Tales of the Oak - Comic Making

With Tales of the Oak, we are trying to interest different audiences in local folklore. Unlike Wee Nasties, or our other books, here we have specifically concentrated on the slightly darker stories, so if it were a film, I think the comic would be rated 12A for "scenes of terror and fantasy violence". The original Tales from the Crypt comics we have based the project on were of course banned altogether, so we were careful not to go too far...

A page from one of the original EC horror comics,
we have tried to use a similar style for Tales of the Oak

The process for us, was to research some local folk tales and then turn them into comic stories. People script comics in all sorts of different ways, this is a page of one of our scripts...

The scripts were then passed to Andy Lee, who worked in two different styles - the pages were either pencilled, inked, scanned in and then coloured...

Or created from scratch digitally

Then evil genius Pete typeset, designed, swore at, reset and generally magicked the pages into the finished article. (which by the way is available exclusively at The Dutch Gable House this weekend for FREE)

A few pages we tried in different ways, so to go with the "silent movie" theme of Night of the Comet, Andy tried colouring the pages. It was really cool, but somehow the blood seemed a bit...bloodier. So we opted for eerie unearthly green instead.

Months and months of time and effort has gone into producing the publication, including lots of time from volunteers, and for Andy in particular it has been something he has worked on almost every day since last October. We hope you'll enjoy it.

We've shared this vid before, but it really is a tremendous overview of the history of the EC Comics...