Hey everyone - big news: I finished all 96 pages of Her Hardboiled Heart (HHH) art yesterday. It’s been the most satisfying and strangely simple comic I’ve made so far, and it won’t be long until you can see it.
In fact, you can back it RIGHT NOW!
I’ve launched the campaign early and this is a heads-up for the people that made it possible: you.
Check out the trailer above.
Rewards start from £6 for digital and £12 for print, plus day 1 backers get great extras.
Hope to see you there. The campaign is only running for two weeks, so don’t miss out.
Making Her Hardboiled Heart
If you’ve been following me for any time, you’ll know I put a lot of (over)thought into what I make. Wild Nature took nearly four years to make. I changed a lot of things in it as I was drawing, especially in part 3. And the collected edition? New pages, redrawn pages, etc.
But HHH has been different. Part of that was I’ve been thinking about it for years, really ever since I started talking to Henry Scriven about him adapting it into a film (the marvellous, To A Cinder).
By the time I wrote the script, I knew deep-down what I was going to say with it, what was going to be different, and what I was going to build on from my other books. The characters and the world were clearer than I’ve had before, and the dialogue - my favourite thing - came to life exactly how I wanted.
For the love of Darwyn
The biggest influence on HHH is Darwyn Cooke’s The Hunter, an adaptation of Richard Stark’s brilliant crime novel. This is what inspired to start making comics when I was in my early 30s. Really, Darwyn’s death was a big motivator to me to stop procrastinating. Life’s too short to not try something you love.
This is the most overt I’ve been in showing his influence, lifting the limited colour palette, the lack of panel borders, and the messy, impressionistic line work. I’m not quite as refined, of course, but I did my own thing with the approach.
It was so much fun working this way. I see why Darwyn used it for the Parker adaptations, because it does a LOT of heavy lifting for mood and send of place. A few lines was enough to conjure the background, or the drifting smoke.
While HHH is set in the modern day, I still used some of the retro-modernist approach that I used in Wild Nature (the future but played through a 1980s straight-to-video action movie). So this is present day London, but where the smoking ban never came into effect.
It gives me some freedom to keep the visual tropes of noir in place (smoke drifting, etc) while still getting all the benefits of modern surveillance/paranoia.
The biggest shift is from New York to London. The original HER short story that inspired HHH was set in New York, as is The Hunter. But I didn’t want to do another book in the USA. So I followed To A Cinder’s lead and moved the action to the UK.
That allowed me to create crime/spy story much more indebted to Graham Green and John le Carré than Richard Stark or James M Cain (whose writing does influence Estelle, the female lead of HHH). It’s cold and wet, with the unique mix of chic and threat that London conjures up.
Mostly, it was fun writing in dialect I knew, on streets I’ve visited, about people I could imagine bumping into.
Anyway, enough rambling. Head over to Kickstarter and check out the book. Part 1 is an absolute blast and parts 2 and 3 won’t be far behind.
See you there!
Darwyn Cooke was a legend. Fine footsteps to follow.
I saw him at a panel in Toronto when he debuted 'The Hunter'. Creators will always say their latest work is their best or favourite, but you believed it when he said it with this book. It was clearly a passion project.