Richard: How did you end up co-founding Time Bomb Comics?

Steve: Time Bomb Comics is the end result of a 30 year obsession with comics and the comics industry. My passion for the medium knows no bounds, but after spending a number of years working abroad I wasn’t as much a front-line fan as I used to be So I hadn’t been to a con for a good decade or so when the first Birmingham International Comics Show was announced in 2006 taking place early December. I live in Leicester, which is a city an hour from Birmingham, so I went there for the day, dragging my long-suffering but utterly-gorgeous wife Suzanne along with me.

The con was in a tiny venue called the Custard Factory, just two small rooms really; but it was packed not so much with the dealers and their bargains I had been expecting but the small and indie press UK publishers and creators. I had encountered small press in the past, but mainly the cheaply photocopied comics that were obviously works of love more than anything else – but here was a room filled with comics that were of the same quality, both in production and content, that was sitting on LCS shelves everywhere. After speaking to the creators and publishers I came away from BICS 2006 with bags of these exciting new comics and had a personal Damascus moment. I realized that the UK comics industry was more diversified, vibrant and creative than I had dreamed of, and I knew I wanted to be a part of it. Of course, that was the easy part.

Back in Leicester I quickly realized there were two major hurdles to overcome. The first of these was that although I had some scripts I didn’t have any artist, the second that I had never had a stab at publishing before in any way, shape or form. It could have ended there and then but over the next few months it kept coming back to me, and I think it was the following April when I decided I wanted to make a serious stab at creating and publishing comics. Then it was a case of finding a partner to achieve this with and hammering out the details, with the goal of sitting behind a table at the next BICS in October 2007 displaying our efforts. The first one-shot we produced was Ragamuffins: Stitches in Time, and the company name came from the fact that our first comic was about time, and we had no idea if it would bomb!

Richard: What is the goal of Time Bomb Comics?

Steve: I guess on a most selfish level it’s a means of getting the stories I want to tell out there, but I weigh that up against a desire to give other creators an opportunity to have work published as well. More and more you hear the big name companies (who, let’s be honest, most of us would be happy to work for given the chance!) getting their new talent from indie comics, and wanting to see work samples that have been published, so Time Bomb offers a platform with which to do that. Our production values are high – glossy covers, high quality stock, each of the books look top-notch. From a purely reader perspective the goal is to entertain, pure and simple, by offering an alternative to what’s already out there. Telling Great Stories is our mission statement and that pretty much sums it up.

Richard: Why does Time Bomb Comics produce just one-shot comics and graphic novels?

Steve: A lot of what Time Bomb does is generated by what my experiences as a reader buying comics are. Our "one-shots only" mantra is a prime example of that. It is notoriously difficult to get an indie book into the hands of the readers. How many times have been to an LCS and picked up a comic #1 but never seen #2? Or found a #2 with no sight of #1? Does anyone pick up a mini-series with #2 or #3? As a reader, especially one more likely to try and indie book than most, it’s really bloody frustrating! (It’s not just the minnows like us either – it’s so hard to get hold of books by Radical, Bluewater, Ape and the like in the UK. Those guys are B-listers in my eyes, so what hope have we Z-listers got?) However, if you came across an indie book that was done-in-one, like Time Bomb’s are, chances are good that you might pick it up, right? From an artist perspective it’s also more appealing and realistic to be expected to commit to something that’s finite, as usually the up and coming artists have to fit their comics work around their day jobs.

Let’s be honest, most talented new artists just don’t have a hope in hell of regularly producing 24 pages a month until they land that dream deal with the big boys. So it seems a win-win from both a reader and creator point of view. Of course, just because we’ve produced a one-shot featuring certain characters doesn’t mean we won’t revisit them again – but when we do the new story will be done-in-one as well. At the same time we’re moving into graphic novels as well as the one-shots, slowly but surely, as they’re perfect for our publishing ethos. Basically at Time Bomb Comics we just don’t believe in issue #2’s!

Richard: What can you tell us about "The Sisterhood" a comic written by you?

Steve: The Sisterhood shines the spotlight on the somewhat dubious activities of the Immaculate Ladies of the Seventy Seventh Cloister as they rid the galaxy of sinners. They’re a group of space nuns who have been indoctrinated through lifestyle drugs and brainwashing by a twisted future church to basically offer non-believers a simple life-choice: convert or die.

We meet them just as they’ve landed on Morningstar, a quiet un-assuming little planet whose inhabitants mind their own business, and The Sisterhood is knee-deep in slaughtering all these inhabitants for wanting to continue doing just that. It’s dystopian and bleak, and it’s painted in this wonderful dark-anime style by an artist called Dan Barritt. It’s the first comic he’s done, and his approach is wonderfully wrong-footing as the Sisters look quite cutesy at first, then you realize they’re actually quite brutal and certainly not the sort of ladies to upset.

It throws in a lot of the ideas I’ve built up over the years about organized religion and how followers of that doctrine see the world – the strange conundrum that those preaching tolerance are often the most intolerant. It’s had some great reviews so far, which is always good to know, and one of which praised it as being as good as a comic you’d read in the long-running British weekly 2000AD which is a massive compliment this side of the pond – massive! There’s certainly scope for a revisit to the world of The Sisterhood at a future point but we’ll see. Although I came up with the idea the design work is all Dan’s, so we have shared ownership in that regard; it’s really a case of Dan being happy to commit such a huge amount of time again to complete another story.

Richard: How did you come up with the idea for "Ragamuffins: Stitches In Time"?

Steve: The original gestation must be several years old now. I’ve had a long fascination with the whole notion of time travel and time as an almost mechanical entity. Of course when any piece of machinery breaks down you call in the repairmen, and that’s who the Ragamuffins are. They actually call themselves Paradoxters in the story. I also wanted to create a group that looked very individual – each of the Ragamuffins have very defined looks and personalities, one of them looks and speaks so differently that we’re not sure what he, she or it actually is – and by using time as a backdrop gave me scope to set a story any when I wanted.

There’s a wonderful British seventies TV series called Sapphire and Steel that features two agents who deal with strange time-related anomalies and that was a big influence for sure, especially that you never find out who, why or what these agents are. No origin story, they just are. I love that, and wanted to give Ragamuffins that same sense of unexplained mystery. In Ragamuffins: Stitches In Time the Ragamuffins arrive suddenly in the middle of London on what seems like a simple little mission but it just gets bigger and bigger until it’s a literally world-ending scenario, but at the end you still have no idea how these four individuals came to be. There’s few bones thrown that touches on the nature of time and the group’s strange time-twisiting abilities but other than that it’s just mind-bending science fiction about the fate of the human race. All in 24 pages! I know Andy Dodd (the artist on Ragamuffins) wants to do a follow up and that’s on the cards for the future. But no origin story – never!

Richard: As a co-founder what do you do besides write at Time Bomb Comics?

Steve: It’s a list that seems ever-growing! A big part – and the most rewarding – is dealing with the other writers and artists who are developing projects for us, including initial submissions. We get far more submissions than I would ever reasonably expect a company as small as Time Bomb to get and that leads to mixed emotions. Pleased that creators want to work with us, very frustrated that aspiring creators don’t follow our very clear submission guidelines. Then there’s planning to attend the conventions and all the prep for those.

We do four a year which doesn’t sound much but all seem to involve lots of planning and re-planning, sorting out travel and accommodation, any promotional elements for the cons, and so on. We also try to have our releases in line with the UK convention schedules, so March/April and August/September is always nuts as I try to make sure that the releases we’ve been trumpeting for the cons in May and October are completed in time. I liaise a lot with printers, each release we put out to competitive quote and then I try and negotiate better print deals. Marketing is another area, sending out press releases, making suggestions for the website layout, trying to get our books into shops and with distributors. Sorting out banners, postcards, displays, t-shirts – all that promo stuff.

Finally there’s determining what we’ll launch, when, how, and the nuts and bolts of fitting it all together. I also try and keep my hand in writing comics for companies other than Time Bomb such as Accent UK, Insomnia, Murky Depths. On top of this there’s a non-comics day job that’s intense and demanding, and a family to look after and spend time with.

Richard: Who is Andrew Dodd?

Steve: Andy is the first artist I collaborated with seriously, creating comics together more than twenty five years ago. When I decided to create Time Bomb Comics I searched him out on the internet and asked him if he wanted to come in with me on the project as a co-founder. In a business sense I needed someone on board who could cover those parts of the company that were beyond me – art skills and website creation. Andy’s in his early forties and lives in Barnsley, a truly awful grey town in Yorkshire, and has worked in comics off and on over the years.

Time Bomb Comics wouldn’t be what it is today without Andy’s contribution and skills, as he takes my ideas and turns them into reality. Both Ragamuffins and Dick Turpin and the Restless Dead (our highwayman/zombie mash-up) were drawn by him, and he has a very traditional British comics style that really suits the comics we produce. We work well together and are on the same page creatively with the comics we produce together. Over the next couple of years he’ll be making a move away from the day to day business side of Time Bomb as he’s returned to university to get a degree, and he wants to keep drawing comics so it makes sense for him to be still on board as a creator if not so much a partner anymore.

Richard: What other talented people work at Time Bomb Comics?

Steve: The only other person that could be classed as in-house would be my wife Suzanne. She’d be the first to admit she has no day to day interest in comics but supports Time Bomb by selling the books at the cons, doing the accounts and admin and perhaps most importantly controlling the funding. Everyone else involved with us is at a purely creative level – our writers and artists, all of which have come to us through our submissions section of the website or approached us at cons. We’re always looking for new writers and artists, especially artists.

Richard: How are British comics different than North American ones?

Steve: Chalk and cheese, I’d say! The biggest difference is that the British comics industry is not dominated by superheroes, so that the comics that are produced tend to be far more wide and diverse in terms of subject matter. In fact, it’s still very unusual for a UK comic to feature superheroes unless it’s a satire or spoof, or alternatively produce a superhero comic that’s so great it makes the US comics that inspired it look lame – such as Marvel Man and Zenith. I think the basic idea of the superhero has intrinsically felt a bit too silly for traditional British comics audiences – which is why the British weekly comics of the past featured sports, war, adventure, romance, humour and science-fiction by the bucket-load but no superheroes apart from reprinted US comics now and again.

These were all for the most part black and white comics too, printed on cheap paper (even today it seems UK readers are much more open to black and white comics than US fans). You’d have to hunt down imported American comics – glossy covers! full colour! - as most newsagents wouldn’t have them, just the British weeklies. That all changed in the 90’s when British comics geared themselves to the pre-teen market and decided to focus on licensed rather than original concepts. With the emergence of comic shops stocking purely US product the future of British comics suddenly looked far from rosy. Therefore apart from the licensed titles, Marvel reprints, 2000AD - the only non-humour weekly from the 70’s still available – and the long running Beano humour weekly and Commando war-digest comics, the current UK originated comics scene is very much underground - you have to make an effort to go and search it out.

However, when you find it you realize how much there is going on and how much of it outshines the mainstream US comics that are in the comic stores. But that diversity is still there, and superheroes are still few and far between.

Richard: What comics do you have planned to write in the future?

Steve: So, so many, yet so little time. For Time Bomb I’ve got Primetime coming up next year which is another 24-page one-shot. It’s a murder mystery set in a media-obsessed future city where everyone is desperate to be on television apart from the detective investigating the case. It’s very fast-paced, sprinkled with some very dark humour, and is being drawn by Paul Thompson – another newcomer – who again has a very individual style that just suits the book perfectly. Then with Andy I’m following up the first Turpin one-shot with Dick Turpin and the Crimson Plague which features an outbreak of vampires in 18th Century London. Both Restless Dead and Crimson Plague were so much fun to write, so much so we hope to do a Turpin versus werewolves story after that.

I’m currently putting together scripts for a longer one-shot/graphic novel called Foxglove which features a 50 year old heroine trapped in multiple realities, Saurus Squad which is going to be my take on a manga comic, a horror story called The Plague Doctor and something called The Split Infinitives, which came to me when I was having a shower. Some of these will come out under the Time Bomb banner, they all might if nobody else is interested in them! I’m also hoping to pitch a biographical comic to Insomnia Publications for their Vigil imprint – we’ll see.

Richard: What is next for Time Bomb Comics?

Steve: From the outset it was very important that Time Bomb Comics didn’t try to run before it could walk, so the intention is to expand slowly but steadily. I’ve lost count of the amount of small comics companies that arrive with announcements of big things, loads of titles and mini-series, then crash and burn spectacularly, so I’m always careful not to confuse ambition with ability. So we intentionally have a very light release schedule – three titles a year max – for the foreseeable future. As to what we do have coming out, we’re closing 2009 with Bomb Scares, a horror anthology featuring work from eighteen different creators. Some are brand new talent that we are publishing for the first time, others have already been working in comics for some time – such as Shane Oakley who was the artist on Wildstorm’s Albion mini-series from a couple of years back.

Our first big release next year is London Calling, which I can only describe as Ealing Studios meets Hammer horror. It’s very British, very quirky, and packed full of in-jokes from 50’s/60’s British media culture. It’s also drawn by Keith Page, a British comics artist of some renown over here. All in all we have a good half dozen projects in various stages of development which makes for an exciting couple of years ahead!

Richard: What comics besides Time Bomb ones would you recommend?

Steve: That’s a tough question, simply because there’s so much good comics being published from the Big Two right down to the grass roots small press. If we’re talking mainstream I’d recommend anything written by Garth Ennis, but especially any of his war stories, and Mark Millar always seems to entertain. Bendis seems to polarise the fans, but Ultimate Spider-Man is exactly what an all ages superhero comic should be I reckon. Vertigo is going through another creative high – Northlanders, Scalped, DMZ are all great, great books. I like a lot of what Dynamite publish – they have a very eclectic range that has something for everyone I think. I have no interest in their variant covers though (or anybody else’s come to that!).

It’s not as big as it should be in the States but given the sheer quality of its content 2000AD weekly is an absolutely essential read. However, one of my favourite monthly books by far is Harker from Ariel Press. Bizarrely, Diamond USA refuses to list it, even though it’s much better than 99% of the comics featured in Previews – it’s a strange world!

Richard: How can someone contact you?

Steve: If it’s a submission enquiry they submissions@timebombcomics.com is the one to use. I would stress that anyone thinking of submitting should make sure they read our guidelines on the Time Bomb website – and follow them! I’d also recommend getting hold of at least one of our books (we’re available through Haven in the U.S.) to get an idea of the type of comics we do publish. Any other enquiries should go through our general feedback@timebombcomics.com address in the first instance, or alternatively contact me through the Time Bomb Facebook group or Comic Space listing. We always love to hear from people, so there’s no need to be shy.

Richard: Any final words of wisdom?

Steve: Two things. First off, I’d recommend that anyone out there thinking about putting together their own comic book to give it their best shot. It’s hard work, but there’s nothing quite like seeing a freshly minted comic story with your name on it either in print or online. Go for it!

Secondly, be open to celebrating diversity in comics. It’s not just about Marvel, DC, and the Wizard hot-picks. Try something new, you could be pleasantly surprised.