Stop by the First Comics booth to say hello. If you want to be absolutely guaranteed of finding us at the booth, try 2pm-3pm Friday, 11am-12pm Saturday or 2pm-3pm Sunday, as that’s when we’re down to do our signings.

And if any of your bring pizza or alcohol to us at the booth, you will win our eternal allegiance forever.

And so concludes our free sample chapter and with it this director’s commentary. I hope you enjoyed this little peek behind the blood-soaked curtain at the humble beginnings of our monster chums. The Necessary Monsters graphic novel will be available from First Comics in the autumn, from either their soon-to-launch website or your nearest full-service comics retailer. The site will be updated with full details of how to purchase the book as soon as they become available, so do keep an eye on us, won’t you?

Lots of questions asked on this page, most of which get answered in the next chapter (for which, dear internet reader, you’ll have to purchase the Necessary Monsters graphic novel from First Comics). Sadly however, exactly what a dream of a heart tastes like remains a mystery. Maybe I’ll finally get around to answering that one in volume two.

For most of the cast I had a pretty clear visual in mind to serve as a starting point for Sean in designing each character’s appearance. But Tuesday was by far the hardest nut to crack and we went in a whole bunch of different directions in trying to figure out the right look for her. The ensemble we eventually settled on owes it’s biggest debt to Candyman’s fur-coated look, although there’s probably also a little bit of Cruella de Vil mixed in or good measure.

And here we see Creeping Tuesday on stage for the first time. As previously noted, the Creeping family owe an obvious debt to Freddy Kreuger, but they also have something of the movie Dreamscape in their lineage. Although I wasn’t actually concious of the link to the latter until after it got pointed out in a review of the comic. Since I did indeed love that movie as a kid, I’m now sure that it’s rather fun take on dream invasions is somewhere in the mix of Tuesday’s horror DNA.

Ah, the multiple zombie mothers. Probably still my personal favourite moment from chapter one. This element of the dream sequence was actually something I had sitting around somewhere in a notebook for quite a while before it finally found a home in Necessary Monsters. I’m quite glad I eventually got to tell a story where a guy being chased by a pack of zombies that all resembled his mother made perfect narrative sense.

As we move into the dream sequence here I think it’s kinda cool how Sean pushes Joey’s proportions a little out of whack – like he’s almost pulsing slightly within the world of the dream. Little surprises like this are the great joy of collaborating with an artist on a comic. Another is to be able to just write “establishing shot of the Manhattan Skyline at night, in the rain” and know that figuring out how to pull it off successfully is no longer your problem.

Keeping Cowboy’s shackle and tattoo on the correct arm proved to be one of the trickier continuity challenges during the series. If you’re ever designing a costumed character for a comic, try to keep them as symmetrical as possible – you’ll save yourself a whole lot of hassle later on.

I’ve always found there to be something wonderfully hilarious about the seething, silent Jason Vorhees of Friday 13th fame. Cowboy 13 is my take on that. He’s the team’s heavy but also their pilot and mechanical expert – think of him as the B.A Baracus to Charlotte’s Murdock.

The idea of each of these little introductory scenes for the main cast was that we’re kind of dipping into each character’s movie and then plucking them out of their own horror narrative to go off and do spy-stuff for the Chain. It also let me get straight into some quick moments of horror and violence which keeps the book moving at a decent pace and prevents things from being too talky/expositiony at the start.