Welcome to the Angry Candy website, home of the British independent comics series West and The Whale House. For a little more information on these titles, please click the West and The Whale House links at the right of the page, where you’ll also find links to our shops on Big Cartel (for print editions) and Comicsy (for print, digital and international sales).

The News/Blog link is a Blogger feed which will keep you up to date on both comic series, as well as other projects involving creators Andrew Cheverton and Tim Keable. If you’re interested in learning more, the Reviews and Interviews links lead to archived material on both series, and the Convention Schedule link will give advance notice of convention appearances where you can buy the comics and meet the creators.

Finally, on occasion, there may be original art (from the comics or from other inspiration) for sale, or commissions offered. If you would like to commission an original piece based on your specifications, please contact us using the Contact button.

Thank you for visiting.

the-shadow-knows-art: “ Andrew Cheverton ( @acheverton ) ” I drew this a hundred years ago - it’s a sketch card, so it’s only about 7cm by 10cm, something like that - and the only thing I think I’d change is the tail of the scarf, which I think looks...
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the-shadow-knows-art:

Andrew Cheverton ( @acheverton )

I drew this a hundred years ago - it’s a sketch card, so it’s only about 7cm by 10cm, something like that - and the only thing I think I’d change is the tail of the scarf, which I think looks scrappy. Check out the other pieces on this Shadow art blog - there are some tremendous artists on there. I’m honoured to be in such company.

West and The Whale House in 2014

It’s been a little quiet here recently, so here is an update on the state of play for our schedule this year.

The next volume of West (Vol III: Killing) will deviate from the single-issue structure of previous volumes, comprising a four part storyline, a finale, and an epilogue, and the four-parter (Mississippi) is currently being tightly plotted (almost but not quite full script) to conclusion. This takes a fair bit longer than previously, so apologies for the delay.

In the interim, we are finishing off our West: The Train Leaves at Noon contribution from The Newspaper Strip Collection of Oscar Charles Drayton to conclude that story, and are planning to offer it in an Artist’s Edition format, scanned in colour from Tim’s original art, and offered with faux-historical text pages, as if it were a long-lost West newspaper strip from the 1970s.

The Whale House, following the departure of artist Chris Doherty, will also continue later in the year. Chris’s preferred commitment was for a six issue series, though these grew to 28 pages each, and this dictated much of the scripting. I am currently reformatting the plot to reduce the page count of each issue down to a more manageable 20 pages, and making the series a couple of issues longer, giving it a bit more breathing room. This reediting will also aid me in drawing the series and committing to getting it onto a faster and more reliable schedule.

(There is a new interview with Chris over on Beard Rock concerning his Video Nasties series and plans for future comics. I’m doubly glad of this, as I want to see Chris continue in comics, and also it offers some proof that I haven’t murdered him and buried his body in the woods.)

In short, both West and The Whale House will continue once the scripts for both series are essentially complete. Getting the ending of West and the structure of The Whale House is paramount, and I think taking the time to ensure that will be worth the wait.

Again, apologies for the delays.

  • Andrew Cheverton

Good News, Bad News.

This is the online equivalent of the those Great News Inside, Chums! banners you used to see on the covers of British comics, which meant that two of your favourite comics were merging into one, and it was a dice roll as to which of your favourite strips and characters were going to survive the cull. Our news isn’t quite that bad, but Good News first.

West Book Two: Distance is being compiled as we speak in the hopes of having copies ready for the Bristol Comics Expo in May. The delay to this volume - and the paperback reprint edition of Book One - has been due to publisher interest which hasn’t come to anything. This book collects all of Volume II of the comics (that is, Distance Parts I and II, Stray Bullets, Confederate Dead, Points West and Autumn Dusk) as well as Tall Tales from Volume I, into a hardcover volume with additional behind the scenes material. (Tall Tales was held over to this volume as its stories dovetail into Points West.)

West Book One: Justice we are trying to reprint in an affordable paperback edition, and this will follow the hardback of Book Two.

The bad news is that, due to personal circumstances, Chris Doherty will no longer be able to continue as the artist of The Whale House. Nobody is more disappointed at this than I am (except possibly Chris himself), but the publishing schedule of The Whale House was always slow, and knowing the toll it put on Chris, I decided it was no longer reasonable to expect such a commitment from him. I hope that Chris finds his way back into making regular comics again as soon as he can (his excellent series Video Nasties is available from Lulu here, and comes unreservedly recommended).

The resultant good news/bad news (depending on your taste) is that, rather than trawling the internet and comic conventions for a replacement for Chris, I will be taking up the art duties on The Whale House from issue three. I have been drawing other people’s comics for a few years now, and contributing short strips to various anthologies (recently, Borderline Press’s Zombre) and websites (Electric Sheep’s comic strip movie reviews), and have been wanting to write and draw my own series for a while. While I regret the circumstances, The Whale House is a very personal project, close to my heart, so writing and drawing it feels right - I hope you will continue to follow the story with me when it continues later this year.

(Secondary to this, but the series I was planning to start writing and drawing this year - the body horror giallo White Flesh - is on hold until I finish The Whale House.)

Thank you for reading.

  • Andrew Cheverton

The Newspaper Strip Collection of Oscar Charles Drayton

The Newspaper Strip Collection of Oscar Charles Drayton - featuring the latest West story The Train Leaves at Noon, alongside other faux-1970s newspaper strip-style stories from John Maybury, Colin Stanford, Arthur Goodman, and David Goodman - is now available to buy online via our Big Cartel and Comicsy storefronts for £7 post-free in the UK.

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Full information on The Newspaper Strip Collection of Oscar Charles Drayton here.

Buy The Newspaper Strip Collection of Oscar Charles Drayton via Big Cartel here.

Buy The Newspaper Strip Collection of Oscar Charles Drayton via Comicsy here.

This weekend is the Thought Bubble 2013 comic con in Leeds. Angry Candy will not be exhibiting, but our work will be featured in a couple of brand new publications. On Table 115 in the Allied London Hall (floor plan here) Space Babe 113 creator John...
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This weekend is the Thought Bubble 2013 comic con in Leeds. Angry Candy will not be exhibiting, but our work will be featured in a couple of brand new publications.

On Table 115 in the Allied London Hall (floor plan here) Space Babe 113 creator John Maybury and Siobhan Hillman will be selling The Newspaper Strip Collection of Oscar Charles Drayton, which features a new and exclusive West strip called The Train Leaves at Noon, by Andrew Cheverton and Tim Keable.

On Table 34 - also in the Allied London Hall - Borderline Press will be debuting their inaugural titles 566 Frames and the zombie anthology Zombre, which features a new story written and drawn by Andrew Cheverton.

Zombre

The zombie/horror anthology Zombre (debuting at Thought Bubble next weekend) is now available to buy in advance through the Borderline Press online shop.

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From the Borderline Tumblr:

“Would you like to be the first people to get a copy of Zombre?

"The book won’t officially be released until November 22nd, but we’re taking delivery of Zombre on Tuesday morning and can have them parcelled up, addressed and back out inside 24 hours!

"£12.95 plus £3 p&p (£5 outside the UK) and now available from http://www.borderline-press.com/Shop”

Zombre (rhymes with ‘sombre’) features The End of the Pier Show, a four page story from Andrew Cheverton about nostalgia, Punch and Judy and the end of the world.

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Full details on Zombre here.

Buy Zombre from Borderline Press here.

West: The Train Leaves at Noon

It’s been a while since we finished Volume II of West with Autumn Dusk. In the meantime, I have been keenly plotting the final Volume III (six issues, four of which comprise our first ongoing storyline) and working quietly on a short West strip called The Train Leaves at Noon, which picks up directly from the end of the Warwick Johnson-Cadwell illustrated Stray Bullets story Fort Eyrie and plunges Jerusalem West and Wilton Frohickie into something completely new - the first West newspaper strip.

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The Train Leaves at Noon will appear in a new comic called The Newspaper Strip Collection of Oscar Charles Drayton (debuting at Thought Bubble this month), conceived by Space Babe 113 creator John Maybury. From John’s website:

“As Oscar Charles Drayton, an obsessive newspaper strip collector, descends into psychotic depression he becomes convinced that the strips in the Daily Inspector are mirroring his life… Presented as a facsimile of one of Oscar’s scrapbooks from 1975, the comic features established small-press comics in newspaper strip form. Each strip tells its own story whilst contributing to the overall meta-story.”

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West is joined by other strips Favourite Crayon by Arthur Goodman, Catgirl Crisis Comics by David Goodman, Space Babe 113 by John Maybury (who also scripted the meta-story), and Run Pussy by Colin Stanford; special contributions by Siobhan Hillman and Paul B Rainey round out the package.

More information on John Maybury’s website.

Oscar Charles Drayton’s Facebook page.

I came across this review today, from the A Place to Hang Your Cape site, of the short strip I contributed (with artist Jenika Ioffreda) to AccentUK's Robots anthology. 

“Auto Lolita – A beautiful paean of unmitigated sadness and abandonment; masterfully choreographed by Andrew Cheverton and Jenika Ioffreda, within four lonely pages.”

What a lovely review.

This book - as the review states - dates back to 2008, and it’s odd to be reminded of these old stories floating around the world, and the idea that people still read them today. A lot of comics - weekly instalments of ongoing narratives - tend to be, because of that nature, ephemeral, and that’s also true, to an extent, of the independent press - the book comes out, you press it, it sells, you move onto the next one. It’s heartening, every once in a while, to have one of your old stories wander back into your life like this. I liked the character of Dolly in AutoLolita; I wonder whatever happened to her?

Read A Place to Hang Your Cape’s full Robots review here.

Buy Robots from AccentUK here.