It's an odd one is Babble. When I was fishing around for a longform project (although at the time if you'd asked me, I wouldn't have said I was networking as much as "bullshitting about comics with some other nerds on the internet" as I didn't know then - or arguably now - how to draw a comic page as I'd been laid off - again - and was really just trying to fill my time with something other than three hour bouts on San Andreas and evenings in the pub), I was surprised that so many creators seemed obsessed with high concept conundrums like "one day everyone comes back from the dead", "the entire population becomes amnesiac", "the whole world develops diabetes" or "everyone falls asleep and wakes up as a dinosaur" and the graphic novel/comic series would follow what happened next, but with Babble, Lee was more interested in exploring his feelings about a high school shooting and the hag that squashed his heart via a short story about the beginning of the end of the world (rather than the spectacle that follows and the last-ditch plan that saves us all). Most people would just put a housebrick through her window at four in the morning while she's fucking someone you thought was your friend, but not Lee - he has to go and write a story about it, and then later develop said story into a graphic novel whose page count suspiciously mirrors that of a screenplay and which features a timely vein of commentary on gender roles in zombie fiction, though when I actually started drawing the book twenty years ago, zombies weren't actually as played out as they are now, so this may be the one time that my slow pace and general unreliability might have worked in the favor of the project I insist on ruining. It intrigued me, is what I am saying, because it tried something different to what I was seeing elsewhere, with Lee actively telling me to rein in anything resembling the excessive gore that often typifies sophomore comic book projects, though he balanced this by insisting that the main character look less like a child - which took the form of terse emails in the early hours insisting that I draw her tits bigger.
I shall probably mention more on the subject as the publication date approaches, but the cover price shocks me - 11 quid for something I have drawn? You could get a book where Judge Dredd fights a werewolf in Old New York which is also the Mines of Moria for that much, and yes, that is actually my benchmark for comics that you need to read.
