The latest Fist Full of Comics was released a few weeks ago, and it continues to get bigger and better, with even more pages at 36 this time and a wide range of material from local comics artists.

My piece is a one pager about domestic life. I'd been wanting to look in on these characters at the beginning of the Seventh Age and see how they were doing after so much time, tucked away in some obscure corner of Hertfordshire or wherever. I figured Tom would be feeling pretty midlifey by now.

I enjoyed drawing this a lot, though I don't know how successful it is as a piece. The style, which is a fairly traditional comic look, is one I tend to avoid, as reviews have described it as "boring." Lately I'm drawn to it - I don't find it hard and it seems to be an evolution of my earlier work in stories such as "Riffin' to Oblivion." I think I'll just have to follow this way of working for a while to see where it goes.

Labels: Fist Full of Comics, Tolkien, Tom and Goldy

Therefore walking at guess she found the hill, which was indeed close at hand, by the rising of the ground before her feet; and slowly she climbed the path that led up from the east. And as she climbed so the fog grew thinner, until she came at last out into the sunlight on the bare summit. Then she stepped forward and looked westward. And there right before her was the great head of Glaurung, who had even then crept up from the other side; and before she was aware her eyes looked into his eyes, and they were terrible, being filled with the fell spirit of Morgoth, his master."
J.R.R. Tolkien Unfinished Tales (edited by Christopher Tolkien)
(Picture of Glaurung and Nienor by John Howe)

I remember many years ago finding myself staring at a poster map of Beleriand in The Little Bookroom in Melbourne. For a kid who had grown up fixated on Tolkien, even to the point of bothering Rayner Unwin with a package of Lord of the Rings drawings in about 1977 (when we were making a comic of The Hobbit for the school magazine), the discovery that there was going to be more from Tolkien - let alone a whole new world - was a revelation!

As great as The Silmarillion turned out to be, somehow its abundance of ideas and imagination wasn't fully realised in terms of consistent narrative depth. Christopher Tolkien did a stellar job of cobbling together his father's work into a cohesive whole, but often the text lacked the glorious prose and evocative mastery that came from J.R.R.'s writing and rewritings. Christopher had been often obliged to choose between different versions in order to put together the narrative, though less so with The Silmarillion than many of the later collections. Apparently, Guy Gavriel Kay suggested early on that some of these tales could be completed as books in their own right, but CT chose to keep the works pure and release them largely as a series of incomplete tales.

Coming up on 17th April is the release of an all-new Tolkien book, The Children of Húrin. This would may surprise some, but one of my favourite Tolkien books is the excellent Unfinished Tales, which contains a collection of Tolkien's most finished tales outside of his famous work, and includes a substantial and enjoyable version of this story.

Labels: The Children of Hurin, Tolkien