Wednesday 22 April 2015

Stuff about Frank and ideas and shit Part 1

For this post I thought I'd talk about how I came up with the idea of writing Bastard Son.

I was born in the early eighties and grew up in a small town in the Peak District in north west England. Due to the relatively remote setting of my childhood, I tended to watch most of my movies on television and tape them on VHS. My love of comics started when I was five years old and consisted of my mother buying me the UK versions of He-Man and Transformers comics. Later on, (early to mid 90s) I had to travel to a neighbouring town to buy non-sequential issues of Marvel and DC books. This was due to the fact that there were no specialised comic shops anywhere near where I lived and the newsagents I bought my books from just got random bunches of comics in every week.

My interest in horror I suppose was always there in the background, but it took a while to properly root itself. I was pretty skittish as a kid and always imagined the films to be scarier than they actually were. By the time I was in my teens, I had seen a bunch of the classics, Halloween, Evil Dead etc. Obviously, I thought these were great and wanted to find more of that calibre, but again, remote town...blah blah blah. The dwindling of my enthusiasm wasn't helped much by how incredibly shit the 90s were for horror movies in general.

By the time I was in my late teens/early 20s, (circa 2000), we had DVDs and I had moved to the great city of Liverpool. From then on, I discovered Dario Argento, Stuart Gordon, Takashi Miike, Lamberto Bava and loads more.

I love decent horror in all it's forms, (I could spend hours talking about my favourite practical effects alone!), but I wanted to bring elements of all the things I love in my favourite horror films into one book. For example, I suppose Bastard Son is based on the lone antagonist slasher template. However, as much as I love Halloween and the Friday 13th franchise, I always felt more could've been done to flesh out the titular characters. As cool as Michael, Jason and Freddy are, I always wanted to know more about their backgrounds. Yeah, I was that annoying kid who always asked "but why?".

One thing I feel is really important in Bastard Son is that Ethan's story is told. Don't get me wrong, there will be an absolute shitload of over-the-top violent kills and enough blood to drown a mammoth by the time we are through, but yeah, story. I mean, what's the point in having a crazed maniac slicing massive fucking blades through other crazed maniacs if you don't know his motivation.... right?

Also, there will be a love triangle between Ethan, a werewolf and a vampire.

Not really.

That would be terrible.

Anyway, I didn't realise how long this entry would be and if you've got this far whilst sober, well done! I'll put part two up tomorrow and I'll continue where I left off.

Peace out fellow bastards!

Frank

P.S. Here are a couple more preview panels for staying with me.



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