Despite a being tough for everybody, 2020 was a good year for creativity - and in particular, collaboration. It’s been a while that old friend Nic Pillai and I have been threatening to produce a comic together, but the ball finally started rolling in the latter half of last year, and I’m excited to begin 2021 by sharing GREYSCALE - A Paranormal Noir set in Folkestone, Dover and the surrounding area, a place that we both know well. The story is being serialised throughout 2021 over on Instagram, and I will be updating this page with new full page strips as they are completed (scroll down for the story to date). I will also be sharing some behind the scenes notes and sketches as the project progresses. In the meantime, here’s Nic with some words on GREYSCALE’s origins and influences:

“A few years ago, on a stormy night flight over the Irish Sea, I doodled a Roswell alien wearing a fedora and captioned it GREYSCALE. I couldn't have imagined then that the little guy would be getting his own comic strip! Me and Dan have been friends for twenty years so working with him on this is a joy. I grew up in Kent; he lives there now. I've always wanted to write a newspaper strip: as a kid, I used to carefully cut Peanuts and Doonesbury out of my grandad's paper. I did the same for Lee Sullivan's Doctor Who strip in the Radio Times. Collections of McClusky's Daily Express James Bond and John Ryan's Harris Tweed shared my bookshelf along with countless Look-In annuals found at boot fairs. It's an honour to be working in that tradition, learning as we go, making each other laugh with words and pictures.”

Episode 20 - an Animated Strip

To mark the occasion of our 20th strip, I pitched the idea to Nic to adapt his script into a single, fully animated page that tracked Greyscale’s descent into the depths of the English channel.

There was something about Nic’s words, the description of the Eurostar below and the Border Patrol boats above that made this passage feel bigger than the confines of a traditional page layout.

The sweeping beam of the floodlight was integral to tracing this journey, and took many hours to get the timing right so that the rest could follow