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.
The latest missive from Duotrope’s Digest proclaims that March is Small Press Month, the time when everyone should go and support their favourite small press affairs, submit stories, buy books and magazines, donate money etc. A little investigation reveals that this may well be an American arrangement, but we live in a global village now, so people keep telling me. Which means this is an excellent time for you to support your favourite small press literary graphic novel publisher (that’s us) by buying a copy of Boys Don’t Cry (or one of Mark’s prints) from our excellent website, or if you’re in Leeds, Travelling Man or OK Comics (prints not available at OK Comics).
To whet your appetite, we’d like to share one of the finished pages of Boys Don’t Cry:
Page 12 (probably)
An earlier page may get split over two, hence I’m not totally sure which page this will be, but it’s fairly early on. Feel free to let us know what you think.
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.
