We’ve decided to make our first graphic novel, Boys Don’t Cry, available to download for free under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND, though the print copy can still be bought from our online shop if you prefer that route.
Teenage goths, bereavement, Edinburgh, families… What more do you need to know?
Boys Don’t Cry by Jacqueline Saville, Mark Pexton, Andrew Woods is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Back in the summer of 2004, minding my own business on an Edinburgh street and open to story ideas floating in from the ether as usual, I saw a group of teenage goths. One lad was walking slightly behind the rest, maybe the pavement just wasn’t wide enough, but whatever the reason it sparked a story which wasn’t completed for nearly two years. In the meantime I met Mark Pexton, already an impressive artist with sequential art ambitions. We spent the next couple of years getting better at our respective crafts (and in Mark’s case finding an international audience with book covers, comics, story illustrations and more) and Mark started talking about adapting ‘the goth lad story’ (we still tend to refer to it as gothlad) as a comic when he had the time. It’s now grown into a ‘graphic novella’ called Boys Don’t Cry which we’re preparing for printing.
So what’s this gothlad story all about? It’s dreamy and atmospheric, it’s set in Edinburgh and St Andrews, it has nightmare sequences, grief, loss, and horses. And a teenage goth, naturally. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I can honestly say that if I hadn’t written it I’d want to buy it, and that’s a good start.
