Written by Chris Welsh, art by Ammar Al-Chalabi. Kickstarter ends on 12/01/2015. The books will be published in March 2015.

WART is the story of an unlucky fellow dragged into alternate universes where he's tortured, toyed with and harassed by giant monsters, evil doctors, a suspicious rat, and a rather disorganised cult. Lovecraftian cosmic horror that doesn't take itself too seriously.

Ever wanted to create your own comic? Here's how we did it…

For the first 18 months or so of knowing each other, Ammar and I communicated solely via email. We met in a group on Reddit (right here), decided we wanted to work together, and did just that. However, we live in different countries, so face-to-face time was pretty much out of the question without expensive flights.

So here's what we did instead.

It started with an email from Ammar outlining his basic idea for a comic. Something to do with a guy trapped in a cell that maybe wasn't completely real, with a couple of big monsters thrown in. Instead of just writing that out I expanded on it, and went back to Ammar with dozens of ideas, a storyline that linked them all, and the promise that I'd come up with a lot of really fun, crazy stuff for him to draw.

Quickly we settled into a groove of emailing ideas back and forth – some got shot down for one reason or another (being dumb, nonsensical or just plain uninteresting) but others we grabbed and ran with. Some of the most fun things we've done have come from expanding on ideas or characters we've already mentioned and bringing them more into the open. The Rat is a great example of this – at the start, it was just a rat, there for some comic relief, and now in Book Two, The Rat is a lot more than that… telling you more would spoil it, so I won't, but you can read it to see what I mean.

It took a few months to get the ideas all in order for Part One, and we ended up with a ten-page, open-ended short that… honestly… no one took much notice of. It was difficult to get the word out. Instead of giving up we started work on part two… then part three… then we collected them into a book and printed up a few dozen copies with our own money. We took them to comic conventions, we finally met in person, and we slowly started to grow. People began to take notice. Not many… not hundreds, but enough to make it feel worth while.

Still, we persevered, and now we're at the point of printing Book Two. We've gone with Kickstarter for a few reasons:

1. It's convenient. Really it is. We're operating it like a pre-order web store. You pay some money, you get your goods when they're ready.

2. It's fun. I've got a little app thing on my phone's main screen (Kickstarter Widget) it's called. I'm refreshing it eagerly every four minutes or so.

3. It gets the word out. With a Kickstarter campaign running, you have to be willing to share it about. It'll die otherwise. So we're forcing ourselves to break whatever shyness we've got surrounding our work. And it's doing well – we're 45% funded at the time of writing, and I'm on Bleeding Cool!

So, to wrap up, I suppose my advice for aspiring comic writers and artists is… just go and do it. Find some like minded people and make it happen. If you suck at it the first go around, try again, and it'll be better the second time. Repeat as much as necessary. And if you're enjoying it, keep making it happen, don't give up, and don't be afraid to put yourself out there a bit.

Make awesome stuff.

Show it to people.

Be brave.

–

Thanks for reading. Feel free to check out our Kickstarter, and pledge if you like what you see. We kinda love Bleeding Cool, so as a 'thank you' for them having us, we'd like to offer you guys a special deal…

If you pledge £25 (plus postage to wherever you are in the world, which you'll be asked on the second page), we'll send you the £35 package. Essentially, £10 off – meaning you'll get both printed books with exclusive content, both digital books, three posters (including the Kickstarter-only digital version) and a t-shirt, for only £25.

All you have to do it put BLEEDINGCOOL25 in the comments box so we know where you came from, and your £25 will be cosmically transformed into £35 worth of stuff.

Thanks again,

Chris Welsh

Writer of Wart – The Comic

www.wartcomic.com