaching a class on storytelling and we were set the task of producing a concept. I thought a lot about 'The Moomins' and I thought a lot about 'Forced Entertainment' and I thought a lot about the council estates that I spent time on in south London. Fairly soon, I conceived of a Rudeboy Moomin. I named him after my next door neighbours son from the Alton estate 'Leo' and the surname came from the crazy 'Sheila Fox' who often visited us then.

I knocked up a few test images and I fell in love with the concept. The essence of the whole thing is this - kids are kids. No matter how rough the area they grow up in, they don't deserve to be demonised out of hand. Leo Fox is meant to be the hero of the lads who grow up where life is a bit tougher and a bit uglier. How far we as producers manage to achieve this is up to us.

It was some months later, in 2004 that UNFIT first came together as a production team. I dropped out of Middlesbrough University. At that time in my life I was thoroughly lost. It was winter in Darlington and Benjamin Lycett and I were kicking around feeling lost together. I pitched him the idea and he was taken by it. "What the f#&k else have we got to do?" I asked him. He asked Paul Wheeler the same thing and before long we obtained a hefty grant to produce "Leo Fox, Nan's Story."

Many things have happened since then and now UNFIT is a scattered force. Scattered but still going. Thanks to the internet, Paul and I have been working on the new incarnation of Leo Fox for just over a year now.

Although there still remains much to be done, we have created a deeply elaborate fantasy / sci-fi world for Leo to live in. What we have so far released is but the tip of the iceberg. We hope you'll stick around to see more.

Welcome to the unreal world of Leo's estate, where anti-mathematical pressure lashes against the thin defences of the real and Strange Things walk abroad.