NOTE: After you’ve read all the posting below (and I hope you do!), please go look at the 2021 posting “The Last Club Vamporama”—I had sadly accidentally deleted the original version of this posting, rather than making it private, forcing me to recreate it—and it’d be really cool if you could leave some new feedback & comments there! Thanks.
While on the theme of 20th anniversaries… I did my first Club Comicana strip around October 2006. To celebrate, let’s have a bit of history and rare art!
That first strip was going to be dropped into my regular “Networks” column for Comics International #201—however, Dez abruptly sold the magazine, and I didn’t get along with the bumbling fool who was tasked with killing it off taking it over… so I didn’t continue working for the mag.
But in actual fact, the very first (unfinished) strip was started in the summer of 2006. And I recently realised, I had never posted it on here. So here it is…
What was the punchline going to be? Look, I know what it was, but it’s more interesting to leave it a mystery. The truth would be too banal and disappointing. Trust me!
As I have been lately restoring my blog archives, this has involved replacing/upgrading a lot of images. I had a decision to make with the old Comicana strips. Did I use the originals, as I first put them out there online—or use the adulterated versions I later replaced them with? I decided to go with the originals. As you might feel, reading the first strip above, I was going severely overboard with Marie’s Franglais speak. I later toned it down a lot. I developed a pretty good feel for it. So I digitally “fixed” a lot of the earlier strips more in line with how I developed the character later.
But it’s historically inaccurate! So, the strips are being restored to their original state!
That said, if I ever decide to do the long-mooted Club Vamporama Omnibus—that will contain newly-scanned revised versions, because I have been making changes on the original artwork more recently. It’s my strip, I can do revisionism all I want! But for the purposes of those old blog entries, being true to the original seemed the right call.
Anyhow, if we’re delving into Comicana history, the first question is: how come it got retitled to Club Vamporama? Simply, I decided to make the character Bette Noir a central figure in the strip, and she runs a nightclub called Club Vamporama! It seemed a better title. That’s all.
Of course, I let all these characters down. Really badly. I had piles of story ideas and I barely scratched the surface. I became utterly dissatisfied with my artwork on this project and, in 2012, I started focusing on the idea of Club Vamporama as a live-action TV series. I wrote all the scripts for series one (six half-hour episodes)—I envisioned it as a comedy-drama a la Spaced and Ideal. I fully plotted all of the second series, too! I really, really believed it was a winner for a while.
During this period, I also decided to use the pen-name Liz Black. It was a funny kind of “art imitates life” joke, the name being the same as one of the main characters (Bette Noir)… but I also wanted to create the myth that Vamporama was always intended as a TV series (and maybe a series of novels)—it just happened that one of Liz’s friends (ie. me) offered to draw some comics based on it while she was developing it for other media!
Rightly or wrongly, I persuaded myself this strategy made the idea more marketable. I suspect I was wrong. Anyhow: there is no Liz Black, or rather—I am she.
Well, of course, through sheer stubbornness, eventually I got to make two short, live-action promotional films for Club Vamporama! Those were Who Is Bette Noir? and Hail Cthulhu! This is how Vamporama Films (now largely dormant) came to be. It was hardly plain sailing, in fact it was one snag after another… but, while I don’t think either of the films are successful, I’m kinda proud of having done them. They both have good aspects, even if they don’t quite work as a whole.
The promo poster for Hail Cthulhu! came out pretty nice too, IMO. (My work, of course.)
Sadly, the failure of this… kinda killed Club Vamporama. I lost all motivation as far as the live-action angle was concerned—too bad, it could’ve been great! And the comics… I never could quite satisfy myself with my own artwork for it.
After I put Vamporama to bed, officially, in 2021, I conceived a comic book mini-series sequel, entitled “Adventures of M”, where Jenni & Marie now live in 1982—and Marie is living her fantasy of being a real-life, actual superhero! Sadly, this project too is on ice—I need an artist better-equipped to draw superhero material than I am.
As this 2023 promo drawing shows—I don’t really do it justice. I’ve tried. So, if you’re an artist and fancy a crack at this—get in touch at the email address linked above!
Now, history… more history, folks… I said this all started in the summer of 2006. That’s not really true.
In 2005, I did a series of six strips with Ed Berridge for a small press anthology titled Lost Property. It had a girl protagonist called “Jen”—and she reminded me of my own character, going way back to 1987, named “Jan”. So I gave her the same dark hair, and I quietly thought of her as a new version of this character.
What was the strip called? Comicana Miscellania!
In 2006, I asked Ed if I could continue with the Jen character myself. And that’s how Club Comicana came to be. The basic premise was, a Locas (from Love and Rockets) style strip set in the UK! It developed from there.
But really—it goes back to 1987-89, and a strip called Blood Stains. The main character, Jan, is a horror fan and starts having strange visions/hallucinations about vampires. Again, being a huge, long-time fan of Jaime Hernandez, my idea was to do something a bit like Locas with a UK setting. Now some would (and have) argued that Jan is a self-insert. Indeed, some of the other characters in the strip bear vague resemblances to friends of mine of the time. Guilty as charged. And, in truth, if anyone in Club Vamporama is ME—it’s not Bette, it’s not Marie… it’s Jenni.
Here’s page 7 of Blood Stains, circa 1988.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, my lettering is cretinously enormous!! I didn’t know what I was doing, OK?
But this is where Vamporama really started.
So we are closer to the 40th anniversary, really (next year).
Interesting. It feels like I would have bought Lost Property if I’d seen it at the time, but 2005 was a time of changes, so I may have just missed it. Where did Blood Stains appear? I do hope someone is willing to give Adventures of M a try.