Bullet Proof Coffin (New Shaky Kane and David Hine book!)

[Greg Anderson]

David Hine and Shaky Kane team up to produce Image's Bullet Proof Coffin!

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2009/11/...by-david-hine/

Launching at next year’s Bristol Comics Expo, will be The Bulletproof Coffin, a giveaway preview of the new Image comic book by Shaky Kane and David Hine with artwork, background information and interviews.

The series proper will launch in June and run to six issues, telling the stories of the classic and fictitious Golden Nuggets comics of the sixties, before the company was bought up and closed down by Big 2 Publishing.

Shaky Kane was one of the artistic driving forces of Deadline magazine in the eighties and nineties, with his remixed Jack Kirby-crossed-with-Moebius stylings telling psychedelically twisted tales. His biggest US exposure was in Deadline USA and a couple of pin ups for Doom Patrol, but he was one of the foremost contributors and influential creators on the UK indie scene.

And now he’s at Image! Where all the cool cats hang out! Here’s a preview of artwork from the series...

[michaeljsmith]

sold

[dan bailey]

What BH said.

[Greg Anderson]

http://www.theouthousers.com/content/view/5530/144/

Greg: Well, how about we move on now to what is truly creator-owned... The long awaited Bulletproof Coffin which you're co-creating with The Shaky Kane. What's a Bulletproof Coffin?

David: A Bulletproof Coffin is where The Coffin Fly lives. The Coffin Fly is one of the characters published by Golden Nugget Comics in the early 1960's. The company was bought up by rival Big Two Publishing who almost immediately cancelled almost all the books and killed off the characters. The hero of our book, Steve Newman, is a collector of ephemera and a big fan of the Golden Nugget books. He works as a Voids Contractor - those are the guys who clear buildings when the occupant dies without an heir. He comes across a whole stack of comics featuring the Golden Nugget characters, but published after the books were cancelled.

The plot thickens when Steve finds a hidden Coffin Fly costume and the boundaries between fiction and the real world become blurred. Each issue will feature a self-contained 8-page comic featuring one of those characters from the 60's. Ramona the Jungle Girl, Shield of Justice, Red Wraith, The Unforgiving Eye and Coffin Fly. As to the Bulletproof Coffin itself, we did toy with the idea of never showing the Coffin so the title would remain teasingly enigmatic, but Shaky has done some terrific drawings of the coffin and as we went along it became an integral part of the plot.

Greg: How did you hook up with Shaky Kane?

David: I've known Shaky since the late 70's when we were both part of the small community of punks in Exeter, where I was at Art College. Later he lived in the same house as me for a while. I published his first comic strip in 'Joe Public Comics' a self-published comic I put together at college. We followed parallel paths for a while, working in the music press and various British comics but we lost touch for many years. We met up again a couple of years ago at a British comic convention and realized we still shared a lot of similar ideas and obsessions.

Shaky had this concept for a comic called The Bulletproof Coffin. He had loads of great ideas for characters and we started throwing story ideas back and forth. Shaky's stories are from the William Burroughs 'cut-up' school of literature, very fragmented and hallucinatory. I guess my job was to put them into a disciplined structure and whip them into shape without losing the spontaneity. The chemistry between us just seems to work and we each recognize one another's strengths. This is the most truly collaborative work I've done and it only works because we know one another so well.

Greg: When exactly can we expect this to come out?

David: I think we're aiming for June launch with a preview ashcan special at the Bristol Expo in May.

[Global Honored]

Wow, looks great. I will be looking for this.

[Greg Anderson]

The Bulletproof Coffin is now officially solicited for June 2nd:

http://brokenfrontier.com/headlines/...-solicitations

[Greg Anderson]

And here is a special preview of images from issues 2 through 4:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bulletproofcoffin/show/

[Greg Anderson]

THE BULLETPROOF COFFIN # 1 (of 6)
story DAVID HINE & SHAKY KANE
art & cover SHAKY KANE
JUNE 2
32 PAGES/FC
$3.99
ALL NEW SIX-ISSUE SERIES!
Relive the Golden Age of comics! The Legendary Kane and Hine return to their greatest creations! SEE! Coffin Fly Vs. Zombie Nam Vets! The Shield of Justice walks the Dead Beat! The Unforgiving Eye sees all, forgives nothing! Red Wraith: He’s red! He’s dead! Ramona: Buxom, Beautiful and Bound! Big 2 Publishing, eat your heart out!
MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR ALL AGES

[Hatut Zeraze]

I will be putting this on my pull-list today.

[Greg Anderson]

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/bull...ne-100412.html

Contemporary comic book superheroes are steeped in history – virtually all of the heroes at the top of today’s sales charts were created decades ago but have managed to endure over the years. But what about the forgotten heroes like the Red Wraith, The Shield of Justice... or better yet – Coffin Fly?

What, you’ve never heard of them? Well, you’re like a lot of people that don’t remember those heroes from the Golden Nugget publishing company of the 60s. But in the upcoming Image miniseries Bulletproof Coffin, we’re going on a psychedelic trip down memory lane, through the long boxes and long memories of a unique kind of comics fanboy into the strange world of Coffin Fly and his fellow heroes.

Bulletproof Coffin is coming from a pair of old friends and UK comics alums Shaky Kane and David Hine. Hine is well known in American comics circles for his work at Marvel and DC, but he comes from a rich history of independent work such as the recently reprinted Strange Embrace book. Cartoonist Shaky Kane has lesser recognition to American comics fans, but for a subset of UK comic fans his art is a welcome sight after years of infrequent output. Kane’s unique line owes much to the works of Jack Kirby and artists of his era, but through the lens of independent comics like Jeffrey Brown or Mike Allred. Together they’ve created this new miniseries and Newsarama has the scoop.

_____

Newsarama: What can you tell us about Bulletproof Coffin, guys?

David Hine: I’ve already said too much. I described the story outline on the Millarworld message board and someone instantly wrote us off as 90’s post modernism. I would have liked to be as enigmatic as possible about what this series is going to be, so people come to it without any particular expectations, but I guess you can’t expect either the readers or the comic stores to invest in a book blind. This comic is the book Shaky and myself have always wanted to buy, but no one was really doing it. It’s a satire of all the comics we love from the last 60 years, including the post modern comics of the 90’s. We mock but we do it with deep affection. It’s like taking the piss out of your Grandad. He may be old and smelly but you still love him.

Shaky Kane: It’s a six-part series recounting the events which surround Steve Newman, who’s life follows the path of obsession to the extent where reality and fantasy overlap to such a degree that he finds himself torn between the two, with life threatening consequences.

And of course being, a collaboration between David and myself it’s about a whole lot of other stuff as well!

It’s about dead superheroes, stone-age girls in chamois leather bikinis, eyeball-headed psychics, bulletproof coffins with spiked tires, spirit walkers, secret attic rooms full of comic book collections, and resurrected GI’s!

Nrama: The lead in this is a guy named Steve. What’s he about?

Hine: Okay, you’re twisting my arm, so... Steve Newman is a collector of Pop ephemera, who comes across a collection of comics that shouldn’t exist because the books were cancelled in the sixties. These comics smell of fresh ink, and he realizes that the creators must still be turning out their depraved stories. Things get weird when he’s contacted by the ageing real-world versions of the comic characters, who are convinced that someone is trying to kill them. Meanwhile Steve finds that his own memories are getting confused. Is this really his beautiful wife? How come he can’t remember how they met? And why does the family’s pet dog have no genitals?

Nrama: In Steve’s big comic collection, the one he holds highest is called Coffin Fly, and is about a hero of the same name who travels around in a makeshift ship he calls “bulletproof coffin”. Can you tell us more about this fictional comic and its star?

Hine: Every issue of Coffin Fly opens with these immortal words': “In the far-flung future, the Earth has been reduced to an arid wasteland! Here Coffin Fly wages a lonely war against those who would plunder and desecrate mankind’s heritage!”

Coffin Fly wanders through this desolate graveyard planet in the Bulletproof Coffin, trawling up forgotten artifacts. He’s trying to preserve the history of human culture – the important stuff like the McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, X-Ray Spex and of course, comic books. When he’s not doing that he’s battling Giant Radioactive Insects, Mutant Nazis and Vampire Aliens. We’ll be featuring his epic battle with the Vietnam Veteran Zombies, a.k.a. The Hateful Dead.

Nrama: These comics are put out by a publisher named Golden Nugget that went under in the 60s. But you’re featuring these “lost stories” in the back of each comic. Can you tell us about these characters, and their style?

Kane: The origin of the characters, featured in the 8-page section stems from an idea I had, maybe ten years ago, certainly before the zombie thing had become such an overused genre. I put together a strip entitled Cease To Exist, a sort of disjointed narrative wherein once-dead superheroes ‘Now walk the Dead Beat’!

The idea lends itself to a gothic melodramatic, yet conversely B-Movie treatment.

The name ‘Coffin Fly’ sprang to mind along with ‘The Red Wraith’, and the idea of a drowned cop. A lawman dredged from the murky Hudson, on a hooked pole. The idea surfaced in a small press magazine entitled Dream Factory.

I find thinking up these ideas relatively easy. David, of course is able to take the ideas and make them into something much more complete, and I hope, reader-friendly. In fact amazingly so.

Ramona, Queen of The Stone Age, is a real crowd pleaser! I’ve always been a sucker for ’In A Savage Land’ type characters, Queen of the Stone Age/ Jungle girl, it’s a mix and match item!

The painted coffin was manufactured out of biodegradable compressed boxboard. It was called an ‘Earth Sleeper’. It featured my Missile Elvis character from Deadline magazine. I painted it up to look like Japanese robot packaging! It would make a cool bookcase and of course a final resting place.

[Greg Anderson]

con't.......

Nrama: From what I’ve read, this has a bit of satire of comic collecting and the industry itself. Did some of your own experiences as a comics reader or professional impart any nuggets of knowledge for this?

Hine: Well, the creators of the Golden Nuggets characters do coincidentally share our names. Here is an extract from their biography, taken from the ashcan edition of Bulletproof Coffin, which will be available exclusively at the Bristol Comic Expo in May. This describes what happened after Big 2 publishing bought up Golden Nuggets and sacked Kane and Hine.

“Kane disappeared into obscurity. Occasionally illustrated pamphlets would appear – pseudo-religious rants that have been described as 'Scientology meets Ayn Rand'. More recently there were rumors that he was producing pornographic comics under the pseudonym Destroyovski, financed by an eccentric Russian oligarch. But the man himself was rarely seen and no new comic book work was officially produced by Kane for more than three decades.

"Meanwhile Hine endured years of poverty and alcoholism before eventually returning to Big 2 Publishing. Kane in his Esquire interview described his former partner as 'A sell out! He went crawling back to beg them for work and he’s been churning out crap for them ever since.' Hine’s work for Big 2 has had a mixed reception, many former fans regretting his willingness to produce blatantly commercial superhero stories including the mediocre but high-selling Z-Men: Final Meltdown.”

Clearly this bears no relationship to our real world experience.

Kane: Well, it’s not exactly Jonathan Swift! But there is a thread running thru the story arc involving the fate of ‘cancelled’ comic book heroes. I don’t know how David approaches writing, but when I mull over an idea certain key phrases leap out at me. Phrases like ‘killed off’. I don’t think it would be spoiling things to say that some of the retro heroes get ‘killed off’ as the story unfolds.

Again, I can only draw on personal experience of the UK comics business, but once you’ve set your heart on following that particular career path, your fate is very much in the hands of editors. It’s a cutthroat business where sales are king

Nrama: If you say so!

Shaky, since this book all started with some stories you had, can you tell us more about?

Kane: Bulletproof Coffin came from an idea I’d begun to formulate during the period of drawing Monster Truck. I was struck by how the popular American culture, that I drew on as inspiration, seemed to exist in the same sub-universe. They sort of complemented each other, in a way that I found all obsessive, living here in the UK, as a child in the mid-sixties/ early 70s.

I’ve always tried to evoke that feeling in the work I produce. As a child I built a ‘Bulletproof Coffin’, or you could say impenetrable barrier between my comfortable inner world and the perceived ‘real world’, which to be honest I still feel at odds with. Gosh! I hope that doesn’t sound too heavy! [laughs]!

Nrama Not too heavy – not for David here at least.

David – how did you get involved and work out the ideas Shaky had?

Hine: We knew one another very well in our earlier careers, then there was a big gap of almost ten years when we lost touch. A couple of years ago we bumped into each other at a comic convention and stayed in touch. About a year later, Shaky gave me a folder of ideas – sketches and ideas for characters. Terrific ideas that set me off on all kinds of weird narrative paths. I actually do have those original notes here, so I can quote you some quotes:

“One night we pulled in the Red Wraith/The man with no shadow/The ghost who shambles...to think he used to scare the crap out of me when I was a kid...RED WRAITH RED WRAITH RED WRAITH...there I said it 3 times...I’m not afraid any more. A graveyard planet. A virtual landscape of tombstones and towering mausoleums...a vehicle of some sort, slowly traveling across the surface of the planet, like a lunar explorer...clunky and heavy, shaped like a coffin, dragging chains as it went...”

Over the next few months I sent Shaky plot outlines and we went back and forth until we had a story. Last year at San Diego Comic-Con I approached Eric Stephenson at Image and handed him the art for the first issue. It turns out Eric is an Anglophile and big Shaky Kane fan from way back. It was the easiest pitch of all time. I contacted Shaky the same day with the news that we had a six-issue series with Image. Since then we’ve been like kids in a toyshop. For the first time in my professional life I’ve fully realized that you can do anything you want in a comic book - Junkie Beatniks, Ramona the Cave Girl, Dinosaurs, Viet Vet Zombies, Psychotic Kids...everything fans of Shaky would expect...except Elvis. Damn! I just realized we don’t have Elvis!

Nrama: For a lot of Americans, this is the first time they’ve seen Shaky Kane’s work. How would you describe him and his work up to this date?

Hine: Mad, bad and dangerous to read. Shaky’s work is a mash-up of Jack Kirby, Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, B-movies and the kind of adverts that promise you spectacles that see through women’s clothes and families of aquatic creatures you can grow in a glass of water. His art looks equally good in a comic book or painted ten-feet high on a wall. As a human being, Shaky is a wonderful husband and father, and I believe he grows his own tomatoes.

Nrama: I’ll ask you about tomatoes another time, Shaky; but I have to ask about this being your informal debut in the U.S. What’s it like?

Kane: For me this is my Jackson ‘This is it!’ moment. To get a book out, and such an uncompromised book, thanks to David’s shared obsessions, in the same America that I spent my whole childhood fantasizing about... I don’t think you can fully appreciate what that means to me as an artist.

Nrama: Shaky’s work is primarily known to be more abstract and not very linear in terms of story. As the writer, what did you do to get it into shape without losing Shaky’s signature style?

Hine: The story is tightly plotted but within that structure there’s almost limitless possibilities, particularly with the inserted ‘Classic comics’. These are the kinds of stories we would have done if we had been working in the 50’s and 60’s – warped horror stories, bizarre superheroes. There will be all kinds of extras too – mock-up ads, pin-ups, maybe the artwork to a series of Hateful Dead bubblegum cards. I guess I’ve imposed a narrative discipline but my scripts are looser than I would normally write. Whatever Shaky comes back with is always better than I imagined it would be. He just sent me a page from issue #4. By day, our guy Steve is a Voids Contractor – a real world occupation that involves cleaning up houses when the occupants die. An entire family has been slaughtered and there’s a scene in the kid’s bedroom where everything’s pink and fluffy and innocent, and Steve’s gathering up all these cute stuffed toys covered in blood. It’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen.

[Greg Anderson]

Bulletproof Coffin #2

Written by David Hine and Shaky Kane, art and cover by Kane.

ITEM! Another Golden Nuggets Classic -- The Shield of Justice brings swift and bloody retribution to the city's streets! ITEM! In Steve Neuman's attic, four smelly, wrinkled old farts in ill-fitting costumes are seeking the mysterious Shadow Men! ITEM! Steve learns that a rat's cage is a beautiful thing!

32 pages, $3.99, in stores on July 14.

[Schmakt]

cool... I damn near missed this. The solits didn't do much for me, and the initial art only preview didn't do much for me, but those interviews were pretty great. I think I got this added to my pre-order just in time. Thanks guys!

[Greg Anderson]

http://www.comicsbulletin.com/featur...9078586787.htm

Alex Rodrik: Let’s delve in to the proverbial “origins story.” How’d you and Shaky come to meet and become a team?

David Hine: I’ve known Shaky for donkey’s years. We first met up when I was at art college and I roped him in to contribute to a comic I self-published called Joe Public Comics. We followed a similar path for several years, both of us doing strips and illustrations for the music press in Britain and the homegrown comics of the eighties, like Deadline and 2000AD. We lost touch for a long time and then met up again at a convention. We found we still had very similar tastes in comics, art, literature and it made sense to collaborate on something. It didn’t happen immediately, but over a couple of years we met up a few times and started talking about doing a creator-owned book together. We hadn’t thought about working together in the past because we were both into writing and drawing our own material.

AR: Was this a project you and Shaky developed together or was it an idea one of you had which was brought to the other?

DH: Shaky had some ideas that he had been playing with for a group of offbeat heroes and I took those and built a narrative around them. Most of the names and basic concepts are Shaky’s. I still have the early notes and e-mails that we were sending one another and it’s interesting to see how the ideas developed. Right from the start there were the images of a drowned cop coming back to walk the dead beat, a bunch of imaginary heroes stepping into the real world and haunting our lead character’s attic, and a string of names including Red Wraith and Coffin Fly.

My biggest contribution is to develop the sustained narrative. Shaky’s work is often single illustration or short strips of two or three pages. He’s a concept factory, while I tend to think in terms of quite complex plots. I tried to keep the feel of a Shaky story with a storytelling style that is not too linear and has elements of William Burroughs’ hallucinatory cut-up techniques. When I’m writing I always have Shaky’s style in mind so I’m playing to his obsessions while throwing in a few of my own. As time passed and we went back and forth on the story, it got to the point where I honestly couldn’t say who came up with what any more. It really has become a very close collaboration. I tend to be a little less precise with my scripts than normal because I know Shaky is going to come up with amazing visuals. My dialogue and captions are also flexible. I re-write a lot when the pages come in because the visuals will suggest a new riff on the theme.

AR: What can readers look forward to in Bulletproof Coffin?

DH: For fans of Shaky, this will be a welcome return to the spotlight. There are a lot of people out there for whom Shaky was one of the key figures of British Comics and it’s high time he had a bigger market. For most comic readers in the USA this will be a revelation. Shaky takes the popular culture of America, chews it up and spits it back atcha! We’re having a lot of fun with this book and I think people will enjoy the mock comics we’re producing alongside the core story. There’s twisted horror and noir and really demented super heroes as well as our voluptuous cave girl, Ramona. We’ve got beatnik delinquents and space vampires and a pair of kids who make Pugsley and Wednesday Addams look like the Waltons. The core story is also a solid thriller with a lot of twists that will keep readers guessing up until the bitter end.

AR: Shaky, Dave describes you as a “revelation” to US comics fans. Let’s give the people what they want: a look at the man behind the revelation. Tell us a bit about yourself...how you got into comics...

Shaky Kane: I fell in love, as a child, with the imported comic books, which stood upright, wedged into the spinning magazine rack at my local tobacconist and news agent, way, way back, as far as my memory will allow me access.

This would have been maybe 63, 64 -- certainly before the Batman Television Show arrived on our British black and white horizontally striped TV sets.

In those days you were viewed with some suspicion if you dared approached the spinning rack. The bottom half held comic books, while the top, probably three-quarters of the rack, held an array of Men’s magazine, tales of True Grit and lurid Crooked Detective magazines. As the rail turned I couldn’t help but sneak a glance at the photo real covers, but generally speaking I’d avert my gaze from their corrupting allure, enthralled by the childhood eye-level treasures.

And what treasures! ...beautiful and ugly at turns.

Steve Ditko’s Hulk, Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four, Curt Swan’s swooningly (if such a word exist) evocative portrait of small town America. Metal men and mutant boys, Imaginary Tales and the presumably real ones, and the adverts!

The adverts alone were worth the price of admission!

Chalking out the perimeter of a world less everyday; a world of exotic intoxication, a world I could almost taste. I could smell it on the printer’s ink, and to this day I can smell it on the pages of Previews, and it smells American.

And as I sat in my bedroom, struck down with a childhood illness, feverish in the unaccustomed heat of a freak British summer, a 2B pencil flew in thru my open window, and I took it as an omen, for I knew what I should do.

AR: What was the inspiration for the series?

DH: There are a lot of B-movie and B-comic themes going in The Bulletproof Coffin. From those early notes, there’s a list that Shaky put together from what he calls his ‘cultural filing cabinet’. It includes zombies, giant robots, skulls, custom cars, dinosaurs, cowboys, flying saucers, Frankenstein and pyro-clowns. We didn’t manage to get everything in, but that gives you an idea of the inspiration. It comes as much from the ads that ran in the back pages of comic books as from the comics themselves. I think we all read those ads as kids and imagined something far superior to the actual products that were being sold. X-Ray Spex and Sea Monkeys and Spy Cameras that were probably quite pathetic in reality. I guess what we’re trying to do with this book is fulfill the dreams we had as kids of what all these characters and products should have been like.

AR: Tell us about what you wanted to do with The Bulletproof Coffin artistically.

SK: Artistically I want to evoke those very feelings [I mentioned a minute ago]. Remember those 3/4 sized guitar and amps you used to be able to send away for in the small ad section. If one of those turned up on my doorstep I wouldn’t play Muse numbers on it, I’d play the Surfin’ Bird and you know something, I don’t care how clever people might think they’re being -- post modern, and to level with you I don’t even know what post modern is, THE BIRD IS THE WORD!

[Greg Anderson]

con't

AR: Tell us a bit about the fabled Golden Nugget Comics and the fan favorites featured in the upcoming Bulletproof Coffin.

DH: Golden Nugget Publishing is a mythical company that operated in the 1950’s and 60’s and their most popular comics were created by a team who coincidentally share out names. Kane and Hine produced a number of titles including The Unforgiving Eye, The Shield of Justice, Ramona Queen of the Stone Age, Red Wraith and Coffin Fly. We’ll be including extracts from those comics in each of the issues of The Bulletproof Coffin. These titles were so popular that Big 2 Publishing saw them as a commercial threat, so they eventually bought up Golden Nugget and then promptly cancelled the titles. Hine and Kane left the company in disgust, although Hine was eventually tempted back. Here’s a quote from one of the articles in our ashcan edition: Meanwhile Hine endured years of poverty and alcoholism before eventually returning to Big 2 Publishing. Kane in his Esquire interview described his former partner as “A sell out! He went crawling back to beg them for work and he’s been churning out crap for them ever since.”

The ashcan edition of The Bulletproof Coffin is exclusive to this year’s Comic Expo in Bristol in the UK, produced by the convention organizer, Mike Allwood and designed by David Morris. It’s going to be a bit different to most ashcans in that we’re presenting it in the form of a comic fanzine called The Comic Scene and the interior features articles on the original Kane and Hine and their work, including a set of bubblegum cards called The Hateful Dead based on the Vietnam Vet Zombies, who feature in the Image series. There are also pages from the first issue, sketches and pin-ups.

AR: Why the title “Bulletproof Coffin”? What are its origins and implications?

DH: It relates to Shaky’s traumatized childhood when he found that he could only cope with life by creating a psychic defense that he named The Bulletproof Coffin. It protected him from the outside world and inside its impregnable structure he could live out his warped fantasies. Or something along those lines...

In our story it becomes fully realized as a central part of the concept. In the early notes Shaky sent me he described A Graveyard Planet of tombstones and mausoleums, with a vehicle that traveled across the landscape like a lunar explorer, shaped like a coffin and dragging chains as it went. It’s driven by the Coffin Fly.

AR: How’s it been working with Dave?

SK: Dave is a dream to work with. Dave has stood right next to me at that spinning rack. Dave has definitely heard about THE BIRD!

AR: Tell us a bit about our hero Steve Newman.

DH: Steve’s day job is Voids Contractor. Those are the guys who clean house when someone passes away with no relatives to inherit their property. I read about these people in the press when a team was sent to clear out a council flat after the tenant died. They got the wrong address and destroyed the entire contents of the next-door-neighbor’s flat. Everything the poor guy owned went into the incinerator! But that’s another story. Our guy is a collector of ephemera and he steals things from the properties he clears. He just can’t bear to see all this cool stuff going into landfill. One day he stumbles on a stack of Golden Nugget comics that shouldn’t exist. He realizes that Kane and Hine never stopped producing their twisted stories. Things get progressively weirder after he gets a visit from a bunch of ancient weirdoes dressed in costumes based on the characters. He soon finds himself stepping across the threshold between fantasy and reality. Ultimately the future of humanity depends on his tracking down Kane and Hine before the mysterious Shadow Men get to them. In between times he gets to dress as Coffin Fly and has some close encounters with those aforementioned Zombie Vets and Ramona. I guess you could say he’s trapped between a rock and a soft place.

AR: Are the States going to get any other tastes of Shaky Kane in the coming year?

SK: If the Coffin makes any kind of return, and it’s impossible to tell at this stage, this could run and run, between the two of us, we’ve got a lot of cool ideas, and Dave, to do what he does takes a lot of smarts and that’s one thing Dave’s got A LOT OF SMARTS. It’s privilege to work with him.

@ Shaky and the birds.