Bone Birds

Bone Birds were designed by Dr Abbey.

While the bone birds look a lot like birds made out of bones, all the theories about them assume them to be neither bones, nor birds. One school of island thought has it that these are in fact demons. Some islanders are confident that bone birds do not exist and will refuse to admit being able to see them. The Hopeless Maine Scientific Society considers them to be some sort of insect. Unlike (other?) demons, bone birds maintain fixed forms and look similar to each other. They gather in small flocks and tend to favour isolated open spaces – hilltops and clifftops especially. They are highly vocal, making unpleasant screeching noises when alarmed, and eerie whispery noises the rest of the time. While they tend to avoid people, they will attack anyone who comes into their nesting sites. During nesting season (which does not come at a coherent frequency), they will also attack you for the contents of your washing basket or laundry line. They take hats, and anything else easily removed, to use as nesting material. They aren’t gentle about this, and while they don’t eat people, they will bite people.

Skitterlings

We’ve been designing some new Hopeless, Maine creatures! These are primarily for the role play game, but could turn up other places, too. Skitterlings were initially designed by Dr Abbey.

Skitterlings inhabit caves and tunnels, and make distinctive rustling noises as they move about in the dark. They can see perfectly well in the dark or in light. They tend to frequent walls and ceilings as this makes it easier to attack anything else that happens to be in their tunnels. Skitterlings will cheerfully eat anything smaller than they are, and at full size they can be larger than people. They’re also very protective of objects in their tunnels. That means you can use them to protect your hidden treasures/secrets assuming you can get past them in the first place to drop something off. If you bring a sacrifice, it is entirely possible to leave them an object to protect while they are eating. However, there is no meal tempting enough to stop a Skitterling from protecting its stash. Which might of course be treasure, or a carefully hidden weapon, but might equally be a stick that fell in from a hole in the ground, or a rusty bucket someone abandoned while running away. A Skitterling is best fought off with bladed weapons, and may retreat if you don’t seem to be threatening its precious stash. And yes, they will fight to the death to protect the rusty bucket.

Tom here- This was my interpretation of Dr Abbey’s design sketch. So much fun because he thinks of things that I never would, but there was also enough ambiguity in the design that I had the opportunity to discover how some elements would work in “reality”.

Do not eat the mermaids

By Dr Abbey

Do never kill it
before eating mermaids
Calling Screaming and Crying
Your rope tied up your destiny
The ancient ruins of creature
hide there

I went to the sea last week
They are under the sky.

Hopeless in Japan

We’re very excited to be part of an exhibition in Japan this summer – organised by Dr Abbey. Bits of Hopeless will be there, alongside work from our excellent steampunk chums Dr Geof and Jennie Gyllblad. Also other people that we don’t really know.

In honour of this event, Sloth Comics has put together a special edition limited print run of Personal Demons (The first half of The Gathering for UK folk). We’re massively excited about this. It’s hardly normal for a small, indy comic like ours to go on sale in Japan. There’s even talk of doing a larger print run, in translation!

Durosimi

He picked a bone up under the lighthouse.

It had been used as candle stand.

He noticed a name carved.

Old language

He has a human candle at home.

Melting fat with old bones

Fire on dead hair

Scarlet flame from eye holes.

And spiders

Spiders are eating skulls

Spiders’ nests make a skull chain.

Durosimi grows eight legs

and laughs at himself.

It is a bone black magic.

*

(Text by Dr Abbey, image by Tom and Nimue.

If you’d like to spend more time with Durosimi and his spiders, there’s a 4.5k short story for everyone who backs the kickstarter – if we hit our first stretch goal. The piece above and the short story were written in parallel, and it is thanks to Abbey that the story has so many spiders in it! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hopelessmaine/hopeless-maine-the-graphic-novel-by-tom-and-nimue-brown/)

Durosimi – the Magician

Durosimi O’Stoat is Salamandra’s father in at least some senses of the word. But not all of them. He is obsessed with magic, and power and the quest for more of those things. No bargain is too dangerous, no spell too twisted, no pact unthinkable.

Sometimes I impress myself,

Although I am not easily impressed

My standards are high.

(Art by Dr Abbey, small poem by Nimue)

Alicia Poe – a Hopeless Ghost

I am the ghost of the girl you killed

Over and over when you silenced me

Every time you deprived me of peace

Told me to be nice, say nothing of anything

That is not nice even as it happened to me.

I am the ghost of the girl not allowed

To cry in the night, in pain, in fear.

Shut up or I’ll give you something to cry about.

I am the ghost of the woman you killed

Over and over, when you denied me

The right to be myself, to have my feelings

When you shut down my thoughts,

Ignored my needs, turned my pain

And my despair into irrelevant nothing.

Locked me in the house for my own good

Then in the attic since I could not be trusted

To act in my own best interests.

Saying only you knew what was right for me

Only you could say what was good and proper.

You said nothing is more tragically romantic

Than the untimely death of a beautiful

Young woman. And how you smiled

When you said that to me.

I am the ghost of the woman you killed

And I have all the time in the world

For my revenge.

(Art by Dr Abbey, poem inspired by the art, and a bit of a snarl at Edgar Allen Poe, who really did say something to the effect that the death of a beautiful young woman was the only real subject for literature)

Japanese Salamandra

Those of you who have read Volume 3 – Victims – will know there’s a silly bit where Owen and Salamandra are going to a party. Salamandra has always been good at illusions and likes messing about with appearances, so she dresses them up. I was vague with the script, suggesting that Owen’s might be more silly and less flattering. Tom decided to give Salamandra a distinctly Japanese look.

This caught Dr Abbey’s imagination, and below is his take on Sal in her party gear.

Of course it raised questions – not least being why Salamandra chooses to look this way at this moment.

There are outside the story reasons – that this is an aesthetic Tom likes, and that he has always wanted to appeal to a Japanese audience is most of it. Manga has been a big influence on Mr Brown and there’s a desire to offer something back. Also, this is how Tom does things – he draws whatever arrives in his head and then someone else (usually, but not always me) has to work out how that makes any kind of sense.

So, why is Salamandra inclined to look this way? Has she seen an image like this in a book? Was there a dream, or a scrying experience? Is there a slightly disturbing doll of her mother’s somewhere, wearing just this attire?

I don’t know. Maybe you do. If you are the person who knows how this story goes, please do get in touch and tell us!

Young Salamandra

This week we bring you another Dr Abbey art.

There is an extra story to tell with this one, and on this occasion it is more about the materials than the image. That textured paper was my grandmother’s. I inherited her art equipment, and had quite a stash of paper and oil pastels that were hers. It’s been good putting the paper to use, and I’ve wondered repeatedly what she would make of this process. Hopeless is very different from the kind of art she used to do.

I’m fairly sure that some of the colouring materials used in this were from Dr Abbey’s family as well, and that it is a meeting of people in a rather magical way.

Salamandra as a Child

I had a lot of conversations with Dr Abbey about child Salamandra as he started getting to know the deeper lives of the characters on our fictional island. It’s always interesting bringing someone new into the inner life of the books, seeing what is obvious to them, and what I need to talk about, and what new things are discovered in that process.

“How old is she in this book?” he asked. I had to admit that I couldn’t tell him. Her age is vague, reliably, for reasons.

It’s always difficult to know what to say when there are things in a story that are important, and you want people to notice them, but you also don’t want to spell them out. How old is Salamandra? Is she a physically small child? A precocious child? A magical child? What kind of child is she? If you’ve read New England Gothic, you’ll know that many of the monsters on and around the island are probably her mother’s children. What does that make Sal? What was really going on with her when she was thrown into the sea in The Blind Fisherman?

Who is she? What is she? These are questions at the heart of the story. I can encourage you to think about it, but that’s about as far as I’m ready to go.

In this image by Dr Abbey, we see child Salamandra as she starts to add wrappings to her regular attire. The strips of cloth have prayers, charms and spells written onto them and they are a form of protective magic that she builds up over the years until she has an entire dress of it. She is a grumpy child, and with good reason.

A very long time ago, I read a quote from Toni Morrison to the effect that often the most important part of a story is how we shape holes for other people to put things into. It’s an idea I’ve spent a lot of time with. The holes are where we write ourselves in, bring our own stories and experiences to fill in the gaps. The holes are where the collaboration happens between author and reader. Hopeless Maine is the project in which I have given most thought to the gaps. It’s also the only project I’ve done where a lot of people have responded by wanting to bring their own creativity to those spaces. It’s a truly exciting process.

Who is child Salamandra? She’s the awkward, unacceptable one. She’s the child who refused to be tamed. She is your lost inner child. She is the magic your child self wanted. She is the resilience to survive bullying and to overcome setback. She is herself despite where she came from, she is not simply a product of her parents. She is childhood rage and frustration, and a child’s keen sense of justice and fair play. She might rescue you. She might glower at you. She might set fire to your kitchen chair. If she whispers to you, listen carefully – she may have secrets to share, or demands to make.