Mary Boys

PINNED POST : A one page character origin summary for anyone unfamiliar with the comic.

Mary Boys: ALL STITCHED UP!

In this first full-length Mary Boys adventure, things get a little hairy for our beloved baldies and their wayward mentor, Father Parrish.

It was the final straw. And I mean, the FINAL final straw. The Boys had pursued their crusade against sin in Basham with such vigour that even the town's pious church-going inhabitants were starting to get quite fed up.

It seemed that every day the Boys were getting into some sort of mischief, like setting fires to institutions of ill repute, terrorising some hapless (yet immoral) scum or curb-stomping any biker gang or football firm careless enough to cross their path. The police never seemed to do anything about the problem, so the good people of Basham petitioned their mayor, who went ahead and did something no-one could ever have predicted.

First, he contacted the Bishop's office to remove Father Parrish from his post as priest and ship him off to London to be 'rehabilitated'. The Boys were placed under the care of a new priest tasked with de-radicalising them.

The Mayor then instituted a programme to rid the town of anti-social behaviour by banning the sale of booze and replacing it with a 'harm-free' new drug developed by a company called ASBOPharm. The company's private security force, recruited from the ranks of the very hoodlums the Mary Boys regularly clashed with, monitor the booze ban whilst ASBOpharm uses Basham as a testing ground for its drug trials.

Teenagers flock from all over the country to join these trials and partake in the non-stop debauchery that ensues. To make matters worse, a brutal yet enigmatic serial killer emerges to terrorise the town's population by night.

And so, the bodies pile up while Basham slowly descends into chaos. All the while the Boys are trapped in their own existential crisis which threatens to spell the end to their lives together as a family.

ALL STITCHED UP! is a story in five parts and the proceeds of this campaign will go towards the costs of producing, printing and shipping the first instalment, which will be a 40-page black and white comic book written and illustrated my me, Chubb (who else?!). The whole ALL STITCHED UP! arc has already been written and thumb-nailed.

The campaign for each instalment will launch only when all the art for that book has been completed. This is to avoid long waits between backing and fulfilment.

The comic in this campaign also includes a Christmas story, which ties in with the overall ALL STITCHED UP! arc.

Please sign up to the mailing list to get notified when we launch: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mary-boys-all-stitched-up-part-1/coming_soon/x/22253895#smallpress

Reviews and drawing update

I've finished all the writing and thumbnails for all 5 issues of Mary Boys: All Stitched Up, so it might be time to actually tell people what it's about. But first I'm enjoying knocking out a few pages of pencils. This time round I thought I'd give digital pencils a go, mainly because I tried Clip studio and liked the perspective tools. It saves a lot of time and mess getting the rules out, especially for small awkward panels, like this one:

Yes, I am extremely late to the party, but that's fine since I did everything traditionally before so this all feels like a real doddle, provided that the plan of printing it all out in blue and then inking it traditionally works out. I still need to buy an A3 printer and give it a go.

Mary Boys : Beefheads got a mention and review on Awesome Comics Podcast today. Give it a listen here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2rIarUc4dgdgP3y1xYOJYX?si=pvYoW4MlSoOmyPDtU0epQg They're a fun bunch, so give their other content a listen too. I really enjoyed their discussion on the Bojeffries Saga, a little-known gem from Steve Parkhouse and some northerner called Alan something.

We're at 114 sign-ups to the mailing list. I'd like about 800 before we launch AND we only launch when the campaign book has been drawn. Still a slog, but things are happening. If you haven't signed up yet, then now would be as good a time as any: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/--2802154/coming_soon#smallpress