FARMAGEDDON... Saturdays at Speech Balloons

LET YOUR weekend begin here with our new Saturday serial as you munch on your bowl of cereals... Yes, Farmageddon is nigh and it will be exclusive to the Birmingham Mail's Speech Balloons!

Farmageddon is a re-mastered (if not hobnailed re-booted!) rendition of the comedy comic strip known as The Funny Farm that was popular in Northern newspapers and is now being developed for TV animation.

How did it all come about? Read on...

One upon a time two young lads from up north decided they were going to publish a comic all by themselves, so they formed a company called Picture Box Publishing and put word out via the grapevine (in those pre-internet days) that they were looking for likeminded souls to fill up some pages in their new anthology comic that was going to be called Over The Edge.

Among the people they got involved were folk like Jez Hall who'd worked on Marvel UK books like Transformers before heading for a career as an animation director, and Garen Ewing who would go on to produce The Rainbow Orchid graphic novel series.

Picture Box Publishing also produced commercial artwork and was nominated for sundry awards. But the most productive thing that the pairing of Messrs Niel Bushnell and Gordon Fraser did was produce a little comic strip called The Funny Farm.

The Funny Farm was a gag strip about life in the country, or so it appeared at first, for it got ever more surreal and perhaps a little subversive at times, while still being incredibly broad in its mainstream appeal.

With a two year daily innings for The Hartlepool Mail and also appearing in a short-lived Sunday paper called The News & Echo it had a good run, but was laid to rest, its creators remaining friends but seeking individual career paths.

Gordon worked as a freelance artist, producing a regular one page strip for the Wild About Animals magazine for a considerable length of time, while developing a healthy career in the greeting cards business alongside work such as producing images for television series like BBC 1's Doctors soap saga.

Meanwhile, Neil headed south, predominantly working for Uli Meyer Animation, but also doing some inking work on The Incomplete Death's Head for Marvel UK, before joining Acclaim and working on the Shadowman game. Then in 2002, having returned home to Hartlepool he set up Qurios Ltd within just a few years has gone onto become an award-winning company producing animation and visual effects for film, television and other modern media formats.

Among the in-house projects Qurios Ltd have in development was the newspaper strip series Niel and Gordon had created, under the new name of Farmageddon.

As part of these developments Paul H Birch, a long time fan of the series, broached the subject of the actual comic strip reappearing at Speech Balloons. After many lengthy communications Birch and Bushnell decided on a working format that would see the former acting as editor for a redesigned series supervised by the latter.

This exclusive re-mastered Farmageddon series will offer a "Best of" flavour, while still running chronologically.

The series has been digitally re-lettered and redesigned with the first two appearances being introductory instalments in a special two-tiered format (similar to that used in Speech Balloons' Carter's Column serial) before the episodes begin in earnest... with two running together each Saturday!

We will also be keeping you up to date with developments on the animation series, as well as posting you links to videos.

Avoid disappointment by missing out on Farmageddon... Subscribe to Speech Balloons for free by clicking on the RSS feed to the right!

For more on Farmageddon visit: www.farmadeggon.tv

For more on Gordon Fraser visit: www.freewebs.com/gordonfraser/