Ever since seeing the film METEOR as a young child, I was fascinated and terrified by the idea of an asteroid impact. I don’t actually remember anything about the film itself, except the concept of a giant asteroid heading towards earth, and it having nuclear missiles fired at it. From this formative experience, as well as being interested in dinosaurs (like most children), I became interested in the concept of asteroid impacts.

Years later, when I first heard about the film DEEP IMPACT, I got very excited. Empire magazine described this as a "serious" attempt at making an asteroid impact disaster movie - I particularly remember the line "when the asteroid hits..." being part of the article. It excited me that I would see an asteroid hit the earth on screen. When I actually saw the film, I was massively disappointed. I mean, sure, Morgan Freeman was quite good, some of the crowd scenes were well done, and the idea of preserving a nucleus of humanity was sensible. But apart from that it was absolute rubbish from beginning to end.

I also went to see ARMAGEDDON, hoping to see something a little better. What I saw was even worse.

The most galling thing about the films for me, was that in both cases, the asteroid DIDN'T hit. (Ok, in Deep Impact a bit of it hit, but it was pretty pathetic wasn't it?)

Hollywood has this idea that nobody would want to see a film that has an unhappy ending, where they fail to stop a big threat. It's understandable - one of the most basic definitions of a story is that of a conflict that is resolved at the end. A conflict between man and asteroid would therefore have to result in the asteroid threat being diverted.

Thing is, that's not what I went to the cinema to see. I suffer from the Godzilla factor - I love sitting in a dark room seeing the world completely destroyed before my eyes, before walking bleary-eyed back out into the real world. It's cathartic, it's exhilarating, and it's terrifying. The best disaster movies are the ones where the disaster actually happens - the conflict is not in stopping the disaster, it's in surviving it. My feeling with Deep Impact and Armageddon was that they hadn't realised this basic concept.

Both films also suffered from the most ludicrous debasement of science I have ever seen in cinema. Worst of all, the people that made the films actually seemed to believe it would work.

Leaving aside the logistics of sending a deep-sea oil-driller(!) into deep space on board a shuttle to land on an asteroid traveling at twenty miles per second, why do they always have to use nuclear weapons? What is it with nuclear weapons? Modern disaster cinema treats them as a miracle cure. Both Deep Impact and Armageddon, as well as The Core and a host of other films, solve their impending disaster by exploding nukes in the heart of whatever's bothering them.

I suspected, and a little research proved, that the last thing you want to do with an impending asteroid is nuke it. (See the Asteroids and NEOs section for more on this.)

I found myself occasionally thinking about this from time to time over the intervening years. Watching Deep Impact on TV annoyed me even more, as with a slightly matured palette for films, it was far worse than I remembered. (Except for Morgan Freeman, who was still good.)

I had also become aware that the potential asteroid threat was not being taken seriously. I'm not sure that it ever really was taken seriously by the general public, but it certainly wasn't now, after two films generally regarded as turkeys had pissed all over the concept.

Back in early 2002 I had just finished a 5-part script about a terrorist movement in a future, federal Europe. (It was actually a rewrite of an earlier script, illustrated by the then-unknown, now 2000AD golden boy, Boo Cook.) The problem here was that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11th happened when I was about two-thirds of the way through, and after sitting on the finished script for a few months, it became clear that world events had outmaneuvered my script.

On thinking of another project to write, I kept coming back to the idea of writing an asteroid impact story, but done properly. I wanted to write a story that was politically plausible (if not necessarily likely), based on genuine scientific principles, and that acknowledged the potential danger from an asteroid impact, and our vulnerability to it.

DEVELOPMENT AND SCRIPT

It didn't take as long to develop this one as it usually does for my stories. As I don't do this for a living (and I'm not sure I ever really intend to), I'm happy to let stories gestate for a long time. But once I had decided to write a story about an asteroid impact, the ideas came thick and fast. I had a basic idea - that the impact would be a global secret, and that the story would be structured around the discovery of this secret by a central character.

I had wanted to work with James McKay again ever since we'd worked on a short story several years ago (recently published in Underfire Comics' RAPID FIRE #3 and viewable at my portfolio site), but various things had got in the way. Fortunately he was also keen, and we met up at Fenchurch St Station in London to discuss ideas. I showed him a 5-page script I'd written a couple of months earlier about drugs in a future army (which you can read on my main website), which James liked and decided to illustrate as a submission for 2000AD. (I'd not had much luck with 2000AD submissions, and felt it might get somewhere if it was behind James' sumptuous artwork. It didn't work - they rejected the artwork point blank for having too many panels, and not having enough black in it.)

I told James about the asteroid story so far. He liked the idea, and we threw ideas back and forth. It was probably the most successful brainstorming session I've ever done - everything was laid down in this meeting. The opening robbery (although it was a bank robbery at the time), the massacre of the robbers, and everything that followed, step by step. In fact, the only thing that wasn't decided then was Edward's ultimate role in Charles' predicament, which came during a rewrite.

We decided to walk from Fenchurch St to Gosh Comics, and talked more on the way, ironing out the twists and turns of the story. We passed St Pauls Cathedral, and I was reminded of Churchill's decree during the Blitz that the Cathedral had to survive at all costs, symbolising as it did the heart and soul of British society at that time. Having been up to the balcony at the top with my friend Dilly Rothwell several years before and remembering the spectacular view, I decided it would be the perfect place to end the story.

Later, we passed what to me looked like a big hole in the road in the middle of Southampton Row. I'm not a regular London visitor and hadn't been to this part of town before, so it was a bit puzzling to me. James explained that it used to be an underground tram route that was now simply used for storage, and that it had also once been used for hiding thousands of American infantry during the war. It looked to me to be the perfect entrance to the London Shelter - a secret entrance, hidden in plain sight.

I went home with my head spinning. I was so excited! The story had everything I liked to talk about in a story. (James later told me that all my scripts had certain ongoing themes - they were all downbeat, contained complex moral ambiguities, and had a distrust of authority. It also became a running joke that I always seem to have roaming death squads in my stories.)

As well as being the easiest to brainstorm, it was probably the easiest to write as well, (at least up to that time) and in the end only took me three months. (Bare in mind I was also working as a teacher at the same time, and regularly worked 10 hours a day, often more.) When I finished, I proudly posted it off to James and waited for his response.

About a week later, James got back to me and told me he didn't want to illustrate the script. He liked it, described it as a "typical Ben Dickson script" and enjoyed reading it, but James' pleasure lies in illustrating more fantasy-based work, he had decided that he simply wouldn't enjoy illustrating it.

Disappointed but understanding, I passed the script on to another illustrator, William Volley, whose work I had seen at his Degree Show when I took my students to view the college in Brighton, and had since got in contact with. (Will and I produced a 4-page story for Accent UK's PHOBIAS anthology, which you can also read on my portfolio site.) He liked it too, but for him it played too much like a Hollywood thriller and was too high-concept for him to really enjoy illustrating - the exact opposite problem to James.

And here lies the biggest problem of writing small press comics. Unless you've got money to pay people, it's very difficult to get anyone to illustrate anything unless they're really, really enthusiastic about it. It's all very well producing an 80 page script, but if no-one wants to devote a good few months of their life illustrating it, you're not going to get very far - and the bigger the script, the less likely you are to get anywhere.

I decided that there was only one way this book was going to see the light of day - I'd have to illustrate it myself.

I CAN'T DRAW COMICS!

I've been touting scripts around the small press community for years, starting with the short-lived Dredd fanzine Class of '79. Lots of things held me up along the way, but the biggest one was my own lack of confidence in my illustration skills.

Probably the most asked question of me during this time, particularly if it comes up that I have a Fine Art Degree under my belt, has been "Why don't you illustrate them yourself?" to which I would always reply "Because I can't draw comics".

After I was unable to find an illustrator for Falling Sky, I decided that the only way the project would ever see the light of day was to actually take the plunge and illustrate it myself. I was always fairly skilled at life drawing, so I decided that if I had good enough reference, I would be able to do it that way.

To be honest, extensive referencing in comics was something I always thought wasn't a good thing - somehow, it felt like cheating. However, at this time my favourite ongoing comic had become Gary Spencer Millidge's Strangehaven, a book which relies heavily on reference material, and is unapologetic for it - in fact it considerably enhances the feel of the book.

Reading Garen Ewing's book The Rainbow Orchid, which reminded me of Herge's books, in turn reminded me how much photo-reference he had used. I decided that if two comics artists I respected did it, so could I.

So I set about doing panel breakdowns for the book. They were embarrassingly simple, but laid out "camera" angles more or less as I needed them, and helped iron out any problems with visual continuity.

It was around this time that I suffered a nervous breakdown at work. After a combination of a serious flu infection,a workload I couldn't cope with and finally an Ofsted inspection, teaching finally got the better of me and I found myself unable eat or sleep. Awarded with time off by the doctor, I went home to stay with my parents, and visit friends I'd left behind in Bristol.

Two months later, it was fairly clear to me that I wasn't going to go back. (Take it from me, a job that puts your health at risk, be it mental or physical, simply isn't worth the paycheck.) Needing something to take my mind off what I'd been through, I decided to take the plunge and start work on Falling Sky.

The format I decided upon was two colour, inspired by William Volley's excellent use of two-colour schemes in his degree show. I figured I could always turn them to black and white if needed. I also decided upon illustrating the entire thing on computer, as I had become so used to producing all my artwork on a PC, I actually felt as comfortable on a graphics tablet as I did on paper. I also endeavored to use the array of brushes available to imitate chalk and charcoal effects.

Being back in Bristol amongst my friends was great, as besides the emotional support, I knew enough people to model for me for reference shots. Using bits of a vacuum cleaner nozzle as shotguns and locations stolen from Google, I set about compiling references into comics pages in the computer, until I had references for practically everything in any given panel.

Two people also stepped up to help me in my project - Laurie Ray, and his partner Delphine Guillemoteau. Being romantically entangled as well as artistically-inclined people made them perfect for the main roles of Charles and Rijuta, as they would have few physical qualms about some of the more challenging scenes together. Other friends, although they were usually stoned when I wanted to get reference shots, were happy to participate (if a little harder to control) as background or occasional characters.

(Incidentally, Delphine's character was supposed to be black in the original script - but when I coloured her, she looked Indian to me, so I renamed her from Belinda to Rijuta - which is a Hindu name, meaning innocence.)

Feeling that I couldn't draw comics has helped me on this project in the long run. I've developed a strategy of producing heavily photo-referenced images that are far stronger than would have been otherwise. Although they are by no means perfect in my opinion, and have a lot of room for improvement, they are thankfully not the wretched and illegible scribbles I was scared of ending up with. Taking influence from Herge (in particular the decision to use dot-eyes), as well as Gary Spencer Millidge, Katsuhiro Otomo, Paul Pope and the more obscure Christophe Blaine's The Speed Abater has produced a definitive style that I'm fairly happy with.

So there I was, illustrating between one and three pages a week, most weeks, for about a year and a half. It was incredibly cathartic and confidence building, and would have been a worthwhile exercise regardless of what happened to it after I had finished. And when I finally did finish it, I found I didn't want the experience to end.

I had handed out ashcan samples at various stages of the project at Caption and Bristol conventions and had recieved some pretty favourable feedback. The most encouraging feedback I think came from Paul Gravett, the irrepressible "Man at the Crossroads", as he's known in the comics industry. Being something of an authority in the industry as well as having boundless enthusiasm, Paul's feedback was invaluable throughout the project and ultimately helped me believe that I actually had something people might want to read. Later feedback from Boo Cook, James McKay and others including David Hitchcock, Gary Spencer Millidge and Chris Staros was again very encouraging, with Gary and Chris both very generously offering quotes for the back of the book. I decided to go for the big time and submit the book for publication in the US.

It was rejected by everyone.

However this was not as discouraging as it might at first sound - firstly I recieved rejection letters. Big deal, you might think, but the thing is that you generally don't recieve rejection letters in comics any more. Big companies just don't have the time, they get too many submissions to reply to them all. Secondly, they were the most positive rejection letters I'd ever seen, largely rejecting the book because they didn't feel it was something they could publish because it didn't fit into their remit, rather than telling me it wasn't good enough. (And yes, they do say that if that's what they think.) But everyone had something positive to say about it, one company going as far as telling me they were sure it would be picked up by someone.

At the same time, I was being headhunted by Shane Chebsey. He of Smallzone was starting up a new comics imprint called Scar Comics, and was after the best new books he could find. He offered me a deal that, although there was no money upfront, I found hard to turn down. What can I say?

Overall this has turned into a wonderful experience that was born out of one of the most painful times of my life. The book is now published and keeps recieving rave reviews from everyone who has read it. (It still takes me by surprise!) I've written a few more scripts since then (one was illustrated by James and published in Accent UK's MONSTERS anthology, also viewable on my portfolio site), and also plan to illustrate again - although I'm going to be very selective about what stories I do. I love working with other illustrators, you see. They always put things in my stories that I would never have thought of.

I also have two more stories set in the Falling Sky universe that I might tell one day. I have no plans to do so at the moment though - there are other stories I want to tell first, and I've spent enough time there for now. But you never know, I may well go back...