Short Comic – Hugo Boylan

FREE COMIC: Missing Keys

It might break you for a while.

Perfection calls to you

Script by Hugo Boylan

Art and Colours by Lane Lloyd

Letters by Kerrie Smith

FREE COMIC: Just Ask

Life can seem like so much sometimes.

Sometime all you need…

Script by Hugo Boylan

Art, Colours and Letters by Rebecca Reynolds

FREE COMIC: Lorde’s Will

Crime. Betrayal. Love. Hate.

It should have been an easy job. Snatch the goods, get to the car and get the hell out… but then the cops turned up and everything went straight to hell.

Damnit Hanratty, what were you thinking?

Script by Hugo Boylan

Art by Matt Shiell

Colours by Meghan Ryan

Letters and Design by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

At Pozzo’s Rope

The Impending Prostitute

Flash of Violence

Bag of Truth

It was around this time last year that Eoin Marron and I began to put together an outline for what was to become the Hero. I’ve spoken about the Hero already, so I’ll keep this short so you can get right to the comic. At the time all we really knew was that we wanted to do a short action piece with a twist ending. We’re both readers of 2000AD and both fans of the Future Shock so it seemed like a perfect fit.

Somewhere between our deciding to work together and my starting the script, Eoin got a pretty cool internship, and darnit all if that didn’t push the man to overhaul the layouts and designs and put together a excellent comic! See that last panel, that very last panel right there at the end? All Eoin.

We were lucky enough to have approached Triona Farrell at the exact right time, with a reasonable enough deadline that she was able to take on the project, and really turn her colours to the storytelling. I believe her first comment on the inks was “this is going to be pinker than you’d expect”, before proceeding to explain a whack of colour theory that pretty much resolved any issues I could have with her pallet choice and storytelling. I think she did a brilliant job, and it broke my heart that this short first saw publication in greyscale.

I’d be remiss to not mention Kerrie Smith who not only lettered the comic and designed the logo but also prepared the final files for both print and digital distribution. I work with Kerrie on quite a few projects and I’m always impressed at how she changes up her lettering from project to project to suit the line-work and colours.

Right so, that’s enough from me. Enjoy the Hero!

What Makes a Hero?

Grenade!

Oh Jesu–

Real Hero

The Hero and the IF Anthology

The Hero is a short comic to be published by Alterna Comics in their upcoming IF Anthology.

With art by the excellent Eoin Marron, colours from the always exciting Triona Farrell and letters by the tireless Kerrie Smith, the Hero is a 4 page comic that asks the question, what makes a hero.

When we sat down to discuss our first collaboration Eoin and I had the very loose idea to make a short comic with a twist. Beyond that, Eoin knew he wanted to see the comic in colour and his first choice for colourist was Tree. Somewhere between agreeing to work together and approaching Tree to lend us her pallet, I started obsessing over the role of the “hero” versus the “protagonist” and got an image stuck in my head of a classic superhero being held captive/interrogated by a paramilitary group.

After bouncing ideas around for a little while, we settled on fast paced action piece that would allow us to examine the idea of the hero while building to a twist we could both really enjoy. I won’t go in to too much detail right now, but you should check out the comic to find out more!

In a strange twist all its own, the Hero was fully illustrated, coloured and lettered before we were made aware that the IF Anthology was looking for submissions for superhero stories. This presented us with a very real problem; the IF Anthology is printed in black and white, while the Hero was always intended to be presented in full colour. This was more than a little heartbreaking. Tree’s colours are excellent and deserve to be highlighted, but the IF Anthology seemed like the perfect home for the Hero. Although we agonised over the decision to pitch to Alterna and risk losing a key part of our story in the end we agreed to use Tree’s grey scale shading to bring the inks to life, and trust me they really do come to life! Still, one day soon we’ll get the full colour edition out there!

Tree’s Colours

Tree’s Grey Scale

The IF Anthology features the work of 96 creators over 40 unique and challenging stories and includes the Irish made stories,”Gravity” by writer and letterer Kerrie Smith and artist Hannah Deacon, “We Can Be Heroes” by writer Darrin O’Toole, artist Barry Keegan and letterer Dee Cunniffe, and of course, “the Hero” which you’ve been reading all about.

You can pre-order your copy through the IF Anthology Kickstarter Campaign today!

Murphy’s Day Script

Scripted in 2015, for issue 7 of Lightning Strike Presents, Murphy’s Day follows the story of a man whose day is falling apart around him.

I wanted to do something a little different with this script. To this point in my comic making my focus had been on using dialogue and captions to tell a story. I’ve always found dialogue to be the part of writing that comes most naturally to me, but in my mind comics can be about so much more than just the dialogue. For Murphy’s Day I stripped all of that away to present a mostly silent script (the exception being the constantly ticking clock and buzzing phone). I wanted to create a short comic that would invite the reader to give it a second or maybe even a third look, and so I played with the space on the page too, counting down from 10 panels on page 1 to 1 panel on page 10. I’ll go in to more detail of why I wrote the script the way I did, and how the artist and letterer on the book managed to make it all flow together and improve on my script in a later blog post. Maybe…

FREE COMIC Murphy’s Day

First Published in Lightning Strike Presents Issue 7, Murphy’s Day tells the story of the day everything went wrong for the titular Murphy.

Murphy’s Day was an exercise in storytelling and using a comic book format in an interesting way. To this day I believe it remains one of my better scripts and it doesn’t hurt that Rapha’s art and storytelling is just really lovely!

I hope you enjoy it!

Art by Rapha Lobosco

Letters by Kerrie Smith

Script by Hugo Boylan