Another month, another feverish bout of Hicks activity. Let’s dive in…

NEWS

CORPORATE LEECH AT NEW BRIGHTON BEACH GIVEAWAY

I’m doing my first ever giveaway! I just hit 1.5k followers on the old Instagram, so I’m doing a giveaway of my new comic Corporate Leech at New Brighton Beach. I have also recently closed my Etsy, so I wanted to do something nice, because I know it’s been difficult to buy my stuff for a while, especially for international followers. The ongoing difficulty and headache of just posting your work to people for a decent price is one of the reasons I’ve been partnering with indie publishers, to try and offer some kind of global distribution. I wish it wasn’t so hard to get my work but also for the number of orders I ship it really isn’t worth it at the moment. I’ll maybe open a shop again in the future when I find a way that works better for me, but that’ll probably be UK only. So yeah, if you’re international-based in particular I REALLY encourage you to enter, it’ll be the only way to get this comic for a while.

ENTER THE GIVEAWAY

Mostly I’m keeping this comic for in person events but some shops do stock it in the UK, so if you don’t win the giveaway but you need it stat, please do check out the following shops:

Gosh Comics

OK Comics

Category Is Books

THE NASTY NOVEL!

Honestly, I’ve been kind of excited to write this newsletter because it means I can kinda talk about my novel???!!! So this is something I’ve been tooling around with since Christmas 2024, and I have a harebrained scheme to finish the second draft by end of August, if I write something like 2000 words a day every day in July and August (that’s 62,000 words a month). I’m on the last day of July and Gay Persuasion edits are calling and I’m writing this lol so the chances are I’m not getting any more written this month, which puts this month’s writing tally at… 55,712. Which is fully ridiculous (I was kinda thinking I might hit 45,000).

The good news is I’m smashing these writing goals basically, but the bad news is that the book is growing, so whereas the first draft was a cute 95k this draft is looking to be at least 120k, possibly longer, so the chances, even if I continue this pace, of me finishing in August, are un petit peu slim. But hey, I’ll still be closer to the end of this draft then I would be if I wasn’t cranking out these words! A win’s a win!

It’s been sooo long since I’ve written prose, and I’ve never written something of this length (I think my PhD was only 80k) so there’s been lots of new things for me to work out. Like how writing a novel is not actually easier than making a graphic novel?? ksndjkfdshkf??? I can’t believe I actually thought that.

The last time I was writing prose longer than a 4000 word short story for uni was when I was, guess what, a teenager, and as a result, I feel that even though my comics writing has kept apace with who I am right now, writing prose feels weirdly, and fondly, like travelling back in time to being a teenager, and writing a book infused with all of that person’s interests (God I am really realising how much I loved a) Wuthering Heights b) The Great Gatsby c) The Graduate) and obsessions (God I really loved women as a teenager and I really didn’t know where to put those feelings!!!)

I think its been really weird, moving from comics, especially my solo comics, where I really hone in on Butch things, to moving into a writing sphere where yes, there’s Tonnes of Butch Feels, but also one of my main characters is a hot, kinda awful femme girlie of the type I loved the most as a teen (But like, an elevated version) and I love her SO MUCH and she’s so fun to write. It’s like… all of the feels you have about the women in songs by like Bowie… like how Bowie sings about women in the mid 70s… and you just kinda smush them up and make it lesbian and put them into a character… dinner’s served. The only flaw is that I am really quite stressed no one else will love her like I will and also I’ve been having a miserable time because its set in the 70s and its taken me 18 months to work out how to draw her haircut. You would think… regularly envisioning characters through the medium of comics… I would be good at drawing characters I’ve come up with. And the answer is no because I’ve made all of my cast members really hot hahahahahah and if I can’t draw them as hot as I want them all to be it feels really bad. Again… kind of like being a teenager again. In the end you have to compromise. No, I can not render my impossibly hot femmes and moody butches quite in the right way but I can say, here is what they look like in my style, and find a visual compromise. Here are some rough doodles of the full cast, no one is right yet (except Claudette and her fuckass bob and my girl Margot and her now perfectly rendered ridiculous bangs…)

I’ve also been having a weird time because being in prose, especially first perspective, is so much more interior thinking than I do for comics writing. I think because it takes you so much longer to write the getting from A to B, you have to live in your characters’ skin for longer and I get very stressed because I am a monster to my hot, problematic characters and I keep putting them in stressful physical situations and then I have stressful physical empathic reactions. I guess I’m saying that I’m really in the SAUCE you guys, but I hope one day this story will be shareable because I’m obsessed with it and its all I want to think about.

One of the better things about writing fairly consistently this month is that I have suddenly unlocked being able to write on trains (always an ambition). I actually look forward to long journeys now because its uninterrupted Lock In time. It’s also made me better at utilising weird, hithero unusable slots of time for creative writing. Hence, I’ve even managed to make progress on…

BUTCH BROS 3

I had a bit of spare time whilst sitting behind my table this month and I thought it looked better to thumbnail than to be on my phone and so I ended up knocking out a draft of Butch Bros 3!!! I haven’t had any time to read it back over or make edits before pencilling, but yeah Butch Bros 3 potentially out for Thought Bubble! (It’s long) (I’m so wild for this)

AN EVENING WITH QUEER AS COMICS

I did a bunch of events this month! But I want to take a moment to mention the Quentin Blake Illustration Centre Queer as Comics event, which was almost like a career retrospective which was kinda crazy but also really fun to do! I got to meet Kate Charlesworth and David Shenton and it was just a really lovely evening. It was particularly special because Camp Righteous is displayed as part of the exhibition, and I created a comic for the exhibition brochure. I experienced horrific burnout out making CR around a full time job, and so it’s been really difficult to feel positively about it because I just poured so much into it. But it’s been nice to see it in this exhibition and reflect on it and think about how proud I am of it. The inks in particular are so cool to look back on, damn I really drew all that! The inks were my best work at that point, and it does make me excited to one day do a big project like CR again and see how I would tackle the ink now. Anyway, you can see CR pages up in the Quentin Blake Illustration Centre Queer as Comics exhibition and the exhibition is on until November go go go !!!

UPCOMING EVENTS

My summer events are officially over for now, but new events will be dropping soon so keep them peepers peeled 👀

PRIDECAF, Saturday 19 September, Sparks, Bristol

THOUGHTBUBBLE Saturday 14 & Sunday 15th November, Harrogate Convention Centre, Harrogate

GAY PERSUASION

Pencils are sooooo close to being done! Emma is literally drawing the final page AS WE SPEAK (or rather, as I type). These final pages are so good, I don’t know if I’ve ever written a script where characters are happy for so many consecutive pages together and Emma is knocking it out of the park the expressions are SO GOOD. I think this book is going to be special…

Next month Emma is gonna be inking this bad boy which I means I have to start flatting it!!! Aaaaaa!!!

WHAT ELSE HAVE I ENJOYED?

THE GRADUATE

I really love this movie!! I had a real hankering to rewatch it because I was writing some skeevy 70s nightlife stuff that reminded me of the scene where Benjamin takes Elaine out on the Worst Date Ever and I finally sat down and stuck my DVD on and it’s SOOOOOO good you guys. The awkward comedy is so delicious, I love Mrs. Robinson, I love how it’s filmed, I love the music (I don’t know if I think the music works WITH the film, but it is a great soundtrack), I just love this movie! I don’t think I’ve watched it for YEARS but it still mostly hits great. Watching it back I could really tell how much this movie has influenced me 🫣