Presenting my latest piece of work the comic book "TPM".
This is an eighty-page long "graphic novel" which tells the story of one Dennis Overton who finds himself drawn into the shadowy world of psychic marketing.
I first had the idea in April 2018 when I went to interview Stan Grof in Basel. Grof has a fascinating conviction in the reality of the psychic experience; to the degree that one starts to ponder whether certain things might be possible. In my working notes TPM stood for "Transpersonal Marketing", "Transpersonal" being the Grof-ian buzzword, but it morphed into the name of the agency itself with only echoes of this original meaning remaining. I suppose this is akin to how the acronym KLF always meant a number of different things: Kopyright Liberation Front, Kings of Low Frequency, Kevin Likes Fruit, etcetera.
The comic was also inspired by the research that I did after finishing "Retreat" around the areas where New Age thinking collided with business - that fascinating nexus of self-help, therapy and marketing. If you're interested in a full reading list look at Myers' bookshelves in the comic - it's all there. EST, Werner Erhard's cult, was obviously of interest here; but also the British therapy cult Exegesis run by Robert D'Aubigny which, remarkably enough, I came within a whisker of getting involved with in the late eighties, aged 18.
My nanny had been involved with the group, then trading as Programmes Ltd, and had told me that she thought she could get me work with the record producer Tony Visconti who allegedly had connections with them. I remember visiting Visconti's studio at the time and marvelling at a tiny transistor radio perched on the mixing desk through which they would test the music. I spent a week waiting around at said nanny's house for the call to come (classic cult strategy apparently), visiting Exegesis' HQ in the mornings where they would do a "Positive Telephony" dance before starting the day's telemarketing.
And obviously there's a healthy dose of insights from my twenty years working at the coalface of advertising. Any similarity to persons living or deceased is purely coincidental...
Writing and drawing a comic book as large as this is no mean undertaking. To start off one has to block out the entire script in boxes. Then there's the character design; I needed all the characters to look very different so as to make the complex story as clear as possible. I started by only being able to execute one page of eight frames a day. I thought this was slow, but I found out recently that comics legend Alex Ross works at a speed of ten pages a month. Eventually I got this up to two pages a day. It was difficult putting aside clear days to dedicate to the process and in total the whole production took two years.
The comic's biggest formal innovation is the absence of speech bubbles - this is something of a feat as, you will notice, apart from a few place and time cues, the book is 100% dialogue. That's what comics are innit.
There is a digital copy available for immediate download at Amazon. This was built in Kindle Comic Creator and works very well. You can see a preview there too.
There is also a small first edition print run. Signed naturally! I've had very favourable feedback from everyone who has seen the comic, it's funny and full of surprises, so I hope that you will buy one.
Send money to Paypal address alias@hollowearth.org. Prices for one copy as follows:
UK
Standard: £13.61
Tracked: £18.79
EU
Standard: £16.30
Tracked: £21.17
USA
Standard: £19.46
Tracked: £23.91
Very limited copies remaining. SOLD OUT OCTOBER 2022.
