Out of Hours: Dead Canary Comics

BBH London creatives Mark Lewis and Matt Fitch, the team behind The Guardian’s Three Little Pigs, launched Dead Canary Comics partly as an antidote to the rigours of the day job and also because they wanted to hang with like-minded comic-book geeks. Comic-book devotee Danny Edwards meets the cast of characters

Ok, in the interests of full disclosure, I’m a comic-book geek; a comic-book geek and proud. Well, a comic-book geek and not completely ashamed. But it seems that this industry has more than its fair share of comic-book fans. You only have to skip to the front of this magazine to see our regular strip from commercials director and comic-book artist Andy Poyiadgi (himself the focus of a previous Out of Hours) to see that. And now we have Dead Canary Comics, a nascent publishing label comprised of four writers and artists who have gone much further than simply stating their love of the medium – they’re creating and distributing it too.

Enter Frogman

Mark Lewis [far right] and Matt Fitch [far left], the creative team from BBH London behind The Guardian’s Three Little Pigs, had the original idea for Dead Canary Comics, but the company only really took shape once the duo were joined by Mind’s Eye Media rep Chris Baker [second from right] and storyboard artist Charlie Hodgson [second from left] to form a quartet of comic-book creators. “DCC had existed in mine and Mark’s minds for about five years,” says Fitch. “We came up with this idea for a comic called Frogman and we needed a fake label to publish under and we pretty much pulled the name out of nowhere. I think it actually comes from 30s gangster-speak. If someone squealed, they’d leave a dead canary on your corpse after they killed you.

“When we came up with the idea for Frogman,” continues Lewis, “we showed Charlie and Chris, and Chris said he had an idea for a comic book as well. Then I think we all got drunk one night and decided to start our own label.” Though initially both Dead Canary Comics and Frogman lived solely in Lewis and Fitch’s imaginations, they decided to turn it into a reality about a year ago, spurred on after visiting the London Film and Comic Con. “We all went there last year,” explains Baker, “and were really psyched, because looking at all the other independent comic creators we thought, well, we could do just as good, if not a lot better work than that.”

The Frog Song

The idea for the label’s first release, Frogman, began many years ago when Fitch and Lewis were in a band and Lewis’ brother ad-libbed a song about a crime-fighting guy called Frogman. “I don’t know where it came from,” laughs Fitch, “but we developed it and started drawing designs. We forgot about it for a while but kept coming back to it because it made us laugh.”

Fitch and Lewis decided to write a script for the book and last year Fitch decided to get on with the drawing. “I stopped procrastinating, gave up my weekends for a year and just did it.” Co-written by Lewis and Fitch and drawn by Fitch, they financed the book through Kickstarter and released it in March of this year, and it’s also now available to buy in some London comic stores.

Frogman II is already in production, again written by Fitch and Lewis, but this time drawn by former 2000AD artist John Aggs. “I’d love to do it myself,” says Fitch, “it just takes far too much time.” Baker and Hodgson also have their title Trained Medic – “54 pages of high-octane action” – well under way, with Baker having written the script and Hodgson now working on the art.

Creative liberation

With all four members of DCC having their respective plates full with their day jobs, what is it that compels them to take on, essentially, a second job? “I think it’s really important to have something to take your mind off that day job,” says Hodgson, “something to get excited about and over which you have some sort of ownership.”

“Speaking from an agency position,” continues Lewis, “everybody knows how frustrating it is when stuff doesn’t get made and, on the creative side, when you don’t get your own way or when the client pulls an ad. For Matt and I, we’re the clients, so we can do whatever we want. There’s creative liberation.”

Regarding the future of Dead Canary Comics, there’s a lot more to come. Baker states that while the label is still in the process of finding its own voice, it would eventually like to be a voice for British independent comics. “But it’s really all been happening in the past few months,” he says. “Frogman has come out, the DCC site is up, the Twitter feed is there, the Facebook page is there… I think the intention is to grow as an outlet to allow artists and writers to come together and create comic-book titles, just as we have,” says Lewis.

“The concept,” adds Fitch, “is to take the production company model we all know from advertising and apply that to comics. We want to put people together, some with their own stories, sometimes with ours, and get those comics out there.”