Carter's Column: Seek & You Will Find... Behind the Scenes

SEEK & YOU Will Find is the title of the new Carter's Column series debuting exclusively next Sunday at Speech Balloons.

It is a short six part story but it has taken a long time for it to see the light of day, for alas, the original artist, Joe Ahern, passed away a few years ago.

Joe was an extremely talented individual, intelligent too, but he never boasted about either fact. Certainly in the art area he should have done, because he would have had a career that left us with more published work. The trouble was, he didn't push himself or put himself forward.

He also had a problem with time - He could never understand why you might be screaming blue murder when you'd got him some small freelance commission or set him an appointment with someone to get some work and he strolled up an hour or even a day late! It wasn't because he was slow; he could churn the work out and it still looked good. I blame it on him being left-handed; the brain apparently works differently and left-handed people have no concept of time.

I know an awful lot of left-handed people, and they're either all like that or over-compensate by being obsessively punctual. I fall into the latter category, because I'm left-handed too, and that's probably why I understood Joe's psyche pretty well. However, those of you who saw me interview Howard Chaykin at BICS 2009 last month, might recall me asking his opinion on it, because he's a left-hander too, and he thought it was a crock of *%!& or symbols to that affect, he did agree that statistically we did younger than you right-handers though.

I don't know why, as if there's a rhyme or reason to these things, but Joe left this mortal coil. It's not fair, but that's the ways the cards got dealt.

It happened just as things were looking good for him. Typically.

He had been assisting James Hodgkins on work for both Marvel and DC, and had been securing a number of prestigious freelance art commissions for himself; the results of which could be seen advertised over the West Midlands, and it really seemed he was gearing up to talk to some major comics publishers on his own.

But it didn't happen. His heart packed in.

We went to the funeral following the hearse with his coffin in. James and I laughed that he'd actually made it somewhere ahead of us. Then we probably shed a tear. We certainly shed some memories and continue to do so.

What's more, on his mother's request, I got to take care of all his art. At times it has proved more intimate than a diary as one looks at the many worlds he imagined in his head and had the talent to put down on paper. One day, I'll make sure more people see them.

Among the art I found the incomplete pencils for the first episode of Carter's Column: Seek & You Will Find. He'd gone suitably retro sci-fi in style for me but typically left it unfinished, as you can see above.

From time to time I would look at it, and a little voice in the back of my head would say: "Get someone else in to finish it off". I wasn't sure for a long time, but then I realised that Joe always loved the collaborative idea of various people pitching in to complete something. It's how he'd come to be involved in previous Carter's Column strips. He was never precious about his own work.

So I asked Mats Engesten if he would step up to the plate, draw the last pencilled panel of Episode 1 (as you can see here), ink it all, and then illustrate the remaining storyline.

Mats lives in Sweden. Viking blood runs in his veins: He's prepared to meet challenges head-on and he is also an honourable being; and so he understood implicitly what it meant for all concerned to have a little piece of Joe's work see the light of day worldwide over the internet.

Frankly, Mats has been invaluable on so many levels with the remastered series of Carter's Column appearing at Speech Balloons.

To continue our international flavour we invited Donald Jackson from the USA to letter the series, and closer to home Andrew Dodd has digitally coloured the forthcoming story.

My thanks go out to all those who've been involved in putting Seek & You Will Find together.

But enough of these maudlin feelings, I know Joe Ahern would have no truck with them, he never wanted to draw po-faced serious stuff - Something that had adventure and was a bit of a laugh was much more his cup of tea - and so that's what you'll be getting next week!

For more information on the creators visit:

For Paul H Birch: www.myspace.com/paulhbirch

For Mats Engesten: www.go.to/engesten

Make sure you don't miss out next Sunday as we feature some behind-the-scenes information on our new Carter's Column saga and other Speech Balloons exclusives during the week by subscribing free via the RSS feed!