The Lengths issue 5: There Is No Hell has now been sent off to print after a slight delay. I suppose it’s what people call personal circumstances, but I’m not sure what the polite way of describing it is when your most recent ex-boyfriend suddenly dies over Christmas. Whatever the term is for that, that’s what happened, and it slowed things down a little for me through January, as I’m sure you can understand.

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.