Richard: What is the basic storyline of "Cancertown"?

Cy: Cancertown is the story of Vince Morley, a man with neuropsychiatric problems and a brain tumour the size of a baby's fist. At certain times and places, Morley believes his tumour permits him to enter a monstrous alternate world he calls Cancertown. When the lost and dispossessed of London start tripping over those same cracks in reality, Morley makes it his life's work go in and rescue them from the residents of Cancertown, even at the risk of becoming one himself.

Richard: What is a Badmouth?

Cy: The Badmouth is the first Cancertown resident we encounter in the story. People who fall into Cancertown have a tendency to lose their connections to the real world, and those tendencies are eventually translated into physical changes. There are a number of powerful entities within Cancertown, and the nature of a victim's transformation largely depends on whose "territory" they end up in. Those who are adopted by a creature called the Corpsegrinder become Badmouths - essentially mindless balls of muscle and ill will. There are several other types of resident, though.

Richard: Why will people identify with Morley?

Cy: Morley's condition makes it extremely difficult for him to deal with people, but he's trying very hard to hold onto whatever it is that keeps him anchored in the real world. There's little to aspire to in his personal qualities or conduct, but at the end of the day he's risking everything in order to help the one person in the world he's psychologically capable of caring about.

Richard: Who are some of the other characters in this comic?

Cy: Morley's life seems to revolve around a severely burned homeless girl who calls herself Bug****. Bug**** appears to have ties to Cancertown that run every bit as deep as Morley's, although she never falls in herself. While he doesn't fully understand the nature of their relationship, she's the only person with whom Morley feels any kind of human connection.

Inside Cancertown, we have a pretty wild collection of characters. The Corpsegrinder is sort of a sly old monster who gets bigger the more you fear him, while Crosshair is a skinny punk kid who can kill you with his eyes. Of course, we've also got the really dangerous ones, like Evil Twin and the Piecemaker, but I can't really say too much about them.

Richard: Where did the idea for "Cancertown" come from?

Cy: Well, like several of my stories, Cancertown arrived in the aftermath of a very memorable migraine attack. A severe one can mess me up quite badly for a day or so, but in that semi-delirious "oh-my-God-I-think-I'm-going-to-live" rush, I tend to scrawl down a mass of notes that somehow eventually draw into focus as storylines. Morley himself was quite a late addition, his mental issues coming out of some reading I was doing on Cotard's Delusion, among other things. That aside, the core of his personality arose from me struggling to come to terms with what Cancertown was really all about. He sort of trudged up with his hands in his pockets and started explaining it to me.

Richard: What is "Layer Zero" about?

Cy: Layer Zero as a concept is about Insomnia Publications showcasing people's work in a format that allows it to really shine. Each anthology has a simply expressed theme, but the contributors are free to explore it in any way that suits them. My first entry, Remember this Moment, was an attempt to construct a short story under the principles of a magic trick. My entry in the upcoming Choices anthology features a man being literally haunted by the series of bad decisions that have dominated his life for many years.

The Layer Zero books are attracting some really good creators, and the anthology format is one that's always appealed to me, so to be able to contribute to it has been great.

Richard: How would you describe "Harlan Falk" and "Slaughterman's Creed"?

The Case Files of Harlan Falk deals with a once-respected hostage negotiator who is forced out of business when he claims that the young victim in his last case was murdered by his own imaginary friends. Emerging from years of alcoholism, denial and despair, he reinvents himself as a monster negotiator - a man who makes literal deals with devils. These days, Falk is as comfortable brokering peace treaties between rival faerie clans as he is settling a zombie siege. He's ruthless, utterly impartial and has only one unbreakable rule: no-one messes with the negotiator. If you deal in bad faith with Harlan Falk, you will live specifically and exclusively to regret it.

Slaughterman's Creed is, in all probability, the darkest thing I've ever written. It's somewhere between a British gangster thriller and a Samurai revenge tale. Sidney is a professional killer working for a human trafficker. Using the tools and techniques of the traditional abattoir slaughterman, he is almost completely uneducated except in his family’s trade. When he is called upon to breach his professional code and bring a pregnant woman to slaughter, Sidney's world is changed forever. Betrayed by those he has served his whole life, the Slaughterman embarks on a bloody vendetta - determined to bring the entire monstrous empire to the blade.

Richard: What was the last storyline in "Starship Troopers" you worked on?

Cy: The last few Troopers scripts I've written have been one-shots featuring individual members of the Vandals roster in their defining moments, but the most recent full arc I've scripted is called My Time in Hell, which picks up a couple of the story threads we set down in the Triple Threat two-parter last year. The surviving Reaper Cell member has hijacked a Fleet vessel and used it to seize control of a crystalline planetoid whose very existence is both vigorously denied by, and a critical threat to, the Federation. I don't know what the state of play on the license is at the moment, but it's all scripted up to issue twenty.

Richard: How did you join Insomnia Publications?

Cy: Everything sort of happened to me in a rush at the Bristol convention in 2007. I'd received an offer from Insomnia to send them a script through ComicSpace, and they'd already decided by the time of the show that they wanted to go ahead with it. The two gigs that were offered to me at that convention (Cancertown and Starship Troopers), pretty much formed the launch pad for my adventures in the comics business.

Richard: What was your first published work?

Cy: In terms of fiction (I've been a freelance business writer for over a decade), my first professional work was Extinction Protocol, a twenty-part Starship Troopers strip I wrote for Mongoose Publications with art by Nic Wilkinson. It was featured in their online magazine, Signs & Portents, which turned out to have a monthly readership of around 60,000. If I'd known that when I started, I'd probably have been a lot more nervous about it.

Richard: Why do you like to write?

Cy: Tough question, since there really is no single answer to it. In part, it's a tremendously liberating experience to get a story out of my head and onto paper. Working on creator-owned books with Stephen Downey and Scott James has been fascinating, and watching them bring characters and situations I've described to life is about as close to real magic as I can imagine.

Also, writing eases the migraines and temporarily silences the voices...

Richard: What do you do with your spare time?

Cy: I play a lot of PC and console games, but I consider myself only a casual gamer. I've been guilty of war gaming, even role-playing, on occasion, but that's not really who I am either. I guess if I were to pin a single activity down as my "hobby" it would be magic. Now, I'm not talking about the kind of "magic" those other British comics writers are into (you know, the famous ones). You won't find me conjuring up homunculi or taking spirit walks or any of that toss, but I've got an eleven-inch Muscle Pass and I'm not afraid to haul it out when necessary (sleight-of-hand reference - sorry).

Richard: How can someone contact you?

Cy: cy@cydethan.com is always a good bet.

Richard: Any final words of advice?

Cy: Build strong characters, then let them tell you what the story is.