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Introducing Gwyllion (a little later than planned)

Gwyllion #1 cover

For the past eleven years, we’ve worked to make a name for ourselves – and to a good extent, we’ve succeeded. We’ve been interviewed on podcasts, guested on panels, and featured in writing magazines. All that has helped us to grow as a business. Encouraging new talent and assisting people to network within the small press industry has always been a strong part of our ethos. We try to open doors as others opened doors for us in earlier years and hope to foster new creators to start their journey in publishing. And that brings us to Gwyllion…

But first!

You might remember in 2018 we took on Laurie Raye to assist us with marketing and social media. They ran our newsletter and may have responded to your email queries. Eventually they moved on but we’ve stayed in touch. (They’ve even helped us at shows from time to time since then).

Laurie Raye at Thought Bubble 2019
Laurie Raye at Thought Bubble 2019

Laurie has hardly been idle in that time: they’ve written 23 monthly installments of the horror webnovel Palus Somni, as well as working on a number of projects published on itch.io.

Palus Somni on Royal Road

How Gwyllion started

Sometime at the start of 2020 Laurie came to us with an idea. We ended up talking about amplifying voices and how to improve representation within Welsh genre fiction. They wanted to create a curated long-form zine focusing on fantasy, science fiction and horror (topics we have… a little experience with) which was something lacking within the Welsh publishing scene at the time. That discussion evolved and eventually Laurie decided on a name: Gwyllion, a Welsh word with the following meaning…

Gwyllion can be many things. The ghosts and spirits that haunt the halls at twilight, the dusk wanderers up to no good. The scoundrels and the miscreants. The wise old fae who take no nonsense from humans. Hags and witches, wisps and sprites, the gwyllion are every malevolent trickster that wanders the night in search of mischief.

From there, things moved fairly quickly. They established a team of volunteers to cover the assorted roles needed to go about making Gwyllion a reality. They asked us if we could act as a consulting editor to their fledgling project – and, of course, we agreed. We both shared the goal of helping others to have a voice and a platform, and we were able to bring skills and contacts acquired over a decade to use in plugging the gaps in their knowledge.

The first issue of Gwyllion was released in September 2020 and was met with positive press. A few months later it was discussed on BBC Wales considering the influence of Welsh fiction.

Gwyllion cover issue 1
Gwyllion issue 1

And now…

The submissions period for issue 2 closed a few days ago and there’s a lot of positivity within the team about the pieces received. At the moment, issue 2 is on track for a May 2021 release date.

So… why “introducing Gwyllion” and why “a little later than planned”? The second part first… in a word: Coronavirus. It’s been a tough year for all of us. We’d planned to put out some version of this post in August or September of last year but with no shops, events, fewer sales and higher stress levels than usual… that didn’t happen. Now that the world looks to be recovering and events are (hopefully) restarting, we’re trying to do the same. So “introducing Gwyllion” means that we have now got the physical and digital editions listed in our store. We won’t be making any profit from Gwyllion – we’re donating our time to help them help others, and it’s only fair that they receive the full proceeds from sales through our site to enable them to become a self-sustaining enterprise.

After all, we’ve benefited from the help of older, wiser, more established folks over time – it’s only fair we offer the same to those coming up behind us. You can get involved with Gwyllion here.

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Interview with the creators of 7 Shades

Our  next release is going to be 7 Shades: Hell’s Belles, the follow up one-shot to last year’s 4 issue miniseries. A few months back we caught up with David Clifford and Peter Rogers while they were doing a signing event at The Comic Guru and were able to record this interview with them.

In the interview David and Peter go into detail what the creative process looks like for them as well as talking about future plans. The series has been really well received so far and we’re looking forward to that continuing. Next week we’ll be launching 7 Shades: Hell’s Belles at Thought Bubble in Harrogate. David will be at Thought Bubble and will also join us at MCM Birmingham on November 16th and 17th. We have more appearances planned for the future. Keep an eye on our appearances post for more details.

We’d love to know what you think of the video – and of the series… and if you’re yet to pick up the first season you can find it here!

Production team

We’d like to thank the following for making the interview possible:

  • Editor & Videographer: Benjamin Powell
  • Audio Engineer: Barney George Andrews
  • Sound Mixer: Patrick Flannery
  • Image FX: Dani Abrams
  • And a special thanks to Kristian Barry of The Comic Guru for allowing us to film in his store.

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Thoughtbubble 2011

Phew, we’ve been kept on our toes for the past few days. A few days up in Leeds then the start of Christmas trade… anyone would think you guys don’t want us to get any rest!

What’s that? Thoughtbubble? Yes, we spent the weekend of the 19th and 20th November in Leeds meeting, greeting, chatting to, and displaying our wares for you lovely people. This was our second year at Thoughtbubble and if you take our great experience last year, you can double that! It was fantastic to catch up with other industry insiders; Scott Stanford, Genki Gear, Dr Geof (sometimes NSFW), Com.X and many more.

Aside from those we loved meeting each and every one of you that came to our store. I’m told we have photos of some of you in cosplay… but right now I’m not sure where the files are. Once I find them I’ll put them up.

Thackeray was definitely our most popular product for the weekend, but it had stiff (pun intended) competition from Stiffs #1 which we had limited copies of as a convention exclusive. The guys from Stiffs and The Pride had their own stall in the other hall to us and they reported how positive everyone was about their comics, so they were pretty thrilled about the weekend too.

The biggest news from the weekend though is that Gav Mitchell, artist for both Stiffs and The Pride, won the prestigious 2000AD portfolio competition! That’s right, we have an award winning artist working on not one, but two of our titles.