It’s Indie April, a celebration of all things Indie, be it novels, movies, music or art. The idea being to encourage interaction between indie creatives, and that most elusive of beasties the wider audience, and it is a time to celebrate all those wonderful indie creatives and their work.  As a writer, my focus (I know, I know, this bits always the same in these posts, look just skip down a paragraph why don’t you…) is on bringing indie writers (and artists) to your attention. So for the rest of the month, I will be periodically featuring some of the best the independent scene has to offer. Some of these will be names familiar to those who read my blog, some will be new, but all of them are undoubtedly wonderful and deserving of a wider audience. So take the plunge and invest in some indie goodness, give an indie writer (and artists) a try, I guarantee you’ll not regret it.

Hopeless Maine: Tom and Nimue Brown

Tom Brown and Nimue Brown, collectively responsible for art, stories and tentacles in the series of graphic novels set on the island of Hopeless, somewhere of the coast of Maine. Tom leads on the art and Nimue on the stories but they both do both, which just speaks as to how utterly talented they both are. Hopeless started out as a webcomic, before coming to print. The Island setting is now it’s in the process of becoming a roleplaying game, tarot deck, a cuddly spoonwalker and all manner of other things. I don’t know exactly what a cuddly spoonwalker is, but I know I want one…

These novels had been on my to buy list ever since I first saw Tom Brown’s gorgeous Burtonesque artwork, but it is Nimue Brown’s writing that sets this truly apart because no matter how beautifully atmospheric the artwork (and it is beautiful, grim, dark and utterly gorgeous) a graphic novel lives and breaths through the writing. So while the art is a feast for the eyes, the words need to be a feast for the soul, which they are. Just the chapter titles alone give you a taste of how beautifully written this is, ‘My mother wants to drink me’ and ‘I don’t think I will ever get used to being dead’.
You can not help but be drawn into the strange, dark, tragic lives of the character, and the grim foreboding haunted island of Hopeless, somewhere of the coast of Maine, or somewhere else perhaps.
As I said this was on my to buy list a while before I bought it, but I am so glad I did, and if it needs any more compliments from me, let me just say this, the moment I finished reading it, I ordered the next book… and now I am damned to wait for it to arrive…

You can find out more about the island of Hopeless, Maine and its many strange, occasionally grotesque, endlessly weird and grimly fascinating inhabitance at https://hopelessvendetta.wordpress.com/  and the books are available on Amazon, in many a local comic shop, and if your lucky enough to get to one when they are there and not busy fending off tentacles steampunk festivals and other such gatherings.

This is normally where I do the earlier posts bit, but there ain’t any because I have only just read the first book and the review I wrote for Amazon is what you have just read… However, those who follow my Lovecraftian reviews which I have been doing for so damn long I may never finish them all will know I normally rate Lovecraft’s stories with tentacles. So given this is Hopeless, Maine, in a slight divergence from the norm for these posts I’ll give it a tentacle score as well…

PS: I have also now don’t an interview with Nimue and Tom and you can find it by clicking on the bit that says Interview Click here, which is this bit, so click on it…

Also, as your doubtless aware by now, this is the part of these posts where I come up with a reason why I have a Harvey Duckman link at the bottom of this post. The excuses for doing so when the writers (and artists) I am talking about have nothing to do with the anthology have become ever more tenuous. Someone is bound to point this out at some point. But as I am one of 14 other Indie writers of SciFi, Fantasy, Steampunk and Horror within its folds, one of which is Craig Hallam who I know really likes Tom and Nimue’s work, I’m going to do it anyway. So you could do worse than get yourself a copy by clicking on the lovely picture below 🙂 More indie April shorts coming as soon as (I figure out who to do next, probably Katie Salvo, writer of life stories of German philosophers sisters and their incestuous relationships shes not in Harvey either and I’ll probably need an even more tenuous link in her case…