Next month, I’m going to be moving away from London, which is going to be a strange change for me – leaving behind the city that’s been home for most of my life, apart from brief sojourns in Norwich and Leeds, and the place that’s been home throughout my adulthood. It’s also the places where all of the most adult stuff has happened, too. It seems apt that the move comes as I finish The Lengths. The last two issues are feeling more and more like a love letter to the capital.

I’m going to have an action-packed final month of living in London, despite having managed to slip a variable number of discs in my back (seems to be 1d4 each time I see a doctor – sorry for going on about it, twitter!), so I’ll be at Kapow in Islington next weekend, where you’ll find me on the mezzanine in Artist’s Alley on table 204. The following weekend, I’ll be at the London MCM Expo, in the comics village.

Then, it’s the Jubilee weekend, so obviously, I’ll be shaking my head forlornly while my boyfriend waves a tiny flag at a canary-coloured woman (who, I admit, was very funny when I met her), then the following weekend, for the 9th of June, I’ll be at the Comic Salon as a guest of Zwerchfell Comics in Erlangen in Germany. It wouldn’t be a goodbye London month without a trip to Germany, would it?

Issue Six will be shipping next week, and to celebrate all of this, and to make moving house (on my birthday weekend, too) a little easier, you can use the very cryptic code LONDON to get 10% off orders from the web shop until the 15th of June. That’ll work for The Lengths, which now runs to 150 pages, Badger’s Diary, The Peckham Invalids (including a new story!), and art sales. Get in!

Issue six, Art History, is coming soon.

Eddie has to face the consequences of the choices he’s made and face his demons and himself and answer the painful question: has it been worth the price he’s paid to create the new life he’s leading as Ford? Challenging realisations and surprises await as he looks back and wonders if he can keep running from himself.

I’m taking pre-orders over at the web-shop, which will let you beat the rise in postage costs.

As a little bonus, over the weekend, I drew this picture of Nelson on my new iPad, trying to get my head around how to draw on the tablet. If you’d like the full sized version for a background on your iPad or phone or whatever, I’ll happily email it over to you as a freebie with your order.

Eddie makes his case, from The Lengths 3.

Just been reading that the state of Ontario in Canada has passed a law making it easier and safer for prostitutes to advertise and to work together in brothels. While the article I’ve linked to is right, and this doesn’t address the issues of poverty and addiction affecting street prostitution, it does make sex work a lot more straightforward to do safely and legally.

I remember when I was doing the interviews for The Lengths, one sunny summer afternoon in 2006, I was on the balcony of a friend’s place in Covent Garden. My friend was a sex worker (he has since changed careers), and we’re talking with a mutual friend (also an escort) about our attitudes to safer sex over a coffee and some cakes I’d bought from a shop downstairs. The conversation was frank and honest, and the escort was one of the most desperately sexy men I’d ever met and I could understand why people would pay him a thousand pounds a night for his time. It was difficult to focus on keeping notes when all I think I wanted to do was just breathe in near him and feel lost.

I think that how I felt around him was what ended up as how Eddie feels around Nelson in the story, all swept up in pheromones and confused.

While we were talking, my phone rang and it was the press office from the Home Office calling me back to answer questions about the legal status of prostitution in the UK.

The woman I spoke to was lovely, as people generally are, and explained the difficulties they face in legislating in a way that differentiates between sex work and the enforced sex trade. She said that the laws are there to protect vulnerable women from being exploited, but said that she recognised that those same laws then make sex work difficult and more dangerous for the men and women who choose to do it. We both said that it would be easier to differentiate between the two but that it would be politically tricky to make the distinction, since people tend to only see prostitution as exploitative.

From talking to escorts, lawyers and the Home Office, it became clear that prostitutes are in a very difficult position if they want to run a legal business in the UK. Although there is a tax code for prostitution, the law that prohibits brothel-keeping means that if you work as a prostitute and admit it, you’re in breach of your tenancy agreement. Check your tenancy agreement, there’s a clause about not being a whore, it’s there in case your landlord would fall foul of the “living off immoral earnings” law. That would count even if your landlord or lady wasn’t your pimp, the money you earn is criminalised even if the sex work itself is not.

Similarly, if you’re a prostitute, it’s legal, but if you have a housemate who does it, suddenly your house becomes a brothel and you’re both criminals.

Therefore, by having to lie about the nature of your work, you’re likely to not declare your earnings, which means you’re going to end up in trouble for tax evasion and money laundering.

It’s a foolish state of play where the law muddles the sex trade and sex work. No-one’s outraged by Tesco when they employ staff, only when the government pays them to abuse vulnerable people and force them to work for free. One’s a job, the other’s forced labour and exploitation. I’m not saying Workfare is anything like sex trafficking; there’s no threat of violence or systematic rape, but the loss of freedom and the loss of self-determination’s the scandal.

What Ontario is demonstrating is that it’s possible to differentiate in law between a job and sexual slavery. Between a safe place of work and a sexual prison. Between a man or woman who makes a choice to enter into a pecuniary sexual agreement with someone else and someone who is traded as a commodity in such a transaction under threat or duress.

Suddenly, it’s possible to pay taxes, to be a rent boy who pays rent, to have a housemate with the same job as you. Suddenly you could feel a little more comfortable about the job you do, maybe even a little more honest and accepted for it. Perhaps, even, people could talk about the job you do without being constantly distracted by the need to talk about an obviously horrific and distinct criminal underworld that’s abhorrant and nothing to do with the world you inhabit.

Wouldn’t that feel a lot safer for everyone?

–

My comic, The Lengths,  is based on interviews with male escorts in London and is available from all good UK comic shops or online here.

As a result, the cover price for issues 6-8 and prices on postage for my comics will, unfortunately, need to rise in line with these increases in cost, so issues 6-8 will be £3 a copy, as issue 1 was before I was able to get the cost price down. I’m really sorry that I can’t keep the price that low, but it’s still cheaper than most mainstream comics and The Lengths carries no adverts, so you get a comic that’s full of story. As always, it will remain cheaper to buy several things at once and I’ll keep the postage costs to the minimum, but when I make a very slim return on the cover price of each comic, I’m very sad to say I can’t protect customers from the price rises I’m facing.

What I would suggest, though, is getting your orders in before the price rises hit, or getting them in person from your local comic shop if you’re in the UK. You’ll also be able to see me at Comiket, Kapow!, London MCM Expo, MCM Manchester and Leeds Thought Bubble this year.

Head to http://cutebutsad.bigcartel.com for The Lengths, The Peckham Invalids and prints.

The Peckham Invalids has just been featured on BBC2′s See Hear, with a very generous amount of time given to the comic, especially considering that it’s something we’re still working out how we’re doing it and how it looks and feels to each of us.

You can see a little preview of an interview with me here, or the programme is available on iPlayer for a little while if you’re in the UK.

The Broken Frontier piece on The Lengths is lovely:

“Without the teensiest, tiniest doubt The Lengths is a comic that deserves similar attention. Its layered narrative, with those revelatory chronological shifts back and forth, and intense, multi-faceted characterisation mark it out as one of the most unique and thought-provoking comics – small press or otherwise – out there at the moment.”

It’s quite wonderful to have that kind of thing to live up to in the last three issues!

You can pick up all my things over on my web shop and The Lengths should be in your local comic shop – if it isn’t, have a word with them!

So, yes, lots to live up to in the next few months and lots of what-next planning to do!

Given that image, I think it’s safe to assume that issue 6 continues Eddie’s spiral towards the nadir of his story. In some ways, I’d say that issue 6, Art History, is the equivalent to the 11 o’clock number of the series, and I’m really pleased to have reached this point. When this is a comic that I started out making on a desk at college, then in the little studio I had in a shipping container in the back yard of a deconsecrated police station in Deptford and now I’m making in a room above a hair weave shop in Peckham, when I’m not too distracted by the drama on the street outside, of which there is a great deal.

Over a weekend where there’s been some quite hilarious nonsense said about gay marriage comparing it to slavery, which I’m not sure if that’s the Catholic church tacitly blessing gimps, it was great to be going round town dropping comics off at Prowler, Gay’s The Word and Gosh! Comics, too. If your local shop has run out or doesn’t stock it, they can get it from Diamond UK, or if they get in touch with me, I can sort that out for them. Otherwise, you can order direct from me, too.

So, since it’s a new week, might I be so bold as to suggest this might be a good time to introduce new readers to the story of Eddie and the dogs in The Lengths?

That aside, I’ve had a wonderfully inspiring trip to Berlin, which has given me lots of ideas for a story I want to tell once this one’s told and I’m a fair way into issue 6, Art History, which starts to move Eddie towards the end of his hard won coming of age along a path of sex, drugs and unrequited love. If this was a play, he’s at the beginning of Act Three, so things are a mess for him, but it remains to be seen what kind of a story he’s writing for himself.

A lot of the dialogue between Eddie and Nelson in issue 5 comes almost verbatim from one of the interviews I did for The Lengths, one where I had my own sense of morality and security challenged by the confidence and bravado of a man who, I have to say, was one of the most brash, sexy, assured and in some ways, terrifying men I’d met. It drove home to me some of the clear choices you had to make in your mind and that you had to stick to in order to be able to do the job as well as he did it, and I knew I just didn’t have that kind of resolve and was too introspective to have the nerve to do it as he did. I admired him as much as I knew I couldn’t be like him. It was one of those moments where you realise you’re too far down the path of your own life to ever be like someone else.

Eddie’s not that far down the path of his own life yet, poor sod. Not yet, anyway.

I’m going to be at the Comica Comiket on April 21st and the London MCM Expo on the 26th and 27th of May. I’ll add more convention dates and other events as they’re confirmed, but it’d be great to see you out and about.

Head over to pick up issue 5, 1-4 are still available, as are lots of other goodies.

Stay warm, whichever way seems the most fun, dog lovers.

The last few months have been insane for me. The Lengths has found its way into Out There and Attitude Magazines, it’s now in a load of new shops, I’ve spent some quite healthy time away from London in Sweden and on the Isle of Wight, I’ve met a new love and I’ve suffered the horrible grief of the death of my last boyfriend at Christmas. Against the backdrop of all of this, the fifth issue of The Lengths has been taking shape, with a back-to-basics approach of paper and pen dominating the drawing technique for this issue to reflect what’s going on for Eddie as his double life’s continuing to fall apart.

You can pick up The Lengths 1-4 from your local UK comics shop, from Prowler in Soho, Gay’s The Word in Bloomsbury, Gosh! in London or online.