Without Fear

SKYSCRAPER is a comic I wrote with Mitchell Collins on art, Simon Robins on colours and letters, and we funded a newspaper sized print run on Kickstarter through my imprint Four Colour Ray Gun.

I’m incredibly proud of this comic. It’s unlike anything I’d ever done before, and I think it turned out absolutely beautiful, and exactly how we imagined. It’s a strange one-shot comic we printed at newspaper size, on newsprint paper stock. Every page is the same structural frame, a front view of a building, broken into 5 tiers. We then set about solving a murder mystery, of sorts, as each tier treks through time to show the history of the building, the truth behind the recent death, and the future we never saw coming. It’s part crime story, part warped sci fi tale, and part experiment with time, panels, and story in the comic form.

This video flips through the comic, at double speed, so you can see how everything flows. Note how fine Mitchell Collins’ artwork is, and marvel at the colour schemes of Simon Robins as he plays with time cna character through the palette of each tier. An absolute gods level team up from these two, and I was blessed to write for them.

I love when a comic plays with this kind of structure, hence why I wanted to add something to the pantheon myself. I recently read HEDRA from Jesse Lonergan and it did some super awesome things with panels and layouts. ACTION TANK by Mike Barry is a great example of explosive and dynamic layout use. Whether it’s repetition for effect, or mucking around with time, I’m totally down for those types of comics. Scott McCloud frequently talked about comics and time as going hand-in-hand in the most interesting ways, and I think the best creators playing with that concept do the most stunning things with storytelling and art.

I hope the people who buy SKYSCRAPER get a few good reads out of it because I wanted to craft something that’s engaging, intriguing, and finally informing on some level.

You can buy a copy here: bit.ly/skyscrapercomic