A recent interview I did with the guys at 8th Wonder Press. Watch out for their Uncanny Adventures Anthology which will be released very soon. Features my Communication Meltdown story with art by Randy Valiente.
Six Questions With: Paul Bradford
Tell us a bit about Who You Are And How You Came To Be.
I’m Paul Bradford and I am a comic book writer. I was born in Scotland, but currently live in Perth, Western Australia. I grew up reading British Comics in the 70’s and 80’s and these comics had a big impact on me. They were a great way to vanish into whole new worlds and live fantastic adventures. Nowadays however I like to collect comic book related busts and statues and have a large collection of these. I also have a few Aussie Muscle cars from the 70’s.
How did you find yourself making comics?
In high school, I teamed up with a few people who all had a common interest in creating comics. However the whole thing never really went anywhere and we didn’t actually produce any comics. I guess that sparked my interest in writing comics and I continued to write and develop ideas for stories. Roll forward a few years and I started submitting scripts to companies in the US and in the UK. That process however did not lead to any opportunities for me to write comics. The Australian comic book scene was pretty non-existent back then and there was definitely not a lot happening in Perth. At that stage, I wasn’t about to travel overseas to try my hand at submitting at conventions as I didn’t think that a writer would have much chance at being picked up that way. If I had been a kick ass artist, I probably would have tried that avenue. Roll forward a few more years and the whole internet thing came along. This gave me the opportunity to make contact with artists from around the world. Some of these connections went nowhere, whilst others thrived and my writing started to come to life in the form of comic books. I continue to use the internet to make new contacts with artists as well as publishers, such as 8th Wonder Press.
Without giving too much away, tell us about your story “Communication Meltdown” and how you approached it.
Communication Meltdown was written with the general idea of having a historical event that in fact had something else going on, something that was coming out of left field. Once I had the general idea for the story, it pretty much wrote itself. I did do some research on the historical event though, in order to get the details correct that I needed to use within the story. The story itself was written as a done in one story with the hope of finding an anthology to publish it. I wrote it as a ten page story, which seems to be a little too long for a lot of anthologies out there. It was written quite a while ago and I am really glad to finally get this story into print. I have worked with the artist, Randy Valiente, on a few other projects since then and they have been printed, so we are both pleased to now see Communication Meltdown being published.
What are you reading right now, comics or otherwise?
To be perfectly honest, I have not been doing a lot of reading in recent years. My interest in collecting comic related busts and statues has taken over from reading and collecting comics. As a writer, I think that I may have made a conscious decision to stop reading comics as I used to read comics that had ideas similar to stories that I was developing. As I could not bring my comics to print, it used to frustrate me that a similar idea was published and I had to scrap my work. But I guess that happens to the best of us. Ideas would then be similar to movies and the like, so you learn to take those knocks and move on. After all you cannot avoid watching television and movies, well I can’t anyway. Having said that, I have recently started reading a few comic books again. I picked up IDW’s Judge Dredd, as I was a huge fan of 2000AD in my younger days, but these books are not really doing it for me. I am hoping that IDW’s Judge Dredd Year One really meets the mark. I have also recently picked up Tom Taylor and James Brouwer’s graphic novel The Deep: Here Be Dragons that was published by Gestalt Comics. This was a pretty damn good read and I am looking forward to picking up the follow up graphic novel The Deep: The Vanishing Island.
How did you meet up, and what’s your creative process like?
I originally made contact with Randy Valiente quite a few years ago now. He posted some of his art on the now defunct Heavy Metal Magazine Forum. I liked his style and contacted him through the forum, which then led to us working together. I have worked on a few short comics with Randy over the past few tears and hope to work on a few more in the coming years. The process, I guess, would be similar to anybody who works with others in different countries, I live in Australia and Randy Lives in the Philippines. Essentially, I send Randy the script, he does up some rough layouts of how he sees the pages, I give it the go ahead or suggest some changes and we move on. Randy will then do up the pencils and I approve or suggest changes and then he does the inks and then the letters and colors (if required). I am fairly open for the artist to make changes to the layout as long as the story still flows well. From my viewpoint, I think if the artist can have input into the look of the page, then this is more interesting for them.
I have been working on a few projects in recent months, some of which will be seeing the light of day very soon. I have also had some of my previous works reprinted in various anthologies. Keep a look out for the following, some of which are available right now: Astral Crusaders – The Standard Bearer available for download (CE Publishing – Megabook M2 and Emerald Star Comics Presents #1), Witch Hunters (soon to be published by Evil Moose Publishing – Moose Crossing Anthology #1), Ultimate Man and The Night Errant (soon to be published by Source Point Press in Alter Egos volumes 1 and 2), The Last Knight (soon to be published in Indie Comics Horror #2) and Silent But Deadly (available later in the year in Indie Comics Magazine #7). To keep up to date with new releases and info about my comics, please visit my blog at inertiapublications.blogspot.com.
