Worlds End - Volume 2

Artwork – A Hard Reign’s Gonna Fall

 Hi Folks,

Well, here as promised for a while now the latest piece of artwork from the second of the Worlds End “Science Fusion” graphic novels.

This is the front Endpaper and shows Gweldar, Geek, Ralf and Zephol walking in along, on their way through a dense forest scene. But who’s that lying in wait amongst the brambles around the corner?

If you click on the artwork below you’ll be directed to a larger piece over on the main Wizards Keep website.

I hope it has been worth the wait.

If you want to know what happens to our heroes you’ll have to wait to pick up your copy of the book upon publication.

Next: the Cover Art to Volume 2.

Until next time, have fun!

Tim Perkins…

May 24th 2013

Wicked Comics Present

Comics Workshop

Hi Folks,

Well, with one week to go before I fly out once more to the wonderful island of Malta, I thought I would once again remind you of the reason for my visit.

I’ll be running two workshops the first on Saturday 1st June for students on an existing course and the second on Sunday 2nd June for all the local artists and writers.

As of this moment there are still a few places on the Sunday workshop, which are still available or at least where a few moments ago when I checked with the organisers. So if you are thinking about coming along, act fast as the workshop has proven to be very popular, which is great news.

For more information on the Sunday workshop drop the guys a line at:

info@maltacomic-con.com

There is an official FaceBook Events Page, which you can visit by signing into FaceBook and clicking the link below too.

COMIC WORKSHOPS in MALTA

Next up, definitely some more NEW artwork from Worlds End – Volume 2 – A Hard Reign’s Gonna Fall.

Until next time, have fun!

Tim Perkins…

May 23rd 2013

The Lakes International Comic Art Festival

Tickets on sale now

 

Hi Folks,

I ask a little indulgence today as I promote the forthcoming festival in the lovely town of Kendal, in Cumbria later in the year, at which I am one of the official attendees.

The tickets have gone on sale and more information can be found by following the link below:

Ticket Bookings

Please check back here next month when I’ll be able to share some more information with you that the organisers are presently keeping TOP SECRET.

I love teasers…

Next up, Another Malta Workshop Blog and then honestly – definitely some more NEW artwork from Worlds End – Volume 2 – A Hard Reign’s Gonna Fall.

Until next time, have fun!

Tim Perkins…

May 22nd 2013

Wicked Comics Present

Comics Workshops

Hi Folks,

In just over a couple of weeks time I shall find myself once more flying out to the beautiful island of Malta. As I mentioned last time I am going to be producing two of my now famous comic workshops.

The first one on the agenda is for the Wicked Comics Educational Program, which is a Basic Course in Creating Comics for the Premju tal-President Fund. This I will be running on Saturday 1st June for a number of students already on a ten-session long course on creating comcs.

The Guys at Wicked Comics have already been involved with the students over a period of time and following my visit they will be producing some of their own work for display and hopefully sale at this year’s forthcoming MaltaComicCon on November 30th and December 1st.

I cannot wait to see what they have been working on up to press and for a chance to inspire them into producing something really great for their appearances at this year’s convention.

The second is a workshop I am going to run on Sunday 2nd June. I have been looking at such an opportunity to do this kind of thing with the guys for a number of years now and finally that has happened. This one is for the local artists and the organisers themselves and anyone else that wishes to go along there – all fans of comics.
 
Cost of the Sunday Workshop is €35.00 and includes the price of Lunch.

For more information on this workshop drop the guys a line at:

info@maltacomic-con.com

There is an official FaceBook Events Page, which you can visit by clicking the link here too.

COMIC WORKSHOPS in MALTA

You can also click on the promotional poster below for more details too.

I’m really excited and cannot wait to be out there once again.

Of course there’ll be photos and a Blog for the time spent there too.

See you soon guys - we are going to have so much FUN with the Workshops!

Next up, some more NEW artwork from Worlds End – Volume 2 – A Hard Reign’s Gonna Fall.

Until next time, have fun!

Tim Perkins…
May 14th 2013

MaltaComicCon 2013

Year five of my all-time favourite event

Hi Folks,

It’s now time to announce, officially, the dates for this year’s forthcoming MaltaComicCon. Is it really five years since I first met you all? Anyhow, I’ll turn you over the guys themselves for a moment…

”Do you remember how much fun you had at the Malta Comic Con 2012? How good it felt to meet all the awesome guests and creators that exhibited at our show? The rush you felt seeing your favourite creators sign and sketch? Do you remember how amazing it was to spend 2 days with so many wicked folk, discussing and doing the things you like most? Of course you do! How can you forget when we all had such a blast at the show? All those lovely people in costumes, all the buzz in the video game rooms, the thrill of tabletop and role playing games with the wicked folk at W.A.R.S, all those informative and entertaining talks, discussion panels and workshops! And what about all the free movies? The portfolio reviews, those impressive exhibitions and most of all, the fun filled atmosphere experienced during the whole 2 days of the convention!

You would all love to experience all these feelings again wouldn’t you? And why shouldn’t you? Yep the Malta Comic Con is coming again and it’s going to be super!

And if you haven’t experienced the Malta Comic Con yet, this is your wake up call!

Wicked Comics are proud to announce that this year the Malta Comic Con (Good Vibes) will be happening on Saturday 30th November and Sunday 1st December at St. James Cavalier Valletta. So keep the dates free for 2 more days of fun for everyone! Fans can look forward to another killer roster of foreign creators who are not only gifted but are also really nice folks, more local creators and locally created comics, cosplay events and competitions, gaming events and competitions, free movies and animations showing during the whole duration of the convention, impressive exhibitions and a healthy number of talks, workshops and discussion panels. There will be something for everyone!

As customary Wicked Comics have designed a number of packages for fans wishing to travel to the Malta Comic Con from abroad, which include heavily discounted accommodation rates and local transport from hotel to convention. Similarly Wicked Comics have a number of packages tailored for foreign creators who whish to exhibit at the Malta Comic Con including heavily discounted tables.

Anyone wishing to know more about these packages, and local creators/retailers wishing to exhibit at the Malta Comic Con 2013 are kindly requested to email us for more details on:

info@maltacomic-con.com  

For more details kindly visit:

http://www.maltacomic-con.com  

Testimonial from legendary comic creator and Malta Comic Con 2012 guest Herb Trimpe:

“I have to reiterate and say what a great time we had in Malta, and all because of your show. Selling points: great people--great location (the fort)--great environment (your country, five+ stars, fantastically beautiful)--hospitality tops--weather--the Med--oh, yeah, and… the food! If I left anything out, you can add it, as we're sure it's the best of whatever. I honestly can't think of anything you could do better!” (H.Trimpe, 2013)”

Well there we go, take it from me when I say the deals they do for folks are brilliant. One of my students came along last year and he enjoyed himself so much he is joining me back out there once more later this year.

The event is spectacular and what’s not to love?

They have the event in a medieval fortress, there’s the sunshine, there are comics and other merchandise, sunshine, lots of international and local guests, sunshine, lots of sights to see, sunshine, lots of wonderful cuisine and the people themselves are brilliant, warm and accommodating and great fun to be with to boot. Oh, yeah, and there’s the sunshine too…

As I‘ve said many times before; now I look on the organisers as my friends and really look forward to seeing them every year around the same time. It really is that kind of event.

In fact I’ll be out there in a few weeks time as I produce two of my now famous comic workshops. One is for the Wicked Comics Educational Program, which is a Basic Course in Creating Comics for the Premju tal-President Fund. This I will be running on Saturday 1st June for a number of students already on a ten-session long course on creating comcs. Wonderful that these guys don’t just produce the conventions they produce educational activities like this. I am running three sessions, whilst the Wicked Comics folks will have already run the rest.

The other is a workshop I am going to run on Sunday 2nd June. I have wanted to do so for quite some time as a way of saying thanks to everyone for their treatment of me whilst I am out there. This one is for the local artists and the organisers themselves and anyone else that wishes to go along there – all fans of comics.

For more information on this workshop drop the guys a line at:

info@maltacomic-con.com

I’ll be posting a promotional poster on here soon with more details too.

I’m really excited and cannot wait to be amongst my buddies again.

Of course there’ll be photos and a Blog for the time spent there too.

See you soon guys.

Just before I sign off, I’d just like to thank everyone that has been in touch in regards the Orphan Works Bill, this last few days. Your support is fantastic, but we need to keep promoting and keep sharing the links to the petition with everyone we know as well as writing to the MPs themselves.

Next up, some new artwork from Worlds End – Volume 2 – A Hard Reign’s Gonna Fall.

Until next time, have fun!

Tim Perkins…
May 7th 2013

Stop The Legalised Theft of Copyrighted Works

UK Government Fast-Tracking New Orphan Works Bill


Hi Folks,

Well, I know I said that the next Blog would show some new artwork from Worlds End – Volume 2 – A Hard Reign’s Gonna Fall, but something has come up of such magnitude and importance that I am publishing this particular Blog post instead in lieu of the aforementioned one.

I guess by now, having read the above title and subtitle to this Blog you will be recalling my similar Blog posts around three years or so ago, when the US Senate tried to do the same thing by getting an Orphan Works Bill passed through the back door, so to speak.

Well a lot of UK folks didn’t think it applied to them back then and I said it did along with millions of other creative folks around the globe. Then when the US Bill was overturned, such was the opposition to it, I Blogged that the UK Government had decided to do the same kind of things themselves and again some folks were totally blasé about the all affair. Suddenly though, any reports of the UK Orphan Rights Bill disappeared - that is until now.

Yes, the UK Orphan Works Bill is back with a vengeance and the government are trying to sneak it in the back door once more, just like their American counterparts did.

This Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act effectively strips all ownership of creative works from the person creating them and puts them in the public domain. The thinly disguised act of theft hidden behind the sycophantic smiles of civil servants within the Intellectual Property Office means they simply don’t see copyright as a “right” any longer. Rather they see it as – to quote them – “a framework“ Obviously just something else to be toyed with and manipulated with at will.

The reality of the act that is now in operation actually means that all anyone needs to do is say they have done a “due diligence” search and they can use anyone’s work without asking the owner/creator of the work prior to exploiting it themselves.

Bear in mind a creative person may not wish others to exploit their work(s).

“The powers do not remove copyright for photographs or any other works subject to copyright”, says a spokeswoman for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills under whose banner this diabolic act has been written. This is typical government speak for I’m only telling a slight untruth.

What the person in question is omitting, with this statement is the fact that the powers DO remove the right of the copyright owner to decide whether or not they want to licence their work, negotiate the terms on which they may want to licence it, what the price of any such license would be, asserting any credit and discussing the moral rights. In other words most of the “acts ALREADY restricted by copyright”, the ones which are the “exclusive right” of the copyright owner (in the words of the Copyright Act), are now no longer in the hands of the copyright owner. They have been repealed and lie with anyone else wishing to exploit such works.

This is a typical government/corporate decision! We want to give the right to exploit any creative work (they continue to use the word Orphan) to our buddies in the corporate sectors, which whilst under the Berne Convention they simply cannot.

Does it then stand that we, creative folks are now allowed to start using logos implying we are affiliates of corporate entities such as Google, Instagram, etc?

I somehow doubt it and that’s only putting a logo on to a website or letterhead.

What we are seeing is an illegal grasping of ideas, and creative works by all and sundry, but more so for opportunistic big corporate business. A system is being set up by the super-rich-mentality of the new aristocracy AKA the UK government, who have been found out time and time again in recent years, regardless of party affiliation to be corrupt, in league with the bankers and corporate companies and with NO REGARD whatsoever to the people trying to earn a decent day’s living.

The Berne Convention was set up for a reason to stop this exact same type of exploitation by anyone other than the actual owner of the work from occurring, on a global scale. What they also neglect to mention is the cost of any litigation which WILL come to all creative people from this moment on, unless the act and thus the new legislation being sought to be put into action via the back door, is stopped, will be astronomical and totally untenable for anyone except the super rich to oversee.

In other words the opposite of what Robin Hood would do. Here we see the super rich being given carte blanche rights to steal whatever they see fit from the much poorer creative people that actually DO MORALLY OWN the rights to their creations.

This thinly disguised, cynical piece of legislation is being touted about under the pretext of Orphan Works.

Now for those unsure of what that means;

An Orphan Work is a piece of creative work, which someone may wish to exploit and which the person seeking to exploit it did not originate. Unsure if the work is still within the period of time that the copyright carries or whether indeed the owner of the said work(s) is still alive there needs to be a search to check this out. If not out of copyright the owner can still be approached in regard to whether a license to re-produce the work, book or whatever is a doable option. If there is no record of such an owner’s existence then the work can be used under a license sought through the Copyright, or Intellectual Property Office.

But that’s simply not good enough for the greedy politicians and their cronies! No they want to reverse this process, placing the emphasis on either keeping track of any infringements and then pursuing these in court every two minutes to stop such infringements – like that is going to happen in the real world were normal folks would never be able to afford to do this – or by having every single image or creative work entered on a registry at a cost – again untenable due to the cost of doing this for every single image and/or work in question.

This act is the most obscene and immoral thing to happen here in the UK in recent history and makes a mockery of the Berne Convention under which a creator has automatic copyright.

Canada has exactly the system I cite above.

This is how it works over there:

• I see something I wish to exploit commercially.
• I go to the Canadian Copyright Office.
• I pay for a search and find out if I can use the said work or not.

The copyright owner neither has to obtain costly protection by registration (something no one has to under the Berne Convention) nor has to worry about costly court cases. The copyright is with the owner and the owness is on the perpetrator of the act of copyright infringement to pay the court costs and any damages incurred by the owner should any such infringement take place.

Below are some “further reading” links:

http://www.stop43.org.uk/
http://metro.co.uk/2013/04/29/twitter-users-stripped-of-rights-to-own-snaps-3698502/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/29/err_act_landgrab/
http://copyrightblog.co.uk/2013/04/29/d-err-cretins-1-creators-0/

Please, please sign the petition below – just follow the simple instructions to do so:
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/49422

Please, please also write to your local MPs to get them to abolish this immoral and obscene new piece of law. I realise this takes a little effort, but the government cannot be allowed to take this “Right” away from creative people.

If we don’t get this overturned then expect to see a total eradication of anything truly, uniquely creative being produced ever again. After all what is the use of producing something commercially if by law you are not the only person that can exploit it?!!

Next up, unless there is more to report on this travesty, is a promotional Blog on this year’s forthcoming comic convention out in Malta and an upcoming trip out there in a few weeks time to teach comic illustration.

Then I’ll run one for the new artwork from Worlds End – Volume 2 – A Hard Reign’s Gonna Fall.

Until next time, have fun!

Tim Perkins…
May 3rd 2013

Space Ace

John Ridgway’s latest colour work

Hi Folks,

Well in my last Blog I promised some news on John Ridgway’s latest colour work and I mentioned a title… Space Ace, which for those that don’t know was a comic strip drawn by RON TURNER back in the nineteen-fifties.

First though I thought I would take a little time out to tell you a little about John himself. It all starts way back in the nineteen-eighties and my visiting a comics convention down in Birmingham, which I attended as a young twenty-something year-old wannabe comic creator with my wife, Margaret in tow for support.

This was my second convention following the one in 1979 when I was still an art student, but my first actively looking for work. With me I had a portfolio of work; a huge A1 presentation folder, which weighed a ton and needed a couple of yards of clear space to open it up to folks. Yes I work in millimetres and picas, but I speak the old language of feet and inches, pounds and ounces… LOL.

At that convention I was lucky enough to encounter a new writer there, who’s work had been adorning 2000AD, Marvel UK and Warrior at the time; a gentleman some of you may have heard of, a certain Mr Alan Moore. He graciously allowed me to show him my work. When I had shown him the last piece he told me he thought the stuff inside was great, but that not being an artist himself, he thought it may be of more use to me to show it to one of the artists in attendance there. He then pointed me in the direction of one in particular, one whom I had been following through his work at Marvel UK and Warrior. The aforementioned Alan Moore then bid me good luck and I plucked up the courage once more to speak to the artist in question.

That artist was John Ridgway. Little did I know that I would later work with him on Doctor Who as his inker and more importantly that later still I would be in the privileged position of saying he became and is still a great friend of mine.

Well, it is with great excitement that I announce to the world here in my humble little Blog that John continues to work on as many (if not more) comic book projects than he has at any point in his career. Some creator-owned, some co-creator-owned and some for mainstream publishers, like IDW, Print Media and some like the one on show today with like-minded folks that want to put out great comics.

The book’s opening introduction by publisher, John Lawrence begins… “When Ron Turner died in 1998, the world of British SF illustration lost one of its leading lights…”

Having known John for some three decades now I think I can safely say that this is something with which John Ridgway agrees. I am lucky that I have seen stuff, which few people on this planet of ours have seen, produced by John. Coloured pages of Gil Kane’s Space Hawks, Coloured versions of the Daily Mirror’s Garth by Frank Bellamy, Colourised versions of his and Jim Hudnall’s seminal, Age of Heroes as well as lots more, including some older European comic book works too, amongst all his 3D work, and work on his creator owned projects like, Wereworld, Alternate Earth, and (I think his favourite), Frontiers.

There was one, which I was privileged to keep getting sneak previews of too, the one, which you are looking at today, Space Ace, by the aforementioned, Ron Turner.

Ron worked for just about all the UK comic publishers during the fifties, sixties and seventies and even the eighties, as well as producing a huge array of SF or Sci Fi book covers. As John Lawrence mentions in his introduction of all of his work he ever did the one, which he looked on, as his favourite was Space Ace. Although the pay on his other books was far higher he looked on the fact that he was able to work outside of editorial control over the character and this added to his total enjoyment of working on the book. Like John Lawrence also goes on to say, “ - Ron’s marvellous artwork has been enhanced by the superb colouring of JOHN RIDGWAY, an artist absolutely in tune with Ron’s own colouring sensibilities and, showing the same degree of dedication, has given it the presentation Ron would have approved of himself.”

I am so happy to be able to share the news about the arrival of this latest book.

It’s now a prized possession in the Wizards Keep studio.

I won’t spoil any of the story elements, but here are some examples of the wonderful artwork inside the pages of the books and its cover too.

Now then I didn’t just post this recent missive just to SHOW you SOME of the artwork, my intention is to point you in the right direction, so you can order a copy of the soft cover comic book yourselves.

The full colour, 35-page comic book comes with a glossy, heavy weight card cover. As I say there is a one-page introduction at the front of the book and a brief history of the origins of the strip at the back. It contains four great stories and the front cover has VOL 1 emblazoned on it underneath the title, so there is obviously thoughts about a follow up volume, or perhaps even volumes. I know from speaking to John Ridgway that there is a second volume in the works, even as you read these words.

It really is a terrific, fun read and beautifully illustrated throughout. The addition of John’s wonderful colouring brings Ron Turner’s artwork well and truly into the 21st century, which Ron literally depicted in his work on Gerry Anderson’s TV21 comics.

You can write for details on how to buy the books to John Lawrence via email at:

Larryjohn.21@tiscali.co.uk  

You can also check out more artwork from various projects and follow the artist himself over on John Ridgway’s FaceBook Page.

You won’t be disappointed – this comic book really is the cream of comic book creators at their best!!!

Next up…

More artwork from Worlds End – Volume 2 – A Hard Reign’s Gonna Fall.

Until next time, have fun!

Tim Perkins…
April 23rd 2013